Cold war in the rear-view mirror: Boris Pasternak, Isaiah Berlin and the publication of Dr Zhivago 

In Russia this month, events are being held to mark the 130th anniversary of Boris Pasternak’s birth. He is far from the only celebrated Russian author to have been treated by the country’s authorities like a criminal while alive and an icon in death. History has a taste for irony; Russian history, perhaps, more than most. 

In my teenage years, I read Dr Zhivago. It had been smuggled out of the Soviet Union, and published first in Italy in 1957. To a foreigner, the novel — a romance set against a background of war and revolution —appeared essentially apolitical. In the author’s homeland, it was thoroughly traduced. Novy Mir said the spirit of the book showed a “nonacceptance of the socialist revolution”. Meanwhile a pack of official writers denounced Pasternak, one of Russia’s most admired poets of the twentieth century, as a “traitor”, “bourgeois reactionary”, “malevolent Philistine’”and “low-grade hack”. 

When, on October 23, 1958, Pasternak received the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was forced to renounce it. Six days later, Vladimir Semichastny, the Komsomol boss, attacked him before an audience of 14,000 people attending the Central Committee plenum of the Communist Party: “If you compare Pasternak to a pig,” he said, “a pig would not do what he did, because a pig never shits where it eats.’’ Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, applauded prominently. It later emerged that he was the probable author of Semichastny’s insults: apparently, he had called the Komsomol boss the previous evening and dictated the line about the pig, among others. The pressure on Pasternak at the time was so intense that, according to his son, Yevgenii, it fatally weakened his fragile health. He died a year and a half later, in 1960.

Boris Pasternak in 1933. (PA Images)

For those brought up in the West, particularly if they were born after 1980, it is hard to grasp the terrifying sense of isolation and vulnerability felt by those who did not submit to the Party line in a one-party state on the model of the Soviet Union. If you asserted a personal view that did not conform to that of the authorities, you were at risk of isolation, harassment, arrest and, under Stalin, death. “The Kremlin mountaineer”, in the phrase of the poet, Osip Mandelstam, had died only four years before Doctor Zhivago found its way into foreign hands. Decades of terror still pervaded the minds of Soviet citizens, and no one knew whether the denunciations and disappearances might soon start up again. The safe assumption, after decades of terror, was that they would, the only question being when the wheel would turn. After all, the publication of Pasternak’s book in the West was still considered a crime. Not too long before, authors had been put to death for it (including Boris Pilnyak, Pasternak’s friend and neighbour in the artists’ community of Peredelkino, just outside Moscow).

Writing over half a century later in the London Review of Books in September, 2014, Frances Stonor Saunders told the story of how the manuscript of Pasternak’s novel was smuggled out and published in the West with, initially at least, the author’s consent and cooperation. For Stonor Saunders, the episode offered an example of nefarious western activities during the Cold War. In her essay — The Writer and the Valet — she presented the involvement of Isaiah Berlin (the “valet” of the title) as in some way analogous to Soviet persecution of authors like Pasternak. Yet her account of what happened, rather than being a credible version of events, is an indicative document of the western post-Cold War — a resonant example of how some of the deceptions, equivocations and lies of the Cold War survived its demise, to stalk the world that followed like the undead in a Dracula movie. 

Frances Stonor Saunders (Twitter)

Nominally, the essay was a review of two recent books about the “Zhivago Affair”. More accurately, it was an undisguised attack on Berlin, whom she introduced at the moment of his meeting with Pasternak on 18 August, 1956 as “…bespectacled and pudgy, his indoor skin betraying the rigours of the Senior Common Room and the international diplomatic circuit.”’ The Oxford professor was in this way summarily convicted of being an unappealing sissy with an “indoor skin”, culpably familiar with the comforts of university life and the haunts of the well-connected. In Stonor Saunders’ view, it seemed, these were irreparable defects, although what else one would have expected of a political philosopher and Oxford don was not quite clear. By contrast, Pasternak was presented, in Stonor Saunders’ gushy prose, as an alluring figure: “Sinewy and tanned from long walks and tending his orchard, at 66 he was still an intensely physical presence. This was the woodsman-poet who was waiting by the garden gate to greet his friend Isaiah Berlin…”

