Memory Remains

Top row · 1st from left (top-left corner)

Boris Pasternak 1890–1960

One of the few writers who refused to sign the 1937 letter demanding the execution of Marshal Tukhachevsky — despite a personal visit from the leadership of the Union of Writers.

The writers’ letter was organised immediately after the secret execution of Marshal Tukhachevsky and other generals (11 June 1937). The heads of the Union of Writers came to Pasternak demanding his signature. He refused — which at that moment bordered on suicide.

Stalin, by some accounts, struck his name from the execution lists with the words “Do not touch this cloud-dweller” — but this is apocryphal and not documented.

Source Encyclopedia.com

Top row · 2nd from left

Boris Pilnyak 1894–1938

Writer. Shot on a fabricated charge of “espionage”; his Tale of the Unextinguished Moon (1926) hinted at Stalin’s involvement in the death of Frunze.

The novella appeared in the journal Novy Mir in 1926 and was pulled from sale immediately: it transparently described a military commander whom “the Kremlin” forced onto the operating table and who died under the surgeon’s knife. The prototype was People’s Commissar for Military Affairs Mikhail Frunze, who died under anaesthesia on 31 October 1925. Pilnyak was forced to “repent” publicly.

In 1929 he published the novel Mahogany with a Berlin émigré press, which provided grounds for renewed persecution. Trying to rehabilitate himself, he wrote The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea (1930), a novel about the construction of a Soviet dam.

Arrested in October 1937, shot in April 1938 at Kommunarka. Rehabilitated in 1956.

Sources Britannica / Find a Grave

Top row · 3rd from left

Paolo Iashvili 1894–1937

Georgian poet, one of the leaders of the “Blue Horns” group. He shot himself inside the Union of Writers of Georgia when Beria was pressuring him to testify against his friend, Titsian Tabidze.

The “Blue Horns” group (Georgian symbolism) was the flowering of Georgian poetry in the 1910s. Both of its leaders, Iashvili and Tabidze, came under attack as “nationalists.”

In July 1937, at a meeting of the Union of Writers of Georgia, Iashvili walked to the podium and shot himself with a pistol in front of those present. The single interpretation accepted by historians: he chose death over taking part in the denunciation that would have led to Tabidze’s arrest.

His friend Titsian Tabidze was arrested in August of that same year, 1937, and shot in December. Pasternak, who was close to both, immortalised them in his verse.

Source New York Review of Books

Top row · 4th from left

Lev Landau 1908–1968

Theoretical physicist, future Nobel laureate (1962). Arrested in 1938 for taking part in a leaflet that compared the Stalinist regime to fascism; released a year later thanks to Kapitsa.

The leaflet, which Landau wrote in the spring of 1938 together with the physicist Korets, began: “Comrades! The great cause of the October Revolution has been vilely betrayed…” and directly called the Stalinist regime “fascist.” It was to be distributed on 1 May 1938.

Landau was arrested on 28 April 1938, before the leaflet was distributed. He faced execution.

Pyotr Kapitsa wrote Stalin a personal letter guaranteeing that Landau would work under his supervision and had not engaged in political activity. Landau was released on 28 April 1939 — exactly one year after his arrest.

Source Linda Hall Library

Top row · 5th from left

Nikolai Klyuev 1884–1937

Peasant poet, friend and mentor of Yesenin. Shot in a case built around a fictitious monarchist organisation in Tomsk.

First arrest, 1933: the poem Pogorelshchina (1928–1932), which mourned the destruction of the Russian village under collectivisation, became the main incriminating material. Exiled to Narym, then to Tomsk.

In Tomsk in 1937 he was arrested again — charged with organising the “Union for the Salvation of Russia,” a monarchist organisation that in reality did not exist. The case was entirely fabricated.

Shot 23–25 October 1937 near Tomsk. Place of burial unknown.

Source Northwestern University Press

Top row · 6th from left (top-right corner)

Pavel Florensky 1882–1937

Orthodox priest, mathematician, physicist and philosopher, called “the Russian Leonardo.” Arrested; died in the camps. The exact place of his execution remains disputed by historians.

In 1933, charged with “counter-revolutionary agitation and propaganda” and with membership in a fictitious monarchist organisation, the “Party of the Rebirth of Russia.” The real reason was the incompatibility of his open Orthodox priesthood with Soviet ideology: he refused to renounce his holy orders despite pressure.

Sentenced to 10 years in the camps. He worked as a scientist on the Solovetsky Islands, researching the extraction of iodine from seaweed — a real contribution to Soviet industry.

In October 1937 he was sentenced again by an NKVD troika, charged with “Trotskyist propaganda” in the camp. Shot 8 December 1937.

