In her classic memoir of Soviet state terror in the 1930s, Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam recounts the last years of her marriage to the poet Osip Mandelstam as they flee from city to village to town, dependent on handouts from a few brave friends and strangers, exiled from their Moscow home as enemies of the state. Osip’s chief crime had been to recite a poem at a dinner party that he never wrote down, let alone published, mocking Stalin and exposing his brutal regime.Article continues after advertisement
The final couplet: “And every killing is a treat / For the broad-chested Ossete.” (Stalin was rumored to be of North Georgian, or Ossetian descent, not an ethnic Russian.) Osip is finally arrested and deported in 1937, the year of the “Great Purge,” which took his life along with those of almost a million other Soviet citizens deemed disloyal or simply “not needed.”
Writing from a perspective of relative safety in the 1960s, Mandelstam looks back on the early years of widespread belief in a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” to which she and her husband initially subscribed, and traces the gradual erosion and then swift abandonment in Soviet society under Stalin of “humanist” values—respect for “the fate of every individual.” “There is a moment of truth,” she writes, “when you are overcome by sheer astonishment: ‘So that’s where I’m living, and the sort of people I’m living with! So this is what they’re capable of! So this is the world I live in!’”