When Stonor Saunders was challenged on her “indoor skin” remark by Henry Hardy, the editor of Berlin’s essays, lectures and correspondence (“this is pure novelistic invention, with no place in a serious article”), she responded in a tone of injured innocence: 

“I accept that I entered this comment as an opinion, but I didn’t come to it while lolling on a chaise-longue with nothing better to do, but after looking at photographs of Berlin and from extensive reading of biographical and autobiographical material which nurtured the impression in me that he was an indoor type who preferred talking to walking (in contrast to Pasternak, the “woodsman poet”). And is it really novelistic to suggest that his familiar beat was the Senior Common Room and the diplomatic circuit?”

Her defence was as strangely obtuse as her initial remark. She’d concluded that Berlin wasn’t an outdoors type, she wrote, by “looking at photographs” and “reading biographical… material”. Rigorous research indeed, but she could easily have saved herself the trouble: the question wasn’t whether Berlin was an athletic paragon — obviously he wasn’t — but why anyone should care about the matter one way or the other. Just as Pasternak isn’t remembered for taking walks in the forest and tending his orchard, but for his poetry and prose, so Berlin is noted for his books and essays which, in the mid-twentieth century, defined and defended the liberal tradition in the face of the Marxist challenge. 

Stonor Saunders’ faux naïf tone belied the principal intention of her essay, which was to bring Berlin into disrepute in order to vindicate the broad Left’s view of the Cold War as, to quote her own words, a “feint, counterfeint round of pugilism”, or again, “a protracted argument about washing machines…” Whether she succeeded or not, no halfway sentient reader could doubt what she was driving at.

After her introductory observations, Stonor Saunders’ review turned to Berlin’s work, offering a heavy-handed satire of his famous autobiographical essay, Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956:

“The Foreigner Visiting Pasternak at His Dacha” is its own subgenre of intellectual history. Its principal theme is the excitement of discovering a lost generation who, like “the victims of shipwreck on a desert island”, have been “cut off for decades from civilisation” (Berlin). The foreigner, moved by his role as witness to an impossible reality, records every detail of the encounter: the welcome (Pasternak’s handshake is “firm”, his smile “exuberant”); the walk (oh, that “cool” pine forest, and look, some dusty peasants); the conversation, with Pasternak holding forth “as if Goethe and Shakespeare were his contemporaries”; the meal, at which his wife, “dark, plump and inconspicuous” (and often unnamed), makes a sour appearance; the arrival of other members of the Peredelkino colony, the dead undead; the toasts, invoking spiritual companions – Tolstoy, Chekhov, Scriabin, Rachmaninov . . .”

The curious point about this passage was that, as far as the reader knew, there was no “subgenre of intellectual history” here. Stonor Saunders mentioned only Berlin’s essay, which could hardly have been called a “subgenre” in itself. More mystifyingly still, when you referred to Berlin’s memoir of his meetings with Pasternak at his dacha and elsewhere, Stonor Saunders’ account of them seemed to be extremely inaccurate. In Berlin’s essay, there is no handshake, “firm” or otherwise; no smile, “exuberant” or restrained; no walk, no pine forest, no peasants (whether dusty or turned out in their Sunday best); Berlin does describe Pasternak’s conversation in which he mentions a good many authors, including Goethe and Shakespeare, but not as if they were his contemporaries; his wife is neither sour nor, alternatively, “dark, plump and inconspicuous”; no other members of the Peredelkino colony arrive, although Berlin mentions some encounters on the fringes of his meetings with Pasternak; finally, there are no toasts to spiritual companions — not Tolstoy, Chekhov nor any other Russian literary titans.

