The Great Terror

Another talent of the first rank, Osip Mandelshtam, was a sick man, with a nervous complaint. In 1934, he was called in to the NKVD on an order signed by Yagoda himself, interrogated the whole night, and then sent to prison. He had written an epigram on Stalin. Pasternak is reported to have pleaded for him with Bukharin, a sign of Pasternak’s naïveté. (It seems to have been now that Stalin rang up Pasternak and asked if Mandelshtam was a good poet.) Other writers went to Yenukidze, still influential. At this time, when the Terror had not got into its stride, such interventions may have been helpful. In any case, the poet was sentenced merely to three years’ exile at Cherdyn, a small town near Solikamsk, for “conspiracy.” He attempted suicide, and his wife appealed to the Central Committee.

Mandelshtam was transferred to Voronezh, a tolerable provincial town. He was able to return to Moscow in May 1937, but could not get permission to remain. On 2 May 1938 he was again arrested, taken to the Butyrka, and sentenced by the Special Board to five years’ forced labor in the Far East on 2 August 1938. Sent off by train on 9 September, he arrived on 13 October at the Vtoraya Rechka Transit Camp, from which prisoners were sent on to Kolyma. But he seems to have become half-demented, and was rejected from the transports. In his calmer moments, he sometimes recited poetry to his fellow prisoners, and once he was told that a line of his had been scratched on the wall of a death cell at the Lefortovo: “Am I real and will death really come?” When he heard this, he cheered up and for some days was much calmer. He suffered from the cold in his tattered leather coat, and seems to have got little food, dying, apparently of hunger, on 26 December 1938.⁷⁷ He had written of his times:

But your spine has been smashed,

My beautiful, pitiful era,

And with an inane smile

You look back, cruel and weak,

Like a beast that has once been supple, At the tracks of your own paws.

As with other citizens in all these arrests, the blind chance of “objective characteristics” prevailed. In December 1937, so Ehrenburg tells us, his son-in-law Boris Lapin tried to account for various arrests of intellectuals: “Pilnyak has been to Japan; Tretyakov often met foreign writers; Pavel Vasilyev drank and talked too much; Bruno Jasienski was a Pole…. Artyom Vesyoly had at one time been a member of the Pereval literary group; the wife of the painter Shukhayev was acquainted with the nephew of Gogoberidze….”⁷⁸

Writers sometimes intervened for their colleagues, occasionally with partial or eventual success. Tikhonov, Kaverin, Zoshchenko, Lozinsky, Tyanova, Shklovsky, and Chukovsky are named as doing so for Zabolotsky, Vygodsky, and others.

But there were denouncers as well as victims, cowards and bullies as well as brave men in the literary world, as elsewhere. When Pasternak was refusing to sign the authors’ circular applauding the killing of the generals—only to escape because the organizers added his name anyway—Yakov Elsberg, the author of several books about Herzen, Shchedrin, and others, who had formerly been Kamenev’s secretary, now embarked on a course of deletion to remove the taint of this association, denouncing his former RAPP associates and others. Another, N. V. Lesyuchevsky, denounced Zabolotsky, Livshits, Komilov, and the other Leningraders. He was still alive and was feebly defending himself in 1988.⁷⁹

During the “Thaw” of 1962, the Moscow writers’ organization managed to secure the expulsion of Elsberg on a charge of having informed in the 1930s. The equally notorious case of Lesyuchevsky was raised, then shelved. But when the organization fell briefly into the hands of a liberal leadership at the end of that year, the members voted once more to reopen the case, again abortively.⁸⁰ Such men lasted, indeed, while an honest Stalinist like Fadeyev, who had tried to save some of his political enemies, committed suicide in 1956 on the exposure of his patron.

Besides mere police spies, there were men who had simply sold out to Stalin, like Alexei Tolstoy, who wrote that “Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin was a typical potential Trotskyite” and made a career as a regime hack. There were others who just accepted the killing of their colleagues. Surkov remarked long after the rehabilitations, “I have seen my friends, writers, disappear before my eyes, but at the time I believed it necessary, demanded by the Revolution.”⁸¹