In 1945, several educated, high-minded officers in the Soviet Army identified with the Decembrists, a group of young Russian officers who returned from the battle against Napoleon inspired with political liberalism and eventually organized a military revolt to establish constitutional authority.

The postwar years high-minded officers in the Soviet Army, Moscow’s Arbat sector

The war conflict cruelly slaughtered previously educated youth, including volunteers from Moscow, Leningrad, and other places. Approximately nine out of 10 volunteers did not return home. The cultural environment shaped by the old intellectuals decreased dramatically. Leningrad, where over a million people died during the Nazi siege in addition to tens of thousands killed during Stalinist oppression, experienced the most social and cultural devastation.

Moscow’s Arbat sector became a violent place, invaded by social “outsiders” who had little respect for the city’s traditions. he poets from IFLI and the Institute of Literature were annihilated. Pavel Kogan died on the front lines in 1942. “Where the young forest once stood, only trees and stumps remained,” Slutsky wrote later. Those who survived felt compelled to live their lives with unique significance and passion, not only for themselves, but also for their companions who had died. Initially, the survivors felt that they could use their energy and skills to reform and improve life in Russia.

A Soviet officer recalled a few years later: “It seemed to me that the Great Patriotic War would inevitably be followed by a vigorous social and literary revival like after the war of 1812 and I was in a hurry to take part in this revival.” The young war veterans expected the state to compensate them for their suffering and sacrifices “with greater trust and increased rights of participation, not just free bus passes.”

Slutsky characterized this postwar mentality succinctly: “Bow to no one!” Like the poets of the Proletkult following the Revolution, he hoped to use poetry and power to effect change in Russia. After the war, the passion for poetry persisted: from 1945 to early 1946, Pasternak, Akhmatova, and other poets lectured in front of vast audiences in filled halls. Educated Russians remained to trust in the power of the word and the concept. A group of veterans became philosophy students at Moscow State University (MGU), men with unquenchable curiosity.

Yuri Levada, a student from the 1952 class, recalled: “It seemed as if there had never been such interesting people there before or since.” Boris Grushin, a student in the same class, recalls how war veterans inspired students by teaching philosophy “with new perceptions and assumptions, with a new vision of life, of the world.” This set of thinkers, like Slutsky, Samoilov, and the poets, saw it as their job to discover the principles of human growth not only in Marx, Engels, and Lenin’s books, but also in the writings of classical German and French philosophers. There were people who “spent the war with a volume of Hegel.”

The postwar years posed a significant challenge to the prematurely gray young intelligentsia. In 1946, Stalin launched a furious attack on what he saw as “laxity” and blamed it on Western influences. Georgy Shakhnazarov, a young war veteran and PhD student at the Moscow Institute of Law in 1949, eventually concluded that the Zhdanovshchina efforts were aimed at postwar youth rather than older cultural elites. Stalin recognized that the war veterans “believed they were entitled to live as they deserved” and determined to oppose them. His plan was “to destroy their political innocence, to engage them in a pogrom against Jewish ‘cosmopolitans’ in university departments, party meetings, publishing houses, and other institutions of the ideological establishment.”

The youthful idealists were slow to see what was coming. Slutsky, Samoilov, and Sergei Narovchatov were unsure how to interpret Zhdanov’s attacks. The only conceivable answer appeared to be the need to rally society for the Cold War. Samoilov taped his chats with Narovchatov. “The period of agreement with [Western] ‘democracies’ must inevitably come to an end,” because Europe had become a battleground for the Soviet Union and Western nations.

The young thinkers erroneously expected Europe to become “socialist” and the Communist International, which Stalin had disbanded in 1943, would be reinstated to promote global revolution. Instead, Stalin used great-power chauvinism, Russian nationalism, and anti-Semitism to restore ultimate control over Soviet society. Instead of providing guidance to a group of attentive and understanding leaders, Slutsky had to make a living by writing shows for state radio like “People of the World Praise Their Great Leader.” To make ends meet, Samoilov had to translate the Albanian poem “Stalin Is with Us” and other propagandistic garbage. The very air these young geniuses breathed was tainted with danger, frightening enough to make them cringe at the sound of passing footfall outside their door.

Nevertheless, the pals continued to meet and debate. Samoilov married in 1947, and the living room of his common flat on Sretensky Boulevard in Moscow was frequently full of visitors. They included physicists, economists, and historians in addition to poets. At the end of 1949, Slutsky and Samoilov found a second home in an apartment owned by Yuri Timofeev, a student at the Institute of International Affairs. Yuri had an extensive library and a superb collection of medieval armor.

Above all, he was a collector of human talent brilliant men and women. Aside from Samoilov and Slutsky, Timofeev’s gatherings were attended by other poets and writers, scholars, playwrights, radio and cinema personalities, actors and actresses, and other young people of quick wit and intelligence who shared a love of high culture. The guests, as they had in the prewar years, enjoyed generating and discussing broad notions and fundamental truths.

Alexander Kazhdan, a young professor of Byzantine history at Moscow State University, presented his research findings. Lev Landau a scientist, explained quantum mechanics, which was outlawed in the Soviet Union as a “bourgeois science.” Samoilov and Slutsky performed poems that could not be published.

Everyone sung songs they’d brought home from the war or learnt on the streets. Their ideals had survived the war, but no one was willing to die on the battlefield to establish a worldwide “Soviet race.” Fear stifled political discourse.

The chats were about science, literature, and poetry, intermingled with lighthearted banter, music, and flirtations. One of the attendees stated, “We wanted to compensate ourselves for the four years that the war took away from us.” Another profound and hidden cause was a strong desire to escape the shabbiness and homogeneity of modern Soviet life.

Those informal and noisy meetings in Stalinist Moscow, from 1949 to 1952, were a magnificent oasis in the desert of Soviet persecution for the hundred or so young men and women who attended them. Following the arrests of Kremlin doctors, many of whom were Jews, in early 1953, a national Stalinist pogrom was poised to break out.