The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  And yet, despite this effort at setting things right, Simonov then refused to show compassion for Zoshchenko. In 1954, a group of English students came to Leningrad and requested a meeting with Akhmatova and Zoshchenko. The meeting was attended by several Party members from the Writers’ Union in Leningrad. The foolish students, who made their anti-Soviet feelings clear, asked Akhmatova and Zoshchenko for their opinion of the Central Committee decree of August 1946. Akhmatova replied that the decree had been correct. She was no doubt frightened of the consequences of saying otherwise. But Zoshchenko was less careful. He replied that the decree had been unjust, and he violently rejected the accusations of cowardice against himself. The Party leadership of the Writers’ Union immediately accused Zoshchenko of ‘anti-patriotic behaviour’, and sent a delegation headed by Simonov to Leningrad to ‘work him over’. In a heart-rending speech of self-defence that bordered on hysteria, Zoshchenko declared that his writing life was finished, that he had been destroyed, and he pleaded with his accusers to let him die in peace. Simonov rejected Zoshchenko’s pleas and went after him in the manner of a prosecutor at a purge meeting. ‘Comrade Zoshchenko is appealing to our feelings of compassion, but he has learned nothing, and he ought to be ashamed,’ Simonov declared, referring once again to his war record and his ‘anti-patriotic’ conduct after 1945.54

  The attacks against Akhmatova and Zoshchenko were soon followed by a series of repressive measures against ‘anti-Soviet elements’ in all the arts and sciences. The State Museum of Modern Western Art was closed down. A campaign against ‘formalism’ and other ‘decadent Western influences’ in Soviet music led to the official blacklisting of several composers (including Shostakovich, Khachaturian and Prokofiev) charged with writing music that was ‘alien to the Soviet people and its artistic taste’. In January 1947, the Politburo issued a decree against a History of European Philosophy (1946) by G. F. Aleksandrov, the head of Agitprop (the Central Committee’s Department of Agitation and Propaganda), accusing the book of having undervalued the Russian contribution to the Western philosophical tradition. Aleksandrov was soon removed from his post. Later that year, in July 1947, the Central Committee published an ominous letter censuring the scientists Nina Kliueva and her husband Grigorii Roskin for ‘obeisances and servility before foreign and reactionary bourgeois Western culture unworthy of our people’. The scientists had been accused of giving information about their cancer research to the Americans during a tour of the USA in 1946. On their return they were dragged before an ‘honour court’, a newly founded institution to examine acts of an anti-patriotic nature in the Soviet establishment, where they were made to answer hostile questions before 800 spectators.55

  As the Cold War intensified, fear of foreigners took hold of society. The American journalist Harrison Salisbury recalls returning to Moscow as a foreign correspondent in 1949. None of the Russians he had known from his previous stay in 1944 would acknowledge him. He wrote to his old acquaintances Ehrenburg and Simonov, but not even they replied to him. In 1944, it seemed to Salisbury, the country had been poor, but, compared with the 1930s, there was a new mood of freedom and a buoyant atmosphere that arose from the people’s hopes for victory. By contrast, in 1949 the country had reverted to a state of fear, and there was a

  complete severance of any kind of ordinary human relations between Russians and foreigners which, in turn, simply reflected the impressive xenophobia of the Soviet government and the degree to which they had made it plain to all Russians that the most certain, if not the quickest, way to obtain a one-way ticket to Siberia or places even more distant lay in having anything to do with a foreigner.

  The briefest of contacts with foreigners could lead to arrest for espionage. The Soviet jails were filled with people who had been on trips abroad. In February 1947, a law was passed to outlaw marriages between Soviet citizens and foreigners. Police kept watch over hotels, restaurants and foreign embassies, on the lookout for Soviet girls who met with foreign men.56

  After the foundation of Israel, in May 1948, and its alignment with the USA in the Cold War, the 2 million Soviet Jews, who had always remained loyal to the Soviet system, were portrayed by the Stalinist regime as a potential fifth column. Despite his personal dislike of Jews, Stalin had been an early supporter of a Jewish state in Palestine, which he had hoped to turn into a Soviet satellite in the Middle East. But as the leadership of the emerging state proved hostile to approaches from the Soviet Union, Stalin became increasingly afraid of pro-Israeli feeling among the Soviet Jews. His fears intensified as a result of Golda Meir’s arrival in Moscow in the autumn of 1948 as the first Israeli ambassador to the USSR. Everywhere she went she was cheered by crowds of Soviet Jews. On her visit to a Moscow synagogue on Yom Kippur (13 October), thousands of people lined the streets, many of them shouting ‘Am Yisroel chai’ (‘The People of Israel live!’) – a traditional affirmation of national renewal to Jews throughout the world but to Stalin a dangerous sign of ‘bourgeois Jewish nationalism’ that subverted the authority of the Soviet state.57

