by Peter Finn
The death certificate, signed by compliant doctors, said the cause of death was appendicitis. Suicide could not be acknowledged. Soviet ritual required collective expressions of grief from different professions. In a letter to the newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Gazette), a group of writers said Alliluyeva “gave all her strength to the cause of liberating millions of oppressed humanity, the cause that you yourself lead and for which we are ready to surrender our own lives as confirmation of the uncrushable vitality of this cause.” There were thirty-three signatures, including Pilnyak, Shklovsky, and Ivanov, but Pasternak’s was not among his colleagues’. Instead he somehow managed to append a separate, individual message. “I share in the feelings of my comrades,” he wrote. “On the evening before I had for the first time thought about Stalin deeply and intensively as an artist. In the morning I read the news. I was shaken as if I had actually been there, living by his side, and seen everything.”
Stalin’s reaction to this bizarre message and its hint of clairvoyance is unrecorded. In the wake of the suicide, Stalin was deeply emotional, openly wept, and “said he didn’t want to go on living either.” Pasternak’s words, amid all the chest-thumping and sterile pronouncements, may have been read by Stalin as the pronouncement of a yurodivy, or “holy fool”—an otherworldly man with a gift for prophecy. In the New York Russian-language newspaper Novy Zhurnal, the émigré scholar Mikhail Koryakov wrote, “From that moment onwards, 17 November 1932, it seems to me, Pasternak, without realizing it, entered the personal life of Stalin and became some part of his inner world.” If the dictator, in response to the message, did extend a protective cloak to the poet when others were being slain, it was not something Pasternak could know; he, too, could feel the cold fear that Stalin engendered.
One evening in April 1934, Pasternak ran into Osip Mandelstam on Tverskoi Boulevard. The poet—passionate, opinionated, and a brilliant conversationalist—was someone Pasternak acknowledged as an equal, another master of his art. But he was also a dyspeptic and incautious critic of the regime. Right on the street, because “the walls have ears,” he recited some new verse about Stalin. It read:
We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches.
But where there’s so much as half a conversation
The Kremlin’s mountaineer will get his mention.
His fingers are fat as grubs
And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,
His cockroach whiskers leer
And his boot tops gleam.
Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders—
Fawning half-men for him to play with.
They whinny, purr or whine
As he prates or points a finger,
One by one forging his laws, to be flung
Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.
And every killing is a treat
For the broad-chested Ossete.
In the version that came to the attention of the secret police, the poem included the phrase “the murderer and peasant slayer.”
“I didn’t hear this; you didn’t recite it to me,” said Pasternak, “because, you know, very dangerous things are happening now. They’ve begun to pick people up.” He described the poem as an act of suicide, and implored Mandelstam not to recite it to anyone else. Mandelstam didn’t listen, and inevitably he was betrayed. The secret police appeared at Mandelstam’s apartment in the early morning of May 17. The poet Anna Akhmatova had arrived the previous evening and was staying with the Mandelstams. As the search commenced, the three sat in silent fear; it was so quiet they could hear a neighbor playing the ukulele. The spines of books were cut open to see if they hid a copy of the poem, but the agents failed to find one. Mandelstam had not committed it to paper. It was already light when the poet was taken to the cells at the Lubyanka, the massive security complex in central Moscow that housed the Joint State Political Directorate, or OGPU, a forerunner of what became known as the KGB. His interrogator presented him with a copy of the poem, one that must have been memorized by the informer. Mandelstam thought he was doomed.
Pasternak interceded with Nikolai Bukharin, the recently appointed editor of the daily newspaper Izvestiya and a man Lenin called the “darling of the Party”—one of the old Bolsheviks from the revolutionary leadership in 1917. Bukharin knew and admired the country’s artistic elite, even those outside the reigning dogma, and he was a “persistent opponent of cultural regimentation,” according to his biographer. “We serve up an astonishingly monotonous ideological food,” Bukharin complained. As editor of Izvestiya, he had brightened up its pages with new subjects and writers. Pasternak had just contributed some translations of the Georgian poets Paolo Yashvili and Titsian Tabidze.
