Every single soul was marked. During one year alone, 1937, the heart of the Yezhovshchina, “Yezhov’s Time,” when Nikolai Yezhov ruled as chief of the Cheka, five percent of the population was arrested. Stalin’s “Devil Dwarf” (Chyortovski karlik) would have wiped out the entire country if he’d continued at such a pace. He was gathering files on everyone, even the Boss and his Politburo. As one of his superiors said about him when he was a deputy sleuth: Yezhov doesn’t know how to stop. But he was only Stalin’s apparatchik. He did the Boss’s bidding. On one particular day of the Yezhovshchina, December 12, 1937, Stalin and his lackey Molotov examined the death list that Yezhov had prepared, checked off 3,167 names, and went to the movies—perhaps to watch an American film with Shirley Temple, the Boss’s favorite forbidden actress. . . .
Mandelstam, like almost everyone else, was “morbidly curious about the recluse in the Kremlin.” And he would often ask himself: “Why is it that when I think of him, I see heads, mountains of heads? [ . . . ] What is he doing with all those heads?” And how could Babel, the Headless Man, or Nadezhda, or Mikhoels and Mandelstam, or Gorky himself, hope to survive near a man with a mountain of heads? Gorky would be the first to die (in 1936), probably poisoned by Genrikh Yagoda, chief of the Cheka before Yezhov and the Yezhovshchina. Stalin had lured Gorky back to the Soviet Union from Sorrento. The Boss couldn’t bear to have Russia’s most celebrated writer in exile. “Gorky’s a proud man, and we have to bind him to the Party with strong ropes.” Gorky became Stalin’s prisoner, with a mansion in Moscow, two or three dachas, and an army of servants (all Cheka recruits) that kept him in a kind of golden cage.
Mandelstam would die in some transit camp two years after Gorky. He refused to eat, fearing that the other prisoners wanted to poison him—which wasn’t so insane, since Stalin poisoned a lot of people. It was the urkas, hardened criminals, and not the political prisoners, who kept Mandelstam alive. They called him the Poet, and they fed him with their own spoons. But he didn’t last out the Siberian winter. And Babel? His surveillance by the Cheka dates from 1934 when his fellow writers began to inform on him. “The writers exceed everyone else in their savagery and degradation,” as Nadezhda notes. Once the hounds were upon him, it was just a matter of time. Only Nadezhda managed to escape Stalin’s mountain of heads.
She was a stopiatnitsa, the outlaw wife of an outlaw poet. And she became a wanderer, a barefoot girl, without a fixed address. “[B]ecause I was homeless they overlooked me.” Like most Russians, other than favored writers, artists, musicians, and the rest of Stalin’s apparatchiks, Nadezhda was hungry half the time. “Peasants just lay quite still in their houses—exhausted from hunger. We all do this. I have spent my whole life lying down”—lying down in the dark, pretending that the Cheka didn’t exist. The entire country was in an hypnotic trance. Neighbors and friends were all spies. “After 1937 people stopped meeting each other altogether.” Even in the Kremlin there were no guests. Time had become a frozen wall and space “a prison ward.” But there was something even more insidious. Osip’s brother Evgeni believed that the real subjugation of the intelligentsia “was played not by terror or bribery [ . . . ] but by the word ‘Revolution,’ which none of them could bear to give up.”
And this was Babel’s downfall. He’d come riding into the Revolution on his own fanciful white horse, considered himself a cavalier who’d throw himself into the hurly-burly to write about the Red Cossacks’ last stand. And however skewered his own vision had become—with Red Cossacks on the rampage, and Polish Jews stuck in the middle of some monstrous slaughter—he was still a child of the Revolution (with his own unorthodox songs). And that’s why he couldn’t remain in the Villa Chauvelot. This becomes clear in his speech to the first Congress of Soviet Writers, when he talked about practicing the genre of silence. The mysterious summons that brought him back from France in 1933 had come from Gorky, who wanted Babel to help him organize the congress. And Babel’s speech, delivered on August 23, 1934, may have been in a “dead language,” as Lionel Trilling suggests, but is still disturbing. He starts out by praising Stalin, who had called writers engineers of the human soul, more important than tanks and planes. But he talks about the birth of a revolutionary style—“the style of our period must be characterized by courage and restraint, by fire, passion, strength and joy.” Of course, Babel’s songs of fire had little to do with Stalin’s Revolution, but so what?
