The Whisperers

occupied Ukraine during the Second World War, which won the Stalin Prize in 1946.

*  That person (who is still alive) went on to become the head of the Department of Party History at Leningrad University.

*  There is a legend about the victory parade in Moscow on 24 June 1945, when Zhukov led the columns of troops across Red Square riding on a white Arab stallion. It was said that Stalin had intended to lead the parade but that at the rehearsal he had been thrown by the stallion. The legend is untrue, but it suggests the popular desire for Stalin to be toppled by Zhukov.

*  Voznesensky did not advocate a restoration of the mixed economy but he did favour lifting state controls on prices so that they would better reflect supply and demand. He also advocated an expansion of the cooperative sector, and more investment in consumer industries, such as textiles, both measures which had been important to the early success of the NEP.

*  It has often been suggested that Zhdanov was a political moderate, a liberal reformer, who lost out to hardliners, such as Malenkov, in Stalin’s ruling clique, as relations with the West deteriorated in 1945–6. According to this view, the hardline cultural policies were in fact imposed by Zhdanov’s rivals in the Party leadership. But the archives show that Zhdanov had no independent political ideas, and that policy positions within the ruling clique were developed in response to various signals from Stalin, who used Zhdanov to impose on all the Soviet arts and sciences a rigid ideological conformity to the Party’s anti-Western stance.

*  For the same reason Simonov defended the writer Vasily Grossman, whose play If We Are to Believe the Pythagoreans was savagely attacked in Pravda in September 1946. Simonov wrote to the paper’s editor, defending Grossman on the grounds that a writer who had spent ‘the whole war fighting at the front’ did not deserve to be criticized in the abusive language used by the critic, even if he had made ‘serious ideological errors’ (RGALI, f. 1814, op. 9, d. 1384, l. 2).

*  Zaslavsky was probably the author of the infamous Pravda article of 1936 (‘Muddle Instead of Music’) denouncing Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. In 1929, Zaslavsky had denounced his own brother as a ‘Trotskyist’ to demonstrate his loyalty to the Party. On Fadeyev’s initiative, and with the agreement of Stalin, Zaslavsky and Ehrenburg were both removed from the list of members of the JAFC shortly before the arrest of its other members in December 1948 (RGALI, f. 2846, op. 1, dd. 75, 101, 187, 310, 311).

*  The phrase ‘literary scum’ (literaturnye podonki) had been used to characterize Zoshchenko in the Central Committee’s decree of 14 August 1946.

*  Aleksandr Borshchagovsky died in May 2006 at the age of ninety-four.

*  Anti-Semitic Russian nationalists of the tsarist era.

*  Natalia was not asserting her own Jewishness: nationality, or ethnic origin, was a required category in all official documents.

*  Maltsev (Rovinsky) was in fact a Russian but he shared the name of a well-known Jewish editor called Rovinsky at Izvestiia (Stalin had probably confused the two). He changed his name from Rovinsky to Maltsev after an anti-Semitic reaction against one of his earlier novels.

*  In the autumn of 1952, Stalin had replaced the Politburo with a larger Presidium of twenty-five members in preparation for a new purge of the Party leadership.

*  One of Lev’s most important friendships within the party was with Andrei Starostin, one of the four famous Starostin brothers, all footballing stars with Spartak Moscow. Lev had known Starostin since the 1930s, when his younger brother Igor had played for the youth team of Moscow Dinamo (Igor Netto went on to become a stylish midfielder with Spartak Moscow, and from 1952, when Lev was in the Gulag, the captain of the Soviet national side). Lev was deeply influenced by Starostin’s ideas, which he recorded in a notebook. One idea, which Lev now sees as the ‘guiding principle’ of his whole life, was borrowed from Tolstoy: ‘Do what is necessary, and what you think you should, and whatever will be, will be.’

*She left the Party as soon as Tania and her brother Aleksei emigrated to the USA – at the height of the Kremlin’s campaign against Elena Bonner and her second husband Andrei Sakharov – in 1978. Elena Bonner had joined the Party in 1956. She stopped paying her Party dues after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, but out of fear for the welfare of her grandchildren, Ruth Bonner secretly went on paying them for her until 1972 (interview with Elena Bonner, Boston, November 2006).

*This is not confirmed by Marianna’s cousin Katia Bronshtein (nee German), who was eighteen at the time.

*Galina took her mother’s name.