“A HEAP OF DUNG, crawling with worms, photographed by a cinema apparatus through a microscope—such is James Joyce’s work,” bellowed Karl Radek. With his chin-strap beard, thick, round glasses and unkempt, receding hair, the Soviet propagandist cut a faintly comical figure as he ranted into the microphone. Sitting in the audience, surrounded by his fellow writers, Isaac Babel listened with dismay. Radek’s words echoed around the vast Hall of Columns in the House of Unions building in Moscow, a grand venue befitting the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers. This was where Lenin had lain in state. Now, for two weeks in August 1934, more than seven hundred delegates gathered in the largest assembly of writers in Russian history, presided over by the first man of Russian letters, the walrus-moustached Maxim Gorky. It was Gorky who had asked Babel to return from Paris the previous year to help him organize the Congress. Despite his misgivings, Babel could not refuse his mentor.
On the walls of the hall hung posters depicting Shakespeare and Cervantes, Gogol and Pushkin, and every time Babel entered and left the building, he was confronted by a giant banner suspended on the facade of the building opposite carrying the slogan: “Writers are the engineers of human souls.” It was a phrase of Stalin’s coinage.
There were many souls waiting to be engineered in the Soviet Union: in the years after the revolution Russian literacy rose from 20 percent to 80 percent. The Congress began with a series of open-air readings in the Moscow Park of Culture and Rest, attended by tens of thousands. During the subsequent proceedings, the Hall of Columns was visited by delegation upon delegation from every corner of the Soviet Union, from young pioneers to miners and engineers.1 The proceedings, two sessions a day of speeches, were covered exhaustively in Pravda. This was a major event, an attempt to jolt Soviet literature back to life in its cultural war with the West.
For a writer like Babel, the preceding years had been miserable. After a period of relative freedom in the 1920s, Soviet literature came under the sway of hard-line factions who believed writers should form themselves into “artistic brigades” of “shock workers” and be attached to the large-scale construction projects or collective farms that were part of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan to industrialize the Soviet Union.2 These brigades of writers were encouraged to write collective novels about the factory or canal to which they had been assigned. The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, who were the dominant faction from 1929, were not tolerant of those who did not follow their line, and many writers who charted their own course were bullied, censored, and denounced. Babel, who never joined the Party, was considered suspiciously independent. Those who, like Boris Pilnyak and Evgeny Zamyatin, dared to publish their work abroad were either humiliated or cast out and denied the opportunity to publish at all.3 Pilnyak, who enjoyed a huge readership and critical acclaim, made the mistake of publishing his novel Mahogany in Berlin after it had failed to pass the Soviet censors. He had to grovel his way back into favor. Zamyatin refused to apologize after his dystopian masterwork, We, was published abroad and was banned from publishing until, with the help of Gorky, Stalin permitted him to go into exile in France.
The problem for those directing Soviet cultural policy was that the books produced by the “artistic brigades” were mostly terrible. Even as committed a revolutionary writer as Gorky was embarrassed by what his country was producing. And Stalin listened to Gorky. In 1932, without warning, Stalin killed off the idea of “proletarian literature,” forcibly disbanding all the factions and forming one large new collective: the Union of Soviet Writers. This was an historic moment, the dawn of a new kind of literature, to be called “socialist realism,” a state-mandated aesthetic built into the statute book of the new writers’ union. It was different from realism in that it did not depict “objective reality” but rather reality “in its revolutionary development.” What reality in its revolutionary development looked like was one of the problems that the Congress was supposed to solve.4