Source Gulag Exhibition

Right side · upper

Boris Kornilov 1907–1938

Poet, author of the Song of the Counterplan (lyrics for the 1932 film, music by Shostakovich). Shot in a case about a “Trotskyist terrorist organisation.” First husband of Olga Berggolts.

Kornilov and Berggolts married in 1926 and divorced in 1930. His arrest in 1936 and his execution in 1938 became a tragedy for Berggolts as well: soon after, she herself was arrested (1938–1939).

The charge — membership in a Trotskyist organisation — was a standard fabrication of 1937–1938. Kornilov had no connection to any underground.

Rehabilitated posthumously. The Song of the Counterplan outlived its author.

Source Find a Grave

Right side · lower

Anna Akhmatova 1889–1966

Her poem Requiem (1935–1940) was never written down in full: she recited the lines to trusted friends, who memorised them, and the paper was burned at once.

Requiem is a cycle of ten poems with a prose preface. Written about the Great Terror, but personally: in 1935 Akhmatova’s son Lev Gumilyov and her common-law husband Nikolai Punin were arrested. In 1938 her son was arrested again and sentenced to the camps. For seventeen months Akhmatova stood in the prison queues at the Kresty in Leningrad, trying to pass parcels and learn her son’s fate.

The central image of the poem is a mother waiting at the prison walls. The finale, the “Epilogue,” demands a monument be placed not by the sea nor by a tree, but here, at the walls of the Kresty. (In 2006 a monument was set up in exactly that place, in keeping with her testament.)

In the USSR, Requiem was first published only in 1987. The first book edition appeared in Munich in 1963. Before that it existed only in people’s memory and in samizdat.

Source EBSCO Research Starters

Bottom row · 1st from right (bottom-right corner)

Isaac Babel 1894–1940

Writer (Red Cavalry, Odessa Stories). Shot on a fabricated “espionage” case after his arrest in 1939. Rehabilitated in 1954.

Arrested 15 May 1939. Under interrogation, “confessions” were beaten out of him — of spying for France and Austria and of belonging to a Trotskyist organisation. All of it was false.

On his confession, in the interrogator’s hand, is written: “Admits his guilt.” Shot 27 January 1940. Before the execution he managed to say: “Let me finish… I ask for time to finish…”

Source n+1 magazine

Bottom row · 2nd from right

Daniil Kharms 1905–1942

Absurdist writer, a founder of the avant-garde group OBERIU. Arrested in 1941 for “defeatist sentiments”; died of starvation in the psychiatric ward of a prison during the Siege of Leningrad.

According to an NKVD informer’s denunciation, Kharms said: “The Soviet Union lost the war on the very first day. Leningrad will now either be besieged and we will starve, or it will be bombed until no stone is left standing. If I am handed a mobilisation notice, I’ll punch the commander in the face — let them shoot me, but I will not put on the uniform and I will not serve in Soviet troops.” The words were recorded in the NKVD protocol of 21 August 1941.

To avoid execution, Kharms feigned insanity. The military tribunal sent him to the psychiatric ward of the “Kresty” prison, and there the siege caught up with him. He died of dystrophy on 2 February 1942.

His wife was told he had been deported to Novosibirsk. His archive was saved by Yakov Druskin, who in 1942 made his way to Kharms’s apartment and carried the manuscripts out in a suitcase.

Source BOMB Magazine

Bottom row · 3rd from right

Osip Mandelstam 1891–1938

Poet, leader of Acmeism. Died in a transit camp near Vladivostok after being arrested over an anti-Stalin epigram read to a narrow circle of friends in 1933.

The poem known as the Stalin Epigram (“The Kremlin Highlander,” November 1933) begins “We live, not feeling the country beneath us…” In it Stalin is called a “murderer and peasant-slayer,” his fingers “fat as worms,” and each of his decrees a “horseshoe” — “one in the groin, one in the forehead, one in the brow, one in the eye.” The “broad chest of an Ossetian” is invoked, an allusion to Stalin’s Caucasian (highlander) origin.

Mandelstam recited the epigram to some 15–20 people. Someone denounced him. He was arrested on the night of 13–14 May 1934. The text of the poem in the case file is in an autograph Mandelstam himself wrote out during interrogation.

The first arrest ended in exile to Cherdyn, then to Voronezh — Stalin ordered him “isolated, but preserved.” The second arrest came in May 1938. He died in the Vladperpunkt transit camp on 27 December 1938 of typhus and exhaustion. Place of burial unknown.

Source Find a Grave

Bottom row · 4th from right

Mikhail Bulgakov 1891–1940

Writer and playwright. His 1930 letter to the Soviet government openly demanded permission to emigrate or to be given work after all his plays were banned.

