The arts have long been Russia’s other world, a flourishing garden of creativity when political discourse was choked by intolerant autocracy. They defied and triumphed over censorship and repression, offering Russians a better vision of themselves.
The revolutions of 1917 had sparked hopes of a golden age for the arts. Painters, writers and composers seized the opportunity of untrammelled freedom with febrile innovation. The poets Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely and Vladimir Mayakovsky produced some of their most important work; the writers Mikhail Zoshchenko and Mikhail Bulgakov pushed at the bounds of satire and distorted realism; Kasimir Malevich and the Suprematists took painting into new regions in search of abstract geometric purity; the Constructivists, Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin and others strove to square the circle between the concrete forms of architecture and photography and the values of ‘art for art’s sake’; musical experimentalism broke through the barriers of harmony, overflowed into jazz and orchestras without conductors. The trend was avant-garde, dispensing with the constraints of the old realism, looking ever more intensely to unleash the power of pure imagination. At first the regime was tolerant, preoccupied with other more pressing matters. But by the mid 1920s, the Communist leadership was looking disapprovingly at the radicalism and the abstraction, beginning to shape the doctrine that would eventually insist on all art being made to serve the aims of socialism.
From 1932, literature was brought under the control of the Soviet Writers’ Union, and the bureaucrats who ran it took it upon themselves to police the work of authors, poets and playwrights, defining what was acceptable and what was not, according to the dictates of the party. In 1934, the First Congress of Soviet Writers’ Union adopted the doctrine of Socialist Realism. From now on, it decreed, all art must depict man’s struggle for socialist progress towards a better life. The creative artist would now serve the proletariat by being realistic, optimistic and heroic. All forms of experimentalism were degenerate and un-Soviet. Only official art – and only official artists – would be tolerated.
Stalin’s claim to ownership of the arts and his insistence on art serving the state were nothing new in Russia. But the autocracy now exercised a stranglehold on society unprecedented in history, and it left writers, composers and artists with stark choices: to stay and do the tyrant’s bidding; to flee; or to stay and oppose. In Stalin’s Russia, a stray word could bring a death sentence; a poem could explode with the power of a bomb. The poet Osip Mandelstam wrote that ‘Russia is the place where poetry1 really matters – here they shoot you for it.’ He revelled in the power of his art, but he feared the man who did the shooting:
We are living, but the ground2 is dead beneath our feet;
Ten steps away our words cannot be heard.
In half whispers we speak of the Kremlin mountain-man,
The murderer, the peasant slayer …
Most of Mandelstam’s poetry consists of exquisite, finely wrought verses lamenting the loss of culture and humanity in the new era of the revolution; their tone is restrained and understated, dedicated to redemption through art. Just once, however, he let rip with a savage expression of his hatred for Stalin, the destroyer of art and the hangman of the Russian soul:
His fingers are oily as maggots,
Words fall from his lips like lead weights.
With his gleaming leather boots
And his laughing cockroach whiskers,
He flings decrees and diktats,
Heavy as horseshoes, into peoples’
Groins and eyes and foreheads.
Every killing is a treat
For the broad-chested Ossetian.
By 1934, the revolution was 17 years old and determined to exert its authority; the slightest word of criticism could mean the Gulag. Mandelstam was well aware of the danger. But still he read his ‘epigram’ about Stalin to friends and acquaintances, in a state of exultation, with an almost triumphant warning to all of them: ‘Not a word3 about this or they’ll shoot me.’ Within weeks he was arrested.
For the ruler of one of the world’s greatest empires, a man who murdered millions with little compunction, Stalin took a strangely obsessive interest in the fate of individual writers and artists, personally weighing and meting out rewards and punishments, seemingly consumed by the thought that his actions would be judged by a higher authority.
Even though Mandelstam had insulted and humiliated him, Stalin sought guidance on whether this was a truly great poet or whether he could exterminate him with impunity. He rang Boris Pasternak, late at night and with no warning, to ask for his opinion. Terrified by the Georgian voice on the end of the line – the voice of the man Bukharin described as ‘Genghis Khan with a telephone’ – Pasternak equivocated. He answered ambiguously and spoke about the values of poetry. He asked Stalin if they could talk about life and death. But he didn’t have the courage to say, ‘Yes, Mandelstam is a great poet.’ Stalin lost patience and put the phone down. Within a few days, Mandelstam had been sent to a labour camp, where he would perish. Pasternak’s son, Yevgeny, told me his father was haunted by the memory of that phone call for the rest of his life:
Stalin wanted to know if my father4 knew about Mandelstam’s poem, but he avoided a straight reply … By telling Stalin he wanted to talk about life and death, he was really saying he wanted to talk about all the crimes that were being carried out in Stalin’s name; it was a terrible, dangerous conversation … Luckily Stalin hung up the phone when he did; otherwise it would have meant death for my father.
Stalin’s own tastes in music and literature were notoriously staid; although well-read and interested in the arts, he disliked experimentation and the avant-garde. Ultimately, he was interested only in what could further the cause of the Communist revolution. And to be effective as propaganda, art had to be comprehensible by the masses of ordinary people; anything more complicated, innovative or original was by definition useless and, worse still, potentially dangerous.
The Futurist poets – most importantly, Vladimir Mayakovsky – embraced the revolution and proclaimed the power of art and imagination. The Fellow Travellers produced modernist prose, not always to the taste of the arch conservatives in the Kremlin. The self-described Proletarians demanded that literature be subjugated to party control, claiming for themselves the right to speak for the party, but in the end they too fell foul of the Bolsheviks’ shifting standards. Independent writers, including those who at first welcomed the revolution, found themselves marginalised and threatened.
