Stalin and His Hangmen (30 page)

Menzhinsky and Stalin now pressed on with a trial of the harmless remnants of pre-revolutionary Russia’s law-abiding socialists. The accused had never been, or no longer were, Mensheviks but they had underground experience and OGPU had trouble breaking them. Iagoda threatened to arrest his victims’ sick wives and elderly parents – and did so, even after the accused caved in and signed dictated formulaic confessions, sixty volumes of them.

With the benefit of his now considerable experience Menzhinsky could see that only fourteen of the 122 accused would perform reliably in open court so the rest were dealt with behind closed doors. Even so, Nikolai Krylenko, prosecuting, was wrong-footed in court. One
Menshevik who had escaped abroad, Rafail Abramovich, was said to have visited Russia to brief the conspirators but was able to prove that he was in western Europe all that time and successfully sued two German newspapers that printed reports of the trial. Even loyal Bolsheviks had trouble suspending their disbelief at the ludicrous testimony. One noted in his diary:

A hall flooded with lights, microphones, sound recorders, judges, stenographers. One impression only: a trial that had been over-rehearsed. Ramzin was examined when I was there. He was led across the hall… A heap of correspondents filling the front rows fired their cameras at him for several minutes, sitting on top of each other. Ramzin was wearing a white collar, a jacket buttoned up to the neck, standing by the microphone and not waiting for questions from the prosecution, spent at least a whole hour giving his evidence. He said really shattering things…
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Bringing the Writers to Heel

If the Soviet people had any hope of intercession at the end of the 1920s, before everyone’s conscience and common sense was obliterated by terror, that hope lay with the creative intellectuals, especially the writers. For over a hundred years, from Pushkin to Tolstoi, Russian poets, novelists and philosophers had stood up for the people against oppression, enduring prison, exile abroad or in Siberia, poverty and obloquy. But if the novelist Leo Tolstoi and the philosopher Vladimir Soloviov had courted repression to save the lives of those whom the Tsarist state proposed to kill, their successors Vladimir Mayakovsky and Mikhail Bulgakov stood back from the brink. Five years of the New Economic Plan had given them back a semblance of the security, prestige and prosperity poets and novelists had once enjoyed but they had not recovered the moral security destroyed by the civil war. They might intervene for close friends, and would still protest when OGPU purloined their diaries or when Glavlit banned their works, but they did little more.

Not a single writer with the exception of Osip Mandelstam now had the courage to confront Menzhinsky and Stalin on any matter; to stand
up for liberty of conscience, let alone free speech or the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. True, poets and philosophers all had friends, wives, mistresses and children who would go down with them; ‘“I have a wife and children” is the best cog in the machinery of tyranny,’ said the Slovak novelist Jan Johanides. Undoubtedly, Stalin was more terrible than Nicholas I or Alexander III. So much worse then, the crime of conniving at his atrocities than assenting to the Tsarist oppression of the nineteenth century. The cowardice of Soviet intellectuals led to a punishment as terrible as that which moral courage would have incurred.

Stalin was now preparing to deal with the intelligentsia, but because he regarded himself as a creative mind, because he depended on writers, cinematographers and composers for his entertainment, he moved stealthily. New cadres of engineers could be trained, peasants replaced by tractors, and the Politbiuro was easily replenished from the eager ranks of the Central Committee. It was far harder, Stalin knew, to find new writers, composers, actors and painters; the young proletarian writers to whom the old guard had been ordered by Lunacharsky and Gorky to pass on their skills, produced, as Stalin knew, little but trash.

Stalin took great interest in the arts from 1928. The theatres, cinemas, concert halls and publishing houses of Moscow and Leningrad were thriving but the quarrelsome intelligentsia were like headless chickens; their patrons – Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev – had fallen from power. As NEP foundered under taxation and persecution, independent publishing vanished and authors were cut off from Russian culture abroad, writers were left to the mercy of editorial boards and state publishers, controlled by Glavlit’s censors.

