So we raises our glasses,
And drink in silence
To those who stand by the machine-gun,
To those whose only friend is the rifle,
To everyone who knows the verb ‘to fight’,
A sad verb that we need to know.
To those who can leave a silent room
And walk into the unknown fire… 97
At the same time as Simonov was making his career, his three Obolensky aunts were languishing in exile in Orenburg, a city on the eastern Volga steppes 1,500 kilometres south-east of Moscow, having been expelled from Leningrad in the repressions that followed the murder of Kirov. Simonov was fond of his three aunts. He had written to them regularly since he was a child. Liudmila, the eldest of his mother’s three sisters, had married an artillery captain from a family of Russified Germans, Maximilian Tideman. His death in the First World War had left Liudmila and her three children stranded in Riazan, where Maximilian’s regiment had been based. After returning to Petrograd in 1922, Liudmila worked as a teacher in a school for handicapped children. By the time of her arrest, in 1935, her three children had grown up. Two went with her to Orenburg, but her eldest son remained in Leningrad, where he was highly valued as a manager at the Red Triangle Factory, which helped to protect him from arrest. Daria, or ‘Dolly’, the middle sister, was severely handicapped, the left side of her body deformed and paralysed, which made it hard for her to move. Personal misfortune had turned her into a cantankerous old maid. Dogmatically religious, she made no secret of her hatred of the Soviet regime and clung to the traditions of the aristocracy. In 1927, Dolly came to visit Aleksandra in Riazan. There were constant arguments about religion which, claims Simonov, led him to become an atheist (although in his later letters to his aunts Simonov continued to express religious sentiments). Simonov visited Dolly in Leningrad on several occasions, but he thought of it as a duty call. He much preferred Sonia, his third and youngest aunt, with whom he often stayed in Leningrad. Sonia was a plump woman with a ‘round face and a kind smile’ which reflected, as Simonov recalls, ‘her simple good nature and openness’. Unlike Dolly, Sonia adapted to the Soviet system, although her manners, values and beliefs retained traces of the nineteenth-century culture of the aristocracy. Trained as a teacher, she worked as a librarian and lived alone in a large room in a communal apartment. But she was not bitter or unhappy with her lot. On the contrary, Simonov recalls her as the liveliest and most fun of all his aunts. Not having children of her own, she loved to have her nephews and her nieces stay with her. She had a soft spot for Konstantin, her youngest nephew, whose interest in books she helped to stimulate. ‘My dear, darling Kiriushonchik,’ she wrote to Simonov, ‘I hope that you grow up to become useful and a comfort to us all, who love you so dearly. I hope that you will always have enough to eat, as we had in olden times.’98
The last time Simonov saw Sonia was in the autumn of 1933, when he stayed with her in Leningrad. He wrote his first poems in her room. In February 1935, Sonia was exiled with Liudmila and Dolly to Orenburg. Simonov recalls his mother’s reaction when she found out, in Moscow, that her ‘three sisters had been sent into exile, along with many other people she had known since her childhood in St Petersburg’.
She sat there in tears with the letters [she had just received from Orenburg], and suddenly she said: ‘If I had returned then with Liulia [Liudmila] from Riazan to Petrograd, I would be together with them now, of course.’ I remember being shocked by the way she said these words. She spoke with some sort of guilt that she was not with them, that she had somehow managed to escape the ordeal that afflicted her sisters. Then she asked my stepfather: ‘Maybe, we will be exiled from here?’ When she said ‘we’ she was not talking about the family; she meant herself, her origins, the Obolensky clan.99
Simonov does not explain why he was so shocked. Perhaps he was surprised by his mother’s expression of guilt. But there was something else besides. Simonov had been brought up to think of himself as a ‘Soviet person’. Even the arrest of his stepfather had failed to shake him from this view. On the contrary, it had reinforced his striving to fashion for himself a proletarian identity. All his efforts to recast himself, first as an engineer and then as a ‘proletarian writer’, had strengthened his identification with the Soviet system. But his mother’s response to the arrest of his aunts – which was, it seems, the first time that he had heard her identify herself as a ‘social alien’ in Soviet terms – forced him to confront reality.
