The Whisperers

his hopes for the future. Isolated in literary society, Simonov now found a soul-mate and a loyal supporter in his son. ‘He is very pleased with you in all respects,’ Zhenia wrote to Aleksei after seeing Simonov on his return. ‘He is pleased with the way you have turned out, physically and spiritually, and with the way that you are seen by your contemporaries.’ As for Aleksei, he had never known his father so happy and excited: ‘He was full of the Twentieth Congress, of his new family, his daughter, his new house, and his new novel, The Living and the Dead. It seemed to him that he could turn over a new leaf and live his life in a different way.’ During those three days in Iakutsk Aleksei fell in love with Simonov. The ideal father he had pictured all these years had finally materialized, and Aleksei flourished; his new connection with his father gave him a sense of independence and maturity. In his letters from Iakutsk, Aleksei explained to Simonov his ideas on literature and life, and asked for his advice, man to man. ‘I have great hopes for our forthcoming meeting,’ he wrote to him in February 1957. ‘There is so much I must tell you, so much to ask you, which I cannot put in a letter.’25

Aleksei’s closeness with his father was short-lived. The intimacy they had achieved in Iakutsk could not be repeated in Moscow, where Simonov had no time for his son. Politics divided them. Aleksei was swept along by the democratic spirit of the thaw, towards which his father remained sceptical, if not totally opposed. Aleksei was too young, politically too immature, to mount an articulate opposition to his father’s politics. He had no real thoughts, for example, on the Kremlin’s bloody suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, when his father had supported sending in the tanks to crush the anti-Soviet demonstrators in Budapest. Yet there was in Aleksei an element of latent protest and dissent, which was perhaps connected to the history of the Laskin family. In 1956, Aleksei applied for his first passport. In the section where every Soviet citizen was required to register his ethnic origin, he was determined to write down Jewish, even though he had the right to register as Russian, the nationality of his father’s family, which would make his life much easier. It took the concerted efforts of all the Laskins – and the insistence of Samuil and Berta in particular – to talk him out of it. For Aleksei, identifying with his Jewish origins was a conscious act of political dissent from the values of the Soviet regime. His views on other matters displayed the same attitude. Aleksei was repulsed by the falsity and hypocrisy of the Komsomol. He was deeply impressed by Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone, a blistering attack on Soviet officialdom, and wrote to its author to tell him that it was a work of genius that was badly needed for the country’s political reform. He signed the letter with his grandfather’s name (‘Aleksei Ivanishev’) rather than his father’s, so as to avoid the connection being made with Simonov, who had criticized the novel for giving rise to anti-Soviet sentiments, and had forced Dudintsev to tone down its assault on the bureaucracy before printing it in Novyi mir. Simonov was far more cautious than his son towards the reformist spirit of the thaw. ‘If one steps back for a minute and looks at the country and the spirit of the people,’ he wrote to Aleksei in February 1957, ‘one can say without exaggeration that we have travelled an enormous distance since 1953. But when some writer considers it his duty to stir up unnecessary rebellion, then I have no sympathy for him.’26

Simonov’s own de-Stalinization progressed very slowly. The revelations of the Twentieth Party Congress had both excited and shaken him, and it took a while for him to come to terms with them. For Simonov the crucial moral test of the Stalinist regime remained its conduct in the war. It was while working on his great war novel, The Living and the Dead (1959), that Simonov began to grapple with the central moral question raised by the war: the regime’s appalling waste of human life. The novel deals with many of the issues that had been excluded from the public discourse on the war: the devastating effect of the Terror on the military command; the chaos and confusion that overwhelmed the country in the first weeks of the war; the climate of mistrust and the incompetence of the officers which cost so many innocent young lives. Drawing on his diaries and memories of the war, Simonov retells the story of the fighting through a series of vivid scenes where officers and men struggle to make sense of events and carry out their duty in the face of all these obstacles. He shows how people were changed by their experience in the war, becoming more determined and united against the enemy, and implies that this human spirit was the fundamental cause of the Soviet victory. Simonov had always seen the leadership of Stalin as a crucial factor in the war. But in The Living and the Dead he began to reassess Stalin’s role and moved towards the populist conception – which he would develop in his final years – that it was the Soviet people who had won the war and that they had done so in spite of Stalin’s leadership. As Simonov suggests, the chaos and mistrust that Stalin’s reign of terror had fostered in the army led directly to the military catastrophe of 1941; only the patriotic spirit and initiative of ordinary people like the heroes in his book had reversed the crisis and turned disaster into victory. Simonov had touched on some of these ideas in his diaries of 1941–5, which he filled with observations of the war. He had discussed them with his friends, including the writer Lazar Lazarev, before 1953. But as Simonov himself confessed at a literary evening in the Frunze Military Academy in 1960, he had ‘lacked sufficient civic courage’ to publish these ideas while Stalin was still alive.27

