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The publication of Diane Seuss's poem, “Still Life with Dictator”, in this issue of ROOM made me think of another poem about another dictator which appeared in circumstances very different from these. I refer to the poem on Stalin which was composed and read in a small circle by the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) in Moscow in November 1933.
In the fall of 1933 the Soviet Union had experienced five years of tremendous social convulsion wrought by the Soviet Government in implementing the first five-year plan. With no preparation or concern for the consequences, every sector of the economy was industrialized, the peasants in their many tens of millions were forced onto collective farms, the arts and media were expected to confine themselves to celebrating these changes, and in place of the collective leadership prior to 1928, everyone was now expected to express a deep love and admiration for Joseph Stalin as the demiurge of the changes.
These forced changes brought terrible suffering. Collectivization ruined harvests and people starved. Furious peasants sabotaged their farms. A whole section of the country, the Ukraine, was deliberately deprived of grain in 1932 for political reasons, resulting in five million deaths or more. If you were alive in the Soviet Union in late 1933 you would have seen starving people everywhere even as you read in newspapers and novels about the glorious Communist future that was being built. Some believed what they read and thought no further; others saw with their own eyes what was happening. For the latter it could be an agonizing situation because the changes that created such terrible suffering were also being done in the name of the Revolution and the people, words which for many in the Russian intelligentsia still had great meaning. Mandelstam, who grew up in the last decade of czarist rule, was among these.
But he found he could not bear the suffering he witnessed and the mounting level of falsification and dishonesty that p