Stalin and His Hangmen (38 page)

Soviet writers irretrievably abased themselves in 1932 when they took a cruise on a government mission along the White Sea canal, 140 miles from Lake Onega to the White Sea. The canal had been built on Iagoda’s initiative by OGPU’s political prisoners, kulaks and convicts. Even the engineers were prisoners. Iagoda prided himself on the speed and cheapness with which he built this canal – under two years, for a fifth of the budget – which showed Stalin what OGPU might do for the economy. The death toll was well above 100,000. Some 300,000 prisoners – underfed, freezing in winter, tormented by midges in summer – had cut through bogs and granite. There was little reinforcing iron for the concrete; human bones and tree branches were used. All for nothing. The canal was too shallow for ships that could withstand the Arctic Ocean; it was ice-free only for half the year and in any case the canal duplicated an all-weather railway to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk. Before it was finished it was crumbling and has since been reconstructed twice.
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Iagoda saw the White Sea canal as a personal triumph. His brother-in-law Leopold Averbakh, with Semion Firin, deputy chief of the GULAG, and Gorky, led boats laden with Soviet intelligentsia. Averbakh, Firin
and Gorky contributed to a book glorifying OGPU’s humanity and expertise, and the re-education of criminals and subversives by labour. Among the writers who volunteered for, or were cajoled into, this act of prostitution were the ‘Soviet Count’ Aleksei Tolstoi and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko. Prince Dmitri Sviatopolk-Mirsky, recently repatriated from England, and the innovative Victor Shklovsky were two literary critics on the flotilla of ships, and the graphic Hemingway style of the 600-page panegyric to slave labour betrays the latter’s hand. Imprisoned writers like the futurist Igor Terentiev were presented to the tourists as seekers of redemption by labour. Nobody on board could have been fooled. The statistics in
The Stalin White Sea – Baltic Canal
are lies: a figure of 100,000 labourers is given – the number at any one time and a third of those actually used. Fewer than 13,000 of the survivors were freed when the canal was finished.

Only one contribution to this volume can be read without revulsion: Mikhail Zoshchenko wrote ‘History of a Re-forging’, the biography of a con man, Abram Rottenberg, a Jew from Tbilisi. Rottenberg’s cosmopolitan adventures end on the White Sea canal, but unlike other prisoners portrayed Rottenberg is reluctant to redeem himself, and Zoshchenko concedes that he could take up fraud again. Apart from Zoshchenko, who refrained from murderous slogans, every contributor also valiantly called, like Gorky and Stalin, for ‘the enemy to be finished off’.
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The one foreign correspondent who wrote objectively about forced labour, the German journalist Nikolaus Basseches, got short shrift from Stalin. Kaganovich and Molotov, who had ‘like idiots put up with this capitalist shopkeepers’ puppy’, were told ‘to pour filth on the pages of
Pravda
and
Izvestiia
over this capitalist scum, and after a short time chase him out of the USSR.’
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Just one major Russian poet, Nikolai Kliuev, beggared and ostracized, living on the charity of friends and foreigners, wrote the truth about the White Sea canal. The lines only survive because he later quoted them under interrogation by the NKVD in Siberia:

That was the White Sea canal of death

Akimushka dug it,

So did Prov from Vetliuga and Auntie Fiokla.

Great Russia got soaked

To the bones with the red shower

And hid its tears from people,

From others’ eyes in alien bogs

[…]

Russia! Better to be in smoke and soot

Than the blood of canal locks and the lice of brushwood causeways

From Ararat to the Northern seas.

Before 1931, when Stalin still roamed the streets late in the evening, he, Molotov and Voroshilov would stroll over from the Kremlin, sometimes several times a week, to see Gorky. They stayed, eating, drinking and talking, until late at night. A motley group of writers came to these gatherings and many were awed by Stalin’s modest bonhomie. Conspiratorially cautious as ever, Stalin always sat facing the door. He fed the gathering titbits of inner party gossip: ‘Lenin knew he was dying. Once, when we were alone, he asked me to bring him potassium cyanide. “You’re the cruellest man in the party, you can do it,” he said.’ Stalin invited writers to speak their minds.
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‘There will be unity only in the cemetery,’ he told them, but few appreciated how close they were to that cemetery. Like Mao Tse-tung and his slogan ‘Let a thousand flowers bloom’, Stalin wanted to mark out the weeds in his literary garden.

