In 1971, he met Sergey Melnik, who was a regular at the VOOPIK gatherings in Moscow. He introduced Lev to the underground journal Veche, which published fringe articles with anti-Semitic overtones. It was the brainchild of dissident Vladimir Osipov, who had just returned from seven years in a labour camp in Mordovia, and who had begun to publish his journal in the town of Alexandrov using borrowed typewriters and mimeo sheets.79 Known as the ‘city without friars’ – in criminal jargon, a friar was someone who had no connection to the criminal underworld – Alexandrov was a popular place for released camp inmates to settle, as it was located just outside Moscow’s 101-kilometre limit: as close to the capital as former political prisoners were allowed to live.
An article in the first issue of Veche was devoted to the familiar nationalist bugbear: the ruin of historical monuments in Moscow. Entitled ‘The Fate of the Russian Capital’, it highlighted the destruction wrought by the building of new Soviet monstrosities, such as the New Arbat Street, which cut through a historical neighbourhood in the mid-sixties and raised a row of ugly high-rise buildings in its place. The culprits in the destruction of Russia’s historical patrimony were not hard to find; the article listed the architects of the new buildings, almost all of whom had Jewish surnames. It is true that architecture was one profession in which Jews were not prohibited from working by a quota on nationalities, and so they were overrepresented in its ranks. But it was pure nonsense to suggest that the architects had anything to do with the decisions on which buildings to demolish: those were all made by the party at the level of the provincial committee and above – and those people were almost exclusively Russian.
Lev hosted Osipov often at his wife’s apartment in Moscow, and published one article in Veche about his theory of passionarity. Their meetings continued until 1974, according to Osipov, when suddenly a very public spat engulfed Veche. In February of that year, Osipov issued an announcement, picked up on Radio Free Europe, the Munich-based US government-funded radio station, that Melnik was a KGB agent. Melnik, however, stood his ground and made a blunt denial. If the KGB paid no attention to Veche before, suddenly it had no choice but to intervene. In April of that year, Yury Andropov, head of the KGB, ordered a criminal case to be prepared against Veche – calling it an ‘anti-Soviet’ publication. A few months later the journal was shut; and a year after that, Osipov went to prison again for eight years. Lev’s association with Melnik and Osipov may well have been one of the factors – in addition to his arguments with the academic establishment – that closed off his access to the ‘thick journals’ and wider public forums.
A line of ascent
As Lev’s feud with Bromley (and his friendship with Osipov) was developing, the struggle within the Soviet elite over nationalism was getting fiercer. By 1970, Brezhnev and his ideological chief Mikhail Suslov seem to have decided that the independent political activities on both sides of the ideological divide had gone far enough. Two ‘thick journals’ on either flank of the nationalist-liberal ideological schism were shorn of their editors; Alexander Tvardovsky, the chief editor of Novy Mir, resigned in February 1970, and Anatoly Nikonov, chief editor of its ideological antipode, the nationalist Komsomol journal Molodaya Gvardiya, was sacked in November.80 The orthodox Communist Party was clearly anxious to put nationalism back in the box, and Brezhnev, at a meeting of the central committee, complained of ‘too much church bell ringing on television’ – referring to religion.81
One of those who had survived the purge of 1970 was Alexander Yakovlev, a young central committee bureaucrat, who at that time was acting head of the committee’s department of propaganda. Eager to prove his loyalty in the wake of the shake-ups (as well as to eradicate the word ‘acting’ from his title), Yakovlev authored the article ‘Against Anti-Historicism’, published in the relatively liberal Literaturnaya Gazeta in November 1972. It offered a sweeping criticism of the nationalists’ approach to history: that is, as a heterogeneous process composed of peoples, rather than a homogeneous one composed of a single mankind on a single ascending path up the ladder rungs of dialectical materialism. Nonsense, said Yakovlev: the half-century since the October revolution was ‘brilliant proof of the fact that the history of humanity develops in a line of ascent, in full accordance with the objective laws of public life discovered by the great scholars, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’.82 The article named 16 historians by name, accusing them of propagating historical errors, of romanticizing Russia’s autocratic past, and of promoting a non-class approach to history.
The nationalists went berserk, writing letters and calling for Yakovlev’s head. Brezhnev was apparently angered, saying: ‘Well, if this guy published this kind of article without being asked to, and picks a fight with our intelligentsia, then we should send him away.’83 It speaks volumes for the power lobby of the ‘Russian Party’ within the communist elite that Yakovlev, spouting nothing but pure Marxist orthodoxy and zeal, dramatically miscalculated and lost his gambit. He was sent to Canada as ambassador – a political exile, but an important one, which slightly mitigated his humiliation.
With Yakovlev’s exile, ‘we considered that we had won’, recalled Valery Ganichev, who remained in his post at Molodaya Gvardiya until 1980. ‘The Russian patriotic trend began to show up at the highest levels of the central committee.’ By this point, the ‘Russian Party’ within the Communist Party had reached the very summit of the regime: ‘They stood against a cosmopolitan wing in the Politburo and against dogmatic supporters of Marxism who denied any national beginning in the life of a society.’ Ganichev’s colleague Semanov put it another way. Talking to me in 2010, he made this comment, which says more about the nationalists than it does about their adversaries: ‘In reality there were two parties: the Russian party and the Jewish party.’84 His autobiography, published posthumously in 2011, is entitled Russian Party: Why the Jews Will Never Win.
The perception was that the nationalists had protection, and the illusion of favouritism encouraged those ‘Russia Party’ sympathizers lower down in the state hierarchy in thinking that formerly taboo interpretations of history were acceptable. Gradually, the nationalist approach to teaching and writing history was being vindicated – if not on a scholarly level, then at least on a political level. This was reflected in the curious support that Lev was suddenly receiving from within the party’s Olympian central committee, where officials increasingly stepped up to back him. Lev, as we have seen, was a frequenter of nationalist gatherings and a contributor to nationalist journals. While many of his friends in high places were nationalists, several were not – they were people he had met along the way who had ties to him, or else were entranced by his parents’ mystique.
One of these was Lev Voznesensky, son of the deceased rector of Leningrad University, who had kept in contact with Lev after their time together in the Karaganda labour camp. He had since joined the central committee, where he was in a position to aid Lev. ‘I would only say that much of his work would not have seen the light of day without help from friends of friends.’85 But the most powerful friend Lev made, one who would time and again intervene on his behalf in his frequent brutal fights with rival academics, was Anatoly Lukyanov, who held a high-ranking post in the presidium of the Supreme Soviet. He would eventually become chairman of the central committee and then chairman of the Supreme Soviet. Gumilev had met Lukyanov through Voznesensky.86 Lukyanov, an avid fan of Akhmatova, offered to help Gumilev with an ugly court fight surrounding the disposal of her archive (it so happened that one of the judges deciding the case was an old friend of Lukyanov’s). From that time on, Lukyanov and Gumilev maintained close contact, with Lukyanov becoming an oddly recurring fixture in Lev’s life. Lukyanov almost single-handedly marshalled support for Gumilev’s second PhD dissertation defence in the mid-1970s, as well as for other publications.