The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia Read Online Free PDF Page A

actress, who was still pursued by Simonov. The love-triangle had become the gossip of the Soviet elite, which dubbed it the ‘USSR’ (Union of Serova, Simonov and Rokos-sovsky). Determined to break up the affair, Rokossovsky’s wife complained to Stalin, who disapproved of his leading generals being distracted by personal affairs. In July 1942, Stalin ordered Rokossovsky to take up the command of the Briansk Front, south of Moscow, and focus his attentions on the war. Throughout that summer Valentina tried to revive the romance. Hopelessly in love with the handsome general, she flew out to the front to visit him. But after Stalin’s intervention, Rokossovsky refused to receive her. As it became clear that her passion for the general would not be reciprocated, Valentina softened towards Simonov, who had continued to send her gifts and poetry. She slept with him but said she was not in love with him. Sometimes she exploited him in cruel and humiliating ways. Once she even made him deliver one of her love letters to Rokossovsky at the front. 20
    By this time the ‘romance’ of Simonov and Valentina had become the subject of a cycle of lyric poems known by everyone. Their love affair became an established fact in the nation’s literary imagination even before it existed in reality.
    The most famous of these poems was ‘Wait For Me’, written in the summer of 1941, when Simonov was a long way from conquering Valentina’s heart:
Wait for me, and I’ll come back,
But wait with all your might,
Wait when dreariness descends
With the yellow rains,
Wait when snowdrifts sweep the ground,
Wait during the heat,
Wait when others are given up
And together with the past forgotten.
Wait when from distant places
Letters do not arrive,
Wait when all who’ve waited together
Are already tired of it.
Wait for me, and I’ll come back,
Don’t give your approval
To those who say you should forget,
Insisting they are right.
Even though my son and mother
Believe I’m already gone,
Though my friends get tired of waiting,
Settle by the fire and drink
A bitter cup,
So my soul should rest in peace…
Wait. Do not make haste to join them
In their toast to me.
Wait for me, and I’ll come back,
Just to spite all deaths.
Let the ones who did not wait
Say: ‘It was his luck.’
It’s hard for them to understand,
For those who did not wait,
That in the very heat of fire,
By waiting here for me,
It was you who saved me.
Only you and I will know
How I survived –
It’s just that you know how to wait
As no other person. 21
    Simonov had written these love poems for Valentina and himself. He did not think that they were suitable for publication, because they lacked the mandatory ‘civic content’ of Socialist Realist poetry. ‘I thought these verses were my private business,’ Simonov said in 1942. But living in the dug-outs at the front, he had recited them to the soldiers, who wrote them down and learned them by heart. The men found an echo of their own emotions in these poems and encouraged Simonov to publish them in Krasnaia zvezda . In December 1941, when Simonov returned on leave to Moscow, several of his poems were broadcast on the radio and then published in Pravda . ‘Wait For Me’ had the greatest response. The poem was reprinted hundreds of times in the press. It was copied out and circulated in millions of private versions by soldiers and civilians. It became a hit song. In 1942, Simonov wrote the screenplay for a film ( Wait For Me ) in which Valentina played the leading role. A stage version was produced by theatres in cities across the land. Soldiers copied out the poem in their albums and notebooks. They kept it in their pockets as a talisman. They engraved the poem’s main refrain on tanks and lorries and tattooed it on their arms. Lost for words to express their own emotions, they simply copied out the verse in letters to their sweethearts, who responded with the same pledge. ‘My darling Volodenka,’ wrote one woman to