Could he come and talk?
With the exception of the occasional, brief exchange, Katya Paustovsky had not seen her former husband since their divorce thirteen years earlier. Like her 24-year-old son Dima, therefore, she was surprised when he phoned with such an un-Paustovskian request in the summer of 1949. As soon as he rang off, mother and son asked each other: ‘What kind of trouble could he be in?’
His father, Dima recalled, had stayed at their house all morning. Dima had never seen him so nervous or out of sorts; at times he actually seemed at a loss for words. His marriage to Valeria, the actress, Paustovsky told them, was on the rocks.
‘With Valeria around I can’t get a word on paper,’ he exclaimed. ‘The only solution I see is to get out.’
‘But who will you lean on then?’ With that question Katya had hit the nail on the head; without a woman’s care, the anguished writer would be unable to work.
Paustovsky began talking about a girlfriend of his.
‘Ah, the stalwart Tanya,’ Katya surmised. She was referring to Tatyana Yevteyeva, the impulsive, extrovert, blue-eyed blonde Paustovsky had met in 1939 at a New Year’s party in Yalta. Katya knew just where the conversation was leading: he was planning to divorce the fickle Valeria in order to marry for the third time, to Tatyana, also an actress.
Paustovsky nodded and, frowning in exasperation, said he had indeed decided to trade in his dacha at the Peredelkino writers’ colony for an uncertain life with Tanya. LitFond had allocated the holiday home to him after the war, but he could hardly put Valeria and her son Sergey out on the street.
‘I need a roof over my head, and a desk to write at,’ was how he summed up his most pressing requirements.
The account of this meeting was included in Dima’s concise chronicle of his father’s three marriages. In it, the son defended his father’s ‘unfaithfulness’; Paustovsky’s freedom-loving ‘Cossack blood’, he explained, would resist whenever he felt the bonds of marriage begin to pinch. At moments like that he chose ‘to preserve his creative freedom’.
But what had happened afterwards? How had Paustovsky fared during his marriage to Tatyana? The one person who could tell me first-hand was Tatyana’s daughter, Galya. She had been thirteen when the writer walked into her life.
Galina Arbuzova-Paustovskaya was now a stout woman in her sixties. After Dima passed away, she had inherited the rights to and control over Paustovsky’s literary estate.
When I phoned her in the early autumn of 2001 she was about to leave for her kitchen garden outside Moscow. The weather forecast for the next few days, she said, was sunny; the carrots and leeks had to be brought in, the currants needed picking.
Galya sounded easy-going, a woman without airs. She spoke of Paustovsky as ‘my second father’ and began rattling off anecdotes, sometimes with theatrical asides.
‘My goodness!’ she interrupted herself at last. ‘Listen to me! I’m getting carried away already!’ If I liked I could visit immediately; the carrots and leeks wouldn’t rot that quickly in the September soil.
Galya and her husband lived in style: they owned a spacious apartment in one of the ‘Seven Sisters’ with which Stalin had adorned the capital of world communism. Those skyscrapers still dominate the Moscow skyline, like abandoned stage scenery for the Soviet utopia. The location was prestigious enough, where the Yauza river meets the Moskva, less than a kilometre from Red Square.
The complex’s architecture is taut and grand, its vertical lines accentuating the height of the towers. Balancing on top of the cornices are statues of soldiers and workers, hulking proletarians, while the highest point is crowned by a red star framed by laurels. The central tower dates from 1951; the two lateral wings were completed in 1952 (shortly before Stalin’s death) and in 1953 (just afterwards). The granite facade on the ground floor housed a beauty salon, a post office, a china shop, a restaurant and bar and a cinema called ‘Illusion’. The shop windows, I noticed, had not yet been touched by private enterprise; their display cases still exhibited the dingy wares of Soviet life.
With its cathedral-like vault, the main entranceway had been built to impress; it made the visitor feel puny and timid. Beside the doorman’s lodge was a map showing the exact route to the right staircase. But in the lift to the fifth floor the building gradually regained the proportions of a normal tower block, and only when Volodya opened the oak-panelled door of his apartment did I realise that I had been holding my breath all the way.
Galya’s husband had friendly, deep-set eyes and broad lips; he was dressed in faded blue denim. His wife had adorned herself like a Soviet aristocrat. Her permed hair was bound up with pins and lacquer, her neck hung with gold, and she had concealed her plumpness beneath a dress decorated with a butterfly motif.
As she called to Volodya in a ringing voice, asking him to put the kettle on, I took in the view: the bustle of traffic along the embankment below, the double-decked sightseeing boats put-putting across the Moskva and, in the distance, a park containing a brightly painted church. I tried to absorb the interior as well (bookcases floor to ceiling, portraits of Paustovsky on the walls), but Galya gave me little time. Tapping two sweeteners into her Nescafé, she launched into an account of the year 1949, when she and her mother had been living in a cramped room on Gorky Street.
‘Number twenty-two,’ she said. ‘Where the Marriott is now.’ Paustovsky had visited them there before, and would bring flowers and sometimes an album of verses or some other present for Galya.
‘One day, though, he moved in with us. I can still see him standing there in his long coat, his shoulders sagging, looking a little lost. He had only one suitcase with him.’ Her bracelets tinkling, Galya demonstrated the dimensions of Paustovsky’s valise: ‘A little one, like that.’
