BORIS PARAMONOV
Why are we trying to lay the blame on only one man now? Is it be–
cause we are trying to hide those others who were helping him, or
maybe even directing him? I don't understand why we are avoiding
the names of people whose much greater talents demand they be
brought into the light - the names of Voroshilov and Kaganovich. It
seems to me that they, not Voroshilov but Kaganovich , could have
quite an influence on our JosefVissarionovich [Stalin's patronymic] in
this direction.
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Certainly, the words "talents" and "our JosefVissarionovich" were not
used without irony. But once again, what is really worth noticing is this ten–
dency to distribute the weight of Stalin's crimes among his hypothetical Jew–
ish contingent, though everyone is well aware of Stalin's own anti-Semitism.
The names of Kaganovich and Yagoda are mentioned most frequently; they
certainly outweigh the names ofVoroshilov, Molotov, the foreign minister,
Zhdanov, the chief ideologist (the last two were descendants of Russian aris–
tocracy), Ezhov, the head of the KGB from 1937 to 1938, and finally, Be–
ria, the KGB chieffrom 1938 to 1953, a Georgian by nationality. An old
piece of folklore comes to mind: in Russia, when a Russian steals something
they say a thief did it; when a Jew steals something, they say a Jew did it.
Some of Rasputin's latest statements, quoted in
The New York Times Maga–
zine
U
anuary 28, 1990) by Bill Keller, leave no doubt about his anti–
Semitism and his efforts to blame the Jews for the Russian Revolution and
the subsequent communist rule of terror.
Behind the anti-Semitism of the country writers is a profound ideological
motive. Many Soviet literary critics say that "country writing" has sung the
requiem for the Russian countryside, for its tradition, its dignified work ethic,
the beauty of its land - all of it destroyed by the invasion of machines, espe–
cially the village churches, which used to serve, as Solzhenitsyn wrote, as the
centerpieces of any rural landscape. But above
all,
it is the requiem for some
fifteen million peasants, victims of collectivization, exiled from their native
villages, who for the most part perished during the famine and in Gulag
camps. In his novel,
The Foundation Pit,
recently published in the Soviet
Union after almost sixty years of oblivion, Andrei Platonov, though not tied
to the country writers in the genetic sense, painted this symbolic scene: a
group of purged
kulaks
is placed on an iceberg and set free to drift into the
Arctic Ocean. Platonov's work is still being treated as a sensation, evidence
of the fact that the wound has not healed, the problem has not been resolved.
The country writers do not need to use such symbolism to tell of the real
sufferings in the countryside; unlike the city-dweller Platonov,
all
of them
come from the country. They saw it
all
happen with their own eyes.
The country writers' position is defined not only by their reaction
against the collectivization of the Russian peasants, but also against the pro-
