Once Yagoda gets rid of everyone around Gorky, Stalin gets rid of Yagoda and “crowns” Yezhov as new chief of the Cheka on September 25. Yagoda has become too close to the Bolshevik “barons” Stalin intends to destroy, buying them American cars, finding them little ballerinas from the Bolshoi. He’s not the right kind of torturer. When his thugs at the Lubyanka can’t extract a confession fast enough, Stalin complains: “Is this a hotel or a prison?” But the Boss is devious, as usual. He “promotes” Yagoda, appoints him Commissar for Communications in a country that can only deliver lies.
Yezhov arrests all those loyal to Yagoda, and the Yezhovshchina begins. He will give the Boss whatever he wants—arrest, destroy, drive people to suicide; women working at the Lubyanka are “frightened of meeting him even in the corridors.” But who is this Devil Dwarf? Born on May 1, 1895, in southwest Lithuania, near the Polish border. His father, a Russian from Tula, once kept a brothel. The family moves to Petersburg in 1906. The boy is barely literate, having gone to school for one or two years at the most. An apprentice tailor and mechanic at fifteen, he has his first “liaison” with another little tailor boy. He’s drafted into the tsar’s army during World War I, serves behind the lines as a mechanic of sorts. Disappears and reappears as a mechanic in a railroad yard, a worker in a glass factory, a cop. His fellow workers find him with a book and begin to call him Kolka Knizhnik, Nick the Bookworm. In 1919 he enlists in the Red Army, serves at a radio base in Saratov, soon becomes political commissar of the entire base; by 1936 he’s Stalin’s favorite apparatchik, photographed with him near some canal built by convicts under his control, wearing the same uniform as Stalin, the same military cap, one hand thrust inside his coat, just like the Boss. The Devil Dwarf has an angelic face and a child’s voice; he loves to sing and dance (with his lame leg). Being Stalin’s bloodhound begins to agitate him, darken his nature: the angelic face turns black; his teeth start to fall out; he suffers from neurasthenia (like Babel). Yezhova has to end her Moscow “soirees.” He torments her, has her followed. She scribbles a note to him: “Kolya darling, I earnestly beg you to check up on my whole life, everything about me.”
Yezhov learns from Stalin, begins to edit manuscripts. He “sculpts” Boris Pilnyak’s new novel, The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea, though he himself has trouble finishing a sentence. Pilnyak grows profoundly depressed. “There isn’t a single thinking adult in this country who hasn’t thought that he might get shot.” Despite having Yezhov as an editor, he will be arrested in 1937, shot in 1938.
Yezhov uncovers the “Center of Centers,” a web of spies “in all spheres of Soviet life,” bent on murdering Stalin (this fanciful web is probably Stalin’s own creation).
1937
Babel is suddenly “productive” again. He publishes “Sulak” (a tale of the Civil War), “Di Grasso,” and “The Kiss,” a kind of coda to Red Cavalry. Lyutov is now an officer with his own orderly, Mishka, “a cunning Cossack.” Mishka becomes his pimp, landing Lyutov a young widow who offers him nothing less than “an increasingly violent, never-ending, silent kiss” while he entertains her with stories of a Moscow “in which the future is raging.” He becomes “betrothed” to the widow, but as is usual with Lyutov, he leaves her flat and crosses with his brigade into the borderless kingdom of Poland. Yet it’s “Di Grasso” that intrigues me—it’s a perfect tale for the Yezhovshchina. Di Grasso’s leap could also be the savage, mindless, and bloody art of our Devil Dwarf.
March 5: Babel’s been hiding like a ghost in Gorky’s dacha outside Moscow. “The house is empty but from time to time I get the impression that the shade of its departed master is lurking around.” He must have realized that Gorky was communing with him ghost to ghost. “Again and again it is demonstrated to me that I cannot work if I live in Moscow.” But how can anyone work in the middle of the Yezhovshchina?
Yezhov’s new title is Commissar-General of State Security, making him a Soviet marshal. He brags that he can arrest the entire Politburo if he wants to do so. He’s the one man in the country who has Stalin’s ear. Stalin locks himself up for hours with the Devil Dwarf, calls him Yezhevichka, Little Blackberry Bush. The Boss celebrates Yezhov the way he’d celebrated Gorky—has bridges, steamers, factories, collective farms, soccer fields, asylums, orphanages, and Cheka schools named after him. Yezhov is on everyone’s lips. He’s drunk half the time, debauched, sleeps with Zinaida Glikina (his wife’s best friend) and with Zinaida’s husband. He arrives at the Lubyanka in a drunken stupor, beats up prisoners during interrogations, walks around with blood on his tunic.