There was nothing else to be done, the tiny apartment had to be shared. The room was only three by five metres and opened onto a communal hallway with sinks and toilets, and a shared kitchen down at the end. To create the illusion of privacy, Tanya had turned the linen cupboard ninety degrees, forming a sort of niche for the marital bed.
‘I slept on a mattress under the table,’ said Galya, who had not been entirely overjoyed at the arrival of her ‘second father’. She had realised that a writer needed to write, which Paustovsky did while sitting on the windowsill. ‘All I minded was that I wasn’t allowed to sing or listen to the radio. I was a fairly raucous schoolgirl, but of course that would have distracted him.’
His move to Gorky Street did not, however, free Paustovsky from his writer’s block, and the literary climate also hampered his productivity. After 1946, the hopes for greater artistic freedom that had arisen during the war years seemed to evaporate; once again, all that was expected of Soviet writers was plain old ‘hurrah patriotism’: stories and poems positively thrumming with chauvinism.
‘Konstantin Georgiyevich hated that,’ Galya said. ‘The only safe subjects he could think of were the Russian forest and Pushkin.’
Like the other citizens of a country full of smoking ruins but freed of Nazis, Paustovsky had hoped that the worst of the censorship was over. Their victory over fascism had, after all, brought the allies together as never before: amid the intoxicating triumph of 1945, Americans and Russians along the Elbe had embraced like long-lost friends. The bell jar over Soviet territory was exhibiting cracks and fissures. But Stalin did not allow the openness to last long: after the conferences at Yalta and Potsdam, he once more turned his back on the West and tightened his grip on a Soviet society thrown out of joint.
His loosening of the ideological reins at the start of the war had not been voluntary. Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa had so overwhelmed the Union that German army divisions needed only fourteen months, between June 1941 and August 1942, to engulf the Soviet Empire as far as the outskirts of Stalingrad. The counter-offensive was slow in coming. Such a counter-attack, the Soviet commander-in-chief realised, could be motivated only by patriotism, not by any pride in socialism. Meanwhile, Stalin proved pliable enough to reinstate the Russian Orthodox Church in 1943, and have popes brought in to bless with holy water his Katyusha ‘organ pipe’ rocket batteries.
Hatred towards the Germans made it unnecessary to cow Soviet writers and other artists any longer. Pure patriotic fervour was sufficient to make them don uniforms and travel to the front as war correspondents, where they were free to let loose their anti-fascist rhetoric. At one fell swoop, the war had rescued Paustovsky and his colleagues from the terrorisation of the 1930s.
Galya told me that her stepfather had looked back on the arrests, exiles and disappearances as a game of Russian roulette. The terror had been completely arbitrary, but Paustovsky believed he detected at least one pattern: the higher one’s profile, the greater the risk. ‘He felt that Isaak Babel had been playing with fire by consorting with the Party brass and starting an affair with the wife of an NKVD chief. Sticking your neck out, that was the most dangerous thing you could do in those days.’
His own salvation he credited to having fled to the forests of Meshora, where he had spent eight months in hiding after the appearance of his biography of the disgraced Marshal Blyukher. In a letter to a 14-year-old nephew, he had written: ‘Remember this, my boy: it is easy to die a hero’s death, but it is difficult to live a hero’s life.’
In the autumn of 1939, with Europe spellbound by the threat of war, the wave of terror within the Soviet Union subsided. Valeria had urged her husband to turn to playwriting; she dreamed of one day starring in a production of his. Although descriptions (of nature) came more naturally to him than action and dialogue, Paustovsky gave in and took the one hundredth anniversary of Lermontov’s death as the premise for his play Lieutenant Lermontov – about the writer’s role in putting down the insurrection in the Caucasus in 1840. Lieutenant Lermontov was touring the provincial theatres when Hitler’s armies invaded Belarus and the Ukraine.
During the hasty mobilisation which followed, Paustovsky was sent to the front near Odessa, as an army correspondent. A photograph from then shows him in camouflage, taking cover behind a stand of reeds, pen and paper at the ready. His dispatches and short stories (‘The Night of the Siege’) were paeans to the courage and invincibility of the country’s defenders, who nevertheless soon had to yield the entire Ukraine. After the retreat, Paustovsky and his family were proclaimed ‘valuable Soviet inhabitants’ and evacuated to Alma Ata, where he could go on producing heroic and sometimes melancholy prose beyond the range of the German artillery. Hundreds of thousands of readers, particularly female readers, revelled in his story ‘Snow’, about the love between an evacuee and a wounded marine officer.
Paustovsky’s exemplary role as a morale-building author had not escaped the attention of the Soviet leaders, and in May 1945 he was granted the honour of reading aloud a victory speech on Radio Moskva. It was entitled ‘The Morning of the Triumph’. In his typically mild fashion, Paustovsky drew the listeners’ attention to the sounds of ‘forgotten nature’, once again audible after the roar of the guns and the wail of air-raid sirens had fallen still.
Paustovsky felt doubly liberated: from the Germans, and from the threat of the NKVD. As befits a celebrated author, he set about putting the story of his life on paper. Part one of his memoirs (Distant Years – about his youth at the family estate on the island in the Ros, and his first months at school in Kiev) appeared in July 1946. The book was passed by the censors without a hitch, but received a withering reception from the press. ‘A pity,’ one reviewer wrote. ‘But this is yet another example of literary shilly-shallying.’