What became clear was that it was easier to define socialist realism by what it was not rather than what it was, and one of the things it most certainly was not was modernism. That is why Radek was ranting about Joyce in the session dedicated to “international” literature. In the conclusion to his speech, he told the audience that world literature was defined by a fundamental opposition: socialist realism versus Ulysses.5 Joyce’s novel had been first published in 1922, but it was cleared of obscenity in the United States only in December 1933. By the time of the Congress it was an unlikely best seller in the United States, shipping thirty-three thousand copies by April.6 For Radek, Joyce’s novel was the ultimate expression of experimental, modernist individualism, the death spasm of “bourgeois literature” drawn out over one thousand pages. It wasn’t just Joyce. “In the pages of Proust,” Radek said, “the old world, like a mangy dog, no longer capable of any action whatever, lies basking in the sun and endlessly licks its sores.”7 Modernism was a literature for navel-gazing when what the moment demanded was political urgency. The previous summer, the Nazis had burned books on the streets of Germany and, in this climate, literature was not something to be idly composed by an artist in their garret, detached from society. “On May 10, 1933,” Radek said, “all the world’s writers were told: There is no such thing as neutrality in that struggle which is now taking place on the arena of history.”8 Radek argued that the foundations of Western literary culture were being threatened by fascism. “Hundreds, if not thousands, of writers have been forced to flee from Germany as from an earthquake, leaving their books for the hangman to destroy,” he said.9 The kind of literature needed to fight fascism could not afford to be apolitical; it had to be engaged. “Trying to present a picture of revolution by the Joyce method,” Radek said, “would be like trying to catch a dreadnought with a shrimping net.”10 Under the Nazis, Radek warned, the message to the writer was simple: “He who is not for us is against us.”11
It did not take a writer as sharp as Babel to catch the irony. What was to happen to those who cared more for the literature of Marcel Proust and James Joyce than for the edicts of socialist realism? What was to happen to a writer like Babel who could write only about the reality he saw around him, not about an idealized version of the reality as socialist realism demanded? Those who listened closely heard some ominous caveats in Radek’s speech. “It goes without saying that the revolution and the Party do not exist in order to ensure to all members complete liberty,” he said.12
As packed as the Hall of Columns was, there were faces missing. Radek brought up the case of Nikolai Gumilev, the poet who was arrested by the Cheka, the secret police established by Lenin in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, and shot in 1921. Here, Radek explained, was a writer of talent who had given himself to counterrevolutionary causes. Radek did not mention the many others who were not there. Gumilev’s ex-wife, the great poet Anna Akhmatova, was absent, as was the writer Mikhail Bulgakov. These two were fortunate only to have been ostracized. The predicament of the poet Osip Mandelstam, arrested four months previously, was more serious. He had composed an epigram mocking Stalin that he was careful enough not to transcribe but not careful enough about to whom he recited it. Someone had made a copy and given it to the secret police, and he confessed to its authorship in a cell of the Lubyanka prison. He almost certainly owed his life to the need to avoid unpleasant scandal at the Congress, which was attended by a number of celebrated foreign writers, including Babel’s good friend André Malraux.13 The writers on display at the Congress were safe precisely because they were on display. The message, though, was clear: their continued “liberty” was predicated on their following the new socialist realist line. “He who is not for us is against us.”
AND THEN IT WAS BABEL’S TURN TO SPEAK. As he stepped up to the microphone there was much expectation. He did not take himself as seriously as some of the other writers in the hall. He did not, for example, have the poetic aura of Boris Pasternak, with his intense gaze framed by high cheekbones. Babel was a little chubby and wore wire-rimmed spectacles; while he had only just turned forty, his hair was retreating far back from his forehead. He was garrulous and mischievous, known for his jokes. Yet, of those in the room, only Pasternak could have claimed to be Babel’s rival in literary stature. The publication of Red Cavalry (1926), a collection of short stories drawing on his experiences riding with the Cossacks in the Civil War, made Babel the most famous writer in the Soviet Union. Whether it was composing a story about a brutal episode from the war, or about the Jewish criminal underground of Odessa, or about events from his childhood, Babel was a writer of uncompromising standards, whose every sentence was carefully worked, tested, and repeatedly polished. In this he was the product of his childhood immersion in French literature and his fascination with the work of Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant. It was not only the mot juste he was after, it was the perfect way of punctuating it, too. “No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place,” he wrote in a piece about translating Maupassant.14 His reputation spread beyond the Soviet Union, and Red Cavalry was translated into French in 1928 and into English in 1929, and earned the admiration of Ernest Hemingway among others.
