Испепеляющие годы!

Безумья ль в вас, надежды ль весть?
От дней войны, от дней свободы —
Кровавый отсвет в лицах есть.

These years of conflagration,
Is there madness in you, or is there hope? These days of war, these days of freedom,
Have left a bloody sheen on every face.
— Alexander Blok, “Those Born in Years of Quiet”
September 8, 1914

I

It is the evening of February 10, 1921, and as the pale winter sun sinks beneath the icebound Gulf of Finland, and as the classical facades of the Stroganov, Razumovsky, and Yusupov palaces are slowly enfolded in lilac shadows, members of the Petrograd literary elite are making their way along the Moika River Embankment. They pass by the Summer Garden and the Field of Mars, they cross the Nevsky Prospect and the Kryukov Canal, they walk beneath old ash trees and wrought-iron street lanterns, and, at last, they approach the illustrious House of Writers, for it is here that they will solemnly commemorate the 84th anniversary of Alexander Pushkin’s untimely demise.

The keynote speaker tonight is the preternaturally gifted symbolist poet Alexander Blok, who has prepared a speech entitled “On the Poet’s Calling.” It is a miracle that the terminally ill Blok has shown up at all. His face is truncated with suffering, his heart is failing, he is malnourished and unsteady on his feet, and, most tragically of all, he has been unable to produce a single line of poetry for the last several years, yet he has risen to this occasion and begins his address by asking: “What is a poet? A person who writes in verses? No, of course not. A person is called a poet not because that person writes in verses. But that person writes in verses — that is, they harmonize words and sounds — because that person happens to be an offspring of harmony, a poet.” 

If poetry is the product of harmony, the audience is called upon to consider, then how can one truly be a poet in a world rent asunder by invasions and revolutions, civil war and pogroms, censors and secret police, famine and economic collapse, influenza and typhus? Turning to the nominal subject of his speech, Blok contends that Pushkin did not really die as a result of his duel with Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d’Anthès: “What killed him was lack of air. His culture was dying with him.… Peace and freedom. They are necessary to a poet.… But peace and freedom were also taken away. Not external peace, but creative peace. Not childish freedom, the freedom of liberal chatter, but creative freedom, inner freedom. And the poet dies because there’s nothing for him to breathe; life has lost its meaning.” Blok is no longer talking about Pushkin. He is admitting, on this dark winter’s night in Petrograd, in this House of Writers on the bank of the icebound River Moika, that he is suffocating, unable to breathe the noxious air emanating from the miasma of Soviet Russia. The ailing poet concludes his lecture, “We die, but art remains.”

Alexander Blok was surrendering to despair and ennui, but as winter gave way to spring, and spring to summer in that year of 1921, there were those former subjects of the defunct Russian Empire who sensed that the socio-political catastrophe that had begun with the outbreak of the Great War had finally run its course. It was time for the Russian people to catch their collective breath. The October Revolution had ousted the czarist autocracy, the last of the Romanovs lay buried in a pit just north of Yekaterinburg, and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had concluded the war with the Central Powers. The Polish–Soviet War and the Estonian War of Independence might have ended in humiliating defeats for the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, but the Russian Civil War had gone rather better from the Bolshevik perspective, with the White armies of Alexander Kolchak, Anton Denikin, and Baron Pyotr Wrangel all smashed and ejected from Siberia and southern Russia. The Kronstadt rebellion, meanwhile, had been put down in March of 1921, and by early June of that year the peasant-organized Tambov Rebellion had likewise been largely suppressed.

Although more than 10 million lives had been lost during what Blok had called the “years of conflagration,” an atmosphere of tentative optimism prevailed as the guns started falling silent for the first time since 1914, and so it was that in June of 1921 the Odesa-born poet Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, better known by her pen name of Anna Akhmatova, could find herself able to envision a better life emerging from the wrack and ruin of war and revolution. In an untitled poem dedicated to her good friend Natalia Rykova, she acknowledged the damage that had been inflicted on her country, while looking forward to happier days to come: 

Всё расхищено, предано, продано,
Чёрной смерти мелькало крыло,
Всё голодной тоскою изглодано,
Отчего же нам стало светло?

