The Dream of Social Justice and Bad Moral Luck: Eight Jewish Lives under Stalin 9798887192710

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THE DREAM OF SOCIAL JUSTICE AND BAD MORAL LUCK EIGHT JEWISH LIVES UNDER STALIN

Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and Their Legacy Series Editor Maxim D. Shrayer (Boston College) Editorial Board Karel Berkhoff (NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies) Jeremy Hicks (Queen Mary University of London) Brian Horowitz (Tulane University) Luba Jurgenson (Universite Paris IV—Sorbonne) Roman Katsman (Bar-Ilan University) Dov-Ber Kerler (Indiana University) Vladimir Khazan (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Alice Nakhimovsky (Colgate University) Antony Polonsky (Brandeis University) Jonathan D. Sarna (Brandeis University) David Shneer (University of Colorado at Boulder) (deceased) Anna Shternshis (University of Toronto) Leona Toker (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Mark Tolts (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

THE DREAM OF SOCIAL JUSTICE AND BAD MORAL LUCK EIGHT JEWISH LIVES Alice Nakhimovsky

UNDER STALIN

BOSTON 2023

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nakhimovsky, Alice S., author. Title: The dream of social justice and bad moral luck : eight Jewish lives under Stalin / Alice Nakhimovsky. Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2023. | Series: Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and their legacy | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2023018343 (print) | LCCN 2023018344 (ebook) | ISBN 9798887192703 (hardback) | ISBN 9798887192710 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9798887192727 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Jews--Soviet Union--Interviews. | Jews--Soviet Union-History. | Jews--Persecutions--Soviet Union. | Jews, Russian--Soviet Union--Social conditions. | Vsesoi︠u︡znai︠a︡ kommunisticheskai︠a︡ partii︠a︡ (bolʹshevikov) (1925-1952) | Stalin, Joseph, 1878-1953. | Soviet Union-History--1917-1936. | Soviet Union--History--1925-1953. Classification: LCC DS134.85 .N35 2023 (print) | LCC DS134.85 (ebook) | DDC 947/.004924--dc23/eng/20230520 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023018343 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023018344 Сopyright © 2023, Academic Studies Press All rights reserved. ISBN 9798887192703 (hardback) ISBN 9798887192710 (adobe pdf) ISBN 9798887192727 (epub) Cover design by Ivan Grave. On the cover: El Lissitzky, “The Cat Came and Devoured the Kid,” Had Gadya Suite (Tale of a Goat), 1919, lithograph on paper; “Spies and murderers masquerading as doctors-professors,” Pravda, 13 January 1953. Book design by Kryon Publishing Services. Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

In memory of Slava Levina, David Nakhimovsky, and Dr. Hanna Bruskin, whose lives passed under this shadow

Contents A Note on Transcription

viii

Preface01 Introduction: The Soviet-Jewish Historical Calendar and Moral Decision-Making, 1890 to 1953

03

1. Origins

13

Doba-Mera Medvedeva: A Working Girl Seeks a Future

14

Leyb Kvitko: Shtetl, Poetry, Violence

20

Solomon Lozovsky: Blacksmith, Autodidact, Orator

26

2. Communist Romance and Border Crossings, 1917 through the 1930s: Part I

35

Leyb Kvitko: Transformations

36

Solomon Lozovsky: Fighter, Compromiser, Fiction Writer

44

Lina Shtern: A Career in Science and a Fateful Choice

50

Doba-Mera Medvedeva: Two Borders, Poor Choices

53

3. Communist Romance and Border Crossings, 1917 through the 1930s: Part II

57

Nadezhda and Alexander Ulanovsky: Anarchism to Espionage

58

Mary Leder: Santa Monica, Birobidzhan, Moscow

71

Lilianna Lungina: A German Child, a French Child, a Soviet Adolescent79 4. Negotiating the Late 1930s: Terror and Career

89

Kvitko: Prosperity and Compromise

95

Mary Leder: Close Encounters

99

Nadezhda Ulanovskaya: Communications and Failed Communications

103

Vasily Grossman: Jews vs Bolsheviks, and Jewish Bolsheviks

109

Doba-Mera Medvedeva: Manuscripts Burn

117

5. War: 1941–1945

119

Kvitko: Despair and Faith

123

Shtern: Iconoclasm

129

Leder: Evacuation and Trauma

132

Medvedeva: Evacuation without Privilege, Grief beyond Resentment

135

Grossman: A Personal Quest

136

6. Jews, Scientists, and the Trial of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, 1944–1952

145

Kvitko: “I don’t value my life. I want to leave here with a pure heart”

149

Lozovsky: “I can’t look Academician Shtern in the eyes”

155

Shtern: “I always tell the truth”

162

Grossman: Scientists and Old Bolsheviks

173

7. Jews, Doctors, and Aliens

179

Nadezhda Ulanovskaya: Foreign Connections

182

Mary Leder: Endgame

187

Lilianna Lungina: Reality and Rumor

191

Vasily Grossman: A Novel and a Letter

195

8. What Happened Next

199

Bibliography207 Index215

A Note on Transcription Yiddish transcription is YIVO. But two different systems are used to transliterate Russian. References are Library of Congress. But in the text, for general readability, Cyrillic is transliterated as follows:

Initial E is Ye (Yevsektsia) Ia is Ya (Yakir) Iu is Yu (Yury)

Final ia is ya (Nadya) ii is y (Lozovsky) iia is ia (Yevsektsia) aia is aya (Ulanovskaya)

Stressed e is yo (Ogonyok)

Preface A long time ago—and still, some thirty years after the events described in this book—my mother-in-law, Slava Levina, came on a visit to the United States. She looked around at my parents’ apartment and said—not because she was rude, but because she was overwhelmed: “Look at what you have! And all I have seen is revolution and war.” The poignancy of her observation came from a historical truth: they were the same people, with the same roots. My motherin-law’s native language was Yiddish, just like my mother’s. What my parents had—despite the Depression, despite the fact that my father himself had fought in World War II—was luck. The bad moral luck of the title refers to the characters in the book, who bought into an ideology that began in hope and ended with entrapment. The situation of my in-laws, and our family’s—everybody’s—beloved aunt, was different. They were born where they were born; their luck was that they survived. Through it all, they persevered. I have many people to thank, above all my husband, Alexander Nakhimovsky. Irina Paperno and Achsah Guibbory were as generous and astute with the manuscript as they are in real life. Yankl Salant and my friend and past coauthor Roberta Newman checked the Yiddish translations. In St. Petersburg, Anatoly Nakhimovsky and Vera Knorring were indefatigable researchers. Natalia Lozovsky’s generosity opened a door to materials I never would have seen; Ala Zuskin-Perelman provided empathy and perspective, both through her book about her father and through conversations. Anna Shternshis and Sasha Senderovich answered questions and sent materials. Mieka Erley was a perceptive reader, and Elizabeth Dobbs a perceptive early listener. David McCabe always has ideas: I was privileged to be a beneficiary. Columbia’s Harriman Institute (special thanks to Xan Faber) hosted me as a visiting fellow for two years. The preparation and publication of the book were supported by the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. Colgate is uncommonly supportive of research. I am grateful to Dominika Kotter, head to Colgate’s Research Council, and to my colleagues in Jewish studies and Russian and Eurasian studies. Special thanks to Dean and Provost Lesleigh Cushing, astute listener and bringer of food in a time of Covid, and to Colgate’s president, Brian Casey, for steering the institution, accepting dissent, and above all, for being a reader.

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At Academic Studies Press, Maxim Shrayer, Alessandra Anzani, and Ekaterina Yanduganova were outstanding. The reviewers, they know who they are, corrected numerous errors (the remainder are my fault). Thanks to my family: John Stone and Barbara Schaefer, and all of the Stones, Nakhimovskys, Rokhinsons, Lamsters, and Ramalingams. Isaac, Chitra, and Sharon are incomparable companions in addition to being awesomely accomplished, courageous, and wise. To Maya, Ashwin, Dina, and Manny: this is for you, sooner and later. Read and don’t repeat.

Introduction: The Soviet-Jewish Historical Calendar and Moral DecisionMaking, 1890 to 1953 The Jewish lives at the center of this book unfolded in the romance of the Russian Revolution and ended in serial catastrophe. Sometimes the catastrophes left no way out for anybody but, more often than you would think, people could make decisions. The book looks at eight individuals who bought into the revolutionary dream and asks what they decided when things went bad. Under what circumstances did they bow to political pressures antithetical to the ideas they professed, and under what circumstances did they resist, even heroically? Political cowardice is a constant theme, but so, remarkably, is moral resistance that had no point beyond an individual’s conscience. The social justice promised by the Russian Revolution had a Jewish angle: it would bring an end to antisemitism. Religion, suppressed by the state, was no longer a factor. Jews who wanted no part of being Jewish—the majority of our subjects, at the outset—could pursue their Soviet lives. But those who still identified had a number of new options. They could, in the early postrevolutionary years, self-transform as Jewish farmers in Birobidzhan, the newly founded Yiddish-speaking Zion on the Chinese border. They could take part in the Soviet-Yiddish culture that flourished for some time, though with ever expanding restrictions. Then came the catastrophes: the Terror (a general Soviet phenomenon); the war (general Soviet); the Holocaust, and the crackdown on Jews in science, medicine, education, and the arts that began during the war years but reached a crescendo right before Stalin’s death in 1953. Even Jews who saw the Soviet state as liberating them from being Jewish could be targeted as Jews, if not by Nazis then—if for the most part less lethally—by their own Soviet government. Like other Soviet Jews who came of age with them, the subjects of this book saw it all. Some were introspective and some not, but for a variety of

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reasons—their closeness to the center of events in some cases, their experience outside the Soviet Union in others—they reflect on what happened. The eight characters of my book group together or stand alone in various ways. Five are women and three are men. Leyb Kvitko and Vasily Grossman were famous writers; Grossman still is. Solomon Lozovsky was a high-placed government administrator who in a moment of political threat wrote some autobiographical fiction. Lina Shtern was a formidable scientist; Nadezhda Ulanovskaya was a spy. Mary Leder and Lilianna Lungina spent their childhoods outside the Soviet Union before their parents, deluded or entrapped, took them to Birobidzhan (Leder) or Moscow (Lungina). Kvitko, Lozovsky, and DobaMera Medvedeva grew up in the kind of poverty particular to Jewish shtetls. None of them remained there. But while the two men flew high, Medvedeva— the most improbable memoirist of the group—lived the life of most people. All eight were either Party members or lived in harmony with Party directives for many years. When things turned ugly, their paths forward were limited, even in their own minds. Rethinking a belief system is hard for any human being, reflecting our reluctance to walk away from “sunk costs.” But that economic metaphor presumes an environment in which people can sink some new costs in another place. For the subjects of this book, there was no other place. Participating in society, they could not avoid being complicit; every sphere of life was run by the state. And there was another problem related to the belief system that they had joined when they were young. The Soviet language of universal justice was always one of binary division, with some groups regarded as “us” and others as “them.” In the revolutionary period, with its Marxist focus on class, Jews could see themselves, largely, as “us,” deserving of just treatment in the new social order. In the postwar period, with its focus on nationality, their classification abruptly switched. This switch, abundantly evident in newspapers in the postwar years preceding Stalin’s death, was not one that people could fight. It was hard even to confide in others: finding like-minded friends meant taking conversations to dangerous places. Capitulation was always possible—a Jew could agree that all Jews were at fault—though it was not necessarily protective. As with earlier crises like the Terror, some of our subjects self-censored or maintained a red line of their own devising, and a few eventually broke free. A pivotal moment for Kvitko, Lozovsky, and Shtern was the 1952 secret trial of the Jewish Antifascist Committee. Stalin had assembled the Committee at the start of the war to fundraise abroad; after the war, he turned on it. The defendants—initially fifteen of them, including the three who figure here—faced charges of anti-Soviet activity, defined as Jewish

Introduction

nationalism and espionage. They understood that the trial would likely end in their execution. They then faced an existential moment: reframe their lives as they understood them or agree with the prosecution? They could, of course, agree through calculation, trying to save themselves against all odds. That kind of desperate betrayal was such an obvious move, it was amazing that not everybody pursued it. But not everybody did. The fact that our eight subjects left records of their thinking, either written or transcribed from speech during the trial, is unusual. People didn’t speak, even to relatives; if they said something in a letter—rarely—the reference was cryptic. The persistence of that reluctance even past Stalin’s death explains the silence of Lina Shtern, the trial’s sole survivor. At the trial, facing death, she was heroically outspoken. After her return from exile, she unburdened herself, as far as we know, twice. The first occasion was to a fellow research physician and former prisoner (he took notes, which turn out to be quite accurate). The second was to her personal secretary, whose recollections remain unavailable. But Shtern herself committed nothing to paper. Vasily Grossman and Leyb Kvitko are at the other extreme. They definitely left records: they wrote for a living. Kvitko’s Yiddish poetry and Grossman’s Russian prose respond to their time in ways that are both confessional (failures, tragedies, heartbreak) and sometimes prescriptive (a vision of what society should be). Kvitko started out as a modernist, when that style was the political and artistic vanguard. Later, he shifted a lot of energy to children’s verse, which enabled him—not always, though—to concentrate on the miniature dimensions of a child’s world. Grossman evolved differently. A generation younger than Kvitko, he had his roots in socialist realism, which combined a realistic, comprehensible style with a politically mandated worldview. Grossman kept the style but emancipated himself from the worldview. His masterpiece Life and Fate embodies the kind of all-encompassing belief system one might expect of socialist realism. It’s just that by the time Grossman wrote the book, he had discarded what was officially sanctioned for a principled system of his own devising. A touchstone for both men was the Holocaust. They addressed it with uncommon directness—Kvitko in a series of poems in which he carefully exonerated the Soviet Union, Grossman in two searing sections of Life and Fate. Neither work was publishable at the time of writing. But for the purposes of this book, the miracle that the manuscripts survived at all is less important than what is in them. Examining these texts in their political and personal contexts gives us an idea of what mattered to the writers. Poetry and fiction are not memoirs, but they are keys to the thinking of their creators. We can see what

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obsessed them; we can see when they wrote what was expected, and when and how they took liberties. A different window on thinking is trial testimony. The speeches of Kvitko, Shtern, and Lozovsky before the judges and their fellow defendants are breathtakingly direct. Kvitko bares his soul as though, he says, to God—if he believed in God, which he doesn’t. Shtern and Lozovsky say things that could only hinder their defense. For Lozovsky, in addition, we have the set of short stories preserved in a family archive. Lozovsky the writer was hardly in the league of Grossman or Kvitko. But his stories, which celebrate his revolutionary past and imagine a triumphant restoration of justice in the present, are equally a key to his inner world. Our remaining subjects all left memoirs, written or oral. A variety of circumstances freed them from the constraints that kept their fellow Soviets quiet. Nadezhda Ulanovskaya, the former spy, wrote her memoirs after her release from the Gulag. By that point, well into the “vegetarian” times that followed Stalin’s death, nobody much cared. Mary Leder wrote her life story from New York. Lilianna Lungina spoke hers in a blockbuster TV series that aired in liberal 2009, at which point she had already died. As for Doba-Mera Medvedeva, she was simply unknown. She wrote because she was proud of her literacy, and she wanted to tell her story. She wrote in notebooks for her children and grandchildren—and then took out the most incendiary pages and destroyed them. It goes without saying that writing of any kind needs to be examined in the light of what the writer’s purpose was and—especially in the Soviet environment—how the writer shaped his or her story in response to prevailing ideology and political danger. Our characters had multiple motivations for examining their lives, sometimes overlapping. Self-justification and ideological rebranding were part of the mix, but so was the establishment of a historical record and moral rethinking in the face of death. This returns us to the two themes that, in the retrospect possible now, pervade these lives as we will be reading them. One is the desperate oscillation between cowardice and courage. Another is the adoption of belief followed by its retention, modification, or renunciation. These themes are neither original nor, unfortunately, outdated.1 Ideological allegiance and the allied problem of

1

They were examined by some witnesses who are not part of this book, like Mikhail Bulgakov in The Master and Margarita (written 1928–1940, but not publishable until much later) and the Western essayists of the collection The God that Failed, published in 1949. Those books were both conceived under Communism or in response to it.

Introduction

political cowardice is not specifically a problem of Communism. It remains current even in places where the consequences for speaking out are, by comparison, trivial. Beyond the big questions, the lives of our eight subjects reflect important aspects of the Soviet-Jewish experience. Lozovsky, Kvitko, and Medvedeva saw revolution as a triumphant way out of the poverty that defined their childhoods. Lozovsky became a powerful official. Kvitko’s surpassing talent as a Yiddish children’s poet gave him a huge audience in Russian translation. Nothing of the sort transpired for Medvedeva, who loved her children and grandchildren but otherwise saw little in her life but constriction, danger, and disappointment. None of the three had any schooling past early childhood. Kvitko’s lack of education would be a source of anguish for him throughout his life. The same was true for Medvedeva, though it also freed her from ideological constraints—her picture of the shtetl, however clumsy its writing, outdoes Kvitko’s in its complexity. Lozovsky, in contrast to both of them, was a classic autodidact. His Marxist erudition was impeccable, and he knew it. He argued with Lenin. Nadezhda Ulanovskaya and Lina Shtern grew up in bourgeois families but cast their lot with the revolution. Ulanovskaya joined early, as a pistol-wielding teenager. In the 1920s, she was a spy in Shanghai, Hamburg, and New York. The brilliant Lina Shtern chose medicine and biochemistry. Unable, like many Jews, to study in Imperial Russia, she went to Switzerland, where she became the first woman to be named professor at the University of Geneva. Geneva was a hotbed of Russian revolutionaries-in-exile (for a time, Shtern boarded with the family of the Marxist theoretician Georgy Plekhanov). Her Marxist friends and the promise of building science in a just Bolshevik society led her to repatriate. The international adventures of both women came to abrupt ends. Ulanovskaya was sucked into the Gulag on the pretext of associating with foreigners. Shtern was saved from execution for a still unknown reason—perhaps her promises, made in the Lubyanka prison, to work on a cure for cancer. International associations like Shtern’s and Ulanovskaya’s, a feature of Jews generally, are accompanied in these lives by remarkable linguistic and cultural adaptiveness. Lozovsky, fomenting revolution in France, spoke French like a Parisian (or so he says; he was, in any case, not caught). French was Shtern’s preferred language, though she was brought up in a Germanspeaking home and went to a German-language preparatory school before making her career in Geneva. Grossman and his mother, who spent some time in Switzerland when Grossman was a schoolchild, used French as a private language. Kvitko and Medvedeva grew up speaking Yiddish; so did Lozovsky, but he forgot it.

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Another multirooted cosmopolitan was Lungina, whose father was a Soviet trade representative. When the family was in Germany, Lungina was, she says, a little German girl; when her father returned to Moscow and her mother stayed with her in Paris, she was a French adolescent who shared the lives and interests of her fellow students at her lycée. Her mother, like so many Jews, faced a decision of where to go next. It was 1933. America was a possibility, but instead the two returned to Soviet Russia. In a haunting moment in the memoir, Lungina remembers herself in her French overcoat, exiting the train after the final border had been crossed. People in rags were sleeping on the platform floor. This was not the Soviet Union pictured in the postcards sent by her father. But she and her mother were now irrevocably part of it. Lungina’s mother miscalculated badly, though all she sought was to reunite her family. The parents of Mary Leder, Yiddish-speaking American leftists, sought transformation. The destination that drew them was Birobidzhan, the putative Yiddish Zion in a place where Jews were actually rootless. Things did not work out and they left. Leder’s newly acquired Soviet passport meant that she could not follow them, and so she remained in the USSR for thirty years— to be sure, in far more habitable Moscow. She ended up working as a translator under Lozovsky. Her position, fortunately, was far enough below Lozovsky that she was not tried and executed, like two other women who worked in the same office. She also spent a brief stint in spy school, under the tutelage of Ulanovskaya’s husband. Four of our subjects—Ulanovskaya, Shtern, Kvitko, and Lozovsky— were arrested. Kvitko and Lozovsky were executed. Like Leder, Lungina, and Medvedeva, Grossman remained at liberty, but just barely. He had been one rung down on the Jewish Antifascist Committee from Shtern and Kvitko, and two down from Lozovsky, who was not a member but politically and administratively in charge. Grossman ran meetings. The experiences he had as a war correspondent and some personal failures tormented him. He sought redemption and truth through fiction. Grossman’s final, then unpublishable novels Life and Fate and Forever Flowing were meant both as a personal reckoning and a reckoning of an entire generation, both Jewish and not. In these books, Grossman creates characters who behaved the way he himself did, equivocating and succumbing to pressures that were both private and public. He finds them guilty. But on what basis? Is his assessment applicable to others?

Introduction

The philosopher Thomas Nagel makes the point that people can’t be assessed for what is not their fault.2 A person made to work in a Nazi concentration camp is a victim of bad moral luck, forced to make choices that never would have presented themselves in a more ordinary environment. Lungina comes to the same idea, noting that an individual “who in a normal society would never bring evil upon anyone” would become “a true scoundrel in the atmosphere of the early 1950s.” She concludes that “it took heroism to remain a decent person.”3 This book is not a work of moral philosophy, nor does it pass judgment on its characters. Its purpose is to see how this specific set of people weighed their beliefs and their choices. Bad moral luck is a metaphor for the situation that entrapped them. Yet neither for Nagel nor for any of them is that bad luck completely exculpatory. For Nagel, the contradiction between bad moral luck and our perception that we are moral agents is an unresolvable paradox. Grossman, writing some twenty years earlier, leans toward personal agency. In Life and Fate and Forever Flowing, he tries out the idea that circumstances wipe out a person’s ability to act and recoils from it over and over. He applies that idea to himself and, while he is unspecific about the charges—a reader would have to know his life—he declares himself guilty. But he reserves for himself, and therefore anyone, the possibility of change. Nagel makes another point that is fundamental to this book. He says, in effect, that we can’t know when we start out what the effect of our conduct will be. None of our characters, as they joined the Communist Party or worked in accord with it, had in mind anything but the swift realization of social justice. What did they do as that dream turned ugly? What did they think as they acquiesced to some injustices and ignored others while—in many cases—they themselves prospered? What did they do when they themselves became victims? The answers vary. Leder, Ulanovskaya, and Lungina are by turn rueful and self-critical. Of the three, Ulanovskaya played the most prominent role in forwarding Soviet ambitions—she was, after all, a spy—and she has the most bifurcated view: she can congratulate herself on a skillful bit of espionage in one paragraph, and then in the next ask “how could I have done this?” Leder and Lungina had less scope to act, and therefore less to regret. But their outsider status made them perceptive observers. They rarely saw things as normal.

2 3

Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 24–38. Lilianna Lungina and Oleg Dorman, Podstrochnik: Zhizn’ Lilianny Lunginoi, raskazannaia eiu v fil’me Olega Dormana (Moscow: Corpus, 2009), 194.

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The most timid chronicler is Medvedeva: she eviscerates the social hierarchies of the shtetl, but retreats from judgment once that world is disbanded. Grossman, by contrast, devotes the last decade of his life to discarding most of what he lived by earlier. The trial defendants go different ways. Lozovsky and Shtern, who both had experience as fighters for their own cause, use their time at trial to defend themselves. They reclaim their identity as Jews and offer to the Stalinist court the idea—audacious and just slightly veiled—that Stalinism itself was at fault. Just as unprecedented in a Stalinist trial, Lozovsky says to Shtern that “he can’t look her in the eye” because he slandered her. He apologizes. In contrast to Lozovsky and Shtern, Kvitko was obedient. But he was not cynical. A talented man and by all accounts an enormously kind one, he could not think his way out of the beliefs he had embraced so many years earlier. The poet Lev Ozerov wrote this about him: He understood the language of children, Leaves and birds, water and wind. He became a wise man and remained a child. Wisdom doesn’t save the wise man Nor childhood the child.4 The lives examined here are frequently intertwined: only Medvedeva was on her own. But they also run parallel to each other in that the individuals who lived them confront the same crisis points and, though they respond differently, the same set of moral decisions. By virtue of being Jewish, the subjects of this study found themselves on a historical path that differed in important ways from the general Soviet one. Not, of course, always: they shared with the Soviet population writ large a multitude of breaking points, including the 1917 revolutions, the civil war, the Terror of the late 1930s, World War II, and the death of Stalin. But they also had their own historical calendar, a set of events that affected them only. They, and not others, had to make quick and fateful decisions about the Nazi invaders: stay or flee? They had to mourn the Holocaust, not mentionable in public discourse, and keep to themselves the knowledge that Soviet individuals collaborated in it. Jews were by no means not the only group to face crises that were ignored by everyone else. Soviet peasants, the victims of collectivization and famines, 4 Lev Ozerov, “Kvitko,” in Stikhi o evreiskikh poetakh iz kolektsii V. I. Kishinevskogo, ed. Rygor Borodulin, https://www.languages-study.com/yiddish/lider.html.

Introduction

were another, and their calendar of disasters also contains dates specific to them. Awareness of your own disasters does not necessarily make you more empathetic to disasters that hit other people: the collectivization of agriculture, the cause of the famine, was something the Jewish subjects of this book ignored or even, initially, approved of. And the peasant survivors, who had good reason to hate the Soviets, were sometimes collaborators in the “Holocaust by bullets” that took place in the occupied territories where they lived. 5 The Jewish path through Soviet history continued in the postwar years before Stalin’s death, when this study ends. Expecting liberalization, Jews found themselves fired from the military, the sciences, and the arts. Practically all our memoirists give examples of those firings, which loomed over them personally; and practically all reflect Jewish-specific rumors, like the potent one that in the wake of the Doctors’ Plot—Jewish doctors accused of murdering everyone from Politburo members to ordinary Russians—Jews were to be rounded up and deported to Siberia. In the absence of reliable information, people had to give those rumors credence. Sometimes the rumors were correct. In her book about Soviet diaries, Irina Paperno writes about the “irresistible movement of history” that overrode otherwise ordinary lives.6 All of our subjects were ordinary—even the talented writers; even Lozovsky, who rose high in the government. All were overrun by forces they could not combat. Yet the decisions that they made, to acquiesce or to fight, to speak or be silent, still resonate.

*** Some parts of this book reflect work I have done previously and other parts are new. My analysis of Life and Fate was first put forward in my 1992 Jewish Literature and Identity, though it has evolved over many years of teaching and a talk I recorded for the Museum of Tolerance in Moscow. Much of what I say For the situation of Soviet peasants in those years, see Alexander Nakhimovsky, The Language of Russian Peasants in the Twentieth Century: A Linguistic Analysis and Oral History (Boulder, CA, London, and New York: Lexington Books, 2020). The beginning of the 1930s was terrible for peasants, while 1937—for urbanites and Party members, the start of the Terror— was a year of good harvest and some welcome tax breaks (ibid., 146–147 and 165). The phrase “holocaust by bullets” was coined by Patrick Desbois (The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews [New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008]). 6 Irina Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 14. 5

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about Grossman has its origins in conversations with the late Shimon Markish, the literary scholar who was instrumental in getting Grossman’s novel published in the West (and who was, not coincidentally, the son of the Yiddish poet Peretz Markish, one of the victims of the 1952 trial). Ala Zuskin-Perelman, the daughter of Veniamin Zuskin, another victim of the trial, wrote an important book about her father that figures both directly and indirectly.7 My analysis of the 1952 trial was presented in a 2018 article, “Assessing Lives in the Face of Death: the 1952 Trial of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.”8 It is much expanded here. My translation of the notebooks of Doba-Mera Medvedeva was published in 2019.9 I included her in this study as a counterpoint to people who were movers and shakers, and far more erudite than she was. I am indebted to both the new biography of Grossman by Alexandra Popoff (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019) and the older one by the Garrards (New York: Free Press, 1996), as well as to essays on various periods of Kvitko’s life and work by Harriet Murav, David Shneer, Mikhail Krutikov, Gennady Estraikh, and Sabine Koller. Yankl Salant checked my Yiddish and Roberta Newman helped with transcription. Natalia Lozovsky kindly shared materials from the Lozovsky family archive. In St. Petersburg, Anatoly Nakhimovsky and Vera Knorring were invaluable researchers at the Russian National Library. This work was supported by Colgate University, by way of a Senior Faculty Leave; by the Harriman Institute of Columbia University, which hosted me for two years; and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.

7 Alla Zuskina-Perel′man, Puteshestvie Veniamina: Razmyshleniia o zhizni, tvorchestve i sud′be evreiskogo aktera Veniamina Zuskina ( Jerusalem: Gesharim: Mosty kul′tury, 2002). 8 Alice Nakhimovsky, “Assessing Life in the Face of Death: Moral Drama at the Trial of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, 1952,” East European Jewish Affairs 48, no. 2 (2018): 188–209. 9 Michael Beizer and Alice Nakhimovsky, Daughter of the Shtetl: The Diaries of Doba-Mera Medvedeva (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018).

1

Origins The Russian Empire did not want Jews. It acquired them—“swallowed them,” in the phrase of the historian John Klier, along with the Polish territory in which they had lived for several centuries. The Partitions of Poland (1772–1795) were a boon to Russia’s economy and sense of self-worth. The cost was the absorption of a lot of Polish Catholics—a theological problem, as any reader of Dostoevsky can confirm—as well as a political one. Poles had had a kingdom and would rebel. Jews were not yet in a rebellious mode, but the theological problem they presented was much worse. The solution was to sequester them in what became “the line of settlement”—in more poetic English, the Pale. The Pale was the origin point for the subjects of this book. By the time they were born, all between 1870 and 1920, the Pale could be breached, either legally, semilegally, or totally illegally. In the popular imagination of American Jews whose ancestors fled, the Pale has acquired a nostalgic hue. The subjects of this book fled less nostalgically. Relocating in major Russian cities, directly or through temporary way-stations in Europe or the United States, they remembered the Pale with love only when confronted by its destruction. There was a great deal of destruction. World War I, fought right there, was followed by the Soviet Civil War, also there, and then the Polish-Bolshevik War, the last two roughly from 1918 to 1921. Jews suffered in particular, as they had in the pogroms that broke out in that area from the 1880s straight through the civil war, and as they would later on in the Holocaust. The subjects of this chapter either lived through all that violence or were personally, by necessity, attuned to it. Another problem loomed as large as the violence: the restrictions and impoverishment of the small towns (shtetls) that comprised the Pale. The three subjects of this chapter—Doba-Mera Medvedeva, Leyb Kvitko, and Solomon Lozovsky—were drawn to Marxism both as a way of understanding the violence and as a path out of it. Marxism provided a conceptual structure and predicted the scientifically certain triumph of a just new order. Lozovsky and

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Kvitko bought into this; they saw the arc of justice bending in a certain direction, and bending fast. At the same time, their faith was not unconditional. The violent birth of the new age exhilarated Kvitko in theory, but also disturbed him. Lozovsky wanted his own say in how Marxism would be applied; he polemicized. Medvedeva, far from the elite that both men joined, espoused a vague Marxism, acquired in youth groups. When necessary, it was expendable or never even consulted. In the case of the pogroms, which she alone of the three witnessed, her explanation is a kind of realpolitik picked up from an older generation that had learned to work the system as best it could.

Doba-Mera Medvedeva: A Working Girl Seeks a Future Of our eight subjects, Doba-Mera Medvedeva is always the outlier. Lozovsky and Kvitko share her shtetl background, but they were men; they were not held back by the social expectations that kept Medvedeva from shaping her own fate. The forces that constrained Medvedeva will not be operant for the other women in this book, who were either born later, or whose families had more resources. They were, however, forces that constrained a lot of people like her. Medvedeva was born in Khotimsk, a shtetl in the Russian Empire’s Mogilev Gubernia, now Belarus. At the time of her birth, 1892, it had a population of around 3,000. The other town that figures prominently in her notebooks is Klintsy, a comparative metropolis that in the census year of 1897 had a population of nearly 12,000, a third of them Jews.1 The shtetl was in some ways a theological kingdom, but it was not hermetically sealed. The inhabitants were largely literate. Some subscribed to the very modern Yiddish- and Hebrewlanguage press. Unlike the local peasants who surrounded them, Jews moved from place to place, and ideas traveled with them. Medvedeva’s father, Izrail-Velka, embodied modernizing trends. By profession he was a melamed, a low-status teacher of small children. Because the teaching took place in the central room of the three-room house (room, bedroom, kitchen) in which his family cooked, ate, and slept, Medvedeva’s recollection of the routine was not second-hand. “From seven to nine in the morning,” she records, “he would teach children who were not in his class, and also in the evening, from eight to ten, he would work with children who were not in

1 “Klintsy,” Wikipedia, https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%B D%D1%86%D1%8B; “Klintsy,” Rossiskaia evreiskaia entsiklopediia, http://www.rujen.ru/ index.php/%D0%9A%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%86%D1%8B

Origins

his class, while from nine in the morning until eight in the evening, he would work with his main class, consisting of eight to ten children, mostly boys.”2 The “children not in his class” were those whose parents were ashamed to have their tuition paid by the Jewish community. The charity funds that went to teachers like Izrail-Velka were stingy by design, and the parents of his off-the-books pupils could not have paid him a whole lot more. Yet his other activities place him firmly in the world of the Jewish Enlightenment. He subscribed to the Yiddish Der Fraynd (The friend) and the modern Hebrew Ha-Melits (The advocate); he read literature in Yiddish and Russian. He knew, Medvedeva writes, “a lot of arithmetic.”3 Arithmetic was not on the cheder (primary religious school) curriculum, and the main reason boys came to him for instruction was to pass the entrance exams for the Russian gimnazia, where the course of study mirrored what was wanted in the broader, non-Jewish world. And there was more: he established a mutual-aid society (chevre gmiles chesed) for other teachers, and an “interest-bearing savings company” to help Jewish artisans buy raw materials.4 Medvedeva, writing in the Soviet Union in 1939, has some trouble justifying this foray into finance, however limited. On the one hand, she revered her father—on the other, what she was describing was a bank. She emphasizes that it helped the poor, and that the town’s wealthy Jews were opposed. Both of these things were likely true. For all this activity, Izrail-Velka and his family (three children) were barely viable as an economic unit. Then came the death of his wife, the eleven-yearold Doba-Mera’s mother, and everything unraveled. He brought in a new wife, who disliked the old children. Her antipathy did not manifest itself in withholding love; what she withheld was food and shelter. The children were shunted from relative to relative, and not only relatives. For a time, Izrail-Velka went to live with his wife’s family, leaving his children in the care of a butcher who was renting his house. Medvedeva helped with housekeeping, to ensure that her little brothers got fed. Eventually, though briefly, the children were taken in by a relative, Auntie Gesia, in the slightly larger Klintsy. They were fed and bathed: a big deal. From this point on, Auntie Gesia would be their intermittent benefactor. All the flaws and all the benefits of an extended family are visible in this story. There was shelter and some comfort, sometimes more than expected and sometimes horrifyingly less. As Medvedeva herself put it, “They tore pieces of

2 Beizer and Nakhimovsky, Daughter of the Shtetl, 31. 3 Ibid., 30. My translation says “mathematics,” but that’s way too exalted; it could have involved algebra or geometry. 4 Ibid., 32.

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bread from each other’s mouths, because there was nowhere for them to earn money.”5 Her recollections are not out of line with the orphan stories that come up in European folktales and realist fiction. Closer to home, the contours are corroborated in the volumes of adolescent memoirs that that YIVO Institute for Jewish Culture collected in Poland before the Holocaust and later in New York City.6 Orphans—in Jewish practice, children missing one parent—always had it bad. Next to the constant worry over food, the greatest anguish for Medvedeva involved education. Boys got at least a cheder education: a religious imperative. When she was six, Doba-Mera became a pupil at her father’s cheder, where she learned reading, writing, and Jewish texts along with the boys. This was unusual but not unheard of. Better-off families educated their daughters, who became, as Medvedeva notes accurately and with considerably envy, “teachers, doctors, midwives.”7 For a while, on Sabbath afternoons, the ten- or eleven-year-old Doba-Mera got together with some girlfriends and taught poorer girls to read and also to write. Writing would be a Sabbath violation, showcasing both their priorities and their degree of independence. Nobody was monitoring them. The education ended when her stepmother arrived. Later, at Aunt Gesia’s, it again became an issue. Doba-Mera’s girl cousins and neighbors went off to Russian schools, paying their way past the anti-Jewish quotas. She pleaded for the same, without results: her destiny would be apprenticeship and an early marriage. It was not an egalitarian solution but neither circumstances nor tradition fostered egalitarianism. On the other hand, when Izrail-Velka became ill and Doba-Mera had to take him, illegally, to a hospital in Kyiv, the two relied on funding from that same set of relatives, and were sheltered on the road by relatives and relatives’ relatives. The Jewish safety net had gaps, but there was no other. At thirteen, Doba-Mera was apprenticed to a seamstress. She would work for five years, until Izrail-Velka’s illness and death, and her own marriage. Work occupies an enormous place in her memoir. However grim the conditions, it was a venue for self-actualization and a degree of independence. She acquired skill, and also, through the Jewish Marxist circles that had sprung

5 Ibid., 76. 6 Jeffrey Shandler, Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (New York: YIVO, 2004); and Jocelyn Cohen and Daniel Soyer, My Future is in America: Autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants (New York: NYU Press, 2005). 7 Beizer and Nakhimovsky, Daughter of the Shtetl, 35.

Origins

up among young people like her, an education in revolutionary texts. She acquired companions. Sewing was classic for Jews; the poet Kvitko, whom we will meet in the next section, sewed for his family even when he was famous, and Lozovsky’s father-in-law, living in the exclusive House on the Embankment by virtue of his family connection, sewed suits for the Party elite who were his neighbors.8 It was, of course, the skill that above all others Jewish immigrants took to American sweatshops. But the conditions in Russia were much worse. As with Izrail-Velka’s cheder, which literally means “room,” production mostly took place in the rooms where the owner’s family lived. The owner, living barely better than the workers, provided machines and scrounged for work and materials. Even in the off-season, workers were at their machines from seven in the morning to seven in the evening, with an hour for midday dinner. Because there were always small children around, a female worker like Medvedeva could be pressed into additional service as a child-minder. She describes an occasion when this happened, probably because she proudly refused. Her skill made that refusal possible. Medvedeva sometimes boarded with the boss’s family and sometimes, if the work was in Khotimsk, with her father and stepmother. On one occasion her stepmother told her not to eat at home. On another occasion, she was discovered by a neighbor to be boarding with her boss. “How could that be?” said the neighbor. “A father’s only daughter, and the father lives next door, and the daughter doesn’t live with him?”9 In that economy of scarcity, food was the marker of both love and shame. But it wasn’t all bad. As a man’s tailor, working among men, Medvedeva might have been expected to be in a situation of some danger. She indeed mentions rumors that “certain men . . . would try to win over girls, especially girls who were alone,”10 but this does not happen to her—if it had, we might expect a dramatist of her gifts, writing for her grandchildren, to narrate, at the very least, a morally edifying escape. What we see instead are instances of unexpected kindness. After a pogrom, when she is without warm clothes, her fellow workers persuade their boss to offer her a loan. Given that he himself would have had spare money only when the clothing was sold, this is not a small matter. They all

  8 Yury Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 499.   9 Beizer and Nakhimovsky, Daughter of the Shtetl, 86. 10 Ibid., 90.

