Other prose writers of mark who perished include Pantaleimon Romanov, author of Three Pairs of Silk Stockings; Artyom Vesyoly; and S. Tretyakov, author of Roar China. Mikhail Koltsov, of Pravda, under suspicion as an agent of Lord Beaverbrook,57 was arrested on 12 December 1938. Sentenced by Ulrikh on 1 February 1940 to ten years without the right of correspondence,58 he was shot at once. Others who were arrested but survived include Yuri Olesha and Ostap Vyshnia. Vyshnia, accused of planning to assassinate Postyshev and others, was released in 1943, and had to write deriding those abroad who had protested at his supposed liquidation.
Poetry in the USSR was already a dangerous trade. Nikolai Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova’s former husband, had been shot as a counter-revolutionary, on Agranov’s orders, in August 1921, the month which also saw the death of Alexander Blok, long past his brief enthusiasm for the Red Guard, from anemia due to malnutrition. Yesenin had committed suicide in 1925, and Mayakovsky in 1930.
And now many of the best surviving poets in Russia were destroyed.
The poet Vladimir Smirenski (Andrei Skorbny) had been given ten years as early as 1931, for participation in a group which had discussed politics almost entirely in relation to art.59 We do not know the charges against most of the poets who now went to their deaths. It seems that they were seldom accused of poetic crimes as such, though a case is reported of a young poetess arrested for writing a “hymn to freedom” which was construed as “preparation for terrorism,” and sentenced to eight years in the Karaganda camps.60 There is no information about the eventual charges against such men as Nikolai Klyuev, Yesenin’s disciple, whose best poem, his “Lament” for his friend and teacher, sighs, “If I could only touch peace.” He had already in the 1920s spent three days in the Leningrad OGPU’s steam room,61 and been released. He was again arrested in 1933 for “kulak agitation” and counter-revolutionary verses and was exiled to Arctic Narym. Gorky managed to have him moved to the far more tolerable Tomsk, but he was eventually rearrested and is reported dying in a prison train and being buried at some Siberian halt.62
The poet Pavel Vasiliev is said to have defended Bukharin as “a man of the highest nobility and the conscience of peasant Russia” at the time of his denunciation at the Pyatakov Trial, and to have damned the writers then signing the routine attacks on him as “pornographic scrawls on the margins of Russian literature.”63 On 7 February 1937 he left his wife, Elena, to go to a barbershop for a shave, accompanied by his host’s son.
Some minutes later the boy returned.
“Lena, they’ve arrested Pavel….”
… In all the prisons they answered alike, to the question: “Is there a Vasiliev amongst those arrested?”
“No, Vasiliev, Pavel Nikolaevich, is not listed.”
Months went by. Some woman instructed her:
“Prepare a parcel. He’ll be in the place where they accept it.”
It was true—the parcel was accepted in one of the prisons. Moreover they said that she could come again on 16 July.
On 16 July the person on duty said: “He’s been transferred to another place.”
And twenty years later, petitioning for her husband’s posthumous rehabilitation, Elena Aleksandrovna discovered that it was precisely on 16 July that Pavel Vasiliev ceased to be.64
The leading Georgian poet, Yashvili, killed himself with a shotgun on 22 July 193765 as the result of the arrest of other Georgian literary figures, in particular his friend and equal the poet Titsian Tabidze.66 In Boris Pasternak’s Letters to Georgian Friends, we read of the Russian poet’s brave and devoted attempts to help and console Tabidze’s family after his disappearance, until his wife was finally informed of his execution (on 16 December 1937) when he was rehabilitated seventeen years later.
Many Armenian writers were shot. The poet Gurgen Maari, who survived, tells how “I was arrested at night on 9 August 1936. I was not surprised. A month previously the First Secretary of the C.C. of the Armenian Communist Party, Agasi Khandzhyan, had tragically perished. The atmosphere in the House of Writers was very oppressive.”67
He was in solitary confinement for many months without even being allowed out for exercise. It was not until two years after his arrest that he was “tried”:
The Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union is in session. I confess to terrorist acts, to the wish to separate Armenia from the Soviet Union and unite her to the imperialist camp. I intended to kill Beria….
The court was a closed one, the trial lasted three minutes…. I was condemned to ten years’ deprivation of liberty. Once again Sianos [a jailer, formerly in the same orphange as Maari] accompanies me. This time to the cell for sentenced prisoners.
“How many did you get?” he asked in a whisper.
“Ten years.”
“Thank God. You’ve got off lightly.”
“Ten years,” I repeat.
“For the third night running, when they’ve taken people out, they’ve shot them,” he whispers….
The forty people in his cell included two architects, three writers, four engineers, and one People’s Commissar; all the rest were Government employees and Party workers. The opinion of the pessimists was that their prison sentences were just for the sake of form and that they would be shot in any case. However, “in the autumn of 1938 we were crammed into lorries one night and—covered with tarpaulin like forbidden goods—were taken to the station. It was empty at the station, there was not a living soul—only troops.”
For six months, the prisoners lived in the Vologda city jail. Then they were taken to Krasnoyarsk, where “a large army of prisoners composed of representatives of many of the peoples of the Soviet Union swarmed. Inhabitants of Central Asia stood out particularly in their bright national costumes.”
A medical examination determined who was to be sent on to Norilsk in the Arctic. It was then, for the second time in three years, that Maari managed to see himself in a mirror. He could hardly recognize himself. At the Siblag (“Siberian” Prison Camp) in Norilsk, he made friends with Egert, once a famous film actor. He was marched with 200 others to another camp; most of the 200 died later. Maari himself was there until 1947. He briefly describes two camp commandants: one hated “intelligent swine” and sent them to do the heaviest work; the other, who liked books, eased his lot a good deal.
Released in 1947, Maari was not permitted to publish anything under his own name as his civic rights had not been restored, and in 1948 he was rearrested. This time, the cell was full of troops returning from German captivity. In 1948 and 1949, he was incarcerated in nine prisons in nine towns. He and his fellows were then classed as “exiles for life.”
The Ukrainian creative intelligentsia, as we have seen, had been struck down on a vast scale every year since 1930.68 The Ukrainian poets perished in their majority for “nationalist” reasons: sixteen, starting with Vlyzko in 1934, are namea as executed or dying in camps between then and 1942—almost all at Solovetsk, though a few were in Kolyma. A group of neo-classicist poets, Mykola Zerov, Pavlo Fylypovych, and others, was tried in Kiev in January 1936 for nationalism, terrorism, and espionage. One temporary survivor, the poet Mykhalo Dray-Khamara, got a five-year Special Board sentence on 28 March 1936, but seems to have died in camp in 1938 or 1939.69