Djugashvili was a thug, but useful – it was he who planned and executed the bank robberies that funded the early days of the Party. The others looked down on him. Or at least, he felt they looked down on him. Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Bukharin, Lunacharsky; they were all intellectuals, educated; either Jewish or petty aristocracy. Djugashvili was sure they mocked him behind his back; sneered at his seminary education and his artistic pretensions, at the poetry he had written and continued, secretly, to write.
He adopted the nom de guerre of Koba to disguise his Georgian origins. When it came to a Party name, he called himself ‘Man of Steel’. The assonance of Stalin and Lenin planted the seed, the merest hint, of a line of succession.
Zinaida received no reply to either of her letters. She decided she would not write again.
A week later, she wrote again.
I am sorry I was distraught at our meeting. I was distraught at the thought of our apartness. Do you still love me? Do you want to see me? I can’t bear not to see you, to touch you and reconnect; to leave behind sorrow and tribulation.
Don’t renounce our happiness, Seryozha! Don’t give up this woman who loves you. Come to the flat. The children are with my parents. We can talk properly.
The Party gave the important ministries to its stars. Stalin was not one of them. He got the irksome jobs – integrating the recalcitrant national territories into the new empire; compiling personnel files, tabulating the qualifications, skills, foibles and transgressions of the Party’s cadres. It was thankless work, but Stalin did it willingly. He was gathering the knowledge of the buried skeletons and tender underbellies that would serve him well.
Sergei wrote to say that he would be coming. Zinaida replied at once.
The passion of love bursting into flame is more powerful than death, stronger than the grave. Love cannot be drowned by oceans or floods. Hurry to me, my darling; run faster than a deer to the mountain of spices!
They met at the flat they had lived in. The familiarity drew him back. To the days of happiness, of love that had conferred meaning on his life.
It was easier to talk than it had been in the restaurant. Conversation oscillated between the sweetness of rekindled tenderness and the bitter threads of reproach and incomprehension. She told him how much she missed him, how much the children missed him. She opened a bottle of Georgian wine. The more they spoke, the more Zinaida struggled to grasp with her reason something that was beyond reason’s grasp.
‘But why,’ she said. ‘Why do you not do what your heart is telling you?’
Sergei couldn’t explain things that he himself did not understand. Reason gave way to desire. The muscle memory of hands held and knees brushed led them to bed. To the shared sip of joy that consumes us in the moment then fades from our senses, effaces itself from our comprehension until next we experience it. Sergei had missed the joy. Missed Zinaida. He loved her and wanted her.
In the morning, he left. With a mumbled explanation that made no sense.
He wasn’t being published. The Union of Writers assured him it was a temporary hiatus; he remained their most demanded poet; when the politics had calmed down, his work would appear again.
In the meantime, he wrote for the drawer. Bleak, self-accusatory lyrics, in which drunkenness and wild behaviour were no longer a role to be adopted and thrown off at will; no longer a poetic affectation, but an addiction that the poet struggled to control. He began the first sketches for an epic poem, to be called ‘The Dark Man’.
My friend, my friend
I’m ill; so very ill.
Nor do I know
Whence came this sickness.
Either the wind whistles
Over the desolate unpeopled field;
Or, as September strips a copse,
Alcohol strips my brain.
The black man
The black, black man
Sits by me on the bed all night,
And will not let me sleep.
The black man
Runs his fingers over a vile book,
And, leaning over me,
Like a sleepy monk over a corpse,
Reads a life
Of some drunken wretch,
Filling my heart with longing and despair.
‘The Dark Man’ was a poem that would be with him for the remaining years of his life, developing, expanding, changing its form as his troubles mutated and grew.
My darling Seryozha,
We are both articulate people. We can both make clever remarks, we can both flirt and we can both be amusing. But, love, I don’t want to play these games with you. I invited you to the flat because I so wanted to find out how you are, how you feel, what is happening to you in this new and separate life. I loved our physical intimacy – I still tremble at the thought of it – but you deferred all serious conversation, you refused to answer my questions and you left with no explanation. I know that if we met again, you would continue to avoid talking to me about what matters. I think you are afraid.
I feel it is completely and utterly over between us. So why are you so cruel as to play with my feelings?
I don’t want to be angry and bitter. And I also don’t want to be toyed with. I gave you all of me. You broke all your promises. You left me, and now you want to see me as a casual friend or as your mistress.
Can you really not see how cruel this is? If you can’t, then you are monumentally unfeeling. It feels as if you are punishing me for something and I genuinely cannot imagine what that might be.