Днём дыханьями веет вишнёвыми
Небывалый под городом лес,
Ночью блещет созвездьями новыми
Глубь прозрачных июльских небес, —

И так близко подходит чудесное
К развалившимся грязным домам…
Никому, никому неизвестное,
Но от века желанное нам.

Everything is looted, betrayed, sold,
As death flashes its black wings,
Everything is devoured by anguish and longing —
So why does light still shine above?

By day, a cherry-scented breeze wafts
From the mysterious woods beyond the city,
By night, new constellations emerge
In the depths of a pellucid July sky, —

And something miraculous is coming
To the ruined, filthy houses…
Something no one, no one, has known,
Though we’ve longed for it forever.

After the storm, so saith the proverb, comes a calm, and like the prophet Elijah, who found the  presence of the Lord not in the tempests, earthquakes, and infernos that engulfed him atop the Mountain of Elohim but in the “still, small voice” that emerged afterwards, Anna Akhmatova had survived seven years of previously unimaginable horrors, and she could now hear the whispers revealing to her that longed-for miracle of peace, repose, harmony, and fresh cherry-scented air exhaled by the nearby woods. (READ MORE by Matthew Omolesky: The Cockroach and the Sparrow)

Not everyone could hear the “still, small voice” that was calling out to Akhmatova. As his health continued to decline, Alexander Blok complained to his friend Korney Chukovsky that “all sounds have stopped. Can’t you hear that there are no longer any sounds?” To Maxim Gorky, he admitted that the effects of the Great War and the October Revolution had robbed him of his “faith in the wisdom of humanity.” It is perhaps the central tragedy of Russian history that in the contest between Akhmatova’s optimism and Blok’s bleak pessimism, the latter will invariably prevail, as even Akhmatova would be forced to admit within a matter of weeks of sending her poem off to Natalia Rykova.

II

It started with a series of personal tragedies, of which she only learned when the conflict in Crimea had come to an end. Her brother Andrei had taken his life, her other brother Victor was feared dead (though he was actually just stranded on Sakhalin Island in the Far East), her sister Iya was withering away in the grips of late-stage tuberculosis, and her mother was destitute, denied a pension by the Bolsheviks on the grounds that she was the widow of a czarist naval engineer who had been a member of the Ukrainian cossack nobility. The Akhmatova family was not alone in its suffering. The summer of 1921 was marked by widespread crop failures, the result of wartime devastation, drought, and the barbaric Soviet practice of prodrazvyorstka, or grain requisition, which would later be used in the Ukrainian terror-famine. As many as 5 million souls perished, mainly in the Volga and Ural regions, and cannibalism was not unheard of. In the town of Pugachyov, located on the Bolshoi Irgiz River in the Saratov Oblast, it became “dangerous for children to go out after dark since there were known to be bands of cannibals and traders who killed them to eat or sell their tender flesh,” while in Samara “ten butcher shops were closed for selling human flesh.”

The political climate was also changing for the worse, as the Bolsheviks tightened their grip on the Russian populace. Anna Akhmatova’s ex-husband, Nikolai Gumilyov, had openly derided the “half-literate Bolsheviks” running the country into the ground and had provocatively made the sign of the cross in public, so it was only a matter of time before the widening gyre of chaos and oppression reached Akhmatova’s door. One day in July, following a visit by Gumilyov to Akhmatova, the latter led the former out by a back staircase in her apartment building. A nervous Akhmatova blurted out, “You only go down a staircase like that to your execution.”

Alexander Blok passed away on August 7, 1921. His death was presumed to be the result of depression, malnutrition, and probably tertiary syphilis, but his fellow writer, Vladislav Khodasevich, was unsure: “What did he die of? Unknown. He died somehow ‘in general,’ because he was sick completely, because he could no longer live. He died of death.” Khodasevich’s wife, the novelist Nina Berberova, described Blok’s funeral at the Smolensky Cemetery on Vasilyevsky Island:

Everyone had a feeling that along with his death, this city and the whole world were now a thing of the past. The young people gathered around the coffin understood that a new era was coming for them. Blok and his contemporaries had been children of the “terrible Russian years,” and now we had become the children of Alexander Blok. A few months later, there would be nothing to remind us of that former time in Russian life. Some of us left into exile, others were expelled, others were destroyed or went into hiding. A new era was approaching.

