The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

Significant shifts in attitude were occurring among the inhabitants of “Tamara Khanum” as they were occurring among most Soviet people of that time. The confusion at of the beginning of the war was replaced by a wave of patriotism. We all lived with one goal and one emotion: only to win the war. At that moment our Olga announced that, since her daughters were being taken care of by the state in a children’s refuge of the Academy of Science, it was her duty to volunteer for the front where she would bring more benefit to people. And even though she was almost forty, she was sent to a military cook’s school, finished it with the rank of sergeant, and was sent to the front where she spent almost the duration of the war. And, along with many others, at the front she became a member of the [Communist] Party.

THE POST-WAR PERIOD: THE “COSMOPOLITE” CAMPAIGN

The second half of the 1940’s was marked by ruthless ideological pogroms accompanied by robust praise-mongering about the “most wise,” the “genius,” and the “beloved” great leader.

N. Ianevich, Literary Politics

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The first attack was the pronouncement of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union concerning the literary journals Zvezda [The Star] and Leningrad. Just a month-and-a-half earlier the newspaper Kul’tura i zhizn’ [Culture and Life] was founded. It was the organ of the propaganda section of the Central Committee in which loud praise for the achievements of Soviet culture alternated with ruthless vilification of its particular representatives. Each time, we opened the newspaper with horror.

Any judgement, proclaimed on its pages, was beyond appeal. Even if courageous people could be found to speak against it, their writings would not have been published anywhere. Books denounced in this manner were immediately removed from sale and from all the libraries of the nation. And their authors were subjected to lengthy and humiliating “workings over” at meetings of their institutions where they had to repent and admit their errors. Otherwise they were expelled from their positions and never hired anywhere again. In provincial cities this took on a more severe and ruthless nature. I had heard that at one such bloodletting in the city of Khar’kov the victim, who had been ultimately “worked over,” stood up on a dais and said, “You have convinced me, comrades. I have finally understood, that I am not one of us!” This phrase, “I am not one of us,” became a sardonic aphorism. The academic and social life at the IWL went on in an atmosphere of similar pogroms.

A [malevolent] article in Kul’tura i zhizn’ by Viktor Nikolaev accused Leonid Grossman [a noted scholar] of placing the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy in “the same rank with the decadent French writer Marcel Proust.” This was characterized as “slavish adoration of bourgeois culture.” The list of the other “accursed” persons was chosen in a very deliberate manner. Thus began within the walls of the institute the pernicious “anti-cosmopolite” campaign which was already raging in the Writer’s Union and other ideological institutions and in which we did not immediately comprehend an elemental anti-Semitic pogrom that had been let loose by the highest directives of the Central Committee and “comrade Stalin personally.”

A complete replacement of the leadership of the institute took place as a result of Nikolaev’s article. This was followed by a series of notorious cases. The first target of the pogrom turned out to be The History of American Literature. The trouble with this work was that it was begun back during the war when we and the USA were in a united front against Hitler. But due to the tortoise pace of publishing, the book appeared only in 1947, at a tense time in Soviet-American relations. And then the calm, well-intentioned tone of the volume’s authors toward American literature seemed unacceptable to the “ruling comrades.”

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Chapter Twenty-Five

An unbelievable scandal began. The book was accused of containing distortions and political errors, that the “ringing of dollars” was heard in it, and so on. The workers in the foreign sector who had even a tangential association with the creation of the book were most severely castigated and, either immediately or some time later, dismissed from the institute. Abel Isaakovich Startsev was expelled as one of the senior editors, Tamara Motyl-eva—as the reviewer, Anikst—as a member of the editorial board, Tamara Sil’man—as the author of the article on Edgar Allen Poe, which was deemed to be “depraved.”