Vitaly Shentalinsky's Arrested Voices: Resurrecting the Disappeared Writers of the Soviet Regime
Brumberg, Abraham
ARRESTED VOICES: RESURRECTING THE DISAPPEARED WRITERS OF THE SOVIET REGIME, by Vitaly Shentalinsky. Translated by John Crowfoot. Martin Kessler Books, The Free Press, 1996. 322 pp....
...This is no guarantee that new odious chapters will not be written...
...Vitaly Shentalinsky is a Russian poet, journalist, and historian, now in his early fifties...
...Living for many years in comfort on the Isle of Capri (with Mussolini's tacit agreement), he finally let himself be wooed back to the Soviet Union, where Stalin rewarded him with two country villas and a spacious apartment in Moscow...
...I did this . . . because I have always believed that it is my duty...
...All the disclosures about past crimes, they argued, were a sham, and the liberals' attacks on the authorities threatened the very pillars of the "socialist state...
...During the Soviet period, like so many people of his generation, he became an avid reader of samizdat, or underground, literature...
...Together these two groups mounted a rearguard offensive against the "liberals...
...They are Lev Schwartzmann and Nikolay Shivarov...
...The Chechen slaughters, Boris Yeltsin's lust for power and his penchant for vilifying his enemies, the creation of huge discrepancies between rich and poor parading under the guise of reform, all warn against facile optimism...
...Shentalinsky's project was extremely unwelcome to most of the old party apparatchiki, as well as to literary hacks who craved the sanctuary of approved dogmas and whose taste for "socialist realism" had been richly rewarded by the state...
...The psychology of criminals is always fascinating, and it would be useful to know what motivated them...
...This was not to be pursued, as it had been since Khrushchev's thaw, in piecemeal fashion, subject to the whim of this or that bureaucrat...
...I uncovered a group of anti-Soviets in the Khabarovsk theater...
...The book also discusses the fates of writers who were not arrested, but who were pursued, hounded, and harassed...
...Once he became in effect an apologist for Stalin, he ignored the plight of his fellow writers...
...The author does not tell us, but what he makes clear is that the methods applied against outright political prisoners were applied with equal ferocity against writers and intellectuals...
...The Schwartzmanns and Shivarovs were gone, and few in the secret service wanted to see them come back...
...When he was himself arrested (which happened to the best in his fraternity) he penned an indignant letter to the KGB: I feel it my duty to inform you that for a number of years I have been an agent of the secret police...
...Why did the KGB cooperate with liberal intellectuals in ferreting out the truth about the crimes of the Stalin era...
...Pilnyak, Babel, and Mandelstam knew that they had been hauled into the cellars of Lubianka not because of anything they had done—unless, say, writing a melancholy poem was a punishable deed—but because of who they were...
...references to their works were excised from textbooks and encyclopedias...
...They were whipped, beaten, and tortured into submission, forced to invent confessions of the most phantasmagorical crimes...
...One of them was Boris Dyakov, a short story writer and staunch party member, who in 1936 was recruited as an agent under the pseudonym "Woodpecker...
...25.00...
...Others were executed on the spot...
...in certain cases their identities were known...
...It would be useful to know how many of these executions took place under Lenin—or for that matter after Stalin's demise...
...First, people like Aleksander Yakovlev and Mikhail Gorbachev himself, with the help of "the generation of the sixties"—that is, liberals who laid the groundwork for anti-Stalinism in Khrushchev's time— offered their support, often out of humane and laudable motives...
...What gripped him most were writings by and about once-famous Soviet writers who had been cast into limbo...
...Stalin exploited his reputation to launch the official dogma of "socialist realism" in 1934, and in the third of the three large "Moscow Trials" in 1938, accused the former head of the OGPU*, Genrikh Yagoda, of causing the death of Gorky (and others), for which naturally no evidence was produced...
...In the 1920s, Gorky frequently came to the aid of writers arbitrarily arrested or hounded by the police...
...He revised this figure later, though he offers no final total...
