Stalin and His Hangmen (40 page)

Probably the last year in which lyricism was even conceivable in the USSR was 1932. In Pasternak’s
Second Birth,
his finest book, Stalinism met a covert rebuke:

But only now is it time to say

Contrasting the comparison with the greatness of the day:

The beginning of the glorious days of Peter the Great

Were darkened by rebellions and executions.

It was also the last year in which Mandelstam saw his verse in print: the ending of his poem ‘Lamarck’ proclaimed too loudly the end of human freedom:

Nature has stepped back from us,

As if she didn’t need us,

And she has put the dolichocephalic brain

Like a sword back in its sheath.

And she has forgotten, left it too late

To lower the drawbridge for those

Who have a green grave,

Red breath, supple laughter…

Poetry after 1932 had to be written ‘for the desk drawer’, or, since drawers were searched, committed to memory. Pasternak veered away from political reality. Mandelstam confronted the reality but shunned the perpetrators: he called on Bukharin but never went to meet the Politbiuro at Gorky’s. For Mandelstam Stalin was a malevolent god, even an alter ego, another Joseph. But the sight of the humanoids on Stalin’s Politbiuro was, for Mandelstam, unbearable. On the eve of the writers’ congress, he lost his liberty for the lines:

And round him is a rabble of scraggy-necked leaders,

He plays with the services of half-human creatures

Some whistle, some meow, some snivel,

Only he alone pokes and prods.

Iagoda liked Mandelstam’s lampoon well enough to learn it by heart and recite it to Bukharin. Proletarian poets, however, dismayed him by betraying their class. The drunken Pavel Vasiliev was lucky to escape with a warning for writing in 1932 of Stalin:

Cutting thousands of thousands of nooses, you got your way to power by violence.

Well what have you done, where have you pushed to, tell me, stupid seminary student!

These sacred texts should be put up in lavatories…

We swear, o our Leader, we shall strew your path with flowers

And stick a wreath of laurels up your arse.
³⁸

Otherwise, irreverence was to be heard only in the folk quatrains of slaves on the collective farms and in the camps.

For the Soviet literati the bitter pill was sugared. Writers who conformed got apartments, dachas, guaranteed print runs, translation into the major languages of the Soviet Union and tours to the Caucasus or Pamirs. Compliant Russians, Georgians, Ukrainians, Armenians and Kazakhs lived on mutual translation, ‘taking in each other’s washing’. Translation, like children’s literature, for a few years became a haven: readers benefited as poets and prose writers took cover behind another writer or language. ‘An alien tongue will be an embryonic membrane
for me,’ Mandelstam put it. Stalin encouraged translation. Italian authors – the USSR saw itself, in opposition to Mussolini, as the guardian of Italian culture – were recommended. Dante, a poet under sentence of death entangled in feuds between Guelfs and Ghibellines, edified Soviet poets. Stalin had Machiavelli re-translated. Mikhail Lozinsky, Gorky’s protégé and Mandelstam’s friend, spent the 1930s translating
Inferno,
and completed
Paradiso
after a spell in the camps.

Behind the scenes OGPU was tightening its grip. Glavlit came under OGPU’s direct control and censorship became secretive.
³⁹
Only six copies including one for Stalin of lists of ‘major withdrawals, retentions and confiscations’ of publications from book shops and libraries were printed. Any information could count as divulging state secrets: mentioning unemployment, food shortages, grain exports, suicides, insanity, epidemics, even weather forecasts were hostile propaganda. It was forbidden to mention OGPU, the NKVD or even the telephone number of the Registry forBirths, Deaths and Marriages. Almanacs with addresses and telephone numbers of householders in Moscow and Leningrad, published since 1923, were stopped in the early 1930s. Directory enquiries were made at a street kiosk, which took fifteen kopecks (and their names) from enquirers. The censors forbade naming cows and pigs ‘Commissar’, ‘Pravda’, ‘Proletarian’, ‘Deputy’, ‘Cannibal’ or ‘Yid’. So that animals would still come when called, Glavlit suggested phonetically similar substitutes: ‘Anaesthetic’ for ‘Commissar’, ‘Rogue’ for ‘Pravda’.
⁴⁰
The censor mutilated the classics, too: lewdness in Pushkin was ‘pornography’. Folk tales, where heroes chose between the left road and the right road, were rewritten so that heroes now chose between a side road and a straight road.

