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

Russian intellectuals recalled reacting with relief to the outbreak of war. Some had hoped for defeat, hoping that Hitler would establish a puppet Russian state as tolerable as Vichy France; most longed for victory, forgetting that after every major victory the Russian state had tightened the screws. For rallying round, Soviet intellectuals expected gratitude, even though Stalin’s remark “Gratitude is a dog’s virtue” was widely quoted. Even the peasantry assumed that Stalin would have to pay for Anglo-American support: rumors swept the country that Churchill and Roosevelt had demanded the abolition of collective farms as the price of help.

Writers, composers, and painters had been treated with a care they were no longer used to. Very few were stranded in blockaded Leningrad; most were evacuated not to the Volga and Urals, where the government and heavy industry were relocated, but to the warmth and relative plenty of central Asian cities such as Tashkent. Scarce resources were allocated to print poets such as Akhmatova and Pasternak. Symphonies were commissioned; public readings turned writers into stars. Those who reported from the front, such as Konstantin Simonov or Ilya Ehrenburg, were treated like party leaders. No major writer was imprisoned or shot, although the very few still alive in the GULAG were not released. Only Nikolai Zabolotsky, after Ilya Ehrenburg, Samuil Marshak, and Nikolai Tikhonov wrote a letter to Beria in March 1945, was taken off heavy labor and given work as a draftsman which would enable him to survive.

One major poet died a tragic death. Marina Tsvetaeva, lured back to Russia in 1939 despite Pasternak’s warnings of 1935, found herself a pariah. Her husband, one of Beria’s contract killers, was shot, her sister and daughter arrested as French spies, and she was barred from publishing. Evacuated with other writers to Elabuga near Kazan and starving in a garret, washing dishes in the canteen where favored writers ate, she hanged herself. Almost her last poem is a reproach to her fellow poets, none of whom—not even the repentant Pasternak—had dared to be a Good Samaritan:

And there is no coffin!

There is no separation!

The table’s spell is broken, the house is woken.

Like death to a marriage feast,

I am life that has come to a supper.

You are nobody to me: not brother, son, husband, or friend—

and still I reproach you:

you, who laid the table for six souls,

without giving me a seat at the far end.

Pasternak, who had once thought himself in love with Tsvetaeva, wrote a poem in her memory, which he dared in 1943 to read to audiences. Its grief is understated almost to the point of callousness:

In the silence of your departure there is an unexpressed reproach.

Losses are always enigmatic.

In the fruitless searches which are my reply

I agonize without result: death has no outlines.

Oh, Marina, it’s long been time, and not such a terrible trouble,

to transfer your neglected ashes from Elabuga in a requiem.

Returning to Moscow in spring 1943 by riverboat, Pasternak dared to write in the captain’s journal, “I want to have a bath and I also thirst for freedom of the press.” The free speech of the writers was carefully recorded by those of their friends who reported to the NKVD. In 1943 and 1944 Vsevolod Merkulov collated the remarks for Stalin’s perusal. ²¹ The most loyal communists had views that strangely anticipate those of many modern Russians: “. . . it’s an irony of fate that we are shedding blood and devastating our country in order to strengthen Anglo-American capitalism . . . So Hitlerism has played its historic role, for it has saved capitalism from death,” remarked a literary critic, Boris Valbe. Others were more sanguine: the grandson of the great Maecenas Savva Morozov, a journalist who had by a miracle not paid for his ancestry with his life, declared, “it’s clear that after the war life in this country must change radically, under the Allies’ influence the government will be forced to make decisive changes internally. It’s very likely that opposition parties will emerge in the country.” In summer 1943 many writers believed that the generals who were winning the war—Zhukov and Rokossovsky—would gain such political clout that they could become dictators, that the returning soldier would demand the dissolution of collective farms and Soviet power.