Bukharin was out when Pasternak came to see him, and the poet left a note asking him to intervene in the case. In a message he sent to Stalin in June 1934, Bukharin added a postscript: “Pasternak is completely bewildered by Mandelstam’s arrest.”
The entreaties worked, and Mandelstam, who could have been accused of terrorism and sent to almost certain death at a forced-labor camp on the White Sea canal, was allowed to admit to the relatively mild offense of “composing and distributing counter-revolutionary works.” Stalin issued a decisive and chilling command that was passed down the chain: “Isolate but preserve.” On May 26, Mandelstam was sentenced to three years in internal exile in the town of Cherdyn, far to the northeast in the Urals. He was dispatched almost immediately, and his wife traveled with him.
In Cherdyn, Mandelstam threw himself out the second-floor window of a hospital. Fortunately he landed in a heap of earth that was intended for a flower bed, and only dislocated his shoulder. His wife sent a flurry of telegrams to Moscow to insist that he needed to be moved to a larger city to get psychiatric care. The OGPU was inclined to listen; Stalin had ordered him preserved. Moreover, the first Congress of Soviet Writers was soon to take place in Moscow, and the leadership did not want the death of a prominent writer to mar it. The writer’s case again came to Stalin’s attention, and he decided to speak to Pasternak directly.
By 1934, the building on Volkhonka had been turned into communal apartment housing where families each had a room to sleep, and shared a bathroom and kitchen. The phone was in the hallway. A call from Stalin was highly unusual, if not extraordinary, but Pasternak—as he did at first with everyone he spoke to on the phone—launched into a ritual complaint about the din around him because of noisy children.
Stalin addressed Pasternak with the familiar you, and told him that Mandelstam’s case had been reviewed and “everything will be alright.” He asked Pasternak why he hadn’t petitioned the writers’ organization on Mandelstam’s behalf.
“If I were a poet and a poet friend of mine were in trouble, I would do anything to help him,” said Stalin.
Pasternak told him that the writers’ organization hadn’t tried to help arrested members since 1927.
“If I hadn’t tried to do something, you probably would never have heard about it,” said Pasternak.
“But after all he is your friend,” said Stalin.
Pasternak rambled on about the nature of his relationship with Mandelstam and how poets, like women, are always jealous of one another.
Stalin interrupted him: “But he’s a master, he’s a master, isn’t he?”
“But that’s not the point,” said Pasternak.
“What is, then?”
Pasternak sensed that Stalin actually wanted to find out if he knew about Mandelstam’s poem. “Why do you keep on about Mandelstam?” asked Pasternak. “I have long wanted to meet you for a serious discussion.”
“What about?” Stalin asked.
“About life and death.”
Stalin hung up.
Pasternak redialed the number, but Stalin’s secretary told him he was busy. (Perhaps, or just as likely exasperated.) The OGPU allowed Mandelstam to move to Voronezh, about three hundred mile
s south of the capital, but decreed that he was barred from living in Moscow, Leningrad, as Petrograd had been renamed, and ten other major cities. Word of Pasternak’s conversation with Stalin raced through Moscow, and some thought Pasternak lost his nerve and didn’t defend his fellow poet with sufficient zeal. But the Mandelstams, when they learned of the call, said they were happy with Pasternak. “He was quite right to say that whether I’m a master or not is beside the point,” said Osip. “Why is Stalin so afraid of a master? It’s like a superstition with him. He thinks we might put a spell on him like shamans.” Pasternak continued to regret that he didn’t get a meeting with Stalin.
“Like many other people in our country, Pasternak was morbidly curious about the recluse in the Kremlin,” according to Nadezhda Mandelstam. “Pasternak still regarded Stalin as the embodiment of the age, of history and the future, and that he simply longed to see this living wonder at close quarters.” And Pasternak felt that he, uniquely, had “something to say to the rulers of Russia, something of immense importance.” Isaiah Berlin, to whom he confessed this sentiment, found it “dark and incoherent.”
