The Whisperers

Leningrad, a European city he had never liked, whose independence from Moscow had been greatly strengthened by the war. The clampdown began on 14 August 1946, when the Central Committee published a decree censoring the journals Zvezda and Leningrad for publishing the work of two great Leningrad writers, Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova. In singling out these writers for attack the Kremlin aimed to demonstrate to the Leningrad intelligentsia its subordination to the Soviet regime. Akhmatova had acquired immense moral influence during the war. Although her poetry had been rarely published in the Soviet Union since 1925, she remained for millions of Russians a living symbol of the spirit of endurance and human dignity that enabled Leningrad to survive the siege. In 1945, the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who had then just arrived as First Secretary of the British Embassy in Moscow, was told that in the war Akhmatova

received an amazingly large number of letters from the front, quoting from both published and unpublished poems, for the most part circulated privately in manuscript copies; there were requests for autographs, for confirmation of the

authenticity of texts, for expressions of the author’s attitude to this or that problem.

Zoshchenko believed that the Central Committee decree had been passed after Stalin heard about a poetry reading by Akhmatova before a packed house at the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow. After Akhmatova finished reading, the audience erupted in applause. ‘Who organized this standing ovation?’ Stalin asked.48

Zoshchenko was just as much a thorn in the dictator’s side. He was the last of the Soviet satirists – Maiakovsky, Zamiatin and Bulgakov had all perished – a literary tradition Stalin could not tolerate. The immediate cause of the attack on him was a children’s story, ‘Adventures of a Monkey’, published in Zvezda in 1946, in which a monkey escapes from a zoo and is trained as a human being. But in fact Stalin had been irritated by Zoshchenko’s stories for years. He recognized himself in the figure of the sentry in ‘Lenin and the Guard’ (1939), in which Zoshchenko portrayed a rude and impatient ‘southern type’ with a moustache, whom Lenin treats like a little boy.49

As a leading member of the Writers’ Union, Simonov had little choice but to go along with this campaign. In his first issue as editor of Novyi mir he published the decree of the Central Committee alongside a transcript of a speech by Zhdanov which described Akhmatova as ‘one of the standard bearers of a hollow, empty, aristocratic salon poetry which is absolutely foreign to Soviet literature’ and (in a phrase that had been used by Soviet critics in the past) as a ‘half-nun, half-harlot or rather harlot-nun whose sin is mixed with prayer’.50

Perhaps Simonov felt some discomfort as the persecutor of the Leningrad intelligentsia, with which his own mother’s family identified, but whatever feelings he may have had on this score, he refused to let them hold him back from what he understood as his higher duty to the state. Reflecting on these events in the last year of his life, Simonov confessed that he had gone along with the Zhdanovshchina because he believed that ‘something really needed to be done’ to counteract the ‘atmosphere of ideological relaxation’ that had taken hold of the intelligentsia. Unchecked, it would lead to ‘dangerous expectations of liberal reform’ precisely at a time when the Soviet Union needed to prepare for the intensified ideological struggle of the Cold War. This is what he argued at the time. As he put it in a letter to the Central Committee:

On the ideological front a global struggle of unprecedented violence is being waged. And yet, despite the circumstances there are people spouting theories about a ‘breathing space’ – the idea that we should all sit around in a coffee house and talk about reform. These are mostly people, by the way, who have no need for breathing space, because they laboured very little in the war; in fact, most of them did nothing… If they want, we can give them their breathing space by stopping them from working in the field of Soviet art, but meanwhile the rest of us will go on working and fighting.51