It was at Blok’s funeral that Anna Akhmatova learned that Gumilyov, the father of her son Lev, had been arrested by the secret Soviet police on spurious charges related to a non-existent, wholly fabricated monarchist plot known as the Tagantsev Conspiracy. Sixty-one alleged participants, including Nikolai Gumilyov, would be executed on August 26, 1921, in the Kovalevsky Forest outside St. Petersburg. The mass grave that held their bodies was only discovered in 2002 by members of Memorial, a human-rights organization that has subsequently been closed and liquidated by the criminal Putin regime. Around 4,500 victims of the Red Terror were interred here over the years. It was their fate that no monument, memorial, museum, or mausoleum would ever be fixed atop their resting place in the cold earth of the Kovalevsky Forest.

Anna Akhmatova and her son were now politically suspect persons and lived in constant fear of arrests. Following the execution of her ex-husband, Akhmatova took up her pen and produced another untitled poem:

Страх, во тьме перебирая вещи,
Лунный луч наводит на топор.
За стеною слышен стук зловещий —
Что там, крысы, призрак или вор?

[…]

Лучше бы поблёскиванье дул
В грудь мою направленных винтовок,

Лучше бы на площади зелёной
На помост некрашеный прилечь
И под клики радости и стоны
Красной кровью до конца истечь.

Fear, things plucked out of the dark,
The moonlight shining on an axe.
An ominous knock heard behind the wall —
Was it a rat, a ghost, or a thief?

[…]

How much better would be the gleam of rifle
Barrels leveled at my breast

Better, in the grassy square
To put my head down on the unpainted scaffold
And amidst the cries of joy and the moans
Have my lifeblood pour out. 

Two months of uninterrupted suffering had brought Akhmatova around to Blok’s way of thinking. Any faith in the wisdom of humanity had been misplaced, and no miracle was coming, no matter how long the Russian people had longed for it.

III

After Gumilyov’s execution, the poet Osip Mandelstam wrote to Akhmatova: “You know that there are only two people with whom I have the ability to carry on an imaginary conversation — Nikolai Stepanovich [Gumilyov] and you. My conversation with Kolya has never been broken off and never will be broken off.” Years later, in February of 1934, Akhmatova traveled to Moscow to visit Mandelstam, a visit she described in her 1962 memoir Sheets from a Diary. Together they walked down Prechistenka Street, and then they turned onto Gogol Boulevard. Mandelstam looked at his friend and told her, “I am ready for death.”

Three months after his stroll with Akhmatova, Mandelstam would be arrested by NKVD agents who had caught wind of his satirical, disparaging “Stalin Epigram.” He spent three years in exile, only to be released just as the Great Purge began. Again arrested for non-existent counterrevolutionary activities, Mandelstam came down with typhoid fever in a transit camp outside Vladivostok and died on December 27, 1938. The ground was frozen, so his equally frozen body was left outside until the spring thaw, when he and other unburied victims of the Stalinist purges — referred to as a “winter stack” — could be consigned to a mass grave in faraway Vtoraya Rechka.

IV

Anna Akhmatova’s son, the historian and anthropologist Lev Gumilyov, was arrested in 1935, released, and re-arrested in 1938, accused of involvement in yet another non-existent plot, this time to assassinate the Soviet propagandist-in-chief Andrei Zhdanov. Found guilty, just like his father, of belonging to a “counterrevolutionary terrorist organization,” he would be shuttled back and forth between the forced labor camp at Belomor and Leningrad’s central prison, which was originally known as the Investigative Isolator No. 1 of the Administration of the Federal Service for the Execution of Punishments but was better known either as the Bolshoi dom (the “Big House”), or as Kresty (“Crosses”) due to its cruciform ground plan. Lev Gumilyov was far from the only Russian intellectual to find himself incarcerated in the Kresty Prison; the Ukraine-born abstract painter Kazimir Malevich, the wonderfully absurdist writer Daniil Kharms, the avant-garde poet Nikolay Zabolotsky, and the actor Georgiy Zhzhonov all passed through its forbidding prison gates, alongside thousands of other political prisoners.

