Natasha's Dance (83 page)

    During that same month Akhmatova received an English visitor. In

    1945 Isaiah Berlin had just arrived as First Secretary of the British Embassy in Moscow. Born in Riga in 1909, the son of a Russian-Jewish timber merchant, Berlin had moved in 1916 with his family to Petersburg, where he had witnessed the February Revolution. In 1919 his family returned to Latvia, then emigrated to England. By the time of his appointment to the Moscow embassy Berlin was already established as a leading scholar for his 1939 book on Marx. During a visit to Leningrad, Berlin was browsing in the Writers’ Bookshop on the Nevsky Prospekt when he ‘fell into casual conversation with someone who was turning over the leaves of a book of poems’.
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That someone turned out to be the well-known literary critic Vladimir Orlov, who told Berlin that Akhmatova was still alive and residing in the Fountain House, a stone’s throw away. Orlov made a telephone call and at three o’clock that afternoon he and Berlin climbed the stairs to Akhmatova’s apartment.

    It was very barely furnished - virtually everything in it had, I gathered, been taken away - looted or sold - during the siege; there was a small table, three or four chairs, a wooden chest, a sofa and, above the unlit stove, a drawing by Modigliani. A stately, grey-haired lady, a white shawl draped about her shoulders, slowly rose to greet us. Anna Andreevna Akhmatova was immensely dignified, with unhurried gestures, a noble head, beautiful, somewhat severe features, and an expression of immense sadness.
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    After conversing for a while, Berlin suddenly heard someone shouting his name outside. It was Randolph Churchill, Winston’s son, whom Berlin had known as an undergraduate at Oxford and who had come to Russia as a journalist. Churchill needed an interpreter and, hearing that Berlin was in the city, had tracked him down to the Fountain House. But since he did not know the exact location of Akhmatova’s apartment he ‘adopted a method which had served him well during his days in Christ Church’. Berlin rushed downstairs and left with Churchill, whose presence might be dangerous for Akhmatova. But he returned that evening and spent the night in conversation with Akhmatova - who, perhaps, fell in love with him. They spoke about Russian literature, about her loneliness and isolation, and about her friends from the vanished world of Petersburg before the Revolution,

    some of whom he had since met as emigres abroad. In her eyes, Berlin was a messenger between the two Russias which had been split apart in 1917. Through him she was able to return to the European Russia of St Petersburg - a city from which she felt she had lived apart as an ‘internal exile’ in Leningrad. In the cycle
Cinque,
among the most beautiful poems she ever wrote, Akhmatova evokes in sacred terms the feeling of connection she felt with her English visitor.

    Sounds die away in the ether,

    And darkness overtakes the dusk.

    In a world become mute for all time,

    There are only two voices: yours and mine.

    And to the almost bell-like sound

    Of the wind from invisible Lake Ladoga,

    That late-night dialogue turned into

    The delicate shimmer of interlaced rainbows.
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    ’So our nun now receives visits from foreign spies,’ Stalin remarked, or so it is alleged, when he was told of Berlin’s visit to the Fountain House. The notion that Berlin was a spy was absurd, but at that time, when the Cold War was starting and Stalin’s paranoia had reached extreme proportions, anyone who worked for a Western embassy was automatically considered one. The NKVD stepped up its surveillance of the Fountain House, with two new agents at the main entrance to check specifically on visitors to Akhmatova and listening devices planted clumsily in holes drilled into the walls and ceiling of her apartment. The holes left little heaps of plaster on the floor, one of which Akhmatova kept intact as a warning to her guests.
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Then, in August 1946, Akhmatova was attacked in a decree by the Central Committee which censored two journals for publishing her work. A week later Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s chief of ideology, announced her expulsion from the Writers’ Union, delivering a vicious speech in which he described Akhmatova as a ‘left-over from the old aristocratic culture’ and (in a phrase that had been used by Soviet critics in the past) as a ‘half-nun, half-harlot or rather harlot-nun whose sin is mixed with prayer’.
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    Akhmatova was deprived of her ration card and forced to live off

