become a lawyer so that she could help the government to hunt them down. ‘Like Stalin,’ she recalls, ‘I was not at all sorry for people who were sent to the Gulag.’
In 1948, when she was eighteen, Valentina ran away from home. She enrolled at a college for accountants and then took a job as a trainee accountant at a naval base on the island of Sakhalin, where she received the higher rates of pay and food rations reserved for special military personnel. Valentina married a naval officer. She became a trusted member of the naval base, where she worked in the staff building, with special access to the files of all the personnel. In this capacity she was recruited by the MVD to inform on the wives of other naval officers. Her task was to strike up friendships with these women and report to her controller on their private lives and opinions:
In some cases I would approach the women and ask them to make something I could buy: many women spent their spare time sewing and knitting. In others I would befriend the women and get myself invited to their place for tea. Or I would visit them at work. My controller gave me money for these ‘commissions’ (I still have lots of items, mainly coats and pullovers, which my ‘clients’ made for me). He also gave me money to buy a cake for tea, or some other offering so that I could make that first contact and win the women’s trust. The main thing was to make a connection. It was really easy. There was just one rule: you had to be alone with somebody before striking up a conversation about something important. Only then would they speak freely.
Valentina worked as an informer for several years. She wrote dozens of reports on people who were subsequently arrested. She was well paid – well enough to send large sums of money to her aged parents and to buy a house in Abakan, where she retired with her husband in 1959 (at the age of thirty-nine). During interviews she still insists that she was forced to work against her will. She sees herself as a victim of repression too:
It was impossible to refuse, they knew everything about my parents and their kulak origins… I knew that they had imprisoned my father and I was afraid that they would imprison me… Besides, my husband might have suffered, if I had refused to cooperate.
Valentina Kropotina and her husband, Viktor, 1952
On the other hand, Valentina insists that the people she denounced were truly enemies of the people, ‘proven spies’. She feels no remorse for what she did. Indeed, she is proud of the honours she received for what she calls her work in ‘counter-espionage’.36
3
Simonov’s career rose to new heights after 1945. The writer returned from the war with a chestful of medals for his reports from the battlefields. Now a trusted Party member in Stalin’s inner circle of favoured intellectuals, Simonov was put in charge of a small delegation of influential journalists sent by the Kremlin to the USA in May 1946, when the world stood on the brink of the Cold War. Briefed in the Kremlin by Molotov, the Foreign Minister, Simonov was charged by Stalin with persuading the Americans that the Soviet Union did not want a war. The trip gave Simonov his first real taste of governmental privilege. He was shocked by the huge advance that he received for the trip; perhaps he was even unnerved by the disparity between his situation and what he knew of the conditions of ordinary Soviet people, but, if so, the feeling was momentary. Simonov revelled in the pleasures of the West. In the USA Simonov was greeted as an international celebrity. His novel
The American tour was one of several foreign trips made by Simonov in the immediate post-war years. On each occasion he was entrusted by the Soviet government with an important task. In London, which he visited in 1947, Simonov reported on the possibility of recruiting leading writers (including J. B. Priestley and George Bernard Shaw) to the Soviet cause.38 In Paris, where he stopped on his way to America, Simonov attempted to persuade the emigre Russian writer Ivan Bunin to return to the Soviet Union. The only Russian to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Bunin had been living abroad since 1920, when he fled the Revolution in disgust. He was now in his mid-seventies, but Stalin hoped that patriotic sentiment and nostalgia might yet convince him to return to his native land. Many emigres were seduced by the favourable image of the Soviet Union in 1945 and some indeed decided to go back. Simonov met Bunin in Paris in a series of fashionable restaurants. He paid the bills with money given him by the Soviet government. Emphasizing his own noble ancestry, Simonov waxed lyrical about life in the Soviet Union. And when Bunin invited him to dinner in his home, Simonov suggested a ‘collective meal’, for which Valentina Serova was flown in from Moscow with a huge hamper of Russian delicacies (herrings, pork fat, black bread and various types of vodka) designed to heighten the old man’s nostalgia. Valentina even sang him Russian songs. But Bunin did not change his anti-Soviet attitudes. He refused to return to the Soviet Union, even for a visit.39
In 1946, the Writers’ Union was reorganized on the lines of the Politburo, with a General Secretary, Aleksandr Fadeyev, and three deputies, including Simonov. The writer Kornei Chukovsky noted in his diary on 16 November 1946: ‘The leaders of the Writers’ Union are very stony-faced. Frozen still. The worst is Tikhonov. He can listen for hours without an expression on his face… Fadeyev and Simonov are also very stony-faced. It must be from the habit of chairmanship.’ Two weeks after his election to the leadership of the Writers’ Union, Simonov was made the editor of
Elevation to the Soviet elite led to a dramatic transformation of Simonov’s appearance. He abandoned the ‘military look’ of the war years and began to dress in elegantly tailored English suits, or more casually in turtleneck sweaters from America, a camel coat and the short-peaked cap fashionable in the post-war years. Tall and strikingly handsome, Simonov cut the figure of a European gentleman. He reclaimed many of the manners of the aristocracy into which he had been born. He was a bon viveur and generous host; he was loyal and kind to servants, especially to secretaries and chauffeurs; he opened doors for women, helped them with their coats and greeted them with a chivalrous kiss on the hand.41
Simonov’s lifestyle, too, underwent dramatic transformation. He had several homes. There was a spacious dacha in the prestigious literary resort of Peredelkino, just outside Moscow, which he bought in 1946 from the writer Gladkov for a quarter of a million roubles, a large fortune in those days; a house in Gulripshi, a village near Sukhumi, overlooking the Black Sea, which he bought in 1949; and a large apartment on Gorky Street, in Moscow, where he lived with Valentina after 1948. The couple kept two maids, a housekeeper, a secretary and a private chauffeur for the limousine they had imported from America. The apartment was filled with elegant and expensive antiques. There were precious paintings on the walls, including one by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, which must have come from a private collection that had been confiscated by the state. The apartment was the scene of fashionable parties for the elite of Moscow’s literary and theatre world. Simonov was a keen cook and sometimes he would make elaborate meals for these parties; but more often he would call on the head chef of the nearby famous Aragvi Georgian restaurant who would bring his team of chefs to prepare a banquet in the apartment.42
Among his staff at
