LAST CONVERSATIONS WITH ISAAC BABEL
Souvarine, Boris
While Lenin was still alive, Soviet writers and artists found it quite easy to obtain permission and the means to go to the West and stay for a few weeks or even longer. As Napoleon said to...
...Membership in this state- and policecontrolled union was obligatory for Babel as it was for Pasternak and other heretics, their private convictions notwithstanding...
...It was especially after the assassination of Kirov, ordered by Stalin in 1934, that the mass deportations and the massacres of the innocents in series assumed fantastic proportions.] B.S.: (Mindful of the book in progress): Let's get back to Stalin...
...He put his resolution before the Politburo immediately...
...four or five women in Leningrad, and as many apartments...
...The commission included Ehrenburg, L. Leonov, L. Slavine, and Antonina Pirojkova...
...This is nonsense, since denunciations were ordered by the GPU, which then acted upon them or ignored them, whichever suited its purpose...
...How is one to avoid it...
...Isaac Emanuilovich Babel was devoted to his mother and to his sister (later the wife of Dr...
...Babel was nevertheless doomed to the lamentable fate that so many innocent people suffered in different ways: the poet Kliuiev, the novelist Sologub (who died of privation), the stage designer Meyerhold, the historians Riazanov, Nevsky, Steklov, Platonov, and so many others, not to name the Stalinist writers also sent to the "butcher's knife...
...Natalie Parain, the wife of my friend Brice Parain, is paying a neighborly call, and the two ladies are chatting in Russian...
...And so it came about that I could frequently see Zamiatin, Y. P. Polonsky, Kussikov, Mansurov, Niculin, to mention a few of the visitors...
...One reason, among others: "Now nothing is left of the revolution but some skunks and dopes...
...Then he whispered: "I am...
...S IV talin died on March 5, 1953, fourteen years after Babel's disappearance...
...Books have their destiny, and so do manuscripts...
...With the massacre of the people accused in the trials of Zinoviev and Kamenev (1936), of Pyatakov and Radek together with their alleged "accomplices" (1937), and then of Tukhachevsky, Putna, Yakir, and other generals and high-ranking cadres of the Red Army (1937), and finally the trial of Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda, etc...
...6 As I accompany him to the door, I ask, as I have had occasion to do many times with Babel and with others—] B.S.: In a word, no change in sight...
...The reader will understand what importance I attach to this reply, since I know that Babel is offering not a personal opinion but the view of the military leaders with whom he associates, among others that of his friend from Kiev, General Yakir...
...The case has faded from my mind...
...This said, Babel becomes animated, like someone about to relate a juicy tidbit.] BABEL: This is how Stalin proceeds...
...But it is the KGB that pulls the strings, and therefore we will have none of Babel's unpublished works (if they still survive) so long as the spirit of Stalinism prevails at the "summit" of the Soviet state...
...In his "Autobiography," Babel writes that after being a soldier on the Russo-Rumanian front during World War I, he "served in the Cheka," a statement that elicited the reprobations of righteous persons who were poorly informed on this point...
...Babel was neither an avowed dissident nor an open opponent...
...B.S.: And what are people saying about Trotsky...
...Nor are we any closer to being informed about the circumstances surrounding the arrest and death of Babel...
...4 The Army is ready, the peasant countryside is not...
...Babel replied, "Who tells you I'm not writing...
...Under Stalin's regime, this state of affairs continued for a few years...
...After that long stay, however, he was unable to return until 1932, having had to allay the suspicions of the police, who scented his "wrong ideas," for after the publication of Red Cavalry, which made him famous, he had produced almost nothing—only a few short stories in 1932, which were the price of his passport...
...B.S.: And who is the best informed about him...
...Averbach, intimidated: "But Comrade Stalin...
...One can imagine the thoughts that are passing through his mind on the eve of his return to his country...
...Of this, too, not one word in the Recollections of Antonina Pirojkova...
...BABEL: Drinks .. B.S.: And Serebriakov...
...Trans...
...Here is a resume of his reply to my first question...
...B.S.: Do you know anything about Mrachkovsky...
...BABEL: Putna...
...Now and then, he telephones a subordinate...
...He speaks very slowly, weighs every word for five minutes...
...In this way, a certain "milieu" was created—transient but friendly, agreeable, cultivated, amusing...
...1938)—massacres that were accomplished by collective deportations—the terror was at its peak...
...by the NKVD...
...My apprehensions deepened the next year...
...Why was he not publishing anything...
...but they missed the notes about Babel, which were in the country with friends who had offered me hospitality...
...B.S.: Why not so easy...
...They're useful...
...Budyonny's wife was buried without an autopsy the day after her "suicide...
...And as he liked to say: "Without humor one could not live," so he, enclosed in a situation impervious to humor, had before long to stop living...
...Babel says no more...
...All of them go through Germany [that is, through Germany's military academies...
...Knowing the abominable treatment and procedures that Stalin's GPU used to break the morale and physical resistance of unfortunate people who had nothing to reproach themselves for, I cannot think without a shudder of the fate of Babel between May 1939, and March 1941...