Babel’s talent was not the only reason there was so much expectation in the Hall of Columns, though. He was also in trouble. Just as he was being discovered by a generation of enthusiastic French, English, and American readers, parts of the Soviet literary establishment had already turned on him. In 1928, the critic Alexander Voronsky, an early champion of Babel’s work, wrote an article publicly chastising the writer for his low productivity.15 Babel had been on the defensive ever since and, six years later, was still without a major work to follow up Red Cavalry. Why was he not writing? Or, perhaps more to the point, why was he not being published?
In the build-up to the Congress, the implicit criticism of Babel’s silence was made explicit. The American radical Max Eastman published a book earlier that year called Artists in Uniform, attacking the Soviet Union’s cultural policies under Stalin. Eastman had been in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s and was responsible for smuggling Lenin’s “Suppressed Testament” out of the country. When the document was published it caused a sensation, as it criticized Stalin and favored Trotsky’s candidacy to be Lenin’s successor. In the power struggle that followed Eastman became a firm ally of Trotsky. Unsurprisingly, Stalin loathed him.16 There was a section in Artists in Uniform that Eastman called “The Literary Inquisition” in which he devoted a chapter to “The Silence of Isaac Babyel” [sic]. Eastman pointed out that of all Soviet writers, Babel had commanded the greatest respect abroad. “Why was this world-wide expectancy left hanging in the air?” wrote Eastman. “Why did Isaac Babyel turn his back on a fame already international, retire into the background and publish no word, save some recollections from childhood, for five years?”17 Eastman’s answer was that Babel was “an artist and not a recruiting sergeant” who refused “to surrender his incomparable pen into the hands of these new slave-drivers of creation, these brigadiers of the boy scouts of poetry, these professional vulgarians prostituting the idea of the liberation of all society by the proletariat to the task of enslaving all utterance and all creative life to an iron-ribbed bureaucratic machine.”18 Having Eastman fight in your corner was dangerous. With Pravda publishing transcripts of the major speeches for the wider public to read, Babel knew that he needed to defuse the issue of his silence.
Babel began conventionally enough, applauding the unity of the gathered writers before inveighing against “trite, vulgar, commonplace, contrived clichés.” It is the job of writers, he said, “to help the triumph of the new Bolshevik taste in this country.” A “new style” was needed and Babel knew just who writers should learn from. “Look at how Stalin hammers out his speeches,” Babel said, “how his words are wrought of iron, how terse they are, how muscular, how much respect they show for the reader.” The hall burst into applause. “I don’t suggest here that we should all write like Stalin, but I do say that we must all work at our words as he does.” More applause.
This was not wholly disingenuous. For one thing, Babel had been committed to the Bolshevik cause. As a child, he lived through the pogroms whipped up by the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Tsar Nicholas II and his government. As a young man, Babel had been denied entry to university because he was Jewish. He enlisted in the army to fight in the First World War, only for the front to disintegrate on his arrival with the news arriving of the revolution back home. Babel undertook a treacherous journey back to Petersburg, hiding for twelve days in a Kiev cellar while the Red Army fought for the city. Having secured passage to Petersburg, he was robbed on the train and thrown out barefoot into the snow. When he finally arrived in the city, he took a job for a few months as a translator with the Cheka. He then served as an embedded reporter with the Red Cavalry in Poland. He had certainly been on the “right” side during the revolution.
