The Whisperers

believed these rehabilitations were serious and that all the slanderers and other minions might be brought to trial.68

Mandelshtam also tells the story of a senior MVD official in Tashkent who was pensioned off after Stalin’s death but ‘occasionally summoned to interviews with former victims who had by some miracle survived and returned from the camps’. The man could not stand it and hanged himself. Mandelshtam was able to read a draft of the suicide letter he addressed to the Central Committee. The official wrote that he had always worked hard for the Party, and that it had never crossed his mind

that he might have been serving not the people, but ‘some kind of Bonapartism’. He tried to put the blame on others: on the people he had interrogated for signing all kinds of bogus confessions, thereby misleading the officials in charge of their cases; on the officials sent from Moscow with instructions concerning ‘simplified interrogration procedures’ and demands that the quotas be fulfilled; and, last but not least, on the informers who volunteered the denunciations which forced the secret police to act against so many people.

The death of the MVD official was hushed up. He had named too many functionaries and informers before his suicide. But his daughter was determined to get even ‘with those who had caused her father’s death’. As Mandelshtam noted:

Her anger was directed against the ones who had stirred up this nightmarish business. ‘They should have shown some consideration for the people in official positions at the time! They didn’t start all this, they were just carrying out orders.’69

Another one of Stalin’s henchmen to commit suicide was Aleksandr Fadeyev, the alcoholic leader of the Writers’ Union, who was removed from that post in 1954. Fadeyev had been suffering from depression for a long time, but Stalin’s death completely unhinged him. ‘My illness is not in my liver,’ he wrote to a fellow Union member, ‘it is in my mind.’ Fadeyev confessed to Simonov that he was ‘bankrupt’ as a writer. He gave up working on his last novel, a Socialist Realist tale about the Party’s struggle against industrial sabotage, which made use of materials from the 1930s trials, after he had realized, as he explained to several friends, that its moral import was completely wrong: there had been no industrial sabotage. Fadeyev was overcome by feelings of remorse for his part in the repression of writers during his leadership of the Writers’ Union. ‘I was such a scoundrel,’ he wrote to Chukovsky. He was particularly remorseful about his old friend Iogann Altman, who died in 1955, two years after his release from jail. Fadeyev had denounced Altman during the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign and had done nothing to save his friend when he was arrested and imprisoned in 1949. After Altman’s death, Fadeyev went on a drinking binge. He confessed to a friend that he had sanctioned the arrest of many writers he had known were innocent.70

After 1953, Fadeyev attempted to redeem himself by petitioning the authorities for the release and rehabilitation of writers who had been sent to the labour camps. He wrote to Malenkov and Khrushchev, calling on the Party to loosen its ideological control of the cultural sphere, but he was ignored and then removed from his leadership position. By 1956, Fadeyev had become an isolated figure, widely denounced as an unreconstructed Stalinist by the literary intelligentsia, which knew nothing of his later efforts on behalf of repressed writers. Just before he shot himself, on 13 May 1956, Fadeyev wrote a letter to the Central Committee which remained hidden in the Party archives until 1990:

I see no possibility of living any longer, because the cause of [Soviet] art, to which I gave my life, has been destroyed by the arrogant and ignorant leadership of the Party… Our best writers have been exterminated or died before their time because of the criminal connivance of those in power… As a writer, my own life has lost all sense, and it is with joy, with a sense of liberation from this vile existence, where the soul is crushed by malice, lies and slander, that I depart this life.71

Fadeyev was broken by the conflict between being a good Communist and being a good human being. He was by nature a kind person, as many of his victims recognized, but his conscience, his identity and in the end his will to live were gradually destroyed by the compromises and accommodations he had made in his many years of service to the Stalinist regime.72

