The Great Terror

Pilnyak worked at a conformist novel, The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea. Yezhov personally oversaw the production, listing fifty-odd passages for amendment. Pilnyak became deeply depressed, and told Victor Serge, “There isn’t a single thinking adult in this country who hasn’t thought that he might get shot.”⁵¹ (But he had the courage to intervene when Serge was arrested in 1933.) In May 1937, he was attacked flatly for “counter-revolutionary writing,”⁵² and was arrested on 28 October 1937.⁵³ It has now been stated in Moscow that he was shot in April 1938 (and not at the later date given in reference books for the past twenty years).⁵⁴ The charge, or one of the charges, was of being a Japanese spy—he had actually visited Japan.⁵⁵

His wife, the actress Kira Andronikova, mother of his three-year-old son, Boris, was sentenced to eight years.⁵⁶

Other prose writers of mark who perished include Pantaleimon Romanov, author of Three Pairs of Silk Stockings; Artyom Vesyoly; and S. Tretyakov, author of Roar China. Mikhail Koltsov, of Pravda, under suspicion as an agent of Lord Beaverbrook,⁵⁷ was arrested on 12 December 1938. Sentenced by Ulrikh on 1 February 1940 to ten years without the right of correspondence,⁵⁸

he was shot at once. Others who were arrested but survived include Yuri Olesha and Ostap Vyshnia. Vyshnia, accused of planning to assassinate Postyshev and others, was released in 1943, and had to write deriding those abroad who had protested at his supposed liquidation.

Poetry in the USSR was already a dangerous trade. Nikolai Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova’s former husband, had been shot as a counter-revolutionary, on Agranov’s orders, in August 1921, the month which also saw the death of Alexander Blok, long past his brief enthusiasm for the Red Guard, from anemia due to malnutrition. Yesenin had committed suicide in 1925, and Mayakovsky in 1930.

And now many of the best surviving poets in Russia were destroyed.

The poet Vladimir Smirenski (Andrei Skorbny) had been given ten years as early as 1931, for participation in a group which had discussed politics almost entirely in relation to art.⁵⁹ We do not know the charges against most of the poets who now went to their deaths. It seems that they were seldom accused of poetic crimes as such, though a case is reported of a young poetess arrested for writing a “hymn to freedom” which was construed as “preparation for terrorism,” and sentenced to eight years in the Karaganda camps.⁶⁰ There is no information about the eventual charges against such men as Nikolai Klyuev, Yesenin’s disciple, whose best poem, his “Lament” for his friend and teacher, sighs, “If I could only touch peace.” He had already in the 1920s spent three days in the Leningrad OGPU’s steam room,⁶¹ and been released. He was again arrested in 1933 for “kulak agitation” and counter-revolutionary verses and was exiled to Arctic Narym. Gorky managed to have him moved to the far more tolerable Tomsk, but he was eventually rearrested and is reported dying in a prison train and being buried at some Siberian halt.⁶²

The poet Pavel Vasiliev is said to have defended Bukharin as “a man of the highest nobility and the conscience of peasant Russia” at the time of his denunciation at the Pyatakov Trial, and to have damned the writers then signing the routine attacks on him as “pornographic scrawls on the margins of Russian literature.”⁶³ On 7 February 1937 he left his wife, Elena, to go to a barbershop for a shave, accompanied by his host’s son.

Some minutes later the boy returned.

“Lena, they’ve arrested Pavel….”

… In all the prisons they answered alike, to the question: “Is there a Vasiliev amongst those arrested?”

“No, Vasiliev, Pavel Nikolaevich, is not listed.”

Months went by. Some woman instructed her:

“Prepare a parcel. He’ll be in the place where they accept it.”

It was true—the parcel was accepted in one of the prisons. Moreover they said that she could come again on 16 July.

On 16 July the person on duty said: “He’s been transferred to another place.”

And twenty years later, petitioning for her husband’s posthumous rehabilitation, Elena Aleksandrovna discovered that it was precisely on 16 July that Pavel Vasiliev ceased to be.⁶⁴

The leading Georgian poet, Yashvili, killed himself with a shotgun on 22 July 1937⁶⁵ as the result of the arrest of other Georgian literary figures, in particular his friend and equal the poet Titsian Tabidze.⁶⁶ In Boris Pasternak’s Letters to Georgian Friends, we read of the Russian poet’s brave and devoted attempts to help and console Tabidze’s family after his disappearance, until his wife was finally informed of his execution (on 16 December 1937) when he was rehabilitated seventeen years later.