A common reaction was simply to stop writing, to ‘step on the throat of one’s own song’, as Mayakovsky put it. Isaak Babel defiantly told the First Congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1934, ‘I am practising a new genre5 … perfecting the genre of silence.’ It was a deliberately provocative statement, highlighting the regime’s stifling of creative freedom. Babel had been a Bolshevik since the early days and his Red Cavalry short stories had received great public acclaim (see here). But he had become increasingly critical of Stalin and found it virtually impossible to have his work published. In addition, the witty, urbane Babel had had a sexual liaison with the wife of the head of the secret police, Nikolai Yezhov.
In May 1939, Babel was arrested. His common-law wife, Antonina Pirozhkova, was taken with him in the car to the Lubyanka, but released at the prison gate. In her moving memoirs of her husband, At His Side (1996), she recounts his last minutes of freedom:
In the car, one of the [police]men6 sat in the back with Babel and me, while the other one sat in front with the driver. ‘The worst part of this is that my mother won’t be getting my letters,’ Babel said. Then there was silence for a long time. I couldn’t bring myself to say a single word. Babel asked the secret policeman sitting next to him, ‘So I don’t suppose you get too much sleep, do you?’ And he even laughed. As we approached Moscow I said to Babel, ‘I’ll be waiting for you; it will be as if you’ve gone to Odessa, only there won’t be any letters.’ He answered, ‘I ask you to see that the child not be made miserable.’ … We drove to the Lubyanka prison and through the gates. The car stopped before the massive, closed door where two sentries stood guard. Babel kissed me hard and said, ‘Some day we’ll see each other.’ And without looking back, he got out of the car and went through that door. I turned to stone. I could not even cry. I kept thinking, ‘Will they not even give him a cup of tea? He can’t start the day without it.’
Babel’s unfinished works were confiscated and destroyed. His name was expunged from all reference works and he became a ‘non-person’ in the Soviet Union. His family was told he had been sent to a labour camp in Siberia, ‘without the right of correspondence’. Left alone in Moscow, Pirozhkova heard nothing about her husband’s fate for another 15 years, when she was curtly informed that he had ‘died of cardiac arrest7 on 17 March 1941’.
But even that was a lie. Babel’s bloodstained ‘confession’, ludicrously admitting to being a Western spy in the pay of the French secret services, was released after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, together with a record of his trial and verdict. The proceedings, held in the private chambers of the NKVD director, Lavrenty Beria, lasted less than 20 minutes, at the end of which the prisoner was sentenced to death. A typed submission8 from Beria, requesting Stalin’s permission to execute 356 ‘enemies of the USSR’ is dated January 1940. Babel’s is the twelfth name on the list and Stalin has scribbled in blue crayon, ‘Agreed’.
In the stifling atmosphere of repression that descended on Russia in the 1930s, poetry took on a new, almost religious significance. Yevgeny Pasternak says his father was well aware of the secret, subversive power of what he wrote:
The knowledge of free poetry9 was the only thing that could take the place of free speech. Poetry came to encompass everything that was most important to us; everything we believed in, everything we yearned for … It allowed us to keep alive the freedom of memory and independence of thought in the dark years when ‘they’ were trying to reduce us to nothing … Because Stalin knew about my father, it meant his fate did not depend on the murderous petty bureaucrats who were able to crush so many other poets. But, you know, the terror was so thick and all-enveloping that who survived and who did not depended largely on the work of chance … or on the hand of God …
It seems that Stalin’s personal interest in Pasternak’s works saved him from extermination. When the NKVD asked for guidance on how to deal with Pasternak, Stalin wrote on the margin of the secret police report, ‘Leave that cloud-dweller10 in peace.’ Stalin’s decisions were arbitrary and unpredictable. He thought of himself as the supreme authority on art, theatre, music and even linguistics. And it was that blinkered confidence in his own judgement that led him to spare one great poet and condemn another.
It was only a matter of time before the Great Leader would bring his philistine tastes to bear on a Russian musical scene that had been bursting with vitality and brilliance since the early years of the century. Russia had been blessed with a flowering of musical genius that included Alexander Scriabin, Sergei Rachmaninov, Igor Stravinsky and, in the years after 1917, the young Dmitri Shostakovich.
Stalin’s first attempt to bring the composers to his socialist heel, in 1936, was sparked by a controversial opera. Shostakovich’s musically daring, politically dubious Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District had been running to encouraging reviews for nearly two years when Stalin decided to go and see it for himself. So appalled was he by the modernity of the music and the sexually charged nature of the action that he stormed out of the auditorium. Two days later, Pravda published a withering condemnation of the work under the headline ‘Muddle instead of Music’11, an article that signalled the end of artistic freedom in musical life. From now on, the joyful celebration of the proletariat was to be the only theme acceptable in Soviet culture.
When Shostakovich read the Pravda article, he was in no doubt it was written by Stalin himself. He knew he had become an enemy of the people and the conviction that his days were numbered never left him. When I visited Shostakovich’s widow Irina in the Moscow apartment they shared, off Tverskaya Street just north of Red Square, his grand piano was there and she was still classifying the documents of his final years. Irina told me that after the Pravda attack fear became his constant companion. Even after Stalin’s death he continued to look over his shoulder:
It’s terrible when an artist is persecuted12. My husband was always under pressure. He was like the little bird in the old Russian poem: they capture him and squeeze him by the throat … and then they tell him to sing! … He was a nervous man … physically frail … he hated public appearances … But it’s wrong to say he was weak. He had great inner strength. All the attacks on him left him traumatised. But he had constancy and great decency. Morally he was strong.
