The Whisperers Read online

  In Ideology and Utopia (1929) the German sociologist Karl Mannheim discussed the tendency of revolutionary Marxists to experience time as a ‘series of strategical points’ along a path to a future paradise, which they perceive as real and tangible. Because this future is a factor in the present and defines the course of history, it gives meaning to everyday realities. In the Soviet Union this idea of time had its origins in the utopian projections of the 1917 Revolution. For the Bolsheviks, October 1917 was the beginning of Year One in a new history of humanity (just as 1789 marked the start of the new world created by the Jacobins). Projecting the present into the future, Soviet propaganda portrayed the Revolution moving forwards (on the ‘march of history’) towards the Communist utopia; it hailed the achievements of the Five Year Plans as proof that this utopia was just over the horizon.71

  The Five Year Plans played a crucial role in this utopian projection. The conception of the Plan was to accelerate the arrival of the socialist future by speeding up the tempo of the whole economy (hence the slogan ‘The Five Year Plan in Four!’). Indeed the Plan was to conquer time itself by subordinating it to the proletarian will. In the capitalist economies of the West work was organized according to a strictly rational division of time. But in the Soviet Union work was structured according to the goals set by the Five Year Plans. Because the achievement of this goal was always imminent, it made sense to ‘storm’ production, to work for a brief but frenzied spell to reach that goal, when it would be possible to rest. The Stalinist economy was based on this ‘storming’ of production to meet the Five Year Plans, just as the system as a whole was based on the idea that present hardship would be rewarded in the Communist utopia. Nikolai Patolichev, a vydvizhenets of the First Five Year Plan who later rose to the Party’s senior ranks, remembers: ‘We Soviet people consciously denied ourselves a lot.’

  We said to ourselves: ‘Today we don’t have things that we really need. Well, so what? We shall have them tomorrow.’ That was the power of our belief in the Party’s cause! Young people of my generation were happy in this belief.72

  Looking back on the 1930s, many people recall a sense of living for the future rather than for the present. The feeling was particularly strong in the generation that had grown up since 1917 – young people, like Patolichev, who were totally immersed in the values and ideals of the Soviet regime. For this generation the Communist utopia was not a distant dream but a tangible reality, just around the corner and soon to arrive. Soviet schoolchildren in the 1920s and 1930s imagined Communism as a transformation of their own immediate reality (cows full of milk, busy factories) rather than in far-off science-fiction terms.73 That was how they had been brought up to regard the Soviet future by Soviet propaganda and by Socialist Realist literature and art. Socialist Realism, as officially defined at the First Congress of the Writers’ Union in 1934, entailed the ‘truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development’. The artist’s role was to portray the world not as it was in the present but as it would become (and was becoming) in the Communist future.

  According to Liudmila Eliashova (born in 1921) and her sister Marksena (1923), this conception of the Communist utopia was widely shared by their friends at school in Leningrad:

  We were all educated in the expectation of a happy future. I remember when my sister broke our favourite porcelain doll. We did not have the money to buy another doll but we went to the department store, where there were dolls on display, and Marksena said: ‘When there is Communism we shall have that doll.’ We pictured Communism as a time, which we would live to see, when everything would be free, and everyone would have the happiest life imaginable. We were glad to be waiting for this beautiful future.74

  Raisa Orlova, who grew up in Moscow in the 1930s, recalls the sense of ‘hurtling towards the future’. It made the present seem unreal:

  I had an unshakeable conviction that my existence between these old walls [the apartment on Tverskaia Street in Moscow where she grew up] was merely a preparation for the real life to come. That life would start in a new and sparkling white house; there I would do exercises in the morning, there the ideal order would reign, there all my heroic achievements would commence. The majority of my contemporaries – whether they lived in tents, dug-outs, communal flats or what were then considered luxurious private apartments – shared the same kind of provisional, rough and ready approach to life. Faster, faster towards the great goal, towards the new life. Everything could and should be changed: the streets, the houses, the cities, the social order, human souls. And it didn’t seem all that difficult. First the enthusiasts would outline the plan on paper. Then they would tear down the old (‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’). Then they would clear the rubble, and in the space that had been cleared they would erect the edifice of the socialist dream. That’s how Russia was being reconstructed. We thought it was possible to do the same with people.75

