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In 1937 Soviet Russia marked the centenary of Pushkin's death. The whole country was involved in festivities: small provincial theatres put on plays; schools organized special celebrations; Young Communists went on pilgrimages to places connected with the poet's life; factories organized study groups and clubs of 'Pushkinists'; collective farms held Pushkin carnivals with figures dressed as characters from Pushkin's fairy tales (and in one case, for no apparent reason, the figure of Chapaev with a machine-gun); scores of films were made about his life; libraries and theatres were established in his name; and streets and squares, theatres and museums, were renamed after the poet.¹¹¹ The boom in Pushkin publishing was staggering. Nineteen million copies of his works sold in the jubilee alone, and tens of millions of subscriptions were taken for the new edition of his complete works which had been planned for 1937 - though because of the purges and the frequent losses of staff in which they resulted it was only finished in 1949. The cult of Pushkin reached fever pitch when Pravda declared him a 'semi-divine being' and the Central Committee issued a decree in which he was heralded as the 'creator of the Russian literary language', the 'father of Russian literature' and even as 'the founder of Communism'.¹¹² In an article entitled 'Pushkin Our Comrade', the writer Andrei Platonov maintained that Pushkin had been able to foresee the October Revolution because the spirit of the Russian people had burned like a 'red hot coal' within his heart; the same spirit had flickered through the nineteenth century and flared up anew in Lenin's soul.¹¹³ As Pushkin was a truly national poet whose writing spoke to the entire people, his homeland, it was claimed by Pravda, was not the old Russia but the Soviet Union and all humanity.¹¹⁴

'Poetry is respected only in this country', Mandelstam would tell his friends in the 1930s. 'There's no place where more people are killed for it.'¹¹⁵ At the same time as it was erecting monuments to Pushkin, the Soviet regime was murdering his literary descendants. Of the 700 writers who attended the First Writers' Congress in 1934, only fifty survived to attend the Second in 1954.¹¹⁶ Stalin was capricious in his persecution of the literary fraternity. He saved Bulgakov, he cherished

Pasternak (both of whom could be construed as anti-Soviet), yet without a moment's hesitation he condemned Party hacks and left-wing writers from the ranks of RAPP. Stalin was not ignorant of cultural affairs. He read serious literature (the poet Demian Bedny hated lending books to him because he returned them with greasy fingermarks).¹¹⁷ He knew the power of poetry in Russia, and feared it. Stalin kept a jealous eye on the most talented or dangerous writers: even Gorky was placed under constant surveillance. But after 1934, when full-scale terror was unleashed, he moved towards more drastic measures of control. The turning point was the murder in 1934 of Sergei Kirov, the Party boss in Leningrad. It is probable that Kirov had been killed on Stalin's orders: he was more popular than Stalin in the Party, in favour of more moderate policies, and there had been plots to put him into power. But in any case, Stalin exploited the murder to unleash a campaign of mass terror against all the 'enemies' of Soviet power, which culminated in the show trials of the Bolshevik leaders Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev in 1936-8 and subsided only when Russia entered the Second World War in 1941. Akhmatova called the early 1930s the 'vegetarian years', meaning they were relatively harmless in comparison with the 'meat-eating' years that were to come.¹¹⁸

Mandelstam was the first to be taken. In November 1933 he had written a poem about Stalin which had been read in secret to his friends. It is the simplest, most straightforward, verse he ever wrote, a fact his widow Nadezhda would explain as demonstrating Mandel-stam's concern to make the poem comprehensible and accessible to all. 'It was, to my mind, a gesture, an act that flowed logically from the whole of his life and work… He did not want to die before stating in unambiguous terms what he thought about the things going on around us.'¹¹⁹

We live, deaf to the land beneath us,

Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,

All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,

The murderer and peasant-slayer.

His fingers are fat as grubs

And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,

His cockroach whiskers leer

And his boots gleam.

Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders -

Fawning half-men for him to play with.

They whinny, purr or whine

As he prates and points a finger,

One by one forging his laws, to be flung

Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.

And every killing is a treat

For the broad-chested Ossete.¹²⁰