For the rest of his life, Shostakovich felt he must constantly appease the authorities’ lust for blood. He wrote the music they requested, but filled it with secret defiance: to those who listen carefully, there is a bitter, mocking strain in much of his work. He writes the triumphant music the regime demanded of him, but undermines it with an ironic flourish, or a cheeky quotation of his own initials ‘DSCH’ encoded in the notes (in German notation, ‘S’ is E flat and ‘H’ is B natural). His music says one thing, but means another.fn1
After the scandal over Lady Macbeth, Shostakovich made a show of atonement by writing a new symphony – his fifth – that would be tuneful and uplifting, in line with the party’s demands. He even gave it the subtitle ‘A Soviet artist’s response to just criticism’. And it seems to have calmed Stalin’s rage. The work’s finale, with its bombastic D major fanfares is, on the face of it, upbeat and optimistic, a very ‘Soviet’ moment of triumph. But listen and hear the hollowness and stifled anger within. The composer is not cheering, but screaming against the system.
In the scherzo of his Tenth Symphony, written at the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, Shostakovich unleashes the lifetime of pent-up fury he has nursed against the man who tried to stifle his music. It is the symphonic equivalent of Mandelstam’s fatal poem denouncing Stalin and his crimes. The wild, hammering rhythms of the music are relieved only by the appearance in the following movement of Shostakovich’s own four-note musical signature. Now the composer seems to be offering his personal testimony: ‘This I have experienced; this I have witnessed. I have seen the barbarity and survived to tell the story.’ Even though Stalin had been dead for six months by the time the symphony was first performed, Shostakovich remained haunted by the fear of him. He confirmed the true meaning of the portraits in his work only in interviews that he insisted be kept secret until after his death.
Like Shostakovich, Anna Akhmatova knew the full ferocity of the dictator’s rage. She was the first of the great poets to be banned by Stalin, in 1925. Her husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilev, had been executed in 1921 as part of the random killings carried out by the state in response to an imagined anti-revolutionary plot.fn2 Her son Lev was arrested in 1935, when Akhmatova was at the height of her poetic powers. She spent years trying to free Lev from the Gulag, a personal Calvary that her great poem Requiem (1935–40) made into an enduring memorial for all those who trod the same lonely path. In one of the work’s most remarkable passages, Akhmatova describes standing in the endless prison queue of mothers and wives. When someone in the queue, a woman with blue lips, recognises her and asks ‘Can you describe this?’ she replies, ‘Yes, I can.’ As with Shostakovich, the poet announces, ‘I am a witness and I am a writer; perhaps something will survive of what I write’:
Not under foreign skies14
Nor under foreign wings protected,
I was with my people in those hours,
There where unhappily my people were …
I pray not only for myself,
But also for all those who stood there
In bitter cold, or in the July heat,
Under that red blind prison-wall …
I should like to call you all by name,
But they have lost the lists …
I have woven for them a great shroud
Out of the poor words I overheard them speak.
I remember them always and everywhere,
And if they shut my tormented mouth,
Through which a hundred million of my people cry,
Let them also remember me …
The verses of Requiem were so incendiary that they could not be written down; Akhmatova and her friend Lydia Chukovskaya committed them to memory and burned the manuscript. Akhmatova speaks of the power of poetry and the need to keep it alive under the harsh conditions of Stalinist Russia. ‘We will preserve you15, Russian speech,’ she writes, ‘from servitude in foreign chains, keep you alive, great Russian word, fit for the songs of our children’s children…’ Akhmatova’s colleague, Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of Osip, said later that all over Russia there were little old ladies who hardly dared go to sleep at night for fear of forgetting their husband’s verses. Despite years of abuse from the regime, which derided her sensual-sacred poetry as the ravings of a ‘half nun, half harlot’, Akhmatova’s poetry retained an astounding level of popularity among the Soviet public, circulating widely in samizdat or simply learned by heart.
Then, in 1941, with the Nazis at the gates, Stalin relented. Knowing the resonance of her voice for a nation under threat, he allowed her to publish and to broadcast on state radio. Akhmatova was suddenly useful for the regime. She responded with the glorious patriotic verses of her lyric poem ‘Courage’ (1942). Recognising her popularity, Stalin had her flown out of besieged Leningrad to the safety of Tashkent. On the aeroplane, she became aware that below, across the endless terrain of Russia, her exiled son had taken the same journey under very different circumstances. In her epic Poem Without a Hero (1940–65), she writes:
Opening before me16 was the road
Down which so many have trod,
Down which my son was led.
And that funeral procession was long,
Amid the festive and crystal
Silence of the Siberian land …
As she foresaw, Akhmatova’s triumph was through her art. She wrote that Pushkin’s glory was to be remembered and known and loved by successive generations in all the details of his life, while the monarchs and officials who tormented him – for all their great titles and ranks – have been forgotten, or reduced to footnotes in Pushkin’s work. She hardly doubted that she would enjoy the same posthumous vindication.
