Seductions of a police state

Stalin, like Nero, took his poetry seriously, perhaps not for its aesthetic qualities but as an expression of independent thought and feeling, which are always dangerous to a dictator because they suggest the possibility of dissidence. (I’m sure Kim Jong-Il supervises its production very closely as well.)

What this meant for the writers and intelligentsia of the early Soviet period is hard to fathom from the outside, but an account by the widow of Osip Mandelstam entitled Hope against Hope is a window into that bizarre netherworld of Stalinist repression and later terror. It was published in the early 1970s, I believe, and a copy came into my hands through inheritance of some of my late uncle’s books. It is a remarkable gem.

Osip Mandelstam was sympathetic to the Bolshevik revolution but later wrote a 16-line poem in which he calls Stalin a murderer of peasants. His ironic comment that ‘only in Russia is poetry respected—it gets people killed’, turned out to be prophetic. He died in a Siberian work camp shortly after his second arrest.

Nadezhda Mandelstam did not consider herself a writer, but her account is not only utterly gripping as a narrative but a stylistic marvel. Her erudition, insight and sheer toughness come through on every page.


I also recommend it highly to all those impatient to dismantle our civil liberties as quickly as possible in the name of ‘protecting the American people’ or ‘defending our way of life’ as similar phrases ring throughout her 500-page description of Stalinist discourse and its practical applications in a totalitarian state. It is much easier to scapegoat the weak and whip a frightened populace into complicity with abuse than it is to defend the rule of law and the rights of the accused to due process.

She outlines how the revolutionary ideals that sounded so attractive and obvious to her generation became clubs in the hands of the secret police and justifications—readily accepted by many—for waves of purges and human suffering on a staggering scale.

Here is Mrs Mandelstam on the insidious and permanent effect of the 1937 terror and its aftermath. Note how creepily recognizable are her descriptions of the leadership of one of the major crimes against humanity of our century:

In all their different incarnations, our guardians were always sure they were right and never knew what it was to doubt. They always boldly claimed to know just by looking at a seed what its fruit would be, and from this it was but a step to decreeing the destruction of any seedling they thought was useless.

She also revisits constantly the theme of a society’s moral bankruptcy as an outcome of repression and a stimulus to its further deepening:

Every grand idea eventually goes into a decline. Once this has happened, all that remains is inertia—with young people afraid of change, weary middle-aged ones craving for peace, a handful of old men horrified at what they have done, and countless petty myrmidons repeating by rote the phrases they were taught in their youth.