Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health - Part Five by Dave Jaffe

Poets Live and Die Under Communism


   "Josef Stalin killed everybody," a British journalist once wrote. This was true. Stalin, the communist tyrant, ruled the Soviet Union from the 1920's until his death in 1953.
    In the 1930's Stalin crushed the Ukrainian peasants and then launched a series of brutal purges. Millions of people, many of whom were loyal communists, died in the gulag prison camps or were shot dead after so-called 'trials.
     Poets, like many intellectuals, were targets of Stalin's henchmen. Osip Mandelstam was a very gifted poet. He died in one of Stalin's gulags in 1938. Vladimir Mayakovski, a multi-talented poet killed himself in 1930 rather than live in Stalin's Soviet Union.
    Stalin had Pavel Vasiliarov, another gifted poet killed. Titsian Tabidze was a talented poet from the Soviet republic of Georgia. He killed himself in 1937 rather than face one of Stalin's purges. Stalin had four Yiddish poets killed in the 1950's. They were part of a group of Jewish artists who Stalin killed because he feared these Jews were part of a plot to kill him.
    In his book on life in Communist-ruled Poland called 'The Captive MInd', the  poet Czeslaw Milosz mentions three Polish Communist poets  namely Wandierski, Stande and Bruno Janieski.. These three well-known poets of the 1920's and 1930's were afraid of being persecuted in Poland. They fled to the Soviet Union. Stalin had all of them accused of crimes and had them killed.
    "The Western economy squanders talent to an incredible degree," wrote Czeslaw Milosz in 'The Captive Mind'. "Since it is not a planned economy, the Western state cannot come to the aid of people working in the various arts." Milosz's book appeared in the early 1950's. Since then a whole system of grants and prizes for artists have been set up in many western countries, including Canada. Still, anyone who wants to be a painter, poet or any artist is rarely going to end up rich.
     The totalitarian governments of the 20th century that ruled Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Communist Soviet Union and Mao's China crushed and killed many dissident artists and intellectuals. In the capitalist democracies being a poet could mean travelling on a road to starvation. Yet in Stalin's Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany or Mao's China,. a poet's life could also be short and fearful.
     Being a poet has sometimes meant living a dangerous life.