The First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers opened on August 17, 1934, and ran through the end of the month with speeches, workshops, and pageantry. The gathering was broadly divided between those who favored strict party control of literary efforts, and liberals who argued for some artistic autonomy. The Soviet Union’s artistic establishment was in almost constant debate over the form of literature, its relationship to the audience, and its duty to the state. These disputes often assumed the bitter character of religious schism—the conservative and heterodox in a running battle for supremacy. In a three-hour address, Bukharin spoke about “Poetry, Poetics, and the Tasks of Poetry Creativity in the USSR.” Among those he singled out for praise was Pasternak. He acknowledged that Pasternak “is a poet remote from current affairs … from the din of battle, from the passions of the struggle.” But he said he had not “only gemmed his work with a whole string of lyrical pearls, but … also given us a number of profoundly sincere revolutionary pieces.” For the champions of populist, committed poetry, this was heresy. Alexei Surkov, a poet, song lyricist, and budding functionary, who would grow to hate Pasternak with all the bitterness of envy, responded in a speech that Pasternak’s art was no model for emerging Soviet poets.
“The immense talent of B. L. Pasternak,” Surkov said, “will never fully reveal itself until he has attached himself fully to the gigantic, rich, and radiant subject matter [offered by] the Revolution; and he will become a great poet only when he has organically absorbed the Revolution into himself.”
Stalin eventually weighed in, declaring in December 1935 that Vladimir Mayakovsky, dead by his own hand since 1930, “was and remains the best and most talented poet of our epoch.” The pronouncement led Pasternak to write to thank Stalin: “Your lines about him had a saving effect on me. Of late, under the influence of the West, [people] have been inflating [my significance] terribly and according [me] exaggerated significance (it even made me ill): they began suspecting serious artistic power in me. Now, since you have put Mayakovsky in first place, this suspicion has been lifted from me, and with a light heart I can live and work as before, in modest silence, with the surprises and mysteries without which I would not love life.
“In the name of this mysteriousness, fervently loving and devoted to you. B. Pasternak.”
The Leader scribbled on it: “My archive. I Stalin.”
As the literary scholar Grigori Vinokur, who knew Pasternak, said: “I am never sure where modesty ends and supreme self-esteem begins.”
Pasternak would, in the New Year’s Day 1936 edition of Izvestiya, publish two poems that lauded Stalin as the “Genius of Action,” and he expressed a vague desire for some “mutual awareness.” Pasternak later characterized these adulatory lines as “a sincere and one of the most intense of my endeavors—and the last in that period—to think the thoughts of the era, and to live in tune with it.”
In 1936, Stalin began a series of show trials, macabre pieces of theater that would over the next two years mow down the old revolutionary leadership—among them Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov, and, in 1938, Bukharin. “Koba, why is my death necessary for you?” Bukharin asked Stalin in a last note. He was shot in a prison in Oryol on March 15, 1938. Across the Soviet Union, there were waves upon waves of arrests and executions in the ranks of the party, the military, the bureaucracy, and the intelligentsia. Close to a quarter of a million people were killed because they were members of national minorities deemed a threat to state security. The country was in the grip of a deranged, pitiless slaughter. With each torture session, the enemies of the state grew exponentially. In 1937 and 1938, Stalin personally signed lists of names for execution comprising 40,000 people, according to Robert Conquest, a historian of the Great Terror. He notes that on one day, on December 12, 1937, Stalin approved 3,167 death sentences. And Stalin only dealt with middle- and higher-ranking officials, and well-known individuals. Across the country, the system’s lower tiers—the regional bosses—were engaged in their own paroxysms of execution to please Moscow. Feverish denunciation became an integral part of the political culture at all levels of society. Citizens felt compelled to name enemies, or be named.
