Nadezhda
Khazina was born in Saratov, Russia, on 31st
October, 1899. Her mother was a doctor but she wanted to become an
artist and studied under A. A. Ekster.
In 1919
Khazina married the famous poet, Osip
Mandelstam. He was hostile to the Communist government and his
poetry never conformed to the official doctrine of Socialist
Realism.
In 1934
Mandelstam was arrested for writing an epigram that was critical of
Joseph Stalin and described him as "the
murderer and peasant slayer". Khazina and Mandelstam were eventually
exiled to Cherdyn.
They were
allowed to return to Moscow in May, 1937. However, soon after he was
re-arrested and sent to a labour camp. The Soviet government reported
that Osip Mandelstam died at Vtoraya
Rechka, on 27th December, 1938.
Khazina's
book, Hope Against Hope, about
the Soviet Union under Joseph
Stalin, was published in 1970.
(1)
When Osip Mandelstam was being investigated
by the Secret Police he went to see the
short-story writer, Isaac Babel, a leading
figure in the Union of Soviet Writers.
The meeting was later recorded by Nadezhda
Khazina.
The next
person we consulted was Babel. We told him our troubles, and during
the whole of our long conversation he listened with remarkable intentness.
Everything about Babel gave an impression of all-consuming curiosity
- the way he held his head, his mouth and chin, and particularly his
eyes. It is not often that one sees such undisguised curiously in
the eyes of a grown-up. I had the feeling that Babel's main driving
force was the unbridled curiously with which he scrutinized life and
people.
With his
usual ability to size things up, he was quick to decide on the best
course for us. "Go out to Kalinin," he said, "Nikolai
Erdman is there - his old woman just love him." This was Babel's
cryptic way of saying that all Erdman's female admirers would never
have allowed him to settle in a bad place. He also thought we might
be able to get some help from them - in finding a room there, for
instance. Babel volunteered to get the money for our fare the next
day.
(2)
After Osip Mandelstam's death, Nadezhda Khazina wrote
about their experiences of living in the Soviet Union during the 1930s
in her book, Hope Against Hope (1971)
In the period of the Yezhov terror - the mass arrests
came in waves of varying intensity - there must sometimes have been
no more room in the jails, and to those of us still free it looked
as though the highest wave had passed and the terror was abating.
After each show trial, people sighed, "Well, it's all over at
last." What they meant was: "Thank God, it looks as though
I've escaped. But then there would be a new wave, and the same people
would rush to heap abuse on the "enemies of the people."
Wild inventions
and monstrous accusations had become an end in themselves, and officials
of the secret police applied all their ingenuity to them, as though
reveling in the total arbitrariness of their power.
The principles
and aims of mass terror have nothing in common with ordinary police
work or with security. The only purpose of terror is intimidation.
To plunge the whole country into a state of chronic fear, the number
of victims must be raised to astronomical levels, and on every floor
of every building there must always be several apartments from which
the tenants have suddenly been taken away. The remaining inhabitants
will be model citizens for the rest of their lives - this was true
for every street and every city through which the broom has swept.
The only essential thing for those who rule by terror is not to overlook
the new generations growing up without faith in their elders, and
keep on repeating the process in systematic fashion.
Stalin
ruled for a long time and saw to it that the waves of terror recurred
from time to time, always on even greater scale than before. But the
champions of terror invariably leave one thing out of account - namely,
that they can't kill everyone, and among their cowed, half-demented
subjects there are always witnesses who survive to tell the tale.
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