    food donated by her friends. Lev was barred from taking his degree at the university. In 1949, Lev was re-arrested, tortured into making a confession and sentenced to ten years in a labour camp near Omsk. Akhmatova became dangerously ill. With rumours circulating of her own arrest, she burned all her manuscripts at the Fountain House. Among them was the prose draft of a play about a woman writer who is tried and sentenced to prison by a writers’ tribunal. It was an allegory on her own tormented position. Because the tribunal consciously betrays the freedom of thought for which, as fellow writers, they are meant to stand, its literary bureaucrats are far more terrifying than the state’s police.
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It is a sign of her utter desperation that, in an attempt to secure her son’s release, she even wrote a poem in tribute to Stalin.* Lev was only released, after Stalin’s death, in 1956. Akhmatova believed that the cause of his arrest had been her meeting with Berlin in 1945. During his interrogation Lev was questioned several times about the ‘English spy’ - on one occasion while his head was being smashed against a prison wall.
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She even managed to convince herself (if no one else) that their encounter was the cause of the Cold War. She ‘saw herself and me as world-historical personages chosen by destiny to begin a cosmic conflict’, Berlin wrote.
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    Berlin always blamed himself for the suffering he had caused.
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But his visit to the Fountain House was not the cause of the attack on Akhmatova, nor of Lev’s arrest, though it served as a pretext for both. The Central Committee decree was the beginning of a new onslaught on the freedom of the artist - the last refuge of freedom in the Soviet Union - and Akhmatova was the obvious place to start. For the intelligentsia she was the living symbol of a spirit which the regime could neither destroy nor control: the spirit of endurance and human dignity that had given them the strength to survive the Terror and the war. Zoshchenko believed that the decree had been passed after Stalin had been told of a literary evening at the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow during 1944 at which Akhmatova had received an ovation from a 3,000-strong audience. ‘Who organized this standing ovation?’ Stalin was said to have asked - a question so in keeping with his character that nobody could possibly have made it up.
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    * She later requested that it be omitted from her collected works.

    Attacked by the same decree as Akhmatova was Mikhail Zoshch-enko. Like Akhmatova, he was based in Leningrad, a city whose spiritual autonomy made Stalin suspicious. The suppression of these two writers was a way of demonstrating to the Leningrad intelligentsia its place in society. Zoshchenko was the last of the satirists -Mayakov-sky, Zamyatin and Bulgakov had all perished - and a major thorn in Stalin’s side. The immediate cause of the attack was a children’s story, ‘Adventures of a Monkey’, published in
Zvezda
(one of the journals censured in the decree) in 1946, in which a monkey that has escaped from the zoo is retrained as a human being. But Stalin had been irritated by Zoshchenko’s stories for some years. He recognized himself in the figure of the sentry in ‘Lenin and the Guard’ (1939), in which Zoshchenko portrays a rude and impatient ‘southern type’ (Stalin was from Georgia) with a moustache, whom Lenin treats like a little boy.
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Stalin never forgot insults such as this. He took a personal interest in the persecution of Zoshchenko, whom he regarded as a ‘parasite’, a writer without positive political beliefs whose cynicism threatened to corrupt society. Zhdanov used the same terms in his vicious speech which followed the decree. Barred from publication, Zoshchenko was forced to work as a translator and to resume his first career as a shoemaker, until Stalin’s death in 1953, when he was re-admitted to the Writers’ Union. But by this stage Zoshchenko had fallen into such a deep depression that he produced no major writings before his death in 1958.

    The attack against Akhmatova and Zoshchenko was soon followed by a series of decrees in which a rigid Party line was laid down by Zhdanov for all the other arts. The influence of Zhdanov was so dominant that the post-war period became known as the
Zhdanovsh-china
(‘Zhdanov’s reign’). Even though he died in 1948, his cultural policies remained in force until (and in some ways long after) the Khrushchev thaw. Zhdanov’s ideology reflected the Soviet trium-phalism which had emerged in the communist elites following the victory against Hitler and the military conquest of eastern Europe in 1945. The Cold War led to renewed calls for iron discipline in cultural affairs. The terror of the state was now principally directed at the intelligentsia, its purpose being to impose an Orwellian conformity to