Akhmatova survived into her seventies, along with Nadezhda Mandelstam, who said she had ‘drawn a winning lottery ticket that allowed her to live out her days’. Between them they memorised and preserved the poetry of a generation: they were, literally, keeping the culture of Russia alive in their heads until the great barbarism had passed.
For Boris Pasternak, however, a more public trial awaited. His seminal novel Doctor Zhivago, smuggled to the West and rewarded with a Nobel Prize in 1958, thrust him into the international spotlight. Zhivago’s questioning of the collectivist ideals of Soviet Communism enraged the Kremlin and brought a public campaign of vilification against its author. In Pasternak’s dacha in the village of Peredelkino outside Moscow, the museum’s curator showed me the desk at which he had received, accepted and then refused the prize under fierce pressure from the Soviet leadership. The furore, she said, left him a broken man. He was expelled from the Writers’ Union, threatened and called a traitor because he had had his novel published abroad in the ‘hostile’ West. Yevgeny Pasternak told me the pressure weakened his father’s already fragile health:
He was delighted and happy17 when he got the letter offering him the Nobel Prize. He naively thought he would be able to accept it. But the authorities threatened him. If he went to collect the prize, they would never let him back in the country … They would arrest those close to him … I saw him that day, and it was quite clear what a terrible blow it had all been to him.
Pasternak fell ill. When the doctors were called, they diagnosed a heart attack, but also a previously undetected and very aggressive cancer of the lungs. On the day of Pasternak’s death, 30 May 1960, there was no official announcement in the Soviet media, but handwritten notices were posted in Moscow saying that his funeral would take place two days later in Peredelkino. The authorities had the notices torn down, but they appeared again and thousands of people arrived on 2 June to pay homage. The poet’s coffin was carried by his son Yevgeny, and by Yevgeny’s half-brother Leonya, across the fields to the place where he’s buried in the local cemetery.
Mandelstam, Babel, Pasternak, Akhmatova and Shostakovich had chosen to remain in Russia after 1917. But in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, another road had been open to those who had doubts about the new regime, and many artists, writers and musicians took it. The wave of émigrés who left Russia in those early years before the Bolsheviks closed the country’s borders settled chiefly in Western Europe. Russian colonies sprang up in Berlin, Prague and the south of Italy. But the largest number settled in France, colonising certain arrondissements of Paris that are still noticeably Russian even today.
The exiles brought with them all the acrimony and hatred that had riven Russian society at home. Rival political groupings continued their feuds on the streets of Paris. Neighbours mistrusted neighbours. And, after 1924, everyone feared the vengeance of Stalin. Rumours of Red agents carrying out murders and kidnaps circulated constantly. Few slept easy in their beds.
The young Sergei Efron was a former soldier with the White Army. He had impeccable anti-Communist credentials and he was trusted in émigré circles. But unbeknown to his friends and family, he had been recruited by Soviet intelligence. Efron was asked by his Communist controllers to take part in the murder of a Soviet defector, Ignace Reiss, and he agreed to do so. But when the French police discovered he had been involved in the plot, his Soviet spymasters smuggled him out of France and took him back to Russia.
Efron’s story was far from unique; treachery and defections were rife among the émigrés. But Sergei was also married to one of the great poets of modern times, Marina Tsvetaeva, author of some of the most remarkable and passionate lyric verse in the Russian canon.
After a series of youthful affairs with both men and women, she had fled Russia with Efron, the man she called Seryozha, and whom she spoke of as her only true love. When his involvement with the Reds was revealed, Tsvetaeva’s friends in the Paris émigré community regarded her as an enemy. She was shunned and alone. Her daughter Alya had already gone back to Russia, and now her husband had gone too. Tsvetaeva felt she had no choice but to follow them.
She undoubtedly knew the dangers. She had had a brief affair with the literary critic Dmitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky, who later returned to the USSR and was executed by the Bolsheviks. But Tsvetaeva now found herself being forced down the same path. It was 1939, and Stalin’s purges were swallowing their victims; she was going back into the heart of the Terror.
Efron had initially been rewarded for his services to the regime and given a dacha not far from Moscow. Tsvetaeva lived there with him for a while. But in early 1940, Alya and another friend were arrested. Under torture, they incriminated Efron as a French spy and he too was arrested. With her family in jail – her husband soon executed and her daughter sent to the Gulag – Tsvetaeva’s life was unbearable. She had found peace neither in exile nor back in Russia, and the theme of suicide began to appear in her poetry:
What tears in eyes now18,
Weeping with anger and with love …
What a black mountain
Has blocked the world from the light.
It’s time – it’s time – it’s time
To give God … his ticket back.
Later she wrote: ‘The world considers me possessed of courage. But no one is more timid. I fear eyes, blackness, footsteps … for a year I have been taking the measure of death …’
Deprived of her family, with no means of support and too depressed even to write poetry, she hanged herself on 31 August 1941 in the provincial town of Elabuga, where she had been evacuated from the invading Nazis.
As well as poets like Tsvetaeva, the 3 million Russians who fled abroad after the revolution included great painters – Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky; writers – Nabokov and Ivan Bunin; and composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev and Rachmaninov. All were haunted by the knowledge that they could live neither in their native land nor without it. ‘When I left Russia19,’ wrote Rachmaninov, ‘I lost my desire to create. Devoid of my Homeland I have lost myself.’