The Stonor Saunders version appeared to be pure invention — and clumsy, mirthless invention at that. In his reminiscences, Berlin describes two meetings with Pasternak at the writers’ colony of Peredelkino, one in 1945, the other in 1956. He also refers to additional conversations between the two which took place in Moscow. This is how he introduces the 1945 meeting:

“It was a warm, sunlit afternoon in early autumn. Pasternak, his wife and his son Leonid were seated round a rough wooden table in the tiny garden at the back of the dacha. The poet greeted us warmly…”  

That is all. There is nothing that corresponds to Stonor Saunders’ strained lampoon. The same applies to the 1956 meeting: 

“By this time we had arrived at Pasternak’s house. He was waiting for me by the gate, embraced me warmly and said that after eleven years during which we had not met, much had happened, most of it very evil.”

Pasternask’s home, Moscow (Shutterstock)

Where, then, was the insinuating farrago that Stonor Saunders offered in her essay? It appeared to be a product of her active imagination. However, when challenged on this point in the letters pages of the London Review of Books, she performed a surprising manoeuvre. Although her essay focused its censure on Berlin, and did not refer to other contributors to this putative “sub-genre”, she responded:

“I intended it to be clear that “The Foreigner Visiting Pasternak at His Dacha”, as a “subgenre of intellectual history”, was invented by Berlin, but enlarged by many others. For this reason, I attributed the first quote about “the victims of a shipwreck” to Berlin, but not the quotes that followed. They are taken from, inter alia, Olga Carlisle, Miriam Berlin, Gerd Ruge, Sergio d’Angelo.”

As she did not cite these other authors, and gave no references to their accounts, she left the reader with the firm impression that the theatre of condescension, pomposity and error conjured up by her leaden parody was drawn entirely from Berlin. After all, if you wish to something to be clear, the normal procedure is to mention it. 

*

The story of the publication of Doctor Zhivago in the West is a complicated one, and Isaiah Berlin was a significant player in it. As recounted in Meetings with Russian Writers, as soon as Berlin arrived at Peredelkino on 18 August, 1956, Pasternak gave him the typescript of Doctor Zhivago, which he had recently completed:

“He took me to his study. There he thrust a thick envelope into my hands: “My book,” he said, “it is all there. It is my last word. Please read it.” I began to read Doctor Zhivago immediately on leaving him, and finished it on the following day. Unlike some of its readers in both the Soviet Union and the West, I thought it a work of genius…”

Professor Sir Isaiah Berlin, 1966 (PA Images)

Almost forty years later, Berlin was asked by the Sunday Times to select a book for their On the Shelf column. He chose Pasternak’s novel and amplified the account given in Meetings with Russian Writers of his first reading of the book. This began on the evening of his return from Peredelkino to the British Embassy in Moscow where he was staying at the time: 

“A book that made a most profound impression upon me, and the memory of which still does, is Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak….I read it in bed throughout the night and finished it late in the morning, and was deeply moved — as I had not been, I think, by any book before or since, except perhaps by War and Peace (which took me more than one night to read)… What made the deepest impression upon me, and has never ceased to do so, was the description of the hero and heroine, surrounded by howling wolves in their snow-swept Siberian cottage — a description that is virtually unparalleled.”

In his brief article, Berlin analysed the qualities of the novel he particularly admired, above all its evocation of “passionate, overwhelming, all-absorbing, all-transforming mutual love, the world forgotten, vanished…” He concluded his piece: 

“I was terribly shaken… This experience will live with me to the end of my days. The novel is a description of a total experience, not parts or aspects: of what other twentieth-century work of the imagination could this be said?” 

Stonor Saunders’ rendition of Berlin’s response to the novel is confined to a single, snide comment: 

“And so Isaiah wept by the bank of the Moskva River. (Forgive the over-reach, but the river did run in front of the embassy, and what we’re talking about here is not so much Doctor Zhivago, as the novel of the novel.)“

The implication seems to be that Berlin’s reaction to the book was in some way false, excessive or hypocritical. Or perhaps that he was moved for political reasons — because the novel echoed his own attitude towards the Soviet Union — rather than by its literary qualities. It is hard to say because, like much of Stonor Saunders’ invective, her thought is muddy and unclear. Whatever her agenda,  the coarseness of her remark is striking. The mock-serious plea for forgiveness, following the jeering  — “And so Isaiah wept…” — is, perhaps, a recognition that she is far beyond the bounds of literary decency. As an antidote, however, it’s not very effective. 