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go out together to buy her “a pretty black jacket and galoshes.”11 She concludes the story by noting that she repays the loan, showcasing not only their kindness, but also her own independence. The Klintsy pogrom that resulted in the loss of Medvedeva’s clothes took place in 1905, one of the antiliberal and not entirely logical responses to the tsar’s granting of a constitution. The violence took place on a Friday, a market day, which meant an abundance of peasants who had arrived in town with their horse-drawn carts. Preparations had already taken place: Jewish shops had yellow crosses drawn on them, while Russian shops had white ones. Medvedeva was still living with Aunt Gesia; the whole family hid behind closed shutters. The rest of her description she must have pieced together from stories that people told. There were shouts of “Beat the Jews.” Dough was dragged out of a bakery and trampled in the street. Things were set on fire. Medvedeva and her relatives had just escaped the house—they were out in the yard; it was not clear where they would go—when the windows were smashed and the doors flung open. Clothing would be taken and the feather bedding slashed. Feathers were the classic detritus of a pogrom, the destruction of the innermost part of a Jewish home for no reason beyond exuberant, triumphant hate. But the family was rescued by a policeman. They were taken to the precinct house where Jews—predominantly wealthy, she says—were lying on the floor. In the morning, a policeman told them they could go home. The pogrom was over. That the rescuers were paid is not part of her story, but it is the only way to understand it. Medvedeva’s father sent for her (the stepmother was away), but shortly before Christmas, Khotimsk was the scene of a pogrom of its own. It begins with a rumor that miners, wielding iron tools, would attack Jewish shops. That this doesn’t quite happen—the raiding occurs, but in a limited way—is the result of two interventions. First, there is a Jewish self-defense group: men with guns; the marauding miners do not yet have guns. Second, a Russian student, in town for the Christmas holidays, stands up and tells the mob that they would be better off raiding the distillery of Prince Obolensky, just out of town. In Medvedeva’s telling, the miners break into the distillery and get drunk, intending to raid the Jews a little later. In the meantime, the Jews discover that the local constable, a man they had paid off, is about to betray them: he has prepared a telegram asking a regional boss for reinforcements because the Jews are shooting. A rich Jew named Tamarkin finds the telegram and seizes it. “Write

11 Ibid., 90.

Origins

what I dictate to you,” he orders the constable, “or you won’t come out of this alive.”12 It goes without saying that Medvedeva didn’t see any of this first hand, and her account sounds a lot like an Isaac Babel gangster story, perhaps because both have roots in Jewish fantasies of revenge.13 Her admiration for the rich Tamarkin is unqualified. At this point in her story, she simply isn’t bothering with Marxism. The lapse is noteworthy because much of what she recalls of this time is infused with her involvement in Marxist circles. Not unconnected from pogroms, the 1905 era saw the rise of numerous efforts to radically change the situation of Russian Jews. Such efforts ranged from the Yiddish-speaking, worker-oriented Marxist groups that would draw in Medvedeva to various types of Zionism. (There was, of course, a third significant solution: emigration. It was far more widespread in reality than in the lives of our subjects, who all chose Russia, though it will come up later in Medvedeva’s story and also in the stories of Lina Shtern and Nadezhda Ulanovskaya.) Medvedeva’s first encounter with the revolution involves leaflets, slogans, and a strike. She is just an apprentice, thirteen years old. The strike makes her feel grown-up: “after all, the order not to work included me!”14 Then a new acquaintance appears, a master-apprentice with an agenda outside of tailoring. He has ties to “an organization.” He explains to her “why I live poorly and why the Rivkin girls from the same town live well.”15 He gives her a book to read by Marx, probably Capital (she misremembers the title), and invites her to join their secret group. She herself starts leading a group, using her literacy to teach and discuss. There are mass meetings, even in winter, “somewhere in a field, in an old bathhouse.”16 There are contacts with other groups; when she changes jobs, she has a new set of friends waiting for her, and the same ideals. This is the best part of her life, the time—the only time—of her freedom. She is respected; she makes, however poorly, her own living; she has companions, and there is even, because by the end of this period she is sixteen, the hint of romance (it gets nowhere, because the young man is too poor, and her father

12 Ibid., 73. 13 The Babel stories, of course, come later—though their urban legend origins were likely already circulating, even in Khotimsk. Even considering that Medvedeva’s text postdates Babel’s Odessa stories, it is highly unlikely that she read modernist fiction in Russian. She mentions the Yiddish writers Sholem Aleichem and Yankev Dinezon. 14 Beizer and Nakhimovsky, Daughter of the Shtetl, 62. 15 Ibid., 81. 16 Ibid., 83.

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doesn’t approve). There is also danger. Her father and stepmother object that, if she gets arrested, they will be legally responsible. Of all of our subjects, Medvedeva is the only one to encounter Zionism in its formative period.17 Her brush with it—brief, unsympathetic, and a little confused—is at a debate organized between socialists and what she calls Territorialist Zionists. Historically the groups were separate: territorialists promoted the cause of a Jewish homeland in Russia. This rather foundational distinction was lost on Medvedeva, or perhaps her local branch was more attuned to Palestine. What she records in 1939, as though it is distant history, is their idea of buying land from the Turks, in a place where settlers will “break their backs for Jewish capitalists.”18 Freedom for the Jew, as she and her companions saw it, would come only through a change in social order. That belief was widespread. The debate is held in a wooded area that was outside of town, but not outside enough. The police arrive and start arresting people. Medvedeva herself is fourteen years old and still, as she says, quite small. Other women shelter her for a while, and then she slips away. Within a few years, the Marxist period of her life would come to an end—not through rethinking or fear, but because family demands intervene.

Leyb Kvitko: Shtetl, Poetry, Violence Kvitko was never sure exactly when he was born, most likely 1890. Perhaps, as his wife wrote, he was fuzzy about dates in general, or perhaps the circumstances of a large, impoverished family were such that nobody kept track. He did know the date (November 11) and of course the place, the Ukrainian shtetl Holoskovo. His father, like Medvedeva’s, was a melamed—a teacher in a children’s religious school—and also a bookbinder and any number of other things, in addition to which he was seldom home. By the time Kvitko was ten, both parents and almost all of his five brothers and sisters had died of tuberculosis. One sister became a seamstress (tuberculosis took her later) and a brother went to America, but by the early 1920s he too was dead. Kvitko was brought up by his grandmother, whom he revered.19 17 Nadezhda Ulanovskaya ends up in Israel, but that is much, much later. 18 Beizer and Nakhimovsky, Daughter of the Shtetl, 83. We will see this objection later, in official Soviet form. 19 Unless otherwise noted, details from Kvitko’s early life come from B. Kvitko, “Tvorit′ dobro bylo sushchnost′iu ego zhizni,” in Zhizn’ i tvorchestva L’va Kvitko, ed. B. Kvitko and M. Petrovskii (Moscow: Detskaia literatura, 1976), 121–157.

Origins

Like Medvedeva and like Lozovsky, he began work as a child: he did scut work in a dairy, hauled heavy skins for a leather manufacturer, made shoes, and painted roofs. The specifics entailed in this kind of work are detailed in his short novel Liam and Petrik (Liam un Petrik, 1933; 1958), about a Jewish boy and his Ukrainian best friend. Liam in the novel hauls skins that are so heavy he can barely walk and climbs slippery roofs to paint them. Like the real Medvedeva, the fictional Liam and real Kvitko did not work long in any one place (in addition to his other skills, Liam has a stint castrating horses; Kvitko’s experience was somewhat less wide-ranging). But his familiarity with making things stayed with him all his life: his little daughter, when asked what her famous father did, thought for a minute and said that he sewed. While unremarkable for the Jewish population in general, Kvitko’s background made him stand out within the far more educated Yiddish avant-garde. That this fabulously talented poet arrived in Kyiv wearing shoes and clothes that he had made himself became something of a legend. Education would be a fraught issue for Kvitko throughout his life. He claimed to have been illiterate up to the age of ten, which even in the face of the illness and chaos in his family is hard to believe: with male literacy a religious imperative and hence a high priority among Jews, elementary schooling for impoverished boys was community-supported. It is far more plausible that he went to cheder as a very young child like everyone else, and then—just as he boasted—rebelled. How did the future poet learn to write, a skill that even for cheder-goers required an additional fee?20 A girl from Holoskovo was tutoring other girls who could not go to school (we have seen Medvedeva doing the same). Someone asked her to include Kvitko, whose absence from cheder had made him into a local sensation. Teaching a boy would have been inappropriate, so she recruited her brother.21 Like Doba-Mera’s, Kvitko’s early world combined back-breaking work with an absorption in books, Yiddish theater, and eventually poetry and politics. Kvitko’s view of the dark side of his childhood—not merely the specifics of child labor but the psychological and social constrictions of poverty—can be gleaned from Liam and Petrik and a later novel in verse, also in part autobiographical, called Years of Youth (Yunge yorn). Both of these

20 For a discussion of cheder education, see Alice Nakhimovsky and Roberta Newman, Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl: Yiddish Letter Manuals from Russia and America (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014), 10–11. 21 Il′ia Leibman, “Gody iunosti,” in Zhizn’ i tvorchestva L’va Kvitko, ed. B. Kvitko and M. Petrovskii (Moscow: Detskaia literatura, 1976), 157.

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works date from the 1930s—in the case of Years of Youth, the late 1930s— when political and stylistic restrictions shaped what Kvitko could say; we will discuss these restrictions at greater length in the chapter “Terror.” For our purposes here, restrictions don’t necessarily equate with falsehood, and from the point of view even of the late 1930s, there was nothing politically objectionable in writing about Jewish prerevolutionary poverty as long as some subjects, like religion, were broached in politically orthodox ways (a restriction that Kvitko followed scrupulously). This being said, what comes through with aching sharpness about this part of Kvitko’s life is the powerlessness of people at the bottom. Beyond being subject to physical and psychological indignities—when Liam’s grandmother delivers imperfect, crooked candles to a customer, she has them thrown at her—they themselves see no way out. In Young Years, the hero and his sister Nekhe talk about her life as a closed unit in which even the dreams are limited and can only result in grief (the similarity to a folk song is intentional, and the important lines in the original rhyme): “What do you want to be, What do you want to be, little sister Nekhe?” “What do I want to be? A cook for a wealthy man, That’s what I want to be.” “The rich man will beat you With his slippers.” “But I’ll get to eat Fish with potatoes.” Bad things will happen, warns her brother. But Nekhe wants to eat, she wants to wear a white apron, and if she is dishonored (“if her face is blackened”) by the rich man’s daughters, she will “wash it in the blood of [her] heart.”22 Reading sequences like this, it is easy to understand why Kvitko’s patron Kornei Chukovsky could write of him without irony that “he loved Soviet power poetically and tenderly.”23

22 Leyb Kvitko, Yunge yorn (Moscow, Sovetskii pisatel′, 1984), 60–61. 23 Kornei Chukovskii, Dnevnik 1936–1969 (Moscow: Prozaik, 2011), 7.

Origins

There were, of course, ways to escape, at least mentally. One taken up by Kvitko and his companions was Yiddish secular culture and, related to it, the possibility of self-education through reading. Holoskovo had no lending library, so Kvitko and his friend set one up. To raise money for book purchasing they turned to another feature of the secularizing shtetl, amateur theater, complete with ticket sales. Kvitko’s friend recalls putting on Gordin’s God, Man, and Devil, with Kvitko as the devil, and Goldfaden’s operetta The Witch, with Kvitko as the witch, a female role.24 The enthusiasm involved in these pursuits shouldn’t mask their inadequacy as a substitute for an actual education. All his life, Kvitko agonized over his limited education and imperfect Russian. Chukovsky, the illustrious children’s writer and public intellectual who promoted Kvitko in his early career and protected his legacy after his death, wrote that Kvitko would “grow quiet and tense” in the company of educated people.25 In a letter to Chukovsky, Kvitko wrote that he couldn’t even dream of school, that he saw school “only from outside.”26 He meant, of course, Russian secular school, the gimnazia that figures in Medvedeva’s memoirs in as equally and agonizingly unreachable. For Kvitko, achieving literacy in Russian was itself an act of will: he learned it by studying an alphabet book, which he had to deceive his mother to obtain.27 As a child, Kvitko composed poetry in his head. By the time he was a young man, he had a notebook full of poems, and knowledge about him had spread to the nearest decent-sized town, Uman. It was this notebook, and the disarming working-man presence behind it, that propelled his meteoric rise. In Uman, he met both his future wife—she was a piano student, a cultural rung several steps higher than his—and the Yiddish writer David Bergelson, who was living there with his well-to-do brother. Bergelson took Kvitko’s poems to Kyiv to show to the Ukrainian Yiddish literati, and also arranged for him to be tutored in languages and secular subjects.

24 Leibman, “Gody iunosti,” 157. 25 Kornei Chukovskii, “Kvitko,” in Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo L’va Kvitko, ed. Betti Kvitko and Miron Petrovskii (Moscow: Detskaia literatura, 1976), 180. 26 Kornei Chukovskii, Sovremenniki, in his Sobranie sochinenii v 15-i tomakh, v. 5 (Moscow: Agentstvo FTM, 2012), 351–352. 27 To buy the alphabet book, he lied to get the money from his mother; when he finally got it, he tried to read it right to left. Cheder or not, before he was ten—because his mother was still alive—Kvitko knew his way around a Hebrew or Yiddish book and wanted to be literate in Russian, the language of high culture and of the state. For more information on literacy and alphabet books, see Nakhimovsky and Newman, Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl, 1–32.

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In 1917, between the revolutions of February and October, Kvitko married. His wife Betti reports that they had a religious ceremony at the insistence of her father; she herself put up with some mild family objections on account of Kvitko’s intention make a living as a writer. (“What does your fiancé do? He writes poems? And you intend to live on that?”) The wedding was shortly followed by the October Revolution and civil war. Jews in Ukraine were subjected to devastating pogroms. Kvitko was shattered (his poetic response came later; we will look at it in the next chapter). But for the young couple, at this point, nothing proved insurmountable. Betti remembers a trip from Kyiv to Uman, in the course of which armed men stormed the train and ominously ordered the civilians to leave. She bribed a guard and freed both her husband and herself. While all this was transpiring, Kvitko published. His first book was a collection for children, Little Songs (Lidlekh, 1917). Many Soviet writers, some with impressive modernist credentials, would eventually write for children, both because their adult work was dangerously unpublishable and because their offkilter way of explaining the world was acceptable in that limited realm. This was not the case with Kvitko. His children’s work does not for the most part wreak comic havoc on the everyday world (animals do speak, but their concerns are small and understandable). The children’s poems are tender and serious. The book opens, for example, with a tiny poem about a little beetle who falls into the water and is rescued by his beetle mother. Rhyme and rhythm make it work. There was also serious poetry for adults. His collection Footsteps (Trit) appeared in 1919, revealing that the unschooled provincial Kvitko had absorbed all the tools of literary modernism and was now deploying them. Kvitko’s most important work of those years was the long poem “In the Red Storm” (In royten shturm, 1918), published in the first issue of the Kyiv literary journal Dawn (Baginen, June 1919) and then in the collection Struggle (Gerangl) in Berlin, 1929. Here Kvitko addresses the Bolshevik revolution from a viewpoint that is both hopeful, and—in the sense that it addresses violence and family disruption—seriously disturbing. As the poem opens, the poet proclaims his youth and pictures “us”—the young people of his generation—laughing, running, and chasing each other. Is this a banal picture of youthful freedom? Only if that freedom is aligned with violence: a few lines later the revelers fall down to the earth and roll in “warm blood.” Further on in the same poem, the narrator pictures himself with his father, who is dying of starvation. The father calls his son by name, but the poet “braces himself ” and won’t listen. What Kvitko is invoking here is the image of the Bolshevik strong man, whose single-minded pursuit of social justice necessitates his resistance to suffering, including his own and that of people close to

Origins

him. (This myth exerted a great pull on writers: Kvitko would revisit the idea in a later poem about the same revolution, and Vasily Grossman, a generation later, would make it a central theme of his first well-known story, “In the Town of Berdychiv,” and his final major novel Life and Fate.) In “In the Red Storm,” the poet-narrator is aware of moral horror of his behavior. As Harriet Murav has pointed out, he scourges himself, physically.28 But then he moves forward, in step with the revolution. When world transformation is at stake, the struggle of father and son is just a detail. In the manner of many revolutionary poems, this one ends with a vision of the future. That vision is as indeterminate as you can get: the poet and his companions will sacrifice themselves for a goal is discernible only as harmony and bright color: We deliver our lives, We lay down our heads Before your threshold Before your door Then the poem breaks off, with one final disconnected word (“we”). Perhaps the best commentary on Kvitko’s thinking at the time of “In the Red Storm” comes from a passage in a letter he wrote to a friend in February 1917. It would be one of the few papers of Kvitko to survive. It reads in part: Life would be fabulous and the world dazzling if we ourselves did not ruin it all. We turned the wrong way somewhere and then continued on that path further and further, our eyes big with fear, half-choking in that stinking abyss we drove ourselves into, but all the same—we carried with us a small kernel of our past happiness, a single pearl from our lost riches: romantic faith. That’s what we need to guard like the apple of our eye, the way a rich man who has lost all his wealth guards the last golden goblet that reminds him of the past and gives hope for the future.29

28 Harriet Murav, Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 36–38. 29 Miron Petrovskii, “Zhizn′ byla by velikolepna: Pis′ma L. Kvitko M. Khashchevatskomy i A. Gurshteinu,” http://www.judaica.kiev.ua/eg9/eg934.htm. The quote was translated from a Russian translation of the Yiddish original, which is unpublished. Presumably the Russian word romantizm was the translation for Yiddish romantizm. I’m going with “romantic faith”

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Kvitko’s metaphors are overwrought and confusing; it’s possible that he was being intentionally obscure. But two ideas stand out. First, he is saying that people like him, sympathizers with the revolution or actual revolutionaries, have gone off course. He is saying this before it became clear exactly how enormous that straying was. Second, he asserts that they can’t change direction. The best response is to retain one’s faith. And this is what Kvitko would do.

Solomon Lozovsky: Blacksmith, Autodidact, Orator Lozovsky’s origins in a poor family in an out-of-the-way shtetl (Danylivka, Ukraine) are strikingly similar to those of Kvitko and Medvedeva. Hunger was an ever-present threat; work, beginning in late childhood, was rough and constantly changing. And for all this, modern desires seeped through, and lives changed. Like Kvitko and Medvedeva, Lozovsky sought secular education and became involved with Marxist ideas and Marxist circles. But no one life is the same as any other, and here too, what begins in parallel concludes in divergence. Lozovsky’s name at birth was Dridzo. He would take the name Lozovsky when he joined the revolutionary underground. Pseudonyms were common among revolutionaries, particularly Jews, and Lozovsky had a number of them that he rotated as needed. But the familial Dridzo is worth remembering. His daughters continued to use it, and he himself reclaimed it at the end of his life, in the dramatic setting of the Jewish Antifascist Committee trial. We know about Lozovsky’s inner life mostly from two sources: his trial testimony, and a series of stories he wrote in the politically difficult year 1936, preserved in the family archive and quoted at length in a biography written by his grandson Vladimir Shamberg. Both the trial testimony and the stories show the mark of the time and environment in which they were written, though how the two play out is a little surprising. The 1936 stories (“embellished,” warns the author in an introduction30) establish him as a Bolshevik whose previous life—aside from his workingclass bona fides as a blacksmith—is mostly irrelevant. The trial testimony is

as the context doesn’t suggest an artistic movement—English “romanticism,” for the most part—but a state of mind. 30 Solomon Lozovskii, “Vechera vol′nykh razgovorov,” manuscript, in possession of author. Shamberg’s biography (V. M. Shamberg, Lozovskii [Moscow: Tonchu, 2012]) is a very valuable source, but he stumbles here by taking his grandfather’s stories at face value. It is worth paying heed to Lozovsky’s own warning.

Origins

peculiarly more intimate. There are reasons for this: like some of his codefendants, all of whom came to understand that they would be executed, Lozovsky seems to have wanted to sum up his life before the court, starting at the beginning. Unfortunately, the published transcripts excise a lot of biographical material, and at the time of this writing, the archival version is accessible only to the families of the long-deceased defendants. We are lucky that Shamberg quoted from it extensively. Lina Shtern, whom we will meet later, also used the trial to look back at her life. She wrote a life story that she read out over the course of an entire morning session. But the published transcript excises her personal narrative as well, and Shtern left no family to do reclamation work on her behalf. As a defendant, Lozovsky needed to be strategic. But the imperative to account for his life in ways the court might not approve of comes through poignantly, as this response to a request to describe his background shows: My father was a Hebrew teacher. He knew Talmud, he knew Hebrew well, he wrote poems of some kind in Hebrew; my mother was illiterate. My father taught me Hebrew, prayers, and Russian. The simple fact that a Hebrew teacher taught his son Russian shows that he wasn’t a religious fanatic. I was religious until around age thirteen. They made me go to synagogue, say prayers, and the rest of it. In general, our generation, which came of age between the two centuries, was religious in its youth. Kalinin told me how as a child in Sochi he went to church.31 The reference to Kalinin, a fellow Old Bolshevik who had conveniently died in his bed six years earlier, was purposeful: if Kalinin had a childhood in church, then why couldn’t Lozovsky have one in synagogue? The seventy-five-year-old defendant is mildly dismissive of his father’s Hebrew poems, perhaps to free himself from the suspicion that he, the son, admired them. But given the context, some of what he says is almost dangerously respectful. The word “Talmud” in Soviet Russia was almost uniformly pejorative. Lozovsky is proud of his father’s erudition. From this paragraph, also, we see how similar Lozovsky’s father was to Medvedeva’s. Like Izrail-Velka, Abram Dridzo was a provincial maskil, a still-religious man who was drawn to the Jewish Enlightenment and secular

31 V. P. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud: Poslednii stalinskii rasstrel (Moscow: Nauka, 1994), 142.

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knowledge. Also like Izrail-Velka, Abram Dridzo found it hard to support the family. Bread and potatoes—Lozovsky said later, either bread or potatoes— were provided by his mother, who had a market stall where she sold ribbons and thread. From age eight, Lozovsky helped.32 The other recollection from his childhood that Lozovsky brings up at trial was reading Yiddish stories to his mother and her neighbors. It is striking that he mentions this: not only was Yiddish culture ideologically suspect in 1952, but by the time he headed the Jewish Antifascist Committee he had either forgotten how to read the language or pretended that as a way of maintaining distance. Like Kvitko, Lozovsky began work early—aged eleven—and circled through a variety of jobs. He wanted to be a metal-worker in a shop at the railway juncture of Lozova, the town that provided his eventual surname, but they would not take on Jews. Then, when he was thirteen, his two older brothers, a wheelwright and a blacksmith, returned home after a long absence. Lozovsky apprenticed as a blacksmith, underscoring the sheer physical strength that distinguished the members of his family, alongside their intellectual gifts. His physical abilities remained legendary. As a high-placed Soviet official, the possessor of a government dacha, he uprooted trees on his own. Traveling through Lozova with his grandson, he pointed out the railway spurs that he himself had forged.33 At age twenty, all men were subject to the draft. Military service was a particular problem for Jews, who, as Lozovsky noted at trial, were routinely and severely beaten. A solution to that problem, widely undertaken, was emigration. An alternative, pursued by Medvedeva’s husband Abram Medvedev, was to procure a deferment, usually through bribery or feigned health problems. But Lozovsky decided to volunteer. This solved one looming threat: unlike draftees, volunteers were not subject to beating. But to volunteer one needed the equivalent of four years of gimnazia education.34 The Imperial government permitted non-students to sit for gimnazia final exams. This loophole was the reason that Jewish boys flocked to Medvedeva’s father, who tutored them in the arithmetic not taught in cheder—an omission that extended to all other imperial exam requirements. Joining a long line of Jewish autodidacts, Lozovsky prepared on his own.35 His two brothers, the

32 Shamberg, Lozovskii, 72. 33 Ibid., 75. 34 Ibid., 74–78. 35 Shamberg is following his grandfather here: Lozovsky himself, in a letter to his daughter Galina from 1941, writes that “they beat Talmud into his head,” by contrast to the arithmetic that she herself was learning in the eighth grade (ibid., 77). Russian-Jewish autodidacts like Lozovsky are portrayed in An-sky’s Russian-language story “Pioneers” (Pionery).

Origins

wheelwright and the blacksmith, subsidized him, as there was no way he could both work and commit to memory the first four years of the gimnasia curriculum. Later, in the early 1920s, the blacksmith brother turned up in Berlin as a Soviet trade representative. He did not return home. That brother, who had taught Lozovsky his trade and then supported him materially, died under the Nazis. At the trial, Lozovsky could not ignore him: the state kept tabs on people’s foreign ties. He says that after his brother defected, he broke off relations, ignoring multiple letters from his sister-in-law informing him about the death. Whether prompted by fear or patriotic anger or some combination of the two, in personal terms this instance of bad moral luck is simply a betrayal. We can be sure that Lozovsky really did break off relations: had there been a return letter, the prosecution would have flaunted it. But that was all ahead. In 1899, joining the army in Kazan, Lozovsky commenced on an unlikely combination of military service with a continuing, nonmilitary education. Shamberg never says what Lozovsky did as a soldier, but the duties were clearly less onerous than blacksmithing: he was able, without taking leave, to cram the entire gimnazia course of study. His commanding officer, a man of liberal bent, gave Lozovsky permission to take the exams in the Kazan district. Lozovsky passed, and got his diploma (attestat zrelosti). The extent of his achievement can be gauged by the difficulty of the exam and the number of people across the empire who passed it. In 1877, a year for which statistics are available, 1776 students sat for the exam, of whom 1449 passed. The subjects covered in written and oral questions included theology, math, history (Russian history, world history, Russian literature), Latin, and Greek.36 Lozovsky’s cheder education was irrelevant with respect to content, but it was not, as Shamberg thinks, altogether useless: ingrained habits of study, including memorization and foreign language acquisition, were transferable. Argument within defined boundaries, another feature of Jewish education, would not have been relevant for the gimnazia diploma, but it certainly prepared Lozovsky for his future as a Marxist. Lozovsky dated his political awareness to age twenty-three, in other words 1901, the same year that he was demobilized. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, the group that was two year’s shy of its fateful split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Whatever we know about Lozovsky’s revolutionary exploits up to 1917 come from the autobiographical stories that

36 Algirdas Zabulionis, “Ob ispytaniiakh zrelosti v Rossisskoi Imperii v XIX veke,” https:// eaoko.org/ru/publications/detail.php?ELEMENT_ID=133, 41–43.

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he called “Evenings of Impromptu Conversations” (Vechera vol′nykh razgovorov). The stories in “Evenings” read like a Bolshevik thriller. If Medvedeva’s memoirs are marked by family score-settling—not only with her stepmother, but practically all other relatives as well—Lozovsky’s are completely externalized. The series includes exactly one reference to his mother (saying goodbye to her when he leaves for Siberian exile) and none to either of his wives. Their subject was not personal life, but the mythologizing of Lozovsky as an Old (prerevolutionary) Bolshevik. They chronicle serial arrests followed by serial and sometimes harrowing escapes. Lozovsky began his underground work in Kazan, under the pseudonym “Worker Aleksei.” After a short time, he went to St. Petersburg, where, as a Jew without special dispensation, his presence was by definition illegal. False documents supplied by the revolutionary network worked for a time, but in October 1903, he found himself in pre-trial detention. “Prison,” declares Lozovsky in “Evenings,” “was my first real university.” The Lozovsky of 1936 revels at the paradox, but the consciousness-raising consequence of political detention was widely known even at the time, and he was far from the only beneficiary. The “legal” Marxist literature someone could get on the outside (in Lozovsky’s case, supplied to him by a student tutoring him for the gimnazia exam) paled in comparison to the resources of an imperial prison library, stocked with books confiscated from the prisoners themselves. A recent study of the prison library of St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress shows that the police were aware that books might be seditious: at their request, a catalog was put together in 1904 and volumes haphazardly removed.37 But Lozovsky’s first detention was pre-1904, and his prison, not named, was less famous and presumably less scrutinized. He had at his disposal not only “all three volumes of Capital,” but fiction and poetry from Pushkin to Byron, Goethe, Heine, and Boborykin, a popular novelist whose subject was the ugly world of Russian capitalism. Released a year later and allowed to choose his destination, Lozovsky returned to Kazan. There began his career as an orator and the impressive series of adventures chronicled in “Evenings,” to what degree of veracity it is impossible to ascertain. Kazan’s Social Democratic Party was Bolshevik. Lozovsky, also a Bolshevik, was given the assignment to agitate at the Alafuzov Factory, a textile works very

37 A. V. Krakhmalev, “Nauchnye i literaturnye zaniatiia v Petropavlovskoi kreposti,” https:// core.ac.uk/display/50574962.

Origins

prominent in the city. The present-day Kazan tourist agency directs visitors to the still-surviving building with a note that celebrates the founder, Ivan Alafuzov. It makes particular note of Alafuzov’s concern for his workers, which, from the 1870s past his death in 1905, included providing a day-care facility, nursery school, school, theater, and library.38 Lozovsky was there in 1905. Acting on party instructions, the actual or somewhat fictional Lozovsky appears at the Alafuzov factory gate at closing time, aiming for a short speech exhorting the workers to strike “in solidarity with the entire working class of Russia.” Police seize him by the arms and his champions, the workers, by the feet. The police win: they confiscate his money and his watch, and march him off to the fire shed where a group of men start beating and kicking him with their boots. The beatings are serious, but the episode ends in comic triumph. The factory’s liberal manager has intervened and ordered the police to take the agitator to the office. “We have decided to free you,” says the police captain. “Take your watch and money and get lost.” Outside, the crowd shouts in Lozovsky’s support: “Give us back the orator or we’ll tear down the factory.” This is when Lozovsky gives his first genuinely rousing speech (he was in fact a legendary public speaker, and the premise of the story is how he learned his craft). Inspired by the crowd, he “burns with a hatred for tsarism, capitalism, and their servants.” He calls on the assembled workers—Tartars and Russians together—to realize their class consciousness. The next five years of Lozovsky’s life comprised iterations of political work and arrests. His confrontational posture, including a hunger strike in Kharkiv that lasted seven days,39 was an unintended training ground for what happened at the end of his life. His personal arc was, of course, non-standard: most Old Bolsheviks victimized by Stalin chose obedience over self-defense or factual accuracy. Lozovsky himself would be obedient for a lot of his life. But early on, he dissented a lot. Jumping ahead just barely, we see him in Paris in 1911 staking out a position in between Lenin’s Bolsheviks and other Social Democratic factions. Lenin wanted a uniform ideology under his control, meaning that other factions needed to abandon their ideas or he would expel them. Lozovsky headed a group called Bolshevik-Conciliators (primirentsy) and for a time ran an oppositional newspaper.40 Lenin responded by expelling him.

38 “Fabrika Alafuzova,” https://tur-kazan.ru/info/fabrika-alafuzova. 39 Shamberg, Lozovskii, 138. 40 Ibid., 157.

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Lozovsky had reached Paris in 1909 after an adventure-filled escape from Siberian exile during which he nearly drowned in the Nizhnyaya Tunguska River. As improbable as his description sounds, it fits into a world in which, for example, the terrorist (Socialist Revolutionary) Grigory Gershuni was spirited out of Siberia in a barrel of sauerkraut.41 Much of what he tells about himself reflects his organizational talents later in life. Chosen as the leader (starosta) of the political prisoners during the journey east, he was—as he tells it—so trusted that the criminals asked him to represent them as well. Lozovsky extracted from them the promise that they would maintain “internal discipline.” A repeating feature of Lozovsky’s escape is the weakness of tsarist control compounded by a general distaste for autocracy that led liberals, like the Alafuzov factory manager, to help revolutionaries as a matter of conscience. In Siberia, he gets cover from a different liberal, a geologist returning from a gold-prospecting expedition, who agrees to “add” Lozovsky to his official staff. The Alafuzov manager is a comic figure. But the geologist saves his life, and Lozovsky remembers him with gratitude. It goes without saying that throughout his escape, the revolutionary network supplied Lozovsky with money and passports; and peasants along the route were happy to provide services for pay. The forged passports carried him all the way to Geneva, where for the first time he met Lenin and Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya. This part is undoubtedly real: one of Lozovsky’s daughters would become Krupskaya’s longtime secretary, and Lozovsky would be a close colleague of Lenin, though, as we just saw, not a subservient one. Lenin, says Lozovsky, was impressed on learning that his new acquaintance was not a run-of-the-mill intellectual, but an actual blacksmith.42 When the Bolsheviks decamped for Paris, Lozovsky went along. In Paris, he supported himself as a lathe operator and also studied in a driving school; for a time, he ran a garage. A formidable organizer, he arranged for political emigrants to learn electrical wiring. But his political affiliations were, as always, rocky. In 1914, three years after getting kicked out of Lenin’s Bolshevik party, he drew the ire of French socialists over his opposition to the unfolding Great War. With the French government and French radicals seemingly united in their patriotic fervor, Lozovsky fled south for six weeks, where he worked in

41 This one made the news. See “Hid in Sauerkraut Barrel, Russian Political Prisoner Escaped from Siberian Prison,” New York Times, December 5, 1905. 42 Shamberg, Lozovskii, 148.

Origins

a vineyard. But the French revolutionaries were considerably more flexible than Lenin’s Bolsheviks. Having been kicked out of the French socialist party in the Fourteenth Arrondissement, Lozovsky found a new home in the same party, in the Eighteenth.43 He returned to Russia in May 1917—right between the February revolution and Lenin’s coup in November.

43 Shamberg, Lozovskii, 164. Presumably he means the Radical-Socialists.

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Communist Romance and Border Crossings, 1917 through the 1930s: Part I As believers in Marxist doctrine and the Marxist-Leninist future, the characters in this chapter would all have described themselves as materialists. But their border crossings showed them to be idealists in the extreme: they moved in search of a dream. In Lozovsky’s case, the dream was a matter of political doctrine. His trips abroad were official. Lina Shtern, whom we meet in this chapter, was a biochemist whose laboratory was in Geneva. Within science, she experimented; in the political realm, she bought into the dream and moved to the Soviet Union. Kvitko went west for personal reasons that he did not imagine violated his commitment to the new state. Medvedeva, like so many people at the bottom, didn’t move at all. She could have: it came up, but she rejected it once again for personal reasons (mostly, spite). In the cases of Shtern, Kvitko, and Medvedeva, the decisions they made had profound consequences. Did they question their decision or the ethics of their goal? Lozovsky, a professional revolutionary and theorist, was by far the most politically astute. He argued on principle with Lenin, but then succumbed. His dream thereafter would be the same as everyone else’s, though as the 1930s wore on he came under serious personal threat, and a story he wrote in private reveals his fears. Kvitko’s dreams of revolution encompassed considerable violence, which he sometimes celebrated, because he was a modernist, and sometimes questioned at the edges. The one thing he did not question was the speedy triumph of a just world—a quasi-religious stance that he held in common with innumerable other escapees from Judaism and Christianity. Shtern’s world view was the most divided. In biochemistry, she sought truth; in politics, she was a complete innocent. In later years, this innocence— perhaps what we would now describe as a performance of innocence—would

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combine with the issuance of offhand but biting political quips that had they been tied to anyone else would have been quite dangerous. We will take up that part of her life history in further chapters. As for Medvedeva, the clear-sighted appraisal of the shtetl that we encountered earlier failed her when it came to describing the new world. She was, and remained, too frightened. Her account, the least constrained by ideology, foregrounds chaos and fear.

Leyb Kvitko: Transformations When we last saw Kvitko, he was in Kyiv. Except for his children’s poetry (which had not, at this point in the early 1920s, achieved the iconic status that it would a decade later) and his genuinely impoverished background, he did not stand out. He was a modernist poet who believed in the revolutionary future but understood its price in human suffering. Kyiv was a center of Soviet Yiddish culture, and Kvitko was a part of its Kultur-lige, a dynamic literary and artistic organization that like many artistic organizations of the immediate postrevolutionary years, enjoyed considerable autonomy. The organization’s dynamism did not, however, translate into income for its participants, and Kvitko was living hand to mouth. Its autonomy was also short-lived: around 1922, it was taken over by the Yevsektsia, the Jewish section of the Communist Party. But by the time this happened, Kvitko and several other Yiddish writers had decamped for Berlin. The probable reason that he went was that his publisher went. Berlin was a center of émigré culture, with people of all kinds of linguistic, cultural, and political loyalties: Chagall was there; so was the Hebrew poet Chayim Nachman Bialik.1 Kvitko needed his publisher because he needed money—not only for himself but also, we learn from correspondence, for his still surviving sister and her two little children. He also hoped to secure some kind of education. It was

1

For more on this diaspora, see Oleg Budnitskii and Aleksandra Polian, Russko-evreiskii Berlin 1920–1941 (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2013). Gennady Estraikh applies the entirely appropriate term “literary flotsam” to Kvitko and his contemporaries. Gennadii Estraikh, “Yiddish on the Spree.” In Yiddish in Weimar Berlin: At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture, ed. Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (London: Humanities Research Association; Leeds: Maney Pub., 2010), 10. Kvitko’s relationship to Bialik is ambiguous. Bialik was not acceptable in the Soviet canon. Betti Kvitko says that her husband was derisive towards him (“Tvorit′ dobro,” 129); another memoirist, A. Kozodoi, says that when he went to see Kvitko in 1948, he saw on his desk, “dictionaries, notebooks, and a volume of Bialik.” If the Bialik was in Hebrew, that is especially interesting. See, eds., Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo L’va Kvitko (Moscow: Detskaia literatura, 1976), 160–163.

Communist Romance and Border Crossings, 1917 through the 1930s

the desire for education that he stressed at the trial, when he desperately needed to explain why he abandoned the Soviet Union. He had, of course, not abandoned it, certainly not in any ideological way. He doesn’t appear to have studied—his wife says that there simply was not enough money. Otherwise, he replicated in Weimar Germany the twin activities of his earlier life: revolutionary work and writing. He published not only in Berlin but also Moscow and New York. Then he moved to Hamburg, where he joined the German Communist party. An uprising of Hamburg workers is memorialized in a poem called “Hamburg, October 1923” (Hamburg, Oktyaber 1923), in which Kvitko imagines himself in a bloody but ultimately victorious struggle of the proletariat against police. The poem’s language is Yiddish, but the comrade workers it refers to are German: socialist internationalism at its height. In addition to writing, Kvitko had an actual physical job at the Hamburg port, sorting leather for the Soviet foreign trade organization (torgpredstvo), which would export it back home. Kvitko’s time in Hamburg also involved a stint as an arms smuggler. As late as 1943, in his official autobiography, he refers to this delicately as being “entrusted with important Soviet work.”2 The details emerged at his trial, when it was in his interest to boast about them: his actual task was to pack up weapons in crates labeled “Fragile Dishes” and send them off to Chiang Kai-Shek.3 Soviet activities at the Hamburg port were run in those years by Alexander Ulanovsky, whom we will meet in the next chapter. Nadezhda Ulanovskaya’s memoirs don’t mention a young Yiddish poet. She does mention the 1923 uprising, which, perhaps only in retrospect, she is far more cynical about than Kvitko ever would or could be. Where he saw workers versus police, she saw fascists and communists united in their hatred for the ruling Social Democrats. In any event, both Kvitko’s and the Ulanovskys’ sojourn in Hamburg was soon cut off, and for the same reason: their clandestine work had come to the attention of the Germans. In 1925, the police carried out a raid on Kvitko’s apartment. The poet-revolutionary rushed off to the Soviet consulate, which whisked him away on a ship bound for Leningrad. Kvitko’s clandestine work and his menial labor at the Hamburg port were not the whole story. He was also observing, thinking, and writing, all in ways that would not be permissible further on. Some of his concerns were specifically Jewish, linked to the pogroms that had broken out in Ukraine during the civil

2 Leyb Kvitko, “Avtobiografiia,” in Zhizn′ i tvorchestvo L′va Kvitko, ed. Betti Kvitko and Miron Petrovskii (Moscow: Detskaia literatura, 1976), 218. 3 Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 95.

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war. The anti-Jewish violence disturbed him terribly—a detail broached by his wife Betti in an essay published in 1976, a quarter century after his death. Betti’s statement—a single sentence, balanced, as she must have felt necessary, by her assertion that she herself didn’t feel nearly as bad—supports what any reader would see as the emotional core of a cycle of poems, called 1919, devoted to those events.4 The cycle was published in Berlin in 1923. The set of poems, in two parts, is preceded by a prose statement from Kvitko extolling the Red Army as bringing freedom both to his tormented people and to the whole world. This is the optimistic counterweight to the poetry that follows, which is all about suffering—predominantly, as the literary scholar Sabine Koller notes, the suffering of children. Here the two antipodes of Kvitko’s creative world come into stark view: on the one side, the innocence of his poetry for children, and on the other his adult focus on their brutal deaths. Modernism, whose poetics aimed to startle the reader, no doubt played a role in what Kvitko did, but so did reality. The world of the 1919 cycle is almost completely one of entrapment. Take, for example, the fourth poem, “Day and Night” (Tog un nakht). The narrators of this poem turn out to be children, though what they say rings in an adult register, and what they experience is no different from what an adult would. In the day, they long for the comfort of night, and in the night, for the comfort of day. To the child-victims, the perpetrators of the violence loom like some natural phenomenon that cannot be escaped. Who are the perpetrators? The poem simply calls them “they,” and notes that they are obsessed with “us” (a succinct statement about antisemitism in general); they “throw us around” or “use us” at will (varfn zikh mit unz).5 In the sixth poem, “The day grows darker” (Tog vert finsterer) gangs of marauders filthy with blood rip off children’s heads.6 The speaker is again a child with the voice of an adult. He regrets his youth; his head will also be ripped off. It gets worse.

4 Betti Kvitko’s calculations regarding what was permissible to write in a public text cannot be overestimated. In an essay in 2008, Miron Petrovsky, who put together the volume of memoirs that includes her essay, notes that the publishing house editor initially agreed to one single reference to the circumstances of Kvitko’s death, providing it was stated in the usual Soviet terms. That reference was later excised. Miron Petrovskii, “Vy iz Kieva plyvete: stikhi i sud′ba L′va Kvitko,” in his Gorodu i miru: Kievskie ocherki (Kyiv: Pis′mennik, 1990), 353–354. 5 Leyb Kvitko, “Tog un nakht,” in his 1919 (Berlin: Judischer Literarischer Verlag), 1923, 20–21. 6 Leyb Kvitko, “Tog vert finsterer,” in his 1919 (Berlin: Judischer Literarischer Verlag, 1923), 25–26.

