The slaughter of the innocents: writers under Stalin

The spiritual disposition of a
poet inclines to catastrophe.
—Osip Mandelstam

In Russia, during the decade before the First World War, an outstanding concentration of creative genius coincided with the final stages of political collapse. Five Russian authors, who were born in the 1890s and began so brilliantly before the 1917 Revolution, were eventually forced to practice the new genre of silence. Not only did they sometimes suffer from writers’ block, they were also forbidden to write. These authors, persecuted and ultimately annihilated under Stalin’s despotic regime, developed a tremendous capacity for suffering. Between 1925 and 1941 Sergei Yesenin hanged himself, Vladimir Mayakovsky shot himself, Osip Mandelstam died in a prison camp, Isaak Babel was executed and Marina Tsvetayeva also hanged herself.

Boris Pasternak, a rare survivor, described Stalin as “the most terrifying person that he had ever set eyes on — a crab-like disproportionately broad dwarf with a yellow, pock-marked face and a bristling moustache.” In his biography of Stalin, Simon Sebag Montefiore notes a strange paradox: “Literature mattered greatly to Stalin. He may have demanded ‘engineers of the human soul’ but he was himself far from the oafish philistine which his manners would suggest. He not only admired and appreciated great literature, he discerned the difference between hackery and genius.” Montefiore does not mention that Stalin not only recognised but also feared the power of great literature. He thought that influential and dangerous authors had to be brutally suppressed and vaporised. Whenever his torturers in the Lubyanka failed to extract immediate confessions, Stalin would ask, “Is this a hotel or a prison?”

Stalin extinguished what remained of contemporary Russian literature by declaring that nothing could be printed that did not promote the Party line. He decreed, on threat of death, that writers must advocate social awareness instead of bourgeois aestheticism and decadence. Political hacks had to produce officially sanctioned clichés — full speed ahead, ready to sacrifice our lives, freedom-loving peoples, in the name of mankind and all progressive humanity — in a language intelligible to the masses. Great authors under Stalin, though not yet arrested, had to serve terms of internal life imprisonment, a kind of solitary confinement of the self. There was a tremendous contrast, as Yesenin remarked, between “those who are meaner and smaller in mind” and the poet-victims who have “stood, poor and naked, under the winds of fate.”

(Alamy)

Though the beautiful, courageous and superbly talented Anna Akhmatova (above) lived to the age of 76, her life was also tragic. Too eminent to be imprisoned, she was forced to suffer indirectly. Her son was sent to Siberia, her husband died in prison. As she observed, “The Russian earth loves, loves / Droplets of blood.” “Requiem”, her masterpiece, describes the Great Terror of the late 1930s and contrasts images of convulsive nature to immovable iron bars:

Mountains bow down to this grief,
Mighty rivers cease to flow,
But the prison gates hold firm.

Her elegy for her husband, Nikolay Gumilyov, dramatises the fear of arrest:

Terror, fingering things in the dark,
Leads the moonbeams to an axe.
Behind the wall there’s an ominous knock —
What’s there, a ghost, a thief, rats?

Sergei Yesenin, a self-taught, popular peasant poet, at first welcomed but soon became disillusioned with the October Revolution. In 1920 he wrote “A Hooligan’s Confession”, with a delightful simile that recalled and celebrated his peasant past:

And as he meets a cabby in the square,
Recalling the manure smells of his native fields,
He wants to carry every horse’s tail
Like the train of a wedding dress.

But he was soon officially condemned as “the father of hooliganism”. His poems, though still secretly hidden and read, were withdrawn from all libraries, and he became an Unperson.

Yesenin’s ill-fated marriage to the famous dancer Isadora Duncan broke up after a year, and his persecution mania intensified in 1925. A heavy drinker and frequent brawler, he suffered delirium tremens and terrifying hallucinations while confined in a psychiatric clinic. At last he wearily declared, “I am seeking my perdition. I am tired of it all.” His biographer Gordon McVay writes that “Yesenin’s determination to ‘depart’ was maniacal. He tried to cut a vein with a fragment of glass, to throw himself out of the window, to stab himself with a carving-knife, he lay under the wheels of a suburban train” — though it’s not clear how he recovered from that dangerous inclination.

In December 1925 Yesenin finally escaped from life. McVay explains that in a Leningrad hotel he took a rope from his suitcase, wrapped it twice around his neck, “kicked the night table from under his feet, and hung facing the ‘blue night, looking out onto St. Isaac’s Square.” A policeman gave more specific details: “I discovered hanging from a pipe of the central heating system a man in the following state: his neck was not held tight in a loop, but only on the right side of the neck, his face was turned towards the pipe, and the wrist of the right hand had caught hold of the pipe. The corpse was hanging just beneath the ceiling, and the feet were about 1½ metres from the floor.” His wrist on the pipe suggests that he tried to save himself at the last moment as he twisted his body and hung less than five feet from the ground.