During his second visit to Pasternak on the same trip, Berlin learned that the poet had already given the typescript of Zhivago to an Italian communist in Moscow “who… acted as an agent for the communist Milanese publisher Feltrinelli”. Further, the author had assigned world rights to Feltrinelli: “He wished his work to travel over the entire world, to ‘lay waste with fire’ (he quoted from Pushkin’s famous poem The Prophet) ‘the hearts of men’.”

It was on that same day that Pasternak’s wife begged Berlin to “dissuade Pasternak from getting Doctor Zhivago published abroad without official permission”. When the visiting philosopher tried to do so, Pasternak was furious:

“He had spoken to his sons; they were prepared to suffer; I was not to mention the matter again — I had read the book, I surely realised what it, above all its dissemination, meant to him. I was shamed into silence.”

Stonor Saunders noted: “Zinaida’s suffering is not mentioned”. This remark echoed a recurrent theme in her essay, that in writing about these events, Berlin failed to include the women of the story — presumably, it is implied, because he was sexist and self-absorbed. In this vein, Stonor Saunders’ account of what happened on the first day contained a suggestive mistake. She wrote: 

“His published account of his visit of 18 August 1956 is curiously short on colour, and there is no mention of his bride, Aline, who accompanied him, or of Pasternak’s wife, Zinaida.”

Aline, however, did not accompany Berlin on his visit to Pasternak on 18 August, 1956. In his letter to the London Review of Books, Hardy quotes from Berlin’s letter to his mother written the previous day. It makes the position clear: 

“Aline has gone to see Vladimir & Suzdal while I remained because I can see a poet tomorrow & I prefer people to architecture.”

Stonor Saunders had relied on Berlin’s biographer, Michael Ignatieff, who was mistaken in his account. In her response to Hardy, she was obliged to admit her error:

“I searched through my notes and found that I mistakenly took Berlin’s authorised biographer, Michael Ignatieff, as a reliable source for Aline’s whereabouts on the 18 August visit to Peredelkino. No doubt Ignatieff will correct this in any further reprints of his book.”

Her main accusation against Berlin, however, was that he was “energetically meddlesome in the Doctor Zhivago business from the moment he returned from his Moscow honeymoon” and, by implication, that he shared a large responsibility for what she calls the “shitstorm” Pasternak endured in the Soviet Union once his novel came out in the West. She portrays Berlin as a gossipy busybody, interfering unasked while scattering clues like confetti in order to ensure he remained at the centre of events. She may be right in her suggestion that Berlin liked an intrigue and wished to be thought of as in the know — I do not have a view of any venial human faults he may have possessed — but her livid suspicion of his every action is hardly justified by the evidence she cites. 

For example, she deprecates his tendency — when approached by publishers upon his return from Moscow — of dropping hints of being in the know without offering full disclosure, asking: “…why such subterfuge, and why the trim denial of having read the novel?” Yet she herself, in the following paragraph, gives a plausible answer to her own questions: “Publishers can rarely be relied on for their discretion.” Given the intrigues surrounding the manuscript, its sensitivity in the Soviet Union, the fragility of Pasternak’s own position, the literary and political impact that would certainly attend its publication in the frigid yet heated atmosphere of the Cold War, Berlin’s desire to keep a firm hold of potentially controversial information would seem to be perfectly rational. Naturally, Stonor Saunders did not accept this, conflicting as it did with her desire to impute the worst of motives to Berlin at every twist and turn of the story.

