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

Not a single writer with the exception of Osip Mandelstam now had the courage to confront Menzhinsky and Stalin on any matter; to stand up for liberty of conscience, let alone free speech or the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. True, poets and philosophers all had friends, wives, mistresses, and children who would go down with them; “ ‘I have a wife and children’ is the best cog in the machinery of tyranny,” said the Slovak novelist Jan Johanides. Undoubtedly, Stalin was more terrible than Nicholas I or Alexander III. So much worse then, the crime of conniving at his atrocities than assenting to the Tsarist oppression of the nineteenth century. The cowardice of Soviet intellectuals led to a punishment as terrible as that which moral courage would have incurred.

Stalin was now preparing to deal with the intelligentsia, but because he regarded himself as a creative mind, because he depended on writers, cinematographers, and composers for his entertainment, he moved stealthily. New cadres of engineers could be trained, peasants replaced by tractors, and the Politburo was easily replenished from the eager ranks of the Central Committee. It was far harder, Stalin knew, to find new writers, composers, actors, and painters; the young proletarian writers to whom the old guard had been ordered by Lunacharsky and Gorky to pass on their skills, produced, as Stalin knew, little but trash.

Stalin took great interest in the arts from 1928. The theaters, cinemas, concert halls, and publishing houses of Moscow and Leningrad were thriving but the quarrelsome intelligentsia were like headless chickens; their patrons—Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev—had fallen from power. As NEP foundered under taxation and persecution, independent publishing vanished and authors were cut off from Russian culture abroad, writers were left to the mercy of editorial boards and state publishers, controlled by Glavlit’s censors.

In 1927 Lebedev-Poliansky of Glavlit, reporting to the Central Committee, called for Stalin’s intervention. Lebedev-Poliansky had shown vulpine deviousness in letting through, for certain audiences at certain times and places, a few books or plays of artistic merit such as Isaak Babel’s civil war stories Red Cavalry, and Mikhail Bulgakov’s drama The Days of the Turbins. In this he had set himself against Lenin’s widow Krupskaia and his sister Maria, two bigots who exercised fundamentalist censorship in the Commissariat for Education. But censorship grew oppressive. It was now retrospective: secondhand-book shops had their stocks weeded, and libraries were purged of ideological impurity, although state libraries were allowed special closed holdings of banned books. Lebedev-Poliansky complained of “walking on a razor’s edge” between political and artistic criteria. He knew that Glavlit was hated and quoted a prose writer: “There is a general groan over the whole front of contemporary literature. We cannot be ourselves, our artistic conscience is constantly being violated. . . . If Dostoevsky were to appear among us today . . . he too would have to put all his manuscripts back in the drawer with a ‘prohibited’ stamp from Glavlit.” The great poets— Voloshin, Akhmatova, Mandelstam—abandoned verse. Pasternak had stopped writing lyrics. Sergei Esenin had hanged himself, leaving a farewell poem written in his own blood. Bulgakov’s satirical prose on the Soviet mission to transform nature had fallen foul of the censor: “Fatal Eggs” portrayed imported Marxism as irradiated reptile eggs brought in by mistake as hens’ eggs, whose hatchlings devastated the country instead of feeding it; “The Heart of a Dog” depicted Homo sovieticus as a vicious hybrid between a dog and a human being. Stalin himself took umbrage at much of what he read. Pilniak’s story “Tale of the Moon Extinguished” recounted the death of the civil war commander Mikhail Frunze, implying that his fatal abdominal operation had been ordered by Stalin.²⁰ Author, editor, and journal were severely punished.