Lev’s arrest was yet another blow to the long-suffering Akhmatova, who had once, for a brief moment, dreamed of a miracle that would end her country’s suffering. Once again she sought solace in poetry, composing one of her most famous works, the elegy known as “Requiem,” in the year 1940, though it had no chance of making its way past Soviet censors and would only by published in Munich 23 years later, well after Stalin’s death. In “Requiem,” Akhmatova described the 17 months during which she’d pleaded for her son’s release, the terror and confusion she experienced, and the shouts that emerged from her “tortured mouth.” Her poem ends with an eye to posterity:

А если когда-нибудь в этой стране
Воздвигнуть задумают памятник мне,

Согласье на это даю торжество,
Но только с условьем – не ставить его

Ни около моря, где я родилась:
Последняя с морем разорвана связь,

Ни в царском саду у заветного пня,
Где тень безутешная ищет меня,

А здесь, где стояла я триста часов
И где для меня не открыли засов.

Затем, что и в смерти блаженной боюсь
Забыть громыхание черных марусь,

Забыть, как постылая хлопала дверь
И выла старуха, как раненый зверь.

И пусть с неподвижных и бронзовых век
Как слезы, струится подтаявший снег,

И голубь тюремный пусть гулит вдали,
И тихо идут по Неве корабли.

—Около 10 марта 1940, Фонтанный Дом

If ever this country
Should erect a monument to me

I give my consent
But on one condition — put it

Not near the sea, where I was born:
My last connection with the sea is broken,

Nor in the royal garden, near that tree
Where a restless shade still searches for me,

But here, where I stood for three hundred hours
Though the door-bolt never slid open.

For I am afraid that in blissful death,
I will forget the rumbling sound of the police van,

The hateful sound of the prison door,
The wounded sound of an old woman howling like a beast.

From my motionless bronze eyelids,
Let the melted snow flow like tears,

As the dove in the watchtower calls from afar,
And the boats drift quietly along the Neva.

—Around March 10, 1940, Fountain House  

Lev Gumilyov survived his stint in the Kresty Prison, only to be re-arrested in 1949 and sentenced to 10 years in the Siberian Gulag. Finally broken by the deaths of Alexander Blok, Nikolai Gumilyov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Yesenin, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, and her Nikolay Punin — all killed directly or indirectly by the Soviet regime — understandably fearful for her son’s life, and personally suffering under increased censorship — the authorities had declared her oeuvre “bourgeois” and “the poetry of an overwrought, upper-class lady” — Akhmatova was reduced to writing propagandistic works like “In Praise of Peace,” in which she implausibly declared:

Where Stalin is, there too are Freedom,
Peace, and Earth’s Grandeur.

Distasteful though it may have been, this cynical move may have saved her son’s life. Lev was released from his penal labor camp upon the death of Stalin and would live a long and fruitful life, joining the Hermitage and then Leningrad University, and dying in 1992 at the age of 79 having witnessed the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

V

In April of 1995, the monument To the Victims of Political Repression, designed by the nonconformist sculptor and painter Mihail Chemiakin, was installed on the embankment directly across the Neva River from the site of the Kresty Prison, where Gumilyov had languished for so long. The monument is composed of two bronze sphinxes separated by prison bars, through which the Bolshoi dom can be viewed. Beneath the sphinxes are granite bases that feature apposite quotes by Nikolai Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and other dissidents, but the real interest in the sculptural group lies in the faces of the two mythical creatures. From the standpoint of the shops and residences on the embankment, the sphinxes have normal faces, calm and contemplative and attractive. Viewed from the standpoint of the Kresty prison, however, their faces have been eaten away, revealing the skulls beneath. Chemiakin’s sphinxes are perhaps the consummate representations of the Russian state, demonstrating how the veneer of an ancient civilization can be eaten away by Death, as everything is looted, betrayed, sold, and devoured by anguish and longing.

