Peter Winsley: The great soul of the Russian people will always outlive those who seek to destroy it

The Russian symbolist poet Osip Mandelstam once said that Russia is the only country that takes poetry seriously – it gets people killed. In Stalin’s time some Russian poets were victimised and silenced, some were protected. Stalin admired Pasternak’s translations of Georgian poetry into Russian. He wrote a curt note to the NKVD telling it to “leave this cloud dweller alone.”