  Moscow was the building site of this utopia. In the imagination of the Communists, where ‘soon’ and ‘now’ were all confused, Moscow had a legendary status and significance as a symbol of the socialist utopia that was under construction. In this city of fantastic dreams and illusions, a foundation pit was a future housing block, the demolition of a church signalled the appearance of a Palace of Culture. The German Communist Wolfgang Leonhard, who arrived in Moscow with his parents in 1935, describes their confusion when they sought to replace their outdated 1924 map: the new map showed all the improvements which, according to the Master Plan, were destined for completion by 1945. ‘We used to take both town plans with us on our walks,’ Leonhard writes: ‘one showing what Moscow had looked like ten years before, the other showing what it would look like ten years hence.’76

  The speed of change in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s was intoxicating. The illusion that a new world was being created led many people – including a large number of socialist intellectuals in the West – to delude themselves about the Stalinist regime. Nina Kaminskaia, a young law student, continued to believe in the new world even after her father was sacked from his job in a Soviet bank and evidence of a darker reality was mounting. In her memoirs she remembers a song she and her friends would sing, a song of joy at the happy life to come, which symbolized the optimism of their generation and their blindness to the tragedy which their parents were already going through:

  Believing in our country is so easy,

  Breathing in our country is so free:

  Our glorious, beloved Soviet land…

  Our Soviet life is so good and bright

  That children in ages to come

  Will probably cry in their beds at night

  Because they were not born in our lifetime.77

  Members of the Soviet intelligentsia were so swept up by this optimistic atmosphere that they closed their eyes to the horrors perpetrated by the Stalinist regime in the name of progress. Boris Pasternak wrote to Olga Freidenberg, in April 1935:

  The fact is, the longer I live the more firmly I believe in what is being done, despite everything. Much of it strikes one as being savage [yet] the people have never before looked so far ahead, and with such a sense of self-esteem, and with such fine motives, and for such vital and clear-headed reasons.

  Nadezhda Mandelshtam recalls how she and her husband, the poet Osip Mandelshtam, were also sometimes drawn to think this way, fearing momentarily that the Revolution would pass them by if they ‘failed to notice all the great things happening before our eyes’. Osip was arrested in 1934, after he had read out to his friends his seditious poem about Stalin (‘the murderer and peasant-slayer’). As Nadezhda Mandelshtam observed, it was easier to believe in what was being done for the Communist utopia than to insist, as her husband had, on confronting reality: ‘A man who knew that you cannot build the present out of the bricks of the future was bound to resign himself beforehand to his inevitable doom and the prospect of the firing squad.’78

  To accept this vision of the
future entailed adopting certain attitudes that smoothed the way to collusion with the regime. It meant the acceptance of the Party as the source of Truth. For many people this belief involved a constant struggle between the observed truth of existing reality and the higher Revolutionary Truth of the Party. They were forced to live in the margins between these two truths – to acknowledge the failures of the Soviet system while still believing in the promise of a better life to come – something they could only accomplish through a conscious act of political faith. Lev Kopelev, a young Communist who took part in some of the worst excesses against the ‘kulaks’ in 1932–3, recalls his efforts to subordinate his moral judgement (what he called ‘subjective truth’) to the higher moral goals (‘objective truth’) of the Party. Kopelev and his comrades were horrified by what they were doing to the peasantry, but they deferred to the Party: the prospect of retreating from this position, on the basis of what they had been brought up to dismiss as the ‘bourgeois’ ideals of ‘conscience, honour [and] humanitarianism’, filled them with dread. ‘What we feared most,’ recalls Kopelev, ‘was to lose our heads, to fall into doubt or heresy and forfeit our unbounded faith.’79

  Wolfgang Leonhard was similarly conscious of a dual reality. By the time he joined the Komsomol, he had ‘long since realized that reality in the Soviet Union was completely different from the picture presented in Pravda’. His mother had been arrested in 1937; his friends and teachers had all been taken away; and he had been living in an orphanage. But, as he explains to his Western readers, who ‘might find it strange’ to read about his joy on being admitted to the Komsomol,