In Pravda, on August 21, 1936, a letter appeared from sixteen writers under the headline “Wipe Them from the Face of the Earth.” It called for the execution of sixteen defendants in the first major show trial, including Grigori Zinoviev, the former head of the Communist International, and Lev Kamenev, who was the acting chairman of the Politburo during Lenin’s last days. Pasternak had refused to sign, but the writers’ union added his name without informing him. He learned of the addition only at the last minute and came under heavy pressure to let it stand, which he did. His wife, Zinaida, backed his decision, regarding any other choice as suicidal. But Pasternak was ashamed of his failure to strike his name. All sixteen defendants were found guilty of being part of a Trotskyist conspiracy to assassinate Stalin, and they were shot in the bowels of the Lubyanka. Anatoli Tarasenkov, an editor of the journal Znamya, wrote Pasternak a letter about the incident, to which he didn’t respond. When Tarasenkov confronted Pasternak, the poet was evasive, and relations between the two ruptured. In the future, Pasternak decided, he would not allow himself to be compromised.
The sense of choking fear was all-powerful. Ordinary things struck strange notes. Pasternak’s cousin Olga Freidenberg recalled how “every evening radio broadcasts telling about the bloody and basely conceived trial would be followed by the playing of gay folk dances—the kamarinskaya or the hopak.”
“My soul has never recovered from the trauma of the prisonlike knell of the Kremlin chimes striking the midnight hour,” she wrote in her diary. “We had no radio, but from the neighbor’s room it came booming forth, cudgeling my brains and bones. The midnight chimes sounded particularly sinister when they followed on the terrible words ‘The sentence has been carried out.’ ”
Even though Pasternak’s signature ended up on the letter to Pravda, his reluctance to append his name marked him as suspect, and he came under increasing ideological attack from the purveyors of a literary credo. Vladimir Stavsky, a writers’ union official and enthusiastic denouncer, accused Pasternak of “slandering the Soviet people” in some poems about Georgia. Pasternak later wrote of his own disillusionment: “Everything snapped inside me, and my attempt to be at one with the age turned into opposition, which I did not conceal. I took refuge in translation. My own creative work came to an end.”
In a series of defiant gestures, Pasternak put himself at great risk. When Bukharin was placed under house arrest in early 1937, Pasternak sent a note—sure to be read by others—to his Kremlin apartment to say, “No forces will convince me of your treachery.” Bukharin, a dead man walking, wept at the expression of support, and said, “He has written this against himself.” In the 1937 file of the poet Benedikt Livshits, who was summarily executed as an enemy o
f the people, Pasternak’s name is on a list of writers who were possibly being considered as targets for arrest.
In June 1937, Pasternak was asked to sign a petition supporting the death penalty for a group of military defendants, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky. When an official arrived at his dacha in Peredelkino, he ran him off, shouting, “I know nothing about them, I don’t give them life and I have no right to take it away!” The refusal was followed by further pressure from a delegation from the writers’ union led by the odious Stavsky, who screamed at and threatened Pasternak. Zinaida, who was pregnant, beseeched him to sign. “She threw herself at my feet begging me not to destroy her and the child,” Pasternak said. “But there was no arguing with me.” He said he wrote to Stalin to say that he was brought up with “Tolstoyan convictions,” adding, “I did not consider I was entitled to sit in judgment over the life and death of others.” He then said he went to bed and fell into a blissful sleep: “This always happens after I have taken some irrevocable step.” Stavsky was probably more concerned about his own failure to bring Pasternak to heel than about the poet’s actual stance. When the letter of condemnation appeared the next day, Pasternak’s signature had been affixed. He was furious but safe.
Pasternak could not explain his own survival. “In those awful bloody years, anyone could have been arrested,” he recalled. “We were shuffled like a deck of cards.” That he lived left him with a fear that some might believe he had somehow colluded to save himself. “He seemed afraid that his mere survival might be attributed to some unworthy effort to placate the authorities, some squalid compromise of his integrity to escape persecution. He kept returning to this point, and went to absurd lengths to deny that he was capable of conduct of which no one who knew him could begin to conceive him to be guilty,” wrote Isaiah Berlin. There was no apparent logic to the killing. Ilya Ehrenburg asked, “Why, for example, did Stalin spare Pasternak who took his own independent line, but destroy [the journalist Mikhail] Koltsov who honorably carried out every task entrusted to him?”