Poems are written about Yezhov, who’s likened to a snow leopard.
April 3: Yagoda is arrested, and Stalin continues his little game of musical chairs, offering Yagoda’s dacha to Molotov. Yagoda sits in a solitary cell in the Lubyanka; he can’t eat or sleep; often he whispers to himself that God has to exist: only God could punish him for his loyal service to the Boss. Stalin lets him linger until 1938 and has him shot after staging a series of show trials that turn the Party into a band of terrified mice.
Not even Budenny, Stalin’s favorite warrior (and Babel’s nemesis), is spared. In July, the Devil Dwarf tells Marshal Budenny that his wife, “the beautiful Mikhailova,” a singer at the Bolshoi, is facing arrest. She’s accused of having visited foreign embassies with the intent of becoming a spy—a tale that Yezhov himself probably invented. But the hero of the former Red Cavalry knows what to do. He escorts Mikhailova to the Lubyanka, wearing all his medals, and doesn’t see her again until after Stalin’s death, when he petitions the public prosecutor’s office in her behalf. Mikhailova is returned to him, like some princess out of a poisoned fairy tale. She tells him how she’d been subjected to gang rape in the gulag. Budenny doesn’t believe her. He calls her crazy in the head.
September 28: Babel gives an interview at the Writers Union that’s like a performance out of Kafka. It’s Yezhov’s time, “and the slightest indiscretion could be fatal. But it was just as dangerous to refuse an interview as to give one.” When asked about his ideal audience, he says: “I aim at a reader who is intelligent, educated, and has good, exacting taste. Generally speaking, I feel that a short story can be read properly only by a very intelligent woman—the better specimens of this half of the human race sometimes have absolute taste, as some people have absolute pitch.” Babel is performing his circus tricks, to ridicule without being noticed, to speak nonsense that has a glimmer of truth. There’s no room for Babel or any of his readers in Stalin’s private circus of women with absolute pitch—i.e., the fools and ideologues of socialist realism.
1938
Babel publishes “The Trial.”
In October, Yezhova enters a sanitarium near Moscow, suffering from a mild nervous condition. She’s thirty-four years old. In a month she will be dead. She might have been driven to suicide . . . or poisoned by the Dwarf. She writes to Stalin before she dies: “I feel like a living corpse.” Yezhov does not attend her funeral.
The Devil Dwarf is dismissed. Beria will replace him as chief of the Cheka.
1939
Babel, who has been defending Maupassant all his life, says in one of his last conversations with Antonina: “Everything that Maupassant did came out fine, but he lacked heart.” Antonina believes that Babel “had sensed a streak of terrifying loneliness and isolation in Maupassant”—his own loneliness and isolation. And perhaps like Maupassant, he also “lacked heart” in the end and could no longer escape into those webs of nothingness he’d spun as a writer.
April 10: Yezhov is imprisoned in the Lubyanka; he will sit without a word and fly paper airplanes across his cell.
May 11: Yezhov gives his wife (already dead) and Babel (still alive) the ultimate kiss of death: he accuses her and him of being spies.
May 15. Babel is arrested four days after Yezhov’s kiss. He says to Antonina: “They didn’t let me finish,” meaning his “fugitive” collection of new stories. On the way to Moscow, in the Cheka’s own car, Ba
bel says: “The worst part of this is that my mother won’t be getting my letters.” He’s whisked right through the gates of the Lubyanka. So many myths have been engendered around this very moment. According to the daughter “of an important Chekist,” Babel “seriously wounded” one of the men who wanted to arrest him. Others insist that guards saluted Babel while he was being led into the Lubyanka, and that he wore a smile on his face.
Put on the “conveyor belt”—different teams interrogate him continuously—Babel confesses to having been part of a plot to murder the Boss. Yezhova was the ringleader of a band that includes Olesha, Eisenstein, Ehrenburg, Mikhoels, a polar explorer, and Isaac Babel. His French “handler” is André Malraux, who recruited him in 1933 to spy for France; Babel has managed to steal some mysterious secret about aerodromes and crops in the Ukraine.