Distant Years was considered apolitical, and therefore worthless. Who, after all, wanted to read a Cossack boy’s noncommittal musings about his Latin teacher? The newspapers were merciless. What had gone wrong? Whence this unexpected denunciation? Subsequently, Galya told me, the literary editor at Pravda had offered his apologies. ‘Konstantin Georgiyevich ran into him on the street,’ she told me. ‘He was a measly runt, squirming with embarrassment. He said he was sorry, that he had liked Distant Years, but that he and his colleagues had been given a new set of criteria for evaluating books.’
Overnight, between 11 and 12 August 1946, new signposts had been erected in the cultural landscape of the Soviet Union: everything reverted to its pre-war position. The intermezzo of creative freedom was over. A series of decrees issued by Stalin had put an end to the lenience of wartime.
The implementation of the crackdown itself he left to Andrey Zhdanov, the Politburo’s guard dog in the domain of the fine arts. As Stalin’s emissary, this staunch ideologist had also told the 1934 Union of Soviet Writers’ Conference the true meaning of Socialist Realism. But the writers’ compliance with his doctrine had since become watered down.
Zhdanov approached his new mission with cunning. To start with, he selected two scapegoats: Leningrad satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko and the poet Anna Akhmatova. ‘Our literature has no more loathsome chapter than the morality preached by Zoshchenko,’ Zhdanov pronounced. ‘His writings are ideologically void, vulgar and designed for the disorientation of Soviet youth.’ For Akhmatova he showed even less respect; her poetry, he said, was intentionally pessimistic and aesthetic. ‘She is half harlot, half nun,’ the arbiter of culture ruled.
The tactics applied to hobble the Soviet writers’ guild were more subtle than they had been in 1937–39, but no less effective. A writer whose work was censured by the official critics was obliged to admit his error in the form of an exhaustive mea culpa. Public self-denunciation became a mandatory ritual, one to which even the dogmatic chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers, Alexander Fadeyev, was not immune. His novel The Young Guard – about Ukrainian village children who perform the most heroic acts of resistance in the struggle against the German occupiers – had been awarded the Stalin Prize in 1945, but was assailed one year later by blistering criticism from Zhdanov: the writer had failed unforgivably by allowing his young resistance cell to arise spontaneously, and not under the encouraging influence of a model Communist leader.
Comrade Fadeyev was shaken. He had always lauded Stalin as ‘the powerful genius of the working class’, and saw the Stalin Prize as a reward for that loyalty. This blow put him out of commission for three whole days; he withdrew to Peredelkino and went on a zapoy, a headlong flight into vodka-fuelled delirium. Once he finally struggled back to his feet, he did what was expected of him: he grovelled publicly and set about rewriting The Young Guard. In the years of plodding which followed, during which he expanded a number of passages and added five new chapters, he became the laughing stock of the writers’ community. ‘What’s Fadeyev up to these days?’ the joke went in Peredelkino. ‘Oh, he’s working on The Fat Guard.’
Zhdanov’s rants were not merely a refresher course in Socialist Realism, but also included a rabid anti-Western element. The magazines Zvezda and Leningrad were banned because their editors were held to adore everything foreign, an attitude ‘which cannot be tolerated within Soviet literature’.
Stalin struck out at the capitalist world with renewed vigour, prompted in part by his irritation with the ‘Ivans’, those soldiers who had pursued the enemy all the way to Berlin or Budapest and now complained about their own miserable standard of living. Under capitalism, they announced, the Czechs and Hungarians had lived more comfortably than their Soviet comrades. And for those who refused to believe their stories they produced hard evidence – looted jewellery, clocks, sewing machines, motorbikes and assorted household furnishings.
Stalin resolved no longer to model himself on Peter the Great, whose construction of St Petersburg had opened a ‘window onto Europe’, but on Ivan the Terrible, who had banished all foreign influences from his empire.
In 1945, the literary hack Alexey Tolstoy, who had already redrafted a biography of Tsar Peter to Stalin’s wishes, finished a stage play about the life of the dreaded Ivan. It was immediately made into a film.
The battle lines for the Cold War were rapidly being drawn. Andrey Zhdanov set the tone: everything he said instantly became gospel. In contrast to the ‘reactionary, anti-democratic and pro-fascist imperialism of the United States’, he portrayed the Soviet Union as ‘an indefatigable champion of the freedom and independence of all nations, to whose nature all aggression and exploitation are foreign.’
Zhdanov died in 1948, but the period from 1946 until Stalin’s death in 1953 still bears his name: zhdanovschina.
In September 1945, even before this ‘seven-year darkness’ fell, the British embassy in Moscow sent a confidential memorandum to London concerning the state of Soviet literature. ‘Across the entire spectrum of Russian letters,’ special envoy Isaiah Berlin reported, ‘hangs a remarkable pall of total inertia.’ All around him, the writer of the encoded report encountered only wasteland. The older generation of intellectuals, Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak had explained to its author, had yet to awaken from the nightmare of the 1930s. They lived cautiously, calculatingly, as part of the ‘class of the intimidated’. No Soviet writer, they said, could avoid asking himself: to what extent am I willing to comply with the demands of the state, and how much room does that leave for personal integrity? The Foreign Office was presented with a sombre prognosis: ‘There are few signs of anything new or original about to see the light in the Soviet Union.’