(Alamy)

Vladimir Mayakovsky, the next victim (pictured above) wrote a moving elegy to Yesenin that emphasised the poet’s absence and the readers’ loss:

You have gone
as people say,
into another world.
Emptiness…
In the throat
there is a lump of grief…
The people,
the maker of language,
Has lost
Its bell-voiced
Scamp of an apprentice

Mayakovsky, more than other poets, encouraged the public to accept avant-garde art and cultural nonconformity. An enfant terrible and star performer, he shouted his poems in his public readings. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Bolshevik regime and eventually became its unofficial poet laureate.

Yet, like Yesenin, Mayakovsky had a deep-rooted urge to kill himself and suicide was a dominant theme in his writing. He predicted his tragic fate in several poems — “The Backbone Flute”: “More often I think: / it might be far better / to punctuate my end with a bullet”; “Clearance Sale”: “Years and years from now / in short, when I am no longer alive — / dead from hunger, or a pistol shot — / professors will study me / how, when, where I came from.” In “Man,” even his internal organs seek release in varied forms of death: “The heart longs for the bullet / and the throat hallucinates about a razor.”

Mayakovsky’s motives for suicide were, as always, complex. Once the glorified poet of the regime, he was denied permission to travel abroad and became disillusioned with communism while his work declined and his love life failed. His farewell poem, with its famous fourth and fifth lines, was surprisingly magnanimous and casual:

Blame no one for my death, and please don’t gossip…
As they say —
“the game is over”
love’s boat
has smashed against the reef of the everyday.
I’m quits with life.

In April 1930, just before the end, Mayakovsky quarrelled with his lover, the actress Nora Polonskaya. His biographer Bengt Jangfeldt writes that he insisted she leave with him immediately. She tried to placate him by replying, “she had to go to the rehearsal, then she would go home and tell her husband everything, and in the evening she would move in with Mayakovsky for good.” Angry that she refused to obey him and doubting her love, he dismissed her by stating, “So you intend to go to the rehearsal? And intend to meet your husband? Very well! In that case you can go right now, at once!”

After that apparently minor disagreement, she left the room, heard a shot, cried out and rushed back inside. Jangfeldt adds, “Mayakovsky was lying on his back on the floor with his head toward the door, a Mauser pistol beside him. ‘What have you done? What have you done?’ she screamed, but received no answer. Mayakovsky looked at her and tried to lift his head, he seemed to want to say something, but, Nora recalled, ‘his eyes were already dead.’ Then his head dropped.” He punished her by killing himself close to her, knowing she’d discover his blood-soaked body and feel guilty about his death.

Pasternak, still among the living, said “the dead Mayakovsky is more alive than the zombies who have survived him”. He composed an elegy, “Poet’s Death”, that confirmed Mayakovsky’s reputation and compared his work to a volcanic eruption:

Headlong you did repeatedly
Slice into the newborn legends’ ranks.
To foothills’ cravens of both sexes
Your shot was as the blast of Etna.

That volcano had recently erupted in November 1928 and destroyed a nearby town.

There was a tremendous turnout for Mayakovsky’s funeral. Jangfeldt records, “During the three days when he lay in state thousands of people filed past the coffin, which was protected by an honour guard… Out in the street mounted police tried to hold back the surging masses. People were hanging out of windows and trees and off lampposts, and the roofs of the houses were black with curious onlookers… About sixty thousand people followed the truck [carrying the coffin]. The police shot in the air so the coffin could be carried in through the door of the crematorium.”

(Alamy)

Osip Mandelstam (above) famously declared, as if prophesying his own death, “Only in Russia is poetry respected. It gets people killed. Where else is poetry so common a motive for murder?” Elaborating his account of the poet’s fate under Stalin, Mandelstam (like Yesenin) distinguished the talented victims from the safe mediocrities. He told his wife, Nadezhda, that the point of terror was “nothing less than the annihilation of everyone left in the land who retained a scrap of sanity.” Borrowing Tristia, the title of Ovid’s poems about his exile from Rome to the Black Sea coast, and echoing Mayakovsky’s lines “love’s boat / has smashed against the reef of the everyday”, Mandelstam despairingly wrote: “Those who have hearts must hear, Time, / How thy ship is going down.”