By December of 2006, the terms of Akhmatova’s literary testament had been fulfilled, with a monument to the poet erected not far from Chemiakin’s memorial on the Neva embankment. There the poet stands on the unfortunately named Robespierre Embankment, cast in bronze, her figure tall and willowy, and sporting her trademark bob cut, as she looks back over her shoulder, like Lot’s wife, towards the Kresty Prison, unwilling to leave without her beloved son. A copy of the sculpture was placed in the corridors of the old prison, and a plaque bearing the haunting last lines of “Requiem” attached to the outside wall of the detention center, reminding visitors of the horrible sounds made by police vans, prison doors, and the victims of the Soviet regime, sounds that once echoed off the brick walls of the dreaded cruciform buildings.

The independent Russian media outlet Holod reported that on June 15, 2023, the memorial plaque that had been affixed to the outside wall of Kresty Prison Building No. 7 had been torn away. Whether this was an official act, or an act of vandalism, will likely never be determined, although no police report was ever filed, strongly suggesting that it was the former. The plaque would not have lasted long in any event, given that the site of the Kresty Prison has been transferred to the joint-stock company DOM.RF, with the goal of converting the site not into a museum or monument but into a hotel-entertainment complex, a place for the St. Petersburg elite to cavort atop the tortured bones of their ancestors. 

Two days after the plaque went missing, the state-owned energy company Gazprom hosted an event at the Lakhta Center Grand Amphitheater, at which the Russian national anthem was performed by the National Philharmonic Orchestra and the St. Petersburg State Academic Capella Choir. The gala culminated with a ceremony at the Park of the Three Hundredth Anniversary of Saint Petersburg, wherein the tricolor flag of the Russian Federation, the black, yellow, and white flag of the Russian Empire, and the hammer and sickle-emblazoned red banner of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were all raised high above the Gulf of Finland, while an individual who looked like Vladimir Putin (one never can be sure with all the body doubles) looked on from aboard the Okhta yacht. 

One can imagine the outcry if, say, the German energy conglomerate Rheinisch-Westfälisches Elektrizitätswerk Aktiengesellschaft hosted an event in Berlin featuring the Schwarz-Rot-Gold flag of the Federal Republic of Germany, the swastika flag of the German Reich, and the East German Spalterflagge all flying side by side, but in Putin’s Russia this unapologetic approach to the past is no longer surprising. Only a few days before the St. Petersburg ceremony, the Moscow Times exposed how prevalent the “policy of mass intervention of the state in the Russian education system” has become, with historians being informed that “criticism of the authorities in any form, including the czars, is unacceptable.” The brief window that allowed for works like Chemiakin’s To the Victims of Political Repression to be placed on the Neva Embankment, and for Akhmatova’s “Requiem” to be placed on the wall of the Kresty Prison, has slammed shut. Russia is reverting to its historical form, waging wars of genocidal conquest against freedom-seeking neighbors, committing war crimes, cultural genocide, and ecocide in the process, while psychopathic warlords and mutinous mercenaries run amok in its hinterlands.

There is nothing miraculous coming to the spiritual ruins of the Russian Federation, no return of harmony and fresh air, just more of the same: state-sponsored violence, ominous knocks on the door, ideological repression, mass deportations, and the wholesale spilling of blood. After all these years of conflagration, years that call into question the wisdom of humanity, years that have left sensitive, free-thinking souls gasping for air, it is still the poet Anna Akhmatova who, in her devastating “Requiem,” best epitomized the harsh reality of Russian life:

Все перепуталось навек,
И мне не разобрать
Теперь, кто зверь, кто человек,
И долго ль казни ждать.
И только пыльные цветы,
И звон кадильный, и следы
Куда-то в никуда.

Everything is muddled here,
And I cannot make out
Who is a beast, and who is a man,
And how long it will be until the execution.
All that remains are the dusty flowers,
And the clink of the censer, and tracks
Leading from somewhere to nowhere.