In 1927 Lebedev-Poliansky of Glavlit, reporting to the Central Committee, called for Stalin’s intervention. Lebedev-Poliansky had shown vulpine deviousness in letting through, for certain audiences at certain times and places, a few books or plays of artistic merit such as Isaak Babel’s civil war stories
Red Cavalry,
and Mikhail Bulgakov’s drama
The Days of the Turbins.
In this he had set himself against Lenin’s widow Krupskaia and his sister Maria, two bigots who exercised fundamentalist censorship in the Commissariat for Education. But censorship grew oppressive. It was now retrospective: second-hand book shops had their stocks weeded, and libraries were purged of ideological impurity, although state libraries were allowed special closed holdings of banned
books. Lebedev-Poliansky complained of ‘walking on a razor’s edge’ between political and artistic criteria. He knew that Glavlit was hated and quoted a prose writer: ‘There is a general groan over the whole front of contemporary literature. We cannot be ourselves, our artistic conscience is constantly being violated… If Dostoevsky were to appear among us today… he too would have to put all his manuscripts back in the drawer with a “prohibited” stamp from Glavlit.’ The great poets – Voloshin, Akhmatova, Mandelstam – abandoned verse. Pasternak had stopped writing lyrics. Sergei Esenin had hanged himself, leaving a farewell poem written in his own blood. Bulgakov’s satirical prose on the Soviet mission to transform nature had fallen foul of the censor: ‘Fatal Eggs’ portrayed imported Marxism as irradiated reptile eggs brought in by mistake as hens’ eggs, whose hatchlings devastated the country instead of feeding it; ‘The Heart of a Dog’ depicted
Homo sovieticus
as a vicious hybrid between a dog and a human being. Stalin himself took umbrage at much of what he read. Pilniak’s story ‘Tale of the Moon Extinguished’ recounted the death of the civil war commander Mikhail Frunze, implying that his fatal abdominal operation had been ordered by Stalin.
²⁰
Author, editor and journal were severely punished.

Nevertheless, a few literary decisions in 1928 were benevolent. Two of Bulgakov’s plays were authorized for performance, on the grounds that one gave experience to young actors and the other was the sole source of income for a small theatre. Stalin’s most liberal authorization was for an edition of all Tolstoi’s work (eventually ninety volumes). Tolstoyans imprisoned and exiled by OGPU were partially amnestied, despite the opposition to Bolshevism that Tolstoi’s religious and philosophical work enjoins. Tolstoi’s disciple Vladimir Chertkov, deported by the Tsar to Great Britain in 1896, had an audience with Dzierżyński in 1920 and with Stalin in 1925. He persuaded Dzierżyński that Tolstoyans, like other non-violent sectarians, were harmless to the state. Chertkov’s argument to Stalin was ingenious: he warned that Tolstoi’s works would be published abroad if the Soviet authorities did not pre-empt this. Tolstoyans suffered in the collectivization; their communal working of the land could not coexist with Stalin’s measures but Chertkov, and after his death in 1936 his son, secured for Tolstoi’s work and his followers indulgences that Stalin granted to no other unorthodox believers.
²¹

One group of writers, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers and the Proletarian Theatre, had already appointed themselves the secret police of poetry; they were nonplussed by Stalin’s apparent liberalism. They protested about performances of Bulgakov’s
The Days of the Turbins
and
Flight,
both showing the plight of the Whites in the civil war with some sympathy. A commission of the Central Committee, including Krupskaia and Rozalia Zemliachka, demanded instead mass printing of works by specified communist authors.

Stalin made himself the arbiter of literary disputes. Wearing his mask of tolerance, he told proletarian playwrights that concepts of right and left did not apply to ‘such a non-party and incomparably broader sphere as is artistic literature, the theatre, etc.’. Stalin ‘would have nothing against the staging of Bulgakov’s
Flight
if he added to his eight “dreams” one or two more showing the inner social springs of the civil war’.
The Days of the Turbins
was a good play, because it leaves the impression that ‘if even people like the Turbins are forced to lay down their arms and submit to the will of the people… then the Bolsheviks are invincible’, and if Bulgakov’s plays were staged frequently that was because proletarians couldn’t write good plays. ‘Literature should progress not by bans, but by competition.’
²²

Talking to Ukrainian writers in February 1929, Stalin applauded literature in local languages and prophesied that when the proletariat conquered the globe French not Russian would be the universal language. Stalin even conceded: ‘You can’t insist that literature be communist’.

