Suppose you're Nicoli Nattrass, professor of economics at the University of Cape Town, you’re walking down the corridor and you feel that academic colleagues with whom you've previously had a relaxed and friendly relationship are ... squeezing themselves against the wall as you go to your office. And your colleague, So-and-so, is tense and hunched up, saying as little as possible when you have your usual departmental meeting. 

While someone else, Comrade X, pushes past you, banging your shoulder as he passes you in the corridor.

Now, I don't know anything about what is actually happening right now in the corridors and departmental meetings at UCT, and I've not asked Nicoli Nattrass or anyone else about the atmosphere in everyday life there - but I’m guessing, it's pretty chilled. In this binary ideological climate of black and white - or black versus white - or white versus black (the opposite of what Nelson Mandela taught the nation) - something very precious in South Africa's history of the past two hundred years is being killed.

It’s as if new heroes of the moment stride down the corridors and bark out orders, to which the response is generally the old traditional South African "Ja Baas", and bow the knee. (No-one "takes" the knee. That's an abuse of language. The verb to "take" is active, you're in charge, you're the subject, you do what you want. But when you "bow the knee" you express  ... submission. You defer. Don't fool yourself. Nobody "takes the knee" - it’s a conceptual fraud).

There's something "funny" going on here. Funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha.

This kind of harsh experience has happened before, in the former Soviet Union - once, the great tutor of the South African Communist Party, the African National Congress and Umkhonto we Sizwe. South Africans should learn, in particular, from the history of Russia. Not least the damage that was done to so many of Russia's, and the world's, greatest thinkers, writers, scientists and musicians.

It showed itself sharply on 15th August 1946, when the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova - probably the greatest Russian poet of the last century, through good times and very bad - made her way to the Union of Soviet Writers in Leningrad (which controlled your income, if you were a writer) on some small, technical matter, and "could not imagine why everyone was suddenly avoiding her." She just hadn't been listening to the radio or read a newspaper when she got up that morning.

She didn't know that the previous day, Stalin's Central Committee of the Communist Party had issued a damning judgement against herself and the satirist Mikhail Zoschenko, passing a Resolution (not lifted until 1988) condemning the journals Zvezda and Leningrad for publishing works by them. (In a little while, could this be the Journal of South African Science?).

I'm quoting from the superb biography, Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophetess, by Roberta Reeder, published by St Martin's Press, New York, in 1994 (a year of meaning in South Africa).

As Reeder explains, "Akhmatova was accused of being a relic of the past, reflecting bourgeois aestheticism and decadence rather than social awareness. Stalin needed a victim, and a famous one, to teach a lesson to his people - that the relative freedom" of the years of the Second World War (in Russia, the Great Patriotic War) "was now over." 

As Kontantin Simonov, a Russian poet, playwright and author, much later pointed out, "It was a way of showing the intelligentsia its place in society ...". (in Reeder, p.290) 

When she walked up the stairs at the Writers' Union, as Akhmatova later told a friend, everyone pressed "their bodies against the wall to let her pass. Confused employees held their breath and sat numb, their eyes downcast."

Three weeks later, at a meeting of the Leningrad branch of the Writers' Union on 4 September 1946, Andrey Zhdanov - the secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party - announced the Central Committee’s resolution expelling Akhmatova and Zoschenko from the Writers' Union, which meant preventing publication of their works, cutting off their salaries and taking away their ration cards. “Half nun, half harlot, or rather a harlot-nun whose sin is mixed with prayer”, Zhdanov notoriously described her.

A writer who was present, Innokenty Basalayev, wrote later how “a strange and weird silence broke out. The hall became totally mute, frozen, turned to ice.” A woman who felt sick got up and staggered to the exit, but the “enormous white door of the hall was closed tight. It was forbidden to leave. She sat down somewhere at the back.”

Then, when the meeting closed: “Not a word, not a whisper was heard from the steps of the grand formal entrance. Several hundred people left the building slowly and silently.” (in Reeder, p.293)

What happened next in the universities can be seen from the diaries of Olga Freidenberg, professor and chair of the department of classical philology at the Leningrad Institute of Philosophy, Language, Literature and Philosophy (LIFLI), which she had founded in 1932. She was the cousin of the poet, novelist and translator into Russian of five of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, Boris Pasternak. Her diary is recorded together with their correspondence between 1910 and 1954 in Elliott Mossman (ed), The Correspondence of Boris Pasternak & Olga Freidenberg 1910-1954, tr. Elliott Mossman and Margaret Wettlin (Secker & Warburg, London, 1982).

Using the Russian word “skloka”, meaning “trouble”, Professor Freidenberg wrote in 1951 in her diary: “Wherever you looked, in all our institutions … skloka was brewing. … It is hard to define. It stands for base, trivial hostility, unconscionable spite breeding petty intrigues, the vicious pitting of one clique against another. It thrives on calumny, informing, spying, scheming, slander, the igniting of base passions. Taut nerves and weakening morals allow one individual or group to rapidly hate another individual or group. Skloka is natural for people who have been incited to attack one another, who have been made bestial by desperation, who have been driven to the wall.” (pp. xvi, 303-04).

Diary 1946:

“A new wave of holding eminent scholars up for public opprobrium is rising.” (pp.252-53)

Diary 1948:

“The persecution of learning took on the form of poisoning the lives of scientists and scholars. Malevolent criticism by the ‘gendarmes,’ which had begun in such organs of defamation as Culture and Life and The Literary Gazette, spilled over into institutions of higher learning and scientific institutes. … All the professors were put to shame. … Professor Tomashevsky … walked out into the corridor of the Academy of Sciences after his moral execution and fainted dead away. Professor Azadovsky, a specialist in folklore, already weakened by a heart disease, lost consciousness during the meeting itself and had to be carried out. …

“With the new semester, the forces of destruction set to work again in our department. The atmosphere was one of slander, gossip and lies. I was spied upon; my every move was checked. I found myself in a quagmire from which I could not escape. Vague dissatisfactions, complaints, and squabbles among students were being encouraged. … At the most unexpected moment, and from the most unexpected sources, blows were struck at my nerves and my brain.” (pp.277-79)

Diary 1950:

“Moral and intellectual pogroms have spread like a plague through the cities of Russia. People in intellectual walks of life have finally lost faith in logic, have lost all hope. … The university has been devastated. The finest professors have been dismissed. The murder of the remaining intelligentsia goes on without cease. …

“They strike at scholars with whatever means they have at their disposal. Throw them out of work, force them to retire, condemn them to nonexistence by banishment. Professors who survived last year's pogroms are dying one after another from strokes and heart attacks. Eikhenbaum is a complete invalid. Propp recently fainted in the middle of a lecture and was taken directly from the university to the hospital. A few days later Bubrikh, hounded by The Literary Gazette, died at work.”

It is not that there was not a racist issue in this pogrom, either. Many of Stalin’s victims in the universities at this time were Jews. As Professor Freidenberg (who, like her cousin Boris Pasternak, was Jewish) recorded, “Intellectuals with Jewish names were subjected to moral lynching.

“One should see the pogrom as carried out in our department. Groups of students rummage through the works of Jewish professors, eavesdrop on private conversations, whisper in corners. They make no effort to conceal their purposeful vigilance.

“Jews no longer receive an education, are no longer accepted at universities or for graduate study.” (p.295)

University of Cape Town, and other universities in South Africa – beware.

If you want to destroy higher education for the present generation of young people, and for the future of South Africa, the situation is easy for you. Just let the current pogrom on intellectual inquiry continue.

I’ve mentioned it before: South Africa was tutored by the wrong Russians ….