The Magical Chorus

There is a certain smugness in the writings of some Russian conservative historians when it comes to the repressions during the Great Terror against the urban intelligentsia, which, they feel, did not come to the defense of the peasantry in time. The Russian intelligentsia may be guilty of many sins, but it did not deserve the blow that befell it in those years. Behind every person arrested and sucked into the funnel of the Stalin repressions came the family and relatives, followed by distant relatives, coworkers, subordinates, and mere acquaintances. As a historian noted: “It seemed as if the flywheel of repression slipped out of the hands of those who were turning it: the resulting purges shattered the system of management of the economy, beheaded the army, and demoralized the party.”³⁴ It also frayed the fabric of the culture.

At least six hundred published authors were arrested during the Great Terror, that is, almost a third of the members of the Union of Soviet Writers. They are all to be pitied as human beings. There weren’t all that many major writers among them; many of the figures were party workers first and foremost, “moonlighting” as writers. The cultural damage, however, cannot be calculated only by the number of arrested and executed geniuses; the corrosive atmosphere of omnipresent fear, suspicion, uncertainty, and epidemic levels of informing and self- censorship of the Great Terror fatally poisoned the moral climate.

As historians now believe, Stalin began the Great Terror with several political goals: to cement his personal rule, to quash real and imaginary opposition and the Fifth Column, to intimidate the populace, and as an economic bonus, to guarantee cheap slave labor for his industrial efforts. Once he thought he had achieved those ends and saw that society was on the verge of total destabilization, Stalin started curtailing the terror in 1939, admitting that it had been accompanied by “numerous errors.”

But it was that moment when the demoralized elites tried to catch their breath that Stalin sent another terrifying signal to the intelligentsia: Koltsov, Babel, and Meyerhold were arrested in late 1938 and early 1939 and shot, after an unusual delay, probably caused by Stalin’s deliberations, in early 1940.

All three had been accused of being part of an “anti-Soviet Trotskyite group” and of participating in a “conspiratorial terrorist organization” as agents of French and other foreign intelligence services. They were blamed for their contacts with Malraux, who at that moment in Stalin’s imagination had turned into a major Western spy and provocateur, responsible for many failures in Stalin’s foreign policy. (A prominent Soviet writer told me that in the 1960s, when he began traveling to the West, the KGB tried to recruit him, using Malraux as an example and model: for some reason the recruiter thought that an irresistible argument.)

Koltsov, Babel, and Meyerhold were forced to confess their “guilt” and inform on the creme de la creme of Soviet culture—Pasternak, Shostakovich, Eisenstein, Alexei Tolstoy, and Yuri Olesha, author of the fine short novels Envy and Three Fat Men. We know the methods used from the statements (to the prosecutor and also to the Chairman of the Soviet of People’s Commissars Molotov) by Meyerhold, who had renounced his statements, as had Babel. “I was beaten—a sick sixty-year-old man, they made me lie face down on the floor, beating me with a rubber hose on the soles of my feet and back, when I was seated in a chair, they used the rubber to hit my feet (from above, with great force) and along the legs from the knee to the top of the feet. And in subsequent days, when those parts of my legs were covered with large internal bruises, they beat me again on those red-blue-yellow spots with the hose, and the pain was so strong that it felt as if they were pouring boiling water on those painful, sensitive spots (I screamed and wept with pain). They beat my back with that hose, they beat my face with big swings from above…the investigator kept repeating and threatening me: ‘If you don’t sign (that is, make it up?), we will keep beating you leaving only your head and right hand untouched, the rest we’ll turn into a piece of formless bloody chopped meat.’ And I signed everything.”³⁵

The fate of major figures like Meyerhold was decided by Stalin personally: when he put two vertical lines next to the name of the accused, it meant a ten-year sentence; one line meant execution. Stalin put one line on Meyerhold’s file.

It is often said that he did it because he did not like Meyerhold’s avant-garde theater productions. That is hard to believe. Stalin, a politician through and through, was capable of overcoming aesthetic and personal dislike if it served his cause. He praised the avant-garde poet Mayakovsky and he did not touch Tatlin or Rodchenko. Andrei Platonov, whose prose he hated, was never arrested. On the other hand, Stalin never had a more loyal cultural functionary than Koltsov, whom he had killed.

The answer to this riddle may lie in the fact that for Stalin the removal of an important opponent was just a winning move in a political chess game. Did Stalin ever make mistakes, even from his own extremely cynical and ruthless, often cannibalistic, point of view? Of course, more than once. One such grave error within Stalin’s political paradigm was killing Koltsov, Meyerhold, and Babel.

Stalin was obviously basing his thinking on the situation at hand. In 1939, the Soviet leader unexpectedly changed his foreign policy, entering into an alliance with Hitler and thus giving up his antifascist pretense. Consequently, he dropped all his carefully developed plans for uniting the international anti-Hitlerite and liberal intellectuals under the aegis of the Soviet Union.

Stalin now considered all that effort and expense an abject failure. A particularly painful event was the loss of the Soviet-supported republican government of Spain in the civil war begun by General Francisco Franco in 1936. Franco was helped by Germany and fascist Italy, and antifascists from all over the world came to help the republicans, including Ernest Hemingway and Malraux. Stalin’s political emissary in Spain was Koltsov, whose attempts to bond the pro-Soviet elements in Spain failed. Someone had to pay for that and other international fiascoes.

Stalin always found “traitors” and “saboteurs” to be useful lightning rods and scapegoats. In this case, the part was given to a group of leading Soviet cultural figures who in his view had been mere puppets in the hands of Gide and Malraux and through them served their “real masters,” the European imperialists and plutocrats from France and England.

This explanation fit both Stalin’s worldview and the current needs for his policy. But he still hesitated. Meyerhold’s heartbreaking appeal, as we know, did not weaken Stalin’s resolve. But it is telling that the information obtained under duress during interrogations was never used to arrest other celebrities like Shostakovich, Pasternak, or Eisenstein: apparently, Stalin reconsidered his plan to hold a sensational show trial of major cultural figures.

Nevertheless, the execution of Koltsov, Meyerhold, and Babel, which was not reported in the press at the time, poisoned the relationship between Stalin and the intelligentsia. Their ruthless dispatch showed that nothing—not talent, not achievements on behalf of the Soviet regime, not personal loyalty and closeness to Stalin (everyone knew that Koltsov, the de facto editor-in-chief of Pravda, was his favorite)—could save you from the dictator’s wrath. In his own way an extremely pragmatic man, Stalin suddenly took on terrifying irrational traits in the eyes of the cultural elite. Perhaps that is what he wanted. In that case, he had made another mistake.

Yet another signal, loud and clear, was sent by Stalin: all contact with the West was fatally dangerous. In culture, the iron curtain fell then, in early 1940—only to be lifted a bit during the war, when relations had to be mended with the British and American allies. Stalin had expended a lot of effort in order to establish cordial personal ties with Soviet intellectuals. At some point, he decided that crude intimidation would be more effective. It was: the intellectuals were frightened, but the honeymoon with Stalin—and therefore, with the Soviet regime—was over.

Chapter Seven