Gorky was dead, and Pilnyak, Babel and Mandelstam, amongst other authors, had been eliminated. Young writers had no one of stature to look up to. Boris Pasternak, who had been allowed to publish a cycle of poems in the army newspaper Red Star in 1945, had retreated into his work as a translator. Shakespeare and Goethe were to keep him occupied for years. Other safe havens included children’s verse (a speciality of Peredelkino resident Korney Chukovsky) and fables (the new pursuit of scientist Mikhail Prishvin). Some, such as Yury Olesha from Odessa, took refuge in alcoholism; others followed the example of the poetess Marina Tsvetaeva, who hanged herself in 1941.
A great deal of talent, including that of the maligned writer-engineer Andrey Platonov, was gagged. After incurring Stalin’s wrath in 1931 with his story about the collectivisation of agriculture, ‘To the Benefit Of’, he had met with mounting obstruction. Platonov could not support his family with the proceeds from the handful of stories that survived the censor, and was forced to write literary reviews on the side under the pen name F. Mens. But the war also presented him with new opportunities: three collections of his dispatches from the front appeared between 1942 and 1944. As a correspondent, Platonov had risen to the rank of ‘major in administrative service’. But these windfalls could not save him and his wife Masha from further tragedy. After their 15-year-old son Platon was condemned to ten years’ forced labour north of the Arctic Circle, they devoted all their energy to having him released. Platonov wrote to Stalin requesting clemency, and had the letter delivered by his colleague Mikhail Sholokhov, who occupied a seat on the Supreme Soviet on behalf of the Writers’ Union.
Only when Platonov’s NKVD dossier was opened to the public in the 1990s did it become clear how close an eye the intelligence service had kept on him. Thanks to the NKVD’s detective work, one can trace the precise times and dates of his meetings with Sholokhov. The 2nd Political Department filed away reports of telephone conversations and letters from anonymous informants, while the 4th Political Department ventured a literary-critical analysis of Platonov’s oeuvre in which, from 1931 onwards, an ‘increasingly profound anti-Soviet tenor’ was noted.
Following Sholokhov’s mediation, Platonov’s son was brought back to Butyrka Prison in Moscow in 1940. When the case of the underage ‘terrorist’ at last came up for review, he stated: ‘I made deceptive, fantasised statements at the time, at the recommendation of the agent who interrogated me […], and I signed those statements because of his threats that my parents would otherwise be arrested.’
Platon’s sentence was reduced to the time he had already served and on 26 October 1940 he was released, weakened by malnutrition. Less than three years later he died of the tuberculosis he had contracted in the barracks of the Gulag. ‘The Soviet authorities have taken from me my only son,’ Platonov told an informer from the NKVD’s 2nd Political Department. ‘I feel completely empty. Physically exhausted. Like a fly in summer, who barely has the strength to buzz.’ Not long afterwards, Platonov himself was brought back from the front on a stretcher. He had also contracted the illness, while nursing his son. ‘I have consumption in the second degree,’ he told another NKVD informant on 18 May 1945. ‘I am spitting blood.’
As an officer, he received an honorary discharge in order that he might die at home. But Platonov did not die. To the dismay of Zhdanov and his cohorts, he continued to produce and publish prose. In 1946, new work – ‘The Family Ivanov’ – appeared in a prestigious literary journal. It is the story of an army captain, Ivanov, who returns from the war battered and at a loss, torn between safety in the bosom of his family and an exciting life with the canteen waitress Masha. Sentence by sentence, Platonov dissects the agony of the soldier who fears he can never again settle into the role of father and provider. The universality of the situation seizes the reader by the throat and carries him breathlessly to the explosive though pedagogically sound ending: on his way to his mistress, but seeing his two children running after him in the distance, Ivanov jumps from the moving train.
‘A cynical disgrace and a debasement of the Soviet individual,’ one Zhdanov-loyal critic fumed. ‘What Soviet soldier, a victor no less, would exhibit such weakness of character? “The Family Ivanov” is a defamatory falsification of our Soviet reality.’
After this denunciation, Platonov was drummed out of the writers’ corps once and for all. The final years of his life he spent in a single room in one wing of the Gorky Literature Institute. He turned to the bottle and neglected himself; writing students mistook him for the caretaker.
Konstantin Paustovsky, a lecturer at the institute, once saw him wasting away in the courtyard. ‘That man sweeping the pavement out there,’ he noted in the seclusion of the classroom, ‘is a genius.’
Yet none of the academics, including Paustovsky, dared take pity on him. To associate with a pariah was to run the risk of becoming a pariah. So great was that fear that, after Platonov’s death, on 5 January 1951, no one was willing to write either a glowing obituary or any other token of appreciation.
Paustovsky was restless. He earned a living at the Gorky Institute, where he had been teaching the writing of Socialist Realist prose since 1945, yet he derived very little satisfaction from his lectureship; he wanted to write. But where could he do that? As a member of the Writers’ Union he was entitled to stay at one of LitFond’s guesthouses in the Crimea or the Baltic, but never for more than a few weeks at a time.
At home with his new family, privacy was out of the question; he had barely moved in with Tatyana when she announced that she was pregnant.