Pasternak’s bookcase, Moscow (Shutterstock)

Where she did seize on a piece of apparently damning evidence against Berlin, she was given to embellishment and error. In her essay, she wrote:

“In all of these thousands of pages devoted to the Zhivago affair, Berlin’s testimony is reprised without question. He is treated as an impeccable witness, the humble valet to Pasternak’s will, into whose hands fell one of the greatest books of the century as if by accident. Yet an exchange of letters in Berlin’s papers, to date overlooked, suggests a rather different scenario.”

She then introduced Martin Malia — “a Harvard academic on assignment in Russia for the Library of Congress” — inserting in parenthesis: 

“(He may have been doing more than that. In 1967 he was accused by the Russian government of working for the CIA and told to leave the country.)”

Hardly “Russian” in 1967 — it was the Soviet government, of course. And if she believed that Soviet accusations against foreign nationals provided credible evidence of the visitors’ true activities and intentions, she had a defective understanding of the Soviet Union: the CIA connection was the most stale, inherently suspect of all possible rationales for Soviet expulsions. It said nothing about what given visitors were actually doing on their circumscribed travels in the USSR. While it’s possible that Malia was “working for the CIA”, the Soviet assertion that he was tells us nothing about the facts of the matter. Stonor Saunders remarks that Malia was “a Harvard academic”, but that is a rather bland and uninformative label. For anyone trying to make sense of her account, it is useful to know that, later on, he was to become an outstanding, influential historian of Russia and the Soviet Union. Among other books , his Russia Under Western Eyes is a searching, deeply-informed analysis of Russia’s troubled journey “from the bronze horseman to the Lenin mausoleum” (in the words of its subtitle). He was far from being a mere US intelligence stooge.

Stonor Saunders’ mention of Malia stems from a letter he wrote to Berlin in April, 1956, reporting on two separate meetings he had with Pasternak at Peredelkino. According to her essay, Pasternak confided to Malia that he had already sent out the first five parts of Doctor Zhivago “via a friend at the New Zealand Embassy”, and was planning to give the later parts “to some French students now at the University of Moscow for shipment out through the pouch”. She comments: 

“Berlin’s reply is not in the file, but a later letter from Malia contains its echo: Berlin wanted more exact details, in particular to know how he might make contact with the French students.”

She seems to have been wrong on this point too: Berlin almost certainly had no intention of contacting the French students. In a letter posted online by Paolo Mancosu, a Berkeley philosophy professor who is also the author of Inside the Zhivago Storm: The Editorial Adventures of Pasternak’s Masterpiece (which Stonor Saunders calls in her LRB essay “this scholarly, scrupulously even-handed work”), a more persuasive interpretation of the “lost letter” and Berlin’s intentions emerges:

“…when one reads the letter from Malia it becomes obvious that what Berlin is inquiring about is not the French students … but rather how to make contact with Soviet students. Malia writes: “Also my way of making contact with students would not have been of any help to you since it was largely through several normaliens at the University of Moscow, who had left by the time you wrote. The other contacts were all chance contacts for which there is no formula”. This reply would make no sense if Berlin had enquired about the French students. It is obvious that Berlin was interested in making contact with Soviet students, rather than with the French students, and that is quite a legitimate wish given that he was planning to obtain first-hand reports from his visit on life in the USSR.”

Apart from implying that Berlin’s involvement in the “Zhivago affair” was self-serving and in some way unscrupulous (although she never exactly specifies in what way), Stonor Saunders also targeted her familiar foes, namely, the agencies which managed the western response to Soviet propaganda during the cold war, as described in her book, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (published by Granta Books in 1999). In the case of Doctor Zhivago, the initiative for its publication in the West came from Pasternak himself: everyone agrees that Pasternak was eager for his novel to be published abroad, and aware of the risks (given the history he had lived through in the Soviet Union, how could he have failed to be?). On the first day of Berlin’s visit to Peredelkino in August, 1956, the author gave his visitor the typescript of Doctor Zhivago, declaring resonantly: “At least… I can say, like Heine, ‘I may not deserve to be remembered as a poet, but surely as a soldier in the battle for human freedom.”’

