News at Eleven: The only person who might have been able to

save [Osip] Mandelstam--though it is doubtful anyone could have--was fellow poet, and novelist, Boris Pasternak (author of "Doctor Zhivago"). Pasternak approached Nikolai Bukharin, a prominent Bolshevik and then editor of the daily newspaper Izvestia, but Bukharin, too, was on his way to becoming a non-person (and was executed in March 1938).

"Why didn't you come to me instead of Bukharin?" said [Josef] Stalin in an unexpected telephone call to Pasternak that was to become a traumatic event for the poet for the rest of his life. "If I were a poet and my friend were in trouble, I would do whatever I could to help him."

from The Japan Times: 'The noise of time' ensures that art's unbowed spirit is heard

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