The Whisperers

shaving and then got depressed because of it.

In 1952, Zhenia went to stay with Sonia in Vorkuta. It was part of the relaxation of the Gulag system to allow relatives to visit prisoners. Zhenia was one of the first visitors to Vorkuta. On the night before her departure she asked Simonov to come to the house at Zubov Square. Aleksei overheard his parents’ conversation. Zhenia was afraid that she might be arrested in the labour camp (it was a common fear of relatives) and she wanted Simonov to give a solemn promise that, should anything happen to her, he would let their son remain with Samuil and Berta until she returned. Zhenia was generally a diplomat in life. She had an extraordinary capacity for getting on with people of all kinds, without judging them, but on this matter she was adamant – it was a question of principle: Aleksei was not to live with Simonov.

Zhenia (left) and Sonia at Vorkuta, 1952

Zhenia never asked Simonov for anything for herself. In 1951, she had been sacked from her radio job, as part of a general purge of Jews in radio. For a long time she could not find work. She applied to dozens of literary magazines and newspapers and sent along articles she hoped they might publish, but she did not turn to Simonov. For Sonia, though, she would do it. Much of Zhenia’s energy at the time was taken up with the appeal for Sonia’s release. She wrote to all the relevant authorities: to the Military Tribunal that had sentenced Sonia; to the Military Procurator responsible for the review of its cases; she even wrote to the editor of Pravda in the hope that justice would be done. Finally, Zhenia appealed to Simonov. Over a period of six months, she met him several times, hoping to get information and advice. Simonov was unwilling to become involved, as Zhenia wrote to Sonia:

You cannot imagine how Kostia [Simonov] has changed. Nothing remains of the person we once knew. In the past few years I have seen him very little, and never for more than a few minutes, so I’m struck all the more – as you would be too – by his new personality… It is not just a question of his getting older (he is still comparatively young), nor of his becoming wiser with experience or as a result of his exalted position and prosperity. No, it is something else entirely… Kostia promised to get us the information we need. I thought it was worth waiting for because the information was likely to be reliable, but he still hasn’t done it. No doubt he is too busy… He could have done more but – God go with him – let him live his quiet and comfortable life. I have simply stopped respecting him.

In Simonov’s defence there was probably not a lot that he could have done, even had he chosen to intervene on Sonia’s behalf. Certainly that was the view taken by the rest of the Laskin family, who continued to treat him with affection and esteem. On the rare occasions when they saw him, they never raised the question of Sonia’s release. ‘We knew that he was close to Stalin and that he could have had a word with him,’ Fania explains, ‘but none of us ever brought that up – we just couldn’t allow ourselves to do it.’95

In any case, by this time Simonov had become so entangled in the Stalinist campaigns against the Jews that he would have put himself in a difficult position if he had tried to act for the Laskins. When Simonov took charge of the literary newspaper Literaturnaia gazeta, in 1950, he had been instructed by the Kremlin to bring it into line with its own position in the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign. The previous editor had been too soft, and Stalin was depending on Simonov to turn the influential newspaper into the vanguard of the Party’s ‘struggle against alien bourgeois elements’ in Soviet culture. On taking over as its editor, Simonov dismissed eleven members of the paper’s staff (all of them Jews) for ‘poor work and political mistakes’. Under his control the newspaper regularly published articles and editorials whose anti-Semitism was only thinly disguised by the ‘ideological struggle’ with ‘comopolitanism’ and ‘servility towards the West’. Having been a ‘moderate’ in the early stages of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, Simonov, it seems, was becoming one of its hardliners. He maintained this position right until the end of the Stalinist regime. On 24 March 1953, more than two weeks after Stalin’s death, Simonov wrote on behalf of the Secretariat of the Writers’ Union to the Central Committee with a list of names of Jewish writers who needed to be purged (as ‘dead-weight’) from the Writers’ Union. Even later, he wrote to insist on the purge of his old friend and war comrade Aleksandr Krivitsky, the editor of the international section of Literaturnaia gazeta, because of ‘certain biographical facts’, as he put it in his denunciation to the Central Committee, not least Krivitsky’s lack of vigilance against Jewish nationalists.96

