In 1966, Simonov set in motion a process that culminated in the publication of Mikhail Bulgakov’s subversive masterpiece
Simonov’s support for these initiatives was a public statement about his politics. By setting out to rescue suppressed works of art and literature, he was aligning himself with the liberal wing of the Soviet establishment. These efforts, which he undertook on his own initiative (he had no official position in any Soviet institution or journal), earned him the respect of many artists and writers, who made him the chairman of literary commissions and organizations like the Central House of Literature in the 1960s and 1970s. Simonov had not become a liberal in the sense of the dissidents, who were pro-Western and anti-Soviet, but like many Communist reformers in the Brezhnev era, he was open to the idea of a fundamental change in the politics and culture of the Soviet system. Simonov did not openly criticize the Brezhnev government. But privately he was opposed to many of its policies – not least to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 in order to suppress the ‘Prague Spring’ of Alexander Dubcek’s reformist government. The crisis of 1968 was a major turning-point in Simonov’s political development. It radicalized him. He began to question whether it was possible or even desirable for the one-party system to survive in the stagnant form which it had developed under Brehznev’s leadership. According to his son, if Simonov had lived a few more years, he would have welcomed Gorbachev’s reforms:
As a senior Party member there was only so far he could go, of course. He would have had to break his Party mould completely to come out in support of Solzhenitsyn, for example, and he could not do that. I do not know what he really thought, and what he forced himself to think in order to keep himself in check, but I know that he went on evolving politically to the end. That, for me, was his strongest quality – he never lost the capacity to change.37
The development of Simonov’s political ideas in his final years was intimately linked to his re-examination of his past. Simonov became increasingly remorseful about his own conduct during Stalin’s reign. As he admitted his errors to himself, he grew more critical of the political system that had led him to make them. His feelings of contrition were sometimes so intense that they bordered on self-loathing, according to Lazar Lazarev, who was as close as anyone to Simonov at that time. Lazarev recalls that Simonov would castigate himself, both as a writer and as a man, at public occasions. Simonov was known for his self-deprecating irony. His friends and admirers took it to be part of his personal charm. But there were times when they must have realized that his self-criticisms came from darker impulses. At his fiftieth-birthday celebration at the Central House of Literature in 1965, an evening of speeches in praise of Simonov attended by more than 700 guests, he seemed to grow impatient with the kind things said of him. At the end of the evening, shaking visibly with emotion, he approached the microphone to deliver these extraordinary words:
On these sorts of occasions – when someone reaches fifty years of age – of course people mainly like to recall the good things about them. I simply want to say to the people here, to my comrades who have gathered here, that I am ashamed of many of the things I have done in my life, that not everything I have done is good – I know that – and that I did not always behave according to the highest moral principles – neither the highest civic principles, nor the highest human principles. There are things in my life that I remember with dissatisfaction, occasions when I acted without sufficient willpower, without sufficient courage. I know that. And I am not saying this for the purposes, so to speak, of some sort of repentance, that is a person’s private business, but simply because, by remembering, one wants to avoid repeating the same mistakes. And I shall try not to repeat them… From now on, at whatever cost, I will not repeat the moral compromises I made.38
These feelings of remorse intensified over time. He regretted the way that he had written about Stalin and the White Sea Canal during the 1930s. He felt remorse for his participation in the wartime propaganda of the Stalinist regime, for having gone along with Stalin’s lies about the ‘criminal behaviour’ and ‘treason’ of those Soviet generals who ordered the retreat of 1941. He felt remorse for his shameful actions in the Writers’ Union between 1946 and 1953 – years he found it ‘painful to recall’, as he wrote in an essay on Fadeyev: ‘There are many things that are hard to remember without dissembling one’s feelings, and many more that are even harder to explain.’ In the last years of his life Simonov engaged in a long struggle to understand his actions in the Writers’ Union. He interrogated his own memory and wrote several drafts of a personal account about his role in the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign, which remained locked away in his archive. Yet he never tried to defend or justify his actions in those years. Lazarev recalls an evening at Simonov’s house to celebrate his fifty-fifth birthday in 1970. Proposing a toast to the assembled guests, the writer Aleksandr Krivitsky passed around a photograph of Simonov in 1946 and said that they should drink to the words of a well-known song, ‘As he was then, so he is now’. Lazarev took exception to the implication – that Simonov remained a Stalinist – and, proposing the next toast, he said they should drink to the courage of their host, who was ‘not afraid to change and break with the past’. A heated argument began about whether Simonov had changed and whether that was a good thing or not. The next day Lazarev called Simonov to apologize. But Simonov saw nothing wrong. ‘On the contrary,’ recalls Lazarev, ‘he said that the discussion had been highly educational, because it had helped him make up his mind about himself: of course it was better when a person changed, if he changed for the better.’39
Many of Simonov’s activities in the 1970s were driven by his need to make up for his past actions. Haunted by memories of the Stalinist attacks on Jewish writers, he led a brave campaign in defence of Lilia Brik, the muse of much of Maiakovsky’s later poetry. Brik was the subject of a violent and openly anti-Semitic attack by literary critics working for Suslov, who demanded that she should be expunged from accounts of Maiakovsky’s life to purge the memory of the great Soviet poet of all Jewish elements. Filled with regret for his attacks on Ehren-burg in 1954, Simonov organized the publication of the writer’s war journalism. The collection included an article by Simonov, written in 1944, in which he had described Ehrenburg as the best of all the war-time journalists. The book was published in 1979, not long before Simonov’s death. Simonov was in hospital when he received a copy from the publishers. He called Lazarev, who had edited the book, and told him that he was extremely happy and relieved that he had ‘made his peace’ with Ehrenburg.40
Many people in the reformist circles of the literary intelligentsia were sceptical of Simonov’s late repentant liberalism. To them it seemed unlikely that a veteran Stalinist could reconstruct himself so radically. There was always the suspicion of hypocrisy when Simonov came out for some liberal cause. ‘Simonov the man of many faces,’ Solzhenitsyn wrote, ‘Simonov simultaneously the noble literary martyr and the esteemed conservative with access to all official quarters.’41
There were indeed times when Simonov behaved with anything but liberal inclinations. He took part, for