Was he completing the Cheka’s own lunatic script, or was his “confession” much more original, something Babelesque, his own final fiction? Red Cavalry in the Lubyanka. Babel’s interrogators are mostly illiterate and have not bothered to sample a single page of his. He’s entered into a heart of darkness where nothing makes sense. He’s Isaac Babel, after all, a fallen cavalier, the man of many masks. Hadn’t Ehrenburg called him “the wise rabbi”? Wise or not, he’s still a rabbi of the written word. And his captors have no language other than banalities. They’re bandits who beat him with the sawed-off legs of a chair. They can coax him into admitting all kinds of conspiracies—the idea of an “aerodrome” comes from a scenario Babel has been working on. But they aren’t imaginative enough to play with Babel, and Babel is obliged to play with them. In the notes he’s prepared for his inquisitors, he reveals the advice he gave to filmmakers and fellow writers. “I told them [ . . . ] about the necessity for working to deepen their artistic individuality, no matter whether somebody needed it or not.” (The Boss’s cockroach whiskers would have begun to burn over that.) “If you are fundamentally flawed, then perfect this flaw in yourself and raise it to the level of art.” And Babel did exactly that with his interrogators. If Yezhov has unmasked him as a “saboteur” and a spy, then Babel will create the scenario of a spy, with multiple adventures in Moscow and Paris. If Malraux had his own fighter squadron during the Spanish Civil War, then Babel will embroider tales of paratroopers and aircraft designers. If Yezhova recruited him at one of her parties, then he will invent a “harem” of spies around her. But at some point the game will have to end. Babel has incriminated his own friends, after all. When he tries to recant, no one listens. He has to humble himself to the new chief of the Cheka. “Salvation came to me in prison [ . . . ] in my solitude I could see the Soviet land with new eyes as she is in reality, indescribably beautiful.” Beria couldn’t care less about Babel’s “salvation.” Babel is already one of the damned. The Cheka is waiting on orders from Stalin whether to kill him or not.
1940
January 26: Babel’s “trial” takes place in Beria’s own office at Butyrki Prison, since Beria himself sleeps during the day and only works at night; the “trial” lasts twenty minutes. The judges withdraw and don’t even bother to deliberate: the verdict was prepared long before this little danse macabre. Babel is declared an agent of the French and Austrian intelligence services, “linked to the wife of the enemy of the people Yezhov,” and the court sentences him to death.
January 27, 1:30 A.M.: he’s the first to be shot on a list of sixteen names. His body is taken to the crematorium at the Donskoi Monastery in the middle of Moscow, his ashes tossed into “bottomless grave number 1.”
February 4: Yezhov is shot, but not before he makes a last request: “Tell Stalin that I shall die with his name on my lips.” His ashes will be tossed into Babel’s bottomless grave. And the master’s own fiction seems to rise right out of Donskoi and haunt this boneyard: Yezhova’s tombstone is twenty steps from grave number 1. “Even in death she is here, next to Babel and Yezhov.” Yezhova, née Feigenberg, was born in Gomel, the second city of Belorusse, with a Jewish population as dominant as Odessa’s. And perhaps she’d been shaped and inspired by a Moldavanka of her own. Whatever her feelings about Babel, however much she treasured him and the “softness” of his savage tales, she was the one who had him near, in her own little measure of eternity.
1941
October 7: The Germans gather outside the gates of Moscow, like jackals in armor. The Lubyanka is shooting prisoners and burning its files (together with Babel’s manuscripts), as the Soviets prepare to abandon the capital. The Boss sits in the Kremlin, puffing on his Dunhill pipe, his papers already packed. And then, like some mad prophet, Stalin decides not to surrender Moscow; outside, the first snow of the season begins to fall. The Germans have been advancing too quickly and haven’t bothered to bring their winter uniforms.
It’s November. While German planes roar overhead, Stalin decides to have his troops parade right near the enemy’s lines. He has a field hospital built on the spot, should the Germans bomb his parade. He picks Marshal Budenny to inspect the troops. Budenny has grown fat since his days with the Red Cavalry. The parading troops assemble at Red Square. It’s five o’clock in the morning. Specks of light appear on the Kremlin walls. A fierce snow begins to fall, blanketing the troops, rendering them invisible. And Budenny, on his white horse, rides out from the Kremlin gate, finds Stalin’s phantom troops, and leads the parade. . . .
SAAC BABEL WITH MAKHNO, CIRCA 1932
AFTERWARD
1.