  Somehow I dissociated these things, and even my personal impressions and experiences, from my fundamental political conviction. It was almost as if there were two separate levels – one of everyday events and experiences, which I found myself criticising; the other that of the great Party line which at this time, despite my hesitations, I still regarded as correct, from the standpoint of general principle.80

  Even at the height of the Great Terror of 1937 – 8 there were many believers who managed to keep their faith. They explained away the mass arrests according to the abstract formula ‘les rubiat – shchepki letiat’ (‘When the forest is cut down the chips will fly’, or ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’).

  Believing in the ‘march towards Communism’ required an acceptance of its human costs. The Party told its followers that they were involved in a life-or-death struggle against ‘capitalist elements’ at home and abroad which would end in the final victory of the Communist utopia. Hitler’s rise to power, in 1933, was a crucial turning-point in this struggle. It was taken as a vindication of Stalin’s theory that the further the Soviet Union advanced towards Communism, the greater its enemies’ resistance would be. The Party hardened its position, forcing sceptics to put aside their doubts and join the struggle against Fascism (or run the risk of being denounced as ‘Fascist hirelings’). From 1933, the purging of the Party was intensified, with closer scrutiny of individual deeds to root out passive members and ‘hidden enemies’. Whole sections of society were targeted as ‘enemies’ and ‘alien elements’, beginning with the remnants of the old nobility and the bourgeoisie in Leningrad, who were arrested and exiled in their thousands following the murder of the city’s Party boss, Sergei Kirov, in December 1934. Any group that was deemed to be a ‘relic of the capitalist past’ (former ‘kulaks’, petty traders, gypsies, prostitutes, criminals, vagrants, beggars and so on) was likely to be purged as an obstacle to the building of a Communist society. Between 1932 and 1936, tens of thousands of these ‘socially harmful elements’ were rounded up by the police and expelled from the towns.81 Most of them were sent to the Gulag.

  4

  In August 1933, a ‘brigade’ of 120 leading Soviet writers went on a boat tour of the White Sea Canal organized by Semyon Firin, the OGPU commander of the labour camps at the canal. The idea of the trip had its origins in a meeting that took place in Maksim Gorky’s Moscow house in October 1932, at which a number of the country’s leading writers discussed the tasks of literature with several Politburo members, including Stalin, and other Party functionaries. In one of the earliest statements of the Socialist Realist doctrine, Gorky called for a heroic literature to match the ‘grand achievements’ of the Five Year Plans, and Stalin, who compared the Soviet writers to ‘engineers of the human soul’, proposed a tour of the canal to inspire them. Everything was organized by OGPU. ‘From the minute we became the guests of the Chekists, complete Communism began for us,’ the writer Aleksandr Avdeyenko later commented ironically. ‘We were given food and drink on demand. We paid nothing. Smoked sausage, cheeses, caviar, fruit, chocolate, wines and cognac – all was in plentiful supply. And this was a year of famine.’82