‘We didn’t have space for a baby,’ cried Galya, who still looked back in amazement on her parents’ thoughtlessness. Galya remembered the family literally bursting from the seams of their one-room flat once her half-brother Alyosha arrived in 1950; she described ‘the horrible monster of a pram’ which, because the neighbours would not allow them to park it in the common hallway, was always blocking the door. ‘Whenever you wanted to go out you had to first roll the pram into the hall, that’s how cramped it was.’
Shortly after Alyosha was born, Paustovsky was summoned by the general secretary of the Writers’ Union. The chozain, the ‘boss’, he was told, had placed an order: Stalin wanted a book about the building of the Volga–Don Canal, a project which had suffered a ten-year delay but was now racing ahead. Would Comrade Paustovsky complete this honourable assignment with all due speed?
‘My mother said right away: “Don’t do it, Kostya! They want you to sell your soul to the devil!”’ Galya slid up to the edge of her seat; she was now performing both parts in the dialogue between her parents.
‘But we need the money!’
‘We’re getting by, aren’t we?’
Paustovsky was not convinced. ‘If I say no, they may never ask me to do anything again.’
‘So be pleased you’re not a penny-a-line writer.’
‘But if I refuse, they might take it as an insult, and who knows, maybe they’ll see to it that I never get published again…’
To Galya’s relief, her stepfather had finally accepted the commission.
Under the title The Birth of the Sea, the result was published by the Soviet Ministry of Defence in 1952. It was a textbook example of ‘instant historical narrative’ in accordance with the Maxim Gorky Method, as applied to the construction of the Volga–Don Canal outside the ‘heroic city’ of Stalingrad. Like a lone soldier on a battlefield of writers decimated by purges and war, Paustovsky held aloft the banner of Soviet hydraulic-engineering literature.
The Birth of the Sea, like Kara Bogaz, was about the advancement of socialism. This book, however, contained even more exclamation marks, more ordinal numbers, more statistics. Paustovsky’s prime stylistic device was the superlative: ‘There exists no language more flexible, more evocative, more precise or more magical than Russian. But we, those who employ this language, note with increasing frequency how we are at a loss for words to describe accurately the essence of our age, to express the grand scale of our duties and our works.’
But The Birth of the Sea had not survived the ravages of time. None of the libraries I visited had it or had heard of it. My appeal on a used-book site on ru.net, the Russian-language Internet, remained unanswered. This was peculiar, for – with the exception of the biography of the executed Marshal Blyukher – none of Paustovsky’s works had been removed from circulation. A German reference book spoke of Paustovsky’s Volga–Don narrative as ‘a classic from the second wave of Five-Year-Plan literature’. But the book itself was nowhere to be found.
To get hold of the text, therefore, I turned to the photocopier in the attic study of the Paustovsky Institute. The flyleaf was complete with GlavLit number (G-92215) and the date that it was ‘released for distribution’ (13 October 1952).
The protagonist of The Birth of the Sea is the upstanding foreman Basargin. During a meeting in the Kremlin he promises ‘on behalf of the masses’ that the Volga–Don Canal will be finished six months earlier than planned; the nation’s inland waterway transport, after all, can wait no longer for the two rivers to be connected. Basargin considers himself an executor of the ‘brilliance of Comrade Stalin’; when leaving Moscow, and before embarking on the final stage of construction, he orders the pilot to fly over the new waterways of the Soviet Empire.
As narrator on board the plane, Paustovsky views the landscape as a living map, on a 1:1 scale, with ‘the pulse of labour audible so many kilometres above the ground’. In his imagination, even the humming of the cotton mills at the textile town of Ivanovo mingles with the throb of the propellers. The plane follows the course of the Volga–Don Canal, then sweeps over the successive hydroelectric plants on the Volga. Paustovsky is amazed by the prosperity these hydraulic constructions have brought to Soviet citizens. But how could it be otherwise, he realises; well-being is the inseparable companion, yea, ‘the sputnik of Communism’.
As a Soviet writer, Paustovsky seemed unsinkable. A young poet who met him often in Leningrad during the spring of 1951 noted later that the popular romantic tended to walk bent over, and had the profile of a predatory bird. ‘But as soon as his eyes met yours you felt at ease. Behind the thick lenses of his spectacles, his features bore no trace of mockery.’ During their walks along the blackened shores of the Volga, Paustovsky sports an unfashionable pair of sandals and, when they stop to rest for a moment, almost sits on an anti-tank mine. At the age of fifty-eight, Paustovsky still spends entire nights talking to a Komsomol leader young enough to be his son. Together they try to find a fitting name for the high-rise neighbourhood to be built close to the gigantic new hydroelectric station on the Volga. ‘Elektrograd,’ Paustovsky suggests. Or, as an alternative: ‘Hydrograd’.
After reading The Birth of the Sea, I took the ‘Mother Russia Express’ to Volgograd, the former Stalingrad. I wanted to see with my own eyes what Paustovsky had written about. The building of the Volga–Don Canal, especially in the light of failed attempts in earlier centuries, had been no mean feat. The 101-kilometre-long shipping channel was the crowning achievement of Stalin’s drive to turn Moscow into a seaport. Before the war he had already brought the White Sea, the Baltic and the Caspian within sailing distance of the capital; this waterway would add the Black Sea to the list.