Even accidental dissidence was to be repressed. Under Stalin, misprints were declared ‘sorties by the class enemy’. All over Europe misprints had been disingenuously used by typesetters to annoy authority. Queen Victoria was reported to have ‘pissed’ over Waterloo Bridge; Nicholas II at his coronation had a ‘crow’ put on his head, later altered to ‘cow’. Correction slips in Soviet books listed all mistakes and who made them. Writers or typesetters could die for one misplaced letter, as Andrei Tarkovsky’s film
Mirror
suggests unforgettably. Substituting one consonant made Stalin ‘pisser’ or ‘shitter’
(ssalin, sralin),
Stalingrad could be set to read ‘Stalin is a reptile’
(Stalin gad).
Printing ‘Lenin had
kittens’
(okotilsia)
instead of ‘Lenin went hunting’
(okhotilsia)
was punishable. Captions in newspapers were a favourite target for the censors: ‘Stalin by the beating-up (instead of electoral) urn’; ‘We must guard the life of comrade Stalin and the lives of our leaders’ placed opposite ‘Annihilate the reptiles so that not a trace remains on Soviet land’. Translation into other languages of the Soviet Union was unreliable. ‘Who does not work, does not eat,’ in Turkmeni became, ‘Who does not work, won’t bite.’

In the early 1930s the semi-literate troika of censor, propagandist and OGPU man went through every public library, removing some 50 per cent of the books, including major classics. Poetry, apart from Pushkin, Nikolai Nekrasov and Demian Bedny, was devastated.

In 1932 publishing, book distribution, even the second-hand book trade were all placed under the control of the party’s Central Committee. Antiquarian and foreign books sold by diplomats or returning Russians were confiscated by inspectors. As enemies of the people were identified and removed, their books were destroyed and their names excised or inked out from every copy of encyclopedias; more persons were employed in censoring literature than in creating it. The political line changed frequently, so that anti-fascist literature, for instance, or literature on anti-Jewish pogroms, would suddenly have to be destroyed. Stalin’s
Short Course
(a history of the party) went through successive editions as the heroes of the revolution became unpersons. Foreign publications, on which technological institutes relied, were frequently confiscated; polyglots were arrested as spies. So few censors were left who could read English, French or German that foreign newspapers and books were destroyed wholesale in the post office.

Prose writers suffocated under mindless censorship and complained. When in March 1930 Bulgakov complained to Stalin, his letter fell first into Iagoda’s hands. Iagoda underlined certain lines – with sympathy or disapproval, we do not know. ‘Fighting censorship, of whatever kind and under whatever regime, is my duty as a writer, just as calling for freedom of the press is. I am an ardent supporter of this freedom and I believe that if any writer were to try to prove that he doesn’t need it, he would be like a fish publicly declaring it doesn’t need water.’ Zamiatin in desperation published his anti-Utopia
We
abroad and protested to Stalin the following year: ‘The author of this letter, sentenced to the
highest measure of punishment [death], turns to you with a request for this measure to be substituted by another [exile].’

From Unity to Uniformity

In the early 1930s the party was too preoccupied with purges within its ranks to even think of debating the human cost of collectivization. Better to be accused of genocide than be suspected of loyalty to Bukharin, Kamenev or Trotsky. From spring 1930 to autumn 1932 the party could see where Stalin’s policies, which they had endorsed, were leading. Many feared the consequences of collectivization and the impossibly ambitious industrial projects, and believed that strikes and uprisings could encourage the USSR’s neighbours to invade. Yet what alternative was there to Stalin? Bukharin, Zinoviev and Kamenev had by recanting their deviations lost all credibility and had nothing in common but their demand for ‘democracy’ within the party. New men were known only to one region of the country or within one field of industry, the bureaucracy or the party.