Throughout his life Simonov retained an emotional attachment to Stalin’s memory. His own personal history and identity were too closely bound up with the regime to reject the legacy of Stalin root and branch. For this reason, Simonov could never quite bring himself to embrace wholeheartedly the Khrushchev thaw, which seemed to him a betrayal of Stalin as a man and a leader, and as a betrayal of his own past. He could not deny Stalin any more than he could deny himself. Even at the height of the Khrushchev thaw, Simonov held firm to many of the dogmas of the Stalinist dictatorship. He took a hardline position on the Hungarian crisis of 1956. ‘Several thousand people were killed in the events in Hungary,’ Simonov wrote to Aleksei from Calcutta in 1957, ‘but the British spilled more blood during the partition of India, and not in the interests of the people [the motive of the Soviet actions in Budapest, according to Simonov] but simply to stir up religious hatred and rebellions.’28

After 1956, Simonov was seen by liberal reformers as an unreconstructed Stalinist, and by the old Stalinists as a dangerous liberal, but in fact throughout the Khrushchev years he was a moderate conservative. He recognized Stalin’s mistakes and saw the need for limited political reform, but he continued to defend the Soviet system that Stalin had created in the 1930s and 1940s as the only solid basis for the progress of humanity. ‘We have made mistakes on the road to Communism,’ he wrote to Aleksei, ‘but the acknowledgement of our mistakes should not lead us to waver for a moment in our conviction that our Communist principles are correct.’29

When Brezhnev came to power, in 1964, Simonov’s moderate conservatism found official favour, as Khrushchev’s policies of de-Stalinization were gradually reversed and the Kremlin opposed any real political reform in the Soviet Union or the other countries of the Warsaw Pact. From the mid- 1960s, Simonov emerged as an elder statesman in the Soviet literary establishment. His books were widely published and made standard reading in Soviet schools and universities; he frequently appeared in the Soviet media; he travelled round the world as the official face of Soviet literature; and even by the standards of the Soviet elite, he enjoyed a privileged lifestyle.

Aleksei and Konstantin Simonov, 1967

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Soviet victory in 1945, 9 May 1970, Simonov gave an interview to the newspaper Socialist Industry in which he clarified his position on Soviet history since the end of the war:

I have spent a lot of time studying the history of the Great Patriotic War and I know a lot more now than I did when the war had just ended. Of course, a lot has changed in my understanding. But my main feeling, which you get when you travel round the country and see the building going on today, when you see what has been done and what is being done, is that our cause in those times was just. However hard it was, however many lives were lost, our people did what needed to be done during the war. If they had failed in that difficult endeavour, our country would not be what it is today, there would be no other socialist countries, no world struggle for freedom and independence from colonial rule. All of that was made possible only by our victory.30

For people of Simonov’s generation the war was the defining event of their lives. Born around the time of the Revolution of 1917, this generation reached maturity in the 1930s, when basic values were reshaped by the Stalinist regime, and moved towards retirement in the Brezhnev period. From the vantage point of the 1960s and 1970s, these people recalled the war years nostalgically as the high-point of their youth. It was a time of comradeship, of shared responsibilities and suffering, when ‘people became better human