Knowing full well the life-threatening dangers, Mandelstam recklessly, even suicidally, composed and read aloud to an intimate group of friends what Alex De Jonge calls “the only known criticism of Stalin beyond graffiti scrawled on the walls of prison cells in the blood of condemned men.” Mandelstam boldly declared that Stalin is surrounded by fawning subhumans, proclaims savage laws and takes sadistic pleasure in executions:

His fingers are fat as grubs
And words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,
His cockroach whiskers leer
And his boot-tops gleam…
And every killing is a treat
For the broad-chested Ossetian.

Mandelstam compared him to people from a rude and primitive region hostile to Stalin’s native Georgia. At a time when listeners hearing that poem could be arrested and imprisoned if they did not denounce the author, one of Mandelstam’s friends betrayed him.

Pasternak, Stalin’s privileged author, intervened on behalf of Mandelstam, Stalin’s pathetic victim. Pasternak spoke to Nikolai Bukharin, a powerful member of the Politburo, who put Stalin on to the case. (Stalin personally signed the daily death warrants.) Stalin amazed Pasternak by phoning him, testing his loyalty and stating (according to Montefiore): “‘Mandelstam’s case is being reviewed. Everything will be all right. If I was a poet and my poet-friend found himself in trouble, I would do anything to help him.’ Pasternak characteristically tried to define his concept of friendship which Stalin interrupted: ‘But he’s a genius, isn’t he?’ ‘But that’s not the point.’ ‘What is the point then ?’ Pasternak, who was fascinated by Stalin, said he wanted to come for a talk. ‘About what?’ ‘About life and death.’ The baffled Stalin rang off.” He had no time or interest to engage in philosophical discussions. Pasternak’s evasion was judicious. Stalin, widely acclaimed as a genius, bore like the Turk no rival near the throne. It was, indeed, more dangerous to be a genius than a hack.

When Mandelstam’s three-year sentence expired in 1937, he was settled in a remote region near the Urals in central Russia. The local press, following orders, denounced him as a Trotskyite and class enemy. On the edge of insanity, he suffered breathlessness, fainting fits and deep depression, and attempted suicide by throwing himself out of a hospital window. Impaled on the agonies of persecution, he lamented that he was already enduring a posthumous existence, a degrading death in life: “Though I’ve committed no new fault, everything has been taken from me: my right to live, to write, to receive medical care. I’ve been reduced to a dog, a cur. I’m a ghost, I don’t exist, I have only the right to die.” Stalin not only killed poets, he also made their lives so miserable that they wanted to kill themselves.

In May 1937 Mandelstam was arrested for the second time and sentenced to five years hard labor for counter-revolutionary activities. He was sent to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast and confined in a vast transit camp that dispatched doomed convicts to mine gold in the unbearable conditions of Kolyma. Bullied by the criminal prisoners, the intellectuals didn’t last long and vanished into the obscurity of the camps. Ragged and half-mad, afraid to eat the meagre camp food, Mandelstam may have starved to death, frozen to death, died of exhaustion or, most likely, perished during a typhoid epidemic. He suffered more than the other authors who at least had quick, if ghastly, deaths. In December 1938 he disappeared and died in Vladivostok.

In her brilliant memoir Hope Abandoned, his wife Nadezhda bitterly concludes: “I would have preferred anything to those accursed barracks at the far end of the earth with their suffocating stench, filth and typhoid, lice, hunger and degradation, terror, armed guards, watchtowers and barbed wire. After this, to lie in a mass burial pit with a tag on your leg meant deliverance and peace.” There was a painful contrast between the massive crowds at Mayakovsky’s Moscow funeral and the indifferent response in literary circles to the news of Mandelstam’s arrest and death in the remote fastness of Siberia.

Isaak Babel (seen above, in an NKVD photograph taken after his arrest), defining his own complex character, called himself “a man with spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart.” Attached to the Cossack Cavalry, who fought on horseback with swords and rifles in the campaign against Poland in 1920, he wrote battle reports, interrogated prisoners and tended the wounded. The Commander Semyon Budenny never forgave Babel for what he considered a brutal and distorted portrayal of the customs and traditions of that army in his superb stories Red Cavalry.

Babel achieves stunning literary effects by using surrealistic imagery in realistic stories: “Blue roads flowed past me like streams of milk spurting from many breasts,” or by startling similes: “the moon hung above the yard like a cheap earring”; “evening flew up to the sky like a flock of birds.” Some of his sentences, in English translation, have perfect poetic meter: “The frozen, basalt Venice stood transfixed.” Stephen Crane famously wrote that “the red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer”; Babel surpasses this with “the orange sun rolled down the sky like a lopped-off head.” His narcotic morning that “seeped out of us like chloroform seeping over a hospital table,” recalls T. S. Eliot’s “when the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table.”