...A question of life or death...
...Gorky died on June 18, 1936: now Babel no longer had a well-placed protector, albeit one who had lost all influence over Stalin...
...I III n 1936, Ilya Ehrenburg, who moved easily between Moscow and Paris—too easily for him to be honest—arrived once again in France...
...that Ehrenburg was a Stalinist, ergo a liar and a pig...
...he is smiling beatifically, but sometimes a shadow seems to pass over his face...
...In the late 1920s, one would see "the Russians" arrive in Paris...
...Pirojkova was employed as an engineer in the construction of the Moscow subway...
...The Cheka, an entirely new organization, recruited a variety of personnel: new civil servants, secretaries, translators, bookkeepers, typists, messengers, copy clerks, and a lot of people who did nothing at all...
...He created a bad impression with the pieces he wrote for the Daily Telegraph and with his memoirs...
...The reader will bear in mind that this conversation took place in 1932...
...Thousands of men go under...
...Quick to catch on...
...V The Literaturnaya Gazeta of April 28,1956 mentioned that the secretary of the Writers' Union had named a "Commission for the literary heritage of Babel," to be headed by Konstantin Fedin...
...He has a private plane at his disposal...
...In Ukrainian, it says: "In this house, the Soviet writer I. E. Babel lived until 1924...
...B.S.: And Semashko?5 BABEL: The same...
...Because he's a leader, a hero...
...But as the man—broken, 323 ruined, pitiable—is nearing the door, Stalin calls him back: "Give me your card to the Kremlin dining room...
...He strides up and down his office, smoking his pipe...
...Stalin, imperiously: "Drink...
...Babel disappeared before giving a full account of himself...
...The heroes of the civil war are in disrepute...
...In vain...
...Killed his wife and married a middle-class woman...
...In Russian, the word "partisan" is equivalent to guerrilla.] Except for Tukhachevsky's promotion, he's always in agreement with Stalin...
...BABEL: Stalin, furious with Krupskaya [Lenin's widow] because he knows her hostile feelings for both his person and his policies, summons her to rake her over the coals, and he threatens her: "You've not done with your opposition...
...B.S.: Why was Unschlicht sacked...
...Several other works have been referred to here and there...
...none of them foresaw the mutation of the allegedly Soviet regime into a totalitarian barbarism armed with the full resources of modern technology...
...Briefly: after Alliluyeva's sudden death, all sorts of rumors circulated about "mysteries" surrounding her demise...
...BABEL: Drinks .. [I am deeply dismayed...
...Rather, it was in the range of probabilities that Stalin would have driven his wife to suicide...
...In addition to all his official responsibilities, he is now the censor for the Arts Theater and for two others...
...He is in charge of the Magnitogorsk works...
...The last text of Babel's that I was able to read appeared in the Literaturnaya Gazeta of December 31, 1938, written in response to a request from the paper for a statement for the New Year: I hope that in 1939 one may be able to buy in our bookshops, in complete and inexpensive editions, the artistic works of Leon Tolstoy...
...But generally people esteem him because he doesn't give in...
...This leads me to inquire about Manuilsky.] BABEL: Decent...
...well, in a word, it-wasamat-ter-of-sleeping-with-him...
...This is in the official stenographic notes...
...Trans...
...As he had Gorky poisoned...
...B.S.: How so...
...B.S.: What's happening with Pyatakov [assistant commissar for heavy industries...
...I was then writing a book about Stalin, and it seemed to me useful to jot down comments about the state of Communist affairs at the time...
...I have heard it before, but want to hear it told a la Babel...
...Party member, but only for the sake of appearances...
...In the course of our long conversations— at his home, at my home, in a cafe, in the streets, even in the Metro—it had never occurred to me to take any notes...
...B.S.: And your friend Budyonny...
...B.S.: And Klim...
...I know this on my own account...
...Stalin decides all by himself, on his own initiative...
...However, I quote...
...You're afraid...
...Delivered of a "bitter" nuisance who was nonetheless his accomplice for several years, Stalin wreaked his vengeance without further restraint: Zinoviev and Kamenev were executed two months after Gorky, as were a number of their real or supposed partisans...
...He assumed an appalled air, and his eyes widened with horror at the idea of Rosa Kaganovich being handed over to the Minotaur of the Kremlin...
...Like a good Stalinist, Ehrenburg treated Zhenye in the grossest way, and, in effect, said to her brutally: "Babel has another woman, you mean nothing to him anymore, it's finished between you...
...One glimpsed them in Montparnasse cafes and in the studios of such artists as Annenkov, Puni, and Zadkine...
...He had accused his wife of Trotskyism, and claimed that he had merely upbraided her before her "suicide...
...We are in the period of the scientifics...
...B.S.: Horses...
...He would prefer to be understood by a hint...
...He was devoted, too, to his wife, Eugenia Borisovna, who came to Paris in 1925, resolved to remain there, and to his little daughter, Natalie, born in Paris in 1929...
...with no allusions, of course, to what was going on in political and literary circles...