Undoubtedly, there was discontent, dismay and even moral turmoil among party members, especially the middle and older generations who owed little to Stalin. But they failed to act. They had no leaders with any leverage on power; they had no clear idea of how to industrialize the economy without violence against the peasantry. Above all, they had no political principles, no civic beliefs and, consequently, little civic courage. Most were just sick of the bloodshed and feared for their own lives at the hands of the Politbiuro and OGPU.

Doubters knew that Stalin had to be voted out if policies were to change. They also knew that such a vote, if it failed, would be suicidal, and no more than a quarter of the members of the Central Committee, which Stalin had packed with his cronies, would vote against him. The only other recourse – which had been suggested to, and rejected by, Trotsky a decade earlier – was armed force. Some Red Army commanders like Bliukher deplored Stalin’s policies but others such as Marshal Tukhachevsky had no inhibitions about slaughtering peasants, and without Trotsky there was no political figure the army respected enough to
follow in revolt. In any case, senior officers were so closely shadowed by party commissars and OGPU agents that any conspiracy would almost certainly be nipped in the bud. OGPU, citing denunciations from teachers at the military academy, warned Stalin that the army had ‘rightist’ sympathizers at its highest levels – including Tukhachevsky – who might try to arrest Stalin and seize power. On io September 1930 Menzhinsky, who thrived on exciting his leader’s suspicions, advised Stalin, then resting in the Caucasus, to get his blow in first:

It is risky to arrest the members of this grouping one by one. There can be two ways out: either immediately arrest the most active participants of the group, or wait for you to arrive, and meantime just use surveillance, so as not to be caught unprepared. I consider it necessary to note that at the moment all rebel groups get ready very quickly and the second solution carries a certain risk.
⁴¹

Stalin, for once, was sceptical; he consulted nobody except Molotov, and wrote only to Orjonikidze after musing over Menzhinsky’s warning for a fortnight: ‘Tukhachevsky, it appears, has been in thrall to anti-Soviet elements among the right… Is that possible? Apparently the right are ready to have even a military dictatorship in order to get rid of the Central Committee… This business can’t be dealt with the usual way (immediate arrest, etc.). We have to think it over very carefully…’
⁴²
In the chaos of collectivization Stalin needed the military to back up OGPU and dared not let his suspicions carry him away. Stalin and the military did nothing except grumble and speculate about each other.

Between 1930 and 1932 there were two serious explorations of how to overthrow Stalin. Both were quickly detected and crushed, and Stalin by all accounts was not much shaken. The first centred around Sergei Syrtsov and Beso Lominadze, neither rightists or leftists. The serious dissident was Syrtsov, an economist and candidate Politbiuro member, party secretary in Siberia and possessor of impeccable Stalinist credentials: in the civil war he had slaughtered Cossacks, and in 1928 facilitated Stalin’s grain requisitioning expedition to Siberia. Lominadze was a handsome young Georgian and a friend of Sergo Orjonikidze. In 1924 Lominadze had been removed from the Georgian government for
nationalism, in other words leniency towards anti-communists. Stalin, lenient in turn, found him work in the International Youth Movement, and in 1930 let him go back to the Caucasus.

Syrtsov had disliked Stalin’s ‘great turnabout’. From autumn 1930 he protested at OGPU’s proposals to use short-term prisoners as slave construction workers. He criticized the bad quality of industrial output, the waste of resources, the falsification of statistics, the bureaucracy – the latter a keyword for Trotskyist critics of Stalinism. Syrtsov was backed by other economists, particularly in Siberia. Beso Lominadze in the Caucasus, where agriculture was largely small-scale sheep-herding and fruit-growing, went further. His ‘Address from the Transcaucasian Party Committee’ called collectivization ‘pillage’ and blamed Stalin personally.