The Russian Jerusalem (13 page)

Italic in the text indicates direct quotation from Russian writers.  

Izabella Akhatovna Akhmadulina is a Russian-language poet of Tatar and Italian descent. She is one of the most distinctive voices of her generation, a great beauty, and the first wife of Yevgeny Yevtushenko. She is a member of the Writers' Union, even though she was willing to publish alongside writers in trouble with the Party and always declared her reverence for the work of poets such as Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva, who attracted official disapproval. She now lives with her third husband, Boris Messerer, a theatre designer, in Moscow.  

Akhmatova is an iconic figure in twentieth-century Russian literature. Her lyrics of unhappy love were known across Russia before the First World War. Many men fell in love with her beauty, and even in old age she was surrounded by young men who loved her genius. She was one of the first to understand the brutality of the Soviet regime, when her first husband, Nikolai Gumilyov, was executed by the Bolsheviks in 1921. During the years of Stalin's Terror, she was forbidden to publish, and her only son and her third husband were held in the Gulag to ensure her silence. At a time when every scrap of paper could be used as evidence, she and her friends learned the lyrics of ‘Requiem' by heart before burning them in an ashtray. She was fortunate to outlive Stalin, and in the last years of her life received several honours, including an honorary doctorate from Oxford University.

A learned Hebrew scholar and teacher of the late first and early second century AD. He showed exemplary faith and courage even as he was flayed alive.

A distinguished poet and journalist, born in Odessa. After completing a chemistry degree, she studied at the Gorky Institute for Literature from 1934 to 1937 and became a famous Soviet poet, essayist and journalist. She wrote about the heroism of the Soviet people during the Second World War. Her most celebrated poem, ‘Zoya', is about a young Russian girl killed by the Nazis. There are other more personal themes, however, including the French exile of Marina Tsvetaeva, and her own loneliness.

Aragon was a distinguished French poet, involved in the Dada and Surrealist movements, who joined the French Communist Party. In 1939, he married the Russian writer Elsa Triolet, and the couple worked for the French Underground under the German occupation.

Babel grew up in Nikolaev, close to Odessa. His father paid for violin lessons, hoping his son would prove a prodigy, but Isaac preferred to read French literature and wrote precocious stories in imitation of Guy de Maupassant. Refused entry to Odessa University – because there was a Jewish quota – he graduated from Kiev University in 1915 and then moved to St Petersburg. His first patron was Maxim Gorky, who published Babel's stories in his magazine
Letopis
. He went on to work for the Ukrainian State Publishing House. In the Civil War, he supported the Bolsheviks and rode alongside Field Marshall Budyonny's First Cavalry, well aware of the irony of a Jew riding alongside
Cossacks, who had been their historic enemy. The stories in
Red Cavalry
record the violence and courage he witnessed, the casual murder of Jews in their small villages, and his own inability to bring death to a wounded comrade. His clipped prose has an idiosyncratic purity. His fame rests on
Red Cavalry
and his
Tales of Odessa
, set in the Moldavanka, a colourful district of Odessa filled with many Jews and a few gangsters. He fell silent in the thirties, and in 1939 he was arrested and taken into prison. He was executed in 1941.

In Isaac Babel's stories of Odessa, Benya Krik is the Jewish gangster who commands the greatest respect.

An impressive Soviet poet, though remembered now mainly for her radio broadcasts throughout the siege of Leningrad in the Second World War.

Beria was born into a peasant family in the Abkhazian region of Georgia. He was the Chief of Soviet Police who presided over the last stages of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge of the 1930s. He was most influential during and after the Second World War. After Stalin's death, he was for a short time First Deputy Prime Minister. He was executed on the orders of Khrushchev in 1953.