Invoking Stalin in his speech was transparently about self-preservation. Babel was a spinner of tall tales. At the Congress he told Malraux’s wife, Clara, that he regularly went to the Kremlin with Gorky to meet with Stalin.19 There were rumors in literary circles that at one of these meetings Stalin asked Babel to write a novel about him. “I’ll think about it, Iossif Vissarionovich,” was Babel’s supposed reply.20 The truth was that Babel avoided literary meetings at which Stalin was present. He was right to be cautious. Stalin certainly knew about Babel and did not view him favorably. This was down to General Semyon Budenny, the commander of the Red Cavalry and a close advisor of Stalin, who was infuriated by Babel’s stories and publicly attacked him as “a literary degenerate.”21
Babel led a complicated love life. His wife, Evgenia, had emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1925 because Babel was having an affair with a beautiful actress, Tamara Kashrina. Babel and Kashrina had a son, Mikhail, but Kashrina married another writer, Vsevolod Ivanov, soon after the boy was born. Ivanov adopted the boy and raised him as his own. When Babel had trouble securing a passport to visit his wife, Evgenia, and daughter, Nathalie, in Paris in 1932, he appealed to Gorky for help. Gorky pressured Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin’s deputy, to take the issue up with his boss. While Babel was ultimately granted a passport, Stalin initially pronounced Babel “not worth spending foreign currency on.”22 In another letter to Kaganovich, Stalin praised the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov as having “great artistic talent . . . not like ‘our’ frivolous Babel, who keeps writing about things of which he knows nothing (for example, The Cavalry).”23 It is not clear what was worse in Stalin’s eyes: Babel writing about things of which he knew nothing, or Babel writing nothing at all.
In front of the expectant audience, Babel initially tried to make a joke of his lack of productivity. He described himself as the “past master” of the art of silence. The audience laughed. What followed was an implicit plea for more time. He pointed out that were he living in a capitalist country he “would have long since croaked from starvation” if he had not sacrificed his art to commercial demands. He applauded the consideration extended toward writers by the authorities in the Soviet Union. “They don’t push you in the belly if you have something inside there and they don’t insist too much on whether the baby will be a redhead, just light brown, or very dark, on what sort of things he’ll have to say,” he said. “I am not happy about my silence. Indeed, it saddens me. But perhaps this is one more proof of the attitude toward the writer in this country.” It was a weak argument but an argument nonetheless: the tolerance of Babel’s failures reflected well on the literary sophistication of the Soviet Union because, unlike the capitalist West, it understood that literature could not be produced to order. This, though, was the Soviet Union that had reformed itself through the Five-Year Plan. It was productive. How long would Stalin and his dangerous bureaucrats wait for Babel’s next major work to gestate? How long would his silence be tolerated? Babel was no fool. He knew what happened to writers who fell too far from favor. But no one in the Hall of Columns that day, not even as perceptive a writer as Babel, anticipated the true horror of what was coming.
IT WAS LATE IN THE AFTERNOON on December 1, 1934, when Sergei Kirov arrived at the Smolny Institute in Leningrad. He had been working from home, preparing a report that he had to deliver that evening to the Leningrad Party. Having been recently elevated to the Secretariat of the Communist Party, he was a busy man with work on his mind, and perhaps that was why he did not notice the figure that turned away from him in the corridor, nor hear the footsteps as this same man began to follow him. As Kirov turned a corner, the man closed in, drew a Nagant M1895 revolver from his pocket, and shot Kirov in the back of the head. He died instantly.
The assassin was Leonid Nikolaev, the son of a cleaning lady and an alcoholic carpenter, a Communist who had failed at a number of jobs and was unemployed.24 The murder caused a sensation. Was Nikolaev a lone gunman with a grievance? Had Kirov been sleeping with his wife? Was he part of a dissident political faction within the Soviet Union? In the pay of foreign agents? Or was the killing organized by the NKVD on the orders of Stalin? The latter theory gained much traction outside the Soviet Union in the years and decades that followed. It was rumored that Nikolaev had been arrested and freed on several previous occasions despite being found with a gun. In the aftermath of the killing, Kirov’s bodyguard died in a car crash before he could give evidence. The NKVD officials responsible for protecting Kirov were given unusually light sentences. Yet no hard evidence emerged linking Stalin directly to the Kirov murder.25
What is indisputable, though, is that Stalin used the murder as a pretext to launch his brutal purges against his enemies on the right and left of the party. As the NKVD sought to unearth the conspiracy behind the murder, new measures were implemented to speed up political trials and for executions to immediately follow sentencing. The investigations led inevitably to Stalin’s political opponents, who were supposedly being organized from exile by Leon Trotsky. The man Stalin placed in charge of purging these enemies was Nikolai Yezhov, who at just short of five foot was nicknamed “the bloodthirsty dwarf.”26 A ruthless bureaucrat, Yezhov rose quickly through the ranks, despite his heavy drinking, his sexual promiscuity, and his explosive temper. He took over the investigation into Kirov’s murder when Stalin became impatient with the time it was taking to uncover the conspiracy he knew to be there. Yezhov was given the victim’s job, replacing Kirov as secretary of the Central Committee. Two years later, in the autumn of 1936, Yezhov was put in charge of the NKVD. The man he replaced in that position, Genrikh Yagoda, would later “confess” to playing a role in the Kirov assassination. Under Yezhov, the purges gathered terrifying momentum.
