Writers sometimes intervened for their colleagues, occasionally with partial or eventual success. Tikhonov, Kaverin, Zoshchenko, Lozinsky, Tyanova, Shklovsky, and Chukovsky are named as doing so for Zabolotsky, Vygodsky, and others.
But there were denouncers as well as victims, cowards and bullies as well as brave men in the literary world, as elsewhere. When Pasternak was refusing to sign the authors’ circular applauding the killing of the generals—only to escape because the organizers added his name anyway—Yakov Elsberg, the author of several books about Herzen, Shchedrin, and others, who had formerly been Kamenev’s secretary, now embarked on a course of deletion to remove the taint of this association, denouncing his former RAPP associates and others. Another, N. V. Lesyuchevsky, denounced Zabolotsky, Livshits, Komilov, and the other Leningraders. He was still alive and was feebly defending himself in 1988.79
During the “Thaw” of 1962, the Moscow writers’ organization managed to secure the expulsion of Elsberg on a charge of having informed in the 1930s. The equally notorious case of Lesyuchevsky was raised, then shelved. But when the organization fell briefly into the hands of a liberal leadership at the end of that year, the members voted once more to reopen the case, again abortively.80 Such men lasted, indeed, while an honest Stalinist like Fadeyev, who had tried to save some of his political enemies, committed suicide in 1956 on the exposure of his patron.
Besides mere police spies, there were men who had simply sold out to Stalin, like Alexei Tolstoy, who wrote that “Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin was a typical potential Trotskyite” and made a career as a regime hack. There were others who just accepted the killing of their colleagues. Surkov remarked long after the rehabilitations, “I have seen my friends, writers, disappear before my eyes, but at the time I believed it necessary, demanded by the Revolution.”81
In fact, the whole cultural world was under attack. Plots were discovered everywhere—for example, among the staff of the Hermitage Museum.82 The public arts suffered almost equally. The composer N. S. Zhelayev had been a friend of Tukhachevsky, and when he was arrested even the NKVD men were astonished to find that he had not yet taken down a picture of the late Marshal.83 The conductor E. Mikoladze was shot in 1937.84 Many actors are reported in the camps—such as Shirin, sent to labor camp for saying, “Don’t feed us Soviet straw; let’s play the classics.”85 Well-known actresses like 0. Shcherbinskaya (an ex-wife of Pilnyak) and Z. Smirnova followed them.86 Actresses and ballerinas are frequently mentioned in the camp literature: a typical arrest was under Article 58, Section 6, of a ballerina who attended a dinner arranged by foreign admirers.87
The celebrated Natalia Sats, creator of the Moscow Children’s Theater, had been Tukhachevsky’s wife, and was arrested in 1937 and sent to Rybinsk camp. She is reported there at several dates in the 1940s, but survived and was eventually released.
But the greatest victim in the theater was Vsevolod Meyerhold. At the beginning of 1938, a short decree announced the “liquidation” of the Meyerhold Theater as “alien to Soviet art.” It added that the question of Meyerhold’s further work in the theater was being “studied.”88
On 15 June 1939 Meyerhold was invited to make a public self-criticism at a meeting of producers presided over by Vyshinsky—himself, as the artist Yuri Annenkov remarks, a well-known producer of dramas of a certain type.89 Meyer-hold retracted, but also (in one account) counterattacked:
The pitiful and wretched thing that pretends to the title of the theater of socialist realism has nothing in common with art…. People in the arts searched, erred, and frequently stumbled and turned aside, but they really created—sometimes badly and sometimes splendidly. Where once there were the best theaters in the world, now—by your leave—everything is gloomily well regulated, averagely arithmetical, stupefying, and murderous in its lack of talent. Is that your aim? If it is—oh!—you have done something monstrous! In hunting down formalism, you have eliminated art!90
Meyerhold was arrested afew days later. He was severely tortured, and wrotein an appeal to Vyshinsky that fortunately the interrogator Rodos had only broken his left arm so that he could still use a pen. Rodos, he added, had also urinated in his mouth.91 He was shot on 2 February 1940.92 His wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh, who had formerly been married to Yesenin, was found dead in their flat after his arrest, with, reportedly, her eyes cut out and seventeen knife wounds. Only documents were missing, and there was no police investigation.93 Her death was thought of by prisoners to be intended as a general threat to wives.94
Meyerhold’s theater had predeceased him. The disappearance of anyone led also to the disappearance, or reassignment, of his artifacts. On the arrest of the sculptor Kratko, all his works disappeared from the galleries. When A. N. Tupolev was arrested, the “ANT” types of plane were rechristened. One prisoner reports a physicist who had with four collaborators completed a paper and lectured on it at the Academy of Sciences. The paper appeared in the scientific journals under the name of the two collaborators who had not been arrested.95 Unorthodox works simply vanished into the files of the NKVD, where any that have not been destroyed still lie, with Gorky’s last notebooks and Marina Tsvetaeva’s last poems.
Nor have we dealt with the more general effect of actions such as those described in reducing what had been a lively culture to a terrified level of almost unrelieved conformism. We have only been able to give a few illustrations of the way in which the Purge hit the creative minds of Russia—half a dozen stories and a handful of names, including the greatest in the country. A Georgian paper in the Khrushchev era asked rhetorically, “How many eminent writers, poets, artists, scholars and engineers perished in Georgia, repressed illegally, subjected to torture, exiled or shot?”96 The same might be said of the USSR as a whole, where, as a more recent Soviet article puts it, “There came about a tragic, unthinkable annihilation of culture, science, the best part of the intelligentsia….”97 The few cases we have spoken of, and briefly, must stand for a holocaust of the things of the spirit.
11
IN THE LABOR CAMPS
No one who has not sat in prison knows what the State is like.
Tolstoy
The fate of the prisoner who had the good fortune to escape being taken to the execution cellars was to be dispatched to a Corrective Labor Camp.
The Corrective Labor Codex defines three types of camp:
Factory and agricultural colonies where “people deprived of freedom” are “trained and disciplined.” (Article 33)
Camps for mass work which includes those in “distant regions” for “class-dangerous elements” requiring “a more severe regime.” (Article 34)
Punitive camps for the “strict isolation” of those “previously detained in other colonies and showing persistent insubordination.” (Article 35)
The first category was mainly for very minor offenses against factory discipline, and for petty thieves. All sentenced under Article 58 or by the Special Board went initially to category two.
The labor camp was one of the pillars of Stalin’s whole system. Concealment of its nature from the West was one of his most extraordinary triumphs.
For the evidence on the camps was, by the late 1940s, overwhelming and detailed. Thousands of former inmates had reached the West, and their wholly consistent stories were supported by a good deal of documentation, such as the many labor-camp forms and letters reproduced in David J. DaIlin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky’s Forced Labour in Soviet Russia and, indeed, by the Corrective Labor Codex of the RSFSR, produced with much effect by the British delegation to the United Nations in 1949. Yet it was possible for Western intellectuals to disbelieve this material, and to join in Soviet-sponsored campaigns condemning all who revealed it as slanderers.