The Whisperers

Borshchagovsky was expelled from the Writers’ Union and the Party. He lost his job at Novyi mir and was sacked from the Red Army Theatre, where he was the head of literature. Borshchagovsky and his family – his mother, his wife and their young daughter – were kicked out of their Moscow flat. For a while, they were put up by their friends, who let them sleep on floors or stay at their dachas (they even stayed at Simonov’s dacha at Peredelkino). Borshchagovsky took repression in his stride: a survivor of the 1930s, he had learned to carry on as best he could. To make ends meet, he sold his possessions (mostly books) and borrowed money from friends, including Simonov, who gave him money, as Borshchagovsky understood, ‘to ease his own conscience’, and refused to let him pay it back.69

Filled with guilt towards his friend, Simonov went on seeing him as often as he could between 1949 and 1953, when the ban on Borshchagovsky was finally lifted, but he never spoke to him about the speech. It seemed to Borshchagovsky that when they met, Simonov would ‘look at me in an anxious way, as if he thought he needed to explain’. In July 1950, Simonov supported the publication of The Russian Flag, Borshchagovsky’s patriotic novel set in the Crimean War. ‘The book is accomplished, serious and necessary,’ Simonov concluded in his report to the censors. ‘I am convinced that its deeply patriotic content will touch readers’ hearts… Borshchagovsky has committed serious mistakes of an anti-patriotic character, that is evident, but he has suffered and he has acknowledged his mistakes.’ The book was finally passed for publication in 1953.70

Interviewed fifty years later, in 2003, Borshchagovsky was still stoical about the injury Simonov had done him. ‘One grows accustomed to the pain’, was all he would say. But according to his wife, in the last years of his life, he was increasingly haunted by the events of 1949.* In his memoirs he concluded that Simonov had not found the civic courage to defend his friends and fellow writers from the hardline anti-Semites in the Writers’ Union. He didn’t feel Simonov was moved by fear or that he lacked a conscience. Rather, he believed that Simonov was driven by personal ambition, and especially by a kind of political servility: he was simply too devoted to Stalin, too infatuated with the aura of his power, to adopt a more courageous stand.71

The ‘little terror’ of the post-war years was very different from the Great Terror of 1937–8. It took place, not against the backdrop of apocalypse, when frightened people agreed to betrayals and denunciations in the desperate struggle to save their lives and families, but against the background of a relatively mundane and stable existence, when fear no longer deprived people of their moral sensibility. The repressions of the post-war years were carried out by career bureaucrats and functionaries like Simonov. These people did not have to participate in the system of repression. Simonov was probably not in danger of expulsion from the Writers’ Union, let alone arrest. Had he refused to add his voice to the denunciation of the Jews, he might at most have suffered demotion from the leadership of the Writers’ Union and dismissal as the editor of Novyi mir, although of course he may have feared much worse. But the point is, people like Simonov had a choice. They could have followed a career path that skirted the pitfalls of political responsibility, as millions of others did, albeit at the cost of losing out on privileges and material rewards. For those unable to take a public stand, there were quieter ways to avoid involvement in political decisions that compromised their moral principles. As Borshchagovsky wrote of the people who betrayed him in 1949, could easily have chosen not to speak, they could have not shown up at the Plenum of the Writers’ Union, or pretended to be ill: they were not subject to Party discipline. For Borshchagovsky, the persecutions of that period, and the behaviour of those who facilitated them, were rooted in an all-pervasive compliance with the Stalinist regime – the defining characteristic of ordinary Stalinists. As he wrote:

The phenomenon of 1949, and not only of that year, is not explained by fear – or if so, a fear that had long before dissolved into other elements within the human soul… [more to the point is] the servility of officious hangers-on, who had so little courage and morality that they were unable even to stand up to the semi-official directives of the lowest bureaucrats.72