This contempt for intellectuals who shied away from ‘struggle’ – a long-standing view of Simonov’s – explains his hostility to Zoshchenko, in particular. With Akhmatova his attitude was different. He did not like, or even really know, her poetry, but he took exception to the violent language used by Zhdanov against her, because it seemed to him that ‘nobody should speak in such a way about a person who had suffered with the people as Akhmatova had done during the war’.* By contrast, Zoshchenko had spent the war years in evacuation in Tashkent, and according to the Soviet press, which accused the satirist of cowardice, he had fled from Leningrad to avoid fighting at the front. Simonov believed the charge of cowardice. He did not know the truth, or did not bother to discover it: that Zoshchenko, who was in his mid-forties and in poor health, had been ordered by the authorities to leave Leningrad at the beginning of the war. He judged Zoshchenko by the same harsh measure he applied to every man who did not fight, and extended it to the intellectuals who failed to recognize the need to join the ideological struggle of the Cold War. The theatre critic Aleksandr Borshchagovsky, who knew Simonov as well as anyone, points out that this rush to condemn people like Zoshchenko was entirely based on prejudice. Simonov, he writes, had a tendency to

mistrust anyone – especially an intellectual – who had spent the war years working in the rear, and had not shared in the bloody sacrifices of the soldiers at the front. This generalized suspiciousness – which was formed without the slightest effort to look deeper into the biography of each individual – did not take into account the fact that millions of people in the rear worked themselves into the ground so that millions of their comrades at the front could be armed for victory.52

Simonov joined in the attacks on Zoshchenko but not directly in the slander against Akhmatova. When Pravda asked him to write an article condemning the two, Simonov replied that he would speak only against Zoshchenko, and the resulting article was almost wholly focused on the prose writer. However, Simonov reversed his campaign a few months later when he learned the truth about Zoshchenko’s evacuation and heard from the writer Iurii German that Zoshchenko was a courageous man, who had fought with honour in the First World War. Realizing his mistake, Simonov made some efforts to correct the situation: he recommended to Zhdanov the publication of Zoshchenko’s Partisan Tales, written in 1943, which Simonov personally edited, even though he did not think that they were very good. Zhdanov refused to read the tales, but at a meeting with Stalin, in May 1947, Simonov again brought up the issue of their publication on the grounds that Zoshchenko was in a desperate state and needed help. It was a bold and courageous step to go above Zhdanov and ask for Stalin’s help directly for a writer so disliked by the Soviet leader. Stalin told Simonov that he could print the tales on his own editorial authority, but that after they were published, he would read them and form his own opinion about Simonov’s decision to print them. As Simonov recalls, there was more than a ‘hint of a threat in Stalin’s humour’, but he went ahead with the publication of the tales, which appeared in Novyi mir in September 1947.53

And yet, despite this effort at setting things right, Simonov then refused to show compassion for Zoshchenko. In 1954, a group of English students came to Leningrad and requested a meeting with Akhmatova and Zoshchenko. The meeting was attended by several Party members from the Writers’ Union in Leningrad. The foolish students, who made their anti-Soviet feelings clear, asked Akhmatova and Zoshchenko for their opinion of the Central Committee decree of August 1946. Akhmatova replied that the decree had been correct. She was no doubt frightened of the consequences of saying otherwise. But Zoshchenko was less careful. He replied that the decree had been unjust, and he violently rejected the accusations of cowardice against himself. The Party leadership of the Writers’ Union immediately accused Zoshchenko of ‘anti-patriotic behaviour’, and sent a delegation headed by Simonov to Leningrad to ‘work him over’. In a heart-rending speech of self-defence that bordered on hysteria, Zoshchenko declared that his writing life was finished, that he had been destroyed, and he pleaded with his accusers to let him die in peace. Simonov rejected Zoshchenko’s pleas and went after him in the manner of a prosecutor at a purge meeting. ‘Comrade Zoshchenko is appealing to our feelings of compassion, but he has learned nothing, and he ought to be ashamed,’ Simonov declared, referring once again to his war record and his ‘anti-patriotic’ conduct after 1945.54

The attacks against Akhmatova and Zoshchenko were soon followed by a series of repressive measures against ‘anti-Soviet elements’ in all the arts and sciences. The State Museum of Modern Western Art was closed