Communist Romance and Border Crossings, 1917 through the 1930s

In her discussion of 1919, Koller points to a softening in the cycle’s second half, evident in the first poem, “I shook off ” (Opgetreyslt zikh).7 It is indeed the case that Kvitko is seeking a way out, but settling on one isn’t simple. The solution in “I shook off ” seems to be messianic. Messianism is not a mood readily associated with Kvitko, but it is hard to avoid seeing it here: the narrator of the poem brings his listeners joyful “tidings” (psures) of the birth of a “luminous child.”8 Of course, Bolshevism was also invested in the coming of a new and pure generation, which may be why this poem, with the “luminous child” details a little clipped, was the only part of 1919 to make it into Kvitko’s posthumous Selected Works, from the liberal year 1967. Kvitko’s belief—his hope—that the destruction would lead to a new, blessed age is central to another poem he wrote in the same period, the 1920 “After the shooting” (Nakh der biks).9 In this iteration, the narrator heralds the coming of a “new, healthy generation” and “a new man.” Still he hedges his bets: a careful reader will note that the good news the poem conveys with such joyful certitude is either something that will happen, or something dreamed. In her book about Yiddish revolutionary poetry Music from a Speeding Train, Harriet Murav notes how common this approach is in writing about the promise of the revolution.10 Whenever the transformation is situated, it can never be now. Kvitko adheres to this viewpoint unfailingly. The 1919 cycle ends on an unexpected note: a call for Kvitko himself to forgive the murderers. This moral instruction is external to him. It comes from an apparition who embodies the poet’s forefathers (oves: a nod to the patriarchs of Jewish liturgy, although the apparition and the setting in which he appears are intentionally pagan). “Who can forgive as you can?” asks the pagan-Jewish forefather. The question appears, in shortened form, as the poem’s title, “Forgiveness?” (Mekhile?). It is also the poem’s last line, meaning that there is no response to it. There may be a moral necessity to forgive, but the poet doesn’t act on it. It is part of the tragic arc of Kvitko’s life that he would find himself returning to this question after the Holocaust.

  7 Sabine Koller, “‘The air outside is bloody’: Leyb Kvitko and his Pogrom Cycle 1919,” in Yiddish in Weimar Berlin: At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture, ed. Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (London: Humanities Research Association; Leeds: Maney Pub., 2010), 107.   8 Gospel: Yiddish psures, Hebrew bsorah. It’s true that Kvitko used births, of babies and greenery, as a sign of renewal, but this word has other connotations.   9 Leyb Kvitko, “Nakh der biks,” in his Geklibene verk (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1987), 452–453. 10 Murav, Music from a Speeding Train, 12–14.

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In the meantime, there was (there always would be) his poetry for children, an eternal, safe world in which a shtetl child—what other kind of Yiddishspeaking child lived with animals and trees?—communed with those animals and trees and was independently, joyously inventive. In “The Fiddle” (Dos fidele, 1928), a little boy makes himself a fiddle from a box and a string, a twig and some horse hair.11 So magical is his playing that a bee stops buzzing, birdies abandon their cherries, and a hen forgets about her chicks—but don’t worry: only until the end of the poem. The magic of art and craft is similarly depicted in “Little Fifes” (Fayfelekh, 1930).12 A child finds some hollow, dried out wood, puts holes in it, and blows: music! This time around, forest creatures (insects) are uninterested. But children come to listen and they quickly fashion little fifes for themselves. A different kind of safety is at the core of poems about Jewish normalization: if Jews behave like everyone else, they will blend in like everyone else; there will be no cause to target them. In the next chapter, we will look at a Kvitko poem in which Jewish children long to pet some piglets but are held off by their kind Russian caregiver, Anna-Vanna. That the children’s desire to pet the pigs is straightforward (meaning that Anna-Vanna is not a shadow enforcer of kosher laws) becomes clearer through the context of another piggy poem, “The Pig Eats, We Need to Eat It” (Dos khazer est, me zol es esn, 1936), in which the narrator, the pig himself, talks about how he enjoys Jewish delicacies (fish with horseradish, borsht with kreplakh) so as to be delicious and ready for Jewish consumption.13 The pig cheerfully relates the details of his slaughter and preparation—a step-by-step narrative that mimics the difficulty that the eaters, not the victim, will have in reaching this moment. (That animals get slaughtered is a commonplace of Kvitko’s children’s poems, and even makes an appearance in the “fiddle” poem just cited—that the first step to a chicken soup is a slaughtered chicken is a fact of life, and not a violation of a child’s sense of safety.) Another aspect of normalization, as central to Zionism as it was to various Jewish varieties of socialism, was enthusiastic participation in military service. Kvitko’s poem “A Letter to Comrade Voroshilov” (A briv dem khaver Voroshilov, 1932) was much reprinted and anthologized—and also, in its Russian version, set to music. Like the piglet poem, it could work for a Russian-speaking audience because to the non-initiated there is nothing ethnically specific about a

11 Leyb Kvitko, “Dos fidele,” in his Geklibene verk (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1987), 217–218. 12 Leyb Kvitko, “Fayfelekh,” in his Geklibene verk (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1987), 219–220. 13 Leyb Kvitko, “Dos khazer est, me zol es esn,” in his Geklibene verk (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1987), 124.

Communist Romance and Border Crossings, 1917 through the 1930s

little boy writing to the Red Army hero about his beloved brother who has gone off to be a soldier. Of course, if the boy and the solider are Jews, the new enthusiasm represents a staggering reversal of pre-Soviet practice, which was to avoid the draft at all costs (and which Kvitko describes in detail in his narrative poem Years of Youth [Yunge yorn]). The little letter-writer is oblivious to that history, and even takes in stride the possibility of his beloved brother’s death in battle. He himself is learning to shoot.14 The long life of the Voroshilov poem made it a subject of another characteristic phenomenon that affected Kvitko’s work from time to time: political editing. Who was the enemy the boy, the brother, and the People’s Commissar are all facing? In the poem as printed in the 1976 collected works, it is the fascists who are about to overrun the Soviet land. This was fair game in 1932, when Fascists/Nazis had already been singled out as threatening to the homeland. An article from the newspaper Izvestia in 1930—something Kvitko might well have read—includes this: “The imperialists and social-fascists continue to hide the facts about their preparations for intervention, but the working masses will rise as one to defend the USSR.”15 But what about the period of the MolotovRibbentrop Pact? The poem was reprinted then too. Simple solution: replace “fascists” with “the bourgeoisie,” helped by the fact that in Yiddish, both have three syllables.16 Back in the USSR after his escape from Hamburg, Kvitko was tapped as editor of the Kharkiv journal Red World (Di royter velt). A number of lifechanging events accompanied this move back into Soviet literature and literary politics. First, his neighbor in his collective apartment was the Ukrainian writer Pavlo Tychina, who became entranced with Kvitko’s children’s poetry when it was read to him in translation. Second, Kvitko himself became embroiled in a political mess by including, both in Red World and then in his anthology Struggle (Gerangl), a “caricature” of a powerful figure in Yiddish literary politics. Kvitko’s target, Moyshe Litvakov, was a proponent of the “proletarian” direction in Soviet literature; Kvitko was closer to a rival group, “Construction” (Boy). By the end of the 1920s, arguments about artistic method had real-world consequences: it was well understood that in the top-down context of Soviet governance, one style would emerge triumphant and the others would be suppressed. Kvitko’s satirical poem was not subtle: Litvakov (Moyli, from the first

14 Leyb Kvitko, “A briv dem khaver Voroshilov,” in his Geklibene verk (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1987), 213–214. 15 Izvestiia, December 12, 1930. 16 Leyb Kvitko, Lebedik un freylekh (Moscow: Der Emes, 1939), 103.

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syllables of his name) is pictured as a “stinkbird” who propels stink down to writers from his perch on the roof of their building. Litvakov responded by calling the poem “anti-Soviet” and the poet “a dangerous element.”17 It is interesting to contrast what happened to Kvitko with a similar moment in the career of a famous Jewish contemporary of his, the cartoonist Boris Yefimov. For the magazine Searchlight (Prozhektor), Yefimov had drawn a caricature of Stalin, depicted in outsized boots. The editors showed the cartoon to the target himself, who didn’t approve. But nothing happened to the cartoonist. Perhaps the difference was the year: Yefimov’s overreach came in 1927. When Kvitko took on Litvakov a mere two years later, the Soviet Union was in the midst of what was called “The Great Breakthrough,” a transition to out-andout Stalinism. At a meeting of the Jewish Section of the Moscow Association of Proletarian Writers, Kvitko was accused of being a right deviationist, among other offenses, and was fired from the journal. Kvitko responded to the Litvakov affair on several fronts. First, he appealed to his handler from his arms-smuggling days in Hamburg—that handler, a pseudonymous “Yevgeny Petrovich Minaev,” was then in Kyiv. According to Kvitko’s testimony at the 1952 trial, Minaev saved him. He declared that the poet’s work at the port outweighed any criticism on the part of the Yevsektsia and shortly thereafter the writers’ organization that was causing the problems was shut down.18 But Minaev’s intervention, assuming it even took place, was likely not decisive. Kvitko also took a different kind of action: he got a job as an apprentice lathe operator in the Kharkiv tractor factory. In the next chapter, we will run into some Jewish young people putting in time at a factory job to obliterate the stains of their parents’ occupations and acquire proletarian status. The reputation Kvitko needed to clear was his own.

17 David Shneer, Yiddish and the Making of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 174. Shneer’s book has a comprehensive reading of the whole affair, including the poem in Yiddish and in translation. Other important details are given in Gennady Estraikh, “The Kharkiv Yiddish Literary World, 1920s–mid-1930s,” East European Jewish Affairs 32, no. 2 (2004): 82–83. Also worth contemplating is that Litvakov himself, however villainous, was not unaware. Just a few years earlier, sometime in 1924–1925, he had cautioned a visiting American enthusiast, the Yiddish socialist Morris Winchevsky, that the Russians “would teach him how even in old age one has to know how not to deviate from the right path.” Daniel Soyer, “Back to the Future: American Jews Visit the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s,” Jewish Social Studies 6, no. 3 (Spring–Summer 2000): 140. 18 Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 96.

Communist Romance and Border Crossings, 1917 through the 1930s

He could also use his factory job as material for the kind of literature that would return him to a safe place in Soviet letters. (His childhood employment would not have qualified him as a proletarian: in the Marxist context, only factory work counted.) The result was a collection of poems called “In the shop” (In tsekh), in which modernist shock and complexity were replaced by the straightforward viewpoint of a worker. But political winds are hard to forecast, and Kvitko’s results fell short. As Mikhail Krutikov points out, the poet was criticized for failing to show the important role played by the Party.19 Salvation came from the children’s writer and all-around intellectual Kornei Chukovsky, who got hooked on the charm and craft of Kvitko’s children’s poems through the translations of Tychina and some others.20 Chukovsky would himself emerge from the Stalin years largely unscathed, both personally and ethically. His powers were not unlimited; he could not save his own sonin-law, a Jewish physicist who would be executed in the course of the Terror. But in the context of the early thirties, he could and did save Kvitko, who would become his lifelong friend. In the short-term, this meant promoting Kvitko at a children’s literature conference that took place in Kharkiv in 1933 and calling him an “outstanding master,” at a similar event in 1936. Chukovsky rebranded Yiddish Leyb as Russian Lev, and—to borrow the acerbic wording of Gennady Estraikh—turned the new combination Lev Kvitko into a household name.21 In the ensuing years, right up to the Terror, translators fought over the rights to turn Kvitko’s poems into Russian. Kvitko’s poems were set to music— by Prokofiev, as we will see, and also by others, including Mieczyslaw Weinberg, a student of Shostakovich who was also the son-in-law of Mikhoels, the famous Yiddish actor and head of the Jewish Antifascist Committee whose murder in January 1948 would set off the events that lead to the deaths of Kvitko, Lozovsky, and eleven others. In the meantime, in 1933, Kvitko was singled out as “an example of considerable transformation.”22 In 1936, he moved to Moscow.

19 Mikhail Krutikov, “An End to Fairy Tales: The 1930s in the mayselekh of Der Nister and Leyb Kvitko,” in Children and Yiddish Literature: From Early Modernity to Post-Modernity, ed. Gennady Estraikh, Kerstin Hoge, and Mikhail Krutikov (Cambridge, MA: Legenda; and New York: Routledge, 2016), 112. 20 Tychina was studying Yiddish, but many translations into Russian were done by writers working from somebody’s word-for-word rendering. 21 Gennady Estraikh, “Leyb Kvitko,” in The Yivo Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon Hundert, v. 1 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1984), 959. 22 Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 138.

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Solomon Lozovsky: Fighter, Compromiser, Fiction Writer Lozovsky’s motivations in the years immediately following the revolution were principled, goal-oriented, and marked by a strong belief in his own abilities. He compromised when necessary, but at least in the years we examine here, he did not compromise in advance. His expertise at this point was as a labor leader. This put him in a contentious situation in the immediate postrevolutionary years, when the problem of what to do with workers loomed large. How much control should they have? Conversely, how much control should the state have over them? Workers had been drawn to the revolution because it offered them autonomy—but what did that mean in reality? Full autonomy skirted anarcho-syndicalism, a branch of anarchism that envisioned workers controlling their own workplaces, coordinated through some kind of federation. This was enticing as a rallying cry, as Lenin had employed it. But in postrevolutionary Russia it didn’t work: put even into partial practice, it was leading to chaos.23 Lozovsky saw that. After breaking with the Bolsheviks, he referred to economic collapse and “starvation in the Russian land.”24 Some kind of change was needed. Lenin pushed for “statization” (ogosudarstvlenie), the subordination of worker-run enterprises to the state bureaucracy. Lozovsky fought him, taking a position between what the anarchists wanted—the elevation of any workers’ group, however arbitrary or small—and actual professional labor unions, which he saw as representing what workers had in mind when they made the revolution. He called for an “organized” and “principled” barrier between the trade unions and the “present government.”25 That was a strikingly dismissive way of referring to the Bolsheviks. Ultimately, if only for a time, he saw Bolshevik power as a direct threat to the wellbeing of the proletariat.26 Lozovsky’s opposition had not taken long to develop. Mere weeks after the revolution, his objections to the party were on full polemical display. Writing

23 Paul H. Avrich, “The Bolshevik Revolution and Workers’ Control in Russian Industry,” Slavic Review 22, no. 1 (1963): 54. 24 Shamberg, Lozovskii, 219–222. 25 Ibid., 200. 26 For Lozovsky’s objections, see ibid., 313–317. The question of “statization” was resolved positively at Tenth Party Congress in 1921 (ibid., 356–360), at which point the phrase “unions as a school for communism” was put into play. See also D. O. Churakov, Russkaia revoliiutsiia i rabochee samoupravlenie 1917 (Moscow: AIRO-XX, 1998), 116.

Communist Romance and Border Crossings, 1917 through the 1930s

in Gorky’s independent newspaper New Life (Novaia zhizn′), he let loose with an impassioned screed, each paragraph beginning with the phrase “I cannot in the name of party discipline be silent.” In the light of what happened in the late 1930s, when he was silent because he, like everyone else, feared for his life—and in the light of what happened during the trial, when he threw everything to the wind and resumed his ringing opposition—his words in November 1917 are at once chilling and poignant. What could he not be silent about? The destruction of the dissident press. Suppression of strikes. Political arrests. The idea that “for the sake of one of our own we’ll kill five enemies.” The “cult of personality.”27 In response, Lenin personally expelled him from the Party. It was his second expulsion. For two years, from December 1917 to December 1919, Lozovsky promoted his own faction, the Social Democrats (internationalist). Under the aegis of this fledgling group, he declared that the Bolsheviks had made a grievous error in trying to propel their backward, peasant empire directly into socialism—a classic Marxist position, but not the Marxist-Leninist one. Lozovsky added the additional complaint that in precipitating the revolution prematurely, the Bolsheviks had uprooted the structures of democratic self-government.28 His group never got much traction. Just as important, staying outside the Party proved personally unsustainable for him. His grandson Vladimir Shamberg describes what he must have been feeling: “To be alone, outside of the Party or a group, was something Lozovsky was unused to, couldn’t manage, and didn’t want.”29 At the 1952 trial, Lozovsky explained his return to the Bolsheviks this way: an “old” textile worker speaking on behalf of “Ilyich” (Lenin, with folksy respect) asked him to take over the leadership of the Textile Workers Union. The sentimental combination of “Ilyich” and the old worker is best understood in the context of that trial. Lozovsky, in a desperate situation, was trying to showcase his Bolshevik credentials and Lenin’s personal concern for him. Of

27 Shamberg, Lozovskii, 192–193. At the trial, talking about New Life, Lozovsky said that the newspaper was trying to promote friendly criticism, that people on the editorial board opposed that, and that “fortunately, New Life was soon shut down.” Ibid., 215. This sequence does not appear in the published transcript, which has cuts. Shamberg’s footnote is to the FSB file. 28 Ibid., 242. 29 Ibid., 213.

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course, it is likely that Lenin actually wanted his fiery orator back and was using the proletarian emissary to reel him in.30 At various other points in the trial, Lozovsky offered additional reasons for rejoining.31 One was emotional: the assassination attempt against Lenin in August 1918. A second was hopeful: the founding of the Third Communist International (Comintern) in March 1919, understood as an important step toward world revolution. Like many others—we will see this in the Ulanovskys in the next chapter—Lozovsky saw Russian Bolshevism as egregiously flawed. But world revolution remained a shining goal. Speaking at the trial, Lozovsky emphasized his faith in Lenin and world revolution by citing Lenin’s “prophetic” prediction of a revolution in Germany.32 Logically, this doesn’t follow: the 1919 revolt, which resulted in the creation of the Weimar Republic, was anything but a harbinger of Communism worldwide. Later Soviets more commonly oriented towards a different German revolution, the Spartacist Uprising led by the canonic Marxists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. At the time of Lozovsky’s return to Bolshevism, the Spartacist Uprising had not yet taken place, and when it did, one month later, it failed. Perhaps Lozovsky saw the failures as prelude. More likely, he wanted to get back into the game; there was no life outside. Lozovsky’s reabsorption into the Party was quickly followed by his reappearance on the global stage. His new organization, the Profintern, was founded in 1921 to use the labor movement abroad as a “school for communism.”33 Lozovsky became its director and remained so for seventeen years, until the organization itself was disbanded. It was as director of the Profintern that he employed Alexander Ulanovsky and Ulanovsky’s sidekick George Mink, whom we will meet in the next chapter; both had the task of agitating among port workers in Hamburg and New York.34 Like all such organizations, the Profintern had a closely placed rival against which much ink was expended, including Lozovsky’s. The Amsterdam International (formally, The International Federation of Trade Unions) was much larger, socialist rather than communist, and had no interest in subordinating itself to the Bolsheviks. Lozovsky described it as an arm of capitalism.35

30 Ibid., 212–213; this sequence does not appear in the published transcript, which has cuts. Shamberg’s footnote is to the FSB file. 31 Ibid., 183 and 243. 32 Ibid., 282. 33 Ibid., 367. 34 Edward Hallett Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 3:208. 35 Shamberg, Lozovskii, 378.

Communist Romance and Border Crossings, 1917 through the 1930s

In the course of his Profintern years, Lozovsky made both legal and illegal trips abroad. At the trial, he gave a summary: France, Germany, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, China. A more colorful accounting comes from his fictionalized memoir, “Evenings of Impromptu Conversations.”36 Earlier, we looked at the introduction to “Evenings” and two of its chapters. In all, it is a collection of eight stories told by an Old Bolshevik who shares Lozovsky’s age and precise physical build. Like the prerevolutionary stories about the Alafuzov factory and the hero’s escape from Siberia, the stories about the 1920s are full of adventure. Writing for his family—in any event, not for publication—Lozovsky is ideologically orthodox and never introspective: he may not have been inclined to introspection, though it should be noted that unlike Ulanovskaya or Leder, he did not have the opportunity. He is, however, a master of swashbuckling narrative, and, to the extent that the stories are true, shows the kind of self-control in the face of danger that would be amply on display in 1952. The stories also reveal an otherwise hidden comic side. Lozovsky’s fourth story, a triumphant spy farce, takes place in 1922. The author is summoned to “a certain place” and told to prepare for a trip to France. Assuming the persona of a French factory owner, he gets a new name, a passport, a fancy suit, a watch with a gold chain, and two gold rings. But his black beard, well-known to the French police from his prerevolutionary years in Paris, could give him away. With time running out, he cuts the beard, fashions a handlebar mustache, and dyes them both brown. The dye doesn’t work. The beard of the presumed French factory owner turns a disturbing green, and shaving it off is not an option because of the passport. Trapped on his train, the quick-thinking hero wraps a handkerchief around his mouth and chin, suggesting a toothache. This takes him straight through to Berlin, where he sees a professional barber and the story is over—either in fact or as borrowed from its famous literary precedent. The bumbling antihero of the Ilf and Petrov satire The Twelve Chairs, published in 1928, tries to dye his mustache black, but it also turns green. Perhaps the problem was Soviet hair dye.37 But the story continues. The Lozovsky character, beard fixed, moves on to Lyon, where he passes himself off as a bicycle salesman and delivers his speech. Then, on the way to his next speech, he discovers the police are after him. Thinking quickly, he places a Communist teenager at each of the hall’s two

36 Lozovskii, “Vechera.” Shamberg’s Lozovskii has some quotes from this source. 37 Shamberg, Lozovskii, 410–412.

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telephones. He gets a car from a sympathetic French businessman and engages that man’s sister to play a role in his escape. The narrative slows down: the speech lasts two hours. Lozovsky patiently explains the dictatorship of the proletariat, discusses the relationship of the proletariat to the state—the very point of his opposition to Lenin, now forgotten— and exposes the weaknesses of anarcho-syndicalism. The anarcho-syndicalists in the audience leave in despair, and everyone else cheers. “Evenings of Impromptu Conversations” was written in 1936. This was a transitional year, in some ways full of honor and satiety, and in other ways frightening. In many respects, Lozovsky had made it. His apartment was in the exclusive House on the Embankment, whose politically connected residents enjoyed, within Soviet limits, a stratospheric level of material comfort.38 Their children, Lozovsky’s included, intermarried among themselves—and if further significant political ties were needed, Lozovsky’s daughter Vera was now the personal secretary to Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow. But the wellbeing was conditional. It was wholly dependent on the state, and the events of 1936 were the opening salvos in the Terror that would sweep over the intelligentsia, and especially its Party contingent, in 1937 and 1938. The year began with the murder of the Leningrad Party boss Sergei Kirov; in its wake, tens of thousands of people were arrested. Then came the public denunciation of the composer Shostakovich. August saw the First Moscow Trial, in which Stalin’s close political associates were accused of sedition, confessed publicly, and were sentenced to death. We should also pay attention to an event that happened one year earlier, when Stalin closed two organizations that had rewarded pre-1917 revolutionaries. One was the Society of Old Bolsheviks and the other the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiles. The first seven stories in “Evenings of Impromptu Conversation” are all about Lozovsky as an Old Bolshevik who had amazing adventures, many of them as a political prisoner in Siberian exile. Lozovsky’s eighth story is different. Its opening retains the frame of the earlier seven: young members of the Komsomol are listening to an older man spin Communist adventure tales from real life. This time, though, when the young people ask for a new story, their language is about as far as you can get from impromptu conversation. Their vocabulary is political and contemporary

38 Yury Trifonov’s famous 1976 novel, Dom na naberezhnoi (House on the Embankment), is about the residents of this building during the 1930s, as is Slezkine’s The House of Government. Slezkine tracks the Lozovsky family to apartment 16 where his tailor father-in-law Abram Shamberg was also resident. Slezkine, The House of Government, 260–261.

Communist Romance and Border Crossings, 1917 through the 1930s

in the most threatening sense. “Comrade chairman,” says one of them, “would it be possible to hear a story about how our enemies have deceived us? It’s hard to be vigilant if you don’t know their qualities and methods of sabotage.” The story-teller who responds is not the Lozovsky stand-in we saw earlier. He is thin rather than stocky, and, probably more to the point, younger by some twenty years. He is not, in other words, an out-of-favor Old Bolshevik. But this new narrator has also worked abroad and, like the real Lozovsky, is “still writing books and pamphlets.” As the story develops, we learn that a committee at his workplace is combing through his papers. Perhaps they will discover “some formulation that in this specific moment is incorrect?”39 The narrator is beside himself with anxiety. He feels that “he is surrounded on all sides, that the noose is tightening around his neck.” He feels that he is “drowning,” that he is “close to a state of hopelessness.” Here we are clearly in a place of Lozovsky’s personal fear and despair. What is the cause of this new situation? Lozovsky contrives an answer: the narrator’s workplace has been taken over by new people who have been busy embezzling state funds. They have a protector one level up, a Communist who is “masquerading” as an Old Bolshevik. This new contingent does not care about the suffering of people who petition them. Its members travel abroad, but for nefarious reasons. But there are limits to what Lozovsky would write, or maybe feel: we are not, however we might desire it, in the realm of protodissident literature. And so, the henchmen of this vile gang have appropriately suspect, mostly non-Russian, backgrounds. One is from Baku; others are Polish, Romanian, and Hungarian.40 A reader might think that as political immigrants, they are committed communists. That is a cover: in fact, they are spies, engaged in (as the phrase went) “wrecking.” With nobody at his level to help him, the narrator does the only thing possible: he writes, as people actually did, a letter to Stalin. In two weeks, Stalin responds, and the gang is disbursed. The whole truth emerges only later, after “the Party uprooted the nests of Trotskyist spies and right-wing deviationists that had entrenched themselves in our country.” The reference is to the First Moscow Trial, which focused on “right deviationists” alongside the demonized Trotsky himself (in absentia). The narrator has tied his liberation, and the country’s, to the intercession of Stalin and the eradication of the anti-Stalinist opposition. “But what happened to [the main villains]?,” asks

39 Lozovskii, “Vechera.” Italics mine. 40 One is from Tbilisi, which is hard to explain (Stalin was, of course, Georgian).

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a Komsomol listener. “Where are they now?” chime in more voices. “Don’t worry, comrades,” answers the narrator. “They now find themselves in a place where further wrecking is utterly impossible.”

Lina Shtern: A Career in Science and a Fateful Choice Shtern was born in 1878, in Liepaja (Libau/Libave), Latvia. Unlike everyone else we are looking at, she grew up in a well-to-do, urban family—Jewish, of course, but already emancipated from religious practice. Emancipation came with the territory: when Courland—southwestern Latvia—was taken over by the Russian Empire in 1795, it was not designated part of the Pale of Settlement, meaning that its Jews were considerably freer than Jews in Ukraine or Belarus. At home, the Shterns spoke German, still the language of high culture. Multilingualism was a fact of life among Jews of all social levels. Shtern’s particular set, including all the major languages of western Europe and excluding Yiddish, Hebrew, and Latvian, was standard for her class of elite Jews. It was thus, in its own way, Jewish, as were the professional paths of her eight siblings, which embraced science, classical music, and business. It does not seem as though most of them survived the war. Bruno Shtern, her younger brother, became a businessman in America. The two remained close. In the March 1948 memo sent from the Ministry of State Security (MGB) to Stalin and Molotov listing the names of the future Antifascist Committee defendants, then still freely walking the streets, Bruno Shtern’s name was prominent in the counts against Lina. According to the memo, he was an important businessman (in 1948, this is highly doubtful) living in America (he was in Vienna), and “connected to important Jewish nationalist activists.”41 While Shtern was a brilliant student at gimnazia, going on to the university was a problem, despite apparently repeated tries.42 As a woman and a Jew, she had two strikes against her. Discriminatory quotas in higher education had been set by the 1887 quota: ten percent for the vast majority of Jews living in the Pale; five percent outside; three percent for residents of Moscow and Petersburg. It is

41 Shimon Redlikh and Gennadii Kostyrchenko, eds., Evreiskii Antifashistskii Komitet v SSSR 1941–1948: Dokumental′naia istoriia (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1996), 361. 42 Boris Malkin, “Trudnye gody Liny Shtern,” in Tragicheskie sud′by: repressirovannye uchenye Akademii nauk SSSR (Moscow: Nauka, 1995), 156–181; Alla A. Vein, “Science and Fate: Lina Shtern (1869–1968), a Neurophysiologist and Biochemist,” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 17 (2008): 196.

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unclear why she didn’t consider the Higher Women’s Courses with its branches in St. Petersburg and Moscow, where medicine was a particular draw. In any case, like many Russian emigres, both male and female, she wound up at the University of Geneva. Her scientific career in Geneva was meteoric. She arrived at age twenty, in 1898, and while still a student began working under the physiologist Jean-Louis Prevost. Her first scientific article came out in 1902 and her thesis, which made her a doctor of medicine, in 1903. Intending to practice medicine in Russia, she returned home and took the appropriate exams. But she didn’t stay, choosing instead to accept Prevost’s invitation to work under him in Geneva. The return to Europe was spurred by science and career: an understandable pair of reasons that were not replicated in her motivations to return to Russia a quarter century later. Shtern went on to work with Frederic Battelli, ten years her senior. The researcher Alla Vein reports that between 1904 and 1922, Battelli and Shtern published fifty-four articles on cellular metabolism. Their work was a significant element in establishing what later became known as the Krebs or citric acid cycle, the series of chemical reactions involved in cell respiration. In 1918, she became a professor in the newly established Department of Physiology, and Geneva’s first female professor.43 The number of Russian students at the University of Geneva was remarkable—nearly half of the entire student body in the years 1907–1908.44 Geneva itself hosted a Russian political diaspora that included Lenin (resident 1902– 1905) and the Marxist theorist Georgy Plekhanov (resident for most of his adult life, beginning in 1880). Shtern spent some time living at a boarding house run by Plekhanov’s family, where she became close to his wife and daughters.45 An ultimately more important figure in her life was Aleksei Bakh. In addition to his activities as a biochemist with a focus on cell respiration, Bakh was a baptized Jew and alumnus of the Russian radical movement People’s Will. Both Plekhanov and Bakh returned to Russia in 1917. Plekhanov, who had major disagreements with Lenin, left soon after the Bolsheviks took over. But Bakh stayed, thrived, and ultimately invited Shtern to join him there as head of the Physiology Department at the Second Moscow University.

43 Vein, “Science and Fate,” 198. 44 Vein, “Science and Fate,” 196. 45 Malkin, “Trudnye gody,” 157. At the trial, Shtern says that when she was young, she dreamed of being a heroine and wanted to sacrifice her life. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 333.

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Shtern was by all accounts well-off at the University of Geneva. She was working productively; she had money and a social circle. Yakov Rapoport, a later colleague and close friend, describes her move as impulsive, a product of adventurism and naïveté.46 Naïveté—real and in some instances feigned—is a trait that is attached to Shtern often, in contradiction to her brilliance as a researcher. Boris Malkin, who became her student, says that she grew up idolizing Turgenev’s idealist heroines and the real-life revolutionary Sofia Perovskaya. Perovskaya had been hanged for her part in assassinating the liberal—but not liberal enough—Alexander II. Adolescent infatuations with Turgenev and Perovskaya were commonplace. Few people acted on them, and fewer still at the age of forty-eight. Shtern’s colleagues in Geneva were horrified and tried to dissuade her. They kept her position and an apartment open for her for five years. She wasn’t tempted—a fact that she would relate at the trial as evidence of her Soviet loyalty. Shtern arrived in the USSR in 1925, on a date (March 31) that she would celebrate throughout her life as a second birthday, a rebirth: as we have seen with Kvitko, Soviet Marxism exerted a quasi-religious pull on atheists of all kinds. She exulted, says Malkin, in the fact that Soviet citizens addressed each other as comrade. In addition to her scientific articles (forty-nine in her first three years), she wrote political essays for a general audience.47 It is not clear that she wrote these herself, or merely signed them. But she associated with a lot of Old Bolsheviks. One of them, Nikolai Krestinsky, was an acquaintance from her Geneva days, and would distinguish himself by his courage at the BukharinRykov trial, the third of the infamous Moscow Show Trials. Did she believe her friend Krestinsky was a traitor? Did she believe the same of her cousin Nina Strievskaya, arrested in 1937? Malkin says of her that she had “complete trust” in the official press.48 What we know for sure is that in 1938, after trying for eight years, she became a member of the Party. Despite some obstacles—she did not, for example, get along with Ivan Pavlov, the dean of Russian physiology—her scientific productivity was formidable. In addition to chairing the Department of Physiology, she organized two laboratories, in the Mechnikov Medical-Biological Institute and the Institute for Infectious Diseases. When the Second Moscow University was reorganized

46 Iakov Rapoport, Na rubezhe dvukh epokh: delo vrachei 1953 goda (Moscow: Kniga, 1988), 236. 47 Malkin, “Trudnye gody,” 160, mentions “comrade” and political articles; the number of scientific articles is given by Vein, “Science and Fate.” 48 Malkin, “Trudnye gody,” 160.

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into separate institutes, she became the head of its Institute for Physiology. Her work focused on the blood-brain barrier, and connected with that, the introduction of therapeutic agents into the spinal fluid; she also worked on cardiac defibrillation. Until the mid-1930s, she was able to travel abroad. While her primary reason for travel was research-related—even at the trial, she did not relinquish her advocacy for internationalism in science—another draw was the remnants of a romantic relationship with a British biochemist. At some point when she was still based in Geneva the two had plans to marry, but this seemed to entail her abandoning science, so she refused. Such contact as they had broke off when she no longer had permission to attend foreign conferences.49 Otherwise, honors accrued. Like Lozovsky and Kvitko, Shtern was rewarded materially: a private apartment; a car and driver. In 1934, she became a Distinguished Scientist of the Russian Republic. In 1939, the height of the Terror, she became a full member of the Academy of Sciences, the first woman to attain that position.

Doba-Mera Medvedeva: Two Borders, Poor Choices This is a chapter about border crossings, but with two minor exceptions. DobaMera Medvedeva doesn’t cross any. The possibility of emigration comes up and is immediately discarded. As everybody else’s world expands, for better or for worse, Doba-Mera’s contracts. With respect to communism, her romance also ends early. Revolutionary circles were a feature of her life as a working girl in the years between 1905 and 1909. After that, she marries. In our first chapter, we saw a strict division between Doba-Mera’s family life, which was almost uniformly oppressive, and her working life, which paradoxically—for all the exploitation—held promise. After her marriage, she works, but without the expectation of a better future either for herself or all humankind. The first minor exception came in 1909, when she accompanied her father to see a cancer specialist in Kyiv. Kyiv was across the border in the sense that it was outside the Pale. Officially, 50,000 Jews had residency permits, which explains the presence of the Brodsky Hospital, established for Jews by the famous Jewish sugar magnate. Jews from the Pale were not allowed to stay in the city, and those who did anyway were subject to occasional night-time

49 Rapoport, Na rubezhe, 238.

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raids. “At night,” writes Doba-Mera, “they would hunt down Jews, as though they were hunting wolves. And then they would march them in huge groups, like prisoners, back to the Pale.”50 Sholem Aleichem also describes the raids, but with humor: bribery smoothed out a lot. Jews could stay in the city’s Podol district, leading to a situation where some worked or even maintained apartments outside the Podol, but returned there at night. Doba-Mera describes the Podol’s overcrowding, as well as the wealth and beauty of the city: she was seeing an urban center for the first time. Armed with a letter of introduction from Aunt Gesia, she and her father found lodging and were given money, another manifestation of the Jewish network that united distant family just as the constant strife tore them apart. After her father’s death—because the specialists could do nothing for him—Doba-Mera was pressured to marry. A distant cousin, Abram Medvedev, courted her. It is not clear that she ever loved him, but of course she was writing in retrospect, and the marriage, while full of mutual desperate concern, was unhappy. Her long account of their courtship is about family opposition, which is itself about money: not money to live well, but money to barely survive. Doba-Mera did not have a dowry. She says at one point that had she been able to work for a few more years, she would have acquired one. That was, in fact, the working model of her counterparts in Jewish immigrant New York: in that parallel world, seamstresses like Doba-Mera acquired dowries by working, and used the money to choose their own husbands. It helped that for many of them, family was distant. In Doba-Mera’s case, family was right there. Represented by Aunt Gesia, they saw her as a financial burden and were unwilling to provide a dowry. On the other hand, they were concerned and wanted her reasonably settled. Various suitors appeared, all of whom, in retrospect, might have been better. Doba-Mera was proposed marriage to a different Medvedev, who was older and better-off. She refused, because she was a modern girl. Then Abram proposed emigrating to America, a common and obvious solution for Jews in their position. His father summoned Doba-Mera for a talk: “why was I taking their son away and making him go to America?” She immediately promised to stay—but for what reason? Writing in 1939, Doba-Mera presents herself as embattled but independent. With respect to emigration, which comes up more than once—Abram really considered leaving—Doba-Mera finds virtue in her own obedience. Perhaps she was afraid.

50 Beizer and Nakhimovsky, Daughter of the Shtetl, 101.

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Assured that his son and eventual daughter-in-law would stick around, Abram’s father embarked on a nasty stratagem: he invited Doba-Mera to live with his family for a few weeks. Explaining the social codes of that lost world— Doba-Mera is writing, after all, for her Soviet grandchildren—she says that staying with a future in-law was plausible in the case of a bride who lived far away. For Doba-Mera, who lived right there, the unusual move was bound to give rise to rumors. She would be neither free nor married, a situation that would put pressure on her relatives. But in the end, his scheme failed. The early years of the Medvedev marriage involved difficulties with housing, serial illness, fear of the draft, and of course babies: three by the fateful year 1917. Abram’s father died, leaving a family of nine children in a house “with bare walls”—in other words, the furniture had been sold to pay debts. All of these people lived on the edge. Doba-Mera did not resume tailoring, which would have involved impossible hours in someone’s home shop. Instead, she made and sold kefir to wellto-do dachniki—people with summer houses outside of Klintsy. When World War I started, she sewed, likely at home. The product was sheepskin coats for the front, an enterprise that seems to have involved tanning the skins herself. It was dirty and dangerous. Aside from her sewing, what Doba-Mera notes most about the war were the accusations that Jews were helping Germans—and later, rumors that when Bolsheviks took over they would retaliate by killing Jews. There was not much time between the first set of rumors and the second. The Bolshevik revolution was followed shortly by the civil war. Klintsy was taken over by the Ukrainian Hetmanate, allied with Germans, and then fell to the anti-Bolshevik Petliura, who had joined forces with the Poles to fight for an independent Ukraine. The Bolshevik general Nikolai Shchors fought both, and eventually captured the city. Doba-Mera’s account of those months is terse, showcasing her allegiance with the Bolsheviks. She mentions the Cheka—the dreaded Bolshevik secret police—but in the context that only rich Jews fled on their account; in fact, the Cheka believed only those informants who told the truth. She and Abram stayed. They had a bakery, and supplied bread for Shchors himself, who thanked them personally. What happened next is missing from her story. According to her grandson, the historian Michael Beizer, Abram remained a baker through the New Economic Policy period, when the communist future was postponed for an interval of small-time free enterprise. When NEP ended, people who had engaged in it were classified as lishentsy, individuals deprived of the right to vote; more important, their children could not get higher education without

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first working in a factory. Doba-Mera does not mention this interval. Nor, for reasons we will see later, do we learn how and when the family left Klintsy for Leningrad. Laws restricting Jews to the Pale had been lifted after the February Revolution, and when it became safe to do so, Jews migrated to the large cities in great numbers. That was the second border crossing, made possible because border itself had been abrogated. In Leningrad, Jews became nearly 5% of the population, the largest of the ethnic minorities in the city.51

51 Michael Beizer, Evrei Leningrada, 1917–1939. Natsional′naia zhizn′ i sovetizatsiia ( Jerusalem: Gesharim: Mosty kul′tury, 1999), 80–81.

3

Communist Romance and Border Crossings, 1917 through the 1930s: Part II In this chapter, we follow the border crossings of three new characters. They were startlingly young. At the start of her journey, Nadya (Nadezhda) Ulanovskaya was a swashbuckling, ideologically committed teenager. She grew in consciousness and contradiction as she went abroad as an undercover agitator and spy. Mary Leder, another teenager, traveled from California to the Jewish agricultural settlement in Birobidzhan on the Soviet-Chinese border. Her parents were leftists and so was she, but she made no decisions. She was trapped in her parents’ dreams. The same might be said of Lilliana Lungina, who was even younger, except that her mother was not dreaming of utopia. What she sought, and never achieved, was safety. All three women wrote (or in the case of Lungina, spoke) their memoirs in old age. They had at their disposal not only the insider-outsider perspective of their years outside the Soviet Union, but the benefit of time to reassess. In their memoirs, all three try to reconstruct their thinking at the time when they first became aware of discrepancies between their revolutionary values and the Soviet facts on the ground. They either chose belief (Ulanovskaya) or were not in a position to do anything but adapt (Leder and Lungina specifically, but in a broader sense everybody in this book). In any case, it was easy to understand the discrepancies as temporary. A socially just state would come into being soon, not only in the Soviet Union, but also in Europe, the United States, and China. One of the things that unite Ulanovskaya, Lungina, and Leder—and also Lozovsky and Shtern—is their multilingualism. Migration and multilingualism were a long-standing part of the Jewish experience. In the case of these twentieth-century Jews, multiple reasons fed into their extraordinary linguistic facility. Shtern grew up in a border country, Latvia, in a family that envisioned

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passage into the European elite. It is telling that they had no interest in teaching their daughter Latvian (low-class), Hebrew (unnecessary and too Jewish), and also Yiddish (low-class, unnecessary, and too Jewish). In this chapter, Lungina comes to her multiple languages a generation after Lozovsky, through her father who was a Soviet trade representative in Berlin. Soviet trade representative was a position that, in the 1920s, was held by many Jews, in part because they had languages. The success of all these people in merging with other cultures was an impressive combination of necessity and chutzpah—because their linguistic facility was not always stellar. Alexander Ulanovsky, Nadya’s husband, was a spy and ultimately Station Chief in New York City. He passed himself off as German, though he couldn’t even write in German. New York was of course full of immigrants and indulgent toward accents, and Ulanovsky hung out mostly with Communists. But indulgence was never a feature in France, where Lozovsky, as we saw, made his way as a native despite having no formal schooling beyond the elementary, religiously focused cheder. In some of these lives, the Jewish factor was muted; in others, it was strong. Like Lozovsky and Shtern in the last chapter, the Ulanovskys had moved into a wider world and were not looking back; they were communist universalists. But the world of spies and, in the United States, Soviet sympathizers, was heavily Jewish—and so, without willing it at all, at the time of their residence In New York, the Ulanovskys interacted with a lot of Jews. Whittaker Chambers, at that point still a Communist, was an exception. But his wife was Jewish. Mary Leder’s situation was more intentionally Jewish: Birobidzhan, the object of her parents’ socialist fantasies, was created as a Soviet and Yiddish counterpart to Hebrew Palestine. The life of the family there—in the few months that they stayed—was a Soviet life, lived in Yiddish.

