France issued the next invitation a few months later, and Semyon, once more sent out by himself, made his first trip to Paris. The upshot of all these trips is that by the summer of 1921, Semyon could travel in and out of Russia with relative freedom, having proved that he was a trustworthy, loyal ambassador for his country’s business interests. However limited they were, the trade agreements he had drawn up with foreign powers had played the role, as he put it in his memoir, “of a political vanguard…preparing the ground for better, more normal relations between the Soviet Republic and the rest of Europe.” Lieberman’s growing prestige had an even greater personal importance: he could now begin the delicate negotiations necessary to get his son out of Russia and settle him in Great Britain for a proper education.
Getting Shurik out of Russia would indeed prove to be a difficult task. For in the early 1920s Soviet authorities looked on all their envoys’ families as hostages of sorts, as guarantees that the delegates would return from their foreign missions. Semyon first sounded out his immediate superior, Alexis Rykov, president of the Supreme Council of Economy, and received a pessimistic response. “You should give your son the precious opportunity to grow up not in the bourgeois milieu of England, but with the young Soviet generation,” Rykov chided him. Semyon then decided to go straight to Lenin. He gave Vladimir Ilyich a detailed description of his son’s medical problems and of the violence attending his family’s housing situation, and the leader gave his spoken consent for Alex to leave Russia but told him it also had to be cleared by the Cheka. Here the difficulties began. The chief aide to Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka’s dreaded head, categorically refused to allow Shura’s departure from Russia. “We have enough good schools in Russia,” he told Semyon. “You don’t have to look for any in England.” Semyon returned to the Kremlin to see Lenin, repeating the bureaucrat’s response. “Yes, we know, we know,” Ilyich said wearily, as if the Cheka was an all-too-familiar problem. He then picked up a phone and dialed Dzerzhinsky directly. After a brief talk with the Cheka chief, he turned to Semyon and said, “We’ll have to discuss [your son’s departure] at the next meeting of the Politburo.” “Get ready to leave for London,” he added as he rose to shake Semyon’s hand, “can’t waste any time now.” Lieberman began to see a glimmer of hope. Indeed, a few days later Semyon received an excerpt from the minutes of the five-member Politburo, the Communist Party’s supreme organ, which read thus:
Subject of discussion: Proposal by Rykov and Lenin to grant a passport to Lieberman and his son Alexandr for a trip abroad.
Resolution: To instruct the Cheka to issue the passport.
Division of the vote: Against—Dzerzhinsky and Zinoviev. For—Lenin, Rykov and Kamenev.
The episode was characteristic of Lenin’s dealings and is telling of the leader’s shrewdness. He could easily have resolved little Alex’s visa issue by himself, by issuing an executive decree. But in order not to undermine the party’s authority, he habitually made it seem as if nothing was ever his personal decision. He preferred to have all his decrees doled out by the Politburo, knowing that there was always an undecided vote, like the ambitious Kamenev’s, which he could swing over to his side.
It was September 1921. Within a few days, Semyon and little Shurik were on a train bound for Germany. The fact that it had taken the Politburo to decide his fate may well have helped to give Alex that sense of self-importance, and the accompanying delusions of grandeur, which were to mark his character.
After the grim poverty of their Moscow flat, the spacious London home of Semyon’s old friend Leonid Krasin, who had recently become the Soviet Union’s permanent trade delegate in England, made an unforgettable impression on little Shura. Krasin’s wife and three daughters had joined him in London that very summer. And after Semyon returned to Moscow, it was at the Krasins’ redbrick mansion in Hampstead that Alex made his home for the following three and a half years. Of the three blond, blue-eyed Krasin daughters, Ludmilla, fifteen, was the quietest and most responsible; Katia, the wildest and most beautiful (who a decade later would briefly be a mistress of my own father, Bertrand du Plessix), was then thirteen; Liuba was eleven, two years older than Alex, and, as he described her later, “madly seductive…in a flirty yet boyish way.” Alex became a kind of stepchild in this spirited family, an adopted younger brother for the girls. They teased him, played tricks on him, sometimes tying him up in his bedsheets, and undressed and bathed casually before him, which by the time he was twelve he found “gorgeously troubling.” (Any study of Alex that probes his lifelong preference for imposing, blond older women would indeed have to take the Krasin sisters into account.)
Alex attended three different boarding schools during his three-year stay in England. The first one was close to the Krasins’ home, right in Hampstead, and allowed him to return there every weekend; it managed to transform his unruly behavior in a few months, teaching him table manners and the rudiments of the English language. The second institution was the much stricter University School in Hastings, near Brighton, where there were military drills twice a week and brass buttons to be shined. (The rigorous orderliness that was to always prevail in Alex’s physical surroundings may well have been inspired by the Hastings experience.) The year he entered his third school, St. Piran’s in Maidenhead, he suddenly shot up by several inches; he acquired a great new level of self-confidence and was occasionally censured for excessive arrogance.