IN SEPTEMBER 1936, with the Moscow evenings beginning to chill, Babel paced his study, winding a piece of twine repeatedly around his fingers like a rosary. Abruptly he stopped, paused, leaned over one of the pieces of paper arranged on the shelves around him, jotted something down. The pacing resumed. It had been a terrible year, filled with loss and fear, but Babel could not afford to stop working. He needed to write. He had begun longer projects, including a novella, Kolya Topuz, about a former Odessan gangster who struggles to adapt to life on a collective farm before trying his hand as a miner. There were the first chapters of a novel about a Jewish widow leaving the shtetl for Moscow. There were fragments of stories. There were translations of Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish tales. He was writing, he was working, but he was not finishing, not publishing. There were, though, mouths to feed: his wife and daughter in Paris, his sister and mother in Brussels. What he earned he gave away to those he felt needed it more. Antonina Pirozhkova, a thirty-year-old engineer who became his second wife after they met in 1932, described his kindness as “bordering on the catastrophic.”27 But these were times in which kindness was needed, so Babel kept pacing and winding.
The dangers of incurring official disapproval became more acute after Kirov’s assassination. The year began with a warning. Dmitri Shostakovich, the foremost composer in the Soviet Union, saw his opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, attacked in an editorial in Pravda. The editorial, without a byline, accused Shostakovich of sacrificing good music that everyone can enjoy “on the altar of petit-bourgeois formalism.” A rumor circulated that the article was authored by Stalin himself. What followed was an official campaign against formalism—that is, any kind of art that seemed abstract or pretentious or elitist. While many writers panicked, Babel remained calm, toughened by his public battles with General Budenny. Once again, the literary community leaned on Gorky for help. In March, Malraux visited Moscow, and Babel took him to meet Gorky. Malraux made it clear that Western left-wing intellectuals were outraged at Shostakovich’s treatment and the campaign that followed.28 The meeting left a deep impression on Gorky, who wrote to Stalin telling him that there needed to be a change in policy regarding Shostakovich. Gorky told Stalin he had been impressed with Malraux and that Babel had vouched for his standing in European circles. Malraux possessed, Gorky conceded, a weakness “typical of the entire European intelligentsia—‘the individual, his creative independence, the freedom of his inner growth’ etc.” The implication was that this weakness ought to be indulged for the sake of strengthening the bonds of the Popular Front against fascism, or, as Gorky put it, “the broader unification of the European intelligentsia.”29 Gorky knew how to push the right buttons with Stalin, persuading him to reduce the temperature of the attack on artists.
Babel did complete one work, Maria, a play set during the Civil War, and gave public readings at Moscow theaters. He was optimistic of staging it in both Russian and Yiddish versions. That, though, was before Kirov was murdered. The play was canceled before its first performance, and when it was published in a theater journal in April 1935, it was accompanied by a critical review by an arts editor from Pravda.30 Babel should not have been surprised: Gorky felt the play exhibited a “Baudelairean passion for rotten meat.”31 The only avenue to publishing left open to Babel was putting out new editions of his old stories—a new collected edition was coming out that very month. Otherwise, he made most of his income from the film industry, writing and editing scripts. The money was good, and he could work under the radar, as his name was easily left out of the credits.32
Throughout the summer and into the autumn, Babel’s desperate attempts to work were frequently interrupted by visitors. Those whose family and friends had disappeared came to him for help, begging him to put in a good word. Babel could not refuse them and got dressed up and headed out to speak to anyone he thought had influence, former military contacts mostly.33 This was courageous on Babel’s part, for causing too much of a fuss could have made him a target. He missed his chance to escape when Malraux and André Gide had insisted both Babel and Pasternak attend the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture in Paris the previous year (this was the precursor to the Congress attended by Spender in Spain). Perhaps Babel was too optimistic, thinking that with Gorky alive, the situation might improve.
