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

For the Soviet literati the bitter pill was sugared. Writers who conformed got apartments, dachas, guaranteed print runs, translation into the major languages of the Soviet Union and tours to the Caucasus or Pamirs. Compliant Russians, Georgians, Ukrainians, Armenians, and Kazakhs lived on mutual translation, “taking in each other’s washing.” Translation, like children’s literature, for a few years became a haven: readers benefited as poets and prose writers took cover behind another writer or language. “An alien tongue will be an embryonic membrane for me,” Mandelstam put it. Stalin encouraged translation. Italian authors—the USSR saw itself, in opposition to Mussolini, as the guardian of Italian culture—were recommended. Dante, a poet under sentence of death entangled in feuds between Guelfs and Ghibellines, edified Soviet poets. Stalin had Machiavelli retranslated. Mikhail Lozinsky, Gorky’s protégé and Mandelstam’s friend, spent the 1930s translating Inferno, and completed Paradiso after a spell in the camps.

Behind the scenes OGPU was tightening its grip. Glavlit came under OGPU’s direct control and censorship became secretive.³⁹ Only six copies including one for Stalin of lists of “major withdrawals, retentions, and confiscations” of publications from bookshops and libraries were printed. Any information could count as divulging state secrets: mentioning unemployment, food shortages, grain exports, suicides, insanity, epidemics, even weather forecasts were hostile propaganda. It was forbidden to mention OGPU, the NKVD, or even the telephone number of the Registry for Births, Deaths, and Marriages. Almanacs with addresses and telephone numbers of householders in Moscow and Leningrad, published since 1923, were stopped in the early 1930s. Directory inquiries were made at a street kiosk, which took fifteen kopecks (and their names) from inquirers. The censors forbade naming cows and pigs “Commissar,” “Pravda,” “Proletarian,” “Deputy,” “Cannibal,” or “Yid.” So that animals would still come when called, Glavlit suggested phonetically similar substitutes: “Anesthetic” for “Commissar,” “Rogue” for “Pravda.”⁴⁰ The censor mutilated the classics, too: lewdness in Pushkin was “pornography.” Folktales, where heroes chose between the left road and the right road, were rewritten so that heroes now chose between a side road and a straight road.

Even accidental dissidence was to be repressed. Under Stalin, misprints were declared “sorties by the class enemy.” All over Europe misprints had been disingenuously used by typesetters to annoy authority. Queen Victoria was reported to have “pissed” over Waterloo Bridge; Nicholas II at his coronation had a “crow” put on his head, later altered to “cow.” Correction slips in Soviet books listed all mistakes and who made them. Writers or typesetters could die for one misplaced letter, as Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Mirror suggests unforgettably. Substituting one consonant made Stalin “pisser” or “shitter” (ssalin, sralin), Stalingrad could be set to read “Stalin is a reptile” (Stalin gad). Printing “Lenin had kittens” (okotilsia) instead of “Lenin went hunting” (okhotilsia ) was punishable. Captions in newspapers were a favorite target for the censors: “Stalin by the beating-up [instead of electoral] urn”; “We must guard the life of comrade Stalin and the lives of our leaders” placed opposite “Annihilate the reptiles so that not a trace remains on Soviet land.” Translation into other languages of the Soviet Union was unreliable. “Who does not work, does not eat,” in Turkmeni became, “Who does not work, won’t bite.”

In the early 1930s the semiliterate troika of censor, propagandist, and OGPU man went through every public library, removing some 50 percent of the books, including major classics. Poetry, apart from Pushkin, Nikolai Nekrasov, and Demian Bedny, was devastated.

In 1932 publishing, book distribution, even the secondhand book trade were all placed under the control of the party’s Central Committee. Antiquarian and foreign books sold by diplomats or returning Russians were confiscated by inspectors. As enemies of the people were identified and removed, their books were destroyed and their names excised or inked out from every copy of encyclopedias; more persons were employed in censoring literature than in creating it. The political line changed frequently, so that antifascist literature, for instance, or literature on anti-Jewish pogroms, would suddenly have to be destroyed. Stalin’s Short Course (a history of the party) went through successive editions as the heroes of the revolution became unpersons. Foreign publications, on which technological institutes relied, were frequently confiscated; polyglots were arrested as spies. So few censors were left who could read English, French, or German that foreign newspapers and books were destroyed wholesale in the post office.