    the Party’s ideology on all the arts and sciences. Zhdanov launched a

    series of violent attacks against ‘decadent Western influences’. He led a new campaign against the ‘formalists’, and a blacklist of composers (including Shostakovich, Khachaturian and Prokofiev), who were charged with writing music that was ‘alien to the Soviet people and its artistic taste’, was published by the Central Committee in February 1948.
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For the composers named it meant the sudden loss of jobs, cancellation of performances and their virtual disappearance from the Soviet repertoire. The declared aim of this new purge was to seal off Soviet culture from the West. Tikhon Khrennikov, the Zhdanovite hardliner at the head of the Composers’ Union, stamped out any signs of foreign or modernist (especially Stravinsky’s) influence on the Soviet musical establishment. He rigidly enforced the model of Tchaikovsky and the Russian music school of the nineteenth century as the starting point for all composers in the Soviet Union.

    Immense national pride in the cultural and political superiority of Soviet Russia went hand in hand with anti-Western feeling during the Cold War. Absurd claims for Russia’s greatness began to appear in the Soviet press. ‘Throughout its history’, declared
Pravda,
‘the Great Russian people have enriched world technology with outstanding discoveries and inventions.’
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Absurd claims were made for the superiority of Soviet science under the direction of Marxist-Leninist ideology, which led to the promotion of frauds and cranks like the pseudo-geneticist Timofei Lysenko, who claimed to have developed a new strain of wheat that would grow in the Arctic frost. The aeroplane, the steam engine, the radio, the incandescent bulb - there was scarcely an invention or discovery which the Russians did not claim as their own. Cynics even joked that Russia was the homeland of the elephant.*

    This triumphalism also found expression in the architectural style which dominated plans for the reconstruction of Soviet cities after 1945. ‘Soviet Empire’ combined the neoclassical and Gothic motifs of the Russian Empire style that had flourished in the wake of 1812 with the monumental structures that trumpeted the magnificence of

    * Andrei Sakharov records a joke in scientific circles at that time. A Soviet delegation attends a conference on elephants and delivers a 4-part report: (1) Classics of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism on Elephants; (z) Russia - the Elephant’s Homeland; (3) The Soviet Elephant: The Best Elephant in the World; and (4) The Belorussian Elephant - Little Brother to the Russian Elephant (A. Sakharov,
Memoirs
(London, 1990), p. 123).

    the Soviet achievement. ‘Stalin’s cathedrals’, the seven elephantine wedding-cake-like structures (such as the Foreign Ministry and the Moscow University ensemble on the Lenin Hills) which shot up around Moscow after 1945, are supreme examples of this ostentatious form. But metro stations, ‘palaces of culture’, cinemas and even circuses were also built in the Soviet Empire style, with massive forms, classical facades and porticoes, and neo-Russian historical motifs. The most striking example is the Moscow metro station Komsomolskaia-Kol’tsevaia, built in 1952. Its huge subterranean ‘Hall of Victory’, conceived as a monument to Russia’s military heroes of the past, was a model of the Russian baroque. Its decorative motifs were largely copied from the Rostov Kremlin Church.
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    Soviet pride in Russian culture knew no bounds in the post-war period. The Russian ballet was pronounced the best, the Russian classics in literature and music the most popular in the world. Russia’s cultural domination was also imposed on the satellite regimes of eastern Europe and on the republics of the Soviet Union, where Russian became a compulsory language in all schools and children were brought up on Russian fairy tales and literature. Soviet ‘folk’ choirs and dancing troupes made frequent tours to eastern Europe, whose own state-sponsored ‘folk’ ensembles (the Lado and the Kolo in Yugoslavia, the Mazowsze in Poland, the Sluk in Czechoslovakia and the Hungarian State Ensemble) sprang up on the Soviet design.
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The stated aim of these ‘folk’ groups was to promote regional and national cultures within the Soviet bloc. Soviet policy, since 1934, had been to foster cultures that were ‘national in form and socialist in content’.
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But these groups had little real connection with the folk culture they were meant to represent. Made up of professionals, they performed a type of song and dance which bore the clear hallmarks of the ersatz folk songs performed by Red Army ensembles, and their national character was reflected only in their outward forms (generic ‘folk costumes’ and melodies).

    The long-term plan of Soviet policy was to channel these ‘folk cultures’ into higher forms of art on the lines set out (or so it was believed) by the Russian nationalists of the nineteenth century. Russian composers were assigned by Moscow to the Central Asian and