Vigilance was exactly what Simonov was trying to display. Under growing pressure from a series of attacks by anti-Semites who, it seemed, had the support of the Kremlin, Simonov reacted as he always had: he frantically tried to demonstrate his loyalty. The campaign against Simonov began in 1951 with a public argument about the use of pseudonyms by Jewish writers. At a meeting to discuss the Stalin Prize, Stalin asked why the writer Orest Maltsev did not use his Jewish name (Rovinsky) and proposed that anyone using a Russian pseudonym should henceforth be required to include his Jewish name in brackets on all official forms.* This had been official custom during tsarist times, when Jews and revolutionaries were seen as practically synonymous, but after 1917 the practice had been dropped because it was considered anti-Semitic. The use of pseudonyms was widely discussed in the Soviet press, starting in 1949, with hardliners urging the return to the system of identifying Jewish names. In February 1951, an article appeared in Komsomolskaia pravda by Mikhail Bubennov (‘Are Literary Pseudonyms Still Necessary?’). It was a nasty article, openly anti-Semitic in character, in which Bubennov taunted Jewish writers for adopting pseudonyms and accused them, ‘chameleon-like’, of ‘hiding from society’. As the editor of Literaturnaia gazeta, Simonov responded to the article, claiming that the use of pseudonyms was a private matter and citing laws from the 1920s that gave writers the right to adopt them. He signed off the article as ‘Konstantin (Kirill) Simonov’. It was a courageous argument. Komsomolskaia pravda then came out with a defence of Bubennov by no less a person than Mikhail Sholokhov, the celebrated author of Quiet Flows the Don. Simonov was doubtful that Sholokhov had really written it. He wanted to call him and ask him, man to man, what sort of pressure had been placed on him, but then thought better of it. Instead he wrote a second article in Literaturnaia gazeta, accusing Sholokhov and the Bubennov campaign of ‘cheap sensationalism’ and claiming that he would not write another word about the controversy.97

Thousands of other people did. The controversy produced an avalanche of letter-writing to the press. Some people wrote in support of Simonov – many of them Jews, others choosing to remain anonymous. But most correspondents agreed with Bubennov, either because in their view there was no need for any pseudonyms in the Soviet Union, where ‘everyone is equal regardless of their race’, or because they thought the Jews had something to conceal. Many of the letters were violently anti-Semitic and accused Simonov of ‘acting as defender of the Jews’.98

By this stage a whispering campaign had started against Simonov. It was rumoured that he was a Jew. Towards the end of 1952, Simonov was approached by Aleksei Surkov, a leading member of the Writers’ Union and an opponent of the anti-Semitic campaign. Surkov told him that during the past year he had been involved in a number of discussions with senior bureaucrats from the Central Committee about a series of denunciations claiming that Simonov was a ‘secret Jew’. Some people said that his real name was Simanovich, that he was the son of a Jewish craftsman on the estate of ‘Countess Obolenskaia’, who had adopted him; others that he was the son a baptized Jew from St Petersburg. They all pointed to his ‘Jewish looks’ and to the fact that he used a pseudonym (Konstantin instead of Kirill). Simonov’s initial reaction was to dismiss all these rumours as ridiculous: his mother was a princess, not a countess, and she had no estate. But the Simanovich story found its way into a threatening denunciation by a veteran member of the Party, Vladimir Orlov, who accused Simonov of promoting Jews to the editorial staff of Literaturnaia gazeta in order to transform the newspaper into a ‘Zionist organization’. The threat loomed larger in January 1953, when Surkov visited Simonov again and told him he had been approached by the writer Vladimir Kruzhkov, who claimed to have evidence of a literary group in Moscow with connections to Jewish nationalists throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union: according to Kruzhkov, the leader of this group was Simonov. Surkov was taking a huge personal risk by telling Simonov, because he had been sworn by Kruzhkov not to say a word. ‘There are some bastards digging around under you,’ Surkov warned. ‘They’re digging your grave.’99

The anti-Jewish campaign reached its climax around this time. The final episode was the absurd Doctors’ Plot. The plot had its origins in 1948, when Lydia Timashuk, a doctor in the