He is, of course, still remembered for both — his writings and his courage. However, the consequences of his act of bravery (or his desire for martyrdom, as some have suggested) shook him deeply. The reaction of the Soviet authorities was one of unqualified fury. In Stonor Saunders’ words: “Pasternak was vilified as a traitor, denigrated in a massive official campaign as a ‘literary weed’, a ‘superfluous man’, a ‘mangy sheep’, a ‘pig’ who ‘has soiled the place where he has eaten’.”On 29 October, Pasternak declined the Nobel Prize:

“I couldn’t recognise my father when I saw him that evening,” his son Evgeny recalled. “Pale, lifeless face, tired painful eyes, and only speaking about the same thing: ‘Now it all doesn’t matter, I declined the Prize.’” Two days later, he was hounded out of the Union of Soviet Writers, whose members petitioned the Politburo to strip him of his Soviet citizenship and exile him to “his capitalist paradise”.

Although some have suggested the stresses of those days may have hastened the writer’s death 18 months later, Stonor Saunders’ main concern was with apportioning blame. In her telling of it, the predictable, if devastating, effects of Pasternak’s courageous gesture were mainly the responsibility of western intermediaries, Berlin prominent among them, along with her familiar list of malignant agencies: the CIA, MI6 “and their little helpers”, as she puts it. (That is, the institutions she had stigmatised in Who Paid the Piper? such as the Foreign Office, the BBC External Services, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Voice of America and so on). 

A section of her essay is devoted to the CIA’s involvement in arranging the publication of a Russian text of the novel. Repeating a story that has long accompanied the Zhivago drama, she states that the novel’s publication was necessary to ensure its eligibility for the Nobel Prize:

“Since the prize can’t be awarded for a work not published in its original language, the CIA prints an edition through a cut-out, or front, in Holland.”

Yet here again, she seems to have been wrong. Hardy maintains there was no such rule:

“The claim that publication in the original language is a precondition of Nobel nomination has no foundation in fact, as Paolo Mancosu points out in Inside the Zhivago Storm: The Editorial Adventures of Pasternak’s Masterpiece – one of the books FSS is reviewing. And the CIA documents (available online) never refer to any such requirement.”

Caught in a probable error and outnumbered, Stonor Saunders’ evades the point:

“There may have been no official, written requirement that the prize only be given to a work or works published in the mother tongue, but until the award to Pasternak, there was no exception to this formula.”

Pasternak’s jeopardy may have been marginally increased by the Agency’s machinations, but there’s no evidence the effect was significant. In essence, what placed Pasternak in jeopardy was the publication of Doctor Zhivago abroad, which he himself had made possible by conveying the typescript to Feltrinelli. Whether the novel was published in Russian or any other language was beside the point: in the conditions of the 1950s, the foreign publication of Zhivago in any language was bound to draw worldwide attention, to lead to multiple translations and to infuriate the Soviet leadership. 

In an article written just over half a century after the novel’s publication, Anna Pasternak Slater — Pasternak’s niece, and also a translator, literary scholar and fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford — explained the inevitable furore that surrounded the appearance of the novel in the West:

“Pasternak was the first writer of the Soviet regime who dared convey the truth about Russia’s recent history. In the space of 40 years the Russians of his generation suffered two world wars; three revolutions; civil war and famines; the disasters of collectivisation …; the purges of the intelligentsia, the military, the Soviet political elite and the kulaks. Starvation, cannibalism, murder, reprisals, legitimised slaughter – nothing is glossed over in the novel’s unflinching particularity. It ends with Khrushchev’s Thaw, tentatively celebrating “a new freedom of spirit” embodied in the book Zhivago wrote before his death.”

Pasternak onRussian stamp 2015 (Shutterstock)

For forty years, the Soviet regime had done all it could to suppress the truth. It hadn’t been completely successful — that was impossible — but it had preserved a grey space around the country which allowed those who wished to spread confusion about what was happening within its borders to do so. Official pronouncements were couched uniformly in the impenetrable, categorical jargon of Marxism-Leninism, creating, as was intended, varying states of uncertainty among onlookers as to what exactly had happened and was happening over there. Pasternak meant the publication of Doctor Zhivago to help let in the light. It did.

