The Great Terror

Vavilov was now held in Saratov prison. He introduced himself to his cell mates: “You see before you, talking of the past, Academician Vavilov, but now, according to the opinion of the investigators, nothing but dung.” Held in the condemned cell, a windowless underground block, without any exercise, for nearly a year, he was almost saved by his election in 1942 as a Fellow of the Royal Society in London, and his sentence was commuted to twenty years. But it was too late. Dystrophy had gone too far; he was a “goner” and died on 26 January 1943. His wife and son had been evacuated from Leningrad to Saratov in 1942 and lived all this time within a few miles of the prison where he was dying. But they were informed that he was in Moscow and did not learn of his presence.³²

The triumph of Lysenkoism was the most extraordinary of all the indications of the intellectual degeneracy of the Party mind which had followed on Stalin’s replacement of the intellectual section of the apparatus by his own creatures, such as Mitin and Mekhlis, in the early 1930s. The villain of the piece from this point of view was the charlatan I. I. Prezent, who established the orthodoxy of the Lysenko line by a complex and superficially sophisticated manipulation of the Marxist phraseology. To do justice to Zhdanov, he at least was never wholly taken in by Lysenko, and the final destruction of Soviet biology was only accomplished in 1948, as part and parcel of his own political defeat and death. But meanwhile, impressive verbalization, backed by vicious intrigue, secured Lysenko’s position of supremacy even if not yet of monopoly.

Another field in which a wholly erroneous doctrine was declared orthodox was linguistics. By the late 1920s, the teachings of N. Marr, who held that all language derives from the four sounds rosh, sal, ber

, and yon, became accepted as the Marxist line. It is a view otherwise universally dismissed. As a result, old professors first were exiled, later had their books withdrawn, and in 1937 and 1938 were usually arrested. A major case was that of Professor E. D. Polivanov, a friend of Mayakovsky, arrested in 1937 and shot on 25 January 1938.³³ (Stalin abandoned Marrism in 1950, censuring its adherents for having bullied the antiMarrites.)

This was followed by the “Dictionary Affair,” about which little is known except that the French writer Romain Rolland managed to get the sentences commuted to imprisonment.³⁴

But the heaviest toll of all seems to have been among the writers. They were threatened from two directions. A theory of correct aesthetic method was imposed on them, and at the same time the content of their works was subject to intense scrutiny. It emerged in the 1950s that of the 700 writers who met at the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934, only 50 survived to see the second in 1954.³⁵

A recent estimate is that 90 percent of the membership was repressed.³⁶ After the XXth Party Congress in 1956, it was confidentially admitted that “there were more than 600 writers who were guilty of no crime, and whom the Union [of Writers] obediently left to their fate in the prisons and camps.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, telling of this, adds that in reality “the list is still longer.”³⁷ And the Soviet researcher Eduard Beltov has lately revealed that he has long collected a list of a number of writers verified as dead in the repressions—though this also includes the post-1938 purges. He has the names of “nearly 1,300.” But he adds that this is incomplete, that Vasil Bykov, in his capacity as a deputy in the Byelorussian Supreme Soviet, recently applied to that body’s Presidium for information on several dozen Byelorussian writers who disappeared at this time, and that the local “law enforcement authorities” had “no information” about eighteen of those names.³⁸

In the country as a whole, about 150 litterateurs, including some 75 members of the Union of Soviet Writers, could not be traced at all. In all, the organ of the Union now tells us, some 2,000 literary figures were repressed, of whom about 1,500 met their deaths in prison or camp.³⁹

In connection with the Zinoviev Trial in August 1936, a series of hysterical articles in Literaturnaya gazeta attacked Trotskyite writers. They had infiltrated the Writers’ Union apparatus. Numbers of well-known authors were denounced, including I. I. Kataev (who had allegedly received Trotskyite “directives” in 1928, sent money to Trotskyites then in internal exile, and “retained his ties with Trotsky”), Tarasov-Rodionov (who also “for years had ties with class enemies”), and Galina Serebryakova, married in turn to Sokolnikov and Serebryakov; she survived years in camp, but the others did not. At the same time, the periodical attacked scores of other “enemy” writers throughout the Soviet Union.⁴⁰