In a letter of 1925 Babel lamented, “we are seething in a sickening professional environment devoid of art or creative freedom.” Babel, like Mandelstam, was not only Jewish, but had also criticised Stalin’s favourite military unit. Though already vulnerable, he had a dangerous affair with the wife of Genrikh Yagoda, the ruthless head of the secret police. When Yagoda fell from power and became an enemy of the people, Babel became guilty by association.

Accused of political crimes, he was arrested and tortured. In January 1940, after a twenty-minute trial, he was condemned and shot in the head. His last futile words were: “Let me finish my work.” But his manuscripts and diaries were seized and destroyed, his body was burnt, and his ashes thrown into “bottomless grave Number 1”. Soon afterwards, the temporarily surviving writers fought for possession of his dacha. Babel’s existence was completely obliterated until his official exoneration, after Stalin’s death, in 1954.

The fifth victim, Marina Tsvetayeva, wrote an extraordinary poem that Ronald Hingley described in Nightingale Fever. She imagines a morbid “conversation between Yesenin and Mayakovsky taking place in the hereafter. Does any other literature contain such a phantom exchange between two poets, each dead by his own hand, as concocted by a third who was eventually to follow suit? Referring to Mayakovsky’s celebrated suicide note, in which he complains that his ‘love boat’ has been shipwrecked, Yesenin asks his colleague if he really did do himself in ‘for a bit of skirt.’ Mayakovsky fires back a well-merited retort to his dipsomaniac colleague: ‘Vodka’s worse. Are you still sloshed?’”

Tsvetayeva had a “beak-nosed profile, high forehead enveloped in clouds of cigarette smoke and hand weighed down with silver rings and bracelets, myopically rummaging in a chaos of papers.” Among those papers was the characteristically passionate and suggestive “Insomnia” (1916):

I love to kiss
Hands, and I love
To give out names.
And also, to open
Doors!
Wide open, in the middle of a dark night!

While living in Paris, Tsvetayeva failed to interest Russian émigré readers in her work and was plagued by humiliating poverty. In 1939 she returned to Russia at a time when residence abroad usually led to arrest for espionage. Even worse, she rejoined her reckless husband, Sergei Efron. He had fought against the Reds in the Civil War that followed the Revolution, then changed sides and became a Soviet foreign spy and assassin. He joined the Loyalists or Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and returned to Moscow shortly before his wife. After a brief reunion, Tsvetayeva’s husband and daughter were arrested. Efron was shot in 1940, her daughter was sentenced to eight years in prison, and she never saw either of them again.

Hingley observes, “She was no longer writing poetry, and she was more convinced than ever that she had lost her attractiveness as a woman, she was desperately poor and found Stalin’s Russia utterly alien.” Obsessed with death, like Yesenin and Mayakovsky, she ambiguously confessed, “I don’t want to die, I just want not to be.” In September 1940 she wrote that during the last year she had searched in vain for a hook to hang herself.

After the German invasion of Russia, Tsvetayeva was evacuated 600 miles east of Moscow to a remote town on the Kama River in the Tatar Republic. Hingley relates that she reached Yelabuga in August 1941 in a state of advanced physical decay and psychological depression. She was “bent, gaunt, grey-haired, a combination of a tramp and a witch in her old brown raincoat and dirty blue knitted beret. No one had ever heard of her or her work. On 31 August she committed suicide by hanging, and no mourners — not even her own [teenaged] son — attended her burial at an unrecorded spot in the local cemetery.” Like Mandelstam and Babel, she disappeared into total obscurity.

In his elegy “To Marina Tsvetayeva’s Memory”, Pasternak optimistically mourned:

Marina, it has long been time,
And it won’t be that much trouble,
To bring home from Yelabuga
Your disregarded ashes.

Again like the prisoners Mandelstam and Babel, her death was not reported in the Soviet newspapers. She did not have, like Mayakovsky, an elaborate funeral procession through the streets of Moscow as she had predicted in her poem of Easter 1916.

During Stalin’s oppressive regime, three of the tragic poets committed suicide; Mandelstam and Babel were also reckless, suicidal and doomed. None of these writers had actually committed a crime: the accusations against them were false, even absurd. Francisco Goya’s horrific painting “Saturn Devouring His Son” shows how Saturn, fearing he would be overthrown by one of his children, eats each one as soon as they are born. Goya’s gigantic, shaggy, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, ravenous, demonic, cannibalistic god, clutching his helpless victim, has gnawed a limb and head off the bloody torso and is feasting on the torn flesh of the remaining arm stump. Goya’s Saturn is a perfect image of Stalin and his innocent victims.

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