The exiles felt keenly that the true Russia had ceased to exist in October 1917 and that they must keep the flame alive until the barbarians were driven out. They regarded themselves as the custodians of the real Russia, a society and a culture in exile. At their enforced distance from the physical Russia, they created an imaginary Russia, a Russia that never changed, in which they could live. The writer Ivan Bunin turned his villa in Grasse in the south of France into a sort of closed world where Russian was spoken and contemporary life was excluded. Unlike Rachmaninov, Stravinsky never lost the will to compose, but his works of the 1920s – in particular the ballet Le Baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss) – appear as a despairing attempt to recreate a world that is lost. The music is filled with nostalgia, with children’s songs from his youth and Tchaikovskian melodies saturated with longing for the comforting past.
In his memoir, Speak Memory (1951), the writer Vladimir Nabokov describes the pain of being cut off from that past, the constant unexpressed yearning to return. He speaks of exiles who never unpacked their suitcases, who ‘imitated in foreign cities20 a dead civilisation, now remote, almost legendary’. His writing celebrates the Russia he knew as a child and idealised in exile in Europe and the United States. But the sweet nostalgia is tinged with the bitter knowledge that the object of his love has been desecrated by the new rulers of Russia. He always said he would never go back, even if he were able to:
The revolution was blood21, deceit and oppression. All it can promise now is material articles: second-hand, philistine values; copies of Western gadgets and caviar for the generals … I detest it. Any palace in Italy is better than that [going back]. I do not wish to spoil the picture of the haunts of my childhood which I have kept in my mind.
But in the early days of his exile, many of Nabokov’s stories do deal with the desire and the fear of going back. In his Gogolian fantasy ‘A Visit to the Museum’ (1938), the narrator searches for an old Russian painting in a French art gallery. The visit turns into a dreamlike fantasy in which he wanders through endless, nightmarishly expanding corridors until he opens a final door and emerges not in France but in the snowy streets of St Petersburg, now transformed into a terrifying alien place by the Bolshevik regime:
At first, the quiet and the snowy coolness22 of the night, somehow strikingly familiar, gave me a pleasant feeling after my wanderings … but there was a twinge in my heart … Alas! It was not the Russia I remembered, but the factual Russia of today, forbidden to me, hopelessly slavish and hopelessly my native land …
Nabokov’s terror at the Sovietisation of his homeland and the destruction of his childhood paradise by the Bolsheviks was reinforced by the fate of his own father, who had been an official in the Provisional Government between February and October 1917. Nabokov’s affection for his father permeates the pages of his work, and the circumstances of his violent death would make a traumatic impression on him. After taking his family into exile in 1918, Nabokov Senior had continued to campaign for the liberal democratic values of his party, the Constitutional Democrats or KaDety. In March 1922, he travelled to Berlin to chair a KaDet conference at which the party’s former leader Pavel Miliukov was due to speak. The two men had quarrelled and were now political opponents, but Nabokov believed in tolerance and gave his colleague a warm introduction. As he was speaking, two former tsarist officers ran towards the stage singing the tsarist anthem and shooting from revolvers at the startled Miliukov. Nabokov was in his fifties, unfit and overweight, but he jumped off the stage and wrestled one of the men to the floor. His action undoubtedly saved Miliukov’s life. Nabokov himself was not so lucky. The other assassin fired two shots into his chest, killing him instantly.
For some émigrés, the pull of home was overwhelming. Sergei Prokofiev had left Russia after the revolution, carving out a successful career for himself as a pianist and composer in Western Europe and North America. But in 1936, at the height of Stalin’s terror, steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the danger he was putting himself in, he elected to return to Moscow. Prokofiev’s son Sviatoslav, who was a young child at the time and remembers the train journey eastwards as a great adventure, told me that Russia’s lure was too great for his father to resist:
He blamed the vandalism23 of the Bolsheviks … My father writes in his diary, ‘I thought it [the revolution] was inevitable, but it will soon stop boiling and the sickness will finish.’ Like all Russians living abroad, the real émigrés, they all were very homesick, nostalgic for their motherland. He said in his diary, ‘What the hell am I doing in the West, while my music is so much needed in my country?’
Going back showed a naivety on Prokofiev’s part about what was happening in Russia, or – perhaps more likely – deliberate self-delusion. For him and other exiled artists the feeling of isolation in a Western world where their work was misunderstood, where the intellectual classes admired Stalin and disdained those who fled from him, was simply too much to bear. The Bolsheviks promised Prokofiev wealth, fame and privilege if he came back. He believed them … and went.
At first his life in the Soviet Union went well. He felt valued as a composer performing an important public function. He was initially allowed to write what he wanted with no official interference. He composed Peter and the Wolf (1936) to great success and, according to Sviatoslav, believed he could remain apolitical, detached from the realities of the Soviet world. ‘In the beginning he was just very happy24. He saw his friends and literally plunged into the Soviet musical life. But soon came the terrible 1937 years with their purges. He was perplexed when he learned about the arrests of some of his friends.’
Chief among them was Prokofiev’s old ally, the distinguished theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, who was working on the composer’s opera Semyon Kotko (1940) at the time of his arrest in June 1939. Meyerhold’s ‘crimes’ were never formally identified, but his work in the theatre was experimental and avant-garde. He was deeply opposed to the restrictive dogma of socialist realism and made a speech in which he lamented the artistic straitjacket culture was being placed in. After he was arrested and taken to the Lubyanka, unknown men broke into his flat and smashed everything in sight. His wife, the distinguished and beautiful actress Zinaida Raikh, was left dead on the floor of the kitchen with her eyes gouged out. It was a stark image of the cultural desecration practised by Stalin’s regime.