By 1929–1930 all four of Bulgakov’s plays had been banned and his publications stopped. In March 1930 he wrote to the government of the USSR, naming his prospects plainly as “financial ruin, the street and death,” and asking either for the right to emigrate or for work.

On 18 April 1930 Stalin telephoned Bulgakov personally. Stalin asked, “Have we grown very tiresome to you?” Bulgakov replied that a Russian writer cannot live outside his homeland. “Well then, perhaps we should place you at the Art Theatre?” said Stalin. So Bulgakov became an assistant director and literary consultant at the Moscow Art Theatre (MKhAT).

But productions and publications of his own plays remained banned, and he was refused permission to emigrate. He died on 10 March 1940 of hereditary nephrosclerosis — the same illness that killed his father. The Master and Margarita was published only in 1966–1967, in part through the efforts of his widow, Elena Bulgakova, who lived to see the novel appear and died in 1970.

Source Dissent Magazine

Bottom row · 5th from right

Korney Chukovsky 1882–1969

Children’s writer (Moidodyr, Doctor Aybolit). For decades he kept a diary recording the repressions; in the 1960s he sheltered the disgraced Solzhenitsyn at his dacha in Peredelkino.

Chukovsky himself was not arrested — he was too famous and too useful to the Soviet system as a children’s writer. But his granddaughter Elena Chukovskaya (daughter of Lidia Chukovskaya) paid for the sheltering of Solzhenitsyn: she was among those the KGB persecuted for helping him.

Chukovsky’s diaries — a unique document of the era — were published only in the 1990s. In them he recorded the atmosphere of fear, the repressions, the hypocrisy of Soviet culture. He kept them in the strictest secrecy.

Source Russian Life magazine

Bottom row · 6th from right (bottom-left corner)

Sergei Eisenstein 1898–1948

Film director. The second part of Ivan the Terrible (on the oprichnina) was read by Stalin as a parallel to Stalinist terror and banned in 1946.

The first part of Ivan the Terrible (1944) was received with delight and awarded the Stalin Prize. The second, “The Boyars’ Plot,” was made in 1945–1946 and shown to Stalin. He was enraged: the oprichniki were depicted not as a devoted guard but as a gang of masked, sadistic murderers, and Ivan himself wavered and doubted — directly contradicting the Stalinist cult of the “firm hand.”

In February 1947 Stalin received Eisenstein in person, together with the actor Cherkasov (who played Ivan). Stalin explained that Ivan had been a “great and wise ruler” and “the oprichnina was a progressive force.” The film was banned and released only in 1958 — ten years after the director’s death.

Source Not Even Past (Univ. of Texas)

Left side · lower

Nikolai Vavilov 1887–1943

Geneticist and botanist, creator of the world’s seed collection. Arrested in 1940 on a denunciation by T. Lysenko; died of starvation in a Saratov prison.

From the 1930s Trofim Lysenko promoted his own pseudoscientific theory (“vernalisation”) and branded Western genetics — Mendelism-Morganism — “bourgeois pseudoscience” and “idealism.” Vavilov, the recognised world leader of genetics, publicly defended Mendel, Morgan and the laws of heredity, thereby casting doubt on Lysenko’s doctrine, which Stalin backed.

Besides “wrecking in agriculture,” Vavilov was charged with spying for Great Britain and belonging to a Right-Trotskyist organisation. All of it was false.

He died of dystrophy in the Saratov prison on 26 January 1943. Rehabilitated in 1955.

Source Britannica

Left side · upper

Pavel Vasiliev 1910–1937

Poet, one of the brightest voices of the “peasant poetry” of the 1930s. Shot after publicly calling Bukharin “the conscience of peasant Russia” and calling his colleagues’ denunciations “pornographic scribbles.”

Boris Pasternak considered Vasiliev a genius. But Vasiliev was unmanageable and defiant: in 1937, at a meeting of the Union of Writers where Bukharin was already being condemned as a “traitor,” Vasiliev stood up and spoke in his defence. The writers who signed the condemnatory letters he branded authors of “pornographic scribbles.”

Shot in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison on 16 July 1937, aged 27. His ashes were buried in a mass grave at the Donskoye Cemetery. Rehabilitated in 1956.

Sources Executed Today / Find a Grave

Inner left column · top

Sergei Efron 1893–1941

Husband of Marina Tsvetaeva. The only figure in this collage whose espionage charge was not entirely an invention.

In 1917–1920 he fought in the ranks of the White Army as a convinced anti-Bolshevik. Together with Tsvetaeva he emigrated to Europe.

