Though ‘the hunt was on’, as Khrushchev later put it, the Leningraders were initially left at liberty; Voznesensky was even still invited to Stalin’s drunken midnight dinners. Finally, on 13 August, Kuznetsov, Popkov and three others were invited to Malenkov’s office and arrested on arrival by his bodyguard. Though Voznesensky wrote a grovelling letter to Stalin — ‘Please give me work, whatever’s available, so I can do my share for Party and country. . I assure you that I have absolutely learned my lesson on party-mindedness’ — it did him no good.27 He was arrested in turn on 27 October and joined Popkov and Kuznetsov in a special prison. In September 1950 they were put on closed trial in Leningrad, in the old Officers’ Club building on the Liteiniy. Kuznetsov refused to confess and was immediately executed — according to Khrushchev ‘horribly, with a hook in the back of his neck’.28 Voznesensky may have been kept alive for a little longer. There is a story that a few months after the trial Stalin asked Malenkov what had become of the famously workaholic Planning Commission head, and suggested that he be given something to do. Malenkov replied that this would not be possible, since he had frozen to death in the back of a prison truck.29 Altogether, sixty-nine Leningrad-connected Party officials were executed, imprisoned or exiled between 1949 and 1951, plus 145 of their relatives. Least deserving of pity was P. N. Kubatkin, head of the Leningrad NKVD. The standard mugshots taken at his arrest — facing the camera and in right profile — show him haggard and dishevelled, just like his thousands of wartime victims.
Conducted in great secrecy, the ‘Leningrad Affair’ remains something of a mystery today. The pretexts for it, whispered in Stalin’s ear by Malenkov, were that Voznesensky had massaged production figures, and that the Leningrad Party had set up an agricultural trade fair without Moscow’s permission. In reality, it seems to have been the product of Cold War tension — 1949 was the year of the Berlin airlift, the founding of NATO and the Soviet Union’s first atom bomb — combined with Stalin’s fear of rivals. He may have been rattled by talk of a Leningrad-headquartered Russian (as opposed to all-Union) Communist Party, and by a friendly visit to the city by a delegation from Tito’s independent-minded Yugoslavia.30 Revisionists argue that the purge was a shrewd power play, reasserting Stalin’s supremacy and balancing the Kremlin factions. Conventionally, and more convincingly, it was simply one of the last spasms of an ageing, paranoid mind.
In parallel with the ‘Leningrad Affair’, Stalin also launched, again with Malenkov’s and Beria’s encouragement, a Union-wide ‘war on cosmopolitanism’. Wartime harnessing of traditional values — the return of military ranks and insignia, honours named for Suvorov and Nevsky — now curdled into virulent anti-Westernism. It was the era of crackpot pseudo-genetics, of ‘city’ instead of ‘French’ bread, and of boasts that Russians had invented the radio, the aeroplane and the light bulb. People with foreign connections or Jewish surnames began to vanish daily (‘It used to be a lottery’, quipped one, ‘now it’s a queue’),31 and at Leningrad University colleagues gathered once again to accuse each other of ‘formalism’, ‘bourgeois subjectivism’ or ‘bowing to the West’. ‘All the professors’, Olga Fridenberg wrote of her classics department,
were ritually humiliated. Some, like Zhirmunsky, endured it elegantly and with flair. . but Professor Tomashevsky, a man not yet old, of cool temperament and caustic wit, very calm and unsentimental, walked out into the corridor of the Academy of Sciences after his examination and fell into a dead faint. The folklorist Professor Azadovsky, already weakened by heart disease, lost consciousness during the meeting itself and had to be carried out.
It has been calculated that Union-wide, so many Jews lost their jobs that by 1951 they held less than 4 per cent of senior government, economic, media and university posts, down from 12 per cent in 1945.32 The highest-profile victim was Molotov’s luxury-loving fifty-three-year-old wife Polina, formerly People’s Commissar for fisheries. A grotesque pseudo-prosecution, involving accusations of Zionist espionage and group sex, ended with her divorce from Molotov and a five-year sentence to the camps. For all the ugliness Fridenberg found an ugly new word — ‘skloka’ — standing for ‘base, trivial hostility; spite, petty intrigues. It thrives on calumny, informing, spying, scheming, slander. . Skloka is the alpha and omega of our politics. Skloka is our method.’33
Akhmatova, though left at large, was made to suffer by proxy. One of the thousands arrested was her thirty-seven-year-old son Lev Gumilev, not long demobilised having fought all the way to Berlin. He had spent several years in the Gulag before the war, now he was sentenced to another ten, and, despite his mother’s petitions and obedient hackwork (a cycle of patriotic poems titled In Praise of Peace), not released until Khrushchev’s general amnesty of 1956. Also arrested was her ex-husband Nikolai Punin, who, having publicly observed of the disappearance of eighteen colleagues that ‘we lived through the Tartar invasion and we’ll live through this’, was charged with being ‘an advocate of the reactionary idea of “art for art’s sake”’ and sent to the Arctic Komi Peninsula. From camp he wrote his granddaughter jokey letters about sandcastles, hedgehogs and mushrooms, before dying there four years later at the age of sixty-five.34
The same year another old man died alone — Josef Stalin. The news was met with a mixture of stunned silence and intense, cathartic emotion. In schools, teachers led their pupils in mass lamentation; in communal apartments, people struggled to look solemn or burst into tears; in the camps, guards gathered in nervous huddles as prisoners yelled and threw their hats in the air. Hysterical crowds followed the great dictator’s funeral cortege in Moscow, but in Leningrad a man lost his Party card for twice turning off the radio during the orations and quietly carrying on with his work. ‘We were doubly besieged’, Likhachev had written, ‘from within and without.’35 The ‘siege within’ was not yet over: the Soviet Union would remain, and remain greyly repressive, for almost another forty years. But it would never be as bad again.
23. The Cellar of Memory
The chief memorial to the siege of Leningrad is the Piskarevskoye cemetery, in the city’s housing project and ring road-busy north-east. Opened in 1960, it is by Soviet standards a rather self-effacing complex, emphatically a place for mourning rather than victory celebration. The mass graves — big, grass-covered barrows, each marked (symbolically, since the burials were never so tidy) to a particular year — line a long central avenue. At one end an eternal flame wavers, transparent in the sunshine; at the other a statue of a broad-hipped woman in a long dress stands outlined against clouds and sky. The frieze behind her is carved with famous, untrue words from Berggolts: ‘No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten’.
Away from the central avenue, the mounds go on, shaded by limes and birches. Here they are less closely mown, and the dips between them soft with buttercups and cow parsley. One has a rabbit hole in its side. There are individual graves, too — nineteenth-century ones left over from the site’s days as an ordinary cemetery, and hundreds upon hundreds belonging to soldiers who died in Leningrad’s military hospitals, their young faces — handsome, jug-eared, freckled, Asian, with spectacles and without — gazing in fuzzy black and white from oval ceramic medallions. A loudspeaker system hisses into life — Beethoven’s Funeral March, the solemn chords distorted by the breeze and long use. When it snaps off again, the sounds are of birdsong and distant traffic.