Meyerhold’s prolonged torture at the hands of the NKVD left him a broken man. He was reduced to writing terrified pleas for clemency that were made public only in 1991 when the KGB archives were opened by the government of Boris Yeltsin:
They are torturing me25. They make me lie face down and beat my spine and feet. Then they beat my feet from above … when my legs are covered with internal haemorrhaging, they beat the red-blue-and-yellow bruises … it feels like boiling hot water. I howl and weep from the pain … I twist and squeal like a dog. Death, oh most certainly, death is easier than this. I begin to incriminate myself in the hope I will go quickly to the scaffold.
Meyerhold went to his execution in February 1940, reportedly shouting ‘Long live Stalin’, believing, like many others, that the great Father of the Nation could not possibly be aware of the crimes that were being carried out in his name.
Sergei Prokofiev himself was spared arrest, possibly by his international reputation, possibly by the efforts he made to write the sort of socialist realist music the regime demanded from him. Prokofiev’s Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution (1936–7) was written spontaneously, without official pressure. The composer was thrilled by the scale and ambition of the task, and he created a masterpiece, using several orchestras, a folk ensemble and settings of the words of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. The work has only recently been revived in the West, to great critical acclaim. It languished unheard for many years, possibly – according to Sviatoslav Prokofiev – because of its overt Communist message:
People like to say26, ‘Oh, he wrote music for the Bolsheviks,’ but they forget that Mozart and Bach, they also wrote cantatas by command. But it seems to me that some parts sound quite satirical and even ironical. For example, there is a personage Lenin and he is shouting out revolutionary slogans and the orchestra also plays very loud and Lenin with his typical accent shouts, ‘The revolution began!’ or something like that. Well, of course, the party bosses did not like it …
Prokofiev’s miscalculation over the October Cantata was to set words by Lenin and Stalin. The party apparatchiks, who already nursed a personal resentment against him because of his successful time in the West, denounced this as a presumptuous sacrilege and had the work refused. It was never played during the composer’s lifetime. Prokofiev, in the words of his son, finally began to realise ‘something very bad27 is happening in this country’. But it was too late. His requests to travel abroad were refused and, in 1948, Stalin’s cultural commissar, Andrei Zhdanov, condemned his music at the Congress of the Soviet Composers’ Union. A few days later, during the conference, his wife was arrested. Lina Prokofiev, Sviatoslav’s mother, spent the next eight years in the Gulag. His father’s reputation – and his health – were shattered. Prokofiev died the same day as Stalin, on 5 March 1953. There were no flowers for his funeral because they’d all been requisitioned for the Great Leader and Teacher.
On one of the best streets in central Moscow sits an unusual and beautiful private house. It has glazed brick walls, a style moderne frieze of irises, spectacular stained glass and a fantastic staircase of polished limestone. It had belonged to a millionaire banker who fled from Russia after the 1917 revolution, but in 1931 Stalin presented it to the writer, Maxim Gorky, the head of the Soviet Writers’ Union and favourite of the Bolshevik regime. As always, Stalin expected something in return for his largesse. He was determined to see the arts serving socialism, and Gorky was a major author who lent considerable weight to the regime’s case.
Initially a fervent supporter of the revolution, Gorky had been appalled by the abuses of power under the Bolsheviks and had gone into exile in 1921. He spent eight years in southern Italy, wavering between genuine revulsion at the revolution’s cynical violence and regret that he had left behind the trappings of power and influence. From the mid 1920s, Stalin tried to seduce Gorky back to Russia with promises of material wealth and high positions in the Soviet cultural world. The big new house, as well as dachas outside Moscow and in the Crimea, were some of the enticements the regime was offering. And Stalin knew how to appeal to Gorky’s vanity. He was already a famous, wealthy writer, and would undoubtedly be a historic figure in Russian literature. But he agreed to serve as Stalin’s henchman, despite knowing well the crimes his regime was committing.
As head of the Soviet Writers’ Union from 1934 until his death in 1936, Gorky became an apologist for Soviet Communism. He championed collectivisation, the secret police and the repressions. He was a personal friend of Genrikh Yagoda, the bloodthirsty director of the NKVD. He wrote approvingly about the construction of the Belomor Canal, linking the White Sea to the Baltic, which was built by slave labour at the cost of 9,000 lives. Like the Western stooges who allowed themselves to be fooled by Stalin’s rosy PR, Gorky too was a willing dupe. When taken on a visit to the Solovki labour camp, one of the Gulag’s most feared prisons, he wrote glowingly of the good conditions the convicts were kept in. The camp had been specially prepared for Gorky’s visit and the prisoners were given extra food, clothes and luxuries, including newspapers. The prisoners had been warned not to let on to their visitor that this was a show put on for his benefit, and none of them dared to risk doing so. But if you examine photographs of Gorky in the camp, you can see that the inmates are deliberately holding the newspapers upside down in a tacit signal to the outside world that all is not what it seems.
In return for his willing help, Gorky was fêted by Stalin and the other Soviet leaders, who were frequent visitors at his Moscow mansion. The main thoroughfare leading north from the Kremlin was renamed Gorky Street in his honour, and he became the regime’s author number one: his books were published in vast numbers, and his work was taught in every school.
