The Magical Chorus

At the time, some European intellectuals perceived the Soviet Union as the most reliable anti-Hitler force. They considered the barbaric Nazi ideas a grave threat to the traditional values of European humanism. So-called Popular Fronts uniting liberals and communists were organized in France and Spain to combat fascism. The writers’ congress in Paris was intended to cement this union on a world scale.

Stalin allocated major expenditures for the congress. He wanted superstars like George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Romain Rolland, Thomas Mann, Theodore Dreiser, and Ernest Hemingway to come to Paris and to support the USSR’s leadership in the antifascist coalition. Soviet backstage ideologue Ehrenburg and the journalist Mikhail Koltsov, Stalin’s favorite, dealt with the practical side. But the central role had been assigned to Gorky from the start, and his presence would have guaranteed the congress both gravitas and the “correct” political line.

However, Gorky suddenly refused to go to Paris, blaming his health in a letter to Stalin and adding that the congress “does not seem particularly important to me.”²⁹ In Gorky’s absence, the situation in Paris quickly spun out of control. In Thomas Mann’s stead came his brother, Heinrich, not nearly as important; instead of Shaw and Wells, there was Aldous Huxley. Andre Gide and Andre Malraux, representing France, were no match for Romain Rolland, who pointedly went to Moscow to be with Gorky. Besides, Gide and Malraux demanded that Babel and Pasternak, who were not in the original list of the Soviet delegation, attend the congress, and they permitted French Trotskyites to be heard at the congress, criticizing Soviet policy. The latter, from Stalin’s point of view, was an open challenge. Pathologically suspicious, Stalin must have wondered whether Malraux and Gide were sabotaging his policies intentionally and who was helping them on the Soviet side.

Still, Stalin permitted both writers to visit the Soviet Union as honored guests. This was done on the insistent recommendation of Gorky and Koltsov. Malraux had already been to Moscow before the congress, and now came to spend time with Gorky at his Crimean dacha, after a meeting in Moscow with Meyerhold to discuss a planned Moscow production of a play based on his novel La Condition humaine [Man’s Fate]. At the time, Malraux was secretary of the leftist international Association of Writers in the Defense of Culture, founded under the aegis of the congress and intended to actively participate in world politics. He was full of ambitious projects, including a new journal and a large-scale Encyclopedia of the Twentieth Century, modeled after the famous Encyclopedie of eighteenth- century French philosopher Denis Diderot.

According to his plan, this new Encyclopedie would be published simultaneously in four languages—French, English, Spanish, and Russian. Malraux suggested Bukharin as head of the Soviet editorial board. The encyclopedia would be funded, of course, by the Soviets.

Gorky, who adored all kinds of grandiose epochal projects, was in full agreement with Malraux’s plan and personnel suggestions. He informed Stalin of them right away, in March 1936. Citing the opinions of Babel (who “understands people very well and is the wisest of our literary figures”) and Koltsov, Gorky endorsed Malraux’s idea that “by organizing the intelligentsia of Europe against Hitler and his philosophy, against Japanese warmongering, we are instilling the idea of the inevitability of world social revolution.”³⁰

The Frenchman’s crazy projects paradoxically fit the Soviet political and cultural intrigues at the highest level. We now know that Gorky and Bukharin were nurturing the idea of creating a political association that would be an alternative to the communists—the “party of nonparty members,” or “union of intellectuals.” Gorky was to head the organization.

Interestingly, Stalin at first toyed with this idea, for he was thinking about uniting all the strata of Soviet society while at the same time positioning himself as leader of the international antifascist forces. A cultural “party of nonparty members,” controlled by Stalin, could be a useful tool. That is why Malraux’s propositions were for a moment taken so seriously in the Soviet Union. All this was crushed with Gorky’s death and led to calamity.

Gorky died on June 18, 1936. It is still hotly debated whether people in Gorky’s inner circle, infiltrated with informers and secret agents, had hastened his end on Stalin’s orders. (The old writer annoyed the dictator with his unpredictability and whims.) In any case, it is clear that Gorky was seriously ill: the autopsy revealed that his lungs were almost totally calcified (as a result of many years of tuberculosis); when the pathologist tossed them into a basin they made a clanking noise, a witness recalled.

Moscow radio announced the death of a “great Russian writer, a genius of verbal art, the selfless friend of the working man, and fighter for the victory of communism.” More than a half million paid their respects to Gorky on his bier in the Hall of Columns in the House of Unions, on June 19; and about one hundred thousand people were let in by special pass to the funeral on Red Square. Standing atop Lenin’s mausoleum, Stalin listened to the Chairman of the Soviet of People’s Commissars, Vyacheslav Molotov, opening the ceremony: “After Lenin, the death of Gorky is the greatest loss for our country and for humanity.”

One of the speakers was Andre Gide, who had arrived in Moscow on the eve of Gorky’s death. He spoke on behalf of the Association of Writers in the Defense of Culture that was headed by Malraux. His interpreter was Koltsov, who later told his brother that Stalin had asked him: “Comrade Koltsov, what, does this Andre Gide have great authority in the West?” When Koltsov answered affirmatively, Stalin regarded him suspiciously and said, skeptically: “Well, please God. Please God he is.”³¹ He did not like being led around by the nose.

Stalin’s grave doubts were quickly confirmed; as Ehrenburg wrote in his memoirs, in the Soviet Union, Andre Gide “was wholeheartedly delighted by everything but when he got back to Paris, he condemned everything just as wholeheartedly. I don’t know what happened to him: another person’s soul is a mystery.”³² Even toward the end of his life, Ehrenburg maintained the fiction of being surprised, not mentioning the fact that the last days of Gide’s sojourn in the USSR coincided with the open Moscow trial of the “anti-Soviet united center”(Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and other old Bolsheviks who were opposed to Stalin), which signaled the beginning of the Great Terror.

All sixteen defendants were executed on August 24, 1936, a little more than two months after Gorky’s death. Such brutality was a shock not only to Gide; even the experienced cynic Babel had been certain that they would be pardoned. Stalin did not allow Gide to attend the trial, despite his requests; he did not grant the writer a meeting, either.

The somersault in Gide’s attitude toward the Soviets was now seen by Stalin as a planned act of sabotage (“the enemy’s calculation is evident here”). Stalin decided that Malraux was also a spy and saboteur. In 1938–1939, the Soviet intellectuals in contact with the two French writers—Koltsov, Babel, and Meyerhold—were arrested on Stalin’s personal orders. Only Ehrenburg was spared.

The causes, sources, aims, and consequences (including the total number of victims) of the Great Terror (its parameters usually defined as the summer of 1936 to the end of 1938) are still not fully understood and measured, and it is unlikely that much-needed clarity will come in the near future, despite the research being done.

The differences of opinion on the Great Terror in contemporary Russia are astonishing, especially within the conservative wing. Solzhenitsyn characterized this period as a frontal “attack of the Law on the People,” when innocents were delivered a “crushing blow,” while the ultranationalist historian Oleg Platonov in his 2004 book, State Treason: The Conspiracy Against Russia, stated that “the majority of people repressed in 1937 and later were enemies of the Russian people. In destroying the Bolshevik guard, Stalin not only dealt with his rivals for power but to some degree expiated his guilt before the Russian people, for whom the execution of the revolutionary pogrom attackers was an act of historical vengeance.”³³