Then, in June, Gorky died. He was laid out in the Hall of Columns, where he had presided at the Congress two years previously. Babel’s grief was mingled with dread. “Now they are not going to let me live,” he told Antonina.34 Friends began to disappear, arrested in the night by the secret police. In August came the first of the Show Trials, in the same building that hosted the Writers’ Congress and Gorky’s lying in state. The most famous defendants were the Old Bolsheviks Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, both accused of involvement in a Trotsky-inspired conspiracy to murder not just Kirov but also Stalin and a number of other prominent Communist politicians.35 Among those charged as conspirators was Efim Dreitser, a friend of Babel’s.36 They were all found guilty and promptly executed. While the trial took place, Stalin’s war on writers gathered momentum. A group of supposedly Trotskyist writers were denounced in Literaturnaya Gazeta.37 Babel’s name was not among them.38 He was spared—for now at least—but it was clear that by the autumn of 1936, his situation was getting much worse. His friends in the West could not help him: Malraux was fighting with the Republicans in Spain and Gide, after his most recent visit, had been denounced for damning Stalinism in Retour de l’URSS.
FRIENDS AND WRITERS CONTINUED TO DISAPPEAR, but Babel was not taken. He had a new protector, although the protection she offered was laced with danger. She was his former lover, Yevgenia Feigenberg. Babel had sought a reconciliation with his wife in 1927 but, while stopping over in Berlin on his way to Paris, he met Yevgenia, an ambitious and charismatic young woman who was working as a typist at the Soviet Trade Mission.39 Yevgenia was the daughter of a rabbi from the backwater town of Gomel, which she had escaped by marrying Lazar Khayutin, a journalist in Odessa. In that bustling port town, she immersed herself in the literary scene, where she first came across Babel. But Odessa was not big enough to contain Yevgenia, and so she ditched Khayutin for Alexander Gladun, a man with connections in publishing and the foreign ministry, whom she met while he was on a business trip in the city. He took her first to Moscow and then to London, where Gladun had a position at the Soviet Embassy. That went sour when MI5 uncovered an espionage network run in part by the Soviet Trade Delegation. Britain responded by cutting off diplomatic relations with the USSR. Gladun was forced to return to Moscow; Yevgenia went to work in Berlin. Although still married to Gladun, Yevgenia clearly wanted Babel, and when he met her in Berlin, he did little to resist. They took a drunken tour of the city in the back of a taxi before ending up in Babel’s hotel room. He resumed the affair with her on his return to Moscow, where they met at a discreet apartment she kept just outside the city. When the affair ended, they remained friends and occasional collaborators: Yevgenia was an editor at an important journal, USSR Under Construction, and she relied on Babel’s writing and editing skills to help her.40
When the purges escalated, Yevgenia protected Babel. That she could do this was down to a simple fact: Yevgenia was by then the wife of Yezhov, architect of the Great Terror and head of the NKVD.41 When she first met him, in the resort town of Sochi, she immediately realized that despite his physical and intellectual vulgarity, his hard drinking, his promiscuity, and his sadism, he was a man rising rapidly in the party hierarchy. She was not wrong, and at the height of the purges she was chauffeured to parties in a gold-painted Chrysler Airflow sedan, wearing one of the hundred gowns she collected. The marriage was an open one: Yezhov held drunken orgies in which he slept with men and women; Yevgenia pursued affairs with writers and intellectuals through the literary salon she hosted.42 Indeed, just the previous month, in August 1936, Babel had been a guest at the Yezhov dacha. Babel had been careful not to resume the affair, though, and he tended to avoid seeing Yevgenia when her husband was present as he detected a “hostile attitude on his part.” Needless to say, Babel and Yezhov never talked politics.43 With her husband in charge of the purges, perhaps she could keep her former lover safe. Babel kept pacing his room, winding the twine around his fingers, working, waiting.