The Great Terror

The mean viciousness of such campaigns can be seen in speech after speech and periodical after periodical. It is at random that we quote from an attack in Revolyutsiya i natsional’nosti⁷¹ on a Russian–Upper Mari dictionary by the alleged “bourgeois nationalist SR” Epin, who had omitted words like dekulakization, opportunism, kolkhoznik, and the like, though “in order to mask his wrecking policies” included a few revolutionary words in a section at the end on “new terms.” He had also omitted the names of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov from his dictionary. This was all called “counter-revolutionary.”

The Leningrad poet Nikolai Zabolotsky, who exalted a starling’s song against “the tambourines and kettledrums of history,” was arrested on 19 March 1938 “on a faked political accusation.”⁷² A “counter-revolutionary writers’ organization” had been “uncovered” in Leningrad (though its alleged leading members, Nikolai Tikhonov and Konstantine Fedin in Moscow, were never arrested). Those implicated in what was also called the “Pereval Case,” after the magazine in which they had collaborated, included the poets Benedikt Livshits and Boris Kornilov, who were shot in the autumn of 1938; Elena Tager, a short-story writer, who spent ten years in labor camp; and at least five others (all of whom were shot or died in camp). Connections were also made with poets elsewheree in the USSR, like the Georgian Tabidze and D. I. Kharms.

Zabolotsky was interrogated for four days without a break, and tortured. (One of the charges was that a poem of his was a satire on collectivization.) On his return to his cell, he tried to barricade himself in and fought the warders who came for him. He was then beaten even more severely and taken in a state of collapse to the prison psychiatric hospital, where he was held for two weeks, first in a violent, then in a quiet ward. On recovery, he was literally pushed into a common cell designed for twelve or fifteen, which now held seventy or eighty, and sometimes a hundred prisoners. “People could lie down only on their side, jammed tight against each other, and even then not all at once, but in two shifts.” (Such arrangements had been “worked out by generations of prisoners … who had gradually passed on their acquired skills to newcomers.”) At night, the cell was pervaded by “dumb terror” at the screams as “the hundreds of sergeants, lieutenants, and captains of State Security, together with their assistants got down to their routine tasks” in the main Liteyni prison. Meanwhile, several Soviet writers are reported as coming to Zabolotsky’s defense, and, together with his failure to confess, this seems to have led to the removal of his name from the list of major plotters. He was later transferred to a two-man cell in the Kresty, now inhabited by ten. In September or early October, he was sentenced by the Special Board to eight years. On 8 November, he was sent to Sverdlovsk, and on 5 December started a sixty-day train journey in a forty-man railway wagon, suffering the usual horrors, and ended up at Komsomolsk-on-the-Amur, at hard labor in the notorious Bamlag. For part of the time, he is reported employed in the camp draftsman’s office, which may have saved his life. He was released in 1944 and returned from exile in 1946; his sentence was annulled in 1951. However, his health had been undermined, and he was an invalid until his death seven years later.⁷³

The beautiful poet Marina Tsvetaeva had gone abroad soon after the Revolution to join her husband, the literary critic Sergei Efron, who had fought in the White Army. She had written of the “deadly days of October.” In the 1930s, her husband was recruited by Soviet agents and joined a Soviet-supported movement for the return of émigrés to Russia. He was one of the first to be allowed back by the Soviet authorities, and he disappeared without trace soon after his arrival. Their daughter went from Paris to seek him and also disappeared. (He had been executed, while the girl was to spend sixteen years in prison camps.)⁷⁴ In 1939, Marina Tsvetaeva followed them. On 31 August 1941, worn out by long suffering, she committed suicide in the provincial town of Yelabug.⁷⁵

Her scintillating poetry became widely known and circulated in manuscript. But in spite of its influence and popularity in literary circles, it was not to be published until 1957. Much of it had to wait longer, in particular a cycle of romantic lyrics connected with the tragedy of the White Army:

Where are the swans?

The swans have left.

Where are the ravens?

The ravens have stayed.

Even in 1957, the publication of a short selection of her most harmless verses was soon called “a gross political error.”⁷⁶