Nadezhda and Alexander Ulanovsky: Anarchism to Espionage In the civil war year 1920, the once Esther Fridgant became Nadya (Nadezhda) Ulanovskaya. The Ulanovsky marriage came into being through food, or, to be more charitable, love expressing itself as a ration card. The bride was not aware that she had married. She found out on receipt of a document moving her— as the wife of a fighter on an armored train—a step higher on the distribution hierarchy.

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Alexander Ulanovsky’s gesture promised at least comparative wellbeing. But even this level was not attainable. First Nadya contracted typhus, a disease of poverty and chaos. Then she was told that her Alyosha—Alexander—had been shot dead. On the basis of that not unexpected information, she formed a new relationship with a kind young man named Viktor, because what else was there to do? She was seventeen. Over the foundational months of the Ulanovsky marriage, adolescent love and betrayal played themselves out against the violent backdrop of the whole revolutionary enterprise. Soon enough Aloysha reappeared, quite alive and with a present for his bride: a brand-named pistol. (“In our circles,” writes Nadya, “it was fashionable to give girls Brownings.”1) She told him that she was married to Viktor—in the early Soviet years, the concept of marriage was fluid. Alyosha decided to get her back, using for the purpose his one unbeatable argument: he’d been tapped for an assignment abroad, and needed the two of them to work together for world revolution. That proved decisive: Nadya agreed to accompany him. A despondent Viktor asked for the Browning and proceeded to shoot himself. He recovered, as it turned out much later. Relating these events after many decades, Nadya is almost emotionless. Given the time and place, the grotesqueness was inescapable. The only thing that was escapable was the choice to join the revolution. But not joining, and even trying to flee, was no guarantee of safety. Take Nadya’s own family: on a trip to Odessa, she learned that her father and little brother had died of typhus. Her mother had sold the apartment and sought to save her other little child by going back to their shtetl, but that child—a brother or a sister, Nadya never even says—died on the road. Nadya returned without seeing anyone. As they prepared to go abroad, the Ulanovskys stopped in Moscow. As government-funded revolutionaries, they were well-dressed and well-supplied, but the city was hungry. That was one inescapable contradiction. A second one, more overtly ideological, came in the form of a visit to the famous anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, recently deported from the United States. At the time, Lenin’s party was maintaining an uneasy truce with Russian anarchists. This rapprochement enabled Goldman to meet with Lenin

1 Maia Ulanovskaia, and Nadezhda Ulanovskaia, Istoriia odnoi sem′i (New York: Chalidze Publications, 1982), 55. All citations are to this edition. There is an English translation: Maya Ulanovskaya and Nadezhda Ulanovskaya, The Family Story, trans. Stefani Hoffman (Hanover, NH: Seven Arts, 2016).

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and herself hold court in a room at Moscow’s elite Hotel Natsional.2 Alyosha was much younger than Goldman but likewise an anarchist engaged with Bolsheviks. He went to see the famous couple, and Nadya tagged along. Goldman was, at that point, seriously disillusioned. As an anarchist, she was in principle opposed to the state control that was the Bolshevik mode of operation and that she would eventually call “tyranny”; her own memoir, like Ulanovskaya’s, focuses again and again on the living conditions of the party elite versus the deprivation of people on the streets.3 Goldman was disaffected enough to offer anti-Bolshevik pamphlets to Alyosha, and he was sympathetic and also fearless enough to accept them. Nadya writes that they in fact brought the pamphlets to the West—which would be in direct contradiction to their mission there. She does not say who received them.4 Like Goldman, the Ulanovskys felt that the Bolsheviks were brutal. Like anarchists in general, they didn’t like the Bolshevik suppression of the sailors’ rebellion at Kronstadt in 1921. On the other hand, the Ulanovskys accepted brutality if it fostered global revolution, a cause to which they would dedicate the next two decades of their lives. Neither Nadya nor Alyosha asked why global revolution would turn out more successful than the Soviet kind. With doubts tucked away, Nadya turns to an account of her first trip abroad as an undercover agent. The story she retains in memory is not about their mission, which seems not to have been very important: a matter of infiltrating German workers’ clubs and keeping in contact with Moscow by radio. More compelling to her narrative—maybe because it simply makes a much better story—is spycraft. The Ulanovskys’ command of that part of their profession was, in these early years, abysmal. Nobody had bothered to explain things to them, or perhaps nobody at their level even knew. They were not, for example, aware that crossing borders required a passport and visas. Was Nadya in danger? Yes and no: in the matter of border crossings, as elsewhere, instances of wanton death and destruction are matched by an astounding level of credulity on both sides. Faced with her lack of documentation, European border officials were accommodating. Nadya concocted stories, and border control either believed her or wanted to help her or didn’t care. Her Yiddish background undoubtedly helped,

2 Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 411, http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emmagoldman-living-my-life. 3 Ulanovskaia and Ulanovskaia, Istoriia odnoi sem′i, 60. 4 Ibid., 59.

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underpinning the German language tutoring she got in Moscow from a German communist. The necessity of blending in, an imperative of hands on espionage, was also a function of dress. In Germany, Nadya was impersonating a lady of some means; she needed clothes to match. As with border crossings, her execution of this part of spycraft was far from flawless, yet it didn’t matter. Her experiments with clandestine fashion form, in fact, a recurring and psychologically revealing theme in her memoir. Ideologically, she despised the necessity: Bolshevik women didn’t care about dress. In practice, she paid attention. Some years later, in New York, the American then-communist Whittaker Chambers remembers Nadya walking down Broadway without a hat. This was a fashion breach that someone of her presumed class would not have committed, though it is unclear whether Chambers bothered to enlighten her. For her part, Nadya let her keen fashion eye fall on Chambers’s wife, whose cheap frock was—she assumes derisively—chosen to proclaim solidarity with the working class. The point of Nadya’s criticism, preserved to the end of her life, seems to be that she herself would not have been caught dead in a dress like that. Why the disdain for ideological clothes-signaling in this instance? Likely a rivalry of origin: Chambers’s wife Esther was the radicalized daughter of Jewish immigrants, someone very like Nadya, but American. From the beginning, Alyosha’s commitments to the Soviet project wavered, though, unlike his wife, he tried to calibrate his level of immersion. The choices were stark. On the pair’s first trip abroad, he had been in service to the Cheka. He didn’t like the connection, and they returned to Moscow, where he tried to sidestep propaganda work. He took a job as a stoker on a steamship—real work, says Nadya approvingly, “doing something people genuinely needed.”5 Anarchist ideals notwithstanding, someone of Alyosha’s ambition was unlikely to do menial work for very long, and he didn’t. The person who rescued him was Lozovsky, a comrade from their days fomenting revolution in Paris. Lozovsky made Alyosha an offer to join the Profintern—in English, the Red International of Labor Unions—which Lozovsky ran. The mission of the Profintern was to establish communist control over the labor movement worldwide. For most of the 1920s, infiltrating labor organizations would be the Ulanovsky mission, pursued initially among foreigners in Soviet port cities and then, on their second venture abroad, in Hamburg.

5

Ibid., 69.

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At the end of 1928, Alyosha left Lozovsky’s Profintern. His new professional home, Razvedupr—the Intelligence Directorate—became Nadya’s as well. This fateful reset in the Ulanovskys’ base came at the same time as a general revision of Soviet domestic policy. The New Economic Policy, with its limited private sector economy, was on its deathbed. Stalin was consolidating power, and beginning a rapid effort to industrialize. The costs would be borne in part by selling grain abroad, which meant that party activists were sent to the countryside to confiscate grain from peasants. Peasants who didn’t cooperate or possessed any holdings to lose were publicly demonized in a prelude to their absolute destruction just a few years later. Peasants were not the only social group under attack: fifty-three engineers were executed at the conclusion of the Shakhty trial, the first in a series of public trials that blamed problems in industrializing on internal sabotage. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, and yet this is worth noting: shortly after the trial concluded, the Ulanovskys headed to Shanghai, to bring about revolution in China. Alyosha would be station chief (rezident). It is hard to imagine how the Ulanovskys could have escaped notice in Shanghai, but there were a lot of Russian émigrés in China, most of them living poorly and half of them, according to Nadya, working for the Soviets. Among them was a character named Folya, an acquaintance from the prerevolutionary underground who was suspect for a number of reasons but at this point had broken with the Soviets in an intellectually reasoned way. Nadya was unwilling to listen to his arguments (she would remember them when she herself was arrested). Alyosha was much more receptive. Still, the doubts he entertained in conversation did not affect his work for the Directorate—nor, for that matter, did they affect what Folya himself was doing. Folya peddled secrets, and Alyosha bought them. Eventually, the Ulanovskys paid Folya a large sum for some information, which he never obtained. The couple’s cover was broken, and they had to make an escape. As she tells this part of her story, Nadya’s ruminations on the problem of belief dissolve before an existential crisis: the hair-raising prospect of leaving Shanghai and crossing Europe on a set of Czech passports. Neither of the Ulanovskys spoke Czech. As for Folya, the Nadya of the 1970s—a dissident living in Israel—explains that he was a traitor and Alyosha, despite his kindheartedness, should have killed him. An anecdote follows: halfway to safety, on a ship to Marseille, Alyosha told a random English traveler that he couldn’t sleep. The Englishman asked if he perhaps had a guilty conscience. Had he

Communist Romance and Border Crossings, 1917 through the 1930s

killed someone? Ulanovsky, reports Nadya, said, “I didn’t sleep because I didn’t kill someone.” The Englishman took it as a joke.6 As the ’30s closed in, the political landscape grew more ominous. Stationed in Berlin during the German election of 1930, the Ulanovskys witnessed the rise of the Nazis. They understood the complicity of the USSR, which had prevented German Communists from forming an alliance with the Social Democrats (what the Ulanovskys observed specifically was propaganda directed to the working class, which cast “social reformers” and “social traitors” as the main enemy, and ignored the Nazis). Otherwise, they continued their clandestine work. Conditions in Russia were similarly threatening but, at this point in her narrative, Nadya doesn’t pay much attention. She mentions her enthusiasm for the First Five-Year Plan. She recalls her “romantic” idea of collectivization, which began in 1930 with the liquidation of kulaks (comparatively productive peasants, or any peasant somebody didn’t like) and culminated in the genocidal starvation of Ukrainian peasants over 1932–1933. The Ulanovskys had no contacts in the countryside, and basically no knowledge. They did have faith, which they chose not to question. They found out about the famine when they were in America, and then only because a Soviet engineer on a visit to New York, seeing Nadya as “one of us,” proceeded to enlighten her.7 Nadya traveled to America reluctantly. About Alyosha’s feelings she says nothing, although the trip was a significant promotion for him: he was about to become Station Chief in New York City. No longer reliant on the sympathies of border control, the pair traveled under the name Goldman with Canadian forged passports. At the US border, they received a visa for eight days. They then became Mr. and Mrs. Zhuratovich, using the names of deceased Americans, in a practice that remained current for Russian illegals as late as the 1980s. They also had names for use in with American agents and among the left-leaning intelligentsia. Alyosha was Walter Ulrich, supposedly a German. Nadya was Maria or Elaine. The America that Nadya anticipated was the America of novels by Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, enthusiastically translated and printed in the USSR. Arriving in the middle of the Depression, she found, as expected, soup kitchens and unemployment. The problem was that conditions even then were inescapably better than what she had known in the Soviet Union. Unlike

6 7

Ibid., 89. Ibid., 113.

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the Ukrainian famine, this challenge to her belief system was in her face: the Americans lined up for soup kitchens were dressed better than her friends in Moscow. The wife of her driver Charlie (actually, “Charlie”: he was in reality an agent of Russian-Jewish origin) took her to an “undesirable neighborhood” for a close-up look at the lives of the unemployed. Charlie’s two out-of-work brothers-in-law lived with their mother in a three-room apartment. This was at a time when Russian families occupied single rooms in communal apartments, which they shared with strangers, making it understandable that Nadya thought that she would be lucky ever to live that well in Moscow. Also unexpected was what she called the “democratism” of America. In Berlin and Shanghai, traveling first-class, the Ulanovskys were treated with obsequiousness. This was absent in New York, replaced by what was for her a novel sense of “freedom and ease.”8 “We employed a lot of Americans,” writes Nadya, both party members and simply leftists.” From an American perspective, the most important of their acquaintances was Whittaker Chambers, whom we met earlier commenting on Nadya’s missing hat. Chambers’s sensational and ultimately accurate accusations against Alger Hiss, a highly placed State Department employee, would be a pivotal moment for domestic politics in the United States. At the time that Chambers dealt with Nadya, whom he knew as Maria, he was not exactly enchanted with her. In his memoirs, he calls her “striking-looking” but “rather plump,” noting her “fierce” black eyes—a nice revolutionary trope—but also an occasional near-sighted squint. Nadya would return the compliment: Chambers, in her description, was “fat, poorly dressed, and missing a front tooth.” 9 Of the two of them, Chambers seems to have preferred “Ulrich,” whom he describes alternately as sinister and kind. When a reluctant Chambers gave Ulrich a piece of paper bearing the name of an American dentist said to be a Trotskyite, he feared complicity in the man’s liquidation. Not on this occasion: compassionate Ulrich crumpled the paper up and threw it away, saying that “Uncle Joe” (Stalin) would not be interested. On the other hand, when the Ulanovskys suddenly announced their return to Moscow, that same Ulrich gave Chambers (“Bob”) an important warning. “Remember, Bob, there are only two ways that you can really leave us: you can be shot by them or you can be shot by us.”10 Perhaps he was thinking of himself.

  8 Ibid., 96.   9 Ibid., 101. In an interview with William F. Buckley for Firing Line, broadcast in August 1977, she says something similar. 10 Whittaker Chambers, Witness (New York: Random House, 1952), 72.

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By background, the people who worked for Ulrich and with Maria stemmed from two contrasting groups: disaffected WASPs like Chambers and Jewish immigrants whose life experiences combined a familiarity with shifting identities and enthusiasm for radical politics. On the WASP side, Chambers introduced the Ulanovskys to the writers Lincoln Steffens (“I have met the future, and it works”) and his wife Ella Winter, the author of Red Virtue: Human Relationships in the New Russia. Nadya’s recollections of Steffens and Winter are uncharacteristically warm, possibly because they resisted Ulrich’s attempts to recruit them as agents: in retrospect, Nadya consistently prizes those who broke with the Party, and despises, in particular, Westerners who had freedom of choice. One of many in the latter category was the journalist Anna Louise Strong, a Midwesterner who was not a part of the Ulanovskys’ New York circle, but whom Nadya recalls in connection with it. The American editor of the English-language Moscow News, Strong was a propagandist of collectivization who retained her Soviet loyalties even after, in Nadya’s recollection, Stalin personally issued an order to deport her.11 Nadya describes her as a “bitch” (suka). The Jews, all of whom had changed their names, were by far the majority. “Charlie Barton,” whose employment with the Directorate had begun in 1926, was the immigrant Leon Minster, sometimes Mintner. Chambers describes him as a sullen technical worker whose career had stalled, but Chambers was wrong: Minster developed significant contacts with engineers and military officers, who gave him documents on airplane and rocket engines.12 Their friend “George Mink” was born Godi Mindowski in heavily Jewish Zhytomyr (then the imperial Russian province of Volhynia, now Ukraine). He emigrated to relatives in Philadelphia, where he chose an American name and joined the Navy. Mink would be associated with maritime unions, with the US Communist Party, and with Lozovsky’s Profintern.13 He claimed, without evidence, to be Lozovsky’s brother-in-law.14 In New York, Mink was Ulanovsky’s most trusted agent. He

11 Nadya writes in her memoir that Strong was sent to the Gulag (Ulanovskaia and Ulanovskaia, Istoriia odnoi sem′i, 97). 12 Chambers, Witness, 252; other information from Boris Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent: The Life and Death of Alexander Orlov (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 533 note 22; and V. V. Pozniakov, Sovetskaia razvedka v Amerike (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2005), 127–128. 13 Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent, 255–256; Vernon I. Pedersen, “George Mink, the Maritime Workers Industrial Union, and the Comintern in America,” The Journal of Labor History 41, no. 3 (2000): 307–320. 14 Lozovsky had seven living siblings, so it is possible that one of them was associated with Mink’s family, though Mink never mentions siblings of his own and his party autobiography states that he had been abandoned by his parents. For the claim, and for his inclination to

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turned up again in the Spanish Civil War, where he uncovered, and probably eliminated, suspected Trotskyites in the International Brigades.15 Mink was later rumored to be in Mexico where he played a role in Trotsky’s murder. He disappeared forever around 1940. A final Jewish acquaintance worth mentioning is Dr. Philip Rosenbliett, a dentist whose office on Broadway and Fortieth Street was something of a safe house. Rosenbliett, born in Mogilev-Podolsk, worked for the Directorate.16 Chambers was initially confused by him, thinking that he did actual dental work, which Chambers badly needed. Nothing of the sort was on offer.17 People would sit in Rosenbliett’s waiting room without making eye contact with each other, and eventually the doctor would emerge from the treatment room, have a look around, and choose his patient. Nadya and Ulrich, according to Chambers, spent long periods in treatment. (Nadya’s take on this was that Rosenbliett liked to talk.) For Nadya at the time that she wrote her memoir, Rozenbliett had the status of duped American—a character type she had come to despise. Trying to understand what drew him and his Romanian wife to Communism, she hits on a psychological explanation: the Rozenblietts had a daughter who died, and their devotion to the movement was something of a compensation. Whether true or not, when the pair relocated to “the socialist paradise” (Nadya’s words) in 1935—a mere year after their collaboration with the Ulanovskys in New York City—“Ulrich” was no longer their employer and they understood that he did not have a high government position.18 Their tone, writes Nadya, changed, as did their perception of reality. The single time Nadya went to visit them, marveling at their elite apartment, Rozenbliett’s wife explained to her that they got by because of packages from America. Predictably, Nadya wasn’t amused, and the Rozenblietts themselves ended badly. Both were arrested in 1937. He

brag, see the testimony of Investigation of William McCuistion, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the U.S. Special Committee on Un-American Activities (1938–1944), 11: 6465, https://congressional.proquest.com/congressional/docview/t29.d30.hrg-1939uas-0007?accountid=10207. Mink’s work for the Directorate is discussed in Pozniakov, Sovetskaia razvedka, 131. Claiming high-placed Soviet relatives seems to have been a thing: Charlie, advancing himself a step higher on the ladder of Soviet royalty, told Chambers that he was Molotov’s brother in law. Molotov had a famous Jewish wife, Polina Zhemchuzina, born Perl Karpovskaia. 15 Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent, 257. 16 V. M. Lur′e and V. Ia Konchik, GRU: Dela i liudi (St. Petersburg: Neva; Moscow: Ol′maPress, 2002), 460; Pozniakov, Sovetskaia razvedka, 295–296. 17 Chambers, Witness, 258–259. 18 Ulanovskaia and Ulanovskaia, Istoriia odnoi sem′i, 98.

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died; she lived out her remaining years doing menial work somewhere in the provinces.19 Nadya’s memoir gives a much more vivid picture of the people they worked with than the work they were doing. The focus of the Ulanovsky group seems to have been on military and industrial espionage. The importance of military technology is obvious, but factory technology, at a time when the USSR was engaged in a frantic push to industrialize, was equally crucial.20 Their group obtained and photographed plans for Sikorsky helicopters, alongside technical books, trade journals, military journals, and patents obtained for a small fee from the US Patent Office. That a lot of these materials were published and readily available explains an otherwise puzzling aspect of the Jewish Antifascist Committee trial nearly two decades later. At the trial, part of the espionage charge against Lozovsky and his codefendants was that they supplied American journalists with magazine articles about Soviet economics and agriculture. These articles were published and readily available in the USSR. All of the material obtained by the Ulanovskys had to be microfilmed. There is disagreement about where this happened: according to Nadya—who did read Chambers’s sensational memoir and tried unsuccessfully to reach him through Craig Thompson, the Moscow bureau chief of Time Magazine—it took place in a house in Brownsville, Brooklyn, owned by yet another set of Russian-Jewish sympathizers. After the microfilm was produced, it was hidden behind the glass of pocket mirrors that Nadya would buy, apparently in bulk, at a five-and-ten. These were given to cooperating German sailors on two different steamship lines. Focusing on these details of spycraft, Nadya pays very little attention to the Ulanovsky family. Her reticence, which comes across as a kind of emotional coldness, is noticeable enough that her daughter, the Soviet dissident Maya Ulanovskaya, felt it necessary to explain in an introduction that memoir was written as a conversation with Maya herself, the one interlocutor who would be perfectly well aware of what happened to the family. The memoir is in fact addressed to Maya, in the sense that Alyosha is almost invariably referred to as “your father.” Nonetheless, the absence of information is striking. We know that by 1922, Nadya had a little boy, Lyosha. He comes into the narrative later because she is able to use the similarity between his and his father’s names to deflect somebody’s attention. The child Lyosha does not appear in New York

19 Chambers, Witness, 45. 20 Pozniakov, Sovetskaia razvedka, 102–103.

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City (perhaps he was with Nadya’s mother back in Russia) and then disappears from the narrative altogether; he seems to have been killed in battle in 1943.21 Maya Ulanovskaya was born in New York, and her younger sister Irina was born in Moscow at the time of the introduction of the Stalinist constitution, which would have been 1936. There is one notable exception to Nadya’s general reticence about family: she had relatives in Pennsylvania and flaunted Soviet rules to go to visit them. As we have seen, the presence of a sizable Russian-Jewish emigration in the United States was, at this point, quite useful to Soviet power. The state found it comparatively easy to recruit helpers, and the Soviet illegals themselves, with their inevitably accented English, could blend right in. The downside from the point of view of the state was that family conversation was potentially uncontrollable. Soviet Jews on official visits were loyal in most ways, but the temptation to see family they had thought lost forever was intense, and Nadya was not the only one to succumb. At first, she kept her plans to herself. Ulanovsky was learning to drive. Nadya told him: why not practice by driving to West Chester, Pennsylvania? Perhaps because the subject is people she loved from childhood, Nadya’s narrative at this point becomes very Jewish. When her aunt finds her at the door, the older woman bounds up the stairs, shouting “meyn shvesterkind!” (my niece). Writing many decades later, it is this Yiddish detail that remains in Nadya’s mind. Otherwise, the state need not have worried: the family turned out to be more communist-inclined than was, at that point, Nadya herself. Her cousins had changed their names in classic American immigrant fashion: Srulik, for example, to Isidore. One was a worker, the other wrote for a Communist journal in Baltimore. Nadya’s uncle, who had instigated the immigration, was unhappy that his American children had not gotten an education. How much better off were the sons and daughters of acquaintances Nadya told him about, precisely, though likely not intentionally, echoing the Soviet Yiddish folksong that concludes “Everybody can see from my good fortune what Soviet power has given us. My sons have all become engineers!” Nadya stayed overnight. She didn’t tell her relatives what she really felt, which was something like: don’t judge the Soviet Union by my fashionable clothes; you are the ones who are drinking orange juice and eating chicken. Looking back, she felt that she could have saved them. What actually happened

21 “Ulanovskii Aleksei Aleksandrovich,” Kniga pamiati voinov-evreev, pavshikh v boiakh s natsizmom (1941–1945), http://www.jmemory.org/page2.php?data_id=14319.

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was that after her release from the Gulag in 1956, Isidore came to Moscow and refused to see her, because she was, in his eyes, a traitor.22 Nadya conveys the irony of the situation, noting that Isidore was working for the Yiddish newspaper Morgn Freyheyt whose editor, Peysach Novik, visited the USSR and was the cause of someone’s arrest. She could not have known the larger picture, but it figures significantly in the further developments of our story here. On his trip to Moscow, Novik met with members of the Jewish Antifascist Committee. At their trial, he was said to be a spy, and contact with him was declared evidence of espionage, for which Lozovsky, Kvitko, and the rest were executed. In the meantime, in 1934, the Ulanovskys were recalled to Moscow. Nadya remained there while Alyosha, along with his trusted companion George Mink, went to Copenhagen on an underground operation. This operation went badly wrong. The disaster, precipitated by Mink, occurred on the morning on February 5, 1935. The Russian historian Boris Vail, who worked with Danish archival sources and published in Russia in the liberal year 1995, describes what happened.23 Mink’s housekeeper, a woman named Olga, came to clean. Mink emerged from the bathroom and attempted rape, whereupon Olga screamed, freed herself, and went to the police.24 Several weeks later, the Danish police arrived at Mink’s apartment and carried out a most productive search. Was it a setup? Vail didn’t find any indication that Mink had been under surveillance, though a later study quite plausibly cites a Danish police informant.25 Whatever the proximate cause, the search turned up interesting evidence: maps of the Danish Straits, information about shipping, and three American passports, unattached to any individuals who were known to have entered Denmark.

22 Her story gets one detail wrong: the Morgn Freyheyt was based in New York, not Baltimore. 23 Boris Vail′, “Sud′ba Aleksandra Ulanovskogo,” Voprosy istorii 9 (1995): 154. The year 1995 may have been liberal, but when the article has to give information on what happened to Ulanovsky’s family, it says that they went “abroad,” rather than to “Israel.” 24 The account is from Vail′, “Sud′ba Aleksandra Ulanovskogo,” 154. Volodarsky quotes the testimony of the American union activist William McCuistion (Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent, 98 and 552 note 12), who reports Mink’s own understanding of the arrest, as entrapment by a Nazi agent. In his testimony before the US House (hearing dates: October 28, 30; November 3, 27, 29; December 3, 1939) McCuiston says that Mink went before the Profintern and Comintern in Russia and “took the blame” because he had “made the mistake of getting mixed up with a woman Gestapo agent.” Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the U.S. Special Committee on Un-American Activities (1938–1944), 11: 6550–6551. The well-informed Ulanovskys don’t repeat this exonerating possibility, though Nadya mentions Mink’s womanizing. 25 Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent, 98.

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While the search was in progress, two people arrived within minutes of each other. One was a putative American, Nicholas Sherman, born in Yugoslavia in 1892. A search of his hotel turned up more maps of the Danish Straits and information that led the authorities to understand that, as the Canadian Abram Goldman, Sherman had made a trip to Denmark in each of the preceding two years. We have run into Goldman before: Alexander Ulanovsky used that name, and the passport registered to it, when he and Nadya entered the United States in 1931. The Danish authorities also found a German passport with Sherman/ Ulanovsky’s photo on it. Whether they eventually found his real name or not, the Danes understood perfectly well they were dealing with Soviet agents.26 The investigation, at one point at least, turned comic. Examining Mink’s things, the Danes uncovered documents bearing a telltale Cyrillic acronym, MOPR (МОПР).27 Mink, thinking fast but ineptly, assured his investigator that this was the English word MAPS. Acidly noting that the English for naval maps is “charts,” the Dane didn’t buy it.28 Information about the arrests hit the Danish newspapers and then newspapers in North America, from which Nadya, using her privileged access to the non-Soviet press, figured out what was going on. Her contacts at the Directorate had been jollying her along (“no reason to worry; letters sometimes don’t arrive”). Now she went to the Assistant Director with her new information. She understood his response as reassuring: “Well, now that you know, you probably also know that it’s not so terrible.”29 He was right. Mink and Ulanovsky were convicted of abetting military espionage. Ulanovsky got an additional sentence for using a false passport, and Mink for attempted rape.30 Both served eighteen months.31 On completion of his sentence, Ulanovsky faced the unwelcome possibility of deportation to America (he was, after all, traveling on an American passport). With the collusion of a left-leaning American ambassador—at least in the story he told Nadya—he

26 Ulanovskaia and Ulanovskaia, Istoriia odnoi sem′i, 55; Volodarsky says that Ulanovsky’s name “remained a mystery for the next seventy years—that is, until 2005. Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent, 96. 27 “MOPR” was a Comintern analog to the Red Cross. 28 Vail′, “Sud′ba Aleksandra Ulanovskogo,” 156. 29 Ulanovskaia and Ulanovskaia, Istoriia odnoi sem′i, 119. 30 Vail′, “Sud′ba Aleksandra Ulanovskogo,” 156. 31 According to Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent. Ulanovskaya says that he was given two years and released early for good behavior; Volodarsky is probably correct.

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avoided that threatening outcome and went instead to Switzerland, where the Soviet Station Chief spirited him back to the USSR. The couple were reunited.

Mary Leder: Santa Monica, Birobidzhan, Moscow In the same year, 1931, that the Ulanovskys took up residence in the United States, Mary Leder, born in New Haven, was taken by her family to the Soviet Far East. Unlike the Ulanovskys’, her family’s project had a markedly Jewish angle: they would be pioneers in the creation of a Yiddish-speaking homeland in Birobidzhan, on the China–Soviet border. In the course of Leder’s thirty years in the Soviet Union—almost none of them in Birobidzhan— she would come to know both Nadya and Alyosha Ulanovsky and, more tangentially, a number of other people swept up in the Jewish Antifascist Committee trial. In 1965, Leder returned to the United States and wrote a memoir in her native English. It was published in 2001, some twenty years after Ulanovskaya’s. Leder’s parents were American citizens, but also Russian- and Yiddishspeaking Jewish immigrants whose political life centered around Yiddish socialist organizations, primarily the Workmen’s Circle. Her father was a builder, by training a carpenter. He sold the houses that he built, which makes him, in fact, a small businessman—it is hard to imagine that he didn’t in fact hire workers to help him. But he didn’t understand himself as anything but proletarian, and neither did Mary, a blind spot that would ease her entry into Moscow, where class background in those years could either privilege you or disenfranchise you, in the literal sense of depriving you of the vote. When the Depression ruined the market for houses on the East Coast, the family moved to California. But the West Coast offered only menial labor, and two years later the parents and their three children left for the Soviet Union, where, in Mary’s words, “there was no unemployment and the workers ruled the land.”32 A Far Eastern territory of some 64,000 square miles between the Biro and Bidzhan rivers, tributaries of the Amur, Birobidzhan was about as distant as a Jew could get from Belarus and Ukraine—or for that matter Moscow and Leningrad—and remain within the Soviet Union. It was freezing in the winter— the pianist Sergo Bengelsdorf, whose father we will encounter shortly, remembers winter temperatures of -30 degrees Celsius (-86 degrees Fahrenheit).33 In

32 Mary Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), 5. 33 Sergo Bengel′sdorf, Zhiznʹ v evreiskoi kul′ture (Chișinău: Elan-Poligraf, 2007), 9.

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the summer the region was swampy and nurtured an impressive variety of biting insects. Sergo Bengelsdorf, who eventually resettled as far away as he could get, remembers with nostalgia the “far away, mysterious city” of his childhood.34 But in the 1930s, as he also records, it had no running water and no sewers. Mary herself remembers knee-deep mud and streets made out of wooden planks. And a Soviet doctor visiting in 1933, someone accustomed to the way things were on the Soviet periphery, declared conditions there “disgraceful” and “unsanitary.”35 The project of Jewish agricultural resettlement fit into both Marxist nationality theory and Soviet state security. From the standpoint of Marxism, Jews lacked the territory that would make them a bona fide national group.36 Birobidzhan would remedy that. As for state security, a mass migration of Jews to Birobidzhan would provide a buffer against China in an otherwise underpopulated region. Alongside these external motivations was the desire among modernizing Jews to escape the economic niche in crafts and trade that had confined them for centuries. Jewish work, particularly as traders, was not seen as “productive,” a status that was tied strictly to farming. The elevation of farming as a national ideal goes back to the physiocrats, French Enlightenment economists who preceded Adam Smith and understood agriculture, and agriculture alone, as the source of national wealth. The focus on agriculture included a moral dimension that caught up Thomas Jefferson as well as nineteenth-century romantics, particularly Germans, who associated national identity with notions of “soil.” Post-Enlightenment Jews who wanted to cleanse themselves of the diaspora mentality accepted the idea of farming as particularly moral, though the association of soil with nation, buttressed by the idea of the muscular, proud, biblical Jew, took root primarily in Zionism. Outside of Zionism, there were Jewish agricultural colonies both in the Crimea—Trotsky grew up in one of these—and in the United States (Am Olam). Jews who made the journey to Birobidzhan were to become “Jewish peasants.” (The Jewish Peasant [Evreiskii krest′ianin] was actual name of a journal

34 Bengel′sdorf, Zhiznʹ v evreiskoi kul′ture, 7. 35 Robert Weinberg, Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland (Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA and London, University of California Press, 1998), 39. See also Bengel′sdorf, Zhiznʹ v evreiskoi kul′ture, 9; Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia, 17. 36 In How the Soviet Jew Was Made, Sasha Senderovich makes the point that Birobidzhan was meant as a way to make Jews “more like other land-settled ethnocultural groups in the USSR.” This is completely true, though that was, obviously, a motivation for the government more than for settlers. Sasha Senderovich, How the Soviet Jew Was Made (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), 136.

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published in 1925 and 1926.) The ironies embedded in this phrase are too numerous to count. For one thing, Marxism was tepid about peasants—Marx famously referred to “the idiocy of rural life”—and Soviet policy was to turn them into a kind of agricultural proletariat by making them subsistence workers on state-owned or, in what amounted to the same thing, “collectively” owned land. Beginning late in 1932 and continuing to 1974, they could not leave those farms on their own volition. For another, the Jews who did go to Birobidzhan to take up farming proved strikingly bad at it. (This was not, of course, the case in Palestine, but it was markedly so in the Soviet Far East.) In 1939, only twenty percent of the 17,695 Jews in Birobidzhan lived in the countryside, and a lot of them, like Mary’s parents, abandoned the idea of farming for the kind of employment they understood from their previous lives.37 Mary’s father worked on a carpentry repair team; her mother supervised food for a nursery school. That Mary’s parents heard about Birobidzan at all was the function of a thriving propaganda effort that reached not only Soviet Jews but also potential settlers in Argentina and the United States. Even preceding the designation of Birobidzhan as a Jewish Autonomous Region in 1928, enthusiasm for Jewish redemption through Soviet agriculture was whipped up on a variety of fronts, both organizational and artistic. Organizationally, OZET (the Society for the Settlement of Jewish Toilers on the Land) oversaw propaganda and financing;38 IKOR (from the Yiddish; the Jewish Colonizing Organization) worked on potential settlers abroad, including Mary’s family in Santa Monica, California, and the Bengelsdorfs in Buenos Aires.39 There were also songs and films, largely produced (and in some cases, disseminated to the west) after Mary’s and her family encountered the troublesome reality. Kvitko’s children’s poem “Anna-Vanna brigadir” (1935) is about a Jewish agricultural settlement in which Jewish children raise pigs. While it is not specifically about Birobidzhan or any other place that Jews practiced Soviet agriculture, it does celebrate the liberated Jewish peasant. In the poem, Yiddishspeaking children pester their kind Russian foreman, Anna Ivanovna, to open the door to the pig stall so they can see the sweet little piglets. “Anna-Vanna” keeps on giving excuses, demonstrating her indulgence toward both the little

37 Weinberg, Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland, 32. 38 Vsesoiuznoe obshchestvo po zemel′nomu ustroistvu trudiashchikhsia evreev v SSSR, correctly translated as the All-Union Association for the Agricultural Settlement of Jewish Workers in the USSR. 39 IKOR: Idishe Kolonizatsie Organizatsie.

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pigs and the little Jews. And the children keep persisting, showing their enthusiasm and happy distance from their religious past. Prokofiev set it to music. That same year saw the production of a Russian-language film, Seekers of Happiness (Iskateli schast′ia), a comedy about a family of Jewish immigrants to Birobidzhan. It’s not clear where the family is coming from, but the film starts on a ship, which hints that the point of departure was not Eastern Europe.40 The film is also about Jewish transformation through agriculture: at one moment, pigs can be heard snorting. While still on the ship, one would-be migrant asks, famously, “How much does a ship like this cost?” Birobidzhan doesn’t cure him of his interest in buying and selling, and in the end, even his mother rejects him. The subjects of the present book were involved in this project, too: the role of Pinye, the young man interested in money, made the career of Veniamin Zuskin, whom we will meet at the 1952 trial.41 Mikhoels, the great Jewish actor whose murder would begin the Jewish postwar repression, served as consultant. Not everything about Birobidzhan was sham, or even unpleasant. Young people were enthusiastic; Mary remembers singing in the evenings, “where there was always an accordion.”42 Yiddish was spoken in the streets. There was a library named for Sholem Aleichem and the local Yiddish theater was promoted by Mikhoels. Sergo Bengelsdorf, born in 1937, remembers schooling in Yiddish from 1944 to 1949, which was several years after Yiddish schools in the western part of the Soviet Union were shut (all Yiddish schools, including in Birobidzhan, were closed in 1951). The Soviet Yiddish writer David Bergelson came in 1932 and again in 1934, when he declared his intention to stay. City authorities made plans to build him a single-storey wooden house.43 At the 1952 trial, Bergelson would look back on Birobidzhan with unfeigned pathos. For others, and particularly Mary’s American family, reality bit. Inevitably there were food issues. In the city, when they first arrived, there was cabbage soup, boiled millet, and, in Mary’s words, “tea with jaw-breaking rolls.”44 Staples like flour and oil were rationed. In the country, where they relocated for a while, the food situation was worse for them, though better for actual peasants who knew how to keep chickens or a pig. The Ukrainians, whose sector was, according to Mary, the only one that produced anything, supplied bread.

40 A possibility is the rival (unmentioned) Palestine. See Senderovich, How the Soviet Jew Was Made, 355 in the manuscript. 41 Zuskina-Perel′man, Puteshestvie Veniamina, 248. 42 Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia, 18. 43 “V chisle pervoprokhodtsev,” April 22, 2014, http://www.gazetaeao.ru/v-chisle-pervoprohodtsev. 44 Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia, 22.

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Inevitably, there were problems with work. Mary’s mother did not have enough food to feed her nursery school charges, and some of it was clearly being stolen. Her reaction was to protest. The consequence of that naïvely American behavior, predictable to anyone who knew anything about how the Soviet Union operated, was that she was called to a meeting where everyone condemned her, including Mary’s own good friend Feigele. Years later, Feigele would run into Mary in Moscow and apologize. At the time, her mother was bitter. But not yet disillusioned: “none of us,” writes Mary, “had drawn any general conclusions.”45 Mary had not finished high school in California, and wanted to study in Moscow. Like Nadya, she was seventeen. A telegram was sent to Mary’s uncle, who lived in Moscow, asking him to look after her. There was no response, but that didn’t stop anybody. “We thought nothing bad could happen to you in a socialist country” said her father, many years later.46 A train, inexplicably, stopped at their settlement in the countryside. Her father hoisted her up along with two suitcases, gave some instructions in Russian, which Mary still didn’t speak, and off she went to what was then the town of Tikhonkoe (now Birobidzhan, like the region as a whole). At the Tikhonkoe station, she was met by a young man, Mikhail (Moyshe) Bengelsdorf, who looked after her honorably over the entire journey and was, in her recollection, altogether relieved to see her go. Her parents would move on to Stalingrad where, they hoped, conditions would be better. Moyshe Bengelsdorf was another seeker of happiness. In Buenos Aires he had been a tailor, like so many Jews. But his love was Yiddish theater, and Birobidzhan promised him theater, in a single package with national autonomy, social justice, and no Depression. The purpose of his Moscow trip was to study in Mikhoels’s studio, which cherished its branch in the future Jewish Autonomous Region and sought to give theater-loving tailors and shoemakers serious artistic training. Many decades later, in 1973, Mary would visit Moscow on her new American passport and attempt to contact him. He didn’t answer. She had no way of knowing, but he was no longer alive. What might he have told her? Another story of dashed expectations. The beginning had been promising: Moyshe spent four years in Mikhoels’s studio, then returned to the Far East to become part of the Birobidzhan Yiddish Theater. He married a poet, Lyuba Vasserman, who had come to Birobidzhan from Palestine, where the British had expelled her, and the pair took their places in Birobidzhan’s growing

45 Ibid., 70. 46 Ibid., 25.

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Yiddish artistic community. Then came 1949: Lyuba Vasserman was arrested and sent to the Gulag, the theater was closed, and the books in the Sholem Aleichem Library were burned. In one day, said his son, the pianist, “he turned into an old man.”47 But all that was to come. In the autumn of 1931, the optimism of Mary’s family was validated. When the train arrived in Moscow, a woman at the station was yelling in Yiddish and Russian for a young woman she had never met. It was Liza, Mary’s aunt. She took Mary home and looked after her then and later, though she wasted no time informing her that life in Russia was hard, and Mary would have to find her own way. Mary headed to the Komsomol, the Communist Party Youth Group. (The California branch had rejected her, but Moscow was, in those less connected times, unaware.) The Komsomol in 1931 was full of Yiddish speakers, who told Mary that before taking up higher education, she would need to work in a factory and learn some Russian. She was pointed to Dinamo, which made electric motors for trolley cars, and given the choice of fitter and turner. She randomly settled on fitter, though despite some sympathetic mentoring she was unable to meet even minimal standards and would conclude her factory career using her fluency in English to file Western industrial patents and specifications. She thus became an end point in the industrial espionage pipeline that began, among others, with the Ulanovskys. Mary found lodging in a commune within a worker’s hostel connected to Dinamo. It was, in reality, a three-room apartment: a girls’ room, a boys’ room, and a room for chaperones. A communal kitchen, in classic Soviet style, had two work tables and three kerosene stoves. There was a toilet but no place to bathe and no hot water—like most people, the commune dwellers took weekly baths in a public bathhouse. Two other standard features that startled Mary were the loudspeaker radio (actually a loudspeaker connected to Soviet broadcasting through wires) and the naked bulbs, which were, of course, cheap, but

47 Tat′iana Vol′tskaia, “My vyzhili, potomu chto smeialis′. Evreiskaia pesnia,” interview with Sergo Bengel′sdorf, http://archive.svoboda.org/programs/OTB/2003/OBT.041403.asp. The rest of Moyshe’s life is described both in this Radio Svoboda interview and in Sergo’s book, Zhiznʹ v evreiskoi kulʹture. With the theater shut, he took a menial job in a clothing factory. Liuba Vasserman spent seven years in the Gulag, from where she returned, as sometimes happened, an unrepentant Stalinist. Trying to avoid knowledge of his mother’s status, Sergo (named after the Georgian communist Sergo Ordzhonikidze) went to conservatory in Minsk. He remained very involved in Jewish culture, particularly Yiddish song.

