NATASHA

that illustrated the heroic mastery of the natural world by Soviet industry; all of it was styled on the landscape painters of the late nineteenth century, on Levitan or Kuindzhi or the Wanderers, with whom some of the older artists had even studied in their youth. As Ivan Gronsky once remarked (with the bluntness one might expect from the editor of Izvestiia), 'Socialist Realism is Rubens, Rembrandt and Repin put to serve the working class.'¹¹⁰

In music, too, the regime put the clock back to the nineteenth century. Glinka, Tchaikovsky and the kuchkists, who had fallen out of favour with the avant-garde composers of the 19 20s, were now held up as the model for all future music in the Soviet Union. The works of Stasov, who had espoused the cause of popular nationalist art in the nineteenth century, were now elevated to the status of scripture. Stasov's championing of art with a democratic content and progressive purpose or idea was mobilized in the 1930s as the founding argument of Socialist Realist art. His opposition to the cosmopolitanism of Diaghilev and the European avant-garde was pressed into the service of the Stalinist regime in its own campaign against the 'alien' modernists.* It was a gross distortion of the critic's views. Stasov was a Westernist. He sought to raise Russia's culture to the level of the West's, to bring it into contact as an equal with the West, and his nationalism was never exclusive of Europe's influence. But in the hands

(continued) the 1930s - about 100,000 copies of all his works were sold between 1938 and 1941, compared with about 5 million copies of Tolstoy's. It was only in the Khrushchev thaw that print runs of Dostoevsky's works were augmented. The 10-volume 1956 edition of Dostoevsky's works published to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of his death ran to 300,000 copies - though this was still extremely small by Soviet standards (V. Seduro, Dostoevski in Russian Literary Criticism, 1846-1956 (New York, 1957), p. 197; and same author, Dostoevski's Image inRussiaToday (Belmont, 1975),p. 379). * For example, in the foreword to the 3-volume 1952 edition of Stasov's works (V. V. Stasov, Sobranie sochinenii v 3-kh tomakh, 1847-1906 (Moscow, 1952)) the Soviet editors made the extraordinary announcement that 'the selection of materials has been determined by our attempt to show Stasov in the struggle against the cosmopolitanism of the Imperial Academy, where the prophets of 'Art for Art's sake', aestheticism, formalism and decadence in art were to be found in the nineteenth century'.

of the Soviet regime he became a Russian chauvinist, an enemy of Western influence and a prophet of the Stalinist belief in Russia's cultural superiority.

In 1937 Soviet Russia marked the centenary of Pushkin's death. The whole country was involved in festivities: small provincial theatres put on plays; schools organized special celebrations; Young Communists went on pilgrimages to places connected with the poet's life; factories organized study groups and clubs of 'Pushkinists'; collective farms held Pushkin carnivals with figures dressed as characters from Pushkin's fairy tales (and in one case, for no apparent reason, the figure of Chapaev with a machine-gun); scores of films were made about his life; libraries and theatres were established in his name; and streets and squares, theatres and museums, were renamed after the poet.¹¹¹ The boom in Pushkin publishing was staggering. Nineteen million copies of his works sold in the jubilee alone, and tens of millions of subscriptions were taken for the new edition of his complete works which had been planned for 1937 - though because of the purges and the frequent losses of staff in which they resulted it was only finished in 1949. The cult of Pushkin reached fever pitch when Pravda declared him a 'semi-divine being' and the Central Committee issued a decree in which he was heralded as the 'creator of the Russian literary language', the 'father of Russian literature' and even as 'the founder of Communism'.¹¹² In an article entitled 'Pushkin Our Comrade', the writer Andrei Platonov maintained that Pushkin had been able to foresee the October Revolution because the spirit of the Russian people had burned like a 'red hot coal' within his heart; the same spirit had flickered through the nineteenth century and flared up anew in Lenin's soul.¹¹³ As Pushkin was a truly national poet whose writing spoke to the entire people, his homeland, it was claimed by Pravda, was not the old Russia but the Soviet Union and all humanity.¹¹⁴

'Poetry is respected only in this country', Mandelstam would tell his friends in the 1930s. 'There's no place where more people are killed for it.'¹¹⁵ At the same time as it was erecting monuments to Pushkin, the Soviet regime was murdering his literary descendants. Of the 700 writers who attended the First Writers' Congress in 1934, only fifty survived to attend the Second in 1954.¹¹⁶ Stalin was capricious in his persecution of the literary fraternity. He saved Bulgakov, he cherished

Pasternak (both of whom could be construed as anti-Soviet), yet without a moment's hesitation he condemned Party hacks and left-wing writers from the ranks of RAPP. Stalin was not ignorant of cultural affairs. He read serious literature (the poet Demian Bedny hated lending books to him because he returned them with greasy fingermarks).¹¹⁷ He knew the power of poetry in Russia, and feared it. Stalin kept a jealous eye on the most talented or dangerous writers: even Gorky was placed under constant surveillance. But after 1934, when full-scale terror was unleashed, he moved towards more drastic measures of control. The turning point was the murder in 1934 of Sergei Kirov, the Party boss in Leningrad. It is probable that Kirov had been killed on Stalin's orders: he was more popular than Stalin in the Party, in favour of more moderate policies, and there had been plots to put him into power. But in any case, Stalin exploited the murder to unleash a campaign of mass terror against all the 'enemies' of Soviet power, which culminated in the show trials of the Bolshevik leaders Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev in 1936-8 and subsided only when Russia entered the Second World War in 1941. Akhmatova called the early 1930s the 'vegetarian years', meaning they were relatively harmless in comparison with the 'meat-eating' years that were to come.¹¹⁸

Mandelstam was the first to be taken. In November 1933 he had written a poem about Stalin which had been read in secret to his friends. It is the simplest, most straightforward, verse he ever wrote, a fact his widow Nadezhda would explain as demonstrating Mandel-stam's concern to make the poem comprehensible and accessible to all. 'It was, to my mind, a gesture, an act that flowed logically from the whole of his life and work… He did not want to die before stating in unambiguous terms what he thought about the things going on around us.'¹¹⁹

We live, deaf to the land beneath us,

Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,

All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,

The murderer and peasant-slayer.

His fingers are fat as grubs

And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,

His cockroach whiskers leer

And his boots gleam.

Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders -

Fawning half-men for him to play with.

They whinny, purr or whine

As he prates and points a finger,

One by one forging his laws, to be flung

Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.

And every killing is a treat

For the broad-chested Ossete.¹²⁰

Akhmatova was visiting the Mandelstams in Moscow in May 1934 when the secret police burst into the flat. 'The search went on all night', she wrote in a memoir about Mandelstam. 'They were looking for poetry, and walked across manuscripts that had been thrown out of the trunk. We all sat in one room. It was very quiet. On the other side of the wall, in Kirsanov's flat, a ukulele was playing… They took him away at seven in the morning.'¹²¹ During his interrogations in the Lubianka, Mandelstam made no attempt to conceal his Stalin poem (he even wrote it out for his torturers) - for which he might well have expected to be sent straight to the gulags in Siberia. Stalin's resolution, however, was to 'isolate but preserve': at this stage, the poet was more dangerous to him dead than alive.¹²² The Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin had intervened on Mandelstam's behalf, warning Stalin that 'poets are always right, history is on their side'.¹²³ And Pasternak, though obviously careful not to compromise himself, had done his best to defend Mandelstam when Stalin called him at home on the telephone.¹²⁴

The Mandelstams were exiled to Voronezh, 400 kilometres south of Moscow, returning to the Moscow region (but still barred from the capital itself) in 1937. Later that autumn, without a place to live, they visited Akhmatova