mobilizing everyone, as many as possible, into work brigades for the building of fortifications outside of Moscow. I readily joined this brigade along with Liza Glatman, Olga Kuznetsova, Vera Bezuglova and other co- workers who were capable of handling a shovel. We were sent off with great pomp and speechifying, but no sooner did we get to the outskirts of the city than we were sent back. It was too late, all the approaches had been seized by the Germans. There was no place nor purpose for digging or erecting fortifications.
And on the next day—this was 16 October 1941, the notorious day of wholesale Moscow panic—our institute among many others was ordered to leave the city on foot, since there was no transportation and no point in waiting for any. Thousands of people in silent concentration, having taken with them whatever they could, marched along roads away from what seemed to be a doomed Moscow.
That was a cold autumnal day. The wind whipped pieces of burnt personal and official documents along the streets. The Institute of World Literature column, or what was left of the IWL, presented a sorry sight. Most of the men had been called into the army or had gone into the people’s volunteer corps. Several of them, specifically Mark Serebrianskii, head of the Soviet Literature sector, and Misha Zabludovskii, a specialist in Western Literature, had already been killed. Some of the older scholars declined to leave Moscow (A.K. Dzhivelegov among them). Others, members of the Writer’s Union, managed to leave on the 14th or 15th of October with the Writer’s Union convoy. There were others who could not walk at all due to poor health. Our column, therefore, was made up primarily of women with children or aged parents who had not been evacuated earlier. Anna Arkad’evna Elistratova, even then a renowned specialist on Anglo-American literature, trudged along, short of breath, painfully moving her edematous legs. Her mother and totally decrepit father trudged along with her. Old Leonid Ippolitovich walked with difficulty in the column of the institute which had been entrusted to him. Evgenii Emil’evich Leitneker, the middle-aged and ill co-worker of the Gorky sector also marched with difficulty, carrying a heavy rucksack totally filled with his unfinished manuscript:
People quickly began to tire and our younger members began putting the old and infirm on military vehicles which kept passing us. Then they found places for everybody else and by the end of the day all of us were taken care of, including the director who had refused to get on a vehicle until everybody
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else had been provided a place. In this manner we arrived in the city of Gorky [Nizhnii Novgorod] and then by water reached Kazan where we were housed in the university. Finally, in a convoy composed of many academic institutions, we set off for Alma-Ata in Central Asia where the Academy Presidium had assigned us. When it turned out that Alma-Ata was filled beyond capacity, we found refuge in Tashkent.
We were quartered in the building of the Tamara Khanum school of ballet on one of the central streets of the city. In an enormous mirrored hall we spread out crates of manuscripts and articles from our Tolstoy and Pushkin museums which had been sent to Tashkent in our footsteps. We arranged the crates to form small, cell-like rooms which were quickly dubbed “caves;” used anything at hand for curtains, and began to live in them as families or in groups of two or three friends.
From time to time those of us who were stronger were sent by the city council to pick cotton; a group took part in the construction of the North-Tashkent canal, but most of us academic types were utilized as lecturers in hospitals and at the various enterprises and construction sites of the region. For this work Tashkent provided us with minimal room and board.
Most of all, I recall, we suffered from the absence of potatoes—the customary Russian potatoes without which a meal is not a meal with us. But at the Alai farmer’s market, the “belly of Tashkent,” potatoes cost eight rubles a kilo and only those who had money or had managed to bring items for barter could buy them. There were few people like that among us. Once while strolling in the market with Olga Kuznetsova and platonically admiring the colorful rows of fruits and vegetables we spotted our director, Leonid Ippoli-tovich, standing off in a corner holding his hat out with embarrassment. The poor man, he intended to sell or trade it for potatoes, but did it so ineptly that no one understood him. One could think that he was holding it out for alms. We slipped away quietly.
We all loved and sympathized with “Ippolitych,” despite the fact that in contrast to Luppol [the previous director] he was slow in his thinking, had poor relations with his subordinates, had a quick temper, and was unjust in his arbitrary likes and dislikes. But we knew that he was scrupulously honest, unselfish and totally helpless before his bosses, especially when he encountered liars, bribe takers, careerists and other slime of which we had more than enough. We considered it our duty to aid him in all the institute matters, especially in providing for those people whom we had led out of Moscow.
“We,” the morally conscious, active group of “Tamara Khanum” who had become closely knit during the wartime disasters were: Liza Glatman, assistant director in organizational matters; Lidochka Kriuchkova, executive secretary, a warm and sweet person who completed medical school while in
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Tashkent and later became an outstanding doctor at Moscow’s Botkin Hospital; Varvara Nikolaevna Lanina, the irreplaceable chairman of the [city] district committee who was in charge of distributing wearing apparel— footwear, shirts, pants, etc.—and who did so with unfailing fairness and attentiveness though the goods were few and the demand high. Emmochka Evin, from the Pushkin Museum, was also part of the activist group. She was a wonderful comrade who maintained unbroken contact with all our colleagues who were at the front. There was also Tamara Motyleva, who in her business-like manner with high expectations toward herself and others, was a successful administrator throughout the evacuation. But the soul of the group was Olga Kuznetsova, who occupied no titled position, but had a fervid, generous and selfless spirit which drew everyone to her. Soon other co-workers who had fled Moscow independently of the institute began arriving at the “Tamara Khanum.”
The institute gradually recovered and renewed its labors. The work on the history of Soviet literature continued. One of the “English” volumes was nearing completion under the leadership of A.A. Elistratova. In evacuation we began work on the first volume of
Significant shifts in attitude were occurring among the inhabitants of “Tamara Khanum” as they were occurring among most Soviet people of that time. The confusion at of the beginning of the war was replaced by a wave of patriotism. We all lived with one goal and one emotion: only to win the war. At that moment our Olga announced that, since her daughters were being taken care of by the state in a children’s refuge of the Academy of Science, it was her duty to volunteer for the front where she would bring more benefit to people. And even though she was almost forty, she was sent to a military cook’s school, finished it with the rank of sergeant, and was sent to the front where she spent almost the duration of the war. And, along with many others, at the front she became a member of the [Communist] Party.
THE POST-WAR PERIOD: THE “COSMOPOLITE” CAMPAIGN
The second half of the 1940’s was marked by ruthless ideological pogroms accompanied by robust praise-