In the 1930s, under the pressure of an ideological shift and of illness (tuberculosis), he was recruited by Soviet intelligence. He worked for the NKVD in Paris: in 1937 his group took part in the liquidation of the defector Ignace Reiss in Switzerland. He was forced to flee to the USSR.

Arrested in November 1939. Interrogators tortured his daughter Ariadna to make her testify against her father. He was sentenced by a military tribunal on 6 August 1941 and shot on 16 October 1941.

Source Find a Grave

Inner left column · middle

Pyotr Kapitsa 1894–1984

Experimental physicist, Nobel laureate (1978). His letters to Stalin secured Landau’s release (1939); later he spent nearly a decade under de facto house arrest for refusing to work under Beria.

In 1939 he wrote Stalin a personal letter, taking scientific responsibility for Landau’s conduct. It worked — a very rare instance of successful intercession in the era of terror.

After the war Kapitsa refused to take part in the Soviet atomic programme under Beria, whom he described to Stalin, in letters, as an incompetent manager. In 1946 he was stripped of all posts and suspended from work. Until 1953 he lived under KGB surveillance at a dacha near Moscow, doing physics in a home laboratory.

After Stalin’s death and Beria’s arrest he was rehabilitated and reinstated. In 1978 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Source Britannica

Inner left column · bottom

Marina Tsvetaeva 1892–1941

Poet. She took her own life after the arrest of her husband and daughter, left in complete isolation and poverty.

She returned to the USSR in 1939, following her husband and daughter. In August 1939 her daughter Ariadna was arrested; in October–November 1939 her husband Sergei Efron (sources differ on the date). Tsvetaeva was left with her teenage son, with no home, no money and no right to work in the Union of Writers.

During the German invasion she was evacuated to Yelabuga on the Kama. She asked for a job as a dishwasher in the writers’ canteen — and was refused. On 31 August 1941 she hanged herself when her son and the neighbours had left the house. In her note to her son: “Forgive me, but to go on would have been worse. I am gravely ill; this is no longer me…”

Source Encyclopedia.com

Inner right column · top

Vladimir Narbut 1888–1938

Acmeist poet, contemporary and comrade of Mandelstam, editor of several Soviet publishing houses. He died within the Gulag system under unclear circumstances.

Narbut was repeatedly attacked in the 1920s for “naturalism” and “eroticism” in his early verse. In 1928 he was expelled from the Party after accusations of “political double-dealing” (allegedly, during the revolutionary years in Ukraine, he had cooperated with the White Guard). In 1936 he was arrested on a charge of Trotskyism.

Sentenced to five years in the camps and sent to Magadan. The official Soviet death date of 1944 is considered unreliable: most researchers believe he died in 1938 — either shot or killed during transit. The exact circumstances remain unestablished to this day.

Source Bessmertnyi Barak (Immortal Barracks)

Inner right column · middle

Nikolai Gumilyov 1886–1921

Poet, founder of Acmeism, first husband of Akhmatova. Shot in the fabricated “Tagantsev case” — one of the first writers executed by Soviet power.

The “Tagantsev case” (1921) was a fabricated case about a “conspiracy” by Professor Tagantsev against Soviet power. Sixty-one people were shot.

Gumilyov knew of the alleged conspiracy (acquaintances had spoken to him about it) but did not inform — which became the formal grounds for his execution. As an organised movement the conspiracy did not exist: it amounted to scattered conversations among the intelligentsia.

Shot on 25 August 1921, aged 35. Place of burial unknown.

Source Poetry Foundation

Inner right column · bottom

Vsevolod Meyerhold 1874–1940

Reformer of the stage, one of the creators of world avant-garde theatre. Shot after torture; his letter describing the abuse survives.

Meyerhold was among the first to join the Bolshevik party in 1918 and helped build Soviet theatre. But his aesthetics — biomechanics, constructivism, his opposition to “socialist realism” — made him an enemy of Stalinist cultural policy. From 1934 to 1938 his work was systematically demolished in the press. In 1938 his theatre was closed.

On 15 June 1939, at a conference of theatre directors and in the presence of Vyshinsky, Meyerhold gave a defiant speech in defence of his method. On 20 June 1939 he was arrested in Leningrad and taken to the Lubyanka.

Charges: Trotskyism and spying for British and Japanese intelligence. After his arrest, his wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh, was stabbed to death in their apartment with seventeen knife wounds — evidently by NKVD agents.

In a letter to Molotov from prison, Meyerhold described the torture: “They laid me face down and beat the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap…” Shot on 2 February 1940 in the basement of the Lubyanka.

Sources Britannica / The Theatre Times