Victims of Stalin’s years of terror

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32803, 31 December 1971, Page 8

Victims of Stalin’s years of terror

Hope Against Hope. A Memoir. By Nadezhda Mandelstam. Collins. 430 PP(Reviewed by D.C.G.) Though the Soviet authorities have never given any precise details of the dimensions of the greatest skeleton in their cupboard, preferring to deal in the euphemistic generality of “millions of citizens unjustly arrested, imprisoned or shot,” Western scholars have been able to arrive at some sort of consensus as to the total number of victims of Stalin’s great purges of the 19305. As estimated by Robert Conquest in his study, “The Great Terror, they come out thus: arrested, eight to nine million; executed, one million; imprisoned, about eight million (of which, at a conservative estimate, 50 per cent died during imprisonment). In eight years, therefore, some five million people died because Stalin willed it. A total “debit entry” (as Mr Conquest puts it) for the whole of Stalin’s career as dictator, amounts to something like twenty million.

One of these millions of victims was the poet, Osip Mandelstam, who was arrested in 1934, interrogated, and sent into exile for writing a poem denouncing “the Kremlin mountaineer/The murderer and peasant-slayer.” Released

in 1937, at the completion of his sentence, he was re-arrested the following year and sentenced to five years in a forced-labour camp. Happily, he did not long have to endure the terrible conditions endemic in such institutions. By the end of 1938 he was dead. The death certificate sent his brother gave the date of death as December 27, 1938. It is probably not accurate, for officials were given to putting any date that came into their head on such certificates, but it cannot be more than a few months out.

At first sight it is hard to imagine a more unlikely victim of the Stalinist terror than Mandelstam. Gentle, introverted and largely apolitical, he was the totally dedicated poet. Even in his .absorption in his poetry, however, there was danger. One of the leaders of the short-lived (1912-14) Acmeist movement, he won wide popularity during the liberal period of the N.E.P. (New Economic Policy), popularity which reached a peak in 1928, with the publication of his collected poems. With a change in the political climate, however, he fell into official disfavour, and bv 1933 he had become something of the literary “un-person” that Solzhenitsyn today is. Then, in 1934, he was denounced to the N.K.V.D. by a “friend” whose identity Madame Mandelstam clearly knows, but whom she mercifully refrains from naming, presumably because he is still alive.

All sorts of legends surround. the events which followed. The truth is almost stranger than the fictions which for long have obscured it. The essence is that Boris Pasternak received a telephone call one evening from Stalin, who asked why Pasternak had not tried to do anything for his friend and fellow-poet, Mandelstam. When Pasternak tried to explain, Stalin assured him that Mandelstam would not be severely punished, and then asked abruptly, “But he’s a genius, he’s a genius, isn’t he?” To which Pasternak replied, a little elliptically, “But that’s not the point.” and asked to meet Stalin to talk about “life and death.” Stalin did not reply to this, but simply hung up. When Pasternak tried to ring him back, he could reach onlv a secretary. As Stalin said, so it was done. Osip Mandelstam went into exile in Voronezh, together with his wife, under a three year sentence designed to “isolate but preserve.” It was, in the Russia of the thirties, a miracle; a miracle which owed something to the intervention of Nikolai Bukharin, a long-standing friend of Mandelstam’s and still-influential member of the Politburo, but which happened only because, so Madame Mandelstam argues, Stalin felt he could capitalise on the incident. With the heart-warm-ing story of the great man, who loves good poetry and expects friends to stand by each other going around Moscow, Stalin could get on with the business of getting rid of his own

friends and associates amid greater sympathy. Whatever the reason for Stalin’s action, it did give the Mandelstams three further years together, years of happiness despite their financial straits and feeling of oppression. When next Mandelstam was arrested, in May 1938, there was no miracle, just as there was no Bukharin to plead for him, and no longer any desire or need on Stalin’s part to play the beneficent deity. Madame Mandelstam calls her book “A Memoir.” So it is in several senses. First and foremost, of course, it is written to record her memories of her husband, both as a man and (the two were inseparable)' as a poet. Second, it describes, without a trace of selfpraise, her struggle to preserve his memory and his manuscripts. Third, it records, as in its different way Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago does, the death .of the old intelligentsia, of almost the whole generation of writers, artists, philosophers and musicians which found itself rejected and then destroyed by the revolution it initially welcomed.