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also represented the early revolutionary fight against bourgeois indulgences like lampshades.48 The social mix of commune dwellers was no less startling or characteristic of the times. Three of the boys had been besprizornye, a term Mary nicely translates as “wild” children, that was applied to orphans of the revolution and civil war. That these street children had made it to the factory was an important step for them. At the opposite end of the social scale were the children of lishentsy. Lishentsy, literally “the disenfranchised,” had been artisans, tradespeople, self-employed professionals, or employees of religious organizations prior to the revolution—economic categories that were not specific to Jews but covered most of what Jews had been up to in the Pale. The economic or religious sins of these fathers were passed onto their children, who were not, for example, permitted to enroll in institutes of higher education. One way out of the situation, which Mary did not encounter, was for children to renounce their parents publicly in a newspaper.49 But the stain could also be wiped away by two or three years of factory work, and a number of Dinamo commune members were engaged in exactly that. A reader of Mary’s memoir can clearly see the pressures that shaped the behavior of Jews immersed in this proletarian reeducation. The “inseparable” Levitin brothers, Boris and Yefim, stayed as far away from her as possible even though they were fellow Yiddish speakers and Mary, with her primitive Russian, could have really used their help. An American could only bring trouble. On the other hand—politically, the same hand, although Mary suggests a genuine commitment—these Jewish children of the disenfranchised appeared enthusiastic about everything proletarian, appearing tirelessly at all meetings and extracurricular factory activities. In their private time, they read all they could get their hands on.

48 For more on loudspeakers, see the Kommunalka website (Alice Nakhimovsky, Slava Paperno, Nancy Ries, and Ilya Utekhin): http://kommunalka.colgate.edu/cfm/essays. cfm?ClipID=340&TourID=910000; on naked bulbs, see “Naked Bulbs,” http://kommunalka.colgate.edu/cfm/essays.cfm?ClipID=335&TourID=910. 49 Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 60–62. An acid sketch by the Russian-Jewish satirist Ilya Ilf imagines a son, about to be fired, forced to denounce his rabbi father. “‘He’s not a rabbi anymore,’ I say piteously. ‘He cast off . . .” What did he cast off? His robes? No, rabbis don’t cast off their robes. It’s priests who do that. What did he cast off? He cast something or other off, he renounced his bearded way of life, with a screech and a roar he broke his ties to the deity and refused to let him in the house.” Il′ia Il′f, “Bludnyi syn vozvrashchaetsia domoi,” in his Dom s krendeliami: Izbrannoe (Moscow: Tekst, 2009), 291–293. This particular piece of social engineering was abrogated in 1935.

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Another person in the commune—significantly not an equal—was Vassiona, the peasant servant. As Mary notes, the standard Russian word for “servant” was not used, because “servant” was not an acceptable Soviet category: the correct term was “domestic worker” (domrabotnitsa). For people like Vassiona, who in 1931 were no longer escapees from rural Russia but refugees from villages ravaged by collectivization, work as a domestic—in Moscow!— was a highly prized position. Mary wasn’t aware of Vassiona’s choices, or, with the social blinders inevitable to all of us, did not sympathize. She complains of Vassiona’s “vulgarity, filthiness, and sly, troublemaking ways” and accuses her of stealing, which may indeed have been the case. When Mary returned to the commune after some time away, she saw with some satisfaction that Vassiona had been fired and had returned to her village.”50 What happened to her, a Ukrainian, during the Ukrainian famine is terrible to contemplate. Mary’s view of Moscow social classes starts in the commune but was not confined to it. What startled her the most, and remained in her memory for thirty years, was how people ate. If their rations hadn’t been used up, her fellow communards had sausage and cheese for breakfast, with bread, butter or margarine, and tea. The main meal was cabbage soup, often with meat, and there were potatoes fried in sunflower oil. This was an exceptionally good diet, facilitated by the fact that the communards were in Moscow, and had workers’ rations. One step further up was her Aunt Liza and Uncle Yevsei, who had, many years earlier, rebelled against his religious upbringing, become a revolutionary, and served time in Siberia. Though he was not a Party member, his history as a political prisoner under the tsars entitled him to a “private” apartment in a building for former political prisoners and access to special stores. At the top of the social heap was Mary’s friend Galya Babushkina, a lathe operator, who was spending time at the Dinamo factory floor “to acquire the proletarian mentality.”51 Galya’s father, Yefim Adrianovich Babushkin, had been an Old Bolshevik and diplomat. His widow lived in the Metropol, a hotel similar to the Natsional, where the Ulanovskys paid their visit to the anarchist luminaries Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. From a distance of thirty years, Mary remembered their dining room table, “laden with delicacies— white bread, butter, smoked salmon, sturgeon, caviar, sliced sausage.”52 An “unwavering” Stalinist,53 Babushkina liked Mary and performed for her some

50 Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia, 41 and 81. 51 Ibid., 53. 52 Ibid., 54. 53 Ibid., 53.

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of the same functions as high-placed Soviet patrons did for so many unofficial “clients”—as long as they themselves remained in favor. The Babushkins, perhaps because they were only a mother and daughter, did not, as far as Mary knew at the time of her writing, suffer in the late 1930s. Their sense of noblesse oblige had an ideological dimension—they watched over Mary’s political thinking—but their help was also practical and emotional. “For many years,” writes Mary, “the Babushkin residence was a refuge for me in times of difficulty, unhappiness, and doubt.”54 While Mary was acclimating herself to Moscow, her parents had left Birobidzhan for industrial Stalingrad, where conditions were neither dire nor agricultural, but similar problems endured. Nobody was interested in her father’s views on more efficient methods of construction or the poor quality of materials. Eventually, reasoning that they themselves had failed, they decided to return to America. They expected Mary to come with them, but there was a hitch. In order to get her apprenticeship at Dinamo, Mary had needed to show her passport. The family had only one, which they entrusted to the mail. It disappeared, no doubt into the same channel that supplied false passports to the Ulanovskys. Her parents—somewhat to their surprise—suffered no consequences, either on the Soviet or the American side. But Mary did. Because she had been issued a Soviet passport, she was not permitted to leave. The family assumed they would be reunited soon. In fact, Mary would next see her parents when they visited Moscow in 1957.

Lilianna Lungina: A German Child, a French Child, a Soviet Adolescent More than any of our other subjects, Lungina will address the question of belief. We will see, in the next chapter, how she addresses her experience of the Terror in that light. What did her fellow students and teacher believe, and how did they act? And how did she believe and act? How did it happen that she got lost in her own private life at the very moment when she could have asked her father about his story? This chapter is a prelude. It is about her origins, which, like those of Mary Leder, begin in border crossings—not one, but four.

54 Ibid., 56.

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As with Leder, it is the parents who are the decision-makers. The “communist romance” of the chapter title is undertaken by them—or more to the point, Lungina’s father, Zinovy Markovich. By the time of Lungina’s memoir, the time had long past when she could ask either her father or her mother what they were thinking. And in her case, unlike Leder’s, their thinking is not straightforward. Lungina’s origins, as she relates them for her barely post-Soviet TV audience, are unabashedly Jewish. Part of that Jewishness involves the swiftly changing parade of languages and identities. The languages and identities are so numerous, and appear and disappear so quickly, that the effect would be comic if it weren’t accompanied first by the assumption of permanence and then by profound sadness. Her early years are a condensation of the twentieth-century diaspora in the person of a single child. Lungina’s memoir opens with her name. The banality of the first sentence evaporates with the explanation that follows. (Since the text is oral, the variations in pronunciation, indicated below in italics, come through without any need for commentary.) My name is Lilya Lungina. From ages five to eight, when I lived in Germany, my name was Lili Markovich. Then from ten to fourteen, in France, I was Lili Markovich. But when I played in Mama’s marionette theater, I was Lili Imali. Imali was Mama’s stage name, Hebrew for “my mother.” That’s how many different names I had. And how many different schools I went to. I counted them once: twelve.55 Later, in passing, she notes that, when her father wrote her postcards, from his Moscow to her Paris, he sometimes called her Lilya and sometimes Lilit— Hebrew and pointedly irreligious (Lilith was a Cananite goddess). Lungina’s account of her parents’ lives before she was born traces territory that is familiar to us: a childhood in Yiddish; impoverishment on the one side and what seems to be a solid small-city background on the other. Both escape into the larger Russian and then Soviet world. Lungina knew that her father was born to a large family, seven or eight children, in Poltava. Her father received an education in realschule (real′naya gimnazia, a science-oriented secondary school). How he got there, overcoming what would have been a five-percent quota and an elementary education

55 Lungina and Dorman, Podstrochnik, 15.

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that was almost entirely religious, not to mention in Yiddish, is something she doesn’t know or didn’t ask. The usual path was maniacal self-study (Lozovsky’s), sometimes helped by tutors like Medvedeva’s father who had, of course, no schooling either, but were themselves voracious learners. Upon completing the gimnazia, Zinovy Markovich was accepted for study at the St. Petersburg Mining Institute. The Mining Institute, founded by Catherine the Great, was highly prestigious. But even if it had been run-of-the-mill and provincial, it would have kept the usual quota for non-baptized Jews. Following the 1905 revolution, adherence to the anti-Jewish quota was maintained somewhat haphazardly throughout the empire, though there was an attempt to reinstitute it in 1907, the year that Zinovy Markovich matriculated. Some leeway obviously remained: seven Jews graduated in 1913, which made them a little over ten percent of graduates—double the government standard.56 Given the usual five-year course of study, Markovich would have graduated in 1912. It was not a propitious time for engineers aiming for some kind of civilian career. Markovich was drafted. His army career was cut off when he became a prisoner of war in Germany. He was released in 1919. At some point earlier, Zinovy Markovich had joined a Jewish—that is, Yiddish-oriented—workers’ party, which merged with the Bolsheviks in 1917. We can assume this was the Kyiv-based Fareynikte, whose left wing became the Fareynikte Yidishe Komunistishe Partey (United Jewish Communist Party) in 1919.57 That was how, as a matter of inheritance, he became a Bolshevik. The 1919 date meant that he did not have the status of Old Bolshevik, like Lozovsky—nor did he carry the liabilities that status eventually entailed. In the meantime, he was a trusted figure, and for better and for worse, that attribute determined his future. Lungina’s mother, Maria Liberson, was also from Poltava, but in Jewish provincial terms, solidly middle class. Her father was a pharmacist; they lived above the store. Maria Liberson went to a classical gimnazia, as was suitable for a girl of some means. The roadblock on this glide path to acculturation was antiJewish violence, which was quelled in Poltava itself but not in the surrounding

56 Evgenii Zablotskii, “O polozhenii evreev v tsarskoi rossii po materialam arkhiva gornogo departamenta. Evrei-gornye inzhenery.” https://berkovich-zametki.com/AStarina/ Nomer14/Zablocky1.htm. 57 Matityahu Mintz, “Fareynikte,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon Hundert (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1984), v. 1, 503–504.

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region. Even in Poltava, the threat was considerable: leaflets distributed in the marketplace in May 1906 were quite specific: “O Russian! Destroy the Jew spawn.”58 Lungina herself doesn’t recall the specifics: only the word “pogrom” and the year—likely erroneous—1907. The Liberson family left Russia altogether, because a pogrom didn’t have to be on your street for the threat to be clear. They spent two years in Germany, and then moved to Palestine. Maria herself returned from Palestine to wait for Zinovy, and became a student at the Higher Women’s Courses in Petersburg. Lungina doesn’t say what her mother studied, nor was there any need to: far more important was her mother’s artistic flair and her involvement with people in need. One focus was fellow students who suffered from loneliness. Another was the children of Jewish army recruits, who lived with their mothers in crushing poverty. Maria Liberson set up a nursery school to care for those children, put together a program, and was herself one of the teachers there. We know about the nursery school not only because of Lungina’s memoirs but because Liberson herself published an article about it in the Russianlanguage Journal of Jewish Enlightenment (Vestnik evreiskogo prosveshcheniia) in 1914. She writes in the article that she was able to gain the confidence of the mothers when she spoke Yiddish to them—she had to do that, because otherwise she was clearly of the wrong social class. The food in the school was kosher, but likely not strictly: warm milk and barley coffee at the start of the day; soup and meat for midday dinner; milk and fruit pudding at the end of the day. There were no prayers, but there were songs in Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew. The younger children were taught by the Montessori method. The older ones learned Hebrew. The program is quintessential Jewish Enlightenment, right down to the fact of its documentation. Maria Liberson had to have been immersed in that world, which sought to retain some aspects of Jewish ethnic belonging and discard or downplay others. Hebrew and Russian were taught; Yiddish was assumed but not broadened; the Hebrew was secular. But in terms of Liberson’s own life, it was a beginning that had no continuation. She did nothing further with anything Jewish. Perhaps her interest waned—or just as likely, life became too overwhelming. She did no further work with people in need; as we will see, she herself would become exactly that. Her artistic talent would be her means of economic survival.

58 Mikhail Isaakovich Gol′dshtein, “Ocherki istorii evreev Poltavshchiny,” http://histpol. narod.ru/history/evr_gromada/evr_grom-01.htm.

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But in the meantime, things looked promising. Maria and Zinovy reunited after his return, and Lilya was born a year later, in 1920. At this point, Zinovy Markovich’s elite education and Party affiliation propelled him ahead—the vast, largely illiterate Soviet state needed personnel who were both educated and loyal. Markovich moved to Moscow to work under Anatoly Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissar for Education. In 1925 came something new: a massive campaign to industrialize, which necessitated the purchase of machinery from the West. With his degree in engineering, Markovich was an ideal candidate for the task, and he was sent to Berlin as a trade representative. He would be the assistant to Nikolai Krestinsky, whom we last saw as a prerevolutionary expat in Lina Shtern’s Geneva. For a year, Lungina lived within the bubble of the Soviet elite. Her father wouldn’t let her buy a doll carriage: too bourgeois. But she went to the embassy school with Krestinsky’s daughter. The Soviet writer Maxim Gorky, still living in un-Soviet Sorrento, came to the school to visit. In 1936, Gorky, back in Moscow, would die under what were rumored to be mysterious circumstances. A year later, Krestinsky would be arrested, along with his daughter and wife. For whatever reason, the embassy school period of Lungina’s childhood lasted only for a year. She went on to a regular German school, where in short order she became a German child who read books in Gothic script. Remembering the ease of her transformation, Lungina stresses her desire to conform—an attribute shared by most of humanity that was innocuous in a Weimar primary school, but less so later on. At this juncture, the oddity of her background came up, as she recalls, only once. Introducing her to their family at dinner, the mother of her school friend Ursula remarks that she is, yes, from the Soviet Union, but also Jewish, as they were. This reference to Jewishness is telling. First of all, it is positive. SovietJewish memoirs often have a defining moment when the memoirist finds out that he (it’s usually a “he”) is Jewish. A classic instance involves the music critic Nicholas Slonimsky, who overhears a nasty remark and asks his parents what a Jew is. “Look in the mirror,” they tell him.59 These moments of recognition are possible because of the post-Jewish orientation in acculturated Russian families. Lungina’s family, past the period of her father’s Jewish socialism and her mother’s kindergarten, was mostly that. There was a trip to Palestine to visit family. Otherwise, what reigned was neither pride nor shame: just absence.

59 Alice Nakhimovsky, Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), ix.

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The Markovich family idyll, with its holidays in Switzerland and France, came to an abrupt end in 1928, when Zinovy went on “vacation” to Moscow and did not return. The vacation, ostensibly to check up on some machinery he had purchased, was accompanied by vigorous objections from Lungina’s mother, who was, at that point, less Soviet-oriented than her husband. She had reason to be fearful, and so did he. As the First Five-Year Plan came into operation, there was a push against engineers with prerevolutionary training (burzhuaznye spetsy, bourgeois specialists), whose loyalties—now that there were “red” specialists available—were suspect by definition. An ominous sign was the Shakhty trial, which accused the “bourgeois” engineers of sabotage in mining. In the period from the announcement of the trial in April 1928 until Markovich left, Pravda ran seven articles on it. Pravda was an important paper with very few pages. Seven articles constituted a significant amount of journalistic real estate, and also a significant sign; Markovich certainly would have noted it. The trial was also mentioned in German papers. While Markovich, for obvious reasons, never discussed his work in Berlin with his eight-year-old daughter, we do have an account of what it was like from an American mining engineer who was there working for the Soviets. Writing with the help of a journalist after his return to the United States in 1937, John Littlepage was observant and remarkably dispassionate. He got a job to help out with gold mining and recorded what he saw. Littlepage was in Berlin twice, in 1928 and then in 1931. He describes the city as crawling with Soviet émigrés who inserted themselves in the procurement process, acting as middlemen between the Soviets and the German manufacturers. Had Littlepage done his observing a year or two earlier, he would have run into Lozovsky’s older brother, the blacksmith, who was there with the Soviet Trade Delegation. The brother—name unknown—got his position sometime between 1923 and 1925 and remained at it until 1927. Then he was fired because at that point, at least, Soviets were attuned to the problem. In 1928, as Littlepage set out for the Soviet Union, a Berlin-based Soviet gave him a warning: “He said I needn’t get worried if Russians working with me suddenly disappeared under mysterious circumstances.” The unnamed acquaintance justified this: under present Soviet conditions, there simply “wasn’t any other way to manage things.”60

60 John D. Littlepage and Demaree Bess, In Search of Soviet Gold (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1937), 12–14. A fascinating part of Littlepage’s story concerns why the Soviets took up gold mining and hence needed his services. Marxism-Leninism disdained gold, which would be valueless under Communism. Stalin changed this around, influenced by a book about the

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Markovich was also warned. Someone he knew invited him to a café and told him not to go to Moscow. Markovich read this as a potential trap, a kind of ideological sting operation. A test like that was plausible: later in her story, Lungina herself becomes the object of something similar, set up by a girlfriend whose sensibilities were anti-Soviet. For Markovich in 1928, the consequences of his return were not as bad as they might have been. When he arrived in Moscow, agents confiscated his passport. He found lodging in the room of a relative, where he had to sleep on a desk. But otherwise he was untouched. The year was now 1930. Lungina’s mother saw her husband’s return to the USSR as a kind of abandonment of their family, or at the very least, a show of indifference to their wellbeing. She took up with a lover, a younger man named Ludwig, who was the son of the family they boarded with. This personal drama, more than enough for anyone’s childhood, was matched by political drama on the outside. The May Day riots in Berlin, in which many people were injured and some killed, laid bare the tenuous foundations of the Weimar government, and served as a turning point for resident Russians of varying political orientations. Among those residents were the Ulanovskys, who were angered over Soviet support for the rioting German Communists. The Ulanovskys were not, however, émigrés, but spies; they remained at their posts. Émigrés began fleeing to Paris. Lungina’s mother did not do that—yet. In her first move, she took Lilya and Ludwig and left for Tel Aviv. The stay lasted a few months only. Hebrew would be the one language that Lungina did not absorb; she did not become a Zionist child, though she did have time to win a castle-building competition on the Tel Aviv beach. Their time in Palestine was dominated by personal drama, namely about Ludwig, and concluded for Lilya by her encounter with Sabbath laws—not the laws themselves so much as her atheist grandmother’s deference to them, on account of the neighbors. Both the restrictions, which made no sense, and the deference, which she understood as cowardice, stuck with her. Lilya and her mother went to Paris. Her mother spoke French—the gimnazia education in Poltava, intended to make her a cultural European, prepared her for emigration as it had done unintentionally for so many upper-class émigrés. Otherwise, she kept her distance from the Russian émigré community: from this point on, Maria Liberson would never have a community of her own.

California gold rush written by the French poet Blaise Cendrars and translated into Russian in 1926. Littlepage learned this story from a book written by his recruiter, the Old Bolshevik and Soviet mining engineer Aleksandr Serebrovsky. Serebrovsky’s book was quickly withdrawn, and the author himself arrested as an enemy of the people; he was executed in 1938.

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Her closest friend was another displaced Jew from Poltava. Maria supported herself and Lilya by creating a puppet theater, for which she constructed the puppets. The theater was called Petrushka, and displayed the kind of marriage of Russian folklore and modern sensibilities that Parisians were primed to expect from earlier visitors like Stravinsky and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russe, whose Petrushka collaboration had burst on the scene in 1911. Lilya played in her mother’s theater and, not without some embarrassment, handed out fliers for it on the street. The theater thrived enough to support the two of them, though not enough to shield her from the class distinctions that permeated that part of Parisian life. For a year, she studied in a school with the daughter of Ilya Ehrenburg, the Soviet writer who was perhaps more comfortable in France. At other times, giving performances in wealthy houses, she was treated like a servant. Still, in the end, she became immersed in French life. At her French school, she started as an indifferent student and ended up as an excellent one. She read. Ever attentive to the role of conformism in her own choices, she says that she read in order to be accepted by the somewhat older children she admired. As in Berlin, she expected that this life would be permanent. In 1933, the situation was grim on all sides. France was in depression, and the political situation was unstable; Germany had Hitler. Ludwig wrote from New York asking Maria and Lilya to join him, but for whatever reason—distrust, or exhaustion, or an inability to contemplate a third country with an unknown language—Maria declined. The remaining option was the Soviet Union, but here a problem loomed: as a divorced woman, Maria was no longer a Soviet citizen. Judging from the memoir, it seems to have taken most of a year to acquire the necessary papers. In the course of that year, Lilya lived with a family in Nice, where she went to school, made friends, and by the time her mother summoned her was bitterly confronted with another set of goodbyes. Maria’s friends understood the political implications of her decision better than she did, or at any rate did not restrain themselves from saying some things aloud. A French friend took Lilya aside and said: “you know, you are going there, and the key will turn, and you will never come back.”61 The train ride to the Soviet Union took Maria and Lilya through Warsaw, where they stayed with Russian-Jewish friends. Lilya remembers two things: the abundance of food and the warnings about hunger in Russia. How much did Maria Liberson know about the Ukrainian famine, still raging? Living as they did not far from

61 Lungina and Dorman, Podstrochnik, 61.

Communist Romance and Border Crossings, 1917 through the 1930s

Ukraine, these Warsaw Jews knew enough. “Where are you going, how can you go to that terrible country? There’s a famine there!”62 As Lilya and her mother rode the train, the scene grew grimmer. Once they had crossed the border, their train stopped for several hours. They left the platform—where people without tickets could not go—and went into the station. And there they saw it: “People were lying everywhere on the floor, either asleep or sick and helpless . . . children were crying.” Outside the station, it was worse.” These were people who were trying to escape from hunger, “people who were actually dying of hunger.”63 She remembers herself standing in her French overcoat, out of place, and terrified. She begged to go back. “It’s over,” said her mother. “We are on the other side of the border, we are in the Soviet Union. There is no way back.”64

62 Ibid., 65. 63 Ibid., 65. 64 Ibid., 66.

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Negotiating the Late 1930s: Terror and Career Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan began in 1928 and concluded, following the slogan “five in four,” in 1932. The idea of heavy industry initiated in breathtaking speed continued in the Second Five-Year Plan, 1933–1937. Journalists and writers of literary fiction—the sources of information, the calibrators of public mood—were sent to massive construction sites to report on the transformation of humankind. Some of these, like the famous White Sea Canal, used Gulag labor. In the understanding of the era, this was a positive feature: participation in socialist construction was part of the “reforging” (perekovka) of human souls. Writers and journalists recruited for these trips either fell in line or found excuses, often dubiously medical, to get out of them. Fiction about socialist labor projects that could be construed as skeptical either didn’t see the light of day, like Platonov’s The Foundation Pit, written in 1930 and published in 1987; or made it to publication through a chain of unlikely reasons, like Ilf and Petrov’s Little Golden Calf, published in 1933 but removed from print in 1949, when censors wised up. Worker enthusiasm was one side of a coin, the other side of which featured threatening accounts of sabotage, called “wrecking.” Sabotage was a convenient way to understand why, despite the journalistic hoopla, the products of the new industries were often shoddy. As we saw earlier, the first wreckers were engineers, the villains of the Shakhty trial (1928), followed by Industrial Party trial (1930). All were falsely accused and some were executed. A defendant named Pyotr Palchinsky, like Zinovy Markovich a graduate of the St. Petersburg Mining Institute, was executed after the Shakhty trial.1 Like his fellow suspect

1 For more on Palchinsky, see Loren Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1993).

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engineers, he had been educated before the revolution. People like that were easy to demonize as bourgeois. The Terror picked up speed in the late 1930s as major political figures— ultimately, all of Stalin’s rivals—were put on trial and publicly confessed. The historian Robert Conquest was the first to try to understand why the confessions happened. Fear of reprisals against family members likely played a role, though wives were arrested anyway and children sent to orphanages. If defendants counted on clemency as a result of playing along, that hope went unrealized. Very different from these transactional motivations, and more resonant for some of the figures in this book, was some people’s profound belief in the primacy of the Party. The Party may have veered off course, but even so its truth was an ultimate truth and its triumph inevitable. In deference to that truth, the self-sacrifice of individual believers was a small thing. As were facts on the ground. The subjects in this book did not face these questions directly in the late 1930s—the four arrests that ultimately transpired (of Kvitko, Lozovsky, Shtern, and Ulanovskaya) came after the war. But the Terror passed close to them. Zinovy Markovich and Lina Shtern were close acquaintances of Nikolai Krestinsky, who, as the only victim of the show trials to deny the charges against him, presented a particularly troubling case. Their personal knowledge of him had to support his anguished attempts to defend himself, and not the government’s accusations. Shtern and Grossman had relatives arrested: a similar dilemma. Lungina lived in an elite building, where arrests happened nightly. Friends of hers lost their fathers and sometimes mothers. She and her classmates were rescued from danger by an uncommon act of courage and kindness.

Lilianna Lungina: A World of Contradictions The girl in the French coat—and more important, French habits of mind— found herself in a world of contradictions. When she arrived in Moscow, May Day decorations were on display in the Kremlin. Her father, still Bolshevik, took her to Red Square, where she was transfixed by an effigy of Austen Chamberlain, Great Britain’s already former Foreign Secretary. Chamberlian’s effigy was burning as a circle of revelers, holding hands, danced around it. It seemed barbaric. The building where her father lived embodied its own incongruities. Having overcome his homelessness, he now had a place for a family, a three-room private apartment in the center of Moscow, at a time when most Russians, and all of Lilya’s eventual classmates, lived in communal apartments with one family

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to a room. On the other hand, the building’s elevator remained uninstalled, and there was no proper staircase either. To get to the seventh floor, her family climbed ladders. The evolution of Lungina’s father Zinovy Markovich is striking, though related only episodically. The first stand he takes, in total contradiction to the family’s outing to Red Square the afternoon of their arrival, is to pull Lilya from school. Because, at the beginning of her Moscow life, she could not write in Russian, she spent her first year at a German-language school, where her classmates were the children of German Communists who had fled Hitler. As the Fall 1936 school year approached, her father refused to send her back. She cried; he was—unusually, she says—like iron. What rumors had he heard, and decided, this time around, to believe? One year later, all the teachers, many of the parents, and some portion of the children were arrested. The school ceased to exist. The German-speaking Zinovy Markovich became close to a different German-Jewish refugee, the mathematician and chess champion Emanuel Lasker. Lasker had fled to the USSR under the protection of the Soviet Justice Minister Nikolai Krylenko. In her narrative, Lungina remembers a turn of events in which Lasker was unable to reach his patron who seemed to have disappeared. The chessmaster saw where things were headed and, in Lungina’s account, announced at a dinner with her parents that he was going to the United States. The dates of Lasker’s departure for New York (1936) and Krylenko’s arrest (early 1938) do not quite jibe, unless Krylenko was aware that his days of playing the patron were numbered, and deliberately avoided contact. (Eventually, he would confess to longstanding anti-Soviet activity, for which he was executed.) In any case, Lasker—and following him, his friend Zinovy Markovich—were at this point without illusions. The world-famous Lasker could act; Markovich could not. As it turned out, he did not have to: by that time, he was already diagnosed with leukemia. That he was in and out of the hospital did not stop his preparations for arrest. Like many, he had packed a suitcase: shaving things, a towel, soap. Also in preparation, Lilya’s mother dried slices of bread (Russian sukhariki: they would not go bad). In a scene familiar from countless accounts of the thirties, but new to Lilya and her parents as they lived it, Markovich spent his nights pacing in his room. The nature of their elite building, filled with former members of the diplomatic corps, became a curse: steps on the stairs and the sound of the elevator—both now in place—meant that some former envoy was under arrest. Her Soviet-German school life, unfolding at the same time, was an immersion in conformity: “the communist enthusiasm was indescribable.” That she

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was able to keep some distance from it despite a desire to be like everybody else she ascribes to her experience in France. It gave her “other thoughts,” and ultimately a kind of spiritual salvation.2 Speaking to what she imagines as her TV audience, young people who knew the Soviet Union only as it was falling apart, she tries to warn them about political conformity at the same time that she does not elevate herself. She had lived abroad; she was lucky. In her next, Russian, school, the situation is more complex, and owes nothing to her experience in western Europe. This time, there was a political infraction whose consequences were, again by luck, deflected. The atmosphere against which a small act of free speech played out was peculiar. Her new friends, like the old ones, were absorbed in the cult of Stalin. They deified him; when given the chance, they ran off to catch a glimpse of him. Also pertinent was the widespread sense that material life was improving. Historians, notably Sheila Fitzpatrick, have commented extensively on this contrast between an expanding political Terror and a growing sense of plenty.3 Lungina mentions fashion and café life. Moscow stores sold “smoked fish, caviar, and four or even five kinds of cheese.”4 Then, in a burst of adolescent insouciance, Lungina and her classmates prepared a provocative edition of their class newspaper. The paper—which would have been a “wall newspaper,” a single edition, hung up for people to read—was called Class Un-Pravda (Klassnaia nepravda). The playful title hid some provocations, including a reference to the death of the writer and political icon Maxim Gorky by poisoning. Gorky had been a sometimes friend and sometimes opponent of Bolshevism. His unexpected death in 1936 was indeed the subject of rumors, none of them public, as Stalin was in the process of enshrining him in the socialist pantheon. Lungina doesn’t dwell on how aware she and her friends were of the line they were crossing. What she remembers is that they put the typed pages in a locked cabinet. When they went to retrieve them the next day, the pages were gone. They ran to see their principal and whatever they may have been expecting—an attempt to find the thief?—what they encountered was a display of courage and love that would be remarkable in any context but was extraordinary in the Terror year 1937. “Children,” said the principal Klavdia Vasilievna Poltavskaya, “I was the one who took them. And I burned them in

2 Lungina and Dorman, Podstrochnik, 70. 3 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Life in the 1930s (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 89–95. 4 Lungina and Dorman, Podstrochnik, 89.

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my bathroom. I was scared. I took them before someone else would. I wanted to save you and myself.”5 The students’ provocation may have been unthinking, but the act of protection was real. What shaped it, beyond Klavdia Vasilievna’s singularity as a human being, is hinted at in Lungina’s characterization of her as “an old-style pedagogue.”6 She had not “completely bought in to the time in which she lived,” an insight that completely fits in with a later one by Vasily Grossman. In Life and Fate, the hero who rethinks his past and resists pressure sees himself as “a stepson of the time.”7 Klavdia Vasilievna’s outsider perspective was a product of time as surely as Lungina’s was a product of space. Lungina saw it in her language. Speaking to the students every morning at assembly, she did not use the words “Communist Party” and did not mention Stalin. She addressed them as “children”—which, in Lungina’s recollection, was not only tender, but starkly un-Soviet. Klavdia Vasilievna’s uncommon stance had repercussions: the komsorg (Party representative assigned to the school) began paying close attention to her, writing down everything she said. Quite surprisingly, because they understood the danger, Lungina and her friends went to the local Party Committee to defend their principal, and complain about the komsorg. In the end, nobody suffered. The Terror was just unfolding, and the machine of state surveillance was not perfect. Klavdia Vasilievna presided over graduation. Late in life, when Lungina ran into the komsorg on the street, she saw that he had prospered. He remembered her, too—as dangerous. As the number of arrests increased, including not only people in Lungina’s building, but parents of her school friends and sometimes the school friends themselves, there are more situations that test bystanders. One unfolds at a meeting of the Komsomol, the Communist Youth League that Lungina had herself joined proudly and early. When her friends, whose parents have been arrested, get expelled, she defends them at a meeting and herself gets expelled. Explaining her courage this time around, she returns to her foreign habits of mind. But she also brings up the necessity of overcoming her deep instinct to conform. At this moment, she said, she understood irrevocably that there was no truth in what was happening. It was all theater. How to treat a friend who is excoriated at a political meeting is a staple of literature of this period, including Life and Fate. Lungina, though, presents

5 6 7

Ibid., 94. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 94; Grossman’s hero is Krymov; the phrase is pasynok vremeni.

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a more troubling variation, in which categories are blurred. A school friend of hers, living with her sister after the arrest of their parents, invites Lungina to go for a walk late at night, promising to tell her something important when nobody could hear. The conversation is awkward. Then a man appears, asks for the friend by name, and tells her to get into his car. This is a classic arrest scene. Lungina runs to the home of another friend, wakes him up, and together they go to warn the sister. This was itself courageous: they could expect police to be there already. But when the door opens, they are met by the friend herself. What was going on? Lungina understood immediately: an elaborately staged loyalty test, more theater. There is a similarity to her father’s experience when he was warned by a Berlin acquaintance not to return to the Soviet Union. Zinovy Markovich concluded that he might be the object of a loyalty test, and doubled down on his intention to go to Moscow. In that terrifying world, tests might be in play on any side. The remainder of Lungina’s stories about the late 1930s are about normal life, in which Terror sometimes intrudes, and other times does not figure at all. She pays, in retrospect, too little attention to her father. She graduates from high school and begins studying at the Institute of Foreign Literature (not her fluent French or German, but Swedish). She goes on holiday to Koktebel in the Crimea, where she is welcomed into one of Russian culture’s most venerable spaces: the house of the poet Maksim Voloshin, in which his widow still lived. Russian literature, and particularly the poetry of someone like Voloshin, was understood broadly not merely as a cultural phenomenon, but as a moral one, an explicator of what life was, and a beacon for what it should be. At the institute, two teachers of European literature were particularly impressive. One was dazzling, while the other thought as he spoke, providing a model of truth-seeking. Otherwise, the atmosphere was oppressive. In 1938 and 1939, students whose parents had fallen to the Terror were made to publicly confess: “They repented because their father had been arrested, or their mother, and they themselves were guilty before the Party and the country, because they hadn’t unmasked them in time.”8 The confessors were students of both the dazzling teacher and the thinking one. They were students of European literature who were deeply versed in Russian literature. To anyone outside of Russia’s two-hundred-year cultural tradition, which understood literature as a moral beacon; to anyone who has taken a good look at the masterminds of the Holocaust, Lungina’s disillusionment seems naïve. To her, it was shattering.

8

Ibid., 121.

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Kvitko: Prosperity and Compromise The late thirties were far from cloudless for Kvitko. Still, he was prospering in ways that would have been unimaginable to his younger self. In 1936, he left Kyiv for Moscow. In 1939, he received the Red Banner of Labor prize, an achievement that Gennady Estraikh notes put him “a step lower” than his fellow poet Peretz Markish but “a step higher” than Itsik Fefer and Dovid Hofshteyn.9 The prize was followed by the grant of a piece of land for a summer house. In 1940, just before the war, he started building. That same year he joined the Party—he had been a member of the German Communist Party earlier, but the status didn’t transfer. Kvitko’s prosperity, a consequence of his talent, the benevolence of the Soviet establishment, and the helping hand of Kornei Chukovsky, delighted Chukovsky particularly. On January 11, 1936, he records a visit from Kvitko, outfitted in a “fabulous suit and a European coat.”10 In August that same year, on a visit to Kyiv where Kvitko was still living, he describes not only Kvitko himself—“greying and broad-chested, with an unclouded soul, serene and utterly robust”—but also his three-room apartment. Every rug, says Chukovsky, was chosen with precision and taste. Chukovsky could, when he chose, be quite acerbic, but never about Kvitko. He was charmed by Kvitko’s sixteen-year-old daughter Etele. He loved hearing the family converse in Yiddish.11 The phrase “an unclouded soul” (iasnaia dusha) has moral qualities. Chukovsky saw Kvitko as qualitatively different from most of the Soviet intelligentsia. Kvitko had been a delegate to the 1934 Convention of the Soviet Union of Writers. The convention itself represented a major shift in the Soviet approach to the arts. The 1920s had been more or less anarchic, with a multitude of leftist literary groups, many modernist, issuing manifestoes and vying for political hegemony. In 1932, all groups were abolished. At the 1934 convention, “socialist realism”—meaning, in literature, writing that was easy to follow and politically obedient—was declared the only permissible vehicle for Soviet poetry or prose. It was at this convention that Isaac Babel, the great modernist, said that he was embarking on a new genre: silence. (He prefaced this by talking about

  9 Estraikh, “Kvitko,” 959. 10 Chukovskii, Dnevnik 1936–1939, 7. 11 Chukovskii, Dnevnik 1936–1939, 24. For the helping hand, see both this entry and the entry for January 11, just cited: Chukovsky is managing rivalries among Kvitko’s translators and boosting him in public in a way that makes his preferences clear to lesser figures in the Writers Union.