I had arranged a tour with the infamous, but by-then-privatised, Intourist agency. My guide, Ludmila Danilova, was waiting for me at the tram stop at the corner of Friedrich Engels Boulevard. If the old slogans had survived anywhere, it was here. HAIL TO THE SOVIET BUILDERS exhorted an extinguished neon sign on the roof of an apartment building beside the tram rails. All it would take was one strong gust of wind to bring the scaffolding and its gas-filled tubes crashing down past the already shaky-looking balconies. But Ludmila paid no heed to the menace hanging over her. She was dressed in summery lavender; her open-toed shoes (also lavender) contrasted sharply with her painted (metallic purple) nails.
‘Please don’t mind all the weeds.’ Ludmila was leading me down a tourist walkway along the canal. She looked to be in her forties. Despite her spectacles, she proved able to read the slogans and inscriptions posted here and there – sometimes for reasons quite obscure – from a great distance. She spoke knowledgeably of the huge dam just north of the city (‘the biggest in Europe’) that had been dubbed the ‘Hydroelectric Plant of the 22nd Party Congress’. To her, the name and the object together formed a natural whole, a reinforced concrete pillar of resolve. The same went for the lighthouse in the distance, which marked the entrance to the Volga–Don Canal.
Before I could read the inscription myself, Ludmila announced: ‘To the heroic victors over fascism.’ The canal’s monuments, sculptures and triumphal arches, she explained above the click-clacking of her heels, told the combined story of the defeat of Hitler’s Sixth Army, which had been surrounded and annihilated in the winter of 1943. The battle had cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
It was here, precisely half a century ago, that Paustovsky had gazed at the Meccano set arms of cranes and draglines. Ludmila was familiar with his work, but had never heard of The Birth of the Sea. She assumed I was mistaken: if an important writer like Paustovsky had written about her home town, she would certainly have been aware. ‘Are you sure the book is about the Volga–Don Canal?’ Having conducted foreigners around as an Intourist guide even during the Soviet era, she was used to being on top of these things.
‘It’s an obscure work,’ I said reassuringly. ‘You can’t find it anywhere in Moscow.’
Only after I pulled out my photocopies did Ludmila allow herself to be convinced. She jotted down the publisher’s information and resolved to repair post-haste this gap in her knowledge. She was not, she then confessed, actually a certified tour guide; she had been trained as a metallurgist. ‘I sort of fell into this,’ she said. ‘In the 1970s, Intourist was badly in need of staff.’
In 1978, after proving her reliability and taking a crash course in English, she had been authorised to consort with foreigners. Stalingrad was on the itinerary of almost every trip to the Soviet Union. As a model for the Communist utopia, the city had been rebuilt brick by brick after the war. Devoid of memories, of churches or old buildings, but with squares more vast, boulevards broader and statues taller than anywhere else.
Back when tourists could not yet go wherever they pleased, a trip to the Hydroelectric Plant of the 22nd Party Congress or a cruise along the Volga–Don Canal were the high points of what the city had to offer. ‘The successive locks float like white swans in the landscape,’ read a brochure from 1965. The hydraulic engineers had made architectural monuments of them, decorating them with domes, pillars, obelisks, torches, equestrian statues and bronze sheaves of wheat. Each lock boasted one or two slender buildings (‘swan’s necks’), with a gallery from which the uniformed lockmaster could ensure an orderly passage. Temples to socialism, each and every one – and Paustovsky had inaugurated them with his song of praise.
Modern-day reality, however, proved grubbier. Ludmila was embarrassed by the empty gin-and-tonic tins and crayfish shells littering the banks of the canal. When the flow of tourists abruptly dried up between 1991 and 1992, she had started teaching English at a local secondary school. It had been years since she had given a tour of the canal, and she was dismayed to see how her townsfolk had appropriated these picnic spots. ‘Illegal beaches,’ she said in disgust.
The crumbled asphalt path led to a hilltop crowned, like a secular Calvary, by an immense statue of Lenin, taller even than the lighthouse. We passed a palace with a colonnade (‘the headquarters of the canal management company’) and a white stone archway spanning the first lock. In both style and scale, the structure put the Arc de Triomphe to shame. Two medium-sized tankers were moored on the far side: the Lukoil Neft 114 and the Lukoil Neft 66. We could get no closer; the steps leading to the locks had been barricaded with fences and no-entry signs.
‘Well, that’s all we needed,’ Ludmila apologised. ‘But I do understand. These days everyone is afraid of attacks on strategic objects. And we’re a lot closer to Chechnya here than you are in Moscow.’
Chiselled across the pediment of the triumphal arch, beneath which the tankers would later pass, were the words HAIL TO LENIN THE GREAT. As though able to read through metres of solid concrete, Ludmila also told me what was written on the other side: HAIL TO THE SOVIET PEOPLE, BUILDERS OF COMMUNISM.
She knew all the slogans by heart. Lines of verse on stone tablets, ciphers on orientation tables. Only the graffiti on Lenin’s pedestal was unfamiliar to her, and I saw that she was doing her best to ignore it.
The founder of the Soviet Union was a concrete giant 28 metres high, staring out across the broad Volga and the entrance to the canal. The names ‘Olya’, ‘Natasha’ and ‘ROTOR’ (the local football team) had been splattered around the base of the statue. Higher up, on his coat-tails, dribbled letters spelled out the words ‘Russia for the Russians’ and were signed with the runic symbol of the nationalist RNE Party. Ludmila directed my attention to the tugs struggling upstream in the distance. Only when we walked around the back of the statue and the stench of urine hit us full in the face did she lose her composure.
