NATASHA

took off in the wake of the Great Terror (as if to justify it) in 1939. 'Our benefactor thinks that we have been too sentimental', Pasternak wrote to Olga Freidenberg in February 1941. 'Peter the Great is no longer an appropriate model. The new passion, openly confessed, is for Ivan the Terrible, the oprichnina, and cruelty. This is the subject for new operas, plays and films.'¹⁵⁷ One month earlier, Zhdanov had commissioned Eisenstein to make his film. But Eisenstein's conception of Ivan the Terrible was far removed from the official one. The first part

of the film to emerge in his imagination was the confession scene (planned for the third and final part of the film), in which Ivan kneels beneath the fresco of the Last Judgement in the Cathedral of the Assumption and offers his repentance for the evils of his reign while a monk reads out an endless list of people executed on the Tsar's command.¹⁵⁸

From the start, then, Ivan was conceived as a tragedy, a Soviet version of Boris Godunov which would contain a terrifying commentary on the human costs of tyranny. However, because everybody knew what Stalin did with people who made parables like this, the film's tragic nature and contemporary theme could not be revealed until the end.¹⁵⁹ In Part One of the film Eisenstein depicts the heroic aspects of Ivan: his vision of a united state; his fearless struggle against the scheming boyars; his strong authority and leadership in the war against the Tatars of Kazan. Stalin was delighted, and Eisenstein was honoured with the Stalin Prize. But at a banquet to celebrate his triumph Eisenstein collapsed with a heart attack. Earlier that day he had put the final touches to Part Two of his epic film (not publicly released until 1958). He knew what lay in store. In Part Two the action switches from the public sphere to Ivan's inner world. The Tsar now emerges as a tormented figure, haunted by the terror to which he is driven by his own paranoia and his isolation from society. All his former allies have abandoned him, there is no one he can trust, and his wife has been murdered in a boyars' plot. The parallels between Ivan and Stalin were unmissable. Stalin, too, had lost his wife (she had killed herself in 1932) and the effect of her death on his own mental condition, which doctors had already diagnosed as paranoia and schizophrenia, no doubt contributed to the terror he unleashed.¹⁶⁰

When Stalin saw the film he reacted violently. 'This is not a film -it is some kind of nightmare!'¹⁶¹ In February 1947 Stalin summoned Eisenstein to a late-night interview in the Kremlin at which he delivered a revealing lecture on Russian history. Eisenstein's Ivan was weak-willed and neurotic, like Hamlet, he said, whereas the real Tsar had been great and wise in 'preserving the country from foreign influence'. Ivan had been 'very cruel', and Eisenstein could 'depict him as a cruel man, but', Stalin explained,

you have to show why he had to be cruel. One of Ivan the Terrible's mistakes was to stop short of cutting up the five key feudal clans. Had he destroyed these five clans, there would have been no Time of Troubles. And when Ivan the Terrible had someone executed, he would spend a long time in repentance and prayer. God was a hindrance to him in this respect. He should have been more decisive.¹⁶²

Part Two of Ivan was banned by Stalin, but Eisenstein was permitted to resume production on Part Three on the understanding that he incorporate approved material from the previous film in it. On Stalin's instructions, he even promised to shorten Ivan's beard. At a screening of Part Two at the State Institute of Cinema, Eisenstein gave a speech in which he criticized himself for the 'formalistic deviations' of his film. But he told his friends that he would not change his film. 'What re-shooting?' he said to one director. 'Don't you realize that I'd die at the first shot?'¹⁶³ Eisenstein, who had never lacked bravura, was evidently preparing an artistic rebellion, culminating in the confession scene of the film's third and final part, a terrifying commentary on Stalin's madness and his sins:

Tsar Ivan bangs his forehead against the flagstones in a rapid sequence of genuflections. His eyes swim with blood. The blood blinds him. The blood enters his ears and deafens him. He sees nothing.¹⁶⁴

When they shot the scene the actor Mikhail Kuznetsov asked Eisenstein what was going on. 'Look, 1,200 boyars have been killed. The Tsar is 'Terrible'! So why on earth is he repenting?' Eisenstein replied: 'Stalin has killed more people and he does not repent. Let him see this and then he will repent.'¹⁶⁵

