Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

Just a few dogs did not bark in the Soviet night. Two of Russia’s greatest poets, Mandelstam and Akhmatova, did not join the union. When Mayakovsky, who had supported the revolution so vociferously, preferred death to life in the USSR, the shock was profound. Pasternak and Mandelstam felt liberated from lies: they both wrote lyric verse again, Pasternak’s Second Birth, Mandelstam’s Armenian Cycle. To paraphrase John Cleese’s character in Clockwise, “The despair they could take; it’s the hope they couldn’t stand.”

Mandelstam sensed that in the stillness of a Moscow midnight a typewriter was always writing out denunciations. OGPU had been building up dossiers in which painters and poets with any avant-garde interests—once the darlings of the revolution—were linked to former White officers, émigrés, former gendarmes. Hitler’s views on “degenerate art” coincided with Stalin’s. The Ukrainian GPU had a dossier of 3,000 volumes named “Spring”; one of their first victims was Igor Terentiev, sent to dig the White Sea canal.³⁷ As the son of a gendarme and the brother of an émigré, he could have easily been shot. Terentiev later became a free worker on the Moscow–Volga canal; not until 1937 were capital charges pressed against him.

Probably the last year in which lyricism was even conceivable in the USSR was 1932. In Pasternak’s Second Birth, his finest book, Stalinism met a covert rebuke:

But only now is it time to say

Contrasting the comparison with the greatness of the day:

The beginning of the glorious days of Peter the Great

Were darkened by rebellions and executions.

It was also the last year in which Mandelstam saw his verse in print: the ending of his poem “Lamarck” proclaimed too loudly the end of human freedom:

Nature has stepped back from us, As if she didn’t need us, And she has put the dolichocephalic brain Like a sword back in its sheath.

And she has forgotten, left it too late To lower the drawbridge for those Who have a green grave, Red breath, supple laughter . . .

Poetry after 1932 had to be written “for the desk drawer,” or, since drawers were searched, committed to memory. Pasternak veered away from political reality. Mandelstam confronted the reality but shunned the perpetrators: he called on Bukharin but never went to meet the Politburo at Gorky’s. For Mandelstam Stalin was a malevolent god, even an alter ego, another Joseph. But the sight of the humanoids on Stalin’s Politburo was, for Mandelstam, unbearable. On the eve of the writers’ congress, he lost his liberty for the lines:

And round him is a rabble of scraggy-necked leaders, He plays with the services of half-human creatures Some whistle, some meow, some snivel, Only he alone pokes and prods.

Iagoda liked Mandelstam’s lampoon well enough to learn it by heart and recite it to Bukharin. Proletarian poets, however, dismayed him by betraying their class. The drunken Pavel Vasiliev was lucky to escape with a warning for writing in 1932 of Stalin:

Cutting thousands of thousands of nooses, you got your way to power by violence. Well what have you done, where have you pushed to, tell me, stupid seminary student! These sacred texts should be put up in lavatories . . . We swear, o our Leader, we shall strew your path with flowers And stick a wreath of laurels up your arse.³⁸

Otherwise, irreverence was to be heard only in the folk quatrains of slaves on the collective farms and in the camps.