There seems to have beeen another Ukrainian writers’ case in October 1937. At any rate, A. S. Mikhailyuk is given as dying on 23 October and M. V. Semenko on 24 October 1937—a case perhaps associated with that of Ukrainian Politburo member V. I. Porayko, later to be denounced as a prominent fascist, shot on 25 October. Two more Ukrainian writers of note, M. G. Yoganson and G. 0. Kovalenko, perished on 27 and 28 October 1937, respectively; and two more, Slisarenko and P. P. Fylypovich, on 3 November. Yet another concentration of Ukrainians is to be found on 12 to 14 January 1938, with the writer N. Filyansky and the old revolutionaries S. D. Visochenko and A. K. Serbichenko.
And so it was in all the non-Russian Republics. Their men of literature were almost automatically regarded as bourgeois nationalists, since, of course, they had been working in the national traditions of their own languages. In Byelorussia (see here) most of the leading writers were shot. In Kazakhstan, the death dates of almost all the main figures are given as 1937 to 1939.70
The mean viciousness of such campaigns can be seen in speech after speech and periodical after periodical. It is at random that we quote from an attack in Revolyutsiya i natsional’nosti71 on a Russian–Upper Mari dictionary by the alleged “bourgeois nationalist SR” Epin, who had omitted words like dekulakization, opportunism, kolkhoznik, and the like, though “in order to mask his wrecking policies” included a few revolutionary words in a section at the end on “new terms.” He had also omitted the names of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov from his dictionary. This was all called “counter-revolutionary.”
The Leningrad poet Nikolai Zabolotsky, who exalted a starling’s song against “the tambourines and kettledrums of history,” was arrested on 19 March 1938 “on a faked political accusation.”72 A “counter-revolutionary writers’ organization” had been “uncovered” in Leningrad (though its alleged leading members, Nikolai Tikhonov and Konstantine Fedin in Moscow, were never arrested). Those implicated in what was also called the “Pereval Case,” after the magazine in which they had collaborated, included the poets Benedikt Livshits and Boris Kornilov, who were shot in the autumn of 1938; Elena Tager, a short-story writer, who spent ten years in labor camp; and at least five others (all of whom were shot or died in camp). Connections were also made with poets elsewheree in the USSR, like the Georgian Tabidze and D. I. Kharms.
Zabolotsky was interrogated for four days without a break, and tortured. (One of the charges was that a poem of his was a satire on collectivization.) On his return to his cell, he tried to barricade himself in and fought the warders who came for him. He was then beaten even more severely and taken in a state of collapse to the prison psychiatric hospital, where he was held for two weeks, first in a violent, then in a quiet ward. On recovery, he was literally pushed into a common cell designed for twelve or fifteen, which now held seventy or eighty, and sometimes a hundred prisoners. “People could lie down only on their side, jammed tight against each other, and even then not all at once, but in two shifts.” (Such arrangements had been “worked out by generations of prisoners … who had gradually passed on their acquired skills to newcomers.”) At night, the cell was pervaded by “dumb terror” at the screams as “the hundreds of sergeants, lieutenants, and captains of State Security, together with their assistants got down to their routine tasks” in the main Liteyni prison. Meanwhile, several Soviet writers are reported as coming to Zabolotsky’s defense, and, together with his failure to confess, this seems to have led to the removal of his name from the list of major plotters. He was later transferred to a two-man cell in the Kresty, now inhabited by ten. In September or early October, he was sentenced by the Special Board to eight years. On 8 November, he was sent to Sverdlovsk, and on 5 December started a sixty-day train journey in a forty-man railway wagon, suffering the usual horrors, and ended up at Komsomolsk-on-the-Amur, at hard labor in the notorious Bamlag. For part of the time, he is reported employed in the camp draftsman’s office, which may have saved his life. He was released in 1944 and returned from exile in 1946; his sentence was annulled in 1951. However, his health had been undermined, and he was an invalid until his death seven years later.73
The beautiful poet Marina Tsvetaeva had gone abroad soon after the Revolution to join her husband, the literary critic Sergei Efron, who had fought in the White Army. She had written of the “deadly days of October.” In the 1930s, her husband was recruited by Soviet agents and joined a Soviet-supported movement for the return of émigrés to Russia. He was one of the first to be allowed back by the Soviet authorities, and he disappeared without trace soon after his arrival. Their daughter went from Paris to seek him and also disappeared. (He had been executed, while the girl was to spend sixteen years in prison camps.)74 In 1939, Marina Tsvetaeva followed them. On 31 August 1941, worn out by long suffering, she committed suicide in the provincial town of Yelabug.75
Her scintillating poetry became widely known and circulated in manuscript. But in spite of its influence and popularity in literary circles, it was not to be published until 1957. Much of it had to wait longer, in particular a cycle of romantic lyrics connected with the tragedy of the White Army:
Where are the swans?
The swans have left.
Where are the ravens?
The ravens have stayed.
Even in 1957, the publication of a short selection of her most harmless verses was soon called “a gross political error.”76
Another talent of the first rank, Osip Mandelshtam, was a sick man, with a nervous complaint. In 1934, he was called in to the NKVD on an order signed by Yagoda himself, interrogated the whole night, and then sent to prison. He had written an epigram on Stalin. Pasternak is reported to have pleaded for him with Bukharin, a sign of Pasternak’s naïveté. (It seems to have been now that Stalin rang up Pasternak and asked if Mandelshtam was a good poet.) Other writers went to Yenukidze, still influential. At this time, when the Terror had not got into its stride, such interventions may have been helpful. In any case, the poet was sentenced merely to three years’ exile at Cherdyn, a small town near Solikamsk, for “conspiracy.” He attempted suicide, and his wife appealed to the Central Committee.
Mandelshtam was transferred to Voronezh, a tolerable provincial town. He was able to return to Moscow in May 1937, but could not get permission to remain. On 2 May 1938 he was again arrested, taken to the Butyrka, and sentenced by the Special Board to five years’ forced labor in the Far East on 2 August 1938. Sent off by train on 9 September, he arrived on 13 October at the Vtoraya Rechka Transit Camp, from which prisoners were sent on to Kolyma. But he seems to have become half-demented, and was rejected from the transports. In his calmer moments, he sometimes recited poetry to his fellow prisoners, and once he was told that a line of his had been scratched on the wall of a death cell at the Lefortovo: “Am I real and will death really come?” When he heard this, he cheered up and for some days was much calmer. He suffered from the cold in his tattered leather coat, and seems to have got little food, dying, apparently of hunger, on 26 December 1938.77 He had written of his times:
But your spine has been smashed,
My beautiful, pitiful era,
And with an inane smile
You look back, cruel and weak,
Like a beast that has once been supple, At the tracks of your own paws.
As with other citizens in all these arrests, the blind chance of “objective characteristics” prevailed. In December 1937, so Ehrenburg tells us, his son-in-law Boris Lapin tried to account for various arrests of intellectuals: “Pilnyak has been to Japan; Tretyakov often met foreign writers; Pavel Vasilyev drank and talked too much; Bruno Jasienski was a Pole…. Artyom Vesyoly had at one time been a member of the Pereval literary group; the wife of the painter Shukhayev was acquainted with the nephew of Gogoberidze….”78