He brags about the ruggedness of Soviet readers. “Now, foreign authors tell us that they search for their readers with a flashlight in broad daylight. But in our land it is the readers who march at us in closed formation. It’s a real cavalry charge”—the cavalier has climbed on his white horse again.
He speaks of himself as “the past master of silence,” and says that if he lived in a capitalist country, he would have “long since croaked from starvation,” or been forced by his own capitalist publisher “to become a grocer’s assistant.”
But the silence he accuses himself of might have been just another mask. He had to project the aura of a man who was not writing, because what he did write made him the engineer of a very different kind of soul. Like Olesha, he could find no music in factories or collective farms. Olesha, according to Gleb Struve, “had the courage to say that every artist could create only within his powers. A writer can write only what he can write.” And Olesha “candidly admitted that it was impossible for him to put himself into the shoes of an average workman or of a revolutionary hero, and therefore he could not write about either of them.”
And Babel, who could never be direct, who gravitated toward a crooked line, wrote a few tepid tales about the kolkhoz, began his novel on Kolya Topuz, the Old World bandit who became a revolutionary clown, but he wasn’t searching for a new style or language, as some critics suggest; he was withdrawing into the land of Benya Krik: his real electrical circuit had always been the Moldavanka, and even Lyutov, with his law degree from Petersburg, is a creature out of this dark world. The Moldavanka itself had been masked, with its dreamlike streets, and its goddess was the boy’s own grandmother, who couldn’t read or write Russian, who would hold books upside down, but would listen like an enraptured hawk as the boy recited his lessons—to her the music of Russian words “was sweet.” She wants him to become a bogatir, which in her own confusion of tongues means a man who is both rich and a Herculean hero. “You must know everything,” she warns him. “Everyone will fall on their knees before you and bow to you. Let them envy you. Don’t believe in people. Don’t have friends. Don’t give them your money. Don’t give them your heart” (“At Grandmother’s”).
And Babel did become that bogatir, something of a Herculean hero, who was never quite as rich as his grandmother would have liked, but who did wear the Moldavanka’s masks and was quite stingy in matters of the heart. Perhaps he’d given his heart once, and only once, to Makhno. And perhaps the bogatir then had to flee. . . .
In 1928 Viktor Shklovsky wrote about the “Hamburg Reckoning,” a system whereby the prizefighters of Hamburg would rank themselves in individual combat without promoters, managers, or the panoply of a staged fight. And I’d like to apply the Hamburg Reckoning to Babel’s supposedly lean years, in the 1930s, and examine how lean they really were.
1930
Babel writes most of his letters to his mother and Maria from Moscow and his horse farm at Molodenovo. He seems agitated after the birth of Natasha, and scolds his mother about his own upbringing: “Do you chew a day-old bagel with seeds on it with your gums and then give it to her wet with saliva as you used to do to your son? [ . . . ] you rocked your son in a cradle, killing his self-reliance, and if the stuff I am producing turns out badly, I shall know who to blame.” We can sense a residual jealousy: his mother has seen Natasha, held Natasha, and he hasn’t.
Babel works on “Gapa Guzhva,” the first chapter of a novel about collectivization to be called Veliknaya Krinitsa, based on a Ukrainian village he’d visited in the spring. It was meant to herald
Babel’s new direction, into the heart of Soviet matters. And it might have worked at another time . . . but there was no other time. Babel’s mordant peek at enforced collectivization from the perspective of an outcast whore would have been perfect for Maupassant, but not his Soviet son. Babel will abandon the project.
Stalin publishes a letter in Bolshevik outlining the grim future of Soviet literature: nothing should be published that does not conform to the Party’s official point of view. Russian writers will become zombies with certain privileges.
Nikolai Yezhov, the future “Iron Commissar,” joins Stalin’s inner circle. He’s chief of the Central Committee’s records department (put there by Stalin to seek out anyone who’s disloyal to the Boss). This is the first important post for a man who will have a whole little bloody era named after him, the Yezhovshchina.