  The enthusiastic reception of Meir prompted Stalin to step up the anti-Jewish campaign that had in fact been underway for many months. In January 1948, Solomon Mikhoels, the director of the Jewish Theatre in Moscow and the leader of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC), was killed in a car accident arranged by the MVD. The JAFC had been established in 1942 to attract Western Jewish aid for the Soviet war effort, but for many of the Soviet Jews who had joined it, among them leading writers, artists, musicians, actors, historians and scientists, its broader aim was to encourage Jewish culture in the USSR. The immediate post-war years were relatively favourable for this goal. In 1946, Mikhoels was awarded the Stalin Prize. Jewish plays were often broadcast on the radio. The JAFC developed a major project to commemorate the Nazi destruction of the Soviet Jews: a collection of documents edited by Vasily Grossman and Ilia Ehrenburg known as The Black Book. Stalin had hoped to use the JAFC to curry favour with the nascent Jewish state in the Middle East. But as it became clear that the new state would more likely be allied to the USA, he changed his attitude. The MGB was instructed to build up a case against the JAFC as an ‘anti-Soviet nationalist organization’. The publication of The Black Book was postponed indefinitely. After the murder of Mikhoels, the Jewish Theatre was closed down. In December 1948, over a hundred JAFC members were arrested, tortured to confess to their ‘anti-Soviet activities’ and executed or sent to labour camps.58

  In the Soviet literary world the assault against the Jews took the form of a campaign against ‘cosmopolitans’. The term was first coined by the nineteenth-century literary critic Vissarion Belinsky to refer to writers (‘rootless cosmopolitans’) who lacked or rejected national character. It reappeared in the war years, when Russian nationalism and anti-Jewish feelings were both on the rise. For example, in November 1943, Fadeyev attacked the Jewish writer Ehrenburg for coming from ‘that circle of the intelligentsia that understands internationalism in a vulgar cosmopolitan sense and fails to overcome the servile admiration of everything foreign’.59 After 1945, the term appeared with increasing regularity in the Soviet literary press.

  The campaign against the ‘cosmopolitans’ began when Fadeyev forwarded a letter he had received from an obscure journalist (Natalia Begicheva) to Stalin on 10 December 1948. Originally written as a denunciation to the MVD, the letter claimed that there was a group of ‘enemies’ at work within the literary establishment, and cited as the leaders of this ‘anti-patriotic group’ seven critics and writers, all but one of them Jewish. Under pressure from Stalin, Fadeyev made a speech in the Writers’ Union on 22 December. He attacked a group of theatre critics, naming four of the six Jews denounced by Begicheva (Altman, Borshchagovsky, Gurvich and Iuzovsky), who, Fadeyev claimed, were ‘trying to discredit our Soviet theatre’. It was a relatively moderate speech: Fadeyev was apparently reluctant to play the role of Stalin’s henchman. Once a decent man, Fadeyev had been reduced to a trembling alcoholic by the moral
compromises he had been forced to make. Stalin kept up the pressure, enlisting Pravda to attack Fadeyev for not being vigilant enough against the ‘cosmopolitans’, and putting rumours out that he was about to be replaced as the leader of the Writers’ Union. Unable to resist any longer, Fadeyev gave his endorsement to an anonymous article in Pravda on 29 January 1949 (‘About One Anti-Patriotic Group’) which, in language strongly reminiscent of the rhetoric of the Great Terror, denounced several theatre critics as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ and accused them of fomenting a ‘bourgeois’ literary conspiracy to sabotage the healthy principles of ‘national pride’ in Soviet literature.60 All the critics named were Jews. The article was almost certainly written by the Party hack and Pravda journalist David Zaslavsky. A former Menshevik and active Zionist until he joined the Bolsheviks in 1921, Zaslavsky had written several hatchet jobs for Stalin to expiate his sins and expedite his rise into the Soviet elite.*

  Fadeyev at the Writers’ Union, 22 December 1948. Far left: Simonov. Next to him: Ehrenburg. The banner under the portrait reads: ‘Glory to the Great Stalin!’