At St. Piran’s School, Alex acquired two predilections that would have far-reaching results: He developed a passion for Arthurian legend, which with its knightly duties of chastity and obedience, its cult of dominant, unattainable women for whom the knight is ready to perform superhuman feats, had a complex influence on his future love life. And he became engrossed by photography, which he had already fancied as a child, ever since his father had returned from a trip abroad with a vest-pocket Kodak. Despite his mother’s obsession that he become a traditional artist, this was the only art form that had interested him thus far. At St. Piran’s, he spent a lot of time in the darkroom, developing and printing his own photos. He continued to spend many weekends and all of his vacations with the Krasins, who had quickly adapted to upper-crust English life; they took him horseback riding during their holidays in Cornwall or on weekends in London’s Hyde Park. Alex’s father made an occasional trip to London but could never stay for more than a few days, being immersed in the carrying out of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. And the one letter of Alex’s from St. Piran’s I have in my family archives intimates that he enjoyed the school but felt rather neglected by his parents. “Dear Mamika,” it reads. “How is Papyusa, why doesn’t he write to me. Mama…please write more often. I am so happy here Mama, please write Major Bryant a letter or he will be annoyed at you. Please [also] write a letter so that Mr. Cracknell will send me some jam, please, and fruits…. I feel grand. I kiss you and Papa very hard. Your Shura.”
And yet Henriette had begun to embarrass Alex, a feeling that would last throughout his life. She made a brief visit to London in 1922, and Alex, grown accustomed to the Krasins’ understated elegance, was mortified to see how dumpy and theatrically overpainted his mother looked. She took him to a hotel in London for the weekend, and he found her so garishly dressed that he told her, point-blank: “I can’t have dinner with you looking like that.” Henriette had to wipe off much of her makeup and put on a severe black dress before her son would share a meal with her.
In 1922, as Alex was settling in England, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin began to suffer a series of strokes, which would paralyze him and leave him with severe mental handicaps for his last year and a half of life. The Soviet Union began to prepare itself for a transition of rule. The power struggle that occurred during Lenin’s last months was marked by the ascendance of a triumvirate—Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Joseph Stalin—which started systematically persecuting noncommunist members of Lenin’s regime. Semyon Lieberman’s unsurpassed expertise in the timber industry initially protected him. Henrie
tte, however, immediately felt repercussions in her theater work: In the fall of 1923, she was advised that her theater, whose trademark had been the staging of Western classics, was failing to teach “proper Bolshevik values.” She paid no heed to the warning. A few months later, during a rehearsal of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, right after the cast had shouted “Long live the king!”—a detail never criticized during the relative cultural leniency of the Lenin years—a voice cried out from the audience: “Why not ‘Long live the Soviet Socialist Republic’?” Again, Henriette paid no attention, and this time she got her punishment: Treasure Island was shut down by governmental order after two performances, and she was dismissed from her post as manager of the children’s theater. She could not tolerate the prospect of further oppression. In 1924, she requested and received permission to accompany her husband on his next business trip to London. She never returned to Russia.
On money borrowed from a business acquaintance of her husband—Chatterton Sim, the leading timber importer in London—Henriette set herself up in a comfortable house in Kensington. This now became Alex’s headquarters whenever he was not at boarding school. Henriette’s marriage with Semyon, by this time, had become a mere formality, and upon each of his business trips Semyon rented rooms in another part of town. Henriette began to have affairs with a series of rich British lovers, including a banker who paid for her couturier clothes and took her to Italy. She installed a private theater in her Kensington home, in which she hoped to fulfill her new theatrical ambition: pantomimes performed with masks. But she never had a chance to develop those talents in London. For in the first months of 1925, Semyon Lieberman, who throughout the early 1920s had gradually spirited most of his material holdings out of Russia, suffered a temporary financial setback. Being hard-pressed for money, he had to sell Henriette’s Kensington house to Chatterton Sim: Sim’s wife, harboring mixed feelings of envy and disdain for the “Russian savage” who took on a succession of lovers the way other women change dresses, now wanted the dwelling for herself. Upon learning that she had to leave her house, Henriette threw a tantrum at her husband and left for Paris to make her life there, taking Alex with her and leaving Semyon alone, for a while, in England.
Semyon’s definitive fall from power in the Soviet Union occurred, quite predictably, within two years of Lenin’s death in January 1924. In 1925, there began to be onslaughts upon all kinds of spets, who were now looked on as “borderline elements.” Dzerzhinsky’s underlings, the leaders of the increasingly repressive Cheka, had long seen Lieberman as a man who “disrupted the Communist front of the people’s economy” by failing to toe the strict Bolshevik line. Moreover, the death of Leonid Krasin, who succumbed to cancer that year, deprived Semyon of his last support. By the autumn of 1925, the Economic Division of the Cheka had assembled enough of a dossier on him to appoint a special commission charged with “investigating specialist Lieberman.” When Semyon received a summons to return to Moscow in November of that year, all his friends implored him not to go. (Even his wife, notwithstanding the couple’s strained relations, beseeched him not to return to Moscow.) But Semyon, a man of honor through and through, was determined to face the charges. “I went anyhow,” as he explained later, “because it was my duty to my family, to my son, to go back to the Soviet Union and defend myself against slander…. [B]y refusing to return I would only prove…that I was really guilty as charged.”