1931
Babel publishes two of the best stories from the “Dovecot” cycle about his childhood—“In the Basement” (dated 1929) and “Awakening”—and “Karl-Yankel,” a comic tale about a court case involving the Communist Party and the Jews of Odessa.
He’s now settled mostly in Molodenovo, thirty-five miles from Moscow: “I make my way through the snowdrifts to the stud farm, and there, under the direction of a stableman, I am learning a new profession—the handling of horses. It’s a delight that isn’t comparable to any other. They are prize horses, real whirlwinds.” Gorky’s dacha is less than a mile from Molodenovo. “They”—Stalin and his Cheka—“picked the best of places around Moscow for him.” And Babel can visit him any evening, “since, for old times’ sake, the rules that regulate the stream of people around him do not apply to me.”
He resumes his friendship with Evgenia Gladun, a Jewish femme fatale, almost as secretive as Babel himself. Evgenia kept a room outside Moscow where she could meet her lovers. She’d had a little fling with Babel in Berlin in 1927. But 1931 is a complicated year for the future Mrs. Nikolai Yezhov. She met Yezhov at a Black Sea resort while she was still married, and began a liaison with him, without discarding her other lovers. Yezhov will divorce his first wife to marry Evgenia. It’s around this time that his new wife will begin her “soirees” in Moscow, inviting Babel, while Yezhov seethes with jealousy.
1932
Babel publishes “The End of the Old-Folks’ Home” (an Odessa tale), “Argamak,” “The Road,” “The S.S. Cow-Wheat,” and “Guy de Maupassant.” This can hardly be considered a fallow period.
Nadezhda Mandelstam meets Yezhov at a government villa on the Black Sea, near “the dawn of his brief but brilliant career.” She and Osip sit at the same table with the man who will become “one of the great killers of our time.” He’s modest and tiny—five feet tall. She remembers his limp, and the story that someone told about Yezhov’s iron will as a Bolshevik: he could do the gopak, a Ukrainian dance with strong heel beats, “despite his game leg.”
Stalin celebrates Gorky’s fortieth year as a writer: he renames cities, parks, streets, factories, collective farms, schools, and theaters throughout the Soviet Union in Gorky’s honor. The cult of Gorky is complete. Is the Boss being Machiavellian, or does he feel some strange kinship with Gorky? Both have their roots in the lower middle class—Stalin’s father was a shoemaker, his mother a laundress, and all his life he would iron his own pants, mend his own shoes. Both men had to seize language for themselves, and have a maniacal reverence for the written word. Both have a habit of editing other people’s work. Stalin would read books about to be published and “correct” them with his blue pencil; and Gorky would do the same for every young writer in the Soviet Union; he would also “edit” newspapers and published books, often crying over a sentence he happened to enjoy. Perhaps Stalin found in Gorky the poet he would have loved to become. Of course, that didn’t prevent him from having Gorky poisoned when the Grand Old Man of Literature became a nuisance. Stalin is like Ivan the Terrible, his favorite tsar, who could kiss and kill with the same smooth gesture, and mourn those men he murdered.
With Gorky back on Russian soil, Babel has an ally as powerful as the Soviet bureaucracy itself; in September he leaves for France.
October 26: the Boss summons a gaggle of Soviet writers to Gorky’s Moscow mansion; a meeting takes place in the absence of almost every significant writer—Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Bulgakov, and Babel (who’s in Paris). Stalin arrives: “a small man in a dark green tunic of fine cloth, smelling of sweat and unwashed flesh.” He jokes, mingles with the writers, eats and drinks in their midst. It’s here that he articulates his idea about the writer’s religious duty to the State, as an engineer of the human soul. And socialist realism is the root of this engineering. As one writer will remark: “Socialist Realism is Rembrandt, Rubens and Pepin [a Russian artist] put at the service of the working class,” which means everything and nothing. “Probably no one has ever understood what exactly Socialist Realism is,” writes Vitaly Shentalinsky, who pried Babel’s archive from the Lubyanka and was one of the first to call the entire apparatus of Soviet writers a branch of the Cheka.