You have made your decision; you are not proposing to reverse it, it seems, and therefore I ask you to leave me alone.
Where on earth are you going, love? Do you think you will find happiness with your grateful little translator and others like her? These are sad, hollow women. For you it will feel increasingly empty and humiliating. Perhaps you envisage your life becoming all work – writing, publishing, reciting – but that life, for which you will have traded in so much, will not be enough on its own.
I do not understand how you could have given up the love we had. It is so unnecessary and so tragic. But I am not the one who can change things. I love you, and I assume you must once have felt something for me; so please honour that love and don’t hurt me any more.
The note of resignation in Zinaida’s letter shook Sergei. He had not given her a proper explanation; her reproaches were justified, and he felt guilt for that. But sharper than guilt was the fear that gripped him at her suggestion that their relationship might be over. He had treated her badly, but he had never contemplated the possibility that she would wash her hands of him. Losing Zinaida would be the amputation of half of himself. He went to the flat.
She did not seem surprised. There was affection in her greeting. He stayed for two days and two nights. In long conversations over the dinner table, over bottles of wine, then entwined in bed, he explained why he loved her and needed her.
‘We have always shared,’ he said. ‘You tell me your thoughts and I tell you mine. You try to impress me; I show off to you. You are my reason for trying. Hearing you say you love me is my life’s validation.’ He paused. ‘I have been reading our letters from when we first met. They are such an outpouring of fresh, happy tenderness. But when harsh things are said, from sorrow or from anger, it is hard to escape that shadow. I don’t want to lose touch with you, my love.’
‘I understand that you love me,’ Zinaida said. ‘What I don’t understand is why you left me.’
Sergei talked of the sadness that had dogged him since his childhood, of his mother leaving and his grandfather’s severity. Zinaida was unmoved.
‘Human beings are unhappy,’ she said. ‘And it’s natural to feel that there must be someone to blame for it. We reach for the person or people closest to us, because they are the easiest candidates. Too many of us blame our parents . . .’
Sergei laughed. ‘Then when our parents are gone, I suppose we reach for our lovers—’
‘I am serious,’ Zinaida said. ‘And I am puzzled by your attitude to your mother. You never speak of her except to say how she abandoned you. Yet, in your poems, she is kind and loving. How do you explain that?’
‘Because that is what poetry is for,’ he said. ‘To take the pain of life and turn it into something finer.’
‘But do you never think that it might be your fault, Seryozha? That it might be you who is to blame?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘All the time. I sit at night and I turn over in my mind all the moments of ignominy and guilt, the humiliation and the vile, loathsome behaviour. It makes me curl in shame . . .’
The Commissariat for Enlightenment wrote to Kusikov with a departure date. The People’s Cultural Delegation would travel initially to Tallinn in the newly independent Estonia and from there to Berlin. It would be made up of writers and poets considered trustworthy supporters of the Revolution, tasked with the dissemination of socialist culture to the proletariat of the West.
Kusikov’s exit was to be a civilised one. But 1922 was a year of other, less willing departures. A report to the politburo from the head of the Comintern, Grigory Zinoviev, had identified growing evidence of anti-Bolshevik plotting among the Russian intelligentsia. ‘Different groups of intellectuals are launching journals and societies,’ he wrote. ‘For the moment, they are independent of each other, but it is only a matter of time before they unite into a powerful and dangerous source of opposition.’
Lenin demanded a purge. The teaching staff of all Soviet universities were to be investigated; ‘reactionary’ professors replaced by new ‘red’ ones. History and philosophy faculties were decimated; the heads of charitable, cultural and social organisations removed without explanation.
The politburo debated what to do with them. It identified three potential solutions – shoot them, exile them to Siberia or deport them from the country. Trotsky announced that the Party had chosen the humanitarian option.
These elements that we send away, and will send away in future, are a potential weapon in the hands of our foes. In the event of new international conflicts, these irreconcilable dissidents would become military-political agents of the enemy. We would have to shoot them in accordance with the rules of war. This is why we prefer to deport them now, while peace prevails. I trust the world will recognise our prudence and our humanity.
The cream of the Russian intelligentsia, including many of her best philosophers, historians and thinkers were imprisoned, forced to sign documents acknowledging that they were being deported and that any attempt to return would be punished by execution.
The Soviet government hired two German steamships, the Oberbürgermeister Haken and the Preussen, to take the unwanted intellectuals to Stettin on the north German coast. Each of them was permitted to take one summer coat and one winter coat, two pairs of trousers, or two short skirts and two long skirts, together with the equivalent of around $20 in currency.
