Who was Rasul Gamzatov, really?

The Soviet poet Rasul Gamzatov (1923-2003) is a name well known in literary circles in Turkey, particularly among readers of Caucasian origin. While researching Gamzatov online, I came across an article published on 6 October 2024 on the soL Haber Portalı (soL News Portal) under the title It takes courage not to sell one’s mother tongue: Gamzatov’s mountains… (Yürek gerekir anadilini satmamak için: Hamzatov’un dağları...). Centring on Gamzatov, the piece paints an extremely rosy and misleading picture that obscures many of the truths about the Soviet Union’s nationality policy.

In the article, based on an interview conducted by soL Haber Portalı correspondent Özkan Öztaş with Yusuf Şaylan, Gamzatov’s attachment to his mother tongue, to Dagestan and to local cultures is presented as evidence of the supposedly positive and culturally nurturing character of the Soviet experience. It is argued that Gamzatov wrote in Avar, that multilingualism in Dagestan was experienced as a form of richness, that the Soviet Union preserved and fostered this cultural diversity, and that his book My Dagestan (Benim Dağıstanım), which has also been translated into Turkish, stands as one of its finest testimonies.

In a short blog post, it is of course impossible to show in detail just how far the claims advanced by soL Haber Portalı fall short of reflecting the real course of the nationalities question in the Soviet Union in all its complexity. Here, I will confine myself to recalling that, from the second half of the 1920s onwards, as the Stalinist bureaucratic counter-revolution gradually took root and consolidated itself, the class character of political power in the Soviet Union changed; in order to secure its own material privileges, the bureaucratic caste turned to policies of centralisation and, at times, to tendencies that fostered Great Russian chauvinism. It should also be added that, when the Soviet Union broke up, the dissolution of the regime created favourable conditions in the Caucasus for new national conflicts, regional balkanisation and great-power intervention.

Rasul Gamzatov

What I chiefly want to focus on in this article, however, is the fact that, in the course of bureaucratic degeneration, Gamzatov became one of the most degenerate figures among the regime’s circle of loyal intellectuals and artists. The real Gamzatov is very different from the one portrayed in soL Haber Portalı; he is no socialist role model, but a figure trapped in the gap between his limited talent and the genius attributed to him, weary of being displayed in the system’s shop window, yet fiercely attached to the material privileges that came with that place.

The senior Soviet bureaucrat Anatoly Chernyaev, in an entry dated 8 October 1978 in the diary he kept between 1972 and 1991, recorded the following about Gamzatov’s conduct during a trip to Canada, which he attended as head of a Soviet delegation; each episode was a scandal in itself:

Rasul Gamzatov as head of the delegation of the Union of Soviet Friendship Societies to Canada. He was drinking heavily. The hosts were in utter shock when at a reception in Montreal he moved close to the wife of the Deputy Chairman of the CP of Canada Walsh and said, “My queen, marry me, leave him… I am not handsome, but I am rich. You will have a good life.” He fell to his knees and crawled over to start kissing her feet.

He did the same thing with an old woman - the wife of Pravda correspondent Bragin at a reception in Ottawa.

The only speech he was capable of making at a meeting in Toronto was reduced to him saying that when he gets back to Moscow he will ask to become a member of the USSR-Canada Society. The kicker is that all of Canada long knows that he, Rasul Gamzatov, has been the chairman of this society for many years.

In Vancouver at a meeting with Slavic studies students he could not remember a single line from his poems. And so forth.

Maybe it’s true what Boris Slutsky once told me: “Gamzatov is a completely inflated figure. He was made by the 'translators' - Kozlovsky, Grebnev”… It seems very believable. (Anatoly S. Chernyaev, Diary of Anatoly Chernyaev (1978), trans. Anna Melyakova, ed. Svetlana Savranskaya, p. 36.)

The figure that emerges here is not the sort of cultural and socialist personality that soL Haber Portalı seeks to present to its readers, but rather an official celebrity who was for years displayed in the shop window of the Stalinist bureaucracy, pampered by the prestige and privileges that this display conferred, and eventually went completely off the rails. What Chernyaev recounts points not merely to personal weaknesses. It also shows the extent of the moral and intellectual disintegration into which the regime’s favoured artists and intellectuals had fallen. Gamzatov was, without doubt, one of the most extreme examples of this process of decay.

The fact that the Stalinist regime chose to elevate certain figures from particular peoples does not prove that it genuinely offered those peoples freedom, equality and cultural development. On the contrary, this was precisely how the Stalinist system worked: it carefully selected the figures to be placed in the shop window, granted them material privileges, and used these artificially polished examples to render broader historical realities invisible. Once one recalls the deportations, repression, purges, drives towards centralisation, and the destructive effects of Great Russian chauvinism visited upon the peoples of the Caucasus, it becomes clearer still just how deceptive this official shop window really was.

In short, to take Gamzatov’s attachment to his mother tongue and his love of Dagestan and turn them into a eulogy for the Soviet Union is not historically defensible. The real picture is far more contradictory, far harsher and far darker. If the issue is to be approached from a genuinely socialist perspective, what needs to be seen is not the ideological shop window, which conceals bureaucratic privileges, the manufacture of official celebrity, and the historical experience of whole peoples, but the class and political reality that lies behind it.