The Whisperers

pipe, in the Stalin style, as he handed down instructions to subordinates (there were always half a dozen different pipes on Simonov’s desk). According to Chukovskaia, Simonov was arrogant and domineering in his dealings with the staff at Novyi mir. In her diary she compared the editorial offices to a nineteenth- century manor with ‘minions and lackeys’ running everywhere at the lord’s beck and call. She was especially offended by Simonov’s high-handed treatment of two poets, whom she had persuaded to submit work to Novyi mir in 1946. One was Nikolai Zabolotsky, who had just returned from eight years in a labour camp. Simonov agreed to publish one of his poems but then forced him to change some lines for political reasons. The other was Boris Pasternak, a huge figure in the Soviet literary world who was then, at the age of fifty-six, old enough to be Simonov’s father. Pasternak had asked for an advance on a poem which Simonov had accepted for publication in Novyi mir. But Simonov refused because he saw the request as a veiled threat to withdraw the poem if the advance was not paid. He told Chukovskaia that it was unethical for Pasternak to ‘threaten me, after everything that I have done for him. If I were in his position, I would not behave that way.’ To teach Pasternak a lesson Simonov decided not to publish the accepted poem after all. For Chukovskaia, herself the daughter of a writer (Kornei Chukovsky), brought up on the values of the old intelligentsia, Simonov’s behaviour was appalling, because it signalled his acceptance of the primacy of state power over the autonomy of art. ‘He [Simonov] wants to be a patron and demands gratitude,’ she wrote in her diary.

But people don’t want charity. They want the respect which they deserve. Zabolotsky should be published, not because he spent eight years in the camps, but because his poem is good. Simonov is obliged to support Pasternak, not to do him favours, but obliged to support him, because he is in charge of poetry and, in this domain, Pasternak should be his most important responsibility… Simonov does not understand that it is his duty to Russian culture, and to the people, to give money to Pasternak. He thinks of it as a personal favour, for which Pasternak should be grateful.43

Like all power-holders in the post-war Stalinist system, Simonov was able to exercise enormous patronage. As head of Novyi mir and deputy of the Writer’s Union, he could make or ruin the career of almost any writer in the Soviet Union. He could help people in many other ways – to get housing or a job, even to protect them from arrest – if only he was brave enough to use his influence with the authorities. That was how the system worked. Simonov was inundated with personal requests from colleagues, friends, friends of friends, casual acquaintances, soldiers he had met during the war. He could not help them all, of course, but how he chose the people he would help was revealing.

He was very protective and kind towards his private secretary, Nina Gordon, for example, a small attractive woman in her mid-thirties, who had come to Novyi mir in 1946. Nina had previously worked for the writer Mikhail Koltsov, whose articles on the Spanish Civil War had been an inspiration to the young Simonov. Her husband, Iosif Gordon, a film editor from a noble family, had been arrested in 1937 and sentenced to five years in a labour camp near Magadan. In 1942, Iosif was released so that he could fight at the front. Nina informed Simonov about her disgraced husband when he wanted to promote her to become his personal secretary. At that point Iosif was living in exile in Riazan, where he was working as an engineer. Nina offered to decline the promotion. But Simonov would not hear of it. He even said that he would write to the MVD to help Iosif – an offer she rejected because she did not want to exploit his kindness. As it was, her employment in the offices of Novyi mir could have had unpleasant consequences for Simonov, as shown by an incident in 1948, when Iosif, who had been given permission to visit Moscow for a few days, turned up unexpectedly at the editorial offices. A journalist from the newspaper Izvestiia happened to be there and paid close attention to Iosif, who clearly had the look of an exile. The next day, Nina was called in for questioning by the journal’s Special Department, which served as the eyes and ears of the MVD (every Soviet institution had its own Special Department). Her interrogators wanted to know why Nina had concealed that she was married to a political exile, and threatened to report her for lack of vigilance. When Simonov heard about the incident he was furious. He saw it as an infringement of his editorial authority. Nina received a reprimand by the Special Department, which also issued a statement that ‘suspicious persons’ were not to be admitted to the offices, but there was no further action against her.44