  After staying at the luxury Astoriia Hotel in Leningrad, the writers went by train to the White Sea Canal, where they inspected dams and locks and visited the cultural centre to watch a theatrical performance put on by the prisoners. From the safety of their ship, they saw convicts working, but were not allowed to talk to them. To many of the writers it was obvious that they were being presented with a sanitized version of camp life. ‘It was evident to me that they were showing us “Potemkin Villages”,’ recalled Tamara Ivanova in 1989. But if the writers had their doubts, few were brave enough to voice them at the time. During the trip the writers had the chance to question Firin, who acted as their guide. According to Avdeyenko, the only writer who asked about the use of forced labour was Dmitry Mirsky – a former prince (Prince Dmitry Sviatopolk-Mirsky) who had fought with the White Army in the Civil War, emigrated to Britain, joined the Communists and returned to the Soviet Union in 1932 because he believed that Stalin’s Russia was ‘going to play an enormous role in world history’, and he wanted to be part of it. Mirsky’s questioning made the other writers uncomfortable. He clearly had his suspicions about the reasons for the secrecy surrounding the construction of the canal. ‘Here at every step there are hidden secrets. Under every dam. Under every lock,’ Mirsky told Avdeyenko, seemingly referring to the corpses buried there. But even Mirsky did not let such doubts interfere with his participation in the publication of a book commissioned by OGPU to celebrate the completion of the canal. Edited by Firin and Gorky, The White Sea Canal was compiled at shock-work speed by thirty-six leading Soviet writers (including Mikhail Zoshchenko, Viktor Shklovsky, Aleksei Tolstoy and Valentin Kataev) together with the artist Aleksandr Rodchenko (who took the photographs). The book was presented ‘as a token of the readiness of Soviet writers to serve the cause of Bolshevism’ to the delegates of the Seventeenth Party Congress in January 1934. Though it was presented as a history of the canal’s construction, the book’s chief theme and propaganda message was the redemptive and liberating influence of physical labour. By taking part in the great collective work of building the canal, criminals and ‘kulaks’, it was claimed, ‘began to feel useful to society’. Through penal labour, they were remade as socialists.83

  The writers had different reasons for colluding in this legitimation of the Gulag. No doubt there were some who believed in the Stalinist ideal of perekovka, the remoulding of the human soul through penal labour. Zoshchenko, for one, wrote a story for The White Sea Canal about a petty thief called Rottenberg who, having lost his way in life, returns to the correct path through penal labour on the canal. As he explained in an article for Literary Leningrad, Zoshchenko believed the factual basis of his tale:

  I was interested in people who had built their lives on idleness, deceit, theft and murder, and I gave all my attention to the theme of their re-education. In truth, I was quite sceptical at first, supposing that this famous reforging was simply the cynical expression of the prisoners’ desire to receive freedom or bonuses. But I must say that I was mistaken on that score. I saw authentic reforging [on the trip to the White Sea Canal]. I saw real pride in the construction workers and noticed a real change in the psychology of many of these comrades (as they may n
ow be called).84

  Gorky was also a believer. He never visited the White Sea Canal. But this was no obstacle to his glowing praise of it in the book commissioned by OGPU (just as ignorance was no obstacle to foreign socialists, like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who also praised the canal as ‘a great engineering feat… a triumph in human regeneration’ in 1935). Having spent the 1920s in the West, Gorky had returned to the Soviet Union on the first of several summer trips in 1928 and had settled there for good in 1931. The ‘great Soviet writer’ was showered with honours; he was given as his residence the famous Riabushinsky mansion in Moscow; two large dachas; private servants (who turned out to be OGPU spies); and supplies of special foods from the same police department that catered for Stalin. So perhaps it is not surprising that Gorky failed to see the immense human suffering that lay behind the ‘grand achievements’ of the Five Year Plan. In the summer of 1929, Gorky had visited the Solovetsky labour camp. The writer was so impressed by what he was shown by his OGPU guides that he wrote an article in which he claimed that many of the prisoners had been reformed by their labour in the camp and loved their work so much that they wanted to remain on the island after the completion of their sentences. ‘The conclusion is obvious to me,’ Gorky wrote: ‘we need more camps like Solovetsky.’85

  Other writers went on the trip from curiosity, as Mirsky no doubt did. Or because they were afraid of the consequences if, like the writer Mikhail Bulgakov, they refused to have anything to do with the project. Viktor Shklovsky, the literary theorist and novelist whose brother was imprisoned in a labour camp, did not join the writers’ brigade, but he made a separate trip to the White Sea Canal and promoted the idea of perekovka, not just in the OGPU volume but in several other works. He even wrote the screenplay for a propaganda film about the White Sea Canal. It seems unlikely that Shklovsky wrote out of conviction (during his trip to the White Sea Canal he responded to an OGPU officer’s question about how he felt to be at the canal with the quip: ‘Like a live silver fox in a fur store’). In the words of his daughter, it was just ‘the price he had to pay for his brother’s life’. Shklovsky’s brother was released in 1933. But in 1937 he was rearrested and disappeared for ever in the Gulag.86