Despite Fadeyev’s pessimism about the state of literature, Soviet writers played a leading role in the beginning of the thaw. As the regime ceased to exercise a direct veto over writers, literature became the focus for a new emphasis on the individual and private life, and on the rejection of the meddling interference of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Soviet writers moved away from the public themes and heroes of Socialist Realism and strove to portray real people in their domestic and social context. The most daring work of fiction in those years, Ehrenburg’s The Thaw (1954), was deliberately provocative, as if it were a test to see how far it was possible to go in the new climate. The novel tells the story of a despotic factory boss, a ‘little Stalin’, who becomes increasingly corrupt and inhumane, stealing money assigned for workers’ housing to invest in the factory, as he struggles to fulfil the production quotas of the Five Year Plan. The boss’s wife cannot bear to stay with such a heartless man, and the spring thaw, which promises a new and better life, gives her the courage to leave him. In the political climate of 1954, when the thaw had only just begun, it was too early for Soviet readers to discuss the novel’s anti-Stalinism, which was not obvious in any case. Instead they concentrated on the novel’s other theme, the independence of the artist, which was contained in its sub-plot about a painter. The artist churns out works to order by the state and lives comfortably as a consequence, but he recognizes his own mediocrity compared with other painters whose art has not been compromised by service to the system.

The publication of The Thaw split the Soviet literary world. Liberal journals such as Novyi mir, where the novel was first published, hoped it would mark the start of a new era, when writers could at last be honest and sincere, when they would return to their true role of shaping private sensibilities rather than reflecting the interests of the regime. In a discussion of his work at a Moscow library in 1954, Ehrenburg maintained that the purpose of art was to express the ‘culture of emotions’ and help the ‘individual understand his fellow human beings’.73 Alarmed by all this liberal talk, conservatives in the Soviet establishment began to organize a series of attacks on the liberal writers of the thaw. In August 1954, they secured the dismissal of Tvardovsky, the ‘kulak’ son and poet, from the post of editor of Novyi mir. The task of criticizing Ehrenburg fell to Simonov, who replaced Tvardovsky as the editor of Novyi mir. Simonov was chosen because he was regarded as a moderate conservative, and therefore more authoritative than Stalinist hardliners such as Sofronov. In two long articles in Literaturnaia gazeta Simonov attacked The Thaw, arguing that its portrayal of Soviet Russia was too dark and that the conclusion of its sub-plot was simplistic: it was possible, Simonov argued, to be a good artist and to serve the state.74

Simonov remained in the Stalinist camp until 1956, when he began to embrace the spirit of reform. Like many people who had lived in Stalin’s shadow, Simonov was confused and disoriented by the leader’s death. At first, it was far from clear which way Kremlin politics would go: a return to the Terror was quite plausible. In this climate of uncertainty it was not unreasonable for people in positions such as Simonov’s to play it safe by sticking to the political ground they had occupied before Stalin died. ‘In those years,’ recalls Simonov, ‘my attitude to Stalin kept changing. I wavered between various emotions and points of view.’ For much of 1953, his main feeling was a ‘profound sense of grief at the loss of a great man’, which led Simonov to write a startling eulogy in Literaturnaia gazeta (‘The Sacred Duty of the Writer’) in which he argued that it was ‘the highest task of Soviet literature to portray the greatness and the genius of the immortal Stalin for all nations and all future generations’. The article enraged Khrushchev, who insisted on Simonov’s removal from the newspaper’s staff. Simonov remained loyal to his Stalinist origins throughout 1954, placing a portrait of Stalin on his desk. It was a picture he particularly liked: Stalin gazing on that monument to Gulag labour, the Volga–Don Canal. During Stalin’s lifetime, Simonov had never hung a portrait of the ruler in his office or his house. He did so now because he was repulsed by the ‘turncoats’ and ‘careerists’ who had proclaimed their love for the Soviet leader when he was alive but renounced him as soon as he was dead. ‘It was not Stalinism that inspired me [to display the photograph],’ recalls Simonov, ‘but something closer to the noble or intelligentsia idea of honour.’ This same refusal to renounce his past led Simonov, in 1955, to include in a collection of his verse a truly awful ‘Ode to Stalin’ that he had written in 1943 but not published, in which he praised the Soviet leader as the greatest human being in the whole of history.75

Simonov with his son Aleksei, 1954