...Inevitably lacking in my notes are the play of facial expressions, the changes of voice, the eloquent glance, the inimitable accent, all of which I see and hear again as I reread my notes but which cannot be conveyed...
...Only the Western democracies, and the Little Entente, were, by definition, the enemies of "the Homeland of Socialism...
...It wasn't easy...
...But again a propos of Budyonny's aggressive denigration of Babel, the latter says to me, with a broad smile, "I've had some unexpected defenders—Kalinin, and Manuilsky, for example...
...321 Stalin began in 1937...
...Thirty years after this conversation, an article, entitled "The Death of Alliluyeva" (Stalin's wife) in Na Rubeje (no...
...Babel contemplates his small daughter with intense curiosity: she astonishes and amuses him extremely...
...I mention Tukhachevsky, who has recently been promoted.3 BABEL: He was promoted despite the stubborn opposition of Klim [Klementi Voroshilov...
...I listen avidly to Babel, for I know that he is very well informed about Army matters because Army leaders, except for Budyonny, think highly of him and invite him every year to their big maneuvers.] B.S.: Blucher...
...At this first congress, the antiphrastic term "Socialist Realism" was ruled obligatory...
...What about the novel on collectivization, Belaya Krinitsa, mentioned by Leo Labedz in Survey...
...He left Moscow to spend three months in the Caucasus...
...You see with what skill Babel, who was morally obliged to voice in public a wish for 329 the New Year, made the best of it without refusing to reply and while skirting any mention of the present...
...2, p. 75, London, 1977...
...BABEL (his glance full of malice): Of course...
...The early Communist government followed that advice, although its leaders had never heard of it...
...Germain-des-Pres, to have at first-hand some word from her husband...
...She was mistaken...
...He's even worn out by the growing burdens he takes upon himself...
...At the time, Stalinist despotism had not yet reached its paroxysm...
...For example, in an interview granted a Polish paper in 1930, he evoked an imaginary personage "greater than Lenin...
...you see...
...You refuse to drink...
...It was there that on May 15, 1939, Babel was arrested by the GPU and disappeard forever...
...In later years and in the light of data received after the war, I had to revise my views and affirm Stalin's personal, immediate guilt in these tragedies...
...8 "Letters to Alexander Kussikov" by Sergei Esenin appeared in Contrat Social (Paris, Dec...
...To belong to the Cheka, however, could imply various things...
...BABEL: He is rather discredited by the Manchurian campaign...
...Babel shakes his had understandingly...
...Much later, we learned what had happened...
...This digression reflects Babel's lively curiosity about new phenomena in Soviet Russia that are related to the brutal execution of the Five Year Plans...
...But on December 18, 1954, in great secret, Babel had been "rehabilitated" by his assassins in four curt lines that gave no explanation whatever but merely indicated that he had been convicted (of what...
...Since one can't write about people anymore, I am writing about horses...
...To this end, they suggested some well-known female personalities, heightening thereby the incongruity of it all since what added the fillip to the anecdote was Artiukhina's physique...
...We then go out for a stroll...
...I have become a past master in the art...
...I no longer know who told me that Stalin left the funeral procession en route and returned home...
...And the novelist Boris Pilnyak was able to travel as far as America and Japan...
...Thus he responded favorably to Mikhail Bulgakov's request for permission to produce a play by that gifted author...
...The liar Ehrenburg said that Babel was the victim of a "denunciation...
...Not a word about friends who were disappearing as if through a trap door...
...The skeptical Babel saw no use in butting against an oak like a bull calf, as the Russian saying goes—the title, much later, of a very important book by Solzhenitsyn...
...On February 25, 1956, Khrushchev delivered the secret report in which he began to unveil a tiny part of the crimes committed under Stalin...
...Their sui generis Marxism, which would have made Marx snicker, has given way to vodka and despair.] I Khrushchev Remembers(Boston: Little, Brown, 1970...
...However, at the Twenty-second Party Congress, it was revealed that the death of the marshals and generals (Tukhachevsky, Putna, Yakir, etc...
...In 1924 and 1928, when Budyonny indulged publicly in hostile, vulgar comments about Red Cavalry and its author, Gorky had come warmly to Babel's defense in the press, as had Voroshilov in military circles...
...For the general public, the word "Cheka" is associated with the Red terror, and it makes people think of the cellars of the Lubyanka, where condemned prisoners received a bullet in the neck...
...Babel translated for my benefit: "He shat everywhere and he left...
...And he pointed to some ten bound volumes in his library...
...Tuesday, October 18, 1932 To start off, knowing Babel's connections with Gorky, Voroshilov, and other relatively well-informed big wheels, I questioned him about Stalin, of course...
...a civil servant...
...Budyonny," Babel says, "is always on the side of the strongest...
...This deprivation is very great...
...He was granted a dacha in Peredelkino, the writers' village, where he was a neighbor of Pasternak...
...The couple experienced no difficulties of any kind whatever—about lodging, about food—in the city or in the country...
...He does not like to be too precise in his orders...
