Read The Russian Jerusalem Online
Authors: Elaine Feinstein
Yagoda was born in Rybinsk into a Jewish family and joined the Bolsheviks in 1907. He rose through the ranks of the Cheka to become Deputy to Feliks Dzershinsky and in 1934 Joseph Stalin appointed Yagoda People's Commissar for Internal Affairs. Yagoda oversaw the interrogation process leading to the first Moscow Show Trial and the subsequent execution of former
Soviet leaders Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev in August 1936. However, on 16 September 1936, Yagoda was replaced by Nikolai Yezhov and in March 1937 was arrested and found guilty of treason. After another show trial in March 1938, he was executed by shooting.
A famous Odessa gangster, who was one of the models for Isaac Babel's character Benya Krik.
Yeltsin was declared the first President of the Russian Federation in 1991 after his courage helped to defeat the coup against Gorbachev. By the time he left office, however, Yeltsin was deeply unpopular. His reforms devastated the living standards of much of the population, especially the groups dependent on Soviet-era State subsidies. Hyper-inflation wiped out personal savings. In 2000, he announced his resignation, leaving the presidency in the hands of Vladimir Putin. Yeltsin died in 2007.
Yevtushenko is the best-known poet of the generation which grew up after Stalin's death. He was born in Irkutsk, Siberia. He came to Moscow to study at the Gorky Institute and published poetry which rapidly became hugely popular. He gave readings to audiences whose numbers could fill football stadiums and became a figure on the international stage with his poem âBabiy Yar' (1961) which denounced both Nazi and Russian
anti-Semitism
. He was often outspoken, but both Khrushchev and Brezhnev saw he was a useful ambassador for Socialism and he was allowed to travel abroad widely. He sometimes took risks for his friends: the Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn took shelter for a time at his flat. When the Soviet regime collapsed, and sales of all books diminished, he supplemented his income by teaching at the American University of Oklahoma.
Yezhov replaced Yagoda as Head of the Secret Police from 1936 to 1938 during Stalin's greatest purges. He was only five foot tall, had a club foot and a reputation for taking pleasure in cruelty.
Andrei Zhdanov was born in Mariupol, Ukraine. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1915 and became a close associate of Joseph Stalin. After the assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934, Stalin appointed Zhdanov as Governor of Leningrad. In this post he played an important role in the great purges that took place in the Communist Party between 1934 and 1941. After the war, he led the purge of non-conformist artists and intellectuals. Following his carefully worded decree in 1946, the Executive Committee expelled Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko from the Union of Soviet Writers. He died in 1948.
1903 | Pogrom in Kishinyov. |
1905 | A peaceful demonstration of poor men and women, some with children, and led by the Russian rthodox priest Father Gapon, presents a petition at the Winter Palace. They are fired on, and many killed. This sparks revolts across Russia, which are put down with great cruelty. |
1914 | First World War breaks out. In an initial wave of patriotism, St Petersburg is re-named Petrograd, to sound less Germanic. |
1915â16 | Great Russian losses at the Front, and many soldiers desert. |
1917 | After demonstrations, strikes and food riots, the February Revolution ousts Tsar Nicholas II and a Provisional Government is installed. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin returns to Russia travelling through Germany in a closed train. Â Â Â The October Revolution by Bolsheviks, masterminded by Lenin, overthrows the rovisional Government. Russia makes a separate peace with Germany. |
1918 | Civil War breaks out between Bolshevik and White armies. There is famine in Moscow and Petrograd and atrocities are committed by both sides in the Ukraine, Belorussia and Poland. Tsar Nicholas and his family are murdered in Yekaterinburg. Lenin survives an attempted assassination. |
1921 | Nikolai Gumilyov is accused of conspiracy and executed by Bolsheviks. |
1922 | The Civil War ends in Bolshevik victory. The White Army disperses. Tsvetaeva travels to Prague to join her husband Efron. |
1924 | Death of Lenin. Joseph Stalin uses his position as General Secretary of the party to take over the leadership. Petrograd becomes Leningrad. |
1928 | Leon Trotsky, a Jewish intellectual and Stalin's rival, is banished to Kazakhstan, then departed from the Soviet Union. |
1929 | Nikolai Bukharin is made Editor of Izvestia (âNews'). Stalin consolidates his position. |
1934 | The murder of Sergei Kirov, supposedly Stalin' s good friend, becomes the occasion for the beginning of Stalin's Great Terror. Mandelstam is arrested. Stalin telephones Pasternak to ask whether Mandelstam is a poet of genius. Yagoda is appointed People's Commissar for Internal Affairs. Akhmatova's son Lev is arrested. |
1936 | Stalin's former colleagues Zinoviev and Kamenev are interrogated, publicly tried and executed. Yagoda is replaced by Yezhov. A civil War breaks out in Spain, after an attempt by General Franco and the army to overthrow the Republican Government. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy support Franco. Maxim Gorky dies. |
1937 | Yagoda is arrested. In France, Sergei Efron is exposed as a Soviet agent and flees to Russia. |
1938 | Yagoda is tried and executed. Lavrenti Beria takes over his post. Mandelstam is arrested for the second time in May. He dies in a prison camp near Vladivostock in December. |