IT WAS 1965 OR SO. I was an assistant professor at Stanford during that honeymoon period when English departments were no longer at war with living writers and welcomed them onto the campus. We were still orphans who weren’t allowed to teach Dickens or James Joyce, because we didn’t have a doctorate and couldn’t have understood the complexities of craft, but who was I to gripe? Stanford paid my bills, supported my delusion of being a novelist. It also raised men from the dead, meaning that Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky, the prime minister of Russia’s Provisional Government in 1917 (before the Bolsheviks staged their little putsch), was going to appear at the university. I hadn’t heard a peep about Kerensky since his four months in power. And here he was, almost fifty years later, as if there were some time warp, and an old minister like him could slide right out from under his little moment of glory. I remember a tall man with cropped hair—Kerensky. Or perhaps my own time warp has made him tall. He was introduced by Bertram Wolfe, a former radical who had turned against the Soviets and was now affiliated with Stanford’s own conservative think tank, the Hoover Institution.
We were sitting in a classroom, fifty of us, students and teachers, and Bertram Wolfe talked and talked and talked. He was praising Kerensky, but it was almost like a moment out of Nabokov’s Pnin, where the professor babbles to an empty auditorium. The students around me had to leave for their next class. Kerensky sat with a grim, gray look; Bertram Wolfe could have been another devil, like Ilyich (Vladimir Lenin). He was well into his eighties, Alexander Fyodorovich, but he hadn’t given up his own lost war. He didn’t have time to arrest Lenin and those other scoundrels, he told us. “I had to make sure that the trolley cars would run.”
Was it the lament of a sore loser? History hasn’t been kind to Alexander Fyodorovich. And I had to wonder what Russia would have been like under his much milder democracy. For the Soviets, he would become a figure of fun. Babel writes about him in an early story, “Line and Color.” It’s 1916. Our narrator claims to have met Kerensky at a sanitarium in Finland. “The dining-room smelled of pine trees, of the Countess Tyszkiewicz’s fresh shoulders, and of the English officers’ silk underwear.” The countess is as beautiful as Marie Antoinette (another loser). Alexander Fyodorovich cannot distinguish her beauty. He’s nearsighted. Our narrator lectures him about the magnificence of Line, that “mistress of the world,” which escapes Kerensky. He sees nothing of the magic garden they are walking in, surfaces “that undulate like a line drawing by Leonardo.” The narrator begs Alexander Fyodorovich to buy a pair of
glasses.
But Kerensky has the better of him. He doesn’t want to squander his money on spectacles. “I don’t need your line, vulgar as truth is vulgar. You live your life as though you were a teacher of trigonometry, while I for my part live in a world of miracles. . . . What do I need lines for, when I have color? To me the whole universe is a gigantic theater, and I am the only member of the audience who hasn’t glued opera glasses to his eyes.”
The narrator departs from Finland with his tail between his legs. Six months later, he sees Kerensky again. It’s June 1917, and Alexander Fyodorovich is “now supreme god of our armies and arbiter of our destinies.” But his nearsightedness doesn’t stand him in good stead. A bridge has been dismantled. “Streetcars lay like dead horses in the streets.” A rally is held at the House of the People. Alexander Fyodorovich gives a speech about Russia, “mystic mother and spouse,” while his head is deep in clouds of color. “The animal passion of the crowd stifled him.” On his private planet, without opera glasses, he cannot see the growing anger of the crowd. He steps down from the podium, and it’s Trotsky who climbs up after him, Trotsky who twists his mouth and barks at the audience in his merciless voice, full of line and color. “Comrades!”
Of course Babel has it both ways. Alexander Fyodorovich is the visionary—the artist-dreamer with his own musical spectrum of color, who believes in great bundling forms rather than fine lines, but who cannot sway an audience, cannot rule. Yet he rules “Line and Color,” like a quaint and curious bomb within the Soviet canon. The story was published in 1923, but if we go back to 1918, when Babel wrote for New Life, Gorky’s anti-Bolshevik magazine, we find him much closer to Kerensky than to Ilyich—he offers us the bitter colors of a St. Petersburg trapped in a surreal spell, where horses in a Soviet slaughterhouse “stand crestfallen in stalls,” “somnolent with exhaustion,” chewing on their own dung, and where “soulless, stunted women” give birth to little blue monsters with silent mouths and “wide, serious eyes.”
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