Among the 160 or more on the first steamship were the leading representatives of the school of Russian idealistic philosophy, condemned because their quasi-religious beliefs conflicted with the materialistic Marxism that was now de rigueur. The operation became known as the Philosophers’ Steamships. It was overseen by Josef Stalin, urged on by Lenin from his sickbed:
Comrade Stalin, In my opinion we need to expel all such ‘gentlemen’. Pay particular attention to writers and private publishers. The House of Writers must be ransacked; we have no idea what is going on in there. We must clean up quickly. They are cunning and dangerous; relentless enemies. They must be driven out without mercy. We must cleanse Russia once and for all. Chuck them all out. All at once. With no delay and no explanation of motives. We must just say: Get out!
The ‘Philosophers’ Steamship’, Bürgermeister Haken
Sergei and Zinaida fell into the life that she had sworn to avoid. They would meet for a day, a night, a weekend together. Then he would leave.
When he was with her, he was her Seryozha; she could block out the thoughts of his other life. The joy of touch, of warmth, comfort and support; the joy of understanding each other with a word, a gesture, a nod. It was fulfilling and beautiful.
When he went, her imagination darkened. She knew for her sanity, for her dignity, she should cast him off. But she didn’t.
She was spending more time at the Meyerhold Theatre. At first, she had come on official business, observing for the Ministry. She struck up friendships with the actors, then with Meyerhold himself. Her comments on rehearsals were astute and helpful. The troupe accepted her. When Meyerhold asked if she was interested in acting, she nodded.
At the end of a stolen weekend in the country – neither Lola nor the children knew about it – she told him that Meyerhold had asked her to try out for a role in a new production of Ostrovsky’s The Forest. She saw Sergei’s frown and realised he was jealous. She felt an unexpected spike of gratification.
Vsevolod Meyerhold
Vsevolod Meyerhold was forty-eight years old and Russia’s most famous director. He had learned his trade in the Moscow Arts Theatre under Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko. When he outgrew the company’s naturalist acting style, he formed his own troupe. The Meyerhold Theatre, on the corner of Tverskaya and the Garden Ring, had become the first port of call for the dramatists of the Revolution. Highly stylised productions of plays by Mayakovsky and other socialist modernists alternated with witty reimaginings of the classics.
Meyerhold’s relations with the Bolsheviks were cordial. His penchant for experimentalism tested the dictates of socialist realism, but his revolutionary commitment bought him credit. When he needed extras and equipment from the Red Army for a production about the war, he was able to call on his personal friendship with Trotsky to secure them.
He took a liking to Zinaida. Like her, he came from a family of German origin. They were Lutherans, but their name, Maiergold, sounded Jewish. On his twenty-first birthday, weary of Russian anti-Semitism, he changed it to Meyerhold.
Zinaida told Sergei how much she admired her new boss. She had auditioned and Meyerhold had given her the part. She had quit her job at the Commissariat and was going to be an actress.
Kusikov left. He had waited months, but the day came and his friends took him to the station.
He made them promise they would not get emotional. It wasn’t just that he himself was feeling close to tears; there would be officials accompanying the delegation and he needed to keep up the pretence that he was simply taking a short trip, from which he would return.
The train was at the platform. Kusikov located his minders, thickset, muscle-bound men who pored over his papers, lips moving as they read. When they allowed him through, he turned, waved goodbye and imitated an orangutan.
Other writers were on the train. Few knew what lay ahead; all knew what they were leaving behind. The poet Vladislav Khodasevich, travelling with his wife, the novelist and memoirist Nina Berberova, scribbled some lines to give them courage:
Russia’s stepson, what am I to Europe?
What do I know of her; how shall I understand?
All I take are my eight slim tomes of Pushkin,
But they contain my native land.
For those who stay, the neck beneath the yoke;
For those in exile, bitterness and woe.
But I have packed my Russia in my suitcase,
And she will comfort me – wherever I go!
Sergei continued to write; the state continued to turn him down. With independent presses closed on Lenin’s orders, the newly formed state publisher, Goslitizdat, had a stranglehold. He submitted three collections of poetry; all were rejected. He sent some poems to a publisher in Berlin, but publishing abroad smacked of collaboration with the capitalist West, an increasingly perilous business.
Zinaida, by contrast, was finding success. She was a competent actress and she enjoyed the patronage of the boss. Meyerhold was beginning to offer her leading roles, to the chagrin of some of her fellow actors.
When she told Sergei about the close interest Meyerhold was taking in her, he bridled.
‘So what are his intentions?’ he asked. ‘Why have you been keeping this secret from me?’
Meyerhold