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As Mandelstam once said, Russia took poetry more seriously than any nation in the world: “There’s no place where more people are killed for it.”
Decades later, shortly before Stalin died, someone supposedly asked him what formalism and Socialist Realism actually were. He shrugged and replied, “The Devil alone knows.”
Stalin didn’t believe a word of their reports. “This is not a ‘source’ but a disinformer,” he wrote on one communiqué, and followed it up with a rude comment about what the spy could do to his own mother.
the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn observed, “Not to trust anybody was very typical of Josef Stalin. All the years of his life did he trust one man only, and that was Adolf Hitler”— the twentieth century’s most notorious genocidal liar.
The Leningrad Public Library remained open throughout the siege and became a place for people to congregate. “People came to the library to read, even when weak from cold and exhaustion,” one of the librarians explained. “Some died in their places, with a book propped in front of them. We would carry the bodies outside, hoping that the trucks would take them away, but increasingly they were simply left in the snow.”
As it happens, many famous Russian novels are quite long. This was a perfect time, some soldiers and civilians found, to read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
Halfway through the performance, she saw that one of the Musketeers had died of hunger. He lay on the floor with a shattered cup in his hand. The show, quite incredibly, went on. An announcement was made. The actress went out onstage to speak her lines and could not talk for grief. Everyone waited, knowing what she was going through. Somehow, she found the strength to carry on. They finished the play with only two Musketeers.
As a Soviet official commented sarcastically, “We’ve lost millions of people, and they want us to crawl on our knees because they send us Spam.”
