I was troubled by so many questions. In reaction, I made myself become a conformist. That’s what happened, although I use the word ‘conformist’ only now… It was not a game but a strategy of survival. For example, my friend Alla and I did not like the cult of Stalin, but the idea that it might be wrong was simply inadmissible, even to ourselves. I was aware of the constant need to correct myself, to purge myself of doubts.106
In his memoirs Simonov reflects on his reaction to the arrest of a relative (the brother of his mother’s aunt), a senior army officer, in connection with the trial of Tukhachevsky and other senior military commanders in 1937. Simonov recalls that he had his doubts about the guilt of the accused. As a boy he had worshipped Tukhachevsky (whom he had often seen at his uncle’s Moscow flat). Simonov’s mother was irate about the arrest and certain of their relative’s innocence. Consequently, Simonov weighed up the evidence with special care, but in the end he decided to accept what he had read in the Soviet press. Like most people at that time, Simonov assumed that nobody would dare to execute such senior commanders without conclusive evidence of treason against them:
It was impossible to doubt the existence of a dreadful conspiracy. Any doubts on that score were inconceivable – there was no alternative. I am talking of the spirit of those times: either they were guilty or it was impossible to understand.
By the same reasoning Simonov was ready to accept that his relative was guilty of some crime. Because his relative had been arrested once before (in 1931) and then released for lack of evidence, it seemed to Simonov that his rearrest must mean that firmer proof about his guilt had now come to light (a conclusion reinforced by the fact that his stepfather, who had also been arrested in 1931, was now left untroubled by the police).107 In other words, Simonov interpreted the indicators in a way to reinforce his system of Communist belief, because disbelief was ‘inconceivable’.
Another way for people to reconcile the sudden disappearance of friends and relatives with their belief in Soviet justice was to tell themselves that some good people were arrested ‘by mistake’. According to this rationale, there were bound to be errors in identifying the true ‘enemies of the people’, because there were so many ‘enemies’, and they were so well hidden. In this way of thinking, the real enemy was always someone else – the sons and husbands of all the other women in the queue to hand in parcels at the prison gates – and never one’s own friends and relatives.
Recalling the arrest of her husband in 1936, Olga Adamova-Sliuzberg summarized her reaction:
No, it was impossible; it couldn’t happen to me, to him! Of course there had been rumours (just rumours – it was only the beginning of 1936) that something was going on, that there were arrests. But surely all this happened to other people; surely it couldn’t happen to us.108
Olga’s husband thought that there had been some ‘misunderstanding’ when he was arrested by the NKVD. Like millions of others, he left saying to his wife that it would all soon be sorted out (‘It must be a mistake’). Sure that he would soon return, he took only an overnight bag. Slavin and Piatnitsky did the same.
Convinced that an error had been made, many people wrote to Stalin to appeal for the release of relatives. Anna Semyonova, who was brought up as a Communist, recalls writing to Stalin after the arrest of her father in June 1937. ‘I imagined that after a few days Stalin would receive my letter, read it and say, “What is going on? Why has an honest man been arrested? Release him immediately and apologize to him.”’ Three months later, when Anna’s mother was taken away, she told herself again that ‘it must be a mistake’.109
The downfall of Yezhov, the NKVD chief behind the Great Terror, reinforced this system of belief. Yezhov was brought down amidst a host of scandals (not all of them entirely false) about his private life in the autumn of 1938. There were homosexual affairs, bisexual orgies, bouts of heavy drinking and fantastic stories of his wife as an ‘English spy’. But the real reason for Yezhov’s fall was Stalin’s growing sense that mass arrests were no longer a workable strategy. At the rate the arrests were going, it would not be long before the entire Soviet population was in jail. Stalin made it clear that the NKVD could not carry on incarcerating people, solely on the basis of denunciations, without checking their veracity. He warned against careerists who made denunciations to promote their position in society. After Yezhov’s dismissal in December 1938, his replacement, Lavrenty Beria, immediately announced a full review of the arrests in Yezhov’s reign. By 1940, 1.5 million cases had been reviewed; 450,000 convictions had been quashed, 128,000 cases closed, 30,000 people released from jail, and 327,000 people let out of the Gulag’s labour camps and colonies. These releases restored many people’s faith in Soviet justice. They allowed waverers to put the ‘Yezhov terror’ (
Beria’s appointment was greeted with relief. ‘We were overjoyed by the appearance of this pure and ideal figure, as Beria appeared to us,’ remembers Mark Laskin, who hoped, like many people, that ‘all the innocents would now be released, leaving only the real spies and enemies in jail’.111 Simonov recalls that Beria’s review was enough to restore his belief in Soviet justice and dispel any doubts he may have had over the arrest of relatives. Indeed, its effect on Simonov was to reinforce his conviction that anybody who was not released, or who was arrested subsequently, must be guilty of some crime. Recalling his reaction to the arrest in 1939 of the writer Isaak Babel and the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, Simonov confessed:
Despite the importance of these men in literature and the theatre, and the huge shockwaves which their sudden disappearance caused – already at that time – the fact that these arrests were so sudden and, in general, in those circles, so unusual, and because they took place under Beria, who was correcting Yezhov’s mistakes – all this made me think: maybe these men are indeed guilty of something. Many of the people arrested during Yezhov’s reign were perhaps innocent, but these people had been left untouched by Yezhov and were suddenly arrested when the old mistakes were being corrected. So it seemed likely that there were good reasons for their arrest.112
One of the people to have serious doubts about the charges against Meyerhold and Babel was Vladimir Stavsky, the former General Secretary of the Writers’ Union, who had attempted to recruit Simonov as an informer. Born into a working-class family in the provincial town of Penza, Stavsky could not have risen to the summit of the Soviet literary establishment without learning how to compromise his moral principles. As Stalin’s ‘executioner of Soviet literature’, he had authorized the arrests of numerous writers and personally wrote the denunciation which led to the arrest of Mandelshtam in the spring of 1938.113 But all this time Stavsky was tormented by doubts and fears. He confessed his despair to his diary, which, like Prishvin, he wrote in a tiny scrawl, barely legible to anybody else. Stavsky was particularly troubled by a story he had heard about a Party official who used his chauffeured car as a brothel. ‘I don’t understand how it happened,’ the chauffeur had said of the official. ‘He was just an ordinary boy, one of us, but then he crossed some dividing line and turned into a pig with his whole mug covered in filth. A regular worker doesn’t get that dirty in a whole lifetime.’114 Perhaps as a response to his loss of faith, Stavsky began drinking heavily, put on weight and became ill, often not appearing at work for days on end, as he recovered from his latest alcoholic binge. He avoided meetings where writers were denounced, or only spoke against them in the mildest terms. For this he himself was finally denounced by the Party Committee of the Writers’ Union in November 1937:
As the leader of the Writers’ Union, comrade Stavsky makes a lot of noise about the need for vigilance in literature, he calls for a campaign for the revelation of enemies. But in reality he has helped to conceal the Averbakhians, he does not really speak out to disarm the enemies of the people and alien elements of the Party and he remains silent about his own mistakes in habouring connections with the enemy.115
Stavsky came under growing pressure from his political masters and was ultimately dismissed from the leadership of the Writers’ Union in the spring of 1938.
There were many people, like Stavsky, who had doubts about the mass arrests, but few who spoke out
