the USA. But it did contain some straight talk, about the famine of 1946–7 in particular, which was not done at the time (it was not until the Khrushchev thaw that social problems were addressed at all by Soviet literature), and it was this that had attracted censure from the Party leadership. Simonov was shaken by the attack on his work. It coincided with the attack on Fadeyev’s novel The Young Guard (1947), which had also been initiated by Stalin, and also in the Agitprop journal, giving rise to the suspicion that the tyrant was preparing a purge of the leaders of the Writers’ Union. Desperate to understand why Stalin had disliked his work, and eager to correct it so that it would meet with his approval, Simonov went to Zhdanov for advice, but Stalin’s chief of ideology had no light to shed on the matter – Zhdanov himself liked the novella – so Simonov resolved ‘not to publish Smoke of the Fatherland again’.77
Shortly afterwards, Simonov was called by one of Zhdanov’s secretaries, who asked him when he would be delivering his play about Kliueva and Roskin, the disgraced scientists, whom Stalin had accused of subservience towards the West. Stalin had originally proposed the idea of a novel on this subject at a meeting in the Kremlin with Fadeyev and Simonov in May 1947. There was a need, he said, for more patriotic works of fiction to expose the intelligentsia’s submission to the West. Simonov agreed but suggested that the theme was better suited to a play. At that time Simonov was still writing Smoke of the Fatherland, so he put off working on the play, a serious political commission that he felt as a burden, although he did go to Zhdanov’s offices to look at the materials on Kliueva and Roskin. Coming as it did so quickly after the attack on him by Agitprop, the call from Zhdanov’s secretary was a clear message to Simonov that Stalin would forgive him for the mistakes he had made in his novella, if he delivered the play Stalin had been waiting for. Desperate to redeem himself, in the early months of 1948 Simonov produced the first draft of Alien Shadow, a crude propaganda play about a Soviet microbiologist whose infatuation with the West leads him to betray his motherland. In a shameful act of political toadying, Simonov sent the draft to Zhdanov for his approval, and on his advice to Molotov and Stalin for their approval as well. Stalin telephoned Simonov and gave him precise instructions on how to rewrite the play. He advised Simonov to place greater emphasis on the egotism of the scientist-protagonist (Stalin: ‘he sees his research as his own personal property’) and to highlight the government’s benevolence by ending the play with the Minister of Health implementing Stalin’s orders to forgive the errant scientist and let him carry on with his research. ‘That is how I see the play,’ Stalin said. ‘You need to correct it. How you do it is your own business. Once you have corrected it, the play will be passed.’ Simonov reworked the ending of the play, making the changes suggested by Stalin, and sent him the second draft for his approval. ‘I wrote the play in agony, under duress, forcing myself to believe in the necessity of what I was doing,’ recalled Simonov. ‘I could have chosen not to write it, if only I had found the strength of character to resist this self-violation. Today, thirty years later, I am ashamed that I lacked the courage to do that.’78
The episode ended in tragicomedy. The play was published in the journal Znamia and nominated for the Stalin Prize, along with several other plays, whose merits were considered by the Secretariat of the Writers’ Union, before being passed up to the committee of the Stalin Prize. At the meeting of the Secretariat, where Simonov was present, several of his colleagues criticized the ending of the play (the one suggested by Stalin) on the grounds that it was ‘too weak, too liberal, almost a political capitulation, to forgive the scientist rather than to punish him’. Simonov said nothing about his telephone conversation with Stalin. ‘I sat there in silence listening to my colleagues censuring Stalin’s liberalism.’ The play won the Stalin Prize.79
Simonov was accustomed to self-criticism and self-censorship. He wrote many letters to the Soviet leadership confessing to mistakes. He drafted several stories which he then put in the drawer because he knew the censors would never pass them for publication. In 1973, Simonov was asked by the German writer Christa Wolf whether he had ever felt pressure to write what he knew to be politically acceptable. Simonov admitted to a life- long struggle between the writer and the censor in himself and even acknowledged feelings of disgust when his cowardice gained the upper hand.80