Within the constraints of his official position, it seems Gorky did what he could to protect fellow writers who were in danger of arrest and repression. His efforts were not always successful, and he never risked his own wellbeing, but compared to others, Gorky retained some elements of humanity and integrity. His murderous successor as head of the Writers’ Union, Alexander Fadeyev, who personally signed death warrants for the extermination of his colleagues, had no such compunction. Yevgeny Pasternak, whose father was persecuted by Fadeyev, recalled an incident when his mother Zinaida went to plead for mercy:
Fadeyev was superficially friendly: he had the dacha next door to us. When he was drunk, which was often, he would recite my father’s poems by heart and praise them. But that day when Zinaida went to him to plead for clemency towards my father, he told her, ‘Listen. I love28 your husband. But if they tell me to crush him, I shall do it without a moment’s hesitation.’
In the Soviet Union, artists and writers who saved their own skins were understood. Those who did so at the cost of persecuting others were universally reviled.
The question of who collaborated with Stalin’s regime is a vexed one. Hundreds of unprincipled, untalented painters, writers and composers produced reams of worthless propaganda. Tyrants like Fadeyev were complicit in crimes and repressions. But even the greatest artists went some way towards collaboration. Anna Akhmatova wrote a poem to Stalin to try to save her son from the camps. Osip Mandelstam did the same: it failed to save him, but it may have saved his wife Nadezhda. Much later, she said of those terrible years:
People who had voices had their tongues cut out29, and with the stump that remained they were forced to glorify the tyrant. The desire to live is insuperable and people accepted even this if it meant a little more life …
Riddled with guilt and fearing retribution after the death of his protector Stalin, Alexander Fadeyev shot himself in 1956, prompting Boris Pasternak to comment, ‘So, it seems Alexander Alexandrovich30 has rehabilitated himself.’
Fadeyev can no longer answer to the court of public opinion, but his opposite number at the Soviet Composers’ Union lived on into his nineties and died only in 2007. Tikhon Khrennikov was personally appointed by Stalin in 1948 and – astoundingly – remained active in the post until 1991. For nearly half a century, he ruled Soviet music just as the ruthless Fadeyev ruled literature. In 1948, Khrennikov leapt to do Stalin’s bidding by denouncing Shostakovich, Prokofiev and other leading composers after Stalin decreed that Soviet music must be cleansed of anti-socialist, bourgeois-Western elements. His diatribe resulted in humiliating public recantations from Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Nikolai Miaskovsky and Aram Khatchaturian. They were made to apologise for their musical ‘crimes’ and promise to write socialist music in the future. Khrennikov’s defence, offered to me in an interview in his Moscow apartment shortly before his death, was that he was just following orders:
Well yes, we had the decree31 of the Central Committee in 1948, when all the big names – Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khatchaturian – were attacked for writing un-Soviet music. They were accused of writing music that had Western tendencies and was inimical to the Soviet people. As far as I am concerned, they just told me – they forced me – to read out that speech attacking Shostakovich and Prokofiev. What else could I have done? If I’d refused, it could have been curtains for me … death. Stalin’s word was law.
As with Gorky, opinions about Khrennikov are divided. ‘Anti-Soviet’ tendencies are less easy to identify in music than in written art forms, and composers suffered correspondingly less persecution than writers and poets. I have encountered more than one Russian musician willing to testify that Khrennikov did what he could to protect composers like Prokofiev and Shostakovich.fn3 But, despite his initial hints at contrition, he remained proud of the power he wielded:
My word was law32! People knew I was appointed personally by Stalin and they were afraid of me. I was Stalin’s commissar. When I said No! it meant No. They all treated me with respect. But, you know, under me no composer or musician was ever executed! Other unions, the writers and so on, they all had people arrested and executed. But not in my union. No one was ever executed.
Execution was not the only tragedy to befall Russia’s artists and writers. The fate of the poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Yesenin epitomises the destiny of many who loved, or tried to love the revolution. For the greatest among them it was a passionate, almost carnal affaire, shot through with euphoria, betrayal, despair and – all too often – suicide, an astoundingly common fate among poets and writers in the years after 1917. It was as if the revolution had heightened the intensity of existence until everything – art, poetry, love and politics – became a matter of life and death.
Mayakovsky’s verse heaves with the themes of love – love for a woman and love for the revolution. His early poetry is a vigorous, inventive call to arms, a fervent appeal to his own generation to rise up against the old world and hurry on the advent of the new. His epic poems ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’ and ‘Good!’; his poetic exhortations ‘Left March!’ and ‘Ode to the Revolution’; and his ringing political slogans became the common currency of a generation. They are brimfull of confidence in the power of poetry and its central role in building the new society:
The song and the verse34
Are a bomb and a flag;
And the voice of the poet
Raises the class to arms.
Whoever sings today apart,
He is against us.
But in the years after 1917 a skulking fear begins to appear, at first tangentially, then with greater insistence; an ever more powerful theme of unrequited sexual love, and a suggestion that the poet’s love for the revolution may suffer the same fate.
Mayakovsky’s poetry was innovative, fiercely individualistic and technically brilliant. The Futurists were the poets of the modern age. They declared their intention to ‘throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy from the steamship of modernity’. ‘It is time for bullets35 to pepper the museums,’ Mayakovsky announced. The Futurists wanted to renew language, revitalise society and create a new humankind, so their aims seemed perfectly in tune with those of the Bolsheviks.