If Simonov was often kind towards people in his personal sphere and brave in helping them with the authorities, he was far less courageous when it came to people in the public sphere. Many writers turned to him for help during the repressions of the post-war years. Simonov was cautious in his response. He was helpful to some, less so to others, depending on his personal feelings, but he was always careful not to risk his own position or to raise suspicions about himself. For example, in September 1946, Simonov wrote a letter of recommendation for his old classmate from the Literary Institute, the poet Portugalov, who had applied to join the Writers’ Union. He did not mention Portugalov’s arrest (in 1937) or the years that he had suffered in the labour camps of Kolyma, referring instead to the ‘seven years that Portugalov spent in the army’ as the reason why he had not published anything, so as not to give the impression that he was pleading for a former ‘enemy of the people’. Portugalov was turned down by the Writers’ Union in 1946, but he reapplied in 1961, at the height of the Khrushchev thaw. On that occasion, Simonov was more forthcoming in his letter of recommendation, pointing to the ‘injustice of his arrest’ as the only reason why his first book of poetry, which appeared in 1960, had not come out twenty years before.45 Simonov also wrote to support the publication of the poet Iaroslav Smeliakov, a committed Communist and close friend of the Laskins, who had been arrested in 1934, served five years in a labour camp and fought bravely in the war, after which he served another term in the Gulag, working in a coal mine near Moscow.46 But other writers who appealed to him were not as fortunate. Simonov refused to help his old teacher at the Literary Institute, the poet Lugovskoi, who had suffered a nervous breakdown during the first battles of 1941 and spent the war years in evacuation in Tashkent. After his return to Moscow, Lugovskoi wrote to Simonov with a request for help in finding a new apartment. Lugovskoi was living with his wife in a communal apartment, but his fragile mental state required privacy. ‘I am no longer young,’ he wrote to his old pupil,

I am a sick person. I cannot bear to live in a communal apartment, with a family of six in the next room… My nerves are constantly on edge and if I end up in a lunatic asylum it will not be surprising… It is hard to ask for help… but you are a humane person, and that encourages me to turn to you. Forgive me! I love you and am proud of you.47

Simonov did not reply. As he saw it, Lugovskoi did not deserve help. For one thing, he already had an apartment, and worse, he had lacked courage in the war – an unforgivable crime in Simonov’s eyes.

Simonov’s firm commitment to the Soviet ideal of military sacrifice goes some way to explain his entanglement in Stalin’s post-war campaigns of repression, starting with his involvement in the ‘Zhdanovsh-china’, the official clampdown against ‘anti-Soviet’ tendencies in the arts and sciences, which was led by Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s chief of ideology.

The Zhdanovshchina had its origins in the military victory of 1945, which gave rise to a xenophobic nationalism in the Soviet leadership. Pride in the Soviet victory went hand in hand with the promotion of the USSR’s cultural and political superiority (by which the regime really meant the superiority of the Russians, who were described by Stalin as the most important group in the Soviet Union). Soviet-Russian nationalism replaced the internationalism of the pre-war years as the ruling ideology of the regime. Absurd claims were made for the achievements of Soviet science under the direction of Marxist-Leninist ideology. National pride led to the promotion of frauds and cranks like the pseudo-geneticist Trofim Lysenko, who claimed to have developed a new strain of wheat that would grow in the Arctic frost. The aeroplane, the steam engine, the radio, the incandescent bulb – there was scarely an invention or discovery that the Soviets did not claim for themselves. With the onset of the Cold War, Stalin called for iron discipline to purge all anti-patriotic – meaning pro-Western – elements in cultural affairs. He argued that historically, since the start of the eighteenth century when Peter the Great had founded St Petersburg, the intelligentsia in Russia had prostrated itself before Western – science and culture: it needed to be cured of this ‘sickness’ if the Soviet Union was to defend itself against the West.

On Stalin’s orders, Zhdanov launched a violent campaign against Western influences in Soviet culture.* For Stalin the starting-point of this campaign was