  The Pravda article was soon followed by a series of attacks on ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ in the rest of the Soviet press. Stalinists competed with each other to denounce the ‘anti-patriotic groups’ which they claimed were undermining Soviet poetry, music, art and cinema.61 For the Jews named by these vicious articles, the consequences were harsh. Many lost their jobs, or were expelled from the Party or their union, effectively depriving them of their livelihood. Some were arrested. A few saved themselves by confessing their ‘mistakes’ or by distancing themselves from the ‘rootless cosmopolitans’. Of the theatre critics denounced by Fadeyev, only one man was arrested, Iogann Altman, the victim of an ugly article, filled with hatred and thinly veiled anti-Semitism, in the journal Soviet Art. ‘In the name of the Soviet people, we pronounce that the Altmans of this world pollute Soviet culture like living corpses,’ it declared. ‘We must get rid of their rotten stench to purify the air.’ Altman was denounced in the Writers’ Union by Anatoly Sofronov, a fanatical supporter of the anti-Semitic campaign and a major power in the Union during the long absences of the alcoholic Fadeyev. Expelled from both the Writers’ Union and the Party, Altman was arrested on the night of Stalin’s death in March 1953. Altman and Fadeyev had been good friends for many years. It was Fadeyev who had insisted that he should work with Mikhoels in the Jewish Theatre. ‘He needs an adviser, a commissar: think of it as a Party command!’, Fadeyev had said. When Altman was asked by his interrogators how he came to work with Mikhoels, he said nothing about Fadeyev. He knew that he might save himself by naming the leader of the Writers’ Union, but he did not want to implicate Fadeyev in what was being styled as a ‘Zionist conspiracy’. Undoubtedly, Altman hoped that Fadeyev would respond in kind, would intervene to rescue him. But Fadeyev did nothing. Fadeyev was absent from the meeting at the Writers’ Union when Altman was expelled, and nobody could find him in Moscow (Simonov believed that he had disappeared on a drinking binge to escape his responsibilities). Altman never recovered from Fadeyev’s betrayal. Released from jail in May 1953, he died two years later, a broken man.62

  Simonov too was dragged into the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign. At first he tried to hold a moderate line. If he did not openly protest against the campaign, he also didn’t align himself with Sofronov and the other hardliners. Simonov was not an anti-Semite. As the editor of Novyi mir, he had published several writers of Jewish origin. His first two wives were Jewish; the second, Zhenia Laskina, was a cousin of the writer Boris Laskin, who had been named as an ‘enemy of Soviet literature’ in Begicheva’s original denunciation to the MVD. Simonov’s moderate position irritated the hardliners in the Party and the Writers’ Union. Simonov had many enemies: critics who were jealous of his status as ‘Stalin’s favourite’ which had done so much to promote him, as a young man, to the top of the Soviet establishment; and members of the Central Committee who thought that Stalin’s protection had made Simonov insubordinate to the rest of the Party leadership. To drive a wedge between the writer and Stalin, these hardliners accused Simonov of trying to protect the ‘cosmopolitans’. The most vicious of these accusations came from Viktor Vdovichenko, the editor of Soviet Art. Vdovichenko sent Malenkov a long denunciation, listing more than eighty Jewish names in what he claimed to be a Zionist organization within the Writers’ Union. Much of the denunciation was directed against Simonov. Vdovichenko accused him of protecting Zionists. He pointed to the editorial staff of Novyi mir, which he said included many Jews (‘people without kith or kin’), and singled out for criticism Aleksandr Borshchagovsky, who had been brought by Simonov to Moscow from the Ukraine, where the theatre critic had been in disgrace for criticizing a play by Khrushchev’s favourite writer, Aleksandr Korneichuk. Simonov was fond of Borshchagovsky, ‘a quiet and modest man’, whose literary opinions were indispensable at Novyi mir, according to Natalia Bianki, a member of the editorial staff. ‘Simonov decided almost nothing without him. “Let’s see what Borshchagovsky has to say”, was his frequent comment.’ Vdovichenko claimed that Borshchagovsky had not produced ‘a single work that made him worthy of being on the staff of Novyi mir’, and that his influence at the journal was purely a function of Simonov’s Jewish sympathies. He pointed out that Simonov had been married to a Jew and that he had many Jewish friends.63