Lenin served as a pissoir for the young, and Ludmila’s eyes were smarting. ‘No one has any respect for the past any more,’ she said. ‘Say what you like about the Soviet Union, but if our country had not become industrialised so quickly, if we hadn’t had tanks and planes, we could never have beaten the Germans. Today we would be saying “Viel Spass” and “Zum Beispiel” to each other.’
I was about to ask where she had picked up those expressions, but she wasn’t finished yet. Her father had been taken prisoner in 1942 while trying to flee Stalingrad; he had spent the rest of the war in a Ukrainian lager, breaking his back for Hitler. ‘And he was only a child. Ten when they took him away, thirteen when he was released. You don’t forget things like that, do you?’
Ludmila was annoyed by the boorish upbringing young people received these days. ‘I see it in the classroom, too. There’s not a speck of patriotism left. The generation growing up now is out of control.’
In The Birth of the Sea, Paustovsky did more than describe what he saw and experienced. His account was also peppered with eulogies to Stalin: ‘Again and again one asks oneself: whose vision – able to penetrate the mists of the future so powerfully as to reveal it to us in every particular – whose powerful will, whose limitless courage, has carried our country to the present day, referred to so justly as the age of the greatest works of creation? It is the vision, the will, the dedication and the courage of Stalin, friend to all working humanity. And this great city on the Volga, inextricably linked with his works, bears his name with pride.’
Paustovsky’s book ended with the passage of the first motor launch from the Don to the Volga.
‘Batteries of searchlights appeared over Stalingrad to welcome the launch, and on the deep night sky they traced out that man’s name. And the launch sailed beneath that luminous name, as under an archway, and opened as it did the way to the unknown, blessed land, to the golden age of mankind, to Communism!’
Three letters – the S, the T and the L – are all that is left of Him today in the city that bore His name. About 40 centimetres high, they once graced the pedestal where the statue of Lenin now stands by the Volga-Don Canal. Or rather: back when Stalin was still the one standing there.
Alexey Ilyin keeps them in his collection of curiosities at the headquarters of the canal management company, and buffs them once a month with copper polish. He retired years ago, but that does not deter the former hydro-engineer from settling down each day amid the relics of the canal’s history. Arms folded, a cup of lemon tea within arm’s reach. Sometimes he drops off for a bit and the strands of hair normally combed back across his pate fall across his forehead.
It was Ludmila who discovered him for me, while asking around for local people who had witnessed the excavation work. ‘Oh, then you should talk to Alexey Ilyin,’ she was told time and time again. I found him, as Ludmila had predicted, surrounded by his collection.
Alexey Ilyin was sitting with his back to a wall covered in newspaper clippings, drawings and photographs, including the largest statue of Stalin ever built. The photo from Stalingradskaya Pravda showed that the sculptor had depicted him in the Napoleonic pose, his right hand over his heart. In his left hand he held his cap.
‘That cap alone,’ Ilyin said, hopping to his feet with unexpected nimbleness, ‘was so big… three taxis would have fitted in it.’
Even if he had wished, I realised then, Paustovsky could not have ignored the omnipresent Stalin. He towered above the Volga and watched over the excavation sites. The statue had not been made of stone or concrete, nothing that banal, Ilyin said, but of costly copper alloy. I asked him whether there was any truth to the story that its guardians, who watched in dismay as seagulls sullied its head and shoulders, had in fact electrified the entire statue.
‘I don’t know who told you that,’ Ilyin said. ‘But it’s a dirty lie.’
‘I came across it in a biography of Stalin,’ I ventured, but the hydraulic engineer cut me short.
‘Imagine if they had actually done that! It’s preposterous! Dead birds would have rained from the sky during parades or memorial services. What guardian, do you think, would have been willing to assume responsibility for that?’
That argument seemed conclusive to me. Bowing to his reasoning, I asked about his younger years. How had he become involved in the building of the canal?
Ilyin told me he had attended Leningrad’s Hydrotechnics Institute. Almost all of his classmates – the first to graduate after the Second World War – had been sent straight to the Volga-Don project. ‘When I arrived here in 1950 there were still German prisoners of war. Real meat-and-potatoes Germans, you know, with those curly moustaches.’
I pricked up my ears. Paustovsky hadn’t mentioned Nazi prisoners of war.
‘There were 110,000 of them,’ Ilyin continued. ‘You had plain old Wehrmacht soldiers, who knew their place and stepped aside politely for the foremen. Not at all like the SS or the Gestapo officers. I came across a whole crew of those once, up at the thirteenth lock. Arrogant fellows who looked down their noses at you. They really believed they were superior to us.’
Ilyin searched for and found a typed report by a soldier from Vienna by the name of Erwin Peter. He had written his memories of the camp on the Volga-Don and self-published them under the title Jugend hinter Stacheldraht (‘Youth Behind Barbed Wire’). ‘They had wiped Stalingrad off the map, you see, and now they had to repair the damage. That seems like a fitting punishment to me.’
Ilyin had heard of The Birth of the Sea, but even he – an inveterate collector – did not own a copy. The only workers Paustovsky had described, I told him, were volunteers who had spontaneously stowed away in trains in order to offer their services.
