One of Lev’s most important, fateful friendships was with the famed poet Osip Mandelstam, a close friend of Akhmatova’s and, like her, a luminary of Russia’s Silver Age. He was apparently the basis for the character of the Master, the embittered genius writer of Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous novel The Master and Margarita. Osip and his wife Nadezhda lived a bohemian life in Moscow, and Lev stayed with them whenever he was in town. Osip had a strong anarchic streak, like Lev, and loved to play practical jokes. According to Gerstein, whenever Lev arrived, Mandelstam would say: ‘Let’s go play some pranks!’ The consequences of Osip Mandelstam’s gleefully mad nature and razor-sharp artistic gift were to be fatal for him – and were to prove nearly as tragic for Lev.
CHAPTER SIX
THE ‘BIG HOUSE’
On 1 December 1934, Sergey Kirov, the ranking Communist Party bureaucrat for Leningrad, walked out of his office in the Smolny Institute, a sprawling palace a few blocks from the Fountain House, where Lev and his mother were living. Behind him a mysterious man raised a revolver and shot Kirov in the head.
Kirov’s death would usher in one of the most agonizing genocides of human history: the so-called ‘Great Terror’ of the 1930s. By many accounts (including that of a senior NKVD defector), Stalin himself wanted Kirov removed – his popularity and standing in the party were getting too high for the dictator’s liking. But Stalin and his head of the NKVD, Nikolay Ezhov, used the killing of Kirov as an excuse to move on his opponents within the Communist Party, and the secret police set about ‘discovering’ numerous foreign spy networks and conspiracies to commit terrorism and assassinate high-ranking officials.
The repressions gained momentum. Leningrad was the epicentre of the great purge – the first place where Stalin unleashed his henchmen with orders to hunt down enemies of the regime mercilessly. In the wake of Kirov’s death, meetings were held at the university, orators bayed for the blood of the conspirators and ovations followed blood-curdling calls for no mercy to be shown to the enemies of the people.
Over the course of the decade, some 40 million Soviet citizens were arrested, imprisoned or killed. The Great Terror was one of the great evils in a century of evil, and Akhmatova and Lev found themselves in the centre of it. The insanity multiplied, driven by paranoia and revenge. By the late 1930s, Stalin had imposed quotas for the secret police of each region to arrest and exterminate those deemed to be enemies of the state. Confessions were obtained through torture, and sentences were swiftly carried out – the basements of most NKVD office buildings had execution rooms lined with thick wooden planks to prevent bullets from ricocheting. Those who carried out the terror must have known what was happening, though many later claimed to have believed Stalin’s claims that they were in fact rooting out foreign provocateurs. Stalin himself, according to close associates, believed the confessions obtained under torture to be true.
Anyone suspected of disloyalty was hunted down, and intellectuals were at the top of the list. Any document in the wrong hands could be a death sentence. Writing became dangerous, and poems were memorized rather than committed to paper. The lives of St Petersburg’s artists and authors became inescapably intertwined with the party bureaucrats and the NKVD agents who monitored and interrogated them. The police and the artists crossed paths often, and knew each other by name.
Yakov Agranov, the NKVD officer responsible for executing Lev’s father, was placed in charge of the investigation into Kirov’s murder.1 He never met Akhmatova or Gumilev, but he nevertheless became a malevolent presence at Fountain House. His signature appears on many of the arrest documents that remain in the family’s files. Another recurring phantom was Leonid Zakovsky, head of the Leningrad NKVD, a Russified German whose real name was Genrikh Stubis. His irreverent attitude to the impossible cruelty he brought to his job was expressed in his favourite joke: ‘If Karl Marx himself fell into my clutches, I could get him to admit that he was an agent of Bismarck.’ This jest proved doubly ironic: Zakovsky himself confessed to being a German agent and a Trotsky sympathizer before being shot in 1938.2
Throughout the Great Terror, the Soviet Union’s writers, artists and musicians lived in a fishbowl, monitored constantly for signs of any transgression by the NKVD. The first denunciation in Akhmatova’s file is dated 1927.3 More would soon follow, as the secret police was instructed to build cases against the prominent intelligentsia, who lived in dread of a knock on the door. Whenever the doorbell chimed in apartment 44 of Fountain House, a child would be asked to climb onto the bathtub to look out of the window onto the stairwell, in order to see who was calling. Meanwhile the adults waited anxiously in the hall.
They assumed that many of their friends were agents, informing on them; but they did not know who. In Gumilev’s file there are numerous denunciations by one Arkady Borin, whom Lev had befriended during his first year at university, walking up to him and saying: ‘You seem like an intelligent chap, isn’t it time we became friends?’ Arkady’s denunciations are an unconventional source of material for a biography, and yet they provide an interesting – and seemingly accurate – portrait of Lev’s college years. Lev’s file contains this profile, written by Arkady at the behest of his NKVD handlers:
Among his fellow students, he [Gumilev] was a ‘square peg’ in his restrained mannerisms, in his taste in literature and lastly in his passive attitude towards social labour. In his opinion, the fate of Russia should not be decided by the masses of labourers, but rather by a chosen clique of aristocrats… On the subject of the Soviet Union he once said that there has never been a period of Russian history in which there was not the necessity to expend heroic effort to change the existing structure.4
It is unclear what had motivated Borin to spy for the NKVD; but it seems that after a certain period, the weight of his previous betrayals forced him to continue working for his shadowy masters, whatever his personal feelings.
Even worse than the betrayals of outsiders like Borin were the betrayals of families and friends. Under the dreadful, crippling beatings of interrogators, people would sign anything. Family members and friends would implicate themselves and each other, simply to avoid being crippled for life or killed. And soon this would be the fate of this unhappy group.
In 1934, Mandelstam composed a poem that he later called the ‘Stalin Epigram’. So lethally funny and insulting was it that he decided not to put it down on paper, but instead had his wife and Gerstein commit it to memory (‘we were constantly forced by the circumstances of our life to behave like members of a secret society’, said Nadezhda in her memoirs). Lev was one of Mandelstam’s ‘first listeners’, according to Nadezhda – one of those to whom the poet would recite a finished poem in order to get a first reaction. ‘It so happens that all of M.’s [Mandelstam’s] first listeners came to a tragic end’, she wrote in her memoirs.5