"In November 1933 Mandelshtam produced a searing epigram on Stalin which he subsequently read to many of his friends (“We live unable to sense the country under our feet”). Aware of a mounting opposition to Stalin within the party, which reached its crescendo in 1934 at the 17th Party Congress (held January 26 to February 10), Mandelshtam hoped that his poem would become urban folklore and broaden the base of the anti-Stalin opposition. In the poem, Mandelshtam presents Stalin as “a slayer of peasants,” with wormlike fingers and a cockroach moustache, who delights in wholesale torture and executions. Denounced by someone in his circle, Mandelshtam was arrested for the epigram in May 1934 and sent into exile, with Stalin’s verdict “isolate but protect.” The lenient verdict was dictated by Stalin’s desire to win the intelligentsia to his side and to improve his image abroad, a policy in line with his staging of the First Congress of Soviet Writers (August 1934)." Daqui
Ernest Hamlin Baker
Joseph Stalin
1939
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