...By the 1970s and 1980s, even within that organization there were those who, as Shentalinsky illustrates, were repelled by the past modus operandi...
...Nonetheless, Shentalinsky and his colleagues did not retreat...
...The knowledge that their colleagues were manufacturing reports about their "treasonable activities" and sending them on to the "proper authorities" was painful to live with...
...On occasion, the old beliefs clashed with the new...
...Viktorov, the head of the veterinary service, was soon arrested and sentenced to be shot...
...More and more writers began to be "rehabilitated," their works brought back into print...
...That the documents had not in the main been destroyed seems to be characteristic of totalitarian bureaucracies: order and punctiliousness were the hallmarks of the Nazi hell as well...
...In fact, Pavlik Morozov, too, has now been removed from the pantheon, part of an ongoing cleansing process...
...His letters and reports are surely among the more sickening documents of a sickening era...
...This is not to blame the victims, of course, for clinging to the hope, however slim, that their fate might be averted...
...It became possible—in time even fashionable— to speak openly of Stalinist repression...
...That KGB informers included writers was widely assumed...
...Similarly, for a time Gorky turned against Stalin...
...Yet another person in whom the secret police took an extraordinary interest was Maxim Gorky, a man whose chameleon-like qualities, fondness for la dolce vita, and vanity proved valuable both to Lenin and to Stalin...
...When he first began his investigations, Shentalinsky believed that two thousand writers had been arrested after 1917 and that "a half thousand of them did not survive...
...Second, since Stalinism's reSUMMER • 1997 -125 Books maining apologists—people like Kunaev—were enemies not only of the liberal intelligentsia but of the whole policy of perestroika and glasnost, a partial alliance between the liberal intelligentsia and the new leadership made sense...
...And so, in time, the vaults of the KGB were cracked, their contents hauled out into the open...
...In some cases, as it turned out, the records seemed to have been tampered with and important evidence suppressed: this, too, had to be spelled out in the final reports...
...Pugnacious journals such as Ogonyok (Little Flame), once a bastion of stultifying rectitude, published revelatory articles...
...It was a tough job, requiring not only physical and psychological stamina but also a knowledge of Russian and Soviet literature and contemporary literary politics...
...Their writings vanished from public libraries and bookstores...
...Their ability to act rationally further declined as some of their fellow writers joined their executioners...
...Chief among them is the novelist and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov, author of The Master and Margarita, written between 1928 and 1940, but published in its entirety only in 1973...
...Moreover, no one forced me to do this work...
...126 • DISSENT...
...Reading the bogus confessions of the OGPU's victims (Babel: "I passed Malraux information about conditions in the collective farms...
...Only by storming the holy of holies, the vaults of the KGB in Lubianka, Moscow, could full justice to the dead writers and to Russian literature be done...
...This meant that all the pertinent papers were to be obtained, scrutinized, and presented to the public, including the records of the arrests, interrogations, and trials...
...Pavlik Morozov was a schoolboy who won instant martyrdom in the 1930s when he denounced his father as a "kulak," and was murdered for it by his uncle and other villagers...
...And so Shentalinsky and a few of his colleagues embarked on a project designed to clear the names of the murdered writers and bring out their suppressed works...
...The result is Arrested Voices, a book that examines the cases of the most famous literary victims of Stalin—people like Isaac Babel, Pavel Florensky, Boris Pilnyak, Osip Mandelstam, the Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels, the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, and the journalist Mikhail Koltsov...
...Once included, he did his best to place obstacles in the commission's path...
...The existence of this book gives rise to another question...
...It is not surprising, therefore, that even after the project was approved by both the KGB and the party, Shentalinsky and the other members of the "Commission for the Literary Heritage of Repressed and Deceased Writers," as it was named, would run into obstructions, evasions, and often outright refusals to meet their demands for information...
...to help the security organs to uncover enemies of the USSR . . . I gathered materials for the press, exposing the wrecking activities of a number of veterinary workers who were responsible for the excessive incidence of plague among cattle and pigs...
...And so on...