...You know the kind of tests he puts people to: he invites someone and makes him drink a whole bottle of vodka or Caucasian brandy...
...BABEL: His dismissal was cause for widespread satisfaction...
...Some character...
...Babel did write brief, sybilline letters from time to time to reassure his family...
...but who were holders of a payok, which is to say, of the chance for survival...
...A silence of death fell over Babel, over his name, his memory, his works...
...It was at the time a kind of new, inflated ministry that recruited all sorts of people of undefined occupations to perform all sorts of auxiliary tasks...
...You-are-a-fraidtotalk...
...Over the years, an irresistible admiration grows before the truth and beauty of these books...
...He said, for example: "I have so much respect for the reader that I am dumb...
...because...
...Even Zhenye Babel did not want to believe it, and she explained this "confession" as a kind of hoax...
...In case of war, one counts on the regimental commanders...
...To imitate Stalin, Babel tries to assume an ugly, terrifying manner...
...Zhenye was very intelligent, and courageous too...
...He's now building another one, top secret, in the Far East, in the taiga...
...As Napoleon said to Savary, who succeeded Fouche as head of his political police: "Treat literary men well...
...BABEL: Yagoda...
...B.S...
...This explains their excellent relations...
...I have heard him say this more than once...
...he speaks forcefully almost shouting.] Stalin: "Drink...
...Babel tells me about a Dumienko episode, a person whom Trotsky proposed to have shot...
...And in her book Lonely Years, their daughter reports that Zhenye called this "pure fabrication" on her husband's part, for he was given to the mystifying paradox...
...about Babel's literary colleagues...
...In line with Stalinist law, not one word anywhere...
...B.S.: And Preobrazhensky...
...Babel, sprawled out in an armchair, is resting...
...They are about the same age...
...For two weeks, he had Averbach, and Bezymenskytutti quanti—come to his rooms, and he made them talk...
...What...
...This ferocious joke was invented by a clever opposition...
...Later, it was learned that the version current among informed circles in Moscow was that the murder was analogous to the one Budyonny had committed...
...So, too, he granted a passport to Eugene Zamiatin, who was to live permanently in France...
...You still refuse to drink...
...This republication was sullied by a preface by Ehrenburg...
...No one knows whether his "literary heritage" survives in a KGB file— if it does, perhaps our grandnephews and grandnieces will read it some day—or whether the GPU committed the manuscripts to the flames during the 1940 war...
...But this sense of the word has to do with only a very limited part of the functions of the organization, the full name of which, let us remember, was Extraordinary Pan-Russian Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage—sabotage here including smuggling...
...And that "if I were alone, if it were not for my sisters, I would send the whole business packing and take off for Africa or some other place...
...His knowledge of contemporary affairs is varied and vast...
...In Babel: Recollections of His Contemporaries, which appeared in Moscow in 1972, there is a photograph of Pirojkova: she is pretty, and looks modest and likable...
...Yet in Antonina Pirojkova's Recollections there is no hint of any such thing...
...My book on Stalin was finished by then, and I no longer thought to take detailed notes as in 1932...
...I consoled her as best I could, saying what one can say in such a situation: that Babel knew better than to expect her to return to Russia, especially not with a small daughter who should be brought up in the best possible 326 circumstances...
...Babel's singular "factory" may refer to several plants forming a single unit, the Metalurgicheski Gorodok, or Metallurgical Town...
...He goes often...
...BABEL: Yes, killed her...
...There seemed to be a discernible touch of both admiration and astonishment in Babel's remarks, such as one finds in some of his stories in Red Cavalry.] Friday, October 21, 1932 All Communist propaganda, both domestic and worldwide, used to evoke the danger of an imperialist war posed by France, England, and their allies...
...My friend Preobrazhensky, the incarnation of the Sovietized Marxist, drinks...
...Late in 1935 (the exact time is not known), they began to live together...
...BABEL: About 10,000 Trotskyites have been deported or imprisoned...
...For I know his invariable reply to such well-meant suggestions: "I am a Russian writer, if I were not living in the Russian people I would stop being a writer, I would be like a fish out of water...
...But I also greatly enjoyed his comments about Paris, about France...
...For six years in a row, Mayakovsky made his meteoric appearances in France, and Sergei Esenin traveled through the country with Isadora Duncan, en route to America...
...In Odessa, on the wall of the house Babel had lived in-17 Lenin Street, formerly Reschelevskaya Street—a commemorative plaque has been installed...
...In that period, called by Lenin post factum "war communism"—a period of famine and suffering —the key word for most mortals in the city was the word payok (ration allowance...
...B.S.: Budyonny killed his wife...
...He spent some time in Italy, staying with Gorky, then in Paris and Brussels with his family, and he returned to Moscow in September...
...BABEL: This Guguel is a typical Soviet construction engineer...
...its pseudo-members and judges, who were named in the press, were shot in their turn...
...It is Roy Medvedev's merit to have sketched an initial but horrifying necrology...
...Babel made some ironic comment about the fate of these texts if he were to risk proposing them for publication...
...8 We know about the fate of Pilnyak, Mandelstam, and many others...