Brodsky was the only child of a Leningrad Jewish family. His father was a photographer, his mother a teacher. He walked out of school at fifteen, and dedicated himself thereafter to writing poetry whilst doing menial jobs. He was recognised early by Akhmatova as a Russian poet of genius. When he was arrested and charged as a ‘social parasite', his trial aroused international interest. He was condemned to internal exile in Arkangelskoye
in the far north and remained there from 1964 to 1965. In 1972, he was forced to go into exile in Austria. W.H. Auden befriended him there and he was later given a term's Fellowship at Clare Hall in Cambridge, England, before taking up a teaching post at Ann Arbor, Michigan. His English, though idiosyncratic, was excellent, and he wrote essays for the
New York Review of Books
, which also published his poems. America honoured him in many ways: he was given the prestigious MacArthur Award, an Honorary Doctorate at Yale, and elected to the post of American Poet Laureate. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. He married a young wife, Maria Sozzani, in 1990. They had a daughter, Anna Maria Anastasia. Brodsky died in 1996 and is buried in Venice.

Bukharin was involved in revolutionary politics from 1905 onwards. He was taken into prison several times and went into exile, only returning to Russia during the February Revolution. He was a dedicated Bolshevik and after 1925 a loyal supporter of Joseph Stalin. For a time he was Chairman of the Comintern. In 1929, he was deprived of that post but took up the editorship of the key newspaper
Izvestia
(‘News'). From this position he was able to help many writers including those, like Osip Mandelstam, in trouble with the authorities. He remained a supporter of Stalin, but that did not prevent his arrest, torture and trial for treason. He was executed in March 1938.

Bulgakov was born in Kiev, Ukraine and enlisted in the White Army during the Civil War. Out of these experiences, he wrote his great play
Days of the Turbins
, which was, rather surprisingly, much loved by Joseph Stalin. None of his other plays were performed in his lifetime, however, and his novels went unpublished. His desperate letter to Stalin, asking to be allowed to emigrate if he was not allowed to publish, brought an
unexpected phone call from Stalin with the promise of some work in the theatre. His most famous novel is
The Master and Margarita
, in which a devil accompanied by a talking cat fascinates the citizens of Moscow. The eponymous Master is in prison, writing a novel about Jesus Christ; Margarita was inspired by Bulgakov's third wife, Yelena. He died of kidney failure in 1940.

The Russian Secret Police after the Bolshevik Revolution, a precursor of the NKVD and KGB.

Distinguished French film maker and scriptwriter, most celebrated for
Sous les Toits de Paris and À Nous la Liberté
.

Der Nister (The Hidden, or ‘Secret', One) was born in the Ukraine, and wrote novels and short stories influenced by Jewish mystical tradition. He left Russia to live in Germany in 1921, returning in 1927. His writing was condemned by the Soviet regime and he turned to journalism. During the Second World War he wrote about the destruction of Jewish life in Europe. He was arrested in 1949 and died in the Gulag.

The Bolshevik name for Tsarskoye Selo, a suburb on the outskirts of Leningrad.

The son of a Polish nobleman, Dzerzhinsky became a fanatical Bolshevik, and was appointed first Head of the Soviet Secret Police.

Efron was the husband of the great poet Marina Tsvetaeva. He
was the child of idealistic revolutionaries; his mother an aristocrat, his father Jewish. Efron and Tsvetaeva married in 1912. They had two daughters and one son. Efron fought with the White Army in the Civil War, and went abroad when the war ended in Bolshevik victory. When Ehrenburg brought Tsvetaeva the news that her husband was still alive, Tsvetaeva at once decided to follow him to Prague where he was studying. Efron suffered from tuberculosis and when the family moved to Paris he was unable to find employment. He joined the Eurasian movement and helped to edit a magazine with strong ties to Soviet poets. This became a front for the NKVD. When the French police suspected he was involved in the murder of a Soviet defector, he was hastily taken back to Russia by Soviet agents. There he was given a house in Bolshevo, a suburb of Moscow. Shortly after Marina and her son Georgy returned to Russia, Efron and their daughter Alya were arrested. Alya was sentenced to hard labour, Efron imprisoned and then shot in 1941.

