Isaiah Berlin: A Life — 10: Moscow

1. 1. Isaiah Berlin arrived in Moscow in September 1945, fearing the Soviets might detain him as a Soviet citizen born in Latvia.
2. 2. At an embassy party, Berlin met Russian artists including Eisenstein, Tairov, Chukovsky, and Lina Prokofiev, who were astonished by his fluent Russian.
3. 3. Berlin realized the artists at the dinner were gripped by fear, as Stalin had recently reprimanded Eisenstein for his film Ivan the Terrible.
4. 4. Berlin learned that the artistic experimentation of the 1920s ended because of Stalin's purges, with figures like Meyerhold tortured and shot in 1940.
5. 5. The Yezhovshchina of 1937 exterminated the cultural elite, including Mandelstam, Babel, and Meyerhold, leaving Russian culture in a vacant stillness.
6. 6. Chukovsky, a children's writer, survived the purges by becoming popular and protected, and he shared with Berlin a love for Trollope.
7. 7. Berlin asked Chukovsky to arrange a meeting with Boris Pasternak, having read Pasternak's My Sister, Life and been suggested by Maurice Bowra.
8. 8. Berlin explored Moscow, eavesdropping on conversations and absorbing the Russian language, which moved him deeply after 25 years away.
9. 9. Berlin visited his uncle Leo, a professor of dietetics, who hinted at the loss of the family in Riga and the impossibility of travel abroad.
10. 10. At a diplomatic party, a senior Soviet official revealed that peasants were unwilling to return to collective farms, reminiscent of the late 1920s crisis.
11. 11. At a literary salon, poet Selvinsky declared that Russian writers conform because the Party is always right, a statement Berlin recognized as intended for the microphones.
12. 12. Berlin visited Pasternak in Peredelkino, where the poet revealed his new novel 'Boys and Girls', later to become Doctor Zhivago.