...It is almost impossible to obtain them...
...Decision of the Politburo: to dismiss him from said College and Control Commission, and to recommend his expulsion from the party...
...You know, Stalin doesn't care for spotless life stories...
...Kirov's assassination in 1934 was followed by countless arrests and deportations and frightful reprisals...
...BABEL: They're not ready...
...B.S.: You mentioned Kaganovich a moment ago...
...Trans...
...This way, he can always take it out on subordinates who are guilty of having skewed the line, and he keeps the option of ratifying or disclaiming what has been done...
...In this way, he evades responsibility...
...Both women had been living in Brussels—his mother since 1924, his sister since 1926...
...Budyonny related how they had had an argument because she was indignant about Trotsky's arrest...
...Zhenye Babel made an appointment with him in St...
...BABEL: Yes...
...In occupied France, during 1940-41, the Gestapo and the GPU joined in a touch319 ing collaboration...
...What happened there...
...BABEL: You are wrong...
...Averbach, nephew of the Chekist chief Yagoda and secretary of the RAPP, was one of the worst persecutors of gifted writers...
...This article is reprinted, in translation and somewhat abbreviated, from the French journal Contrepoini, Summer 1979, with the author's and the publisher's permission...
...In the memoirs Khrushchev published 40 years later,' he fully confirms what Babel told me about Stalin's method of leading his guests on to talk unrestrainedly by making them drunk....] BABEL: Stalin loves the Moscow Arts Theater and the Ballet...
...At night he talks with his wife, with Stalin...
...Especially in the Chelyabinsk factory...
...That, as "rehabilitation" and, as funeral oration, is all...
...This is not my opinion, for I know this slippery rascal too well...
...Talk to me about Gorky...
...We used to talk, above all, about Soviet literature and politics...
...With the GPU...
...I am not one of those who advises Babel to remain in France...
...I did not know the meaning of the first of these Russian words, which did not appear in my grammar or dictionary...
...BABEL: Stalin wants people to exceed what he says he wants...
...Babel's tone strongly underscores these words.] In the event of war or a crisis, the ex-Trotskyites would call for his return...
...Babel was working, especially for the films (he was writing scenarios...
...Babel was indebted to Gorky, for Gorky had supported his literary beginnings and given him helpful advice...
...He is sober, but he likes to get his guests drunk to see how they handle hard liquor and to make them talk in that state...
...He thinks of everything....] B.S.: In your opinion, who would write the best book about Stalin...
...And Gorky's death was followed by many others: "Look for whom the crime profits...
...It was natural, then, to turn the conversation to the eventuality of such a war, and to the Red Army and its leaders...
...Some allusion to the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, I no longer know in what context, provokes the following comment.] BABEL: The Narkomindiel personnel merely carries out the Politburo's instructions...
...Evoking Soviet Russia, the poet says that he has "absolutely no wish to return there...
...And again I must remind the reader that these remarks were exchanged in 1932.] Sunday, October 23, 1932 Once again, we talk about Stalin...
...Zhenye left this boor and came to my home (I lived nearby) in tears, to seek comfort...
...Babel's first words about Klim displeased me, but I report what he said...
...Alexander Weissberg, physician and the author of The Accused, visited Babel in Moscow in 1932...
...So Babel had founded a new family, which, given the circumstances, was not extraordinary...
...a euphemism so as not to say a domestic...
...B.S.: In Bukharin's famous conversation with Kamenev [see Dissent, Winter 1979], which the Trotskyites reported in 1929, Bukharin says that Stalin is lazy...
...I can't...
...The grisly vision made an impression on me, too, and for a moment we were silent, then both broke into long, nervous laughter that made us feel better....] The summer of 1935 is very warm...
...Thus, the inevitable Ehrenburg (again), who for once was no doubt speaking the truth, revealed that Babel worked for a long time on a novel entitled "Kolya Topuz," the name of the protagonist, an ex-burglar made wiser by manual labor (Literaturnoye Nasledstvo, no...
...He reserves the possibility of disowning a clumsy or even an irreproachable subordinate in the event of failure...
...Then, by way of throwing more light on "the genial secretary," Babel tells me about the case of an important official, a member of the College of Narkomnats (Commissariat of Nationalities), culpable of I no longer know what...
...This is a great lack...
...Litvinov, Krestinsky and company don't count...
...He has a direct telephone line to Moscow...
...Later, Annenkov recalls the memory of Vladimir Pyast, the poet who "hung himself with his suspenders...
...Babel owed it to himself, owed it to the GPU, to appear on the platform at the congress...
...And Stalin's got him with some messy trouble...
...She had her responsibilities toward Natasha, who was seven years old at the time...
...The official version attributed her death to "appendicitis," but no one believed it, knowing that all information from Stalinist sources was untrue...
...Once again we had time to talk together about our mutual concerns...
...BABEL: A hard worker...
...And subsequently, on the basis of accumulating clues and testimony, it was no longer a matter of doubt that Stalin had killed his wife, as Budyonny had killed his, on the heels of an argument...