The eldest child of Marina Tsvetaeva, Alya was very gifted. She kept a brilliantly observant diary at the age of six. She also had considerable artistic talent. Tsvetaeva and Alya were always close, and their intimacy grew even more intense during the Civil War. In Prague, Alya was responsible for most domestic chores so that Tsvetaeva had time to write. In Paris, Alya moved closer to her father. She became a dedicated Communist in the thirties and, when she was given a visa, returned to Russia in 1937. Her father joined her later the same year when the NKVD brought him back to Russia. Alya was arrested and tortured in 1939 and, a month later, her father was arrested on her testimony. She was sentenced to the Gulag and not released until 1947. When it was possible, she worked to restore her mother's legacy. She died in July 1975.

Marina Tsvetaeva's youngest child, whom she adored and spoiled. He was handsome, intelligent, bilingual in French and Russian and eager to return to his homeland. He was often angry with his mother, and blamed the family's misfortunes on her. After Tsvetaeva's suicide, he was evacuated to Tashkent and there recorded in his diary the misery of his mother's last days. Called up in 1944, he was killed in his first battle.

Ehrenburg was a minor poet, a successful novelist and a journalist of genius. He was born in Kiev into a Jewish family. As a student in Moscow, he involved himself in anti-Tsarist agitation, spent a brief period in prison and then left Russia to live in exile in Paris. There he made friends with all the notable figures of the French
avant garde
. He lived as a freelance journalist, his small income supplemented by advances for his novels. His most popular novel was
The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and his Disciples
(1921) which in several ways prefigures Bulgakov's brilliant
The Master and Margarita
. In 1934, from the podium of the First Soviet Writers' Congress, he spoke in favour of Isaac Babel. He wrote regularly for
Izvestia
, notably from the front line in the Spanish Civil War. Though not a Bolshevik, he was vehemently opposed to Fascism. When Paris fell to the Germans in the Second World War, he escaped to Russia, at that time a German ally. When Germany invaded Russia, he worked as a war correspondent. His
Memoirs
, written in ‘The Thaw' after Stalin's death, are probably his best work. He died of cancer in Moscow in 1967.

Film-maker and theorist, scriptwriter and editor, whose best known films are
Battleship Potemkin and October
.

The movement was founded in the 1920s by a handful of Russian
émigrés, including D.S. Mirsky, the literary critic. Their magazine published writers from Soviet Russia – such as Babel and Pasternak – as well as those like Tsvetaeva, living in exile. The NKVD saw its usefulness, and began to offer funds.

A successful novelist and an underground fighter. In 1926, he was appointed to the executive of the Association of Proletarian Writers. His most popular novel,
The Rout
(1927), follows the fate of a group of revolutionary soldiers in flight from Cossacks at the time of the Japanese intervention in the Civil War. As Secretary of the Writers' Union all through Stalin's great purges, he signed the death warrants of many of Russia's best writers, including Osip Mandelstam. An alcoholic, he became seriously depressed towards the end of his life and killed himself in 1956, the year Khrushchev made his speech confessing the extent of Stalin's crimes. In his suicide note, he wrote of his despair when he remembered those who had been slaughtered.

Gorbachev was the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party from 1985 to 1991. He was responsible for initiating reforms of Communism which were much praised in the West but disliked by many in the Soviet Union. In 1991, a group of hard-line Communists attempted a coup; however, the citizens of Moscow linked arms in his support against their troops, and Boris Yeltsin bravely mounted a tank to appeal to the soldiers. When the coup failed, Gorbachev was succeeded by Yeltsin.

Gorky chose his pseudonym, which means ‘bitter', to reflect his anger at the harsh conditions of Russian life under the Tsar. An orphan from the age of ten, brought up by his grandmother, his first book of stories brought him success and he went on to become
a world-famous writer. He was a personal friend of Lenin, but his newspaper
Novaya Zhisn
(‘New Life') was censored by the Bolsheviks and he was unable to prevent the execution of the poet Nikolai Gumilyov in 1921. Soon afterwards, he went to live in Italy. His return to Russia in 1929 was a major coup for the Soviet regime. A central street in Moscow was given his name and much of the horror of the purges of the 1930s was concealed from him. Indeed, special editions of
Pravda
were printed for him daily so that he would not read about the trials and deaths of his friends. In 1935, Gorky's son died in suspicious circumstances and in 1936 Gorky also died. Poisoning has always been rumoured.