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In Chernobyl Prayer (or Voices from Chernobyl), one of the persons interviewed by Svetlana Alexievich is a historian who says,

Because the zeks didn't inhabit a separate world of prisons that were far away. It was all around us. ‘Half the country imprisoning, half the country imprisoned,’ as Anna Akhmatova said.

(Chernobyl Prayer, translated by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait. Penguin, 2016. Pages 211–212. Zeks were prisoners in Soviet Gulags.)

I have not been able to locate the source of this Akhmatova quote online. What is the source of the quote, in what context is it used and does the historian who quotes it remember the words correctly?

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I am unable to independently verify the claim, but in Stalin vs Gypsies Roma and Political Repressions in the USSR (Brill, 2024), the authors Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov trace the source of this phrase (or "meme" as they term it) in the book's final chapter "The Winds of History: Instead of a Conclusion" (pages 309 - 407).

According to Marushiakova and Popov the phrase "half of the country is dwelling [in prison], the other [half] is guarding it" is a misquotation of a statement made by Akhmatova, recorded in Lydia Chukovskaya’s memoirs about her: "Now the arrested will return, and the two Russians will look at each other’s eyes: the one who imprisoned and the one who was imprisoned” 1. The statement was apparently made as a comment on Nikita Khrushchev’s report of 1956, which began the prcess of exposing Stalin’s personality cult. The authors go on to observe:

The shift from the “two Russians” to the “two halves of a country” (which are two very different things) originates from the book Boys in Zinc by the future Nobel laureate in literature Svetlana Alexeevich... and has become an extremely popular meme in the public space.

They thus ascribe the distorted version of the phrase as originating from Alexievich herself. While I have not been able to find a copy of the Akhmatova Journals online, I do have access to Boys in Zinc (or Zinky Boys), but I have not been able to find a quote there similar to the one claimed by the authors above. I wonder if they actually meant to refer to Voices of Chernobyl.

In a comment, kostix was able to obtain Chukovskaya’s actual quote from The Akhamatov Journals:

Теперь арестанты вернутся, и две России глянут друг другу в глаза: та, что сажала, и та, которую посадили.

which translates as:

Now the prisoners will return, and the two Russias will look each other in the eye: the one who imprisoned, and the one who was imprisoned.

This is similar, but subtly different, to the quote reported by Marushiakova and Popov. Note how the original refers to "two Russias", rather than "two Russians". This brings the meaning much closer to the phrase Alexievich quotes: "Half the country imprisoning, half the country imprisoned".

So in summary, it appears that Akhamatov is indeed the source of a quote very similar to that used by the historian in Voices of Chernobyl. It can be found in Chukovskaya’s Akhmatova Journals, and its context was Krushchev's "Secret Speech", in which the rule of Stalin was criticised within the USSR for the first time.

1. Записки об Анне Ахматовой (The Akhamatov Journals), 1997, Vol. 2, p. 190.

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  • Thanks for the feedback @kostix Feel free to edit the citation to make it correct! My Russian is very limited, so maybe you'd like to add an answer of your own if there are some interesting details to the story.
    – Clara Díaz Sanchez
    Commented Oct 31 at 9:49
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    I don't think I'm qualified to answer but the direct citation from ISBN 5-86884-052-6, p. 190, is «Теперь арестанты вернутся, и две России глянут друг другу в глаза: та, что сажала, и та, которую посадили.», which explicitly reads «две России» which is «two Russias». As you can see, it's way more poetic (unsurprisingly, I'd say) and a bit hyperbolic. So, no, it's neither two halves, nor two Russians (which would mean two Russian persons), it's two Russias (the states). Hope that helps!
    – kostix
    Commented Oct 31 at 11:03
  • That's fascinating. And the "two Russias" phrasing is a lot closer to the phrase used in Voices from Chernobyl.
    – Clara Díaz Sanchez
    Commented Oct 31 at 11:25
  • Exactly. I feel like the phrase asked about by the OP is merely a "dumbed-down" original version. This could occur while the phrase was circulating.
    – kostix
    Commented Oct 31 at 11:37

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