Babel wrote of the Revolution, “It’s eaten with gunpowder and the very best blood is poured over it.” It was Babel who at the Writers’ Congress of 1934 had spoken of the “heroism of silence,” a phrase and an activity to be condemned bitterly as a sign of alienation from the regime. Babel knew Yezhov’s wife. Although he knew it was unwise, he sometimes went to see her to “find a key to the puzzle.” He gathered that whatever Yezhov’s role, it was not at the bottom of it.46 He ceased to be published in 1937 and at the end of May 1939 was arrested in his dacha at the writers’ settlement at Peredelkino. He is said to have resisted arrest and was shot on 27 January 1940, a week before Meyerhold, whose case was connected with his.47
Babel, in addition to offending a minor figure like Budenny and bringing into disrepute the First Cavalry Army, from which Stalin was now drawing an inadequate substitute for a High Command, is said to have made a rash joke about the General Secretary. But his offense was small compared with that of Boris Pilnyak, another talent to have arisen from the Revolution. His Naked Year, about a provincial town in 1919, is a most extraordinary representation, in which the struggle for bare existence brings out the excess, the eccentricity, of the range of Russian character.
As early as the 1920s, Pilnyak had become involved in one of the most obscure and doubtful crimes attributed to Stalin. In the spring of 1924, Frunze was appointed Deputy Commissar for War—and in practice took over control of the Army, with little resistance from Trotsky, before Trotsky’s actual removal in 1925. He seems to have sympathized mainly with the Zinoviev–Kamenev group. In the late summer of 1925, he fell ill, and died on 31 October of that year. The rumor in Moscow was that he had been ordered by the Central Committee—that is, in effect, by Stalin—to undergo an operation which in fact killed him. If Frunze had died in 1936 or 1937, the existence of such a rumor would have been perfectly natural. The significant thing is that it circulated at so early a date—at a time, that is, when Stalin had not given any precedents.
Later Soviet books on Frunze have been notably touchy on the point. One biography48 elaborates at some length about doctors who said that an operation was really necessary, and who tended him through his last illness. This is a book by one of those military historians who have elsewhere been so frankly hostile to Stalin’s acts against the generals. Unless (as is, of course, quite possible) other interventions took place on its publication, one tends to think that exculpation from such a source shows that Stalin is really believed not guilty by some of those who would be anxious to know.
The most extraordinary thing is that the rumor was given public circulation. On its basis, Pilnyak, hitherto an almost entirely nonpolitical writer (who had said that he knew nothing of politics and not being a Communist could not write like one), produced his Tale of the Unextinguished Moon, subtitled Murder of the Army Commander. The hero, Gavrilov, is described as a well-known Red Army leader who returns to Moscow on orders and reads in the papers that he has come back for an operation. He has had stomach ulcers, but is now fully recovered. He goes to see a man described as the most important of the “three who lead” the Party, who orders him to have the operation. The doctors examine him, and report that an operation is necessary, but afterwards in private conversation say that it is not. The operation is performed, and he dies of an overdose of chloroform. The story has a very sinister and gloomy tone. It was about to be printed in Novyy mir, but the issue was confiscated and the editors admitted in the following number that accepting it had been a mistake, and printed letters describing it as “a malicious slander of our Party.” In the circumstances then prevailing, there were many copies circulating, and the story was printed in 1927 in Sofia.
It is clear, indeed, that no one with any political sense would have written a story like The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon, and it seems likely that Pilnyak was put up to it by some friend more deeply involved in the struggles of the time. But no more was said about the matter for the moment.
In 1929, Pilnyak was President of the All-Russian Union of Writers, a genuine association then resisting the maneuvers of RAPP to enforce ideological and bureaucratic control of the writers. (Mayakovsky’s suicide in 1930 is now attributed, in part, to persecution by officials of RAPP.)49 In the face of opposition from all the best writers, and to a large degree from Maxim Gorky too, the RAPPists failed in their task, and, as we saw, later lost favor and were themselves purged. But this did not save the non-RAPP writers.
Pilnyak’s last effective work, Mahogany, served as a pretext for action against him. It was published in Germany as a preliminary to its coming out in Russia, then a common practice for copyright reasons. But it was then denounced as anti-Soviet and its publication abroad alleged to be a White Guard provocation. Pilnyak was now in great trouble and ready to submit to any ruling. Zamyatin, chairman of the Leningrad branch of the Writers’ Union, was also under attack; his We (on which Orwell was to draw for 1984) had been published abroad in much the same circumstances as Pilnyak’s Mahogany. He boldly demanded to be allowed to leave the country, refused to retract, and exposed the whole mechanism which literary persecution was already setting in motion, mild though its actions were compared with later developments. He said that the Moscow branch had passed its resolution “without hearing any defense: first there was a condemnation and only then an investigation. I imagine that no court in the world has ever heard of such a procedure.” He added that he could not belong to an organization that behaved like this and resigned his membership in the Union. Finally, Maxim Gorky interceded for both Pilnyak and Zamyatin in Izvestiya:
… We have got into the stupid habit of raising people up into high positions only to cast them down into the mud and the dust. I need not quote examples of this absurd and cruel treatment of people, because such examples are known to everybody. I am reminded of the way in which petty thieves were lynched in 1917–18. These dramas were generally the work of obyvateli [obtuse philistines] and one is reminded of them every time one sees with what delight people throw themselves on to a man who has made a mistake, in order to take his place.50
Pilnyak was “allowed” to settle down to write pro-Soviet literature, while Zamyatin’s boldness was rewarded by permission to leave the country. Zamyatin was one of the few trained Marxists among Soviet writers, and on this account he had rejected Bolshevism, which was welcomed in a vague and romantic fashion by Futurists like Mayakovsky—at a time, indeed, when the Futurists of Italy were showing a similar romanticism toward the other new and dynamic movement, Fascism.
Pilnyak worked at a conformist novel, The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea. Yezhov personally oversaw the production, listing fifty-odd passages for amendment. Pilnyak became deeply depressed, and told Victor Serge, “There isn’t a single thinking adult in this country who hasn’t thought that he might get shot.”51 (But he had the courage to intervene when Serge was arrested in 1933.) In May 1937, he was attacked flatly for “counter-revolutionary writing,”52 and was arrested on 28 October 1937.53 It has now been stated in Moscow that he was shot in April 1938 (and not at the later date given in reference books for the past twenty years).54 The charge, or one of the charges, was of being a Japanese spy—he had actually visited Japan.55 His wife, the actress Kira Andronikova, mother of his three-year-old son, Boris, was sentenced to eight years.56