There were certainly people in a similar position of responsibility to Simonov who refused to get involved in the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign. The President of the Academy of Sciences, Sergei Vavilov, for example, quietly resisted intense pressure to denounce an ‘anti-patriotic group’ in the Academy and sabotaged his own bureaucracy to prevent the dismissal of Jewish scientists (his brother Nikolai, the geneticist, had been arrested in 1940 and starved to death in prison in 1943).73 In the Writers’ Union there were people such as Boris Gorbatov, the Party Secretary of the Writers’ Union Presidium and a close friend of Simonov, who refused to go along with the campaign against the Jews. A Jew himself, Gorbatov had more cause to fear than Simonov: his wife had been arrested in 1948 and sentenced to ten years for ‘foreign espionage’, while he himself was not above political suspicion (in 1937, Gorbatov had been accused of propagating ‘Trotskyist’ opinions in his first novel, Our Town, a proletarian epic about the Five Year Plan in the Donbass; although he had narrowly avoided expulsion from the Party, his brother had been arrested as a ‘Trotskyist’ and shot in 1938). Yet despite the intense pressure of the Stalinist hardliners in the Writers’ Union, who denounced him as a ‘Jewish sympathizer’ of the ‘anti-patriotic group’, Gorbatov refused to join the persecution of his fellow Jews. For this he was forced to give up all his posts in the Party and the Writers’ Union. Borshchagovsky recalls meeting him in 1949 at Simonov’s dacha in Peredelkino. Having fallen out of favour with Stalin, Gorbatov was ‘a broken man who had been driven into a corner’, but he had managed to retain his moral dignity and principles.74

Simonov was an altogether more complex, perhaps even tragic, character. He clearly had a conscience: he was troubled and even repulsed by some aspects of the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign. But he lost himself in the Stalinist system. The military ethos and public-service values he inherited from the aristocracy were so closely harnessed to the moral categories and imperatives of the Soviet system that he was left with few other means to judge or regulate his own behaviour. Simonov had a hypertrophied sense of public duty and responsibility that defined his outlook on the world. ‘Without the discipline of public duty,’ Simonov once said, ‘a person cannot be a complete human being.’ He was an activist by temperament; he could never have pretended to be ill to avoid being forced to make a difficult moral choice. In Simonov’s opinion, the avoidance of public responsibility was tantamount to cowardice. He had no time for people who were prone to indecisiveness, weakness or procrastination – all of which he considered human failings. He admired people who were rational and logical. These were the moral qualities he assigned to his fictional heroes – men like himself, only more courageous, who were able to draw the right conclusions from objective evidence and act decisively.75

It was the elevation of duty to a supreme virtue that determined Simonov’s political obedience: he confused public virtue with submission to the Party line. He was in awe of Stalin. His post-war notebooks are filled with synopses of Stalin’s works, quotations from his speeches and lists of the leader’s phrases and ideas which he set out to learn in order to become more politically literate.76 Simonov was infatuated with Stalin’s power. He felt his presence, felt Stalin watching over him, in virtually everything he did. Stalin was his patron and protector, his teacher and his guide, his critic and confessor, and at times perhaps, in his imagination, his jailer, torturer and executioner.

The slightest criticism from the Soviet leader was enough to reduce Simonov to a state of total misery. In 1948, Simonov’s novella Dym otechestva (‘Smoke of the Fatherland’) was savagely attacked by

Simonov (seated third from right) at the Congress of Soviet Writers in the Belorussian Republic, Minsk, 1949

Agitprop’s main journal (Kul’tura i zhizn’) with the personal backing of Stalin, who, concluded Simonov, ‘disliked the story intensely’. Frightened and depressed, Simonov could not understand what was wrong with the book, which was one of his own favourites. ‘When I wrote it,’ he later told a friend, ‘I thought I was fulfilling my duty to the Party… and to Stalin, who was then, two years after the end of the war, the supreme authority for me.’ The central figure in the novella is a Communist veteran of the war who returns from abroad to the Soviet Union in 1947. Believing that his duty to the nation has been done, he tries to rebuild his private life in the difficult conditions of the post-war years. The novella accurately portrayed a certain mood that was common at that time, and it was a patriotic work, full of favourable comparisons between the Soviet Union and