...BABEL: He has built a strategic railroad in Turkestan...
...The total number of all the deportees must be around 3 million...
...We know that the collectivization of agriculture has been carried out with unparalleled brutality and that its victims must be counted in the millions...
...also, regarding Mayakovsky, Paris, el pormes divers: Mayakovski inconnu, by Georges Annenkov (Paris, 1958...
...The mothers attempt to quiet them, but the little girls pay no head...
...that his letters were written in a tone of serenity so as not to worry his nearest and dearest, whom he loved, albeit with no illusion about his chances of seeing them again because he knew he was no longer able to leave Russia and no one could foresee the end of the present nightmare...
...Weissberg told me later that he had asked the writer, "Why aren't you writing anymore...
...BABEL: He accused her of Trotskyism...
...BABEL: Estimable...
...At home, these things happen...
...At that point, something quite out of the ordinary happened: some writers of repute who were already in Paris sent telegrams to Moscow calling for Babel's participation...
...it's...
...The Stalinist scribbler Konstantin Simonov had the cynicism to make it known that Babel was a Japanese spy (only), and that he expiated his misdeeds in a camp...
...It spread abroad, and some American "Sovietologists" took it seriously, actually believing that Stalin really wanted to enshrine another Leninian widow...
...And so he was not appointed to the Soviet delegation sent to Paris in 1935 to "the Congress of Writers for the Defense of Peace and Culture...
...In the land of the Soviets one does not trifle with one's autobiography, which is gone over with a fine-tooth-comb by professional censors...
...And my friend Serebriakov, a former worker from the Urals, party secretary before Stalin—he also drinks...
...naively]: Why...
...If it goes on, I'll name Artiukhina the widow of Lenin...
...This was Soviet legality and justice...
...In Nice, the painter met the poet, who said to him: "I've stopped being a poet—" and broke off, sobbing...
...Thus Babel's name could have appeared on a list presented to Stalin by Beria, the successor of Yezhov...
...He goes for whole days seeing no one...
...By way of illustrating the personality of the monster, Babel relates a Soviet "anecdote" that is repeated endlessly to the rueful delight of Muscovites...
...on a list of literary people, he crossed out one name, that of Lili Brik, saying: "Let's not touch the wife of Mayakovsky" (from an article by Roy Medvedev, in Twentieth Century, no...
...Stalin calls him in, spells out his transgressions, takes back from him, one by one, his membership cards in the abovenamed organizations, and brusquely sends him packing...
...was revealed: March 17, 1941...
...Her inner strength helped her overcome this trial...
...In any event, I can attest that he never fired a bullet into any neck...
...He's lost his partisan mentality...
...Now he's afraid of running into trouble...
...70, p. 40, Moscow, 1963...
...5, Paris, September 1952) fully confirmed what Babel had told me...
...In the course of three conversations in 1932, however, I felt I should keep some record of his remarks...
...BABEL: (Hesitating, as if reaching for and weighing his words): Ah, well...
...In 1932, the new type of Soviet construction engineer was something unusual...
...Babel had become friends, in 1932, with a cultivated young woman, Antonina Nicolayevna Pirojkova, an engineer by profession...
...He professed that only the dead do not talk and can no longer offend him...
...He thinks...
...And many others...
...He gives orders...
...B.S.: Do you think that at home there are new literary works of merit that the political situation prevents from being published...
...Stalin, furious: "Drink...
...This happy state of affairs lasted for a little while...
...under a regime of spiritual terrorism, silence is the equivalent of confession...
...II Babel was able to return "to Europe" in 1933...
...Also, he's ill...
...For Babel, the name "Makhno" means intrepid ardor, a combative temperament...
...BABEL: When they arrest an intellectual I This appears in Lionel Trilling's Introduction to Babel's Collected Stories...
...BABEL: War...
...B.S...
...This person, he said, founded an "International of oppressed people...
...Two outstanding leaders: Putna, Fedko...
...It is clear that the GPU made a clean sweep of all these works...
...Sergei Esenin's suicide in 1925 was followed by that of Mayakovsky, who took his life in 1930, both men overcome by disgust and despair...
...This Gedali calls to all good people: "Good people unite...
...Summer, 1935 Isaac Babel arrived just as the sessions opened...
...In his absence, Kaganovich is the khozyain [boss...
...In a word, the reasons for Babel's absence from the 1935 congress were not understood in France...
...Are you writing for the better days ahead...
...B.S.: Have you any idea of the size of the political repression...
...Cancer, probably...
...it was offered in short sentences and in a phlegmatic tone of voice, with my observations inserted in-between, in brackets...
...What, you don't want to drink...
...And a babnik [womanizer...
...of Nicholas Gumiliov, Sergei Tretiakov, Adrian Protrovsky, Boris Pilnyak, Bruno Yasensky, who "were shot...
...And a few years later, via listings in encyclopedias, the date of his death (what kind of death...
...6 After Souvarine has also inquired about others they both knew...
...7 This did not dissipate the mistrust that weighed on him, however, for people did not know what he truly thought...
