The Russian Century

mongering about the “most wise,” the “genius,” and the “beloved” great leader.

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The first attack was the pronouncement of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union concerning the literary journals Zvezda [The Star] and Leningrad. Just a month-and-a-half earlier the newspaper Kul’tura i zhizn’ [Culture and Life] was founded. It was the organ of the propaganda section of the Central Committee in which loud praise for the achievements of Soviet culture alternated with ruthless vilification of its particular representatives. Each time, we opened the newspaper with horror.

Any judgement, proclaimed on its pages, was beyond appeal. Even if courageous people could be found to speak against it, their writings would not have been published anywhere. Books denounced in this manner were immediately removed from sale and from all the libraries of the nation. And their authors were subjected to lengthy and humiliating “workings over” at meetings of their institutions where they had to repent and admit their errors. Otherwise they were expelled from their positions and never hired anywhere again. In provincial cities this took on a more severe and ruthless nature. I had heard that at one such bloodletting in the city of Khar’kov the victim, who had been ultimately “worked over,” stood up on a dais and said, “You have convinced me, comrades. I have finally understood, that I am not one of us!” This phrase, “I am not one of us,” became a sardonic aphorism. The academic and social life at the IWL went on in an atmosphere of similar pogroms.

A [malevolent] article in Kul’tura i zhizn’ by Viktor Nikolaev accused Leonid Grossman [a noted scholar] of placing the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy in “the same rank with the decadent French writer Marcel Proust.” This was characterized as “slavish adoration of bourgeois culture.” The list of the other “accursed” persons was chosen in a very deliberate manner. Thus began within the walls of the institute the pernicious “anti-cosmopolite” campaign which was already raging in the Writer’s Union and other ideological institutions and in which we did not immediately comprehend an elemental anti-Semitic pogrom that had been let loose by the highest directives of the Central Committee and “comrade Stalin personally.”

A complete replacement of the leadership of the institute took place as a result of Nikolaev’s article. This was followed by a series of notorious cases. The first target of the pogrom turned out to be The History of American Literature. The trouble with this work was that it was begun back during the war when we and the USA were in a united front against Hitler. But due to the tortoise pace of publishing, the book appeared only in 1947, at a tense time in Soviet-American relations. And then the calm, well-intentioned tone of the volume’s authors toward American literature seemed unacceptable to the “ruling comrades.”

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Chapter Twenty-Five

An unbelievable scandal began. The book was accused of containing distortions and political errors, that the “ringing of dollars” was heard in it, and so on. The workers in the foreign sector who had even a tangential association with the creation of the book were most severely castigated and, either immediately or some time later, dismissed from the institute. Abel Isaakovich Startsev was expelled as one of the senior editors, Tamara Motyl- eva—as the reviewer, Anikst—as a member of the editorial board, Tamara Sil’man—as the author of the article on Edgar Allen Poe, which was deemed to be “depraved.”

The repressed edition—a first effort on the history of American literature in the Russian language—was conceived by the authors in two volumes and written with great love and profound knowledge. The second volume was near completion at the time of the crushing of the first volume. But after the scandal, the materials for the second volume were rejected and destroyed without any discussion. (“I lament the fact, that we were not permitted to complete the second volume,” said Startsev many years later. “They could have castigated and abused us later, but the book would have remained!”)

After the reprisals against the Americanists, there came charges of “cosmopolitism” and the exclusion of a number of Jews who were Communists from the party. The “working-over” proceeded as follows. A commission would be formed within the Communist Party of the institute which would divide amongst itself the principal works of the accused, read them and elicit “ideological errors” which were evidence of the author’s obeisance to the West. All of this would be consolidated and presented at a Party meeting. The overall picture would be solid and convincing, and everyone would be amazed how it was that such a cosmopolite malefactor could do his foul deeds within the walls of the institute without punishment. The “malefactor” of course would try to defend himself. But this was quite difficult to accomplish. His students and admirers suddenly “having seen the light” in the best case would blink their eyes in confusion or, in the worst case, join the pack of enraged dogs in the frenzy of pursuing their game. Then everything would be presented at a general Party meeting where, as a rule, the unanimous decision would be: “Expel from the Party and remove from work.”

Today, after the passing of so many years, it is worth contemplating by what means such unanimity was achieved. It cannot be denied that elements of fear and faint-heartedness played a role in this. After all, we lived in an atmosphere of all-penetrating government terror against which struggle was impossible. However, it was more complex than that. We had all been raised to respect the collective, the mass, the opinion of the majority, to reject individualism which had become a word of censure, so that in the end we had totally lost our individual face. It would never even enter our heads to defend

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an opinion against the opinion of the majority, the embodiment of which we believed was the Party, or more precisely, the Party leadership. Therefore, mass psychosis, even though organized and “pushed down” from the top, gripped and convinced substantial numbers of people.

I will refer to the story of one of the contemporary members of the Party executive committee, E.M. Evnina, a member of the foreign literature division. In her words one of the most shameful acts of her life for which she is ashamed even now was connected to the “case” of Tamara Motyleva. When the first “cosmopolites,” Iakovlev and Kirpotin, were expelled, E.M. reacted rather indifferently because she was not especially familiar with their work, simply believing the report of the investigative commission and what was said in the executive council. Having mindlessly voted, E.M. went on vacation, but having returned to Moscow in a month learned that the case of Motyleva had come up at the last executive meeting.

Though many considered Tamara to be an unprincipled chameleon and called her a “dry old stick” and a pedant, E.M. knew that she had a great capacity for work, clarity of purpose, was very erudite and had a command of several foreign languages. She had been an exemplary university student, always on the honor roll and maintained these qualities in her scholarly work. Upon hearing that Motyleva was being expelled from the party for having made mistakes in her doctoral dissertation, E.M. was extremely surprised since she always considered her a strong scholar and a “correct” communist.

Evnina and Motyleva worked in the same department and, while never having been close friends, knew each