November 8: Nadya Alliluyeva, Stalin’s second wife, kills herself. The Boss had practically driven her insane, insulting her, flirting with other women. Yet he will mourn Nadya for the rest of his life. It’s only after Nadya’s death that he becomes the Kremlin’s mad monk. Since he no longer has a wife, he will allow none of his lackeys to bring their wives to gatherings at the Kremlin or evenings at the Bolshoi. He will no longer spend his nights inside the Kremlin, though a light continues to burn in his office window: a caravan leaves the Kremlin around two in the morning and whisks him away to his sprawling dacha at Kuntsevo (a Moscow suburb), where he lives in one little room.
1933
Gorky visits the White Sea Canal, built by convict laborers, embraces Yagoda, and starts to cry. “You rough fellows do not realize what great work you are doing!” The chief of the Cheka has become his pal. Gorky calls him Yagodka, Little Berry.
Gorky is still free to travel outside the Soviet Union, still has his estate in Sorrento. Babel visits him there in April; he’s working on a play called Maria, and reads portions of it to Gorky and his entourage. Set in Petersburg during the Civil War, the play includes a bunch of swindlers and war veterans without legs. Gorky is disturbed by Babel’s “Baudelairean predilection for rotting meat. All the characters in your play, starting from the invalids, are putrid.”
November: Mandelstam writes his poem about Stalin; he gives us a portrait of “the Kremlin mountaineer” in sixteen lines that’s more revealing than all the odes written about the Boss during his lifetime. The Boss didn’t have “cockroach whiskers” until Mandelstam put them there.
1934
Babel publishes “Dante Street” and “Petroleum” (about the new Moscow, with “trenches, pipes, and bricks everywhere . . . the stench of pitch,” and smoke billowing “like at a wildfire”).
Mandelstam is arrested in May. He hadn’t read his poem on Stalin to more than ten people, but it created a “wildfire” all its own. Yagoda, whose literary tastes never ventured beyond The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask, has memorized the poem, and recites it to Stalin. The entire Cheka waits for the Boss’s reaction. Stalin seems strangely passive. He’s also a poet. He doesn’t want Mandelstam destroyed, not yet. His edict is Isolate but preserve. He rings up Pasternak, chides him: “If I were a poet and my [poet] friend got into trouble I would go to any length to help him.”
May: Gorky’s son Maximka dies after a lightning bout of pneumonia, probably induced by the Cheka. The way to weaken Gorky is through Maximka, “a likeable nonentity,” as Gorky himself described him, loving him nonetheless, this man-boy who had nothing on his mind but racing cars and mystery novels and wanted to work for the Cheka.
Gorky will never recover from Maximka’s death.
According to one of Stalin’s biographers, Edvard Radzinsky, Yagoda would invite members of the Writers Union to visit his own labyrinth at the Lubyanka to “listen in” while i
nterrogators worked on some poor intelligentishka until he confessed or betrayed a friend. And Babel was among the writers who “listened in.”
1935
Maria goes into rehearsal in Moscow but is never staged.
Yezhov and Evgenia move from Pushkin Square to an apartment in the Kremlin; Evgenia can now hobnob with the Party elite. Her husband has become a little Red king. Yezhov’s dacha in Meshchevino, with its tennis court and private movie theater, is much more palatial than Stalin’s own fortress in Kuntsevo.
Gorky tries to attend Malraux’s congress in Paris (where Babel was such a hit), but Stalin won’t give him a passport. The golden cage has shut around this Grand Old Man.
1936
Babel publishes nothing of note.
Stalin condemns Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: the music made him angry, according to Ehrenburg, and thus begins the attack on formalism— “leftist deformations, distortions.” But the Grand Old Man rises up to defend Lady Macbeth, and the Cheka isolates him from the rest of the world, printing single copies of Pravda for him with all the news taken out.
June 18: Gorky dies. He’d become dangerous to Stalin, who is purging the Party. The Boss will have the whole country mourn, but it’s another one of the tricks he’s learned from Ivan the Terrible—cry and cry and remain glad in your heart. And Babel realizes his own predicament in a world without Maxim Gorky: “Now they are not going to let me live.”
Yezhova, editor in chief of SSSR v Stroike (Russia in Construction), welcomes Babel onto the staff; they haven’t been lovers for a long time, but that doesn’t stop Yezhov from having jealous rages about Babel.
Savage Shorthand Page 12