...Lenin advised Gorky to go and "have himself treated in Europe," wishing thereby to be rid of the writer's humanitarian importunings...
...Then he concluded: nothing to be done with these people...
...My question remains unanswered...
...Now there are maybe 1,500 or 2,000 left...
...In 1927-28, he lived for almost a year in "the West...
...But what about Babel's other writings that were confiscated by Stalin's GPU, and preserved (or incinerated...
...In 1937, they had a child, a daughter, Lidya, whom Babel acknowledged as his...
...A heavy drinker...
...We speak of Stalin—for a change...
...However, I scribbled a few points of reference that allow me to round out the preceding account...
...and Velemir Khlebnikov, who "dies of hunger and without lodging...
...Stalin sometimes crossed out this or that name...
...BABEL: Gorky...
...In 1935, during Babel's last stay in France, I again jotted down a few notes...
...And as he had caused the death of Mdivani and Enukidze, the companions of his youth, and of his close comrade Ordjonikidze, another "suicide...
...BABEL: Very popular, even among the peasants...
...And so it happened, too, that I struck up a friendship with Babel...
...BABEL: He's short of men...
...The Union had been officially created by the government when Stalin suppressed the RAPP with one stroke of the pen...
...324 and put him in jail, they given him paper and pencil and tell him, Write...
...He is bored with his usual entourage...
...I try to hide my apprehension, my inner emotion at the idea that, this time, Babel will surely be leaving forever...
...BABEL: No longer exists, He's subdued...
...Always because, as a Russian writer, he could not live apart from the Russian people except at the cost of being like a fish out of water...
...it was associated with the death of Budyonny's wife in November 1927, which occurred shortly after Trotsky was arrested...
...He receives in his box, summons members of the Politburo there...
...He holds the right of life and death over the workers...
...Nobody cavilled...
...I could not abide Voroshilov, whose abject role in the assassination of Tukhachevsky and his entire family and in the massacre of thousands of officers in 1937 proved that I was not wrong.] B.S.: What's being said about a war...
...320 B.S.: The suppression of the RAPP 2—I suppose it is Gorky who has used his influence to bring that about...
...Born wily, he got out of his dilemma in virtuoso style, delivering a well-turned speech that committed him to nothing and offered nothing for his perplexed and disappointed fellow-members to seize upon...
...322 mouthed, so as to avoid giving any grounds for post-factum criticism, and to dominate his associates better by making people worry about what he is really thinking, about his true intentions...
...He invites several comrades, he pours them drinks, fills a big glass with vodka or Caucasian brandy, and offers it—for example, to Averbach—saying, "Drink...
...he was executed shortly after this, like his uncle, and like the majority of the pseudo-proletarian hacks.] B.S.: The papers reported recently that Yaroslavasky has fallen into disgrace...
...that if he had entered into a liaison it was in the nature of things here below but clearly in no way altered his faithful feelings for his family, which had luckily found refuge in civilized countries...
...Suddenly, Tania and Natasha, as if propelled by a spring, take off, yelping as they run...
...1968), in Russian and French...
...In the matter of silence...
...Babel has pronounced the word piett in a tone that leaves no room for hope...
...B.S.: And Lunacharsky...
...Like Alexander Blok, Sergei Esenin, Andre Biely, and many others, he had welcomed the "October Revolution" with great hope...
...It was becoming clear that Stalin was resolved to "liquidate" the party of Lenin in blood...
...never by Germany...
...B.S...
...BABEL: Yes...
...Babel never belonged to the Party Triumphant, but comported himself as a Soviet subject as loyal as possible...
...In those days I had the memory of an elephant...
...In what circumstances was Babel judged guilty...
...In November 1932, the despot's wife, Nadiejda Alliluyeva, had "committed suicide...
...He was interested particularly in anomalies, in bizarre facts...
...I go to the Babels' house in Plessis-Robinson...
...They've come for a moment's respite...
...Also, the censor had passed that way, witness the suppression of passages that mention Trotsky and of "indecent" phrases...
...it now is attributed to Zhdanov, but he was merely Stalin's servile tool...
...His memory is prodigious...
...Trans...
...and the people shout: "Greetings to you, Gedali, creator of the Fourth International...
...Babel was not free to abstain from participation in the congress, since he was already suspected of "wrong thinking...
...The NEP has been finished and done with since 1930...
...But after the purely formal "rehabilitation— which is to say, impurely formal—in 1957 one witnessed a literary pseudo-rehabilitation in 327 the form of a re-issue of Red Cavalry, augmented by the Odessa Tales, a few short stories, and two play scripts (Selected Works, Moscow, 1957...
...But then, I no longer know why nor remember by what transition, Babel begins to talk about a certain Guguel, a stranger to politics and literature whose name I did not even know.] 2 The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, dissolved in 1932...
...BABEL: He drinks...
...his attentive, amused observer's eye detected things that a seasoned old Parisian like me no longer noticed but that sparked droll, pertinent ideas in him...
...I'm writing a book about horses...
...He works hard...
...He makes use of the ones he can get something out of...