All of these aims Madame Mandelstam achieves quite magnificently. Her portrait of her husband is an extraordinarily vivid re-creation of a subtle and complex personality. Suffusing it with warmth and love, yet never sentimental or indulgent, she manages to combine objectivity with the special understanding a woman has of the man she loves. Her portrait of the poet is equally remarkable, and her account of the workings of his imagination and of the genesis of particular poems will be intensely interesting to those who love Mandelstam’s poetry. For all her success in depicting the man and the poet, however, it. is in her portrait of an age that Madame Mandelstam’s greatest triumph lies. Reading a scholarly account of the purge era, one finds oneself asking incredulously how such things could have happened. How could Stalin have disposed of almost all the Politburo within five years without provoking them to dispose of him? How could one man successfully terrorise an entire nation, yet at the same time build up a mystique as a beneficent father figure? These and many other questions Madame Mandelstam answers, not sb much by addressing herself to them direcfly (though by the end of the book she has articulated most of the questions westerners are likely to raise about such a subject) as by presenting us with an utterly convincing picture of how it was to live in Russia in the 19305. In particular, Madame Mandelstam shows how Stalin’s tactics fragmented society, separating people from each other out of fear and suspicion, and driving all but the finest of them to put survival ahead of all else. She shows how particularly vulnerable the intelligentsia were, both on account of their work and their personalities, how easily struck at and, for the most part, cowed. For every Akhmatova and Mandelstam, who maintained their artistic integrity, she pan cite (with sympathy and understanding) a host of lesser mortals who capitulated to the intense pressure put upon them and wrote the kind of laudatory rubbish that passed for “proletarian art.” And even Akhmatova and Mandelstam, it should be remembered, were reduced at one point to constructing verses (the terms “composing” and “poetry” should be withheld from such forced labour) in praise of Stalin. So vivid and detailed an account of the blackest period in Soviet history might be expected to make bleak reading, and so it does, in patches. Taken as a whole, however, “Hope Against Hope” (the title involves a pun upon the meaning of Madame Mandelstam’s name, Nadezhda) is strongly affirmative. It is affirmative in its moving recollection of those friends who stood by the doomed Mandelstams: Anna Akhmatova; the critic, Victor Shklovski, and his family; Tatiana Vasilievna, their Kalinin landlady, and her husband; and, most impressive of all, the unnamed textile workers of Strunino, who saved Madame Mandelstam from arrest and gave her money to flee to another district. It is affirmative too, in its portrait of the Mandelstams, living for each day, and rejoicing in small things, such as the passage of the seasons, “a journey,” as Osip Mandelstam said, “that they cannot take from us.”

It is affirmative, finally, in that Madame Mandelstam has won her battle with oblivion over her husband’s

memory as a man and a poet. Thanks to her efforts, and those of devoted friends and relatives, his “voice” is still heard. For reasons undoubtedly associated with the fears of the Soviet leadership about further de-Stalinisa-tioh, the edition of Mandelstam’s poems projected in 1956 still has not appeared, and Madame Mandelstam does not expect it to do so in her lifetime (she is seventy). Yet in a very real sense the “official” rehabilitation of Osip Mandelstam will be a work of supererogation. He is widely read in manuscripts circulating under the “samizdat” system and very greatly admired.

Proof of this was given most memorably in May 1965, when students of the Mechanical Mathematics Department of Moscow University organised, on their own initiative, the first memorial reading of Mandelstam’s poetry to be organised in the Soviet Union. It was at that same reading that Nadezhda Mandelstam was, much against her wishes, introduced to the students by Ilya Ehrenburg. Her presence was greeted with tumultuous applause. Her response was characteristic. She stood, with reluctance, to acknowledge the applause, and said: “Mandelstam wrote, ‘l’m not accustomed yet to panegyrics . . .’ Forget that I’m here. Thank you.” The students could not forget, and neither, reading “Hope Against Hope,” can we. Though she does all she can to efface herself in her memoir of her husband, the personality of Nadezhda Mandelstam is everywhere felt, inseparable from her husband’s. Which is as it should be in this most remarkable book.