*

One problem with Stonor Saunders’ account was that, in her haste to diminish and inculpate Berlin, she failed to acknowledge that he was in a virtually unique position at the time of his journeys to the Soviet Union. In 1945, after almost twenty years of Stalin’s sway and the recent conclusion of the “Great Patriotic War”, travel to the Soviet Union without official credentials was nigh on impossible. Berlin was a native Russian-speaker who had moved to England when he was eleven, a fellow of All Souls at the age of 23 and, at the end of the war, a translator on secondment to the British Embassy in Moscow. Due to his background, attainments and position, he was able to meet two extraordinary witnesses to the Soviet century — Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova — and to speak with them on equal linguistic and intellectual terms. 

Saunders mocks Berlin’s pretensions – “the excitement of discovering a lost generation who, like “the victims of shipwreck on a desert island”, have been “cut off for decades from civilisation”’ (these, at least, are genuine quotations from Berlin). Yet in his remarkable essay Meetings with Russian Writers Berlin expresses the exact significance of his meetings with these two besieged, largely silenced, fortuitous survivors of Stalin’s massacre of the best and bravest of Russia’s intelligentsia. Is it deniable that Akhmatova and Pasternak, trapped like the rest of the Soviet population in Stalin’s prison house of nations, were “cut off for decades from civilisation”? With her inverted-comma, student-journalism sarcasm, Stonor Saunders implied that this was a mere literary conceit. It was far from it. In 1921, Akhmatova’s first husband, Nikolai Gumilev, had been shot on trumped up charges of participating in an alleged monarchist anti-Bolshevik conspiracy. Suspicion also fell on Akhmatova herself, which led to her vilification and isolation as well as the almost complete proscription of her work. In 1925, a specific Central Committee directive was issued banning her work from publication. It was briefly rescinded in 1940 and then re-imposed. 

During Stalin’s purges, many of her friends and fellow-poets were killed or committed suicide. Her son, Lev Gumilev, was used as a hostage — constantly harassed, arrested a number of times and from 1938, when he was 26, held in labour camps for twenty years with only brief periods of remission. Nadezhda Mandelstam’s extraordinary memoirs, published in English as Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, (Nadezhda, by the by, means “hope, in  Russian) were much concerned with Akhmatova who was a close friend of Nadezhda and her husband, the poet, Osip Mandelstam. Anyone who has read these volumes will understand the full meaning of Berlin’s words “cut off for decades from civilisation”. Apparently this did not include Stonor Saunders.  Her derision was as shallow as it was repellent. 

For Akhmatova, Berlin was the “Guest from the Future”, which was how she referred to him in one of her best-known works – Poem without a Hero. Decades later, a few months before his death, in April, 1997, Berlin was interviewed by Anatoly Naiman, a Russian friend who had also known Akhmatova: “She made me up,” Berlin recalled, “I wasn’t the person she saw in me… She constructed me in some way.” For his part, the philosopher said that his meeting with Akhmatova was “one of the most moving experiences of my life… it affected me profoundly and permanently changed my outlook”. In Hermione Lee’s words, “Berlin’s dedication to liberalism, his commitment to individuals as the agents of history, his profound horror of tyranny and coercion, were fuelled by his meeting with Akhmatova.”

Nathan Altman’s Portrait of Anna Akhmatova (1914) Akhmatova Museum (Peter Kovalev/TASS)

Stonor Saunders’ resolute reluctance to recognise the quality, interest and essential integrity of Berlin’s essay seemed, at first glance, to be a perplexing fact. For anyone with even a passing interest in Russian culture, Berlin’s narratives of his encounters with writers are of intense interest both as personal memoir and historical record. Indeed, part of the puzzlement provoked by Stonor Saunders’ essay was that the author, while touching on Russian literature and history, appeared to care little for either. Nothing she wrote suggested she had read Pasternak or Akhmatova with sympathy, understanding or insight. She was equally impervious to the qualities of Berlin’s essay although, since its first appearance in Personal Impressions in 1980, it has been widely recognised as an absorbing and illuminating portrait of two of the most important literary figures of the Russian twentieth century. 

