The Whisperers

Writers’ Union and the Party, Altman was arrested on the night of Stalin’s death in March 1953. Altman and Fadeyev had been good friends for many years. It was Fadeyev who had insisted that he should work with Mikhoels in the Jewish Theatre. ‘He needs an adviser, a commissar: think of it as a Party command!’, Fadeyev had said. When Altman was asked by his interrogators how he came to work with Mikhoels, he said nothing about Fadeyev. He knew that he might save himself by naming the leader of the Writers’ Union, but he did not want to implicate Fadeyev in what was being styled as a ‘Zionist conspiracy’. Undoubtedly, Altman hoped that Fadeyev would respond in kind, would intervene to rescue him. But Fadeyev did nothing. Fadeyev was absent from the meeting at the Writers’ Union when Altman was expelled, and nobody could find him in Moscow (Simonov believed that he had disappeared on a drinking binge to escape his responsibilities). Altman never recovered from Fadeyev’s betrayal. Released from jail in May 1953, he died two years later, a broken man.62

Simonov too was dragged into the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign. At first he tried to hold a moderate line. If he did not openly protest against the campaign, he also didn’t align himself with Sofronov and the other hardliners. Simonov was not an anti-Semite. As the editor of Novyi mir, he had published several writers of Jewish origin. His first two wives were Jewish; the second, Zhenia Laskina, was a cousin of the writer Boris Laskin, who had been named as an ‘enemy of Soviet literature’ in Begicheva’s original denunciation to the MVD. Simonov’s moderate position irritated the hardliners in the Party and the Writers’ Union. Simonov had many enemies: critics who were jealous of his status as ‘Stalin’s favourite’ which had done so much to promote him, as a young man, to the top of the Soviet establishment; and members of the Central Committee who thought that Stalin’s protection had made Simonov insubordinate to the rest of the Party leadership. To drive a wedge between the writer and Stalin, these hardliners accused Simonov of trying to protect the ‘cosmopolitans’. The most vicious of these accusations came from Viktor Vdovichenko, the editor of Soviet Art. Vdovichenko sent Malenkov a long denunciation, listing more than eighty Jewish names in what he claimed to be a Zionist organization within the Writers’ Union. Much of the denunciation was directed against Simonov. Vdovichenko accused him of protecting Zionists. He pointed to the editorial staff of Novyi mir, which he said included many Jews (‘people without kith or kin’), and singled out for criticism Aleksandr Borshchagovsky, who had been brought by Simonov to Moscow from the Ukraine, where the theatre critic had been in disgrace for criticizing a play by Khrushchev’s favourite writer, Aleksandr Korneichuk. Simonov was fond of Borshchagovsky, ‘a quiet and modest man’, whose literary opinions were indispensable at Novyi mir, according to Natalia Bianki, a member of the editorial staff. ‘Simonov decided almost nothing without him. “Let’s see what Borshchagovsky has to say”, was his frequent comment.’ Vdovichenko claimed that Borshchagovsky had not produced ‘a single work that made him worthy of being on the staff of Novyi mir’, and that his influence at the journal was purely a function of Simonov’s Jewish sympathies. He pointed out that Simonov had been married to a Jew and that he had many Jewish friends.63

Like Fadeyev, Simonov ultimately gave in to the pressure of the hardliners. He was afraid of losing his position in the Stalinist elite and thought he had to prove his loyalty by joining in the campaign against the Jews. In a letter to the editor of Pravda, he countered the hardliners’ accusations of Judaeophilia by distancing himself from Borshchagovsky and the other Jewish critics he had employed at Novyi mir.64 The Kremlin urged Simonov to expand on the themes of the anonymous Pravda article (‘About One Anti-Patriotic Group’) in a keynote speech in the Writers’ Union. Fadeyev had been reduced to a drunken wreck, and Sofronov was keen to do the job, but Malenkov believed that Simonov would give more authority to the ‘anti- cosmopolitan’ campaign precisely because of his well-known moderate stance. Simonov was further pressed by Fadeyev, who warned that Sofronov would give the speech if Simonov refused. A hardline anti-Semite with political ambitions in the Writers’ Union, where he hoped to replace Simonov as the Kremlin’s favourite to succeed Fadeyev, Sofronov was certain to add another dozen names to the existing list of Jewish writers and critics destined for expulsion from the Writers’ Union. Fearful that power would fall into Sofronov’s hands, Simonov agreed to give the speech. He delivered it at the Plenum of the Writers’ Union on 4 February 1949. Simonov’s first wife, the Jewish writer Natalia Sokolova (nee Tipot), described in her diary the dreadful atmosphere as he delivered his denunciation of the ‘anti-patriotic group’:

The speech lasted an hour and a half, then there was a break, and then another session for an hour and a half. People listened, looking tense and guarded, no one spoke except for a rare whispered, ‘Has he named someone new?’… ‘Did you hear?’… ‘Yet another cosmopolitan?’… ‘A new cosmopolitan?’ Some people made a list of all the names, as I did.65

In later years, Simonov continued to maintain that he had made the speech to keep the extremist Sofronov from taking control of the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign. Although remorseful about his role, Simonov insisted that it had been his aim to moderate the campaign against Jewish writers by taking up the leadership of it himself. This is supported by the memoirs of his friend, the theatre critic Borshchagovsky, who was with Simonov in his Gorky Street apartment when Malenkov phoned to say that Stalin wanted him to make the speech. Putting down the receiver, Simonov ‘looked at me sadly and gazed out of the window’, recalls Borshchagovsky. ‘It took him less than ten minutes to reach his decision.’ Then he said:

‘I am going to make the speech, Shura [Aleksandr]. It is better if I do it, and not someone else.’ Having yielded on that point, he looked for some argument to justify his ‘active engagement’, for an honest point of view he could hold to in this dishonest campaign. ‘All this thuggishness (khamstvo) and rudeness we must end. We must learn to argue on a different level, to civilize our language. We have had, and we still have, the problem of the formalists, constructivist apologists, people who want to enslave us to the culture of the West, and we must talk about them.’66

It is also true that in his speech Simonov attempted to set the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign in a broader political and intellectual context rather than offering up some crude Zionist cabal. In a series of articles for the Soviet press, in which he built on the ideas of his speech of 4 February, Simonov accused the ‘cosmopolitans’ of ‘putting [Jean-Paul] Sartre in the place of Maksim Gorky and the pornography of [Henry] Miller in the place of Tolstoy’.67 The Cold War undoubtedly influenced his thinking on the need to defend the Soviet Union’s ‘national culture’ against the ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ who would sell it into ‘slavery to American imperialism… and the international power of the dollar’. But otherwise there is little evidence that Simonov’s participation was crafted as a civilizing influence on the campaign against the Jews. His language was inflammatory. He called the ‘anti-patriotic group’ a conspiracy of ‘criminals’ and ‘enemies’ of Soviet culture who were not to be mistaken for mere ‘aesthetes’, because they had a ‘militantly bourgeois and reactionary programme’, namely working for the West in the Cold War. He blamed the Jews for bringing many of their problems on themselves. They had, he said, refused to assimilate into Soviet society and had embraced ‘Jewish nationalism’ after 1945. He sacked all the Jews from the editorial staff at Novyi mir. He even wrote to Stalin on behalf of the Writers’ Union, calling for the exclusion from the Union of a long list of inactive writers, all of whom were Jews.68

His friend Borshchagovsky was included on that list. From the start of the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign, Simonov had been gradually distancing himself from the theatre critic, who had been singled out as one of the main leaders of the ‘anti-patriotic group’. He knew that in the end he would be forced to denounce his friend, whose career he himself had promoted. After the phone call from Malenkov, when he agreed to give the speech against the ‘anti-patriotic group’, Simonov attempted to justify himself to Borshchagovsky by explaining: ‘If I do it, it will put me in a stronger position. I will be able to help people, which at the moment is the most important thing.’ He warned him not to come to the plenum, saying to the theatre critic as he left: ‘If you come, I shall feel obliged to denounce you in even stronger terms.’ Borshchagovsky did not read the speeches or the articles in which he was named by Simonov as a ‘saboteur of the theatre’, as a ‘bourgeois enemy’ of Soviet literature and ‘literary scum’.* He had trusted Simonov – he had viewed him as a friend – and stoically claimed to understand that he was forced to ‘perform a ritual ideological dance’.

Aleksandr Borshchagovsky, 1947