Stalin’s Children

In the Economist:

ONE of Russia’s most popular television shows is “Wait For Me”, a true-life tear-jerker that finds and reunites separated couples and families. Sometimes the stories it tells are run-of-the-mill melodramas that could have happened anywhere. But often they are tragically Russian, combining huge distances, lavish and indiscriminate cruelty and impenetrable bureaucracy: siblings separated 70 years ago when their parents were executed; lovers who lost one another in prison camps.

“Wait For Me” takes its name from the most famous Russian poem from the Soviet Union’s war with Germany. Konstantin Simonov, its author, was part of the first generation to grow up with the Soviet system’s mock classroom trials, playground games of “search and requisition”, and the “cult of struggle” inherited from the civil war. His aristocratic family was wrecked by the revolution; but like many children of undesirables, he disguised his background, transmuting the values he inherited into devout Stalinism.

Simonov wrote admiringly of the redemptive power of slave labour and the White Sea Canal, one of the gigantic Stalinist infrastructure projects built on the skeletons of prisoners. But it was “Wait for Me” that brought him fame, a dacha, foreign travel and the affections of the actress (herself hiding a tainted biography) to whom the poem had presumptuously been addressed. He copied Stalin’s pipe and moustache, and lent his voice to the dictator’s post-war anti-Semitic purges. The torture and exile of relatives did not dislodge his faith; nor did Stalin’s discombobulating death. Yet Simonov was also a brave war reporter, a generous friend and, eventually, conscience-stricken and remorseful.