ABSTRACT
In autumn 1936 town dwellers and members of the professional classes began to be exposed to massive oppression on a scale rivalling that of the earlier collectivization campaign in the countryside. Vast numbers of managers, engineers, professors, and administrators, as well as officers of the armed forces and others, were either executed or removed to prison camps that few survived. In that summer Pasternak compounded his sins by withholding his signature from the latest writers’ collective protest letter, which applauded the recent execution of Marshal Tukhachevsky and other leading generals. Akhmatova has left only two lyrics attributable to 1937. Both are outspokenly political, and both were preserved in secret for decades, being first published long after Stalin’s death, and then only abroad. The first is a sardonic quatrain in which she says that her “clowning” is likely to earn her “a leaden pellet from the Secretary.”.