Stalin not only loved theatre, he and Menzhinsky learnt from it. OGPU developed Stanislavskian theories of acting and the theatre in a direction more barbarous than Konstantin Stanislavsky could ever have dreamed of for their show trials, aiming to make their victims act as if they believed in their own guilt. The Bolshoi Theatre for opera and ballet, and for drama Stanislavsky’s Moscow Arts Theatre, were Stalin’s, and thus the Politbiuro’s, regular haunts. Few performers from either ended up in the Lubianka, except as informers. Stanislavsky, once the owner of cotton mills, was forgiven his past but was not allowed to forget it. His brother and nephews had been shot in the Crimea, and in the next few years he would lose a dozen nephews and other relatives to the GULAG and the executioner’s bullet. Chekhov’s widow Olga Knipper
was forgiven her tours abroad during the civil war, and her letters of 1918 cursing the Bolsheviks as power-crazed killers. Her nephew the actor Mikhail Chekhov was allowed by Iagoda to leave for Germany and the USA, and his ex-wife Olga Tschechowa became one of Hitler and Goebbels’ favourite actresses. Stalin forbade reprisals against the family and Olga Knipper and at least one of her nephews became NKVD informers. Other theatre directors, however left wing, were damned for their failure to bend their experimentalism to Stalin’s conformist tastes. The theatre director Vsevolod Meierkhold, however outspokenly pro-Soviet, annoyed Stalin intensely with his modernism, which Stalin called in 1929 ‘affectation, mannerisms’. He was doomed.

The Russian theatre had always lived on state patronage; now the Soviet authorities controlled the repertoire, the funding and the fate of actors, authors and directors. Literature was a more private and independent activity. Control required deep penetration by OGPU; writers had to be recruited to detect undercurrents that a simple chekist might miss. Poets acquired OGPU friends: Esenin had Iakov Bliumkin to report on his activities, while Mayakovsky was handled by Iakov Agranov – who gave him the revolver that he was to shoot himself with – and by his mistress’s husband Osip Brik, on whose door someone once scrawled:

The man who lives here, Osip Brik, is

Not just a linguist and a critic.

He’s a grass, a police dog who

Interrogates his friends for OGPU.
²³

Skilled
chekisty
wrote poor poetry; talented poets were bad secret policemen. One Bohemian ‘proletarian’ poet Ivan Pribludny, Esenin’s friend, was hauled in for his incompetence and in 1931 repented:

I formally took upon myself the obligation to be an OGPU collaborator some years ago, but I have done virtually no work and haven’t wanted to, because the demands I had to meet as a collaborator interfered with my private life and my literary creativity. When I was summoned to OGPU on 15 May, I asked the comrade who summoned me permission to go to the lavatory. When I got permission, I went there and wrote the following on the door: ‘Lads, ring Natasha [his wife] on South Moscow 17644 and tell her I’m not there.’… I confess that I thus broke the conspiratorial status obligatory for me as a secret collaborator of OGPU…
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Certain genres of literature had priority for the Soviet state: writers of history were subjected to special ideological rigour. Mikhail Pokrovsky, an old Bolshevik who had edited Lenin’s work, helped set up a Communist Academy and an Institute of Red Professors; he worked until his death in 1932 to suppress conventional historical research. He recognized only his own doctrines, which saw even the Middle Ages as an era of proletarian struggle, and rejected all national history. Russia’s major historians lost first their right to publish, then their teaching jobs, and finally their liberty.

One institution of Tsarist Russia was not yet destroyed: the Academy of Sciences. Its membership had shrunk through emigration, execution, deportation and starvation but enough men of international prestige survived for Stalin and OGPU to be circumspect with this last bastion of independent thought. Unlike the state and government, the academy remained in Leningrad until 1934, and not until 1925 did it even change its name from ‘Russian’ to ‘All-Union’. Until 1934 it elected members from capitalist states including Lord Rutherford from Britain and Albert Einstein from Germany. Stalin’s Politbiuro tried to pack the academy with its own candidates and bribed academicians with trips abroad but in 1928 ungrateful academicians blackballed three communists. They had to hold a new ballot.