Simonov’s mother and stepfather sent monthly packages of food and clothes to Orenburg, and he himself put aside a part of his own earnings to help with these parcels. In 1936, Aleksandra visited her three sisters. As Simonov recalls, she was afraid that she might not return (many people feared that they would be arrested if they visited their exiled relatives). Simonov’s stepfather, always practical, thought it would be better if she did not go, because if she was arrested it would be even harder to help her three sisters. But Aleksandra insisted on going, because, as she said, ‘if she did not, she would cease to be herself’. On her return from Orenburg, Aleksandra was ‘exhausted, sad, worn out from the long journey and the terrible conditions there’, recalls Simonov, ‘but she was not without hope for the future… because she thought that nothing worse could happen to them now’.100
But worse was to come. In 1937, Sonia and Dolly were arrested and imprisoned in Orenburg. Sonia was shot, and Dolly later died in a labour camp. Only Liudmila survived. Looking back on these events in the last year of his life, Simonov recalled his reaction to the death of his favourite aunt:
When I found out that she had been imprisoned, and then we ceased to hear from her, and then they told us that she had died – although not where or how – I remember experiencing this strong and painful feeling of injustice that was related entirely to her [Sonia], or most of all to her. The feeling would not leave my soul – I am not afraid to say this – and it stayed forever in my memory as the main injustice committed by the state, by Soviet power, against myself, personally. The feeling is particularly bitter because I know that, had Sonia been alive, she would have been the first person I would have helped when I was in a position to do so.
Simonov’s regret was based on the awareness he gained in later years – the awareness that he had colluded in the system of repression that destroyed his aunts. Yet as he admits in his memoirs, at the time of their arrest his reaction had been different. He felt sorry for his aunts, but he found a way to rationalize and perhaps even justify their fates:
I cannot remember what I thought about it then [in 1937], how I judged and explained to myself what had happened… I know that I could not have been unaffected, if only because I loved one of my aunts [Sonia] very much… But perhaps I thought: ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’ This acceptance seems much more cynical today than it felt then, when the Revolution, the breaking up of the old society, was still not so distant in people’s memories, and when it was rare to have a conversation without recourse to that phrase.101
If Simonov’s encounter with the White Sea Canal brought him closer to the regime, for others it had the opposite effect. In 1929, Ilia Slavin, the former Zionist and a leading jurist at the Institute of Soviet Law in Moscow, was transferred to Leningrad to bolster the legal department of the Communist Academy. During the purges of that year the Law Department of Leningrad University had been closed down and its ‘bourgeois’ academics expelled. The legal department of the Communist Academy, which replaced it, was deemed in need of trusted Bolsheviks like Slavin to strengthen its resolve against the ‘bourgeois Rightists’ of the Soviet legal world whose presence was still felt in Leningrad.102 Slavin had become a major figure in the field of Soviet law. An adviser to the Commissariat of Justice, he was also a member of the commission that had written the Soviet Criminal Code of 1926, the first major overhaul of criminal law since 1917. In Leningrad the Slavins had two rooms in a large apartment which they shared with another family (in Moscow they had lived in a communal apartment shared by fifteen families). Eventually, they moved to a three-room flat in the House of the Leningrad Soviet, where many government workers, scientists and artists lived. ‘We were relatively privileged,’ recalls Ilia’s daughter Ida Slavina.
My brother and his wife had their own room, my parents had another, where my father also worked, and I slept in the dining room. When there were guests I went to sleep in my parents’ room and then was moved to the divan in the dining room when my parents went to bed… But there was no hint of luxury – it was a Spartan, almost puritanical, way of life, entirely dedicated to the socialist ideals of my father… We shared our extra rations – of which father was ashamed – with our poorer friends and relatives… Books were our only luxury.103
