The one writer who comes out as truly heroic here is Anna Akhmatova, whose work was banned in 1925 and --- after the seige of Leningrad, where so many perished of starvation or sickness --- was assumed by many to have died. One of the most moving passages in Fear and the Muse involves Isaiah Berlin. He was a visiting don from Oxford who, when he arrived in Leningrad at the end of the war, asked if there were any writers still lived there, and was told about Akhmatova. "Is she still alive," Berlin asked, surprised.

He was given her address, and arranged to meet her that afternoon. "The person who greeted them was not the charismatic poet whose angular features were immortalised in a 1914 oil painting by Nathan Altman but a stately gray-haired lady with a white shawl across her shoulders, a noble head, an unhurried manner, and a face that expressed a lifetime of suffering."

When Berlin met her, "Her manner was so regal and severe that he bowed to her, as if she were a monarch." Their conversation --- which lasted most of the night --- was recorded, in detail, by Berlin. At one point, she spoke lines of her own, including her unfinished "Poem Without a Hero," and, Berlin recalled, "I realised I was listening to a work of genius." She also read Requiem from a manuscript, "breaking off to talk about the years 1937 - 1938 and the queues outside the prisons." As punishment for her, Stalin had seen to it that her son, Lev, was imprisoned in Leningrad, and ultimately shipped off to the gulag at Norilsk, "the most northern human settlement in the world."

And when Berlin asked her about Mandelstam, "a long tear-filled silence followed until she begged him to change the subject."

The man who arrived unexpectedly from a country where people speak their minds freely, who brought news of friends she had not seen or heard from in a quarter of a century, was the last great love of Akhmatova's life. On the manuscript of her "Poem Without a Hero," she wrote a third and final dedication to the "Guest from the Future," an obvious reference that was considered so dangerous that the Soviet editors of her posthumous collected works reluctantly left it out. He is probably also the person she was referring to in these lines written in 1956:
He will not be a beloved husband to me
But what we accomplish, he and I,
Will disturb the Twentieth Century.

The question at the heart of Fear and the Muse is offered up to us in the last chapter: "Why this appalling regime was host to such an extraordinary range of creative talent"

There were stable democratic states that allowed their citizens fully free self-expression but could not produce one artist of the stature of a Shostakovich, a Bulgakov, an Akhmatova, or a Pasternak. A disproportionate amount of the great art of the twentieth century came from a regime where to think freely was to risk death. The question this raises is, Why did they persist? Why would Osip Mandelstam spend his life composing poems he could recite only to trusted friends, without any prospect of getting them published? Why did Shostakovich not simply give up composing after the trauma of the suppression of his first opera?

Those of us who have the freedom to write or compose or film almost anything we want cannot conceive of a government with the power to murder writers or musicians or film-makers it considers politically incorrect. Why would they continue on under such pressure? Perhaps the secret is that those who are willing to persist in the face of such state-induced madness are going to have to have a touch of madness themselves.

This book gives us stark pictures of these who were tortured by the need to continue their art. And some, like Shostakovitch), had their bags packed and waiting on the stairs so that when the NKVD put in its appearance, they could be disappeared without waking the family. This spirit of persistence all while awaiting the final visit may be the key: "I create because I have to; it may kill me, but I have no choice." Or as Shostakovich wrote, "Even if they cut off both my hands and I have to hold the pen in my teeth, I shall go on writing music."

Fear and the Muse is a book that creates tension not only because McSmith is an artful writer, but because of the historical tension built into the story. The knowledge is that those five "greasy fingers" could, at any moment, order in the secret police --- after which the novelist, the musician, or the poet becomes toast. And another part of the fascination comes from the way that the man in the Kremlin could, at his discretion, play with you. At his own pace.

Mikhail Bulgakov wrote a masterpiece --- a novel which we now know as The Master and Margarita. He knew it would never be published in Soviet Russia, so he kept it under wraps. Meanwhile, many of his plays were staged but one of them, A Cabal of Hypocrites (also known as Molière), offered a delicious scene in which the 18th Century French playwright is invited to dine with Louis XIV.

Molière: No one in France, sire, has had dinner with you before. I am overwhelmed, and therefore somewhat nervous.

Louis: France, Monsieur de Molière, is sitting before you. France is eating chicken, and is not nervous.

Molière: Sire, you are the only person in the world who can say that!

Anyone with bat-brains knew that the 18th Century king here was in reality the 20th Century tyrant. And Bulgakov paid the price for his play. "He endured endless harassment from the authorities, until everything he wrote was banned except the one play that had received Stalin's personal endorsement."

McSmith claims that the reason that Stalin didn't just up and have all of them shot, the lot of them --- Eisenstein, Bulgakov, Shostakovich, Akhmatova, Pasternak (and several dozen other slightly rebellious writers and journalists and musicians) --- was because the General Secretary was no 20th Century Genghis Khan "from the bandit country beyond the Caucasus Mountains." Stalin was "indeed as ruthless and suspicious as any barbarian despot, but he was not ignorant. He had been educated at the Tiflis Seminary in Georgia, one of the best schools in the empire outside the major Russian cities."

Once in power, he was shrewd enough to understand that his regime gained in prestige from artists producing work that was genuinely admired at home and abroad. He was also clever enough to differentiate between real artists and hacks turning out rubbish to please the authorities. He would, when it suited him, arbitrarily raise a mediocrity like the now-forgotten composer Ivan Dzerzhinsky to sudden prominence while having his officials bully and harass Shostakovich, but his subsequent behaviour makes it obvious that he knew which of those two composers was a great artist and which was the mediocrity.

--- Pamela Wylie