The Whisperers

wrong class background, had always felt uncertain of his position. It was only in the war, when rank was defined less by social class than by the performance of one’s duties to the state, that he found his place in the system.

Army service itself was thrilling to him. Promoted to lieutenant-colonel in 1942, Simonov wore his new authority with graceful ease and style. The writer Iraklii Andronnikov remembers him as ‘a real Russian

Simonov in 1941

officer with fine bearing, calm and self-assured in his uniform, with shiny leather boots and a pistol in his belt. He had white teeth and a sunburned face. He wore his cap tilted slightly to one side.’ The war years were the happiest in his life: they defined it. ‘I have quickly grown accustomed to the military uniform and way of life,’ Simonov wrote in 1942, ‘so much so that I cannot even imagine how I will get on when the war is over and I have no military reports to write, no trips to make to the front, and I have to manage without the thousands of friends I’ve made in dozens of armies.’ Margarita Aliger recalls that he spent the war in a sort of fury of activity. ‘He wrote from all the crucial fronts, rushed back to Moscow, “wrote himself out”, and rushed off again to the places where the fighting was most dangerous. He would never stay in Moscow for more than a day or so, and often only for a few hours, enough to go drinking with some friends.’ Through the war Simonov gained in self-possession and proved his courage to himself. Sexually, too, he grew in confidence. He had many lovers, including Marina Chechneva, the ace bomber pilot and Hero of the Soviet Union. According to one of his later lovers, Simonov had a special attraction to women dressed in military uniforms. He liked to have sex on a Nazi flag, which he had recovered from the front.36

The war shaped Simonov’s entire outlook on the world. His values were measured on a military scale. ‘The army is a sort of school,’ he later said. ‘Serving in the army teaches one for life to carry out one’s duties to society. Not to have this strict sense of duty is not to be a complete human being.’ Simonov was meticulous and diligent in performing his duties, rigidly adhering to routines and rules, rational to the point of seeming cold and uncaring, and sometimes rather domineering in his dealings with people. In many ways his model of behaviour was a figure he had introduced to Russian prose: the officer- intelligent who understands the logic of the orders handed down by the authorities and carries them out conscientiously. In later years, he tended to judge people by the way they had behaved during the war:

Not to blacken the name of someone

But to know them in the dark

The winter of forty-one

Gave us a true mark

And if you will, it is useful from here on,

Not letting it slip from our hands,

With that mark, straight and iron,

To check now how someone stands.37

Simonov applied this harsh measure to Lugovskoi, his charismatic teacher at the Literary Institute who had inspired a whole generation of Soviet poets. Lugovskoi was badly shaken by an incident in 1941 when he was serving at the front and fell under heavy bombardment. Retreating through a town that had been attacked by the Germans, he had stumbled on a bombed-out house where he found the blown-up bodies of several women and children. Lugovskoi suffered a nervous breakdown. He was evacuated to Tashkent. Many friends came to Lugovskoi’s assistance, including Elena Bulgakova, the widow of the writer Mikhail Bulgakov, who tried, unsuccessfully, to lift the ban on the publication of Lugovskoi’s poetry (which had been condemned as ‘politically harmful’ in 1937). Sonia and Zhenia Laskina also reached out to Lugovskoi. They wrote to him with deep affection and friendship. ‘You must come to Moscow,’ Zhenia wrote in 1943, shortly after the Laskins had returned to the capital from Cheliabinsk. ‘You are needed here, and people always come when they are needed. We are not just people, but your friends, you cannot refuse friends.’ Sonia even promised to marry Lugovskoi (‘I shall surround you with the comforts of a family’) if he returned and lived with them in the Laskin apartment in Sivtsev Vrazhek, where eight people were already cramped in the three tiny rooms. But Simonov had no such sympathy. He considered Lugovskoi’s remove to Tashkent a sign of cowardice and ceased to count him as a close friend.38

The war was the making of Simonov as a ‘Stalinist’: that was when he placed his faith in Stalin at the centre of his life, when he assumed his place in the regime’s hierarchy of political and military command, internalized the values of the system and accepted the directions of the Party leadership. Simonov had joined the Party as a candidate member on the outbreak of the war, becoming a full member in 1942. As he later explained, he had joined the Party because he wanted to have a say in the direction of the war effort – he thought that was his duty as an officer – and he did not think the war could be won without the Party’s leadership. The Party ‘alone was a mass force, capable of making the necessary decisions and sacrifices in the conditions of war’, and he wanted to be part of that force. Simonov identified with the Party, and in particular with its leader, even to the point of growing a moustache, brushing back his hair in the ‘Stalin style’, and posing with a pipe.

Simonov in 1943

According to Dolmatovsky, Simonov did not smoke the pipe but adopted it as a ‘way of life’.39

Simonov’s major service to the Party was through his writing. He was an outstanding military journalist, at least the equal of Vasily Grossman and Ilia Ehrenburg, although Grossman, who is better known to Western readers because of his later novels, such as Life and Fate (published in the West in the 1980s), was the better novelist and morally perhaps the more courageous man. This was not a matter of physical bravery. Simonov never shied away from the fiercest point of the fighting. He reported from all the major fronts in 1942: from the Kerch peninsula, where the Soviet attempt to retake the Crimea from the German forces ended in catastrophe during the spring; from the Briansk Front, where the Red Army lost Voronezh in July as the Germans drove south-east towards the grain supplies of Ukraine and the Don and the rich oil-fields of the Caucasus; from Stalingrad, where the Germans launched their first attack, fighting street by street for the Soviet stronghold, in August; and from the northern Caucasus, where the Germans pushed the Soviet forces south to Krasnodar and Ordzhonikidze by December. The only front from which Simonov did not report was Leningrad, where the city continued under siege for a second year, though he did write from the ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, where Lend-Lease supplies from the Western Allies began to arrive on British ships in the summer of 1942.

As a military man, who had himself experienced the bloody fighting at Khalkin Gol, Simonov understood the war from the soldiers’ point of view as well as from the viewpoint of the officer who was obliged to carry out his orders from above. His war reporting was distinguished by its direct observation and humanity. But he also fully accepted the propaganda role the regime assigned him as a journalist. All his war reports were written with the aim of strengthening morale and discipline, fostering love for Stalin and hatred of the enemy. He wrote that patriotic Soviet troops were fighting for the glory of Stalin. ‘United by their iron discipline and Bolshevik organization,’ he reported from Odessa, ‘our Soviet forces are dealing to the enemy a heavy blow. They are fighting without fear, without tiring in the struggle, as we have been taught by the great Stalin… For our Odessa! For the Motherland! For Stalin!’ In Simonov’s reports Stalin’s leadership was a constant inspiration to the Soviet troops. For example, he wrote about an officer he had encountered on the front near Stalingrad who ‘gained all his strength from the idea that our great leader directs everything in our enormous cause from his office in Moscow and thus invests in him, an ordinary colonel, part of his genius and spirit’. He had expressed the same idea in his poem commemorating the anniversary of the Revolution on 7 November 1941:

Comrade Stalin, do you hear us?

You must hear us, we know that.

Neither son nor mother in this frightful hour,

It is you we remember first.

Simonov’s belief in Stalin was genuine. In later years he never tried to deny it. In his memoirs, he acknowledged that the huge significance which he had attributed to Stalin in this poem ‘had not been an