A few writers were emboldened by the relaxed atmosphere. One declared that Politbiuro members should not be portrayed as demigods, that Stalin should be shown with his pockmarks. Another interrupted a toast, declaring that Stalin must be fed up with all this acclaim. Neither survived very long. Korneli Zelinsky noted: ‘When Stalin talks, he plays with a mother-of-pearl penknife… When he laughs, his eyebrows and moustache move apart and something cunning appears… He has caught everything on the radio station of his brain, which operates on all wavelengths… But be on your guard if he is being charming. He has an enormous range of anaesthetics at his disposal.’

While Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov enjoyed the company of writers, and did not mind meeting Menzhinsky, Iagoda and other OGPU agents at Gorky’s, they loathed crossing paths with Bukharin and Kamenev, of whom Gorky was fond. Gorky tried to reconcile them, even forcing Bukharin and Stalin to kiss. Offering his lips for the kiss,
Stalin said: ‘You won’t bite?’ ‘If I bit you,’ said Bukharin, ‘I’d break my teeth; you have iron lips.’
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Gorky persuaded Stalin to give the two opposition leaders a respite before ‘finishing them off’
(dobit,
Stalin’s favourite verb). Bukharin became editor of the government newspaper
Izvestiia,
while Kamenev ran the publishing house Akademiia. Kamenev published memoirs and world classics of a quality and with an objectivity not seen in the Soviet Union before or since. Bukharin made
Izvestiia
as readable a newspaper as censorship and Stalin would permit. From Stalin’s point of view only on Zinoviev was Gorky sound: Gorky never forgave Zinoviev his lust for intellectuals’ blood. In 1935 Zinoviev was in prison awaiting his first trial, accused of ‘moral responsibility’ for Sergei Kirov’s murder. He was allowed to appeal to Gorky:

… to be honest, I have often thought that personally you have never liked me. But a lot of people write to you. So let me too, one of the most unhappy persons in the whole world, turn to you. You are a great artist. You know the human soul. You are a life teacher… I beg you, think hard for a minute what it means for me to be now in a Soviet prison… Of course I realize that the party cannot fail to punish me very severely. But still I fear more than anything ending my days in an asylum for the insane… I end this letter 28 January 1935 in remand prison, and today I’m told I am being taken away… I don’t know where yet. Help, help!
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Gorky did not intercede for Zinoviev, but he did for Kamenev and Bukharin, which disgruntled Stalin. Iagoda was told to isolate Gorky further. Dubious figures were visiting Gorky including Prince Sviatopolk-Mirsky, the literary historian and son of a Tsarist minister who had converted to communism while a lecturer in London. He was denounced to Iagoda as a British agent and only Gorky’s favour delayed his arrest.
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Similarly, the Franco-Russianjournalist Victor Serge, arrested for protests against repressions, was released when Gorky and Romain Rolland combined forces.

Gorky’s glorification of Stalin’s terror – ‘If the enemy doesn’t surrender he is to be annihilated’ – was a betrayal but he was able to rescue some. He had Chinese herbs brought by diplomatic courier to treat an illness that was apparently threatening Sholokhov’s life and commended him
to Stalin’s protection; Evgeni Zamiatin, unable to publish in the USSR, was allowed to leave for France; the Moscow Arts Theatre was ordered to employ Mikhail Bulgakov, and OGPU had to return to Bulgakov the notebooks it had impounded.
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Even Vladimir Zazubrin, the celebrator of Cheka executioners but now in disgrace, was, thanks to Gorky, brought back from Siberia and given a job in publishing (he was shot in 1938). Gorky begged Stalin not to punish the editors who attacked Gorky’s ‘softness’. He lobbied for publishing nineteenth-century Russian classics even when they repudiated communist ideology.
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Stalin now devised an obligatory ideology for all the representative arts, ‘socialist realism’, and in 1932 set up the Union of Writers. Gorky agreed to preside over its first congress in 1934 although, despite his brilliant table talk, he floundered on public platforms. To his credit, Gorky loathed those writers, such as Aleksandr Fadeev and Vladimir Stavsky, whose chief talent was political wrangling and who dominated the new union. Gorky’s price for conducting the first congress was that Stalin should let Bukharin take a leading role in the proceedings.