1939 | Tsvetaeva, ostracised by her fellow émigrés in Paris, returns with her son to Russia to join her husband and her daughter Alya. The Nazi Soviet pact, which dismays many Communist supporters in the rest of Europe, is agreed in August. In September, Hitler invades Poland, Russia occupies Eastern Poland, and the Second World War breaks out.    Germans invade and conquer France. Ilya Ehrenburg returns to Russia from Paris. The London Blitz begins. |
1941 | Germany invades Russia with great brutality, and lays siege to Leningrad. Akhmatova is evacuated from Leningrad; first to Chistopol, then to Tashkent. Isolated from her fellow writers, Tsvetaeva hangs herself in Yelabuga. In September, the Germans take Kiev, and begin to shoot civilians â mainly Jews but also Ukrainians, Gypsies and Prisoners of War. Their bodies are thrown into the ravine of Babiy Yar. |
1942â3 | Soviet armies fight the invaders with great courage and huge losses. The tide of the war begins to turn in favour of the Russians. |
1945 | At a meeting in Yalta in the Crimea, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin determine the shape of Europe after the war. Victory over Germany leaves the whole of Eastern Europe, including Poland, in Russian hands. |
1946 | Zhdanov's decree forces Akhmatova out of the Writers' Union. |
1948 | The UN Security Council creates the State of Israel. |
1953 | A number of Jewish doctors are accused of planning to murder prominent Soviet Leaders in what becomes known as the Doctors' Plot. Stalin is making arrangements to transfer all citizens of Jewish nationality to the Far East. Â Â Â Death of Stalin. |
1956 | Khrushchev denounces Stalin's crimes at Twentieth Party Congress. Ehrenburg publishes his novel The Thaw . There is an uprising in Hungary which is put down with great severity. |
1957 | Pasternak's Dr Zhivago is published in Italy, and brings him worldwide fame. |
1958 | Nobel Prize offered to Pasternak, citing his poetry. |
1960 | Death of Pasternak. |
1961 | Yevgeny Yevtushenko writes his poem âBabiy Yar' which expresses his horror at the massacre, and also at continuing anti-Semitism. |
1964 | Leonid Brezhnev succeeds Khrushchev, and tries to re-establish more central control. Trial of Joseph Brodsky. |
1972 | Joseph Brodsky deported from Soviet Union. |
1975 | Elaine Feinstein's first visit to Russia. |
1978 | Elaine Feinstein visits Russia as a guest of GB/USSR and the Writers' Union. |
1982 | Yuri Andropov rises from Head of the KGB to become first Secretary of the Party. He dies of kidney failure in 1984. |
1985 | Gorbachev succeeds Andropov as General Secretary of the Party, and institutes reforms to the Soviet system. Joseph Brodsky is awarded Nobel Prize. |
1989 | The Berlin Wall falls, and the Soviet Empire begins to collapse. |
1991 | A group of hard-line Communists attempt a military coup, which fails when the soldiers are unwilling to fire on the citizens of Moscow, who link hands against them. The Soviet Union is formally dissolved in December. Â Â Â Boris Yeltsin becomes the new leader of the Russian Federation. Â Â Â Elaine Feinstein visits Russia. |
1998 | Elaine Feinstein visits Russia while researching her biography of Pushkin. Â Â Â The Russian Federation is in economic crisis, with many salaries unpaid and savings destroyed by hyperinflation. |
1999 | Boris Yeltsin resigns at the end of December, and leaves the presidency in the hands of Vladimir Putin. |
2003 | Elaine Feinstein visits Russia while researching her biography of Akhmatova. |
2005 | Elaine Feinstein visits Russia and the Ukraine. |
Â
Â
Daylight
Gold
Selected Poems
Collected Poems and Translations
Talking to the Dead
Â
As translator
Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva
Three Russian Poets:
Margarita Aliger, Yunna Moritz, Bella Akhmadulina
Â
As editor
After Pushkin
E
LAINE
F
EINSTEIN
was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She has worked as a university lecturer, a subeditor, and a freelance journalist. Since 1980, when she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she has lived as a full-time writer. In 1990, she received a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, and was given an Honorary D.Litt from the University of Leicester. Her versions of the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva â for which she received three translation awards from the Arts Council â were first published in 1971. She has written fourteen novels, many radio plays, television dramas, and five biographies, including the critically acclaimed
A Captive Lion: the Life of Marina Tsvetaeva
(1987) and
Pushkin
(1998).
Ted Hughes
:
The Life of a Poet
(2001), was shortlisted for the biennial Marsh Biography Prize. Her biography of Anna Akhmatova,
Anna of all the Russias
was published in 2005. Elaine Feinstein has travelled extensively, not only to read her work at festivals across the world, but to be Writer in Residence for the British Council, first in Singapore, and then in Tromsø, Norway. She was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at Bellagio in 1998. Her poems have been widely anthologised. Her
Collected Poems and Translations
(2002) was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. She has served as a judge for the Gregory Awards, the Independent Foreign Fiction Award, the Costa Poetry Prize and the Rossica Award for Literature translated from Russian, and in 1995 was chairman of the judges for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
First published in 2008
by Carcanet Press Ltd,
Alliance House,
30 Cross Street,
Manchester M2 7AQ
This ebook edition first published in 2011
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© Elaine Feinstein, 2008
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Epub ISBN 978â1â84777â784â3
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