Lieberman’s stay in Moscow was even more tormenting than he had expected. The Cheka had spread so many rumors about his lack of belief in the Soviet regime that even his old friend and former boss at the Supreme Council of Economy, Rykov, refused to see him. (Rykov, who never left the Soviet Union, was to be executed in the 1930s.) Upon arriving in Moscow, Semyon prepared a 150-page document concerning his years of service to the Soviet state. He sent it to the OGPU, as the Cheka was now known, and then readied himself for suicide, sleeping for nights on end with a razor under his pillow. When he was finally called to the OGPU offices, he withstood several weeks of nightly “talks” with the organization. They took place in a small, poorly lighted room to which he was escorted by an armed guard. “You’ve spent a lot of your leisure time with so-and-so, haven’t you?” a typically trifling question went, or, “Where is your son studying now? Isn’t that a very expensive bourgeois school?” He was never dismissed before 4:00 A.M.
Yet suddenly, upon the seventh week of these surreal grillings, on January 2, 1926, as Semyon Lieberman sat dejectedly at his old desk at the Central Timber Council, a Soviet official appeared before him. “Comrade Dzerzhinsky instructs you to leave the Soviet Union within twenty-four hours,” he said stiffly. Lieberman first thought he was dreaming, and then realized he was saved. Dzerzhinsky had apparently decided to spare his fellow traveler’s life for purely pragmatic reasons: The Soviet trade commission in London was insisting that Lieberman be sent back to western Europe to sign an important trade treaty with Sweden, for the Swedes categorically refused to sign the contract with any other member of the Soviet regime. And so, within twenty-four hours, it was Semyon’s turn to leave his homeland for the last time.
After signing the contract with Sweden, Semyon went on to Paris to join Henriette and Alex. For the following months, he remained in a state of emotional turmoil that had all the symptoms of a severe nervous breakdown. And he was eventually committed, for several months of the spring and summer of 1926, to a sanatorium in Switzerland.
Alex Lieberman’s youth seems to have been divided into two phases. Until the age of thirteen, he had been more or less in his father’s charge, accompanying him on his trips through the Russian steppes, visiting with him in England. But in 1925, upon moving to France, he had come into his mother’s jurisdiction.
SIX
Alex and His Mother
Anyone not acquainted with Henriette Pascar’s background might classify her erotic behavior—the one-night stands and numerous affairs indulged in every year with dozens of lovers—as a case of simple nymphomania. But her conduct had sources far more complex than the craving of the flesh. It had to do with an astoundingly unleashed ego, and above all with the gypsy provenance that totally dominated her character. For like all gypsies, Henriette had her own codes, her own prerogatives, and above all her own sexual ethos. She came from a race of people who have always prided themselves on being a law unto themselves, who refuse to marry or bond in manners habitual to westerners, who turn caprice, volatility, and shifting allegiances into norms of behavior, who do not accept guilt or regret as valid emotions. You could not censure her for immorality—or even amorality—any more than you could censure a Saudi Arabian sheik or an African tribesman for having five wives. Gypsies are serious business. The manner in which Henriette met the man who was probably her greatest love, my great-uncle Alexandre Iacovleff, is a perfect example of the way she operated.
Henriette first saw Iacovleff in 1925 as she sat across the room from him at one of Paris’s gastronomic landmarks, the Restaurant Prunier, near the church of the Madeleine. She was struck by the handsomeness of his physique—the very sharp, fine features that led some friends to compare his beauty to that of “a classical Greek sculpture” the Mephistophelean cut of his silky, beautifully groomed brown goatee. She wanted him in her life, immediately, and so she scribbled a note and asked a waiter to carry it to him. It said “Vous me plaisez,” a phrase that in this context translates more readily into “I want you” than “I like you.” Henriette herself, bejeweled and flamboyantly attired in a Poiret dress, was then thirty-six and at the height of her seductive powers. Family legend has it that Uncle Sasha became her lover before the night was over. Henriette was a snob, and Sasha’s recent successes were bound to make him all the more attractive to her: his exhibition of Croisière Noire paintings had just sold out, he was the toast of Paris, and he had just ended a long affair with the dancer Anna Pavlova. Sasha was to remain Henriette’s lover for three years, longer than any man who thus far had captured her heart
.
But despite Henriette’s self-indulgence and her feverish amorous life, she was capable of very astute insights into the characters and needs of those she loved. Upon moving with thirteen-year-old Alex to Paris and settling into a studio apartment in Montparnasse, she had to choose a school for him. Notwithstanding her earlier emphasis on “fantasy and imagination” in education, she was determined to get Alex into France’s most demanding and elitist school. She set her sights on Les Roches, a Spartan institution set in the rolling hills of Normandy, some forty miles from Paris, which was France’s equivalent to Great Britain’s Eton and Harrow or our own Phillips Exeter Academy. It was even more rigorous, in its intellectual demands, than most of the government-run lycées he could have attended. And it had the added advantage of being a boarding school. For however obsessively attached Henriette was to her son, since beginning her liaison with Iacovleff she more than ever valued her sexual freedom, which would have been greatly curtailed by the presence of a teenager sleeping in an alcove right over her bedroom.
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