‘There were some of those,’ Ilyin said. ‘Mostly Komsomol members. But the majority by far were slave labourers. Germans, and our own people.’
‘Russians?’
‘Yes, common prisoners. Thieves, rapists, traitors. You name it. About a hundred thousand of them, too. They were a rough crew, of course. And there wasn’t enough to eat, not after the harvests failed in ’47. But believe it or not, the prisoners were quite gung-ho.’
I didn’t believe it. Victims of Stalin’s capriciousness toiling enthusiastically for Stalin?
Ilyin shook his head. I had it all wrong. ‘Under Stalin, people were indeed sentenced for even minor offences. But you could reduce your own sentence by working hard. It was up to you.’ By exceeding one’s ‘individual task performance’ quota by more than 50 per cent, a prisoner could have his sentence reduced by two-thirds. A person condemned to twelve years’ labour, in other words, could be released after only four. ‘You had to work twelve-hour days or more, but we all did that back then, the technicians too. Without being paid any extra for it.’
Alexey Ilyin regretted that Stalingrad had been renamed Volgograd in 1961. In his eyes, the entire process of de-Stalinisation had been a shame. ‘I don’t agree with it myself,’ he said. He led me to a separate room, an empty space containing only an untouched desk with hammer-and-sickle flags sitting on the corners. Filtered through lace curtains, bands of sunlight entered the room through a bay window. The ‘friend of all working humanity’ regarded us from a painting on the wall.
‘I’m an atheist,’ Ilyin said. ‘But I don’t believe people can live without ideals.’
It had not been Stalin’s death (‘after all, we’re all mortal’) but the moment he was pulled from his pedestal that had come as a ‘psychological blow’ to Ilyin. It was an October evening in 1961. His mother had caught wind of what was about to happen and gone to watch, along with other babushkas from the Red Army District. The sight hadn’t made much of an impression on her: she was a religious woman, born in 1908, and had never converted to Communism. At home that day, when she talked about what she had seen, she did so with an indifference painful to her son. They had pulled the bolts from the pedestal. The surrounding area was cordoned off, but from a distance you could clearly see him being fixed into the slings of the crane. It was growing dark and a handful of stars came out above the Volga. All you could see then was his silhouette. But suddenly he was clear of the ground. Stalin dangled, spun, his feet slammed against the bed of a transporter. ‘Ba-dang!!’ was how his mother had imitated the sound. ‘A twenty-ton piece of copper! What do you expect, it chimes like a church bell.’ Then, amid loud shouts (‘Hold it!’, ‘Stop!’, ‘Left!’), the spectre was lowered onto its side, inch by inch.
‘They took him to the Barricade foundry, where he was cut into pieces.’ Ilyin had gone to the factory gates for a look, but wasn’t allowed in. He was told that the statue would be converted into copper wire, so that no trace of his leader would survive.
The next morning, the S, the T and the L were all he was able to save from the pedestal.
‘No,’ Galya said decidedly. ‘Konstantin Georgiyevich never said anything about prisoners at the Volga-Don Canal.’
Not even in the privacy of his own home, around the kitchen table?
‘Not that I can remember,’ she said, thinking deeply and pinching the bridge of her nose between thumb and index finger. What kind of stories did Paustovsky bring back from Stalingrad? I asked. But that was too obvious: he brought back war stories.
Galya stood up and led me to a cabinet on the wall filled with mementoes of her stepfather. Amid the certificates, spectacles cases and brightly coloured fishing tackle lay a chunk of iron ore, or at least something that looked like coagulated metal. A work of art from a smithy?
But all my guesses were wide of the mark. Turning over the rusty chunk, she pointed out a cluster of about ten fused bullets and shell cases. ‘Konstantin Georgiyevich said the ground in Stalingrad was littered with war fossils like this, that the entire city had been razed by infernos and bombing raids.’
Yet I was still puzzled as to why Paustovsky had said nothing to his stepdaughter about the Gulag camps. Was the subject so sensitive that one couldn’t speak of it freely, not even at home?
Galya looked at me in amazement. ‘No, of course not. Half the country was in prison. Everyone knew that!’ What’s more, you saw convicts everywhere. ‘Germans, Russians… you didn’t have to go to Siberia for that.’
For my information, Stalin had built the entire apartment complex we were in now using slave labour. ‘The prisoners were kept in barracks in the courtyard, where the garages are today. When we moved here in 1953 they were still working on the other wing…’
I interrupted her. ‘Wait a minute, you mean to say that you’ve been living here ever since the publication of The Birth of the Sea?’
It was not so much a question as a realisation. It had dawned on me out of the blue: Paustovsky had been given this luxurious apartment as a reward for his ode to Stalin’s ‘matchless waterworks’.
Galya nodded. ‘We’d hoped for a four-room flat in the middle tower, preferably on the twenty-fourth floor, but it turned out that those were reserved for NKVD officers.’
She laughed high and loud as she recalled her mother stuffing rags into the air vents in the kitchen and bathroom, to prevent eavesdropping. Galya had never considered things like that; she had been pleased enough just to have a bed of her own.
One question, however, still made no sense to me: why had The Birth of the Sea disappeared so completely?
‘Oh,’ Galya said, ‘it wasn’t one of his better books. He knew that, too.’ Waving her hand in dismissal, she said that Paustovsky had been embarrassed by it. ‘After Stalin’s death he made sure it was never reprinted.’