Occasionally, the writer in Simonov did rebel against the censor, and the poet spoke up for his political conscience. In October 1946, at the height of the Zhdanovshchina, for example, Simonov wrote an angry letter to Aleksei Surkov, the editor of the journal Ogonyok, to which he had previously sent a number of poems for publication. Simonov expressed his bitter disagreement, ‘in substance and in principle’, with the petty cuts and changes Surkov had made to his work, including the removal of the names of foreigners (on ‘patriotic’ grounds) and the names of Soviet figures who had been politically disgraced. Simonov took particular exception to the cutting of a poem dedicated to his old friend David Ortenberg, who had been dismissed as the editor of the Red Army newspaper Krasnaia zvezda in 1943 after he had refused an order from the Kremlin to sack several fellow Jews from his editorial staff. Ortenberg had bravely written to the Party leadership to voice his discontent with the ‘unchecked anti-Semitism’ which he had detected in some sections of the military and in many areas of the Soviet rear. ‘I want to include this poem,’ Simonov insisted, ‘I like it as a whole. It is dedicated to a person I love, and I want it to remain as I wrote it.’81
Perhaps Simonov attached more significance to his poem about Ortenberg as he became entangled in the literary persecution of the Soviet Jews. His conscience often troubled him, even when he was involved in the repressive measures of the Stalinist regime, and the conflict nearly broke him as a writer and a man. The physical and mental stress of his political responsibilities showed up in his changing appearance: in 1948, Simonov, aged thirty-three, seemed a young man in the prime of life; just five years later, he looked grey and middle-aged. His hands suffered from a nervous skin condition, and only heavy drinking calmed his nerves.82
Simonov in 1948 (left) and in 1953 (right)
In his memoirs, composed in the last year of his life, Simonov recalls an incident that particularly troubled his conscience and brought him face to face with the realization that Stalin’s tyranny rested on the cowardly complicity of functionaries like himself. The incident occurred in 1952 at a meeting in the Kremlin to judge the Stalin Prize. It was more or less agreed to give the prize to Stepan Zlobin’s novel Stepan Razin, but Malenkov objected that Zlobin had behaved badly in the war because he had let himself be captured by the Germans. In fact, as everybody knew, Zlobin had behaved with extraordinary courage; he had even led a group of resistance fighters in the concentration camp where he was held. After Malenkov had made his statement there was a deathly hush. Stalin stood up and paced around the room, passing by the seated Politburo members and the leaders of the Writers’ Union and asking out loud, as if to himself, but also for them to consider, ‘Shall we forgive him or not?’ There was silence. Stalin continued to pace around the room and asked again, ‘Shall we forgive him or not?’ Again there was silence: no one dared to speak. Stalin went on with his pacing and asked for a third time, ‘Shall we forgive him or not?’ Finally he answered his own question: ‘Let’s forgive him.’ Everyone had understood that the fate of an innocent man had been hanging in the balance: either he would win the Stalin Prize or he would be sent to the Gulag. Though all the writers at the meeting were at least acquainted with Zlobin, no one spoke in his defence, not even when invited to do so by Stalin. As Simonov explains: ‘In our eyes it was not just a question of whether to forgive or not forgive a guilty man, but whether to speak out against a denunciation’ made by a figure as senior as Malenkov, a denunciation that had evidently been accepted as truth by Stalin, for whom the question was whether to forgive a guilty man. Looking back on this event, Simonov came to the conclusion that Stalin had always been aware of the accusations against Zlobin, and that he had himself deliberately nominated his book for the Stalin Prize so that he could stage this ‘little game’. Knowing that there would be nobody with the courage to defend Zlobin, Stalin’s aim had been to show that he, and only he, decided the fate of men.83
4
The ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign opened the floodgates to anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. Anti- Semitism had a long history in the Russian Empire. After 1917, it continued to exist, especially among the urban lower classes, whose hatred of the Jews in trade was a major factor in the popular resentment of the NEP which Stalin had exploited during his rise to power. The widespread indifference of the lower classes towards the purges of the 1930s was also partly shaped by the perception that the Party leaders, the main victims of the Terror, were all ‘Jews’ in any case. But generally before the war the Soviet government made serious
