St Petersburg

Gumilyov had remained, throughout the decades of Soviet rule, a hero and martyr of the underground Petersburg mythos; therefore, his rehabilitation by the state signaled changes in the status of the mythos. At the same time, the authorities began reviewing the cases of a large number of victims of the Stalinist political terror, whose reputations had remained in a social limbo ever since the Khrushchev thaw. This meant the recognition of the innocence of such political groups as the “Leningrad opposition,” led by Grigory Zinoviev; of those arrested and exiled after Kirov’s murder; and of the victims of the postwar “Leningrad affair.”

It became possible to speak openly of Mandelstam’s death in the Stalinist camps, of the extermination of the Leningrad dadaists from the Oberiu group, and Zoshchenko’s death in 1958, hounded and half mad, writing in his last letter to Chukovsky, “A writer with a frightened soul has lost his qualifications.”

Published in the spring of 1987, almost half a century after its creation, Akhmatova’s Requiem, that poetic memorial for all the dead of the Great Terror, and one of the most important documents for the new Petersburg mythos and its image of the city as martyr, was at last freely available to the ordinary reader.

Every such step met fierce opposition from Party hard-liners. A battle ensued over the reputation of Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s ideologue. As recently as 1986 Soviet newspapers had referred to him in glowing terms. “In the city of Lenin, the cradle of socialist revolution, he unfolded his marvelous abilities and special gifts as a political figure. His name is treasured in the national memory.” But by 1988 it was possible to write, “There are many thousands of streets, plants, factories, ships, universities, kolkhozes, schools, even kindergartens and pioneer palaces (in Leningrad as well) named for Zhdanov. Stalin’s name is almost gone, but Zhdanov’s name is all over the place. This is a record of sorts. But a record of what? A record of the cynicism of those who consciously do not wish to stop glorifying that name?”118

When the Party orthodox saw that further defense of Zhdanov’s heritage was unfeasible, they reluctantly gave it up. The infamous Zhdanov resolution of the Central Committee, directed against Akhmatova and Zoshchenko, was rescinded in 1988, forty-two years after it was passed. Zhdanovism in culture, with its demagogic labels and accusations of formalism, cosmopolitanism, and kowtowing to the West, was officially proclaimed a mistake; and Zhdanov Leningrad State University (founded in the Pushkin era) became simply Leningrad State University.

Zhdanov’s role as leader of the defense of Leningrad was also re-evaluated. Sobchak made public the information that, as multitudes starved, peaches were flown in to Zhdanov in the winter, while anyone who “spread rumors” about Leningrad’s hunger was in danger of the camps and almost certain death.119 The truth about the blockade, with all its attendant horror and suffering, began to emerge. This new understanding hastened the legitimization of the image of Leningrad as martyr city.

Attention was again focused on the Silver Age, that cultural flowering at the beginning of the twentieth century, which Zhdanov in his report of 1946 had called, misquoting Gorky, “the most shameful and most mediocre decade in the history of the Russian intelligentsia.” Zhdanov’s label was for years the mandatory one. It was memorized and quoted in school examinations and chewed over in innumerable articles and books. A welcome contrast was the mass reprinting in the mid-eighties of the works of the Russian symbolists, acmeists, and futurists to the great delight of the reading public. A typical reaction was, “The Silver Age is turning out to be, speaking in the language of analogy, the key to the treasure box of the twentieth century.”120

The hundredth birthdays of Akhmatova and Mandelstam, celebrated with great solemnity in 1989 and 1991, respectively, aided the consolidation of their reputations as national classics. In 1990 a foreign tourist at a Leningrad police station on business was astonished to see on a young policewoman’s office wall not the obligatory pictures of Lenin and Gorbachev but a large poster with Nathan Altman’s 1914 portrait of Akhmatova. Poem Without a Hero was recognized as a monument to the Silver Age and as the philosophical encapsulation of the fate of the Petersburg legend in the twentieth century. A special room in the Akhmatova Museum, opened in Leningrad in 1989, was devoted to Poem Without a Hero; another held the materials relating to Requiem.