Stalin

Bulgakov got appointed as a stage director’s assistant. One writer sent him a fake summons to the Central Committee, a poor joke about his desperate petitioning. Bulgakov developed neurasthenia.¹⁴⁴ Bereft of a public, he was said to be narrating stories at his apartment over tea. One such story, according to a fellow writer, involved Bulgakov sending long letters nearly every day to Stalin, signed “Tarzan” to disguise himself. Stalin, frightened, ordered that the letter writer be identified. Bulgakov was found out, brought to the Kremlin, and confessed. Stalin noticed his shabby trousers and shoes and summoned the commissar of supply. “Your people can steal, all right,” Stalin yelled at the minion, “but when it comes to clothing a writer, they’re not up to it!” Bulgakov, in the story, took to visiting Stalin in the Kremlin regularly and noticed he was depressed. “You see, they all keep screaming: Genius, genius! And yet there’s no one I could have a glass of brandy with, even!” When Stalin phoned the Moscow Art Theater on Bulgakov’s behalf, he was told the theater director had died—that very minute. “People are so nervous these days!” Stalin was depicted as saying. “No sense of humor.”¹⁴⁵

Like Bulgakov, Yefim Pridvorov (b. 1883), known as Demyan Bedny (bedny meaning “the poor one,” though many called him Bedny [Poor] Demyan), had been born in Ukraine and made his mark in Moscow, but while Bulgakov sought no more than a modus vivendi, Bedny tirelessly served the regime. He traveled the sites of the Five-Year Plan, declaiming verse to workers, and acquired a personal Ford and a sumptuous apartment in the Grand Kremlin Palace (his wife, children, mother-in-law, and nanny lived with him).¹⁴⁶ Bedny knew Stalin before the revolution and, like him, had published his first verse as a teenager (and was dogged by rumors of uncertain parentage). He flaunted his access to the dictator.¹⁴⁷

But two of Bedny’s poem-feuilletons irked the dictator deeply, one for mocking Russian national traditions (peasants sleeping on their warm stoves, which Stalin also did), and the dictator promulgated a resolution criticizing him. Bedny wrote to him melodramatically (“The hour of my catastrophe has come”).¹⁴⁸ Stalin exploded. “Dozens of poets and writers have been rebuked by the Central Committee when they made mistakes,” he answered. “All this you considered normal and understandable. But when the Central Committee found itself compelled to criticize your mistakes, you suddenly started to fume and shout about a ‘noose.’ . . . Is your poetry perhaps above criticism?”¹⁴⁹

Voroshilov protected his Grand Kremlin Palace neighbor Bedny, whose sloshy charm and erudition played well with the defense commissar.¹⁵⁰ But on September 1, 1932, the politburo heard a report on the poet’s debauched life, and Stalin had him evicted from the Kremlin. Bedny apologized to the dictator for his “life befouled with egotistic, greedy, evil, false, cunning, vengeful philistinism,” but begged for an equivalent-sized apartment for his private library, the largest in the regime, perhaps 30,000 volumes; Stalin promised space for it. (Yenukidze allocated Bedny an apartment in a small building at Rozhdestvensky Boulevard, 15, which the poet, in a sarcastic note to him, called “a rat’s barn.”)¹⁵¹ Bedny had worsened his predicament by indiscretion: one regular at his Kremlin apartment had recorded (and distorted) the often inebriated poet’s table talks, including a complaint that when he loaned books to Stalin, they came back stained with greasy finger marks.¹⁵²

Stalin allowed Bedny to receive the Order of Lenin in connection with the poet’s fiftieth birthday, accompanied by a citation recognizing him as an “outstanding proletarian poet.”¹⁵³ Bedny had just written to Stalin, “I am afraid of nothing more than my letters. Especially my letters to you.”¹⁵⁴

HUMAN SOULS