The Soviet armies were pulling out and Yevdokia Bershanskaya’s night bomber regiment was constantly flying to airfields deeper and deeper in the Soviet interior, airfields that by now often proved to be off the edge of their maps. The mood was somber and they were exhausted. Zhenya Rudneva did what she could to raise their spirits, and her own.
One rainy evening when they had all gathered at the command post waiting for the weather scout to arrive, Zhenya pulled a tattered book out of her map case. It was How the Steel Was Tempered by the blind and paralyzed Nikolai Ostrovsky. Quietly, she began to read. At first no one paid attention, but one by one the girls moved closer to hear the story of Pavel Korchagin. First published as a serial between 1932 and 1934, this novel about a fearless revolutionary determined to serve Bolshevism against all odds was the Soviet Gospel.
Soviet culture, aspiring to transfigure society, space, and even time, conditioned the popular consciousness to expect that all sorts of transformations would be needed if the new state and the new Soviet human being were to emerge. Calendars were changed, streets and institutions, even cities (and after the Second World War entire countries) renamed. The goal was “electrification of the whole country,” and there was a move to mass production of standardized apartment blocks. The ideal Soviet citizen, depicted in new books, paintings and films, seemed the man of the future, even though he had much in common with the ideals of antiquity. He was healthy in mind and body, uncompromising and fearless, ruthless toward his enemies, and devoted heart and soul to his state, which he valued more than his own life.
As a rule, books written at that time in the genre of socialist realism were remarkable for the absence of everyday, physiological, or intimate detail. You would never find out from reading them what kind of beds Soviet people slept in, what they drank, or how they kept their clothes clean. They became more and more lifeless and abstract, providing a mold into which whatever ideological content was required at a particular time could be poured. How the Steel Was Tempered was different. Hearing tales of how Pavel emerged victorious from seemingly the most hopeless situations, the young pilots forgot their tiredness and anxieties. When Junkers appeared and somebody shouted “Air raid!” nobody moved from where they were sitting.
In addition to Pavel Korchagin, Zhenya Rudneva invariably carried in her map case a slim volume of poetry that she was constantly reading to herself. One time, however, to cheer up her friends, she read the lines:
If all the heavenly host should call,
“Abandon Rus and live in Eden!”
I will say, “What need I Eden
When my Motherland is all?”
Seeing how warmly they reacted, she started reading to them from that collection, occasionally at first, and then more often. Her friends copied poems into their notebooks, which nearly all of them had, and learned them by heart. The poet was Sergey Yesenin.
One of the most gifted Russian poets of his time, the blue-eyed, golden-haired son of a peasant had a captivating, typical Russian face. Yesenin’s poems praised the beauty of the Russian countryside, love, and his own poetic, youthful self. But he also spoke of the dark sufferings of the human soul, inner turmoil, and vodka. After he hanged himself in a fit of depression in Leningrad in 1925 his poetry was effectively, if unofficially, banned in the Soviet Union for many years.
What happens when you ignore such a ban was discovered at terrible cost by the family of Olga Golubeva. Her father, an old Bolshevik, came from a peasant family but always longed to be educated and was a great book-lover. In their large home library, though, there was no volume of Yesenin. In the campaign against him and his work in the aftermath of his suicide, he was branded a decadent poet inimical to the changes taking place in the country. His poetry ceased to be published. Nikolai Bukharin’s article, “Hostile Notes,” in Pravda put an end to all prospect of that.
“In ideological terms,” Bukharin fumed, “Yesenin represents the most negative aspects of rural Russia and its so-called ‘national character’: brawls, a hopeless lack of personal discipline, and exaltation of retrograde forms of culture in general.”161 Yesenin’s widow, Tolstoy’s granddaughter, Sofia Andreyevna Tolstaya, and former lover, Nadezhda Volpin, who were both bringing up children by him, had an interest both in seeing Yesenin’s poetry published and in getting some royalty income from it. All their efforts were in vain. In every editorial office they visited, they were given to understand that there was a covert ban from the top on publication of Yesenin. In 1933, a selection of his poetry was published in a print-run of 10,200 copies, but no further editions followed.
Despite this, he was not forgotten, and his poems circulated throughout the land in numerous handwritten copies. Even these proto-samizdat editions were persecuted. When Olga Golubeva’s elder sister and her friend were found to have an album of his poems (probably discovered “by chance” by an informing schoolmate) there was a terrible scandal at their school. The girls, who were only fifteen years old, were subjected to constant harassment at all manner of meetings and turned into outcasts. Young and vulnerable, they could see no way out. They took Olga’s father’s revolver and shot themselves.162
Among all the charges thrown at the dead poet by Soviet writers and political figures, one was indisputably justified: that by taking his life he introduced a terrible fashion among young women in Russia for committing suicide. What, after all, could be more romantic than to die in the same way as Russia’s most adored poet?
Apparently with the assistance of Mikhail Kalinin, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (equivalent to the Soviet President), the collection of poetry Zhenya Rudneva carried with her was published just before the war, in 1940. Few poems could have better met the needs of these young women, longing for love and mourning their friends.
Farewell, my dearest friend.
Know you are safe here in my heart.
I pledge by this predestined end
We shall not always be apart.
Yesenin wrote this, his last poem, in his own blood. It was much discussed and censured for its supposedly decadent overtones, but young hearts responded to its poignancy and sadness.
His beautiful earlier poems were also about love and parting:
Do not stray nor crush the fronds of love-lies-bleeding, seek no trace . . .
or
Perhaps the avalanche of fate
will notice us,
reward our love
with a nightingale’s song.
Foolish heart, why beat you so?