“A toast to our beloved leader of the Leningrad Party and possibly the Baku proletariat too, yet he promises me he can’t read all the papers—and what else are you beloved leader of ?” replied Stalin. Even the tipsy banter between Stalin and Kirov was pregnant with ill-concealed anger and resentment, yet no one in the family circle noticed that they were anything but the most loving of friends. However, the “vegetarian years,” as the poetess Anna Akhmatova called them, were about to end: “the meat-eating years” were coming.7
On 30 June, Adolf Hitler, newly elected Chancellor of Germany, slaughtered his enemies within his Nazi Party, in the Night of the Long Knives—an exploit that fascinated Stalin.
“Did you hear what happened in Germany?” he asked Mikoyan. “Some fellow that Hitler! Splendid! That’s a deed of some skill!” Mikoyan was surprised that Stalin admired the German Fascist but the Bolsheviks were hardly strangers to slaughter themselves.
11. ASSASSINATION OF THE FAVOURITE
That summer, their own repression seemed to be easing. In May 1934, the Chairman of the OGPU, Menzhinsky, a shadowy scholar who had been permanently ill and spent most of his time in seclusion studying ancient manuscripts in any of the twelve languages of which he was master, died. The press announced that the hated OGPU had perished with him, swallowed by a new People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs—the NKVD. This aroused hopes that the dawning jazz age really did herald a new freedom in Russia—but the new Commissar was Yagoda who had been running the OGPU for some time.
The illusion of this thaw was confirmed when Yagoda came to Stalin and recited a poem by Osip Mandelstam, who, with his friend, the beautiful Leningrad poetess Anna Akhmatova, wrote verses with a searing emotional clarity which still shines through that twilight of humanity like beams of heart-rending honesty. Naturally they found it hard to conform with Soviet mediocrity.
Yagoda paid Mandelstam the back-handed compliment of learning the verse by heart, sixteen lines of poetry that damned and mocked Stalin as a bewhiskered “Kremlin crag-dweller” and “peasant-slayer” whose “fat fingers” were “as oily as maggots.” The poet Demian Bedny had complained to Mandelstam that Stalin left greasy fingermarks on the books he constantly borrowed. His fellow leaders were a “rabble of thin-necked bosses,” a line he wrote after noticing Molotov’s neck sticking out from his collar and the smallness of his head. Stalin was outraged—but understood Mandelstam’s value. Hence that heartless order to Yagoda that sounds as if it concerned a priceless vase: “Preserve but isolate.”
On the night of 16–17 May, Mandelstam was arrested and sentenced to three years’ exile. Meanwhile the poet’s friends rushed to appeal to his patrons among the Bolshevik magnates. His wife Nadezhda and fellow poet Boris Pasternak appealed to Bukharin at
“Who authorized Mandelstam’s arrest?” muttered Stalin. “Disgraceful.” In July, knowing that news of his interest would spread like ripples on a pond before the coming Writers’ Congress, Stalin telephoned Pasternak. His calls to writers already had their ritual. Poskrebyshev called first to warn the recipient that Comrade Stalin wished to speak to him: he must stand by. When the call arrived, Pasternak took it in his communal apartment and told Stalin he could not hear well since there were children yelling in the corridor.
“Mandelstam’s case is being reviewed. Everything will be all right,” Stalin said, before adding, “If I was a poet and my poet-friend found himself in trouble, I would do anything to help him.” Pasternak characteristically tried to define his concept of friendship which Stalin interrupted: “But he’s a genius, isn’t he?”
“But that’s not the point.”
“What is the point then?” Pasternak, who was fascinated by Stalin, said he wanted to come for a talk. “About what?” asked Stalin.
“About life and death,” said Pasternak. The baffled Stalin rang off. However, the most significant conversation took place afterwards, when Pasternak tried to persuade Poskrebyshev to put him through again. Poskrebyshev refused. Pasternak asked if he could repeat what had been said. The answer was a big yes.
Stalin prided himself on understanding brilliance: “He’s doubtless a great talent,” he wrote about another writer. “He’s very capricious but that’s the character of gifted people. Let him write what he wants, and when!”
Pasternak’s whimsy may have saved his life, for, later, when his arrest was proposed, Stalin supposedly replied: “Leave that cloud-dweller in peace.”1
Stalin’s intervention is famous but there was nothing new about it: as Nicholas I was for Pushkin, so Stalin was for all his writers. Stalin pretended he considered himself just a casual observer: “Comrades who know the arts will help you—I am just a dilettante”2 but he was both gourmet and gourmand. His papers reveal his omnipotent critiques of writers, who wrote to him in droves.
Stalin’s ultimate pet writer was “the Proletarian Poet,” Demian Bedny, a Falstaffian rhymester, with good- natured eyes gazing out of a head “like a huge copper cauldron,” whose works appeared regularly in
“I agree,” added Molotov. “Must not be published without improvements.” Stalin was tired of his drunken poet and expelled him from the Kremlin: “There must be no more scandals inside the Kremlin walls,” he wrote in September 1932. Bedny was hurt but Stalin reassured him: “You must not see leaving the Kremlin as being sacked from the Party. Thousands of respected comrades live outside the Kremlin and so does Gorky!”3
Vladimir Kirshon was one of Gorky’s circle and another recipient of GPU funds who liked to send Stalin everything he wrote. When he was in favour, he could do no wrong: “Publish immediately,” Stalin scrawled on Kirshon’s latest article when returning it to
When Kirshon sent in his new play, Stalin read it in six days and wrote back: “Comrade Kirshon, your play’s not bad. It must be put on in the theatre at once.”4 But Kirshon was being rewarded for his political loyalty: he was one of the hacks who viciously destroyed Bulgakov’s career.
However, after the creation of Socialist Realism, Kirshon wrote to Stalin and Kaganovich to ask if he was out of favour: “Why are you putting the question of trust?” Stalin replied by hand. “I ask you to believe the Central Committee is absolutely happy with your work and trusts you.”5 The writers also turned to Stalin to sort out their feuds: Panferov wrote to Stalin to complain that Gorky was mocking his work. Stalin’s comment? “Vain. File in my archive. Stalin.”6
When he did not like a writer, he did not mince words: “Klim,” he wrote to Voroshilov about an article, “my impression: a first-rate chatterer who thinks he’s the Messiah. Yeah! Yeah! Stalin.” [68] When the American novelist Upton Sinclair wrote to Stalin asking him to release an arrested movie- maker, Stalin commented: “Green steam!” 7 Stalin’s favourite theatre was the Moscow Arts so he was gentler with its famous director, Stanislavsky, blaming his opinion on his colleagues. “I didn’t highly praise the play
His “nearest comrades,” much less literary than he, became unlikely literary tyrants too: Stalin, Molotov and Kaganovich (an uneducated cobbler) decided artistic matters. Molotov turned on Bedny, for example, with an absurd mixture of personal threat and literary criticism. Bedny, a gossip, even dared to play Stalin off against Molotov who lectured him gravely:
“I read Stalin’s letter to you. I agree absolutely. It cannot be said better than by him…” Molotov warned him about rumours of disagreements between the leaders—“You did your bit too, Comrade Bedny. I didn’t expect such things. It’s not good for a proletarian poet…” Molotov even gave poetical advice: “It’s very pessimistic… you need to