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the perfection of Stalin’s prose—a symptom of what was required to deflect attention from a sentence of oblique protest.) Babel was arrested in 1939 and executed in 1940. Kvitko, for the present, thrived. Part of thriving involved a change in style and content—that is, thriving was utterly dependent on both. The stylistic restrictions were not a problem for Kvitko’s children’s poems. But outside of that limited area they mattered a great deal, and Kvitko changed accordingly: his short novel Liam and Petrik (1933) is as good an example of socialist realism as any. The prose is both realistic (easy to read; no modernist tricks) and ideologically transparent. Abundant details about shtetl life, many drawn from Kvitko’s childhood, make it interesting, but aside from a bit of irresolution on the part of some revolutionary-minded characters, the moral world it presents is a lot less complicated than what we see in the notebooks of Doba-Mera. Even so, it was only published in full in 1957. The novel, inescapably, has its Jewish side, but a reader interested in that aspect of it would have to look hard. The Jewish Liam and Ukrainian Petrik spend their brutal prerevolutionary childhoods together and then lose each other until the very end. The two boys start work young. There is a nod to the Jewish thirst for secular education, though Petrik is indistinguishable from Liam in this and all other pursuits. Older Jewish men are notable for their physical strength and absolute disconnect from moral issues apart from revolutionary ones; there are no references to Jewish texts or synagogue attendance of any kind. Administrative antisemitism appears once, when Liam, much to his surprise, can’t stay overnight in the city of Mykolaiv (his Ukrainian boss of the moment tries to fix things, but unsuccessfully: only a revolution will work). Set in an era of pogroms, the novel ignores them. Cossacks are called in on one occasion—to stop a workers’ rebellion. The novel in verse Years of Youth (Yunge yorn), which we looked at briefly in chapter one, had great personal significance to Kvitko. He worked on it for over a decade, beginning in 1928. The book was printed in Kaunas in June 1941, two years after the Soviet invasion of Lithuania. If the political intention was to foster Soviet enthusiasm among Lithuanian Jews, the timing was poor. That same month, the Nazis invaded. The warehouse where the printed copies were stored was bombed, and the entire print run was lost. A single copy turned up much later—somebody at the press had taken it to read at home. But even in 1957, publication was not a sure thing: the writer Emmanuil Kazakevich, a

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very ill man, extended himself to write an assessment that he understood to be strictly political.12 The novel’s most telling political adjustment had come earlier, in the wake of the unfolding Terror. The poem’s original title was “Jonah” (Yoyneh) after its main character, the famous Red Army general Iona Yakir. Kvitko knew Yakir, a fellow Jewish Communist from Ukraine.13 Then, in May 1937, Yakir was arrested along with some other well-known military figures. A month later he was shot on orders of the Military Collegium—the same entity that would, in the fullness of time, order the execution of Kvitko. Kvitko rewrote, turning Yakir into the safely fictional Shimen (Simon).14 (Another historical figure in the poem, the poet Oyzer Shvartsman, could retain his real name—his death in the course of the civil war meant that nobody was paying attention to him.15) Otherwise, the novel in verse remained the story of Jews who move from desperate poverty and hopelessness to difficult revolutionary battles, some tragedies, and ultimate triumph. Some of the male characters are powerfully drawn. The heroic women are a little hard to differentiate: the creation of believable female characters was not Kvitko’s strong point. It is impossible, of course, to go through the novel and separate what Kvitko thought from what he wrote. We can say that unlike “In the Red Storm” and 1919, this poem leaves little space for ambiguity. Class divisions in the shtetl separate people nearly perfectly into those who are good (the poor) and those who are evil (the wealthy or the religious). Bolsheviks are elevated. While Bolshevism itself isn’t discussed, all other political parties, including Jewish ones, are denigrated. There are some crossover figures, like Asi, the daughter of a village rich man sent to study with her even richer uncle—but from the very beginning, Asi hangs out with servants and workers. The novel is full of conversion narratives, a staple of revolutionary fiction. Among the converts are the hero’s blind mother, his sister Nekhe, a strongman named Volf-Ber, and a klezmer musician—otherwise musicians are evil because they play for Asi’s uncle and sell things at the market. The ultimate transformational figure is Shimen himself, who starts out as a boy who is hungry and

12 Miron Petrovskii, Gorodu i miru: Kievskie ocherki (Kyiv: Pis′mennik, 1990), 373. 13 Ibid., 372–373. 14 Changing names was standard practice throughout the Soviet period. In Kvitko’s Lullaby (Viglid, 1939), Stalin appears to save a child from scary wolves and bears (by sending in tanks). In the poet’s Collected Works (Geklibene verk [Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1967], 247), the tanks are sent in by Lenin. The rhyme remains. 15 Shvartsman’s cousin, the poet Dovid Hofshteyn, would suffer the same fate as Kvitko. Estraikh, “The Kharkiv Yiddish Literary World,” 77.

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ends up as a commander who defies death. Kvitko’s conversion narratives start, as they must, in opposition. Shimen’s mother, for example, embodies the old world. “What are you trying to do?” she asks. God has divided the world into rich and poor: who is Shimen to remake things?16 But eventually, in a conversation with her daughter, even she comes around. Nekhe needs to go to the forest, where her brother is fighting. Can she leave her mother alone? There is a moment of equivocation because the mother’s straits are truly dire, but in the end, even the old woman realizes that the revolution takes precedence. “Go help,” she says.17 Partly played out in that exchange is another staple of revolutionary fiction: the Bolshevik whose devotion to the cause involves not only self-sacrifice but, if necessary, the sacrifice of others who are dearly loved. We saw Kvitko acknowledge this trope in his earlier poem 1919, when the narrator steels himself to ignore his father’s pain. As a revolutionary hero, Shimen needs to show that he, too, is ready to sacrifice those he loves. Should he send his beloved Asi on a dangerous mission? Of course he must. (Tragedy is averted: Asi is taken prisoner but Shimen frees her). The poem has a film-worthy end. Shimen is captured and is about to be hanged when a clarinetist—the most salvageable musician—lifts his instrument to his lips and distracts the marauders. Shimen frees himself from the rope. His problems are over, but Kvitko still needs to describe the joyful world that Shimen’s efforts have brought into being, and he has to do this in ways that don’t closely reference the actual world of the 1930s and still less the world of 1940–1941. His solution is to have his exhausted hero fall asleep. In his dream, Shimen lives the future: the enemy has been vanquished, the earth is bearing grain, people study music or swim in pools, and peasants have agricultural machinery. Shimen wakes up for a bit and then slips back into dreaming, this time reminiscing about fighting, about Lenin, and about Beethoven’s Ninth: the Soviet Union was big on the mass diffusion of Western high culture. As the poem ends, Shimen continues to slip between the world of dreams and the real one. Past heroism mixes with future transformations and the first real-life steps that prove the transformations will indeed happen. All is good. What does this poem, written for Jews, have to say about their specific place in the revolution? Jews dominate the story: they are the villains and the heroes—with some space, to be sure, for even more heroic but less central gentiles. What does the novel then desire for them? Not simply their 16 Kvitko, Yunge yorn, 91–92. 17 Ibid., 155.

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liberation. That legal moment is referenced correctly in the text: the emancipation of Jews in the Russian Empire was the result of the February revolution, and had nothing to do with the Bolsheviks. But legal emancipation and the whole liberal idea are dismissed here in favor of the radical transformation of humankind. That transformation, sealed with the revolution, is visible, for now, in a dream. Erasing Yakir from the story was a necessity if Kvitko had any hopes of publishing. He would have been on dangerous ground even if he had stuffed the manuscript into his desk. Other people in that situation destroyed manuscripts or found a good hiding place. But Kvitko did not do either of those things. His poem was his life’s work and the manifestation of his faith. Whether he thought it through or not, the real Yakir had become a stumbling block to that faith, an aberration on the path to realizing Shimen’s dream, and his own.

Mary Leder: Close Encounters The most striking part of Leder’s recollection of the late thirties is her attention to Soviet hierarchies: the Communist economy of privilege. At the top of Leder’s world, perched a few rungs below high-fliers like Lozovsky, Kvitko, or Shtern, and a rung or so below the still valued Ulanovskys, lived her aunt and uncle, the Mikhlins. As members of the Society of Former Political Prisoners, they had a status just below that of the Old Bolsheviks. By the early thirties, both societies were politically powerless. But they still served as distributors of material benefits: a building of private apartments just for them, and just as significantly, food. Mary does not describe her aunt and uncle as users of the well-known “closed distribution” system, which supplied privileged people with foods that were either unavailable or simply time-consuming to obtain. What she saw was the Stalinist version of take-out, available only to the elite. Her relatives brought food from a hotel, using containers specific to the purpose. Befitting their status, the Mikhlins had a bathroom, though the hot water ran inconsistently. Mary bathed when she could. She was also, always, fed; she stayed overnight. Details like these highlight a peculiarity of 1930s hierarchy and the social upheaval that preceded it: people crossed lines. Leder herself had no fixed housing; she often found herself in a “corner” of someone’s room in a communal apartment, itself overcrowded with randomly mixed families. She was nonetheless introduced to other families from the elite building. Most important were the Atlases, who stood out among the other Jews—everywhere Mary went, non-Jews were a minority—because they were not shtetl Jews and

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spoke native Russian. They had a young relative living with them: Dodya, a first-year chemistry student at Moscow University. The Society of Old Bolsheviks was closed in the midthirties, precisely because they were Old Bolsheviks, and a plausible repository of revolutionary ideals. The Society of Former Political Prisoners was closed at the same time, and for similar reasons, although they had the additional impediment of a past allegiance to parties that were not Bolshevik. Then the Terror started. Dodya was arrested. His arrest, Mary said, was the first of someone close to her. She did not believe that he was a part of a group conspiracy to assassinate Soviet leaders. Neither did he: as he was led off, he assured the family he would be back in a few days. In retrospect, that was a classic response. So was the reaction of one of his cousins, “when you are cutting down trees, chips will fall.”18 Dodya’s arrest was not Mary’s first encounter with fear on an individual level. Shortly before, she had shown up late one night at the Mikhlins’, assuming, as had always been the case, that she could sleep there. But precisely because the building was elite, night arrests in 1937 were already a commonplace. Her uncle answered the door. His face was “ashen.”19 In the morning, writes Mary, they talked. The arrests were happening nightly. Everybody had a bag packed, and so did they. She does not say if the conversation went further. Her other elite protectors, the Stalinist-inclined Lidia Sergeevna, understood the arrests as “housecleaning.”20 A more moderate response, one that Mary ascribes to herself in several places, was that people in control had gone astray. She doesn’t bring up Stalin, either as the prime mover or as a savior duped by underlings, though the duped-savior formula, which substituted Stalin for the tsar of folk tradition, was quite common. In the memoir, Liza Mikhlin is an adherent. These contradictory strains of deprivation and wellbeing, frankness and deception, danger to come and danger averted, permeated every situation in which Mary found herself in the late 1930s. Her first employment, after her flame-out at the Dinamo factory, was with the Foreign Language Publishing House in the center of Moscow. The Foreign Language Publishing House put out translations of Russian and Soviet literature as well as classics of Marxism-Leninism; their work remains to this day in libraries all over the world. Leder’s job, one step above menial, was to read from

18 Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia, 134. 19 Ibid., 126. 20 Ibid., 112.

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texts as another editor checked for accuracy. Standards were high: when errors were found, “people pounced on their colleagues with malicious glee.”21 Because the organization was full of foreigners, danger lurked: a decade later, association with foreigners would be suspect, and being one, even more so if you were Jewish, was even worse. Of the people Leder associated with regularly, Leon Talmi, her supervisor, would be sucked into the Antifascist Committee trial, and executed. The same would be true of Chaika Vatenberg, an assistant editor. Another editor, Eda Litvakova, was a niece of Moyshe Litvakov, Kvitko’s nemesis. Writing about them in 2001, Mary knew about the fate of Litvakov, but not of Talmi or Vatenberg, though nothing about what happened to them was surprising. Mary left the publishing house to pursue a degree at Moscow University, first in biology (because, she says standards were low—an assessment that has some relevance to what would happen to Shtern) and then in history. She didn’t last a year because she was recruited for a special assignment. The invitation came through the Komsomol, where she was active, though another likely factor was her application for a visa to visit her family in California: the assumption was that a personal visit would be a good pretext for intelligence work. The recruiter cautioned her not to discuss their conversation, and gave her 900 rubles, a large sum of money. It was the spring of 1936. That fall, she was told to leave the university. Her fellow students were to assume that she had been arrested and took steps to exclude her from the Komsomol. Upset, Mary turned to her superiors at the spy school, and somebody from Military Intelligence took care of the problem. The school, in Khimki on the outskirts of Moscow, seemed utterly separate from normal life, at least that first year. She took a new name. By design, she was allowed to visit only people on a list kept at the school—in her case, this included the Mikhlins, and indeed it was in this period of her life that she stopped by to spend the night, and was confronted by the Terror. Like Nadya Ulanovskaya, she learned Morse Code, and also topography, cryptography, and foreign languages. She studied the history of the Communist Party for, she says, the third time (the first in biology, the second in history). In September 1937, after a six-week vacation organized by the Intelligence Directorate, Mary returned to school. There was a new instructor, Alexander Ulanovsky. She mentions his surpassing charm, and also that students called him by his nickname Alyosha, which was highly unusual. He taught spycraft,

21 Ibid., 95.

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including skills like how to shake off a tail, and regaled them with anecdotes about his adventures abroad. Mary does not mention his warning about the economic wellbeing of American workers, which, according to Nadya, got him fired. The assumption was that Mary would be going on a mission to the United States. Her main goal was to see her parents. Would she have spied? Was she, in 1937, at all conflicted over promoting a Soviet-style state in America? She doesn’t record thinking about this, but it was at this time that her friend Dodya was arrested. As was standard, she told the head of the school, Captain Averikhin. At the time, he asked if Dodya was a family member, and when assured that wasn’t the case, told her simply to keep it to herself. If there were any inquiries regarding Dodya, Averikhin made them disappear. In January 1938, he went further, inviting her outside for a walk. He began by discussing preparations for her departure: her documents were being prepared; she would travel under her own name; she would get more training at a different center. That much he could have said in the office, in earshot of listening devices, but there was more. If she reached her home, she should “forget everything you were taught here. Get out of this business. It is not for you.”22 She mumbled something about that being disloyal. He told her to remember his words. Averikhin’s warning could have been motivated by romantic feelings; it becomes clearer later in the memoir that he was interested in a relationship. But romance comes in many forms, and not all of them involve altruism. Averikhin’s gesture was both altruistic and dangerous. Working in intelligence, he must have made a bet on Leder’s character, and acted on it despite the risk that it could backfire. Something happened that prevented both Leder’s departure and the continuation of the school. In March 1938, she was told that, because of arrests in the network, her trip was called off. Her roommate of the previous year had been told that the school was closing, for the same reason. Mary was given the choice of returning to the school or to the publishing house. Unable to face the dormitory, she chose publishing. The situation at the Foreign Language Publishing House was tense. Shortly before she returned, a prolific translator in the English section, Joe Fineberg, had been arrested.23 The arrest took place, unusually, at work, as

22 Ibid., 135. 23 She spells the name incorrectly as Feinberg.

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people including Fineberg’s own brother pretended that nothing unusual was transpiring. But afterward, some workplace behavior changed. Out of, Leder says, a sense of mutual protection, the loud criticism abated. If mistakes were found, they were fixed without fanfare. Some errors were, however, uncorrectable. Proofreading something by Stalin in the summer of 1939, Mary missed multiple typos. Her punishment, exclusion from her leading role at the Komsomol, was, all things considered, quite mild. But she was already vulnerable on another front: she had been recruited to serve as an informant. Her solution was to sign the agreement, but establish an internal—she says, instinctive—red line. When she divulged nothing but banalities, her handler got angry, but there were no repercussions. There were bright spots, mostly connected with material life. As someone who worked in the center of Moscow, she could go to an American-style icecream shop, famously introduced by Anastas Mikoyan after a stay in the United States in 1936. A restaurant with Jewish food lasted for a year. And she met a young translator from German, Abram Leder, who would become her husband.

Nadezhda Ulanovskaya: Communications and Failed Communications Of all the personal stories of the late thirties, Ulanovskaya’s is the most detailed and harrowing. But the through-line, and sometimes the sequence of events, can be hard to grasp. The change in the Ulanovskys’ thinking is stark and meticulously charted, but at the same time incomplete. Even when the two of them saw clearly what the system they helped bring into being had wrought, they did not quite renounce its originating idea. Throughout the thirties, they retained their ties to the intelligence community. There was nowhere for them to go. The basic outline of their lives is not hard to summarize. In 1935, as we already saw, Alexander (Alyosha) Ulanovsky was arrested in Denmark on charges of espionage. Nadezhda (Nadya) was reluctant to take a job because she “could be called to join him at any time”—meaning, most likely, that she was reluctant to engage in foreign espionage while her husband was in danger. She went to the Fourth Department—Military Intelligence, her “family”—to consult. Her bosses reassured her, correctly, that Alyosha would be fine, and she stopped by often to read the foreign newspapers unavailable to ordinary people. She decided she wanted to study, and of all the possibilities, it was languages that drew her. She had, after all, experience speaking them. What she did not have was a high school diploma, a major impediment by the

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mid-1930s, when the Soviet system of higher education had entrance exams and requirements. Here the Fourth Department, the new name for the Intelligence Directorate, stepped in, and the barriers were removed. Upon graduation, she became an English language teacher at the Frunze Military Academy, and later gave private instruction to people in the military and in intelligence. Two aspects stand out from this part of her working life. First, while the subject was English language, articles from the British or American press, the same press that she was reading in the Fourth Department library, were considered too dangerous for the classroom. Instruction was based on articles translated from the Russian-language Soviet press. Second is that, despite all efforts, truth crept in. Finding themselves alone with a language instructor, her high-placed pupils sometimes talked with surprising frankness. Alyosha was released from Danish prison and, despite his possession of “American” documents, made it back to the Soviet Union without any awkward encounters with American passport control. He was welcomed and sent to a sanatorium for a vacation. On his return, he became an instructor in the Fourth Department’s spy school, which is where he encountered Mary Leder. It was 1936—in Nadya’s words, “our last happy year.”24 Early in 1937, he lost his job. According to Nadya, he was caught warning students that American workers would not be drawn by money because “they have what they need”; to recruit them, an intelligence agent needed to stress ideas. The loss of his job was, in Nadya’s words, “catastrophic.”25 Like her, he had no higher education and no profession outside of espionage. At first, they managed by selling off things they had acquired abroad, a common solution for people with foreign experience: the sales went through a government consignment store, allowing the state to profit. Then, and notably without training of any kind, he also became a teacher of English, joining his wife at the prestigious Frunze Military Academy. The Terror was then taking hold. They joked (“why worry about work, when you can get arrested tomorrow?”) but the reality was grim.26 Their military housing complex was hit hard. If a father was arrested, the family lost all of its military amenities: “Fathers would be taken at night, and in the morning, the child would no longer show up at day care. A friend of ours said that once when she took her daughter to day care, only two children were present: you [Ulanovskaya’s daughter] and another little boy.27 The maternity hospital, 24 Ulanovskaia and Ulanovskaia, Istoriia odnoi sem′i, 124. 25 Ibid., 130. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid.

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where she went to give birth in late 1937, was the only place she felt protected. But by the time she got there, she was “on the brink of madness.”28 Seeing their way through the madness, they confronted a series of lifechanging questions. Were the arrests justified? All of them or some? And if the arrests were not justified, then who was at fault? Is the idea of communism beyond reproach? Or put differently, had the system gone astray, or was it doomed at its core? And where would one turn to for information? Their answers wavered back and forth. The core idea projected communism as a scientifically achievable utopia in which economic justice prevailed, abrogating in its wake all other forms of injustice and exploitation. Because this was to a great extent a promise of material prosperity at some future point, viewing material prosperity in Depression-era New York was unsettling. We saw her face this contradiction in the last chapter. Now, as her memoirs turn to the Terror, she remembers New York again. This time she recalls a pair of Americans who, having lost their jobs, were thinking of moving to the USSR: the situation of the Mary Leder’s family. The Ulanovskys discussed with each other how they might dissuade the couple without, of course, challenging the core idea in which all of them believed. In a solution that bears repeating if only for its comedy, she hits on the problem of toilet paper. Russians, she tells the Americans, don’t have toilet paper. What do they use? The intelligentsia, replies the putatively egalitarian Nadya, uses newspaper. This gap in living standards should have been easy to brush away by concentrating on the future. Kvitko did that—but only because everybody else was doing it too. But in Nadya’s account of the late thirties, the problem looms. When Alyosha broached the issue in his spycraft class, he was, as we saw, fired— despite the fact that his formulation was a means of protecting Communism’s core message. For Nadya, the core was already vulnerable. Remembering her stay New York maternity ward, she writes about watching a man—specifically a man, not a woman—washing the floors. He had some kind of machine, he barely needed to exert himself. It goes without saying that the machine was not complicated, so that its absence in the USSR was a matter of priority, and ultimately, indifference. More troublesome than the problem of material life were the arrests in high places. Here, Nadya’s perspective was shaped by Soviet newspapers, whose accounts she continued to believe. Or ignore: she writes that she hadn’t focused much on the Kirov murder in 1934, understood now as the launch of the Terror.

28 Ibid., 140.

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Yet she must have paid attention to the campaign of adulation for Stalin that began with celebrations for his fiftieth birthday in 1929 and became ubiquitous thereafter. Greeting Alyosha at the railway station on his return from Denmark, she remembers telling him, “You know, despite everything, Stalin is a great man.” The returning spy was skeptical: “I’m glad you think so. It’s easier to live in harmony with the prevailing situation.”29 When she started focusing on the Terror, she accepted much of what she read. She recalls saying of the First Moscow Trial (1936) that “if they [Zinoviev, Kamenev, and fourteen other government leaders] aren’t shot, then this will be the people’s shame and a call to action.”30 Alyosha, the comparative freethinker, merely concluded that the whole Party leadership was guilty. As for the foreign newspapers to which Nadya had access, the one correspondent she cites is Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who closely hewed the Soviet line. The fears of the Frunze Academy regarding the Western press were unnecessary. Alyosha’s skepticism is worth a side note here. A former anarchist who never joined the Party, he was something of an outsider—as Nadya mentions at one point, all anarchists were “former,” and many were under arrest. We have already seen him play skeptic to Nadya’s believer. He goes further. At one point—when, says Nadya, the “usual” spate of arrests caused her to wonder what was going on, he brought up their shared past: she hadn’t been disturbed when he told how he killed White officers in the civil war; she only objected now, when the targets were people like them. She countered him. “I understand that when people are killed it’s awful, but back then we knew that it was necessary because of the revolution. And here they aren’t giving us any explanations.”31 Both stop there, a step short of first causes. There had always been some degree of acceptable deviation from the party line. When a friend of theirs, for example, officially renounced his parents but put them up in a Moscow apartment, the Ulanovskys did not object. Far more consequential in a moral sense was collectivization and its resulting famine. One could learn about it only from an informant, and here, the Ulanovskys evaluated the plausibility of the information based on how they understood the speaker’s core ideological commitment. Their friend Tartakov clearly passed: he was such an “implacable Communist” that he renounced his newborn son because his wife’s family had the baby circumcised. Tartakov’s stories about the Ukrainian famine, to which he was an eyewitness, dumbfounded the Ulanovskys. They believed but did not

29 Ibid., 123. 30 Ibid., 124. 31 Ibid., 128–129.

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believe. Ultimately, they decided that he was anti-Soviet and somewhat exaggerating, and for those reasons, they did not see him again.32 Commitment to the core was, in other words, necessary but not sufficient. More significant is that fact that up to his firing, which he tried to reverse, Alyosha continued to work for the Fourth Department. It would be correct to argue that he had no place to go: there was, obviously, no private sector to retreat to, and such skills as he had could be practiced in only one place. On the other hand, Nadya does not record him as harboring any doubts about what he was doing, and she records a great deal. The conversation with Tartakov took place in 1936. The next year, a friend from the Artillery Academy—Yakov Rudin, clearly another post-Jewish Jew—also broached the subject of collectivization. Nadya objected that it was “such an achievement,” and when she and Alyosha discussed the conversation later, they concluded that Rudin had been “behaving strangely.”33 Yet it was Rudin’s arrest (the memoir doesn’t give the date, which was May 1937) that “opened their eyes.”34 A phrase like that suggests a conversion experience, and it obviously had that resonance in memory, but the reality that Nadya records looks messier. A few pages after describing their sudden change of belief, Nadya recalls that Rudin’s wife offered to stop seeing them. It was possible, Viktoria Rudina suggested, that she was being followed. Nadya didn’t believe it. “How could you think that?” she said.35 It is a tribute to her brutal self-criticism that she records this. As the Terror wore on, up until the start of the war, moments of candor persisted. An interesting aspect of the memoir is that since the Ulanovskys’ acquaintances were all connected with the military, military intelligence, or in one case, state security, Nadya’s account illuminates the possibilities and limitations of free speech in those circles. Grossman’s Life and Fate will have a lot to say about this, but in a purer form, as befits fiction. Nadya’s account is, like life, less categorical. An example is the Ulanovskys’ encounter with the Old Bolshevik Aron Aleksandrovich Solts. Solts, by origin a Jew from Vilnius, is a curious case because of his unusual reputation for ethics. In a cartoon from 1927, the editor of Pravda and occasional artist Nikolai Bukharin depicts his longtime comrade

32 33 34 35

Ibid., 125. Ibid., 126–127. Ibid., 127. Ibid., 131.

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as a wise owl.36 The famous Thaw writer Yury Trifonov described Solts at length in a “documentary” novella The Campfire’s Reflection (Otblesk kostra). Trifonov himself knew Solts, who lived in the same elite building as his own family (and the Lozovskys).37 After Trifonov’s father was arrested, Solts defended him against the terrifying prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky. Solts’s act represents courage of the highest order, all but unprecedented.38 In consequence, he was confined to a psychiatric hospital. He was released—in Trifonov’s description, a broken man—shortly before the Ulanovskys encountered him in 1940. Nadya’s memoirs note that he had lost his former imposing look. What transpired thereafter is a classic example of a failed communication. The three of them have a conversation about the Terror, in which Solts says that people were arrested for absurd reasons, blaming the widespread fear of Yezhov. As Yezhov had himself fallen two years earlier, Solts’s declaration was edgy, but not completely out of bounds. The Ulanovskys press Solts to say more. Their behavior contrasts to the positions they had taken just a few years earlier with respect to collectivization: trusting Solts, they act in accordance with their changed perspective. But Solts does not trust them and instead of elaborating, he flips to orthodoxy. He declares that “the party never makes mistakes” and accuses the Ulanovskys, because of their employment at the Artillery Academy, of risking the military preparedness of the country. He says they should be nowhere near the Academy. At the same time, Nadya records, he promises not to inform on them. Clearly, he did not really see the Ulanovskys as an imminent threat to the security of the Soviet Union—had he believed that, he would have sought to stop them. This is a conversation about what was permissible to discuss, and with whom. Another encounter from that year, similarly murky, takes place in the city of Grodno, newly occupied by Soviet forces after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Ulanovskaya writes: In Grodno, there were a few teachers who had been arrested in ’37 and freed in ’39, after Yezhov’s fall. One evening I found 36 The cartoon appears many times on the web, dated to October 1927. The website Khronos (“Sol′ts Aron Aleksandrovich,” Khronos, http://hrono.ru/biograf/solc.html), gives an archival location (RGASPI f. 74, op. 2, d. 168, l. 141) and notes the inscription on the back: “Holy Father Aaron Aleksandrovich”—an ironic conflation of Russian Orthodox language with Solts’s markedly Jewish name and reputation as “the conscience of the Party.” 37 Iurii Trifonov, Otblesk kostra (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1966), 10. About the building, see Trifonov’s own Dom na naberezhnoi (House on the Embankment) and Slezkine’s The House of Government. Slezkine refers to Solts (The House of Government, 23), but not as a resident. 38 Trifonov, Otblesk kostra, 11.

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myself on a walk with one of them, a colonel. He did not look anything like a military man, he was small, frail, and kept coughing. It started to rain, and I said, “You’ll catch cold.” And suddenly he responded: “After what I went through, nothing will take me now.” And then we started talking!39 He tells her in great detail about brutality during interrogations. He said it was impossible to withstand, and that he had prevailed only because they didn’t want much from him. This man, of Central Asian background, disappeared at the start of the war. Later, during her own interrogation, when Ulanovskaya is asked who she spoke to of people who had been arrested and released, she names this colonel. He was, in all likelihood, already dead.

Vasily Grossman: Jews vs. Bolsheviks, and Jewish Bolsheviks Our account of Grossman begins here. The future writer was born in Berdychiv, a city so full of Jews that it figured in Jewish jokes. His first big publication, in the illustrated magazine Ogonyok, was called “Berdychiv, no kidding!” (Berdychiv ne v shutku, a vser′ez). But mining a Jewish backwater for a comic title was not the same as identifying with it. In the early part of his life, Grossman did not link himself to Jews. Like many of the subjects of this book, he personally fled. And like them, he made a late return, in a way his earlier self could not have contemplated. He became, in the words of Shimon Markish, “a Russian writer of Jewish fate.”40 Grossman’s late transformation is the most striking aspect of his life and craft. Early in her recent biography, Alexandra Popoff says that “he had the mentality of a man from the free world.”41 But that was never the case. Leaving aside the fact that men from the free world are hardly lacking in political cowardice,

39 Ibid., 147. 40 Shimon Markish, “Primer Vasiliia Grossmana,” in Vasilii Grossman, Na evreiskie temy, ed. Shimon Markish ( Jerusalem: Biblioteka Aliia, 1985), 2:489. 41 Alexandra Popoff, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2019), 5. The historian Oleg Budnitsky says of Grossman’s wartime notebooks, which he greatly admires, that “these are the texts of a Soviet writer, a Soviet correspondent; he could not have been anything else.” Oleg Budnitskii, “Tsena pobedy, v ramkakh tsikla ‘Litsa voiny’: voina Vasiliia Grossmana.” Ekho Moskvy. https://echo.msk.ru/ programs/victory/1908628-echo/.

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even at the free world’s low stakes, Grossman before the war was as conformist as any of his compatriots. He was ambitious, and whatever he thought in private, in public, he succumbed. His stories, as we will see, are better than one might expect for a beginning writer in the age of socialist realism. They are complex enough to be read seriously, and they do not shy from including Jewish characters. It was during and after the war that he changed. He took another path—less traveled, but just as Soviet—as seeker of truth. Always observant, he became both courageous and wrenchingly self-aware. Grossman was born in 1905, to parents who separated soon after, though they continued to correspond. His father, Semyon Osipovich, and his mother, Yekaterina Savelievna, were both well off—their fathers were merchants of the second guild—which meant that, while the young people might not be able to study in Imperial Russia, they had the means to do that abroad. The two met in Geneva. Chronology puts them in that city at the same time as Shtern, and also, of course, Lenin, Plekhanov, and a host of other revolutionary-minded Russian expats. Grossman’s parents met none of these future luminaries, but their orientation was also revolutionary. John and Carol Garrard, Grossman’s earlier biographers, connect Semyon Osipovich in particular to the Jewish-oriented Bund, and thereafter to the Mensheviks. It was a decision that had consequences. Grossman’s parents were already cut off from religious observance of any kind, an inheritance that Grossman shared and never sought to alter. But like affiliation with the Bund, non-observance was typical for acculturating Jews of their time and place. Just as Jewish, but more complicating for Grossman as he grew older, was the status of his mother’s Berdychiv family. Her brotherin-law David Sherentsis was a doctor, builder, and philanthropist. So fabulous was his office building—next door to the second Sherentsis residence in which Grossman spent his childhood—that in the late 1920s, when the building was finally requisitioned, the city council moved in there. By then, Grossman was gone, but his place in the residence was taken by his daughter Katya, the product of his own short-lived marriage. David Sherentsis was arrested and executed in 1938. Also typically Jewish were Grossman’s family ties abroad. Two of his father’s brothers emigrated to the United States, and some of his mother’s family ended up in Argentina. The anxiety that this must have provoked makes it to Life and Fate, when the hero Viktor has to name his relatives outside the country in an official questionnaire. A more benign foreign link was Grossman’s knowledge of French, cemented in two years of early schooling in Geneva, in a period when his mother took a stab at living on her own. According to his daughter Katya, when her father and grandmother wanted

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her not to understand something, they resorted to French. A different Jewish family might have used Yiddish—but Grossman’s was upper-class, and Yiddish was far in the past. Among Grossman’s cousins was Nadezhda Almaz, Lozovsky’s assistant at the Profintern. Nadya and Grossman became close, and she used her own and Lozovsky’s connections to help him in numerous ways. She brought his manuscript about Donbass miners to the Communist Academy (later merged into the Academy of Sciences), presumably to get his name in circulation. She got him to a Profintern conference, and also on a junket to Uzbekistan to “investigate the economic and social conditions of the local population”—a formulation that, as the Garrards note, is clearly not Grossman’s language.42 In Moscow, Grossman lived in Nadya’s apartment. Then, in 1933, Nadya was arrested. This was early; her punishment was exile. When her term ended, she was charged with Trotskyism and sent to a camp in Vorkuta, in the far north. From there she was brought back to Moscow to the Butyrka prison on yet another charge—but at that point, the “bloody dwarf ” Yezhov was himself toppled, replaced by the more liberal Beria, and Nadya was judged to have served out her term. Grossman had sent Nadya money, and went to visit her in exile. But he did not send a letter in support of her character, and given the care and protection she had extended to him, their mutual family felt that he was an ingrate. The family’s anger at him may have had other causes—but then again, they knew the conditions. Grossman’s callous use of other people extended to his mother, who had become Katya’s sole caregiver even before the divorce (Katya’s mother was not around). Yekaterina Savelievna was in her sixties, and ill; again, the Sherentsis family sheltered both grandmother and grandchild. The situation worked out for Grossman, who at one point, didn’t see Katya for eighteen months. In the early thirties, Grossman’s father was also in trouble, in a different way. Like Lungina’s father Zinovy Markovich, he was an engineer at a time when engineers who had qualified before the revolution (Markovich) or before the revolution and also abroad (Semyon Osipovich) were convenient targets for accusations of “wrecking.” Semyon Osipovich had the additional black mark of association with the Mensheviks. From March 1 to 9, 1931, fourteen Mensheviks were put on trial. Pravda seethed with invective against them

42 Carol Garrard and John Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman (New York: Free Press, 1996), 81.

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(typical headline: “The Metal Workers of Leningrad and Sormov, the Forest Workers of Arkhangelsk and Karelia, the Collective Farmers of Ukraine and the Don Demand the Annihilation of the Counterrevolutionary Organization of Menshevik Interventionists”43). Semyon Osipovich had more limited options than Zinovy Markovich. In fact, he basically had one, and he acted on it, leaving Moscow for a job in Novosibirsk. When he was fired from there, he remained in Siberia, but even farther from central authorities. Distance often helped. Grossman, though, was doing well. His own education, completed reluctantly, had been as a chemist. This landed him a first job at a soap factory—a nine-hour day (one hour for lunch) plus two hours on a bus each way. It was also boring and ill-paid. After a second job in Donbass, good for his socialist credentials but unpleasant to live through, Nadya got him a gig at the Sacco and Vanzetti Factory in Moscow, named after the American martyrs to socialism. Sacco and Vanzetti made pencils. Grossman hated his work, but the state’s need for factory-based literature was not matched by engineers who could write. Grossman’s star rose. He was mentored by Ivan Kataev and Nikolai Zarudin, alumni of the liberal Marxist Pereval group, which had been disbanded, along with all writers’ groups, in 1932. Zarudin and Kataev helped him publish the story “In the Town of Berdychiv” in The Literary Gazette (Literaturnaia gazeta), a major coup that let him leave Sacco and Vanzetti behind. Kataev followed up by discussing Grossman in a review article in the same prestigious paper, where he allowed that the new writer needed to learn, but also compared him to the eminent Fadeev. Kataev and Zarudin also helped Grossman extricate himself from a trip to Magnitogorsk, a typical PR project for Soviet industry—though Grossman later joined another one to an automobile factory, presumably less oppressive. Kataev and Zarudin were arrested and executed in 1937. The Terror reached Grossman in other ways as well. In 1935, he had begun an affair with the wife of the Pereval writer Boris Guber. In 1937, Guber was also arrested and executed, and in early 1938, the authorities came for his exwife. This time, Grossman stepped up in defense. “When the Party,” he wrote to Yezhov, “through the lips of comrade STALIN says that a son does not answer for [the sins of] his father, how can a woman, a housewife, the mother of two children, answer for a husband she left some three years ago?”44 Perhaps more

43 Pravda, March 2, 1931, 3. 44 Vasilii Grossman, letter (signed) to Nikolai Ivanovich Ezhov, 1938, John and Carol Garrard Collection of Vasilii Semenovich Grossman papers, box 2, item 16, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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significantly, he immediately adopted his two stepsons. As Olga Mikhailovna’s family had refused to take them, it was Grossman’s action that saved them from a Gulag orphanage.45 In the end, she was released. His career was also under some threat. An article in Pravda in November 1936 discussed Grossman’s story “Four Days,” which we will look at shortly. While Pravda absolved “Four Days” of “formalism,” a serious ideological sin, the story was criticized for “naturalism”—meaning, specifically, a reference to one character’s long underwear. Then, in June 1937, Stalin decimated the top ranks of the Red Army. It was in response to this event that Kvitko had to abandon his hero, General Iona Yakir. Grossman, too, had to respond. The Literary Gazette published an open letter whose first sentence refers to Yakir, Tukhachevsky, and the other fallen generals as “despicable Fascist spies.”46 One paragraph later, they are “fascist dogs,” and the signatories call for their execution. Grossman was among them. So were other future liberals, like the writer Konstantin Paustovsky. Let us turn now to Grossman’s own voice, his stories. As with Kvitko, we have to balance the demands of genre and self-censorship with the imperative felt by both of these great writers to convey their own perspective. Socialist realism demanded not only “realism,” by which was meant ease of reading, but also socialism’s ultimate triumph. The label was an oxymoron: how can you be both realist and predict an outcome? Kvitko, as we saw, negotiated the well-known problem in a well-known way, by postponing the triumph to the future. Grossman’s stories of the 1930s amazingly avoid this. A reader who came to them without knowledge of the triumph of the Soviet State would not be certain that that triumph was either inevitable or desirable. Let us start with Grossman’s early success, “In the town of Berdychiv” (V gorode Berdicheve). The story is startling and sentimental, making it an ideal vehicle for the movie it became.47 The story takes place during the Soviet-Polish War of 1919–1920, which ravaged heavily Jewish areas in western Ukraine and Belarus before concluding in Soviet defeat. As it begins, a Russian woman of peasant background who serves as a military commissar finds herself pregnant. After trying many ways to end her pregnancy, she has to give birth, and is put up with a Jewish family. The commissar rides horses and shoots guns. The Jewish family, by contrast, is rooted in place. There is a father, last name Magazinik, a mother, Beila,

45 Popoff, Vasily Grossman, 91–96. 46 “Nash dolg pokazat′ moshch′ i velichie Krasnoi Armii,” Literaturnaia gazeta 32 ( June 1936). 47 Commissar, directed by Aleksandr Askoldov, 1967, first screened 1987.

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and seven children; their room smells of kerosene, sweat, unwashed clothes, and—inevitably, in the Russian understanding of Jewish things—garlic. The commissar finds it oppressive. It is to Grossman’s credit that he doesn’t take the masculine/feminine contrast too far. The Jewish Beila is a strong woman. She initiates the commissar into the details of childbirth, and the commissar has no choice but to follow her lead. When the actual birth occurs—the midwife’s services arranged, of course, by Beila—the commissar is considerably less stoic than her Jewish counterpart at similar moments. Here Grossman engineers another twist: just when the reader imagines that the commissar will remain with her newborn, sunk in Jewish domesticity, she hears a revolutionary song and takes off to find her regiment. The baby is left behind. Magazinik also undergoes a change of heart. Earlier, reasonably extrapolating from his experience living in a town that had changed hands fourteen times, he tells Beila and the commissar that they are living in the best time for human beings, “when one set of occupiers has left and the second hasn’t yet arrived.”48 But now, shamed by the example of the commissar, he rethinks. Referring to the Jewish socialist Bund—illegal by the time of the story, but that’s not an issue—he declares: “That’s the kind of human beings we once had in the Bund. But are we human beings? We’re manure (navoz).” 49 “Four Days” (Chetyre dnia, 1935) is the story criticized in Pravda. It is set in the same general area during the same Soviet-Polish War, but the domesticity in this case is bourgeois, and the Bolshevik—one of three, but the one that concerns us—is a Jew. The bourgeois household is headed by a doctor—a bit of an idiot, who talks too much. His family has in storage an unfathomable amount of grain and other foods. Their furniture is heavy, and must be dusted and moved. Their overworked servant girl cooks, washes, delivers tea on demand, and dreams of marriage as a way out. Grossman’s family saw this as a mean-spirited caricature of David Sherentsis, which it may well have been, though they were wrong in thinking that the Pravda article dwells on this character; it doesn’t even mention him.50 The doctor in the story is not Jewish.

48 Vasilii Grossman, “V gorode Berdicheve,” in his Na evreiskie temy, ed. Shimon Markish ( Jerusalem: Biblioteka Aliia, 1985), 1:20. 49 Ibid., 23. 50 The Garrards accept this as fact, probably because it was handed down as a family story (Garrard and Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev, 127–128); but it is not in the article.