Yet the mystery at the heart of Stonor Saunders’ vituperative myopia isn’t too hard to unravel. Sometimes she reveals rather more than she would perhaps have wished of the depth of her desire to discredit Berlin and his like, as well as her perverse view of the twentieth century history and the Soviet Union itself. In seeking to clarify Berlin’s motives, she writes:

“Like many Russians forced to emigrate in the wake of the Revolution (whose excesses he had witnessed as a boy in Petrograd), he couldn’t accept that Pushkin was gone and the light coming from Tolstoy’s country estate extinguished. In the USSR, there was no place for such metaphysical antiquities, or for their heirs who, like Nabokov’s “gaunt ladies with lorgnettes”, sighed for a world that had been swept away. St Paul’s, Oxford and the Foreign Office couldn’t dispel in Berlin the psychological vulnerability of the diaspora, of “Russia Abroad”, that strange in-between place where, as Semyon Frank said, one had to “live and breathe in a vacuum”.”

Coming upon this paragraph, I felt a certain astonishment allied to a deep sense of discovery. In Stonor Saunders’ view, limited intellects like Berlin and Nabokov viewed the Soviet Union with hostility for purely selfish and nostalgic reasons. They “sighed for a world that had been swept away”. 

Clearly, there could be no other reason for their antagonism towards the Soviet state. Not decades of unprecedented violence by the state against the people, not the killing of tens of millions of entirely innocent souls, not the suppression and destruction of precious cultural and religious values inherited from the past, not the imposition by force of a single, monomaniacal ideology and the exclusion of any hint that alternative viewpoints might exist, let alone be worthy of respectful consideration. No, they merely sighed for “metaphysical antiquities”. 

On my first reading of Stonor Saunders’ essay, I read that paragraph a number of times, somehow awed by the narrowness of its vision, the nakedness of its prejudice, the sheer dimension of its cluelessness and moral imbecility. Clearly, it would be futile to expect from such a mind a careful attention to facts, a reasonable judgement of evidence or a decent respect for those who don’t share her view of the world. Here we were deep in the kingdom of rant.

Her essay was, nonetheless, an important signal. It was the ghost of Cold War controversies surviving into the present, a sign of how that unsettled legacy remains a spectral presence in many of our debates. Stonor Saunders had dedicated her career to showing that what she calls, in her essay, the Kulturkampf mounted by the western powers against the USSR during the Cold War was a reprehensible conspiracy which brought disgrace on the governments who were responsible for it and the individuals who took part in it. The question of whether there was a justification for western attempts to answer Soviet lies and challenge Soviet oppression holds no interest for her, let alone the larger, more complex issue of how far western efforts at “containment” of the Soviet Union helped to shape the course of the Cold War and ultimately bring about the collapse of the Soviet system. 

Instead, she was entirely happy to live in the autistic world of the post-1989 broad Left, where the Cold War is seen as “a great engine of false realities…”  In this popular view, there was nothing much at stake and, whether there was or not, the way the West went about defending its position was just as bad as anything the Soviets got up to. Certainly, a good deal of what the West did was indefensible – for instance, US interference in what was then known as the “Third World” including the suborning of insurrection in sundry times and places in the interest of whichever strong man they happened to favour at the time. The list of atrocities the western powers committed, aided and abetted during the Cold War is long, but we still need a more searching and honest view of the history than Stonor Saunders offers. To accept her view, you have to forget half of what happened and maintain yourself in a state of one-eyed ignorance about the rest. Amnesia and indifference are comfortable conditions, after all, but they’re also poisonous concoctions and, as we have discovered, hard to eliminate once they have taken hold.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout the pandemic. So please, make a donation.