The Whisperers

4

Some time at the end of the 1940s Akhmatova was walking with Nadezhda Mandelshtam in Leningrad when she suddenly remarked: ‘To think that the best years of our life were during the war when so many people were being killed, when we were starving and my son was doing forced labour.’ For anyone who suffered from the terror of the 1930s, as Akhmatova had done, the war must have come as a release. As Pasternak would write in the epilogue of Doctor Zhivago (1957), ‘When the war broke out, its real horrors, its menace of real death, were a blessing compared with the inhuman power of the lie, a relief because it broke the spell of the dead letter.’ The relief was palpable. People were allowed to act in ways that would have been unthinkable before the war. By necessity, they were thrown back on their own initiative – they spoke to one another and helped each other without thinking of the political dangers to themselves; and from this spontaneous activity a new sense of nationhood emerged. The war years, for this reason, would come to be recalled with nostalgia. They were remembered as ‘a period of vitality’, in the words of Pasternak, as an ‘untrammelled, joyous restoration of the sense of community with everyone’.69

For the writer Viacheslav Kondratiev, that feeling of belonging was the defining feature of the time:

We are proud of those years, and this nostalgia for the front stirs all of us, not because they were the years of our youth, which is always recalled with fondness, but because then we felt ourselves to be citizens in the truest sense of the word. It was a feeling which we did not have before or afterwards.70

The renewed sense of personal and collective responsibility was evident, especially in the period from 1941 to 1943, when the infrastructure of the Stalinist regime had virtually collapsed as a result of the German invasion, and people had to rely on their own resources and make their own decisions about how to act. The historian Mikhail Gefter, then an army doctor, describes these years as a period of ‘spontaneous de- Stalinization’:

Before our eyes – a person subject to the whim of fate, unexpectedly, in the face of death, finds the freedom to take command of himself… As an eye-witness and a historian I can attest: in ’41 and ’42 there were a multitude of situations and decisions that constituted a process of spontaneous de-Stalinization… We remained Russian, Soviet, but in those years the universal human spirit also entered into us.

For Ada Levidova, who spent the war years working in a medical institute, this spontaneous de- Stalinization was reflected in a shift of power from the Party officials, who formally controlled the hospital, to the doctors and nurses: ‘There were far too many instances when a crucial life-and-death decision needed to be made by the people on the job, without authorization from the authorities, when we had to act, or improvise, without regard for the official rules.’71

People had a sense of being needed by the war effort. They felt that they could make a difference. From this feeling of involvement they derived a sense of civic freedom and individual responsibility. Hedrick Smith records a conversation in the house of a Jewish scientist in the early 1970s. The scientist had said that the war was ‘the best time of our lives’ and explained to his shocked friends:

Because at that time we all felt closer to our government than at any other time in our lives. It was not their country then, but our country. It was not they who wanted this or that to be done, but we who wanted to do it. It was not their war, but our war. It was our country we were defending, our war effort.

According to Kondratiev, a veteran of the front, even the most humble soldier, who was constantly abused and made to feel insignificant by his commanding officers, became his own general when he went into the attack on the battlefield:

There nobody can command you. There you’re in control of everything. And in defence too you have to have your wits about you… otherwise the Germans will break through… You feel as if you hold the fate of Russia in your hands, and that everything might turn out differently, but for you. In peacetime in our society, nothing depended on the individual. But in the war it was different: everybody felt their personal involvement in the victory.72

For the ‘generation of 1941’, which had grown up in the shadow of the cult of Stalin and the Party, this new freedom was a shock to the system. ‘The military catastrophe of 1941–2 forced us for the first time to question Stalin,’ recalls the literary historian Lazar Lazarev, who went to war directly from high school in 1941:

Before the war we had not questioned anything, we believed all the propaganda about Stalin, and believed in the Party as the embodiment of justice. But what we saw in the first years of the war forced us to reflect on what we had been told. It made us question our beliefs.73

The atmosphere presaged the change of values in 1956, the opening year of the Khrushchev ‘thaw’, when Julia Neiman wrote the poem ‘1941’:

Those Moscow days… The avalanche of war…

Uncounted losses! Setbacks and defeats!

Yet, comrades of that year, tell the whole truth:

Bright as a torch it flamed, that shining year!

Like crumbling plaster, subterfuge flaked off,

And causes were laid bare, effects revealed;

And through the blackout and the camouflage

We saw our comrades’ faces – undisguised.

The dubious yardsticks that we measured by –

Forms, questionnaires, long service, rank and age –

Were cast aside and now we measured true:

Our yardsticks in that year were valour, faith.

And we who lived and saw these things still hold

Fresh in the memory, and sacred still,

The watches, rooftops, and barrage balloons,

The explosive chaos that was Moscow then,

The buildings in their camouflage attire,

The symphony of air raids and all-clears –

For then at last seemed real

Our pride as citizens, pure-shining pride.74

As citizens claimed new freedoms, the ideological influence of the Party and the cult of Stalin inevitably weakened. Although it nearly doubled in its size during the war years, the Party lost much of its pre-war revolutionary spirit, as the most committed Bolsheviks were killed in the fighting of 1941–2.By 1945, over half the Party’s 6 million members were serving in the armed forces, and two-thirds of them had joined it in the war. This rank and file differed significantly from the Stalinist Party of the 1930s: it was more pragmatic, not so ideological (or even trained in Marxist-Leninist ideology), less inclined to view the world in terms of class and impatient with bureaucracy.75 The new mood was summarized by Pravda when it argued, in June 1944, in sharp contrast to the Party’s pre-war principles, that the ‘personal qualities of every Party member should be judged by his practical contribution to the war effort’ rather than by his class origins or ideological correctness. According to Lazarev, who joined the Party from the ranks, Bolshevik ideology played almost no role in the war, and the pre-war slogans that advanced the cult of Stalin and the Party lost much of their power and significance:

There is a legend that the soldiers went into attacks shouting, ‘For Stalin!’ But in fact we never mentioned Stalin, and when we went into battle it was ‘For the Motherland!’ that we shouted. The rest of our war cries were obscenities.

The war gave rise to a whole new repertoire of anti-Stalin rhymes and songs, like this one from 1942:

Dear Joseph Stalin!

Now you’ve lost Tallin!

The food we get is bad!

You’ll lose Leningrad!76