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More unexpected in this portrait of a bourgeois family is its generosity, whose source is the doctor’s wife. She sympathizes with the town’s Jews: again unexpected, and an unalloyed good. The family is also harboring three revolutionaries—one older man, a friend of the doctor, and two young upstarts, one Jewish. All of these people share family meals. The prevailing feeling—cut by brutal chess competitions between the young Bolsheviks—is of warmth and concern. The older man gives lectures in Marxism to the doctor’s receptive adolescent son. It makes sense that this kind of harmony is confined to four days. The Jewish character, the young Bolshevik Faktorovich, is the most problematic. He is the type of Jewish commissar—single-minded, unbendable— that we saw in Kvitko. Grossman exploits some elements of Faktorovich’s classic Jewishness. He has a gargantuan head but a weak body; at the point we meet him, he’s seriously and maybe mortally wounded. But physical weakness is not the only classic Jewish trope that Grossman draws on. He calls Faktorovich a iudei—literally “Judean,” whose roots are in a past that is historically grand and militarily respectable. It is to Grossman’s credit that he doesn’t leave Faktorovich’s portrait there. Faktorovich is a fanatic. He is a former Chekist who arrested his own uncle. Other people in the story, mostly women, have sympathy with suffering. Faktorovich lacks it. But in the end, his fanaticism carries the day. He escapes the bourgeois house, along with his fellow revolutionaries and the family’s adolescent son. Probably we are meant to celebrate this—the story was after all published—but considerable ambiguity remains. Grossman’s stories about the period contemporary to their writing— the mid to late 1930s, industrialization and the Terror—show the same kind of ambiguity. An example without Jews is “The Young Woman and the Old Woman” (Molodaia i staraia), written in 1938–1940. When we meet the two women, they are off to a “rest home”—in other words, a government hotel in a pleasant setting, in this case the Crimea. Two things stand out. First is the story’s nod to social history, which embraces not only the precipitous rise of the young woman from peasant tractor driver to manager, which was quite common and celebrated, but the reality of arrests. The young woman has been granted a dacha in the country. Who lived there before? A man who was arrested, and who left behind him a chest of pine cones, each one separately wrapped. Like his existence, they are discarded. Second is an unexpected plot turn. When the two women go off on vacation, the old woman is in despair because her daughter has been arrested. The

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young woman, by contrast, meets a man and marries him. The old woman is glad that someone has attained happiness. But she’s mistaken: what happens instead is that the new husband dies in an accident, and the old woman’s daughter returns. There is not progress here, but a kind of circularity. The story “Ceylon Graphite” (Tseilonskii grafit), written 1935, has the trappings of classic construction-type fiction, set in a pencil factory. Grossman’s experience at Sacco and Vanzetti means that the raw ingredients and process of pencil-making are prominently represented. But even at this point, Grossman is a surpassingly fine storyteller and collector of lives. He doesn’t draw a reader in through words—his prose is, and would always remain, no more than serviceable—but through convincingly differentiated characters, one after another. This ability remains even when some characters—in this story, an engineer from India—are a little beyond his experience and somewhat formulaic. The story takes up the compelling contemporary issue of socialist construction. The pencils the factory is producing are “sh . . .”51 The factory itself is a mess. If things don’t improve, the main engineer sees himself as facing “five years at a canal.”52 The reference is to something like the White Sea Canal, whose construction, just completed, relied on a heavy contingent of conscript labor. Accusations of industrial sabotage, Grossman’s father’s nightmare, is brought up in a jocular way, but even now the reference feels audacious. “If we get arrested,” says the chief engineer, a Jew, “it’ll be under Soviet conditions.”53 That’s supposed to be a joke. Engagement with foreigners was another touchy issue. In the story, Ceylon graphite is successfully replaced by graphite from Siberia; the Soviet Union has to produce its own products. But the story also pursues internationalism in the sense of intraethnic friendship in the name of a socialist future. The engineer who procures the Siberian graphite is a Jew. We know this because of his name, Boris Abramovich; because of the Yiddish words he tosses around on occasion; and by his declaration that he’s replaced his ancestral Jerusalem with Communism. It’s a worthwhile switch; it produces an excellent pencil. The other important foreigner is the Indian engineer. He too is welcomed, and forms a tender friendship with a Russian woman who works as a cleaner. And yet this story, which should end in triumph, doesn’t. The friendship is tentative. The Indian is lonely; the story ends wistfully.

51 Vasilii Grossman, “Tseilonskii grafit,” in his Na evreiskie temy, ed. Shimon Markish ( Jerusalem: Biblioteka Aliia, 1985), 1:97. 52 Ibid., 73–74. 53 Ibid., 74.

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Doba-Mera Medvedeva: Manuscripts Burn Doba-Mera Medevedeva ripped out and burned the notebook pages that cover these years. Her willingness to air grievances of all kinds, including those that might well have hurt the children and grandchildren for whom her notebooks were intended, leaves only one reason she destroyed them. She was afraid they would be discovered by someone outside her family. Personal misery could be shared, but not the events of the Terror—even though, of her immediate family, nobody was arrested. Doba-Mera’s notebook for the Terror years begins on page 258. The two sentences below are crossed out, but still legible: At this point I became convinced that our life had just entered a period of calm, but that the slightest disturbance would make it erupt like a volcano. That period of calm was because there were no causes or instigators, but if there were any, the troubles would come back at us with great severity.

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War: 1941–1945 The outbreak of war in the early hours of June 22, 1941, came as a shock. Until the bombs fell, the Soviet government had been in full compliance with the pact it had signed with Hitler in August 1939. The next morning, the radio played somber music, with periodic notifications that an announcement would be coming. At noon, Molotov spoke—not Stalin. A famous photograph, taken by Yevgeny Khaldei outside the offices of TASS, the Soviet Press Bureau, preserves the anxious concentration of people who had gathered there to listen to the broadcast on the loud speaker. Their fate, and that of the whole country, now hung in the balance. In the beginning of the war, Hitler’s troops swung in from the west and proceeded along a broad front, virtually unstoppable. Within a hundred days they were occupying a belt 500 miles deep from the Gulf of Finland to the Black Sea, including Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics, and the Russian Northwest. The entire old Pale of Settlement fell under German control and remained so for almost three years. Local people, some the victims of collectivization and the statesponsored starvation that had accompanied it, initially welcomed the Germans and became willing collaborators. Nobody looked out for the Jews. The Holocaust began immediately. The 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which divided the area of the old Pale between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, determined its two faces, European to the west and Soviet to the east. West of the border, industrial-scale facilities served by railroads constituted the well-known death camps. To the East was the “Holocaust by bullets,” where killing was done by a firing squad or even an individual with a pistol. The hundreds of towns and villages where the massacres unfolded were connected mostly by dirt roads, with no infrastructure other than a ditch or a trench when a natural ravine was not available to catch the bodies. Local people, mostly peasants, participated in the genocide almost unavoidably: somebody had to bring horses and carts, dig and then cover the ditches, sort the clothes, and feed the executioners. Those duties were not very different

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from collective farm work, and there was no other work available to them. Of course, the former Pale also had large cities. In Berdychiv, where Grossman’s mother still lived, 30,000 Jews were herded into ghettos before being shot. In Kyiv, over two days in September 1941, 33,000 Jews were murdered at the Babyn Yar ravine; the killing, carried out by members of Nazi Einsatzgruppen supplemented by Ukrainians, continued until the occupation was over.1 Odesa was occupied in October, and the murder of its Jews began immediately. At the end of the war, only 5,000 Jewish Odessans remained alive. All of our subjects had family in those places; they themselves escaped annihilation only because they were elsewhere. Their experiences fall into three groups. Grossman joined the army and was made a war correspondent. Lungina, Leder, and Medvedeva evacuated to the Volga and beyond, either through connections, or desperately and chaotically on their own. Kvitko, Lozovsky, Shtern, and Ulanovskaya were linked to important official institutions—in the case of Ulanovskaya, Lozovsky’s Sovinformburo. Kvitko, Shtern, and eventually Grossman became seriously involved in the Jewish Antifascist Committee. (Lozovsky’s wartime experiences are covered in chapter six of this book; Ulanovskaya’s in chapter seven.) While no Soviet citizen escaped the war, the Jewish part of it was sharply relevant only to Jews. Until 1943, when Grossman published “Ukraine without Jews” in the journal Banner (Znamia), what the Nazis were doing was not discussed in the Soviet press. Jews found out through rumor. Some understood immediately what was happening, and others did not. The special danger to Jews was immediately obvious to two constituencies: the government, which saw it as a way to fundraise among American Jews, and prominent Soviet Jews, who were all in with the fundraising but also—and more and more as time passed—devoted themselves to gathering data and trying to aid survivors against a wall of resistance. The public face of that drama was the Jewish Antifascist Committee, under Lozovsky’s administrative control as a branch of the Sovinformburo. Officially, there were five such committees (Slavs, Jews, Women, Youth, and Scholars) but from the outset of the war straight through Stalin’s death, only the Jewish one mattered.2

1 2

Natan Meir, “Kiev,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon Hundert (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1984), 1:894. The encyclopedia is two very large volumes. In late 1941, the Polish Bundists Henryk Erlich and Wiktor Alter promoted the idea of something like the eventual Antifascist Committee, with the addition of a transnational Jewish

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The Soviet imperative of fundraising and the Jewish imperative of warning other Jews about the impending catastrophe danced around each other. As a way to communicate with Jews in occupied territories, Yiddish writers lobbied to restore the newspaper Der Emes (Yiddish for pravda). By the time that permission was granted, it was already the summer of 1942, and the newspaper, now tied to the Antifascist Committee, was called Unity (Eynikeyt). Of greater Soviet importance was a rally broadcast by radio on August 24. Here the twin imperatives—warn and fundraise—were both on display, in temporary harmony. The rally’s most publicly memorable statement came from a speech by the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, who declared that his mother’s name was Hannah, and he was a Jew. The statement resonated because a return to Jewish self-awareness was so widespread. Other famous speakers were blunt about the danger. The actor and theater director Solomon Mikhoels, already the state’s most famous Jew, reminded his “brother Jews” that Hitler’s written intention was “the complete annihilation of the Jewish people.”3 By then, of course, the annihilation was well underway. The firebrand poet Peretz Markish referred to “the mounds of corpses and ashes that remain from shtetls and cities in which Jews lived for over a thousand years.”4 At the Antifascist Committee’s first plenary session in May 1942, two themes surfaced that would remain pertinent straight through the creation and suppression of the collection of Holocaust testimonials known as the Black Book. One was the need to publicize the heroism of Jewish soldiers. Related to it—because stories about Ivan fighting at the front, and Abram making money back home were already rife—was an attempt to counter antisemitism.5 As the state was not interested in countering antisemitism but to the contrary had begun to promote it, this effort got nowhere. We will see the change from the ground up in the stories of Shtern and Leder. But from the point of view of the Committee, especially at the outset, there were enough mixed signals to make it seem that their initiatives could prevail. In a memo sent by Lozovsky to his boss Shcherbakov in February 1942, the tasks of the new Committee are presented with what in retrospect looks like

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fighting force led by the Soviet Union. Stalin, who had already arrested Erlich and Alter and sentenced them to death in 1939, freed them, toyed with them for a while, and ultimately arrested them again. Erlich killed himself in prison and Alter was shot. Redlikh and Kostyrchenko, Evreiskii antifashistskii komitet, 45. Ibid., 42 Ibid., 33.

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astounding liberalism. The Committee will collect “concrete materials” about the condition of Jews in occupied territories and about the role of Jews in the Soviet armed forces, including the stories of Jewish military heroes. It will publicize accounts of Nazi atrocities against the Jews. Fundraising is point fifteen, the final one.6 The placement at the end of the list was disingenuous. It was fundraising, and nothing else, that spurred the fateful trip of Mikhoels and fellow Committee member Itsik Fefer to the United States, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and Canada in 1943. The poet Fefer had a dual role here: he was both accompanying Mikhoels and reporting on him. Mikhoels undoubtedly knew this. Yet the trip was a major success, with a rally in New York’s Polo Grounds that included speeches by Albert Einstein and New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, and singing by the Black actor-lawyer-singer-Yiddish speaker Paul Robeson. That was the high point. The low point, in terms of the life expectancy of Mikhoels, Fefer, and Lozovsky, was the genesis of the Black Book and the Crimean project. The Crimean project was a plan for resettling Jewish survivors on collective farms in northern Crimea, a place where Jewish farming had earlier been supported by the New York based Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.7 In addition to Mikhoels, Lozovsky was heavily involved in the Crimean proposal. With his approval, Kvitko was sent to gather data. Both the Committee and the American leadership of the Joint understood what later proved to be the case: that Soviet Jewish survivors would not be welcomed back to the towns where they had lived. The impetus behind the Black Book came from several sources— Lozovsky’s memo regarding the mission of the Antifascist Committee; a separate initiative by Ehrenburg; and, in April 1943, a letter to the committee from Albert Einstein, in his role as head of the American Committee of Jewish Writers, Artists, and Scientists. Einstein’s group had been the source of the invitation to Mikhoels and Fefer to visit the United States. In New York, plans were discussed for simultaneous publication in the Soviet Union, the United States, and Palestine. The book would preserve the facts for the historical record, while the cooperation would model unity in the aftermath of genocide.

6 Ibid., 57–58. 7 Jonathan Dekel-Chen, Farming the Red Land: Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power, 1924–41 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2005) is an invaluable source about the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Jewish farming in the Crimea. See ibid., 4, 86, and throughout.

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Kvitko: Despair and Faith Kvitko was involved in the Jewish Antifascist Committee from its beginnings. He was never, like Lozovsky or Mikhoels, the organization’s public face. He was named to the group because he was famous, but he had himself a profound personal sense of the peril that faced his nation and his language. Just a month after the Nazi invasion of June 1941, before the Committee was formed, he had been one of six writers to petition Lozovsky to resume publication of the Yiddish newspaper Der Emes. The paper had been shut down with the 1937 arrest of its editor, Kvitko’s nemesis Moyshe Litvakov. Now, the writers argued, the Soviet cause needed to be propagandized among Yiddish-speakers under Nazi occupation. The initial response—not from Lozovsky, but from the Sovinformburo’s titular head Shcherbakov—was negative.8 For the moment, the imperative of suppressing Jewish particularism won out over fundraising in the nonSoviet Jewish diaspora. The writers were told that was no need for a Yiddishlanguage newspaper; if they wanted to publish, they could go ahead and do that in Russian. A few months later, they tried again. Kvitko once again signed, along with Markish, Zuskin, Mikhoels, and Bergelson—all of whom would be executed, one way or another, at the war’s end.9 But now, the interests of the Yiddish writers and the Soviet government coincided. The newspaper Eynikeyt began publication. In the terrifying first months of the war, the Yiddish writers pressed their case further. This time they suggested the “radio rally” with speeches targeted at Jews in Great Britain and the United States who could be mobilized to help the Soviet war effort. Lozovsky and Shcherbakov approved. Broadcast as planned, the speeches were highly unusual in their emphasis on Jewish peril and Jewish crossnational solidarity. They also cast the Soviet Union and Russians in particular in the best possible light. Mikhoels begins his remarks like this, in a manner that would be unthinkable five years later: From the free Soviet Union, where Jews are the builders of a new society and a new life, I turn to you, Jews of the entire world! Brother Jews! 8 Redlikh and Kostyrchenko, Evreiskii antifashistskii komitet, 30. 9 Ibid., 35–36. The sixth signatory otherwise doesn’t play a role in this book. Isaak Nusinov, a professor of literature, was arrested in January 1949 and died seven months later in Lefortovo prison.

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Hitler has sharpened his bandit knife against you, your sons and daughters. He has trained his poisonous stinger on the fates of tens and hundreds of thousands of Jews . . . On his flag, alongside other atrocities, he has inscribed “the complete extermination of the Jewish people.” There is no need to go through the particular methods of beastly, bloody, fascist cruelty, never seen before and beyond any boundary of human imagination.10 Ilya Ehrenburg declared himself a Jew, a public acknowledgment that would be widely remembered, in no small measure because listeners understood it had been approved in advance. Like Mikhoels’s speech, Ehrenburg’s was politically calculated. He begins by saying that, as a child in Kyiv, he witnessed a pogrom perpetrated by the tsarist police and “a bunch of lowlifes.”11 The Russian people, he repeats several times, were entirely blameless in this violence. Ehrenburg doesn’t bother exonerating Ukrainians, perhaps because he was subsuming their identity into that of the innocent Russians. In either case, the message was that foreign Jews whose families had fled pogroms need not be afraid of supporting Russians, whose actions toward Jews were always and unconditionally protective. However necessary this posture was under the circumstances—who knows if the speech would have been permitted in its absence—Ehrenburg’s wholesale defense of Russians would later be overturned by his friend and rival Grossman, whose Life and Fate would chart Russian antisemitism in all its gradations. And what of Kvitko? Kvitko, as we have seen, was not a public speaker: he was uncertain about his Russian, deeply felt his lack of education, and met publicly only with readers who were children. He left Moscow in October 1941, initially for Alma-Ata. His wife’s memoirs say nothing about his connection with the Antifascist Committee—even in 1967, it was a topic best avoided. She mentions, amusingly for us, her own evacuation together with Soviet dignitaries including Lina Shtern. To everyone’s delight, Shtern’s small bag of belongings turned out to contain a bottle of vodka. Kvitko’s family ended up in Chistopol, in Soviet Tataria, along with many members of the Writers Union and their families. The writer Lidia Chukovskaya, daughter of Kornei, was also there. So was one more writer—not a member

10 Ibid., 39–40. 11 Ibid., 46–47.

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of the Writers Union, not yet the twentieth-century luminary that she became. This was the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, on her own and frantic to somehow get herself a residence permit. Deciding who did and who did not merit a place to live was in the hands of evacuated Union officials, and Chukovskaya, herself only a “daughter,” asked the better-placed Kvitko to intercede. He had no idea who Tsvetaeva was, and the status of the two poets was entirely different: Kvitko was a Party member and recipient of literary prizes; Tsvetaeva had an émigré past and a husband who was under arrest. Kvitko pulled what strings he could, and successfully, but not fast enough to prevent Tsvetaeva’s suicide. Chukovskaya relates these events in an essay about Tsvetaeva’s last days. She could have left Kvitko out—instead, she pays homage to her father’s friend, a man who “hated injustice.”12 That he himself became a martyr, and she, at the time of writing, was a major Soviet dissident, undoubtedly played a role. But Kvitko did not have lobby the literary establishment on behalf of a politically suspect, unknown poet. He was asked to act, and he did that. By 1942, Kvitko was on the editorial board of Unity. Part of what the Antifascist Committee was doing was fact-finding, meaning that there was little about the unfolding tragedy that he did not know. What he felt is clear from a series wartime poems written in the voices of the dead, some of them military figures, but the vast majority Jews, often children. These poems are very different from the poems of the pogrom cycle 1919. Kvitko is no longer a modernist. Faced with similarly horrifying reality, he is not using poetry to shock but more to memorialize individuals behind whom stand multitudes, in an abyss of loss. The poet whom Chukovsky described as “full of light” and Chukovskaya as an inveterate optimist is no longer either. Will violent death give way to a bright future, as he sketched, however hazily, in 1919 and Years of Youth? The closest he comes might be the poem “The new twins” (Dos naye tsviling) in which, in the ruins of a shtetl, the wife of Hirsh the Smith has given birth to two babies. The new father invites the poet to celebrate, in a mix of destruction (their surroundings) and traditions (a glass of whiskey). “Life is taking its first steps,” says the poet. But the joyful recognition of birth-after-death is not connected with any illusions about universal justice, or indeed with universalism at all. What is celebrated? That the world has brought forth two new Jews.13

12 Lidiia Chukovskaia, “Predsmertie,” Sobesednik 3 (1998). http://www.synnegoria.com/tsvetaeva/WIN/about/tchukovs.html. 13 Leyb Kvitko, Gezang fun mayn gemit (Moscow: Der Emes, 1947), 39–40.

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Justice without forgiveness is the subject of the powerful “The plaint of the Polish boy” (Dos klog fun poylishn yingl, 1946). Addressed “to you, advocates, lawyers, to you,” it proceeds in a language very far from lawyerly: If it would rouse the dead from their sleep, they themselves to choose their judges, the skeleton itself to hold the punished, they themselves to carry out the punishment. You, who in our anguish saw your happiness, You who saw all, and it was as though nothing happened, My eyes will eternally demand! Give me back my people! I will eternally see in you the skin and bones of my people. Then the Polish boy gives his story, including the taunt of his landlady, who says she has washed his shirts in Jew-soap. The end combines boundless pain with the possibility that somehow, in some kind of geological time, tears will effect a change. Weep, my heart, weep, I will not pacify you. Even flowing water moves the strongest stone.14 In the poem “Strength” (Shtarkeyt, 1942), Kvitko uses the metaphor of water and stone a little differently. The poem uses the diction of a folksong, asking what is stronger: fire is strong but water beats it down; water is strong, but a cloud carries it, a cloud is strong but wind disperses it, and so forth. A human being is defeated by death. What defeats death, then? “A man who serves his people in need.”15 Service to one’s suffering people is one imperative that can be brought from the edge of death. It is completely consonant with loyalty to the Soviet Union, which was—in actuality—the only force that was then saving Jews. In another poem from the same year, “The Word about the Oath” (Dos vort vegn der shvue), seven thousand people stand before what will be their mass

14 Ibid., 61–62. The date is from Kvitko, Geklibene verk, 314–315. 15 Kvitko, Gezang, 47.

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grave. They promise that if one of them should remain alive, that person must, “in the name of the slaughtered,” call on Jews “to be faithful to the Soviet flag.”16 Not all of the poems are this straightforward. “The Word about Etele” (Dos vort vegn Etln, no date) is unusual in some of its references and in its personal intensity: perhaps it matters that Etele was the name of Kvitko’s daughter. In the poem, Etele is eight years old and in the forest, making her way to the Soviets. She has lost all of her selfhood to the ancient, still viable tropes of antisemitism: She is no longer called Etl, not Etl with the lovely darting black eyes, only “Jew” the enemy calls her, “Jew dog.” So many centuries she’s been taking Christian blood to make matzoh, he says, And wields her influence (or “operates”) in the global league of bankers. His next set of associations is more startling: Her head, her neck, are a mural from the Song of Songs. They will be attacked by vermin, and only her dreams will seek in the Deluge, like a dove from the ark, a bit of dry land. From her narrowed eye peers “all is vanity.” This is an unusual moment, both for Kvitko and Soviet Jewish literature more generally. References to Jewish history were occasionally permissible in Soviet literature, but here Kvitko draws on three biblical texts, one after the other. These references have no purpose beyond reminding Yiddish readers of the little girl’s, and their own, ancient pedigree. They are very spare and say nothing explicit about the religious context from which they are drawn. But that context was usually taboo. These suddenly relevant biblical allusions crossed a boundary. Where can Kvitko go next? He appears in the text in his own voice. The only thing he can offer Etele is his love, and a promise, entirely vague, entirely divorced from politics or ideology, to restore her faith in the world. No, no, I cannot forget this, this must not be forgotten. Not in tears, not in curses, can the pain be measured. Come into my arms, press yourself against my heart, or against my chest.

16 Ibid., 50–51.

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Etl, little Etl, oh, what the enemy has done to you? He has disfigured the world in your eyes. He has covered its face, like your mother’s, with tumors. Can I see how you look upon the world? Let me, Etele, defend it for you.17 All of the poems discussed here were part of Kvitko’s postwar collection Song of My Spirit (Gezang fun mayn gemit, 1947). There is a poem in the collection that has that title. It is dedicated to Stalin, and begins like this: Because my children were dragged to the edge of the abyss, and I was unable to prevent the end, you lifted up my head: “Struggle.” You shielded me from extermination. True friend, song of my spirit. Was this hymn a prerequisite for publication? Highly likely, and the necessity for it did not even need to be spoken out loud. Did Kvitko believe it? Very possibly: people did. Soldiers fought for Stalin; pilots put “for Stalin” onto airplanes. People who were otherwise quite cynical—a category that did not include Kvitko—could believe that Stalin was the cause of the victory over the Nazis at the same time that they saw him as the architect of the Terror, a phenomenon so widespread it had a label: Soviet schizophrenia. In the case of Song of My Spirit, it is worth noting that Stalin appears only in this single poem. The final poem in the collection is a different dedication, as is as far removed from Stalin as could be imagined. “The Word about Grandma” (Dos vort vegn bobenyu) is dedicated to Kvitko’s grandmother, who brought him up and whose death, as his wife attests, shattered him. It is also written from his own voice. The first and last verses go like this: It’s good that you departed this life so long ago. You missed the most terrifying, the worst, gone to your rest, with a blessing to the world.18

17 Ibid., 54–55. 18 Ibid., 72.

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Shtern: Iconoclasm Like Kvitko, Shtern expected only justice from the USSR. Kvitko ran into its inversion in 1925, but the setback had been brief. Shtern’s encounter came almost a decade later: unlike literature, science through the 1930s was not subject to rewrites. But the Terror of the late 1930s upended the country, or at least the intellectual and Party segments to which Shtern belonged. In the first “Border Crossings” chapter, we noted the 1937 arrest of Shtern’s cousin, a Party activist named Nina Strievskaya. Nina Strievskaya was, like Lozovsky’s daughter Vera Dridzo, a close associate of Lenin’s wife. But by the late thirties, that connection was not protective. Strievskaya’s husband was shot, and she herself spent seventeen years in the Gulag. According to Shtern’s student Boris Malkin, Shtern accepted the validity of the charges against her cousin.19 The one event to which she did object—and in a widely reported conversation outside of her private circle—was the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. When “an important political leader”—her longtime friend Yakov Rapoport doesn’t say who—tried to reassure her that the agreement was simply “a matter of convenience,” Shtern retorted that “even marriages of convenience produce children, and this one will too.”20 One of the products of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was the SovietFinnish War, which started in November 1939, a mere three months after the signing. Shtern played a minor medical role in that war. As a result of her research into the blood-brain barrier, she had become convinced that traumatic shock would be best treated by injections of phosphoric acid into the spinal fluid. With her usual energy and uncommon personal courage, she organized medical brigades to the front to promote the therapy and joined one herself. Her behavior at the front was heroic. But reports from field doctors did not back her up, and further on into the war, the method was rejected by the Medical Directorate of the Soviet Army.21 Shtern’s stubbornness in pursuing the therapy irritated people in the scientific and political hierarchy. Her stubbornness manifested itself in other circumstances as well—even Malkin, in his first very cautious book about her, notes that when her interpretation of data differed from that of a graduate student,

19 Malkin, “Trudnye gody.” 160. This did not destroy their relationship—perhaps Strievskaya never knew. When Shtern returned from exile, it was Strievskaya who met her at the train platform. 20 Rapoport, Na rubezhe, 241. 21 Ibid., 241–242.

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she would be rudely dismissive.22 In the case of her traumatic shock therapy, Shtern’s obstinacy helped no one. Later, in a strictly moral sense, it would serve her well. In the spring of 1942, when the government hit on the idea of creating the five Antifascist Committees, Shtern’s international reputation made her an all around asset. She was attached to three of them: Women, Scientists, and Jews, missing only, for obvious reasons, Slavs and Youth. From her speech at the Jewish Antifascist Committee’s First Plenum, in March 1942, we can see that her participation in the Jewish branch was far from perfunctory, and also that in that early phase of the war she sensed no problem in expressing solidarity with Jews. “We are here as representatives of the Jewish people,” she says, adopting an identification that had earlier seemed of no consequence to her. Her main idea is that destroying fascism will destroy antisemitism, and that Soviet Jews must engage American and other foreign Jews in this battle. She suggests the formation of international Jewish brigades to fight at the frontlines.23 The harmony of purpose between the Soviet state and its Jews lasted for one year. In the spring of 1943, an unsuspecting Shtern was caught in the opening stages of state-sponsored antisemitism, which at this point entailed firing Jews from professional positions in science and the arts. The new turn of events was made known to her by a colleague with the last name Shtor—to a Russian ear, foreign and likely Jewish. Shtor, a former assistant of Shtern’s who now directed his own lab, asked if he could go back to work in hers. The rector of Moscow University had just told him to resign, explaining in a perfectly forthcoming manner that it was awkward for the Lomonosov Institute to have a Jew as chair of a department. In fact, the rector explained, other Jews had already been fired. We know this story because Shtern relates it during her testimony at trial. It is curious but characteristic that at the trial, nearly a decade after the incident took place, Presiding Judge Cheptsov doesn’t question the veracity of the incident. He could have said that nobody fired Jews because they were Jewish, that Shtor was incompetent and Shtern was succumbing to anti-Soviet propaganda, but he doesn’t bother. Looking back, Shtern stresses two things. First is her initial skepticism, combined with faith in the Soviet mission: it was inconceivable to her that the state could engage in active antisemitism. The second is her insistence, both in 1943 and 1952, on material fact. Shtor had told her

22 I. A. Rosin and V. B. Malkin, Lina Solomonovna Shtern (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), 93. 23 Redlikh and Kostyrchenko, Evreiskii antifashistskii komitet, 246.

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that the rector had a written order: at trial, she says only that “apparently” there was a written order. Nevertheless, she had advice for him: he shouldn’t resign; he should fight. Assuming that an unjust order was local or transient and then resisting it was Shtern’s own modus operandi. A second incident followed, which involved her more directly, and which she also relates at court. As editor in chief of a medical journal, Shtern was told to fire two Jews on her staff. She asked for an explanation. Firing Jews, it turned out, was a matter of war strategy. The Nazis had been issuing brochures saying that “Jews were everywhere in the USSR,” a situation that “diminished Russian culture.”24 Unsurprisingly, the idea that readers of Nazi brochures would be attuned to the staffing of The Bulletin of Experimental Biology and Medicine proved unconvincing to her. A more cynical person would have understood the distinction between policy and excuse and acknowledged the virtues of shutting up. Shtern operated by different rules, and wrote to Stalin. Her letter reiterates her thinking quite directly: “the reason for removing the managing secretaries seemed so unconvincing to me that I did not agree to accept it . . .” It goes on to reiterate what to her were bedrock principles: This [action] contradicts everything that I have known up to this point, everything that I have lived by and have referred to with pride at all my lectures in various countries in Europe and America. It is hard for me to imagine that the policy being recommended and implemented by certain people is in fact an order. . . . Only in its final paragraph—in fact, only in its address to Stalin personally— does the letter follow the usual obsequious practice, and even here, the overriding context is Shtern’s own evaluation of what is at stake: Therefore I decided to turn to you, dear Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, for an explanation, in the belief that this question has important foundational significance and its resolution does not permit compromise.25

24 Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 317–318. Malkin also relates the incident and names the emissary as Professor Sergeev, an active member of the Academy of Sciences (Malkin, “Trudnye gody,” 173). 25 The letter is quoted in Malkin, “Trudnye gody,” 172–173.

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That Shtern would send a letter to Stalin was both naïve and audacious. Soviet citizens did write to Stalin, the same way that Russian imperial subjects once wrote to the tsar; on the other end of the social-political continuum, an important associate of Stalin’s like Bukharin could write in an appeal to the leader’s mercy. Shtern was in neither class, in addition to which she was not writing about herself and didn’t have a personal, political association with the state. Her power was external, a matter of international reputation, and she leveraged it. In a narrow sense, Shtern won. Her Jewish staff remained in place, which meant there was no need to reevaluate the principles she outlined in her letter. Did she need anything further? That same year, 1943, she was given a Stalin Prize. But state antisemitism continued unabated, and the minutes of a 1944 JAFC meeting reveal Shtern to be quite aware of that and attempting to negotiate through it. The subject of the meeting was a report given by representatives of Jewish partisan groups that had fought in the forests in Belarus. Now, disarmed and disbanded, they faced a hostile local population. Shtern brings out their predicament through questioning, and responds by calling for the punishment of collaborators who were then “emerging dry from the water.”26 Her response sidesteps the question of exactly why those collaborators were emerging dry from the water. As we will see later, even the compilers of the Black Book documentation of Nazi atrocities against the Jews were reluctant to touch the subject of local collaboration. The official line was that Nazis were perpetrators and local populations protective. Shtern ignores the taboo, and comes close to saying that protecting a certain class of collaborators was government policy.

Leder: Evacuation and Trauma In February 1941, a year or so after his marriage to Mary, Abram Leder was offered a position in a German-language newspaper published in newly Sovietized Riga. It was a military position. Mary was pregnant, and looking forward to visit him in a “foreign” city. Her reasons were the same as those of Ulanovskaya’s colleagues who reveled in the recently annexed Grodno: novelty and shopping. But Abram was reluctant to have her come. He couldn’t write what he knew from listening to the BBC: that war was possible and even

26 Gennadii Kostyrchenko, “Edinstvennaia vyzhivshchaia: Lina Shtern,” http://lebed. com/2012/art6059.htm.

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imminent. And so, she arrived on June 15, 1941, one week before the German invasion in the early hours of June 22. Mary’s trip to Riga, and two other trips to Rostov—one before the war, and one just after—were an unexpected immersion into the world of old-fashioned Jews. As a Soviet-American Muscovite of more or less Communist convictions, she had not encountered Jewish people like the ones in Abram’s Rostov family. Her father-in-law was a ladies’ tailor, illiterate even in Yiddish, who supported his family well by barter and work off the books; her mother-in-law passed money to needy relatives and friends. Visitors were constant, including, after the start of the war, people who had fled Odesa. Mary had no sympathy for any of this, which struck her as disorderly and intrusive. In retrospect, she was ashamed. What did people know, particularly Jews? The whole country operated on rumor and private interpretation of the official press. Before the invasion, in the period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the press assumed a German triumph; it paid no attention to potential victims. Mary’s father-in-law assumed that the Germans would be reasonable, as had been the case in World War I. Others assumed the opposite. The Jewish family the Leders boarded with in Riga expected the worst. In Rostov, where Mary briefly stayed when it looked like Moscow would fall, refugees from Odesa brought news of atrocities. Abram had advised her not to go to Rostov, but his letter arrived too late. And then, also in Rostov, a woman on the street told her that the Germans would come soon and “take care of the Communists and the Jews.”27 The woman may have known that Mary was Jewish and may not have. The main dynamic, as Mary saw it, was how blatant she was about her sympathies. In the chaos of two evacuations, kind interventions saved her. On the way out of Riga, a conductor—a Russian woman—had found her a place on a train; later, leaving Moscow, the Party secretary at the Foreign Language Publishing House where Abram had worked let her join their evacuation. This help would not have been sufficient on its own: ticketed or not, evacuees with suitcases pushed others out of the way. Fortunately, a colleague of Abram’s recognized Leder and gave her a space. That same man, a Hungarian Communist, advised her to slip across the Turkish border and try to contact Americans. Mary was at this point not alone. In Moscow, she had given birth to a baby girl. Again, an intervention saved her: friends who evacuated earlier passed on to her the peasant woman who had, like many peasant women, been employed

27 Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia, 194.

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as a domestic. That woman made it possible for Mary to care for her child. But the little girl did not thrive. When the mother and child reached their destination in Engels, on the Volga north of Stalingrad, the seven-month-old fell ill with pneumonia and died. Like the other subjects of this book, Mary was, until the war, much more Soviet than she was Jewish. She and Abram saw Communism, for all its flaws, as a way forward, while Jewish particularity had no conceivable future, though they tolerated it in older relatives. The unfolding Holocaust divided Jews like Mary from other Soviets. The genocide was something they paid anguished attention to, while others did not have to. Abram’s parents and family in Rostov were all murdered. Thinking about them many years later, Mary asks the inevitable questions: why did they obey Nazi orders? Why didn’t they leave? And she answers: because they had no place to go. Because if they didn’t obey, their neighbors would have informed on them. Mary returned to Moscow as soon as that was possible. With Abram at the front, failing to advance in rank and sent to ever more dangerous positions, she began a job with the foreign section of TASS, translating articles from the Soviet press for dissemination in English-speaking countries. She sometimes worked the day shift and sometimes the night one, climbing up a stopped escalator in the deep Belarussian Railway Station and walking home alone past security guards who learned to recognize her. She also returned to the history faculty of Moscow University, where she hoped to remain for an advanced degree. It is at that point that she crossed paths with the other aspect of the Jewish historical calendar, the late-war onset of Soviet state antisemitism. She describes the same kind of street-level antisemitism that the Jewish Antifascist Committee sought to counter in the Black Book and Grossman put in his novel: Jews were said not to have fought in the war. Antisemitism also prevented her from joining the Party. Abram had joined at the front, and Mary, having aged out of the Komsomol, could not imagine their lives outside it. But she was turned down. When she went to the Central Committee to find out why, the official she spoke with gave an oblique answer to a question she hadn’t even asked. “You know my name,” he said. It was a Jewish name. “You see that I am Jewish and I have a responsible position.”28 At Moscow University, there was a similar roadblock. Someone had seen the list of students put forward for advanced degrees: all Jewish names have been crossed off. She spoke to her supervisor at TASS, a worldly (in her view)

28 Ibid., 252.

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Old Bolshevik. He didn’t dispute the reality of the discrimination, but gave her a reason: excluding Jews was necessary to counter Nazi propaganda that Jews were favored in the Soviet Union. This is the same talking point that Shtern faced when she asked why the Jews had been fired from scientific journals. At TASS, Mary had once again been recruited as an informant, an assignment she could not turn down but sought to passively resist. Now she went to her handler to complain about the university’s action; like Shtern, she assumed it was some kind of lower-level sabotage. The handler asked her to write up a report, including the names of the students who had passed on that information to her. In some combination of faith and cynicism, she wrote up a report. There was no name in it but her own.

Medvedeva: Evacuation without Privilege, Grief beyond Resentment “The war,” writes Medvedeva, “was unexpected.” By this she means the SovietFinnish war that began in November 1939 as a way of neutralizing Finland. The Soviets miscalculated, a reality that was hard to hide in nearby Leningrad. The Medvedevs’ son Gessel was at the front, as was a daughter and a son-in-law. One night, Gessel appeared at their apartment, frozen and delirious: the clothing issued to Soviet soldiers was not warm enough. She and Abram put him to bed with irons and hot-water bottles, and the next morning he went back. Unusually, Doba-Mera reports herself not surprised by the Nazi invasion in June 1941, though what happened immediately before showcases both the understanding that war might happen and the avoidance of that understanding. Her daughter and son-in-law were then in Borisoglebsk, over 600 miles away, working full-time with a small child. Doba-Mera left Leningrad to help them, and without warm clothing, because it was summer. But Aunt Gesia—the same Aunt Gesia, now in Leningrad as well—went to the train station to see her off. She feared, correctly, that they would never see each other again. War came the next month. Abram would not leave blockaded, bombarded Leningrad; Doba-Mera assumes he could have left and did not. More resentful than proud, she accuses him of caring more for the evacuation of workers he had supervised than he did for himself. Where she was in Borisoglebsk, the railway station was filled with evacuees: “Hungry people in rags, without roof or food, wandered everywhere and little attention was paid to them.”29 One of 29 Beizer and Nakhimovsky, Daughter of the Shtetl, 139.

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the entities that paid no attention was the government, which supervised only evacuation from major cities.30 Many of the evacuees were Jews, writes DobaMera, some from Khotimsk. And then Borisoglebsk itself was not safe. Doba-Mera and her family became evacuees, waiting for a train whose arrival time was not clear. People shoved each other out of the way and children got lost, including, briefly, her grandson. Eventually, her family, three adults and a child, pushed their way onto the train, where they would stand in the corridor for days because other people, traveling with luggage, had occupied their seats. Finally, they reached Orsk, on the geographic boundary between Europe and Asia, just north of Kazakhstan. It was there, in late 1941, that they received the “good” news—an adjective Doba-Mera appropriates from street-level antisemitism and herself puts in scare quotes—that the Jews under German occupation had all been killed. This was all word-of-mouth, passed on by both the exultant and the grieving. What happened in fact was found in archives by the historian Rebecca Manley. A degree to evacuate Klintsy, which by then had important textile factories, was issued on August 19, 1941. At that point, according to a document, the “railway did not work, there was no motor transport, no animal-drawn transport since the collective farm horses had also been evacuated, and thus all the paths . . . were cut off.”31 The government, by design, made no effort to prioritize the safety of Jews.32 Doba-Mera’s notebook for these years ends with the arrival of Abram, swollen from hunger. The next-to-last paragraph is about mourning so intense that she does not complete her sentence. “Grandmother,” she writes, “my sisters, my sister Meita and the other relatives and in general everybody who was a blood relation.” The sisters she refers to are Abram’s sisters. Meita was her stepsister. Grandmother lived with Aunt Gesia in Klintsy. In life, she resented them. Now all that gave way to grief.

Grossman: A Personal Quest At the outbreak of the war, Grossman had a lot to look forward to. His wife, with his help, had survived her encounter with the terror machine; his

30 Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 40. 31 Ibid., 64. 32 Ibid., 32.

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daughter Katya remained with his mother in Berdychiv. As a member of the Writers Union, Grossman was a card-carrying member of the Soviet elite. Like other official writers, he had a personal exemption from the military, and access to material perks that radically separated him from the rest of the population. Then, suddenly, everything changed. On July 7, the Nazis reached Berdychiv. As we have seen in other stories, Jews were far from uniformly ignorant. As Medvedeva scrambled to evacuate, most of the refugees she saw were Jews, “running as though from a fire, tormented, in rags.”33 In Berdychiv, a mere two weeks after the invasion, a third of the Jewish population had managed to flee.34 The execution of individuals began almost immediately, followed by the confinement of the remaining Jews into a ghetto, at which point all of them were doomed. Grossman’s daughter was off in summer camp, where she would survive. But what about his mother? Yekaterina Savelievna was an educated woman, and all around her, people were using any means they could to get out. Grossman could have saved her. As a member of the Writers Union, he had a private apartment with a study—this at a time when most Soviet citizens lived in single rooms, often with mothers and even servants (Grossman himself had a servant). With his status and connections, he could have gotten his mother onto a train. Even Leder and Medvedeva got onto trains. Why didn’t Yekaterina Savelievna join Grossman in Moscow? According to Grossman’s close friend Semyon Lipkin and his biographers John and Carol Garrard, the problem was Grossman’s wife, who did not like her mother-inlaw. She objected to hosting Yekaterina Savelievna, and Grossman gave in. Alexandra Popoff, whose biography of Grossman postdates that of the Garrards, does not bring up this complication.35 In her account, the death of Yekaterina Savelievna was a tragedy among so many others, the result of her ignorance of Nazi intentions.

33 Beizer and Nakhimovsky, Daughter of the Shtetl, 141. 34 “Berdichev: odna iz nerasskazannykh istorii,” Yad Vashem, https://www.yadvashem.org/ru/ education/educational-materials/lesson-plans/Berdichev.html. 35 Popoff cites two postcards from Yekaterina Savelievna suggesting that she was managing as best she could—but not the cables, contents unknown, that according to the Garrards were exchanged as the Nazis were approaching, on June 30 and July 1. Popoff, Vasily Grossman, 118; Garrard and Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev, 137. Another problem cited by the Garrards but not by Lipkin or Popoff was Yekaterina Savelievna’s mentally disabled niece, whom she was looking after. If that was the case, then Yekaterina Savelievna chose Grossman’s marital stability over her and her niece’s lives—a judgment with which Grossman tacitly concurred. It is worth noting that Medvedeva, a woman of no connections, traveled with a toddler, and Leder with an infant.