...Do you know what people were whispering when Stalin went off, leaving the country's affairs, the economy especially, in a lamentable state...
...Babel never missed an opportunity to visit his family and spend time in their company...
...With the publication of Red Cavalry in French in 1928, Babel's reputation in France was made—not with the general public, but in intellectual circles concerned with questions of socialism...
...A new edition of the Selected Works, enlarged by an "Autobiography," some articles, recollections, and letters, appeared in 1966...
...Suddenly, Tatiana, the Parains' daughter, and Natalie, the Babels' daughter, burst upon the scene, laughing, breathless, redfaced, noisy...
...BABEL: No more...
...In Pirojkova's Recollections, which chronicle their life together over seven years, everything is for the best...
...of Marina Tsvetiayeva and Andre Sobol, who "committed suicide...
...Eugenia Borisovna (Zhenye to her friends) lived with her daughter in a small house on the rue de l'Etang-s'il-pleut...
...BABEL: Stalin isolates himself...
...Shaposhnikov...
...and so forth...
...Trans...
...Our conversation ends...
...Averbach is disconcerted, and stammers, "But Comrade Stalin...
...The following year, in August, the Union of Soviet Writers held its first congress...
...about military leaders whom he knew, not even General Yakir...
...What about those unpublished writings...
...He continued to write reassuring letters filled with apparent optimism about the state of Soviet affairs...
...There can be no doubt: Stalin will stop at nothing...
...He 325 likes to call her "Makhno," which was the name of the Ukrainian anarchist from GulaiPolie who had made so much trouble for Denikin's White and Trotsky's Red Russians...
...And here another ray of sinister light is projected on the procedure: Yezhov would submit to Stalin a list of the important persons to be arrested...
...1894-1941...
...But they were typed manuscripts...
...He's a scientific military man...
...For this is 1935, all our information from Moscow is disturbing, and we have no hope...
...Obviously, this was for the benefit of the censor, but it also served the needs of his own line of conduct...
...Recently, he's decided to be close4 A major metallurgical and industrial center...
...And so he was happy to find a captivating conversationalist in Gorky...
...Babel pronounced the word ubil (killed) with a detached air, looking at me indulgently, as if to say: That surprises you...
...And, in extremis, Babel obtained an exit visa for the last time...
...In some cases, the official information attributes the sentences to this or that judicial, military, or civil agency...
...I suspect that Babel belonged to this last category...
...That's all...
...B.S.: And in that eventuality, who would be slated to assume supreme command...
...on January 26, 1940...
...And so on...
...I don't drink anything alcoholic...
...In my book about Stalin, which was finished in 1935, on the strength of what information was then available I conceded the suicide of Alliluyeva, the natural death of Gorky, and the assassination of Kirov by a fanatic—which goes to prove that I was not trying to blacken the picture...
...had been decided by the Politburo...
...The alleged tribunal authorized to have functioned never existed...
...they ransacked my home, my library, and my files...
...I forget how the name of Budyonny comes up again...
...These conditions could not last for long, because the countless arrests that followed were to pack the prisons with unfortunates unable to move, ergo unable to write.] B.S.: And you...
...not the slightest allusion to the millions of victims of the famine...
...Like Pyatakov...
...In 1931, three more stories had been published in a little magazine (Les Humbles, no...
...For then Stalin fancied himself as a patron of literature and the arts...
...Finally, they found Rosa Kaganovich for him...
...As he had ordered the murder of Kirov, his "best friend," to use the words of his daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva...
...in them, curiously, he kept begging his wife to return to Russia, knowing that she would do nothing of the sort...
...At that time a man like him could neither express himself freely nor had he the right to be silent...
...S Both Semashko and Lunacharsky were People's Commissars...
...The partisans of Trotsky—and not only they— are mercilessly hunted down...
...you understand...
...Babel describes Stalin after his domestic drama as more solitary, gloomy, and closed-off than ever , and he adds—] BABEL: A woman had to be got for him...
...Translated from the French by ADRIENNE FouLKE 330...
...Nasral i uiekhal...
...328 To have or not to have a payok, that was the whole question...
...And Babel looks at me with a sarcastic air, as much as to say, How about that...
...Babel tells me that at the time of Alliluyeva's funeral, thousands of Chekists were posted along the streets leading from the Kremlin to the cemetery of the Monastery of the Virgins, and on the roofs of all the houses, and that all the windows were ordered shut...
...Like the hero of a famous comedy, he hastened to laugh or to smile at everything for fear of being forced to weep...
...the working conditions were pitiless, and caused the death of many workers, but not one word about these unfortunate human beings...
...Less than five months after this wish concerning Tolstoy, he was condemned to lasting silence...
...his face is entirely relaxed...
...Putna, a former Trotskyite, was Soviet military attache in London before he perished, along with thousands of high-ranking officers, in the purge of Red Army cadres that 3 To Marshal of the Soviet Union...
...BABEL: Likewise...
...BABEL: A remarkable personality in various respects...
...BABEL: Stalin then had enough of him...
Vol. 28 • July 1981 • No. 3
