The great soul of the Russian people will always outlive those who seek to destroy it

The Russian symbolist poet Osip Mandelstam once said that Russia is the only country that takes poetry seriously – it gets people killed.  In Stalin’s time some Russian poets were victimised and silenced, some were protected.  Stalin admired Pasternak’s translations of Georgian poetry into Russian.  He wrote a curt note to the NKVD telling it to “leave this cloud dweller alone.”

Russia’s Memorial organisation was established during the fall of the Soviet Union to study and commemorate human rights violations and other crimes committed by Stalin’s regime.  It was banned shortly before the invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.  Yet despite this, yesterday many Russians commemorated the victims of Stalinist terror through taking part in the Returning the Names event.  Every year, this event sees people taking turns reading out the names of people executed during Stalin’s Terror between 1936 and 1938. 

In Moscow, the event is traditionally held at the Solovetsky Stone memorial opposite the former KGB’s Lubyanka headquarters, now occupied by the FSB.  This year the authorities have banned the event from this location.

Osip Mandelstam’s Stalin Epigram  led to his arrest and death in custody.  Yet his contemporary, Anna Akhmatova, wrote of Russian poets and poetry that “our holy trade has existed for a thousand years.” Through all Russia’s troubles, brave and gifted Russian poets still write to “free language from the captivity of violence”. 

The great soul of the Russian people will always outlive those who seek to destroy it.