Eisenstein took inspiration from Pushkin, whose own great drama Boris Godunov had served as a warning against tyranny in the wake of the suppression of the Decembrist revolt by Tsar Nicholas I. But there is a deeper sense in which his brave defiance as an artist was rooted in the whole of the Russian humanist tradition of the nineteenth century. As he explained to a fellow director, who had pointed out the connection to Boris Godunov:

'Lord, can you really see it? I'm so happy, so happy! Of course it is Boris Godunov: 'Five years I have governed in peace, but my soul is troubled…' I could not make a film like that without the Russian tradition - without that great tradition of conscience. Violence can be explained, it can be legalized, but it can't be justified. If you are a human being, it has to be atoned. One man may destroy another - but as a human being I must find this painful, because man is the highest value… This, in my opinion, is the inspiring tradition of our people, our nation, and our literature.¹⁶⁶

Eisenstein did not have enough strength to complete his film. The heart attack had crippled him. He died in 1948.

6

The Leningrad to which Akhmatova returned in 1944 was a shadow of its former self. For her it was a 'vast cemetery, the graveyard of her friends', Isaiah Berlin wrote: 'it was like the aftermath of a forest fire - the few charred trees made the desolation still more desolate'.¹⁶⁷ Before the war she had been in love with a married man, Vladimir Garshin, a medical professor from a famous nineteenth-century literary family. He had helped her through her son's arrest and her first heart attack in 1940. On Akhmatova's return to Leningrad she was expecting to be with him again. But when he met her at the station there was something wrong. During the siege Garshin had become the chief coroner of Leningrad, and the daily horror which he experienced in the starving city, where cannibalism became rife, stripped away his sanity. In October 1942 his wife had collapsed from hunger on the street and died. He had recognized her body in the morgue.¹⁶⁸ When Garshin met Akhmatova at the station, it was only to tell her that their love affair was over. Akhmatova returned to the Fountain House. The palace had been half-destroyed by a German bomb. Her old apartment had large cracks in the walls, the windows were all smashed, and there was no running water or electricity. In November 1945, her son Lev came to live with her, having been released from the labour camp to fight in the war, and he resumed his studies at the university.

During that same month Akhmatova received an English visitor. In

1945 Isaiah Berlin had just arrived as First Secretary of the British Embassy in Moscow. Born in Riga in 1909, the son of a Russian-Jewish timber merchant, Berlin had moved in 1916 with his family to Petersburg, where he had witnessed the February Revolution. In 1919 his family returned to Latvia, then emigrated to England. By the time of his appointment to the Moscow embassy Berlin was already established as a leading scholar for his 1939 book on Marx. During a visit to Leningrad, Berlin was browsing in the Writers' Bookshop on the Nevsky Prospekt when he 'fell into casual conversation with someone who was turning over the leaves of a book of poems'.¹⁶⁹ That someone turned out to be the well-known literary critic Vladimir Orlov, who told Berlin that Akhmatova was still alive and residing in the Fountain House, a stone's throw away. Orlov made a telephone call and at three o'clock that afternoon he and Berlin climbed the stairs to Akhmatova's apartment.

It was very barely furnished - virtually everything in it had, I gathered, been taken away - looted or sold - during the siege; there was a small table, three or four chairs, a wooden chest, a sofa and, above the unlit stove, a drawing by Modigliani. A stately, grey-haired lady, a white shawl draped about her shoulders, slowly rose to greet us. Anna Andreevna Akhmatova was immensely dignified, with unhurried gestures, a noble head, beautiful, somewhat severe features, and an expression of immense sadness.¹⁷⁰

After conversing for a while, Berlin suddenly heard someone shouting his name outside. It was Randolph Churchill, Winston's son, whom Berlin had known as an undergraduate at Oxford and who had come to Russia as a journalist. Churchill needed an interpreter and, hearing that Berlin was in the city, had tracked him down to the Fountain House. But since he did not know the exact location of Akhmatova's apartment he 'adopted a method