But the leaders of the revolution were cultural conservatives. Lenin considered Mayakovsky’s work to be ‘nonsense, stupidity36, double stupidity and pretentiousness’. By the late 1920s, Mayakovsky was out of love with the revolution. He wrote plays attacking the philistinism of Soviet society and the deadening bureaucracy of officialdom. By 1930, he had had enough. In a third-floor room in an apartment building just behind the Lubyanka, he took off his shoes and overcoat, sat down on the bed and shot himself. For three-quarters of a century the room has been preserved exactly as he left it – his shoes on the floor, his overcoat on the bed and the complete works of Lenin on the bookshelf. His suicide note, in the form of a poem, suggests the poet’s unrequited love had overwhelmed him:
It’s past one o’clock37. You must have gone to bed.
The Milky Way streams silver through the night.
I’m in no hurry; with lightning telegrams
I have no cause to wake or trouble you.
And, as they say, the incident is closed.
Love’s boat has smashed against the daily grind.
Now you and I are quits. Why bother then
To balance mutual sorrows, pains and hurts.
Behold what quiet settles on the world.
Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars.
In hours like these, one rises to address
The ages, history and all creation.
Mayakovsky’s death sent shock waves through the Soviet Union. He had been the official poet of the regime, his verses were the soundtrack of the revolution. If he were disillusioned …
Five years earlier, Yesenin, the mercurial peasant genius, had trod the same path of despair. A boisterous, spontaneous poet who toured the bars of Moscow reciting his verses, Yesenin too was a man of inexorable passions. He drank too much, got into fights and was briefly married to the American dancer Isadora Duncan, even though they didn’t speak each other’s languages. He tried his hardest to love the revolution and write the poetry it wanted from him, but kept coming back to the songs of love and nostalgia and respect for human beings that were supposed to have been left behind in the old world of the ‘former’ Russia. In his poems, you can hear Yesenin desperately trying and failing to come to terms with the new social order (‘I want to be a poet38/And a citizen/In the mighty Soviet state’). But ultimately, it was Yesenin’s refusal to sing the dull, socialist song of Stalinist mediocrity that turned him into the poète maudit of literary legend, and ensured the undying affection in which Russians still hold him:
I am not your tame canary!39
I am a poet!
Not one of your petty hacks.
I may be drunk at times,
But in my eyes
Shines the glorious light of perception!
Yesenin’s lyrical evocations of the Russian countryside brought him fame. Schoolchildren learned his poetry by heart. But, like Mayakovsky, Yesenin fell out of love with the revolution. His poems started to express doubts about the new order, and his work met official disfavour. Alcoholism and a series of failed love affairs ended with him hanging himself in a Leningrad hotel in 1925, having written a poem in his own blood.
Yesenin’s grave in the Vagankovskoe Cemetery in Moscow has been a place of pilgrimage ever since. His last lover killed herself on his tombstone on the first anniversary of his death. And even today I know that whenever I go there, a troupe of Moscow down-and-outs will eagerly recite Yesenin’s verse in return for a little vodka money. The writer and critic Viktor Shklovsky lamented in the 1930s, ‘Art must move organically40, like the heart in the human breast, but they [the regime] want to regulate it like a train.’ There was always something monomaniacal about the Bolsheviks. The love and lyricism of poets like Mayakovsky and Yesenin left them indifferent. Poetry was useful only if it was socialist poetry. Lenin famously said, ‘I’m no good at art41: art for me is a just an appendage, and when its use as propaganda – which we need at the moment – is over, we’ll cut it out as useless: snip, snip!’
fn1 If art can kill its creators, in the strange world of the old Soviet Union it seems it could also kill its tormentors. In 1969 the ‘pre-premiere’ of Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony – a private performance for Soviet officials, where the regime’s musical enforcers would root out any deviations from official socialist doctrine – was attended by Pavel Apostolov, a critic who for years had persecuted Shostakovich and other composers. Shostakovich was by then a sick man, and in the recording of his introductory speech you can hear how weak his voice has become. Talking about his new work, the ailing composer says he has chosen to write a piece about death and takes Soviet society to task for refusing to talk about the subject as if it didn’t exist. It was clearly not a welcome discourse to the official arbiters of public taste in the audience. When the symphony was played, with its settings of poems all concerned with the subject of death, Apostolov rose to his feet and forced his way down the row of seats to walk out of the hall. As the door crashed behind him, Shostakovich and most of the audience thought the critic was demonstrating his disapproval of the content of the symphony and that political retribution would follow. But when they came out, they found an ambulance outside. Apostolov had been having a heart attack and had died as the last notes of the symphony were being played. For the Moscow intelligentsia, who had suffered so much at the hands of bureaucrats like Apostolov, this was the blackest of black comedy. The apparatchik killed by a symphony. Such was the power of art.
fn2 Gumilev was arrested in August 1921 on fabricated charges of plotting to overthrow the state. Numerous appeals were made on his behalf, but Lenin and Dzerzhinsky remained unmoved. When Dzerzhinsky was asked if they were entitled to shoot one of the leading poets in Russia he replied: ‘Are we entitled13 to make an exception for a poet and still shoot the others?’
fn3 Khrennikov’s defence evokes33 some limited sympathy even from Shostakovich’s widow Irina: ‘Well, Dmitry used to say: “If it wasn’t Khrennikov, someone else would have done it … maybe someone even worse.” But Khrennikov was malicious and vindictive. He caused a great deal of harm. A great deal. He was always scheming. And now he tries to say it wasn’t his fault … All the attacks on Dmitri left him traumatised. In 1948, it was really tough. They banned his music, he lost his job at the conservatoire. Life was hard. But he wrote his secret revenge: his music …’