As the German forces swept closer to Moscow, Stalin began rapidly to restore the idols of Russian patriotism that the Bolsheviks over the last 20 years and more had assiduously purged from the national existence. The patriarch of the Orthodox Church was summoned and told, as he stood dumbfounded, that the Church would be expanded, with new positions and new churches. Stalin famously drank a toast to the ‘Russian people’ and had the national anthem changed from the ‘Internationale’ to the Soviet ‘Hymn’ because, it was thought, soldiers would respond to an anthem dedicated to their motherland more readily than to a worldwide movement. One (probably apocryphal) story has it that Stalin ordered the Madonna of Kazan icon flown around Moscow in an aeroplane, evoking the ancient Russian practice of parading icons around cities on the eve of war to bring good fortune and God’s blessing.
The near-dormant element of Russian art, literature and poetry that the Bolsheviks had sought so hard to crush in the 1930s – the family and private life – suddenly came to the aid of the Rodina, or motherland, which was under threat. Russia welled up with nationalism and patriotic fervour. In 1941, Akhmatova was accepted back into the Writers’ Union (having been excluded in 1925). During the siege, her poems were read daily over the radio to inspire the defenders of Leningrad and its starving inhabitants (though she was in Tashkent at the time). In 1942, her poem ‘Courage’ appeared in Pravda. In 1943, a volume of her works was published and immediately sold out. Artists whose works had been in disfavour found themselves dealing with unaccustomed celebrity. Pasternak and Akhmatova, who had lived more or less as internal exiles since the revolution, were suddenly deluged with letters from well-wishers. Akhmatova was chosen to sit on the board of the Leningrad branch of the Writers’ Union, and she attended official celebrations. She told an acquaintance, Isaiah Berlin, that she had received a huge number of letters from soldiers quoting from both her published and her unpublished works, and asking for interpretation, and even advice on their lives.
Berlin, who spent half a year in Russia as a diplomat in 1945, wrote of meeting Akhmatova that year and reported on the astonishing new celebrity status that she and her colleagues like Pasternak had gained:
The status of the handful of poets who clearly rose far above the rest was, I found, unique. Neither painters nor composers nor prose writers, nor even the most popular actors, or eloquent, patriotic journalists, were loved and admired so deeply and so universally, especially by the kind of people I spoke to in trams and trains and in the underground.20
But already the chill was being felt in May 1944, when Akhmatova gave a poetry reading in the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow, the largest auditorium in the city, and received a standing ovation from the 3,000 listeners present. Stalin, learning of the event, is supposed to have asked his subordinates, ‘Who organized this standing ovation?’
Unbeknownst to Akhmatova at the time (a fact that she later confided to Professor Berlin in 1965, when she received an honorary doctorate from Oxford), Stalin had been privately furious with her for meeting the English academic in 1945. ‘So our nun now receives visits from foreign spies’, Stalin is supposed to have said, followed by a string of obscenities. Stalin’s jealousy knew no bounds, and with his sights now set on Akhmatova, he moved. Nationalism had served its purpose, and the genie had to be put back in the bottle. Patriotism had to be reigned in, and the old orthodoxies of class struggle and historical materialism had to be reasserted. The family, the nation, love and passion, with all its potential to inspire Russians to struggle and sacrifice, had to be annihilated, and this process of rolling back the zeitgeist started with Akhmatova and her native city.
Leningrad had been the most heroic of the Soviet cities, withstanding assault by German forces for just under three years, blockaded and starving. But in the glow of victory following the war and the 900-day siege, the leaders of Leningrad pushed their luck a bit too far. They continued Stalin’s nod to Russian nationalism with enthusiasm: streets in Leningrad were renamed and 25 October Street returned to its pre-revolution name of Nevsky Prospekt. Having stuck their necks out too far, the Leningrad party bosses needed to demonstrate their loyalty. Akhmatova, who continued with other writers to write poetry for the local journal Zvezda, became a scapegoat.
No sooner had Lev returned to the city and resumed his studies – finally passing his exams to receive a bachelor’s degree from the University of Leningrad, a full 12 years after he had started – than his mother’s dramatic fall from grace interrupted his hard-won peace yet again. In August 1946, the central committee of the Soviet Communist Party issued a decree harshly rebuking Zvezda. Andrey Zhdanov, the party’s top ideologue and himself a Leningrad native, delivered a blistering speech to Leningrad party bosses in which he publicly attacked Akhmatova’s work as ‘individualistic’, using the now famous phrase ‘half nun, half harlot’ to describe her. She was expelled from the Writers’ Union, and the ban on her work was reimposed. Gerstein recalls Akhmatova’s ‘proud condition of disgrace’, to which by now she was thoroughly resigned.21 The Fountain House was handed over to the Arctic Institute, and though she continued to live there, all who entered to see her had to show their passports and be recorded. Needless to say, this meant Lev and Akhmatova were alone for most of the time: ‘People stopped greeting me in the streets. They would cross to the other side of Nevsky Prospekt to avoid me’, Lev told Kozyreva’s sister-in-law Maryana.
Akhmatova’s ration card was taken away, and they were on the verge of starvation most of the time, surviving on a diet almost exclusively of black bread and sugarless tea. They lived on Lev’s ration card – he had enrolled in graduate school, at the Institute of Oriental Studies at the University of Leningrad, and began working on his candidate’s dissertation,22 on the subject of the first Turkic khanate. Soon, however, a pretext was found and he, too, was expelled from the university.
Lev found work on several archaeological digs – ‘to feed myself’, he wrote. He travelled for this work, but whenever he was in Leningrad he continued to study. He found a group of like-minded bohemian friends. According to Maryana Kozyreva, it was a ‘rather cheerful diverse group, from which, every so often, somebody would utterly disappear without a trace. But they lived by a principle, “Milady death, we are asking you to wait outside the door.”’23
The terror of the late 1930s was over, but the intelligentsia still felt the watchful eye of the secret police on them. People now covered their telephones with cushions because it was rumoured that they were equipped with listening devices. ‘We all felt as if we were constantly exposed to X-rays and the principal means of control over us was mutual surveillance’, wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam of the postwar period.24
Lev finally had what seems to have been his first adult relationship with a woman: in May 1947 he met and fell in love with Natalya Varbanets, who worked in a library. She was hauntingly beautiful, described by Kozyreva as ‘a real Nastasiya Filipovna’ (after the femme fatale of Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot). She was carrying on an affair with her married boss, however, and would not commit to Lev.