The children of Moscow Arbat in USSR attended schools in the 1930s when the majority of teachers were from the time before the revolution. The majority of shared flats in the Arbat were small in size, yet they were filled to capacity with books from antiquated private libraries. The “Arbat culture,” as defined by a scholar specializing in this area, refers to the conventional culture of the common intelligentsia during the late 19th century, which was slightly influenced by the artistic and musical tendencies of the “Silver Age.”

The children of Moscow Arbat in USSR attended schools in the 1930, postwar and post-Stalin generations

This culture assumed a strong dislike for nationalism and anti-Semitism. Furthermore, it was founded on the premise of romantic relationships between different genders, and most importantly, the belief that “history is rational and progresses in a favorable and constructive manner.”

The children residing in the Arbat area have also acquired an additional fundamental principle from the former intellectual elite: a perception of societal obligation, a sense of accountability towards the nation, and a desire for personal involvement. The Arbat was not the sole location where the groups of young intellectuals and artists from the postwar era were raised. The Institute for Philosophy, Literature, and History was a Soviet equivalent of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in France.

In Moscow, there was also the Institute of Literature, where experienced writers and poets conducted seminars for young individuals interested in the humanities. The purpose was to train and develop the most talented individuals to become influential figures in shaping and creating culture. In the 1930s, additional educational institutions at the university level were established to serve as training grounds for the educated elite in the Soviet Union.

However the Bolshevik vanguard, the majority of the Old Bolsheviks, Red Army commanders and generals, countless “Red professors,” and hundreds of leftist writers were killed in the secret police dungeons, gulag camps, and mass graves on execution fields. The significant bloodshed eliminated the heroes of the revolutionary and Soviet history, and instead, elevated the imposing image of the Great Leader, Stalin.

The horror obliterated and eradicated from collective recollection the exemplary figures of their formative years, including Nikolai Bukharin, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, and the literary luminaries Isaac Babel and Boris Pilniak. The majority of the individuals who survived the acts of terror at universities and other cultural institutions were, ironically, the teachers who did not espouse the communist philosophy.

Instead, having grown up in the nineteenth-century traditions of liberalism and humanism, they couldn’t help but pass on their manners, habits, ethical standards, and aesthetic attitudes to their students while keeping their political opinions to themselves. Passion for Russian fine arts coexisted with a determination to transform Russia and the world among IFLI and Institute of Literature students alike.

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A number of these pupils were gifted poets who later became the voice of the postwar and post-Stalin generations. Among them were Jews whose parents had relocated to Moscow and abandoned their Jewish roots in favor of embracing the new Soviet “motherland” and identity. David Kaufman (alias Samoilov) arrived with his family from Vilno.

Pavel Kogan arrived from Kiev. Some were Russians whose parents came from the countryside or the provincial lower-middle class; they had also abandoned the “old Russia” and connected strongly with the new Soviet Russia. Sergei Narovchatov, a blue-eyed poet from a Russian hamlet on the Volga, stood out among them. The most profound aim of these revolutionary romantics was to sacrifice themselves in the future war against fascism and Nazism, as well as to continue humanity’s great spiritual transformation, which they believed had begun with the Russian Revolution. They looked for like-minded individuals and, surprisingly, found them at the Moscow Institute of Law.

At a period when Soviet jurisprudence and “socialist law” justified the killing of “enemies of the people,” Konstantin Simis, Boris Slutsky, Vladimir Dudintsev, and other law students joined a literary circle led by Osip Brik, a friend of famous poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. They invited poets from the Institute of Literature to attend a session. Slutsky, an aspiring poet from Kharkov, wowed them with his organizational abilities, extraordinarily broad learning, and strong belief in the global revolution.