Gorky sent a draft of a frank opening speech for Stalin’s comments. On 14 August, Kaganovich, an unlikely critic, reported his misgivings to Stalin, who was relaxing in the Caucasus:

As it is, the lecture won’t do. Above all, its construction: three quarters, if not more, is taken up by general historical philosophical reflections, and those are wrong. His ideal is primitive society… Clearly this position is un-Marxist… Soviet literature is almost unmentioned… In view of the seriousness of our alterations and the danger of the lecture going wrong, we (I, Molotov and Voroshilov) went to see him and after a fairly long chat he agreed to introduce corrections and changes. His mood seems to be bad… It’s not just that he started talking about difficulties… but the taste his objections left.
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Gorky was clearly not completely reliable and the congress had to be carefully orchestrated. In August 1934, Kaganovich and Stalin’s Central Committee satrap for the arts Andrei Zhdanov decided which writers should run the union. Of the thirty-three men and one woman nominated for the union presidium, only a handful – Gorky, Aleksei Tolstoi, Mikhail Sholokhov and the Georgian novelist Mikheil Javakhishvili – had any distinction; the rest were party apparatchiks. Fifty-nine writers
of various ethnic affiliations were chosen for the plenum. For Buriat Mongolia, Yakutia and Karelia, Kaganovich and Zhdanov could not suggest anybody. Overall, there were a few real writers – Boris Pasternak, Ilya Ehrenburg, Samuil Marshak (the children’s writer and translator of Burns) and Paolo Iashvili, the Georgian poet – but the majority were either hacks or thugs. Some, like Demian Bedny or Zazubrin, were both.

The union’s self-government was a sham. Iagoda controlled those writers who were OGPU agents and Andrei Zhdanov oversaw the congress. Zhdanov and others nervously listened to Bukharin’s speech but restrained the Stalinist left from howling it down. Foreign delegates including André Malraux were stopped from circulating freely. As the congress began, OGPU found nine copies of an anonymous leaflet addressed to foreign delegates, apparently composed by a group of Soviet writers:

… We Russian writers remind one of prostitutes in a brothel, with just one difference, that they trade their bodies and we trade our souls; just as they have no way out of the brothel, except death by starvation, neither have we… At home you set up various committees to save victims of fascism, you assemble anti-war congresses, you make libraries of books burnt by Hitler, all very well. But why do we not see you acting to save victims of our Soviet fascism, run by Stalin?… Personally we fear that in a year or two the failed seminary student Iosif Jughashvili (Stalin) will not be satisfied by the title of world-class philosopher and will demand, like Nebuchadnezzar, to be called at the very least the ‘sacred bull’. Do you understand the game you’re playing? Or are you, just like us, prostituting your feelings, conscience, duty? But then we shall never forgive you for that, never ever…
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The authors of this manifesto were never identified, nor did any foreign delegate speak of it. OGPU informers summarized participants’ private comments for Stalin’s perusal:

ISAAK BABEL:The congress proceeds as dead as an imperial parade, and nobody abroad believes in it. Our press can inflate its stupid fictions about the delegates’ colossal enthusiasm. But there are foreign correspondents who will shed the right light on this literary requiem. Look at Gorky and Demian Bedny. They hate each other, but they sit at the congress together like turtle doves.

Iagoda and Agranov had unsettling feedback: Malraux had reacted to honours bestowed as ‘a coarse attempt to bribe me’; writers were signing an appeal for the return of Nikolai Kliuev; a parody of Aleksandr Pushkin’s tribute to Gavriil Derzhavin was circulating: ‘Our congress was joyful and bright, / And this day was terrible nice – / Old Bukharin noticed us / And, seeing us off to the coffin, blessed us.’