...But Arrested Voices is the first book, to my knowledge, that reproduces actual denunciations, often naming their authors...
...Some answers suggest themselves...
...Kunaev and others like him were formidable enemies, with considerable support within the highest echelons of the party apparat...
...One of the most fascinating chapters of Arrested Voices is called "Denunciation as a Literary Genre...
...More's the pity, therefore, that we know so little about these men...
...said one KGB agent who cooperated with Shentalinsky—half menacingly, half in jest...
...Was it simply another job for them, or did they have personal reasons for persecuting writers, poets, and theatrical directors, or were they perhaps members of that peculiar genre—educated hoodlums...
...Stalin seemed to respect Bulgakov, while subjecting him to savage cat-and-mouse games, now promising to let him travel abroad, now withdrawing his promise, encouraging him to think his plays would be staged, only to make it clear that the "encouragement" was but a cruel hoax...
...Thus: I was made to lie face down and then beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap...
...The lists of those executed by Nazi killing staffs are still being examined today...
...For a time, Gorky supported Lenin, then he distanced himself from him, and later again became his follower...
...Finally, the KGB itself...
...The latter was exceedingly diligent in preparing his dossiers and honing his methods of breaking his victims, which is why he got "juicy" cases, such as Babel, Mandelstam, and Platonov...
...We shall not surrender Pavlik Morozov...
...I submitted reports to the NKVD about the anti-Soviet agitation of persons engaged in literature and the arts...
...As for the interrogators, though they cannot always be identified, two men who excelled in "unmasking" the "literary spies" are named by Shentalinsky...
...Yagoda was duly executed...
...124 • DISSENT Books wriggle, twist and squeal like a dog when its master whips it . . . . (This comes from a letter sent by Meyerhold to Molotov, which the latter—need I point out?— ignored...
...It was a gruesome story...
...Why then did they feel that if they would only promise to mend their ways, or write a sycophantic poem about Stalin, they would be spared...
...How many were killed by execution squads alone, however, can be surmised from the volumes—four hundred in all— that were found in 1991, and that carried the names of thousands of people from all walks of life executed between 1921 and 1991, "page after page of surnames marked with a tick in red pencil, 'sentence carried out.' " This grim statistic covers not only the Stalin period, but the whole history of the USSR...
...Pilnyak: "Since 1926 I have remained in contact with Professor Yonekawa, an officer on the [Japanese] General Staff...
...Lying face down on the floor, I discovered that I could *Unified State Political Directorate, later the NKVD or internal security police...
...Still, what Shentalinsky and his colleagues have accomplished is a distinct victory for the forces of decency in a society that has seen so little of it in the past...
...Thousands of writers, many of them ardent supporters of the revolution, had found themselves hounded, excoriated in the press, and forced to criticize or disavow their own writings at debasing meetings staged in front of "fellow writers or indignant workers and peasants...
...Some were arrested and never heard from again...
...If a writer regularly denounced his colleagues in public it could be safely assumed that he did so in secret communications to the OGPU, too...
...The chief editor of the supemationalistic litSUMMER • 1997 • 123 Books erary journal Nash sovremennik, Stanislav Kunaev, demanded to be included in Shentalinsky's commission...
...They sat me on a chair and beat my feet from above, with considerable force...
...The terror machinery was gone, but the language of its one-time partisans was all too familiar...
...We are, by now, inured to stories of the horrors of Stalinist methods, but it comes with a particular shock to read how Isaac Babel, Boris Pilnyak, Nikolay Kluyev, and others were subjected to the "conveyer belt," almost uninterrupted interrogations going on for days and nights...
...How many victims were claimed by Stalin's killing machine...
...A dozen or so years after the emergence of samizdat, Shentalinsky was buoyed by the coming of glasnost and perestroika...
...All three humiliated themselves by kowtowing to Stalin, and were promptly executed anyway...
...Through him I became a Japanese agent"), one finds oneself wondering to what extent the victims were conscious of the gulf between the accusations and their actual behavior...
Vol. 44 • July 1997 • No. 3
