The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia by Orlando Figes Read Free Book Online

so, and often only for a few hours, enough to go drinking with some friends.’ Through the war Simonov gained in self-possession and proved his courage to himself. Sexually, too, he grew in confidence. He had many lovers, including Marina Chechneva, the ace bomber pilot and Hero of the Soviet Union. According to one of his later lovers, Simonov had a special attraction to women dressed in military uniforms. He liked to have sex on a Nazi flag, which he had recovered from the front. 36
    The war shaped Simonov’s entire outlook on the world. His values were measured on a military scale. ‘The army is a sort of school,’he later said. ‘Serving in the army teaches one for life to carry out one’s duties to society. Not to have this strict sense of duty is not to be a complete human being.’ Simonov was meticulous and diligent in performing his duties, rigidly adhering to routines and rules, rational to the point of seeming cold and uncaring, and sometimes rather domineering in his dealings with people. In many ways his model of behaviour was a figure he had introduced to Russian prose: the officer- intelligent who understands the logic of the orders handed down by the authorities and carries them out conscientiously. In later years, he tended to judge people by the way they had behaved during the war:
    Not to blacken the name of someone
    But to know them in the dark
    The winter of forty-one
    Gave us a true mark
    And if you will, it is useful from here on,
    Not letting it slip from our hands,
    With that mark, straight and iron,
    To check now how someone stands. 37
    Simonov applied this harsh measure to Lugovskoi, his charismatic teacher at the Literary Institute who had inspired a whole generation of Soviet poets. Lugovskoi was badly shaken by an incident in 1941 when he was serving at the front and fell under heavy bombardment. Retreating through a town that had been attacked by the Germans, he had stumbled on a bombed-out house where he found the blown-up bodies of several women and children. Lugovskoi suffered a nervous breakdown. He was evacuated to Tashkent. Many friends came to Lugovskoi’s assistance, including Elena Bulgakova, the widow of the writer Mikhail Bulgakov, who tried, unsuccessfully, to lift the ban on the publication of Lugovskoi’s poetry (which had been condemned as ‘politically harmful’ in 1937). Sonia and Zhenia Laskina also reached out to Lugovskoi. They wrote to him with deep affection and friendship. ‘You must come to Moscow,’ Zhenia wrote in 1943, shortly after the Laskins had returned to the capital from Cheliabinsk. ‘You are needed here, and people always come when they are needed. We are not just people, but your friends, you cannot refuse friends.’ Sonia even promised to marry Lugovskoi (‘I shall surround you with the comforts of a family’)if he returned and lived with them in the Laskin apartment in Sivtsev Vrazhek, where eight people were already cramped in the three tiny rooms. But Simonov had no such sympathy. He considered Lugovskoi’s remove to Tashkent a sign of cowardice and ceased to count him as a close friend. 38
    The war was the making of Simonov as a ‘Stalinist’: that was when he placed his faith in Stalin at the centre of his life, when he assumed his place in the regime’s hierarchy of political and military command, internalized the values of the system and accepted the directions of the Party leadership. Simonov had joined the Party as a candidate member on the outbreak of the war, becoming a full member in 1942. As he later explained, he had joined the Party because he wanted to have a say in the direction of the war effort – he thought that was his duty as an officer – and he did not think the war could be won without the Party’s leadership. The Party ‘alone was a mass force, capable of making the necessary decisions and sacrifices in the conditions of war’, and he wanted to be part of that force. Simonov identified with the Party, and in