  Like Fadeyev, Simonov ultimately gave in to the pressure of the hardliners. He was afraid of losing his position in the Stalinist elite and thought he had to prove his loyalty by joining in the campaign against the Jews. In a letter to the editor of Pravda, he countered the hardliners’ accusations of Judaeophilia by distancing himself from Borshchagovsky and the other Jewish critics he had employed at Novyi mir.64 The Kremlin urged Simonov to expand on the themes of the anonymous Pravda article (‘About One Anti-Patriotic Group’) in a keynote speech in the Writers’ Union. Fadeyev had been reduced to a drunken wreck, and Sofronov was keen to do the job, but Malenkov believed that Simonov would give more authority to the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign precisely because of his well-known moderate stance. Simonov was further pressed by Fadeyev, who warned that Sofronov would give the speech if Simonov refused. A hardline anti-Semite with political ambitions in the Writers’ Union, where he hoped to replace Simonov as the Kremlin’s favourite to succeed Fadeyev, Sofronov was certain to add another dozen names to the existing list of Jewish writers and critics destined for expulsion from the Writers’ Union. Fearful that power would fall into Sofronov’s hands, Simonov agreed to give the speech. He delivered it at the Plenum of the Writers’ Union on 4 February 1949. Simonov’s first wife, the Jewish writer Natalia Sokolova (née Tipot), described in her diary the dreadful atmosphere as he delivered his denunciation of the ‘anti-patriotic group’:

  The speech lasted an hour and a half, then there was a break, and then another session for an hour and a half. People listened, looking tense and guarded, no one spoke except for a rare whispered, ‘Has he named someone new?’… ‘Did you hear?’… ‘Yet another cosmopolitan?’… ‘A new cosmopolitan?’ Some people made a list of all the names, as I did.65

  In later years, Simonov continued to maintain that he had made the speech to keep the extremist Sofronov from taking control of the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign. Although remorseful about his role, Simonov insisted that it had been his aim to moderate the campaign against Jewish writers by taking up the leadership of it himself. This is supported by the memoirs of his friend, the theatre critic Borshchagovsky, who was with Simonov in his Gorky Street apartment when Malenkov phoned to say that Stalin wanted him to make the speech. Putting down the receiver, Simonov ‘looked at me sadly and gazed out of the window’, recalls Borshchagovsky. ‘It took him less than ten minutes to reach his decision.’ Then he said:

  ‘I am going to make the speech, Shura [Aleksandr]. It is better if I do it, and not someone else.’ Having yielded on that point, he looked for some argument to justify his ‘active engagemen
t’, for an honest point of view he could hold to in this dishonest campaign. ‘All this thuggishness (khamstvo) and rudeness we must end. We must learn to argue on a different level, to civilize our language. We have had, and we still have, the problem of the formalists, constructivist apologists, people who want to enslave us to the culture of the West, and we must talk about them.’66

  It is also true that in his speech Simonov attempted to set the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign in a broader political and intellectual context rather than offering up some crude Zionist cabal. In a series of articles for the Soviet press, in which he built on the ideas of his speech of 4 February, Simonov accused the ‘cosmopolitans’ of ‘putting [Jean-Paul] Sartre in the place of Maksim Gorky and the pornography of [Henry] Miller in the place of Tolstoy’.67 The Cold War undoubtedly influenced his thinking on the need to defend the Soviet Union’s ‘national culture’ against the ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ who would sell it into ‘slavery to American imperialism… and the international power of the dollar’. But otherwise there is little evidence that Simonov’s participation was crafted as a civilizing influence on the campaign against the Jews. His language was inflammatory. He called the ‘anti-patriotic group’ a conspiracy of ‘criminals’ and ‘enemies’ of Soviet culture who were not to be mistaken for mere ‘aesthetes’, because they had a ‘militantly bourgeois and reactionary programme’, namely working for the West in the Cold War. He blamed the Jews for bringing many of their problems on themselves. They had, he said, refused to assimilate into Soviet society and had embraced ‘Jewish nationalism’ after 1945. He sacked all the Jews from the editorial staff at Novyi mir. He even wrote to Stalin on behalf of the Writers’ Union, calling for the exclusion from the Union of a long list of inactive writers, all of whom were Jews.68