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unprecedented cultural efflorescence, spent its first decade or so looking
    like the benevolent guardian of a realized dream. Left-leaning culturati in the West were able to fool themselves for decades afterwards that a totalitarian regime had somehow opened up new
    possibilities for making art a political weapon in the eternal struggle to free the people’s creative will. The dazzle-painted agitprop trains and the snappily edited newsreels of Dziga
    Vertov were seen as signs of vigour, which they were, and of truth, which they were not.
    Among the Soviet Union’s apologists in the West, it was commonly supposed that, while the self-exiled Stravinsky no
    doubt enjoyed his personal freedom, Prokofiev and Shostakovich gained from being thought important by the power that paid them, and that this putatively fruitful relationship between creativity
    and a centralized statehad been established in the early years after the Revolution. In reality, the intelligentsia was already doomed, simply because Anatoly Lunacharsky, the
    commissar for culture, wielded absolute power over the artists. He could wield it benevolently only with the indulgence of his superiors, which was withdrawn in 1929, the year the nightmare began
    to unfold unmistakably even to those who had been carried away when they thought it was a dream. (Awareness could be fatal: Mayakovsky, the poet most famous for transmitting state policy through
    works of art, shot himself not because he was mad, but because he was mad no longer—he had suddenly woken up to the dreadful fact that his creative enthusiasm had been used to cosmeticize
    mass murder.)
    Akhmatova, to her credit, had always tried to stay aloof from the Revolution. But the Revolution was never likely to pay
    her the courtesy of staying aloof from her. As early as 1922, her poetry had been correctly identified as politically unhelpful, and she was forbidden to publish any more of it. The ban was
    relaxed temporarily in 1940, but we need to remember that Akhmatova, as a poet, was never really allowed to function. She earned her living mainly from translation and journey-work in prose. (As
    a consequence, a threat in 1947 to expel her from the Writers’ Union was tantamount to a sentence of death.) Praising Pushkin, as she did in the essay that mentioned his “lyrical
    wealth,” was as close as she was allowed to get to saying something subversive. As it happened, it was permissible to place a value on a poet’s specifically poetic gifts as long as
    the poet was accepted as exemplifying—or, in Pushkin’s case, heralding—the correct political direction. If she had been caught even thinking about the “lyrical
    wealth” of, say, Osip Mandelstam, she would have been in even more trouble than usual. Osip Mandelstam had been murdered by Stalin in 1938. There had been a time when Osip, like most of the
    male poets of his generation, had been in love with Akhmatova. She had returned his affection, much to the annoyance of his wife Nadezhda, who, in her essential book Hope Against Hope , can be found forgiving Akhmatova for alienating Osip’s affections. Nadezhda Mandelstam knew that the glamorous Akhmatova, like Tolstoy’s
    Natasha Rostova, needed to be adored: she was a vamp by nature. If there had been no revolution, Akhmatova could have made her seductive nature her subject, in the manner of Edna St. Vincent
    Millay but to even greater effect. History denied herthe opportunity to sublimate her frailties. It made her a heroine instead. There were crueller fates available in
    Stalinist Russia, but that one was cruel enough.
    What we have to grasp is that it needn’t have happened to her. History needn’t have been like
    that. That’s what history is: the story of everything that needn’t have been like that. We also have to grasp that art proves its value by still mattering to people who have been
    deprived of every other freedom: indeed instead of mattering less, it matters more. For the Russians,