The Malygin house in Sestroretsk, 1930s
To make a career in the years of the Great Terror necessarily involved moral compromise, if not by outright informing, then by silent collusion with the Stalinist regime. Simonov, whose own career took off in these years, wrote with extraordinary candour and remorse about what he saw as the collaboration of the silent Soviet majority in the Great Terror. In his memoirs, dictated on his death-bed in 1979, Simonov accused himself:
To be honest about those times, it is not only Stalin that you cannot forgive, but you yourself. It is not that you did something bad – maybe you did nothing wrong, at least on the face of it – but that you became accustomed to evil. The events that took place in 1937–8 now appear extraordinary, diabolical, but to you, then a young man of 22 or 24, they became a kind of norm, almost ordinary. You lived in the midst of these events, blind and deaf to everything, you saw and heard nothing when people all around you were shot and killed, when people all around you disappeared.
Seeking to explain this detachment, Simonov recalled his own reaction to the arrest in 1939 of Mikhail Koltsov, a hugely influential writer, whose reports from the Spanish Civil War were an inspiration to the young literary circles in which Simonov moved. Deep down Simonov had never believed that Koltsov was a spy (as he confessed to the writer Fadeyev in 1949), yet somehow at the time he had managed to suppress his doubts. Whether out of fear and cowardice, or the desire to believe the state, or simply from an instinct to avoid subversive thoughts, he had made a small interior accommodation in order to conform to the necessities of the Stalinist regime. He had realigned his moral compass so as to navigate his way through the moral morass of the Great Terror with his own career and beliefs intact.80
Simonov was not an informer, but he was pressured by the Soviet authorities, which perhaps wanted him to become one. In the spring of 1937, Simonov was invited by Vladimir Stavsky, the Secretary of the Writers’ Union, to join three other young prose writers from the Literary Institute on a working holiday in the Caucasus. They were to write about the life of Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the former Commissar for Heavy Industry, a famous Georgian and comrade of Stalin in the Civil War, who had just committed suicide. Shortly before they were due to leave, Simonov was summoned to Stavsky’s office. Stavsky demanded that Simonov tell him ‘all about the anti-Soviet conversations [he had been conducting] at the institute’. He wanted him to confess and repent, to put him in a position where it would be difficult to refuse the demands of the authorities. When Simonov denied that he had held such conversations, Stavsky claimed to ‘have information’ about him. He told him it was ‘best to tell the truth’. Stavsky ‘was clearly irritated by my apparent inability to be sincere and speak the truth’, recalled Simonov. After several rounds of accusations by Stavsky and denials by Simonov, there was a stalemate, with Simonov refusing to cooperate. Stavsky accused him of spreading ‘counter-revolutionary poetry’ and banned him from the trip. Gradually it dawned on Simonov where Stavsky’s ‘information’ had come from. Among the students at the institute there was a craze for Kipling’s poetry. One day Simonov was drawn into a conversation about Kipling with a young teacher who then asked him what he thought about the poetry of Nikolai Gumilyov (who had been shot as a ‘counterrevolutionary’ in 1921). Simonov replied that he liked some of Gumilyov’s poetry, though not as much as Kipling’s. Encouraged by the teacher, he recited some of Gumilyov’s verse. As he recalled the scene, Simonov felt terrified for the first time in his life. He knew he was in danger of arrest, not just for his views on Gumilyov, but also on account of his noble origins, which were, it seems, connected by the teacher to Simonov’s indulgence of Gumilyov in his report to Stavsky. For the rest of the academic term Simonov avoided the teacher, who was himself arrested later that year (he had turned informer in a last desperate effort to save himself and had tried to entrap Simonov).81
By the spring of 1937, the Literary Institute was in a state of high anxiety. Like other Soviet institutions, the institute had been caught unawares by the sudden launching of the Great Terror; and inside it there was a sense of panic that this surprise attested to a ‘lack of vigilance’. At a series of purge meetings, students and teachers called hysterically for greater ‘Bolshevik vigilance and real self-criticism’ to rid the institute of all ‘formalists’ and ‘Averbakhians [Trotskyists]’. Several students were arrested, some for liberal or religious motifs in their poetry, others for defending Boris Pasternak (who had been criticized in the Soviet press for his individualistic style). About a dozen students were ‘worked over’ by the Komsomol (i.e. forced to recant their work at a student meeting where they were severely criticized). One of these students was expelled from the institute and handed over to the NKVD after she refused to renounce her father, a poet then out of favour, and bravely told her massed accusers: ‘My father is the most honourable person in the Soviet Union.’ For this she did ten years in Kolyma.82
Two of Simonov’s good friends at the institute suffered persecution in the Great Terror: the poet Valentin Portugalov was arrested in February 1937, after a fellow student reported to the police something he had said; and in April of that year, Vladimir Lugovskoi, the charismatic teacher, was denounced by the Presidium of the Writers’ Union for having allowed the republication (in 1935) of some poems from the 1920s (romantic verses about Russian nature), which had since come to be considered ‘politically harmful’. Forced to recant his poems, Lugovskoi wrote ‘On My Mistakes’, a ten-page exercise in self-abasement, in which he pledged to purge himself of ‘all the outmoded thoughts’ that had prevented him from ‘keeping up with the march of history’.83 Lugovskoi was terrified. For the next few years he published no poetry, except for a ‘Song About Stalin’, which was set to music in 1939.84 A soft-spoken and mild-mannered man, Lugovskoi also made a series of rabid political speeches in which he called for the blood of enemies. ‘It is time,’ he told a group of Moscow writers in October, ‘to purge our country of all those bastard-enemies, the Trotskyists, to sweep away with an iron broom all those people who betrayed our Motherland, and to purge those elements within ourselves.’85
Simonov, too, reacted out of fear. Until the incident in Stavsky’s office, he had been regarded as a model student and Soviet loyalist, but now this reputation was in doubt. Looking back at the Stavsky incident, Simonov recalled that he was ‘stunned and shocked, not so much by a sense of sudden danger… but more by the realization that they no longer believed or trusted me’. He set out to prove his worth in a series of attacks against the ‘formalists’ and other ‘enemies’ at the purge meetings in the institute.86 The most extraordinary of these speeches, which he gave at an open meeting of the institute on 16 May, included a vitriolic condemnation of his friend Yevgeny Dolmatovsky:
Often there are conversations [in the institute] where people only speak about themselves. In particular, I recall having to listen to a disgusting speech by Comrade Dolmatovsky at a meeting of the fourth class. He did not say, ‘the institute’ and ‘we’, but rather, ‘I and my institute.’ His position was: ‘The institute does not pay enough attention to individuals like me. The institute was founded to educate two or three talents, like me, Dolmatovsky, and only that justifies its existence. For talents like me – Dolmatovsky – the institute should lay on the best of everything, even at the expense of the rest of the students.’87
Perhaps Simonov had spoken in the spirit of self-criticism (which included criticism of one’s closest friends) that had always been a part of the Komsomol ethos. Students were expected to demonstrate that they were loyal and vigilant. Perhaps he had meant no harm to his friend, although he was clearly jealous of the high regard for Dolmatovsky’s talent, which was frequently expressed by the institute’s Director (who placed Simonov in a lower category that was ‘only good enough for teaching, journalism, or editorial work’).88 In the event, Simonov’s denunciation had relatively minor consequences for Dolmatovsky. After graduating from the institute in 1938, he was sent to work as a journalist in the Far East – a posting well below his literary worth and one which he described as the hardest in his life. It could have been much worse. The two men remained on amicable terms and often wrote in praise of each other, but among Simonov’s friends there was always the suspicion that Dolmatovsky harboured a grudge against him.89
As for Simonov, the years of the Great Terror, which were so catastrophic for many of his friends, catapulted him to prominence as a poet favoured by the Stalinist regime. In 1937, he contributed several poems to the cult of Stalin, including one, ‘Parade’, which was written for an orchestra and chorus:
This is a song about Him,
About his true friends,
His true friends and comrades.