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The problem with absolving Grossman is that Grossman does not absolve himself. Central to both Life and Fate and Forever Flowing are confrontations between a weak husband and a materialistic, self-absorbed wife, in which the husband wants to help a family member in dire need and the wife objects. One of these iterations is terribly close to what Lipkin and the Garrards describe, while the other is a little more distant.36 In both, the wife is not even a moral actor; she is beneath that, and Grossman doesn’t care about her. His concern is the failure of the husband, the uncertain man who acquiesces.37 Forever Flowing takes place after the death of Stalin. Its moral coward is a Russian named Nikolai Andreevich, a scientific administrator of middling abilities. During the postwar repressions of scientists for ideological deviations and Jews for being Jewish, Nikolai Andreevich took a middling path. Then Grossman gives him a tipping point, a test that he does not pass. His cousin Vanya has just been released from the Gulag. Vanya sends a telegram: he’s arriving in Moscow. Nikolai Andreevich’s wife has no interest in hosting Vanya. Vanya will be dirty, he will spoil their bathtub; he will ruin Nikolai Andreevich’s chances for advancement in his career. “Don’t you understand?” cries Nikolai Andreevich. “Have you no idea at all how much Vanya means for my soul?”38 “Soul” is common in Russian expressions, where its usual equivalent is the English word “heart.” But Grossman, a religious thinker without religion, really means “soul” here. And Nikolai Andreevich’s soul is divided. On the one hand, he shares his wife’s worries over his career, which Vanya’s presence could derail. On the other, he wants to confess to Vanya, and only to him. Nikolai Andreevich imagines them spending time alone at a dacha. He thinks, “let Vanya pass judgment on me.”39 At dinner with his wife and Vanya, Nikolai Andreevich confesses, though he also justifies himself. He explains what happened with his colleagues, two Jews and a Russian freethinker. Of course, he, Nikolai, was opposed to antisemitism, but the Jews overemphasized it, and the Russian freethinker was himself

36 There is a third iteration, in Za pravoe delo (its English translation uses Grossman’s original title, Stalingrad) in which the mother’s failure to come to Moscow is nobody’s fault. But that novel was written with Soviet rules in mind, while his two final novels came after Grossman’s break with those rules. 37 In the novel, Lyudmila is humanized when her beloved son dies. Grossman’s wife also had a son who died in the war. 38 Vasilii Grossman, Vse techet (Moscow: Eksmo, 2010), 502; Vasilii Grossman, Forever Flowing (New York: Harper and Rowe, 1972), 10. 39 Grossman, Vse techet, 522; Grossman, Forever Flowing, 37.

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at fault for failing to recognize the importance of nationalism in science. Seeing Vanya shake his head despondently, Nikolai Andreevich’s wife intervenes. She will tell the blunt truth, and tell it proudly. “Why are you too timid to say that Mandelstam and Pyzhov are infatuated with their own selves?” she says. “Why keep lamenting that life has put them in their place? It certainly has—and thank God.”40 Up to this point, Vanya has been forbearing—like a mother, says Grossman, faced with a misbehaving child. Now he becomes viciously angry. There will be no seclusion in a dacha; he leaves without spending the night. The weight of Vanya’s judgment is underscored in a section of Life and Fate in which Grossman, like Tolstoy before him, breaks the narrative to speak in his own voice. The section directly precedes a scene in a death camp, and Grossman’s concern is with who can pass judgment. Only, he concludes, a sinner “who has been crushed by Fascism, who has himself experienced the terrible power of the State, who has himself bowed down, fallen, shrunk into timidity and submissiveness.”41 As the character Vanya passes judgment on the cowardly, submissive Nikolai, so Grossman, the author, passes judgment on Nikolai and on himself. Nikolai’s submission to his wife is personal, not political. It is analogous to Grossman’s submission to his own wife, assuming that took place. Personal and political transgressions are closely tied. In Life and Fate, the confrontation between the fictional husband and wife mirrors Grossman’s real-life story as Lipkin and the Garrards describe it. Here, the act of moral cowardice is committed by the book’s main character, Grossman’s own stand-in, Viktor Shtrum. Viktor is an elite Jewish physicist whose mother is trapped in Berdychiv. His wife, Lyudmila, is Russian—and according to Lipkin, a close portrait of Grossman’s own wife, who was Ukrainian. The fictional Viktor had wanted to bring his mother to live with his family in Moscow, but didn’t act on it because Lyudmila objected. Lyudmila’s behavior is not exactly antisemitic. But indifference in the face of need this extraordinary is easier if the person in need belongs to an outgroup. Viktor, the character, is obsessed with his mother’s death. Grossman, the author, wrote letters to his mother years after he knew for certain that she was dead. In Life and Fate, Viktor’s mother writes him a letter describing her experience in the ghetto—a letter so convincing that it took primary place in a

40 Grossman, Vse techet, 526; Grossman, Forever Flowing, 43. 41 Vasilii Grossman, Zhizn′ i sud′ba (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1980), 370; Vasilii Grossman [Vasily Grossman], Life and Fate, trans. Robert Chandler (New York: New York Review of Books, 2006), 536.

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dramatization of Life and Fate, which of necessity eliminated most of the plot.42 Readers commonly think that the letter is real. Like Grossman, the fictional Viktor remains married to his wife, not altogether tranquilly. But he blames her. “In his soul,” writes Grossman, “he reproached Lyudmila for her coldness toward his mother. Once he’d even said, “If you hadn’t got on so badly with my mother, she’d have been living with us when we were in Moscow.” Lyudmila’s reasoning follows the pattern we just observed in Forever Flowing: whatever the enormity of an in-law’s need, her personal comfort comes first. “Viktor’s mother, Anna Semyonovna, had indeed suffered a terrible fate,” she thinks. “But how could he have expected her to get on with Anna Semyonovna when Anna Semyonovna didn’t like Tolya [her son from an earlier marriage]? That had been enough to make her letters and her visits to Moscow quite unbearable.”43 Weeks into the war, Grossman’s guilt was profound. He tried to enlist in the Army, but was turned away because of nearsightedness. He then offered himself as a war correspondent, and the head of the Army newspaper Red Star (Krasnaia zvezda), read across the country, snapped him up. This was justified: by the end of the war, his reputation as a correspondent had outstripped any reputation he had garnered as a writer of fiction. In the field, he spent all his time with soldiers and officers; he understood their thinking and could reproduce their speech. His personal fearlessness was legendary. He was, in all likelihood, courting either death or revenge. Grossman reported from Stalingrad, the critical turning point of the war in the east. He spent his time on what the historian Antony Beevor calls the “burned out city” on the Volga’s west bank, where the German and Soviet snipers fought it out from house to house.44 This is not a book about Stalingrad, but Grossman’s association with that city, his national position as the voice of those who fought for it, will be relevant in the next chapter. With the surrender of Paulus’s Sixth Army, Soviet forces moved through Ukraine. Here Grossman saw the immediate aftermath of the Jewish catastrophe, still unstudied and unnamed. He began to write about it. His story “The Old Teacher” (Staryi uchitel′) is about an event of mass extermination, and a moment of compassion between victims. It came out in Banner. But the essay

42 A 2007 production by director Lev Dodin of the St. Petersburg Malyi Dramatichesky Teatr. 43 Grossman, Zhizn′ i sud′ba, 40; Grossman, Life and Fate, 72–73. I’ve changed Chandler’s “heart” to “soul” for consistency; the Russian is v dushe. 44 Antony Beevor, ed., and Vasily Grossman, A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941–45 (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 134.

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“Ukraine without Jews” was deemed unsuitable for Russian-language readers. Translated into Yiddish, it appeared in Unity. In July 1944, Chuikov’s Stalingrad Army liberated Treblinka. Grossman was there. Himmler had attempted to dismantle the death machinery, but he didn’t have time: it was all on view, and the Soviet Army turned up about forty survivors. Grossman interviewed them. His account, The Hell of Treblinka (Treblinskii ad), focuses on the sadism of the guards, like a certain Stumpfe who would laugh hysterically when he observed or carried out a killing. Another imperative was to understand why the victims did not rebel. From local peasants, Grossman learned that, sporadically, they did. People broke free of trains, sometimes holding children; all of them were killed. The railway station, Grossman notes, looked normal; the camp had flower beds. The deceit promoted quiet, but it was followed by terror: attack dogs, rapes, infants thrown against walls. The combination allowed the killing to unfold with a relatively small staff. And what about the victims? He tries, on the basis of what he learns, to restore their humanity, making the reader of his essay encounter “the living Treblinka corpses, who had lost the image and the likeness of human beings, retained to the final minutes their human souls.”45 “It is infinitely hard even to read this,” he writes later in the essay. “The reader must believe me, it is as hard to write it.” Yet it is everyone’s duty to learn what happened. “Everyone who would turn away, who would shut his eyes and walk past would insult the memory of the dead.”46 “The Hell of Treblinka,” published in Banner in November 1944, was reprinted as a self-standing book by the military publishing house Voenizdat in 1945. It was submitted as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials. Still, to Grossman’s distress, the Red Star gave the Treblinka assignment to a similarly famous but more tractable writer-correspondent, Konstantin Simonov. Simonov did not have Jewish baggage, and his article does not pay particular attention to Jews.47 The political signals were mixed: sometimes it was acceptable to mention Jews as Nazi victims, and sometimes not. In 1944, in the wake of these events, Grossman joined the literary commission of the Jewish Antifascist Committee. Here began his close association with the Black Book. Eventually, when Ehrenburg left that project over concern that

45 Vasilii Grossman, “Treblinskii ad,” in his Na evreiskie temy, ed. Shimon Markish ( Jerusalem: Biblioteka Aliia, 1985), 1:167–168. The phrase “image and likeness,” Russian obraz i podobie, is from Genesis 1:26, another example of Grossman’s appropriation of religious thinking. 46 Ibid., 178–179; translation from Beevor and Grossman, Writer at War, 301. 47 Beevor goes through this story, see Beevor and Grossman, Writer at War, 280.

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the book would not be published in the Soviet Union, Grossman took over the leadership. But his concerns were largely the same as Ehrenburg’s. He wanted the book to show examples of Jewish courage, in response to widespread depiction of Jews going to their deaths like sheep.48 He wanted to emphasize the ways in which non-Jewish Soviets helped their Jewish neighbors—rather than helping the Nazis, for which the evidence was considerable. In Life and Fate, Grossman would break with this last point. A meeting Grossman attended before Ehrenburg’s departure reveals above all everybody’s grief-stricken identification with the dead. Like Kvitko in his Holocaust poems, Grossman sees the committee’s mission as speaking for them: “All the materials we have are stories from people who miraculously survived, but it is crucial for us to take on one more task: to speak in the name of those who lay in the earth and can’t say anything.” He is concerned that since the committee has only survivors’ stories to work with, the impression will be that there were a lot of survivors. At another point in the same meeting, he insists that Jews be referred to as “people” rather than “Jews”—he doesn’t say why, but a plausible explanation is that for the readership he envisioned, exterminating “people” would be more objectionable than exterminating Jews.49 After the demise of the Black Book, in exactly the way that Ehrenburg predicted—and after two additional traumas that we will examine in the next chapter—Grossman embarked on Life and Fate. The novel was an exercise in free speech as he understood it. The book has constraints, but they are of Grossman’s own devising. It is constrained structurally through strict mirroring in pairs and triads. It is constrained by thematic unities, in particular, an emphasis on spontaneous kindness as the only human grace in a world where so many institutions fail. In contrast to the examples of mean-spirited wives with which this section opened, most of the spontaneous kindness in Life and Fate is an attribute of female characters. Just not every female character. Perhaps the most striking part of Life and Fate is its examination of the Holocaust. Holocaust fiction is now a genre—as the Israeli poet Dan Pagis put it, “at first the details horrify / but later they’re a bore.”50 For Grossman, writing in the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, finding novelty in genocide was not 48 Redlikh and Kostyrchenko, Evreiskii antifashistskii komitet, 257. 49 Ibid., 250. 50 Dan Pagis, “Autobiography,” in his The Selected Poems of Dan Pagis, trans. Stephen Mitchell (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), 5.

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an issue. He could not even be sure that his work would reach readers in his lifetime, and it indeed did not. There are two Holocaust narratives in the book, which do not overlap. One is the story of Viktor Shtrum’s mother in the Berdychiv ghetto. Contained in her letter to her son, it describes what we would now call gradual dehumanization, orchestrated by the Nazis but carried out spontaneously by neighbors and friends. Grossman stresses the impossibility of predicting who would behave ethically in the absence of norms or rewards. Viktor’s mother, a doctor, is abused by some people who once respected her, while a patient who had always been gruff risks bringing her bread. The other Holocaust narrative ends in the gas chamber. There, three lines come together. One is the story of a military doctor named Sofia Osipovna, a woman who is a Jew but not much of a Jew, and uninterested in motherhood. Her Jewishness becomes important when she is captured—not only because it is determinant for her captors, but because in the sealed railway care she begins to see the people trapped with her as Jewish family. The second is the story of a little boy, David, who was spending the summer with relatives in Ukraine. On the train, Sofia Osipovna looks after David. At the selection, a call is made for doctors and surgeons. She does not save her own life by identifying herself; she has become David’s mother. The third narrative line is about collaborators and guards. Grossman tries to see what brought them to this point. Roze, a German, is a gentle man who got absorbed by Nazi ideology; he felt the Party was looking out for people like him. Khmelkov and Zhuchenko are of uncertain, but Slavic, nationality—either Ukrainian or Russian. Other sections of the novel pay respect to what happened to Ukrainians in the genocidal famine of 1932–1933. But there were Ukrainian collaborators, as there were Russian ones—and contrary to the political line of the Black Book, Grossman includes them. He differentiates their stories. Zhuchenko enjoys himself, like Stumpfe from Treblinka. Khmelkov had been taken prisoner, and simply didn’t want to die. And then the victims meet the executioners. Approaching the door to the gas chamber, David releases a tiny chrysalis he has picked up on the ground: “Let it have its freedom,” he thinks. Next to him, Sofya Osipovna’s eyes meet those of the maniacally smiling Zhuchenko. She wants to strangle him; instead, he hits her on the head with his club. Inside, in terrible crush, she finds David and holds him in her arms. They struggle to breathe, and then they die.

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The death scene is balanced by a narrative of compassion—another doublet. A Ukrainian peasant named Khristia—there was a real person by that name, described in Grossman’s notebooks—saves a Russian soldier who has escaped captivity. By his accent, he is a Muscovite; he belongs, in other words, to an identifiable group of enemies: the interlopers who had enforced collectivization and the resulting famine. But he is in need, so she bathes him, feeds him, and hides him. Accidently and profoundly, she becomes his mother.

6

Jews, Scientists, and the Trial of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, 1944–1952 The postwar harassment of Jews had several striking moments, some public, some hidden, and some both of those things. Among the hidden was the secret trial of members of the Jewish Antifascist Committee. It went from May through July 1952 and culminated in the execution of Lozovsky, Kvitko, and eleven others. A fourteenth defendant had fallen into a coma and died in the course of the trial. The fifteenth, sent into exile in Central Asia, was Lina Shtern. The conclusion that readers might draw, that Shtern was spared because she was a woman, would be wrong: two women of lesser status—Mary Leder’s colleagues—were shot along with everybody else. The execution took place on August 12, 1952. For a long time, few people knew that date and nobody could refer to it in public. Gennady Estraikh points to an astonishing hidden reference from 1984: in the Russian-Yiddish dictionary published in that year, the appearance of which was itself a mark of great liberalism, the entry for the adjective “twelfth,” says, in both Russian and Yiddish, “on the twelfth of August.”1 The arrests of the fifteen took place over 1948 and 1949. Other people were on the list for arrest later on, including Grossman.2 All were Jews. What caused the sudden semi-public onslaught of state antisemitism is a matter of conjecture. Historians can point to the establishment of the state of Israel, which the Soviet Union supported initially in the hopes that it would become a client state in the Middle East and dropped when it didn’t. The first envoy from that state was the Yiddish-speaking Golda Meir, then still Golda Meyerson.

1 Gennady Estraikh, “The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee,” East European Jewish Affairs 48, no. 2 (2018): 145. 2 Redlikh and Kostyrchenko, Evreiskii antifashistskii komitet, 392.

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Her appearance at the Moscow Choral Synagogue attracted crowds of Jews, which frightened the government, as any spontaneous expression of minority self-awareness, but especially the Jewish kind, was bound to do. Some people knew to be careful. Ala Zuskin-Perelman, the daughter of defendant Veniamin Zuskin, remembers being taken by her aunt to peek at the Israeli consulate from a safe distance; her parents were furious.3 At the trial, Kvitko expressed his disdain for Meyerson, “the Palestine lady,” thereby separating himself from Jewish “nationalists” and also not saying the name of the state she represented.4 As Grossman showed in Life and Fate, an everyday, not overly virulent variety of antisemitism was part of life in the Red Army during World War II. State policy went further, though not yet openly: In 1942, during the battle of Stalingrad, a directive came down from the Central Committee detailing the over-prominence of Soviet Jews in the arts and calling for their purge by arts institutions. From the end of 1948 through the first months of 1949—coinciding with the arrests of most members of the Jewish Antifascist Committee— there was an attempt to purge Soviet physics of Jewish physicists. A conference was scheduled for March 1949, with papers investigating the infection of physics by “cosmopolitanism” (the code for Jews was “rootless cosmopolitans”) and “idealism” (the opposite of Marxist-Leninist materialism). It was called off at the last moment because somebody—possibly Beria, who headed the Soviet atomic bomb project—understood what would happen if that project lost some of its best talent.5 Soviet physics was saved because it was needed. The Jewish Antifascist Committee was no longer needed, and from the point of view of the government had vastly exceeded its domain of wartime propaganda and fundraising. Even more provocative was the Crimean Project, initiated during discussions that Mikhoels had held in New York with the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee during his wartime trip. The idea, as we saw in chapter five, was the establishment of Crimea as a postwar homeland for Holocaust survivors. This was not new: southern Ukraine and northern Crimea had been the site of Jewish agricultural colonies established first in the nineteenth century and later under the Soviets, in the early 1920s. As late as 1936, the Crimea boasted five Jewish

3 Zuskina-Perel′man, Puteshestvie Veniamina, 320–321. 4 Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 101. 5 David Holloway, “How the Bomb Saved Soviet Physics,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 50, no. 6 (1994): 46–55; Anatoly Sonin, “How the A-Bomb Saved Soviet Physicists’ Lives,” Moscow News 13 (1990).

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autonomous districts, all made up of collective farms.6 But that was then. Now, as postwar politics took shape, the Crimean Project pressed the dangerous buttons of Jewish “nationalism” and Western-capitalist-Jewish intervention. In the early postwar period, Mikhoels had become the most visible Jew in the country. He was inundated with appeals from survivors who had nowhere else to turn. Seeing him as a kind of Moses, a towering figure who bridged the chasm between the state and his own people, they wrote him letters and lined up at his theater to ask him personally for help. This spontaneous elevation doomed him as much as the Crimea plans, and he knew it. On January 13, 1948, he was summoned to Minsk to judge a theater competition. His mood, recalls his daughter, was somber.7 He called on people to say goodbye, unusual given that he was only supposed to be gone for a few days. Grossman and Ehrenburg accompanied him to the railway station.8 Once in Minsk, he was called out to the dacha of someone he knew slightly, where he was shot dead. His body was then run over by a truck to feign an accident. Everything except the accident became known decades later: state antisemitism was for the present a matter of broad hints and plausible deniability. In public, Mikhoels was given a state funeral, which conveniently allowed the government to check out who came to mourn. At the trial, Kvitko singles out Mikhoels’s funeral as a heinous display of Jewish nationalism. But those who needed to got the message. The composer Shostakovich, whose beloved student Mieczyslaw Weinberg was Mikhoels’s son-in-law, was in that group. Coming to pay respects to the family—to the shiva, in essence—he told Mikhoels’s daughter that he envied the dead man. On the same day as Mikhoels was murdered, Shostakovich had been publicly excoriated for “formalism.” What was happening to Jews was mirrored by an assault on the entire even slightly non-conformist intelligentsia. One more event of Jewish import took place during those years: the compiling and sudden repression of the Black Book. Like the Crimean Project, the Black Book stood at the unsurvivable nexus of Jewish particularity and what the Soviet leadership understood as Western-capitalist interference. Before its collapse, the major figures in the effort were Grossman and his fellow war correspondent Ehrenburg. The book was supposed to be published simultaneously in Russia and abroad. But Ehrenburg, the head of the Antifascist Committee’s Literary Commission, pressed for immediate publication in Russia. An astute

6 Dekel-Chen, Farming the Red Land, 4. 7 Nataliia Vovsi-Mikhoels, Moi otets Solomon Mikhoels (Moscow: Vozvrashchenie, 1997), 197. 8 Beevor and Grossman, Writer at War, 346.

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analyst of political possibilities, he understood that if the moment passed, the Russian part of the project would fall apart. In the fall of 1944, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Andrei Gromyko, asked that documents collected for the Black Book be sent to the United States. A hundred pages were sent. Ehrenburg had not been consulted, and he resigned. Grossman took his place.9 There followed some waffling in the Politburo, and then, in June 1947, the publishing house Der Emes risked a printing of 50,000 copies. Nothing was done with them and, five months later, the printer warned that the copies lying in the warehouse were getting moldy. In a last-ditch effort, already a month after Mikhoels’s death, Fefer asked permission to save some copies in a closed reserve. His request was denied.10 By that time, the case that culminated in the 1952 trial was already being prepared. The years of interrogation that preceded it were brutal; the outcome was predetermined. The proceedings were led by three judges from the Military Collegium, who served as both prosecutors and jury. There was no counsel for the defense. While the trial was secret, there was someone present who was transcribing it, a situation that meant that the defendants were addressing not only the judges and one another but also, they could hope, posterity. Unlike their predecessors at the show trials of the Terror years, who for the most part played their appointed roles in that judicial theater and did not question the premise of their arrest, these defendants tried to defend themselves. Their methods varied. Some accepted their guilt in full and professed repentance and loyalty: perhaps they were angling for a reprieve. Some accepted guilt in part and fought off the rest. Some apologized to each other. Some accused each other. Three, including Shtern and Lozovsky, were heroic.11 The defendants were aware they were about to die. The poet Hofshteyn, who had hoped he was headed to the Gulag, suddenly got the picture “when

  9 Redlikh and Kostyrchenko, Evreiskii antifashistskii komitet, 241–243. 10 Redlikh and Kostyrchenko, Evreiskii antifashistskii komitet, 241–245. The publication story also appears in Ilya Altman’s introduction to Joshua Rubenstein, The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), xix–xxix. Altman says that the book was never supposed to be published in the USSR, though the transcript of Fefer’s speech at the Antifascist Committee meeting of April 1946 clearly shows an expectation of domestic publication (Redlikh and Kostyrchenko, Evreiskii antifashistskii komitet, 258–259). 11 An earlier version of this thesis can be seen in Nakhimovsky, “Assessing Life in the Face of Death.”

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Lozovsky here mentioned the highest degree of punishment” (the standard phrase for execution). Hofshteyn had apparently missed Kvitko’s confession that “I don’t value my life” and “I want to leave here with a pure heart.”12 Kvitko was not the only defendant who, aware of his looming death, used the trial as a venue for a kind of self-examination, an attempt to leave here—this life—in a state of moral tranquility. The public introspection of many of the defendants, including Lozovsky and Shtern, makes it possible to use the transcripts as a guide to what they were thinking. In the case of Shtern, we have something else as well: an account she gave to a friend soon after she returned from exile.

Kvitko: “I don’t value my life. I want to leave here with a pure heart” Kvitko was the fifth defendant to speak. The roster of speakers was set, roughly, by how obedient they were expected to be. The first was Itsik Fefer, poet and Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) informer from the time that he accompanied Mikhoels to America in 1942–1943. The second was Emilia Teumin, an editor, whose acquiescence was almost total. The last was Lina Shtern. The defendants had prepared for the trial by reading, over eight days, forty-two volumes of testimony transcribed from the interrogations of their codefendants and signed by them. These volumes would be an issue throughout the trial. Some defendants, looking back on how they themselves had been coerced, questioned how accurate the transcripts could be. Others, desperate and trying to curry favor, did the opposite: the great poet Peretz Markish called them “the forty-two-volume compilation of Jewish shame.” For the debilitated defendants, one of whom would die in the course of the trial, the mere task of reading those volumes was herculean. Ala Zuskin-Perelman calculates that, over an eight-hour day, her father and his codefendants would have had to read four pages a minute to simply get through the material.13 Of all the defendants, Kvitko comes across as the most vulnerable: they were all, of course, vulnerable, but Kvitko doesn’t even try to mask it. Early in his testimony, he describes his isolation. For two years, he says, he has been alone in a cell, by his own request. He has nobody to get advice from. “I think things over on my own,” he says, “and I worry.”14 Always aware of his lack of

12 Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 66 and 138. 13 Zuskina-Perelʹman, Puteshestvie Veniamina, 376. 14 Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 91.

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education, a condition that Lozovsky technically shared but never noticed, he feels that he cannot defend himself. Yet Kvitko was the only one of the defendants (including Ilya Vatenberg, who held a law degree from Columbia University) to complain that he was not told his rights. “They tell me why I’m being given this to read; what rights I have, they don’t tell me.” He asks for a defense attorney.15 The others do not, either because they trust their own competence (Lozovsky, Shtern, and the heroic doctor Boris Shimeliovich) or because, unlike Kvitko, they are aware that a good Bolshevik does not ask for a lawyer. The purity of a Bolshevik’s soul was expected to shine through. Kvitko, in fact, gives ample testimony to the state of his soul, which was one of unconditional devotion to the Party. Chukovsky’s statement about him— that he was in love with the Party—is borne out by what he says about himself: “They say that I wormed my way into the Party but that’s not true, that can be checked with facts. In the October Revolution I didn’t lose anything, I didn’t have any kind of property, all my family had died of tuberculosis, and in the Revolution I became a human being and everything I possess I obtained because of the October Revolution.” His calendar is the Bolshevik calendar: “The day of the October Revolution will always stay in my memory as the most joyful and happy holiday of my life.” 16 In 1949, the year of Kvitko’s arrest, Arthur Koestler’s anthology The God that Failed made the argument that Communism was a substitute for religion. Kvitko never saw the book and never could have seen it, but his testimony supports the claim. “If only there were a person who could read my thoughts and feelings, he would tell the truth about me,” he laments. And further, even more explicitly: I don’t know how to say it so you will believe me. If a religious criminal stands before a judge and considers himself unfairly judged or unfairly guilty, he thinks: okay, they don’t believe me, I’ve been convicted, but at least God knows the truth. I don’t have a God and of course I never believed in God. I have one God: the Bolsheviks, that’s my God.17 In the pretrial investigation, Kvitko’s interrogators had made good use of his displaced religiosity by acquainting him with some canonic Marxist texts

15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 94. 17 Ibid., 91.

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and providing him with their correct interpretation. Kvitko applied what he learned and does not hide where he learned it. His new knowledge led him to a particular enmity towards Lozovsky. “I accuse Lozovsky more than others,” he testifies, explaining that Lozovsky knew Lenin personally, and therefore knew that Lenin wanted the Jews to assimilate. “Knowing this,” he asks, “what did Lozovsky do?” Kvitko partially exonerates himself and his fellow writers because “our instrument is language”—meaning that he assumes for all of them a forgivable lack of ideological sophistication. While defendants were permitted to respond to one another, Lozovsky, at this point, holds his tongue. The person who objects to Kvitko’s formulation, at least with respect to Lenin’s intentions, is Fefer. Fefer may have been a poet, and an informant despised by pretty much everybody, but unlike Kvitko, he was well-read. Turning to Kvitko, he is openly sarcastic: “Are you aware that when the Jews addressed Lenin and Stalin with questions about the development of culture in the national languages, they always supported it, and that most Jewish organizations were established under Lenin?”18 It should be said that Kvitko wasn’t the only defendant to succumb to communist scripture as explained by exegetes from the Lubyanka Prison. Two immigrants from New York, Leon Talmi and Ilya Vatenberg, fell just as readily. Talmi describes the experience of rereading Marxist texts in prison as having a film removed from his eyes, a classic phrase for an experience of religious conversion. After that, he understood that “Jewish nationalists, taking leadership positions, had misled the Soviet government and Party organs.”19 Vatenberg, the Columbia-educated lawyer, is prompted by judge/prosecutor Cheptsov to do his rethinking at the trial. Cheptsov reminds Vatenberg that all truth is class truth. Vatenberg reasons his way through this: since all truth is class truth, then as the representative of class truth, the interrogator must be correct. It therefore—as Cheptsov had just suggested—made no sense for him to repudiate his testimony in court. And he doesn’t. The charges against Kvitko were the same charges faced by all the defendants. First was treason, meaning sending information abroad (the fact that the information came from the Soviet press and was to be used as propaganda was discounted). Related to that was espionage: members of the committee had

18 Ibid., 105. 19 Ibid., 250. Complicating this story, and brought up at the trial, is the fact that Talmi’s own son had been arrested for harboring seditious literature. Leder also discusses this. Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia, 292–293.

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associated with two representatives of the New York Communist Press, both on official visits to the USSR. Finally and more generally was the matter of “nationalist moods.” Moods were a thought crime, an emotional prelude to treason. Nationalism, with or without moods, was a relatively new charge—Fefer claims to have heard it first during the investigation.20 If that was the case, the defendants quickly learned to use it to incriminate themselves, as they were meant to do. Teumin tells the court that while she had personally “freed herself from nationalist moods,” she failed to object when made the target of “nationalist propaganda” by Fefer and Mikhoels.21 Kvitko says, “The propaganda, which was supposed to serve the interests of the Soviet Union, was carried out by us in an intensely nationalist form.”22 The word “nationalist,” as used in the trial, refers only to Jews. At one point, Fefer uses it to refer to Jews who weren’t even Soviet. “We came to an agreement about the Black Book with the American nationalists,” he says.23 Nobody misunderstands him. Kvitko responds to the charges by declaring himself partially guilty. How to fight those charges that he rejected and counter them with evidence of his worth as a poet and Party member? One strategy, with which he had considerable experience, was to rewrite the narrative—in this case, the narrative of his life. His efforts are particular striking with regard to his conflict with Moyshe Litvakov in the late 1920s, which excluded him from literature until Chukovsky discovered and championed him. Retelling the story to the court—in some detail, it still stung—he singles out as his rescuer not Chukovsky, but the handler who had supervised his clandestine work at the Hamburg port. Ultimately, says Kvitko, justice triumphed: the state shut down the literary organization that had cast him out. It is easy to see the subtext here. An aberration in Party morality had been corrected in the 1920s; perhaps this would be the case again. Kvitko doesn’t dare say this directly, but he does describe the degree to which his place in literature had been restored. Just a month and a half before his arrest, he had been honored with a jubilee dinner. Famous Russian writers attended! Another strategy pursued by Kvitko is unique to him and relates to his longstanding insecurities about his education. At several points, Kvitko makes 20 Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 106. For more about nationalism and mood, see Alexander Nakhimovsky, “The Transcripts of the JAFC Trial as an Extended Conversation: Words, Sentences, and Speech Acts,” East European Jewish Affairs 48, no. 2 (2018): 215–218. 21 Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 49. 22 Ibid., 100. 23 Ibid., 26.

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clear that he was not respected by people in charge, particularly Lozovsky, and hence had almost no organizational role on the committee. He worked as a proofreader. Even that job, he tells the court, he didn’t do well because his Yiddish (presumably, his Yiddish spelling) wasn’t good enough.24 Here Kvitko is making an argument from weakness. Yet he was not always or only weak. Kvitko was the fifth defendant called to testify, but the first to raise an issue that others—most notably Shtern, Lozovsky, and Shimeliovich—would repeat in much stronger terms: his signed testimony at the interrogation was coerced. Torture and threats of torture had long been a feature of Soviet interrogations, but it was taboo to mention them. The power of the taboo can be seen in the transcript of one of the Show Trials, the Bukharin-Rykov trial of 1938. The defendant Nikolai Krestinsky (we have met him before as a Geneva acquaintance of Lina Shtern) was being examined by the notorious prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky. Under interrogation, Krestinsky had declared himself a Trotskyite and a German spy. Now, at the public trial, he was denying it. Vyshinsky feigns incredulity, and Krestinsky is silent. He cannot say out loud that he was tortured. Vyshinsky: Why such disrespect for the investigation: when there’s an investigation going on, you lie. Explain. Krestinsky: (is silent). Vyshinsky. I don’t hear an answer. I have no further questions.25 Cheptsov tries something similar with Kvitko. Under interrogation, says Cheptsov, Kvitko testified that he had absconded to Berlin because he was a nationalist. The exchange continues like this: Kvitko: That’s a lie. Presiding judge [Cheptsov]: What do you mean? Whose lie? Kvitko: Mine. Presiding judge: Why did you lie? Kvitko: Because it was very hard for me to battle against the interrogator. If only you gave some thought to how people were humiliated.26 24 Soviet Yiddish spelling was different from the spelling Kvitko had used as a young poet. 25 “Stenogramma Bukharinsko-Trotskistskogo protsessa 2 marta 1938,” http://www.hrono.ru/ dokum/1938buharin/utro2-3-38.php#prizn. 26 Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 92. This is not the only point where Kvitko fights back. Soon after, he declares that his testimony was false; that the interrogation was carried out with its

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Cheptsov needles Kvitko further: why did you say you were an enemy of the Soviet Union? Kvitko replies, “Because nobody believed me and they wrote down what they needed to.” Once again, Kvitko is not silent. He denies his testimony and denies that the nationalists Bergelson and Markish incited him to run away; he wasn’t even acquainted with Markish at that time. “Listen to my arguments,” he pleads. “Understanding your arguments is what I want to do,” replies Cheptsov. “Here is your signature. This is a document with which the court has to contend.”27 Kvitko got nowhere; there was nowhere for him to get. He was caught in another kind of paralysis as well: he did not relinquish either his faith in Communism or his understanding of his own innocence. Kvitko was self-aware enough, and open enough, to confess this to the court. Reading the testimony about him, he sees himself split in two: Wherever there is dirt, there is Kvitko, wherever some kind of ulcer, there is my name, wherever there is a crime against the Soviet state, there I am again, everywhere it’s me. I say, if I had read these two volumes about a man I didn’t know, I would say, kill the bastard, so that he doesn’t contaminate Soviet soil, chase him away.28 Kvitko denied all charges against him except one. He pleaded guilty to failing to use Jewish literature as a vehicle for Jewish assimilation. As we saw earlier, Kvitko’s poems encouraged Jews to eat pork (the poem “The Pig Eats” in chapter two) and serve in the Army. But he spoke Yiddish with his own daughter and, in the shadow of the Holocaust, wrote one poem that celebrated the birth of a new Jewish generation and another that referred back to biblical texts—a connection that he meant historically, as a nod to the long Jewish presence on earth. By confessing here that he was guilty of not turning Jews into non-Jews, he was accepting his own annihilation. Very soon after, that happened.

conclusions determined in advance and his arguments were ignored, and that everything he said was “translated into the language of the transcript” (ibid., 99). 27 Ibid., 93. “Here is your signature” was a cliché; just a little later, Cheptsov deployed it against the poet Hofshteyn (ibid., 114). 28 Ibid., 91.

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Lozovsky: “I can’t look Academician Shtern in the eyes” If Kvitko’s mark as a defendant was vulnerability, Lozovsky’s was strength. Lozovsky, as an Old Bolshevik, embodied the kind of fierce intransigence that Kvitko, in happier times, had celebrated in two narrative poems and that Grossman, in Life and Fate, would put to a moral test. Lozovsky, like Kvitko, was a Party member, but the place of the two men in Party hierarchy could not be more different. Before he was fired from his positions as a prelude to his arrest, Lozovsky was a member of the Central Committee, serving as Deputy Foreign Minister and Deputy Director—for most purposes, the actual executive—of the official press agency Sovinformburo. Occupying a high position was hardly protective by definition. Obviously enough, it had no effect on those Bolsheviks who fell on their swords during the Show Trials of the late 1930s. But whatever factors—promises of pardon, blind loyalty—led his predecessors to confess to all manner of outlandish accusations, for Lozovsky, these were no longer operant. Lozovsky knew he was going down. What he wanted to do was go down with his reputation intact and preserved by the transcriber for future generations. The path to this behavior was not a straight line. When we last saw Lozovsky, in the late 1930s, he was worried about falling victim to the Terror— worried enough to write a story about it in which the first-person narrator is rescued by Stalin. The idea that a noble Stalin was unaware of malfeasance beneath him was common enough. It is hard to believe that Lozovsky, or anyone close to power, bought into this. But desperation has its own rules. For close to a decade, Lozovsky remained safe. His first job after the disbanding of the Profintern in 1937 was as head of the state literary publishing house Goslitizdat. This was a demotion, though not so great at is might seem. Literature was a particular concern to the state that saw it as a powerful tool and therefore in need of control. The importance meant that politics could intrude for any reason, not necessarily even ideological. When Lozovsky, for example, rejected a manuscript, its well-connected author had him summoned to a meeting that included not only the reigning luminaries of Soviet literature, but Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov and Stalin himself. Telling this story, even Shamberg is struck by its pettiness, a year and a month before the outbreak of war.29

29 Shamberg, Lozovskii, 447–450. At the time of the meeting, Lozovsky was no longer even head of Goslitizdat. The manuscript, by Aleksandr Avdeenko, was about workers in the

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The ensuing war was Lozovsky’s salvation: the government needed someone of his competence. Evacuated to Kuibyshev with the Central Committee, he worked on plans for a postwar world order that the Soviets could dominate.30 But his main job was to direct Sovinformburo, ostensibly under Shcherbakov, and then, in 1946, on his own. Throughout the war years, he handled propaganda directed abroad and decided where foreign correspondents could go and what they could see. That was the capacity in which he hired Ulanovskaya, a minor move that would prove fateful for her. He was also the official responsible for all five Antifascist Committees, including the Jewish one. That connection proved fateful for him. In January 1949, his world began to collapse. On January 13, Malenkov called him in to justify the Crimea project, now seen as a major act of treason. The transcript of that meeting shows Lozovsky on a tightrope. Why had he sent the letter about Crimea to the Central Committee? He downplays it: there was some stupidity going on there (byli gluposti). Did he agree with it? Lozovsky first says no, but then, when pressed, says probably.31 The next blow was directed at his family. His grandson Vladimir Shamberg had been married to Malenkov’s daughter—now, abruptly, Shamberg was informed that he was divorcing her. A day later, the same Malenkov told Lozovsky that he had been removed from the Central Committee and from the Party. “It’s an intrigue by that bastard Malenkov,” Lozovsky told Shamberg. “I wrote directly to Stalin . . .” A week later, as he was out walking with his younger daughter, a black car drove up and took him away.32 At the trial, in addition to accusations of nationalism and espionage, the prosecution brought up Lozovsky’s complicity in the Black Book and Crimean heresies. Here Lozovsky went with the prosecution, projecting himself backwards as a straightforward proponent of Bolshevik policy as it would stand in 1952. In other words, he claims to have had no particular interest in either resettling Jewish survivors in Crimea or documenting their experiences of genocide. To the contrary, he says that he viewed those undertakings as harmful to Soviet interests.

Donbass; it was rejected on grounds of pornography. The luminaries were A. N. Tolstoy, Fadeev, and Fedin. 30 Shamberg, Lozovskii, 526–527. 31 “Iz protokola doprosa G. M. Malen′kovym i M. F. Shkiriatovym S. A. Lozovskogo, 13 ianvaria 1949,” Dokumenty 20-ogo veka, http://doc20vek.ru/node/2191. 32 Shamberg, Lozovskii, 19–21.

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When the Black Book is brought up at the trial, it is presented as an example of Jewish nationalism. Lozovsky retells the book’s history with this in mind. He was, he says, misled by Mikhoels and Fefer into thinking that the book would be about Nazi atrocities outside the Soviet Union. He says he was opposed to publishing in the USSR because “the USSR has its own organizations”—an opaque formulation that probably mean somebody else, somewhere else, should have decided whether Holocaust testimonials were fit reading for a Soviet audience. He tells the court that he put together a commission to evaluate the Russianlanguage book. That commission’s report has been preserved. It made the entirely reasonable suggestion that survivors’ accounts rewritten by professional writers be published separately from documents. While it complained that “excessive attention is paid to Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and other collaborators,” it also called the materials “exceptionally useful” and “a true picture of Nazi atrocities” in occupied territories.”33 In a letter to Ehrenburg accompanying the commission’s report, Lozovsky wrote that the book presents “an astonishing picture” of Nazi atrocities.”34 Even at the trial Lozovsky offers some defense of the book. He disputes that nationalism is universally bad—in some cases, say, under colonialism, it is even a virtue. He reminds the court that the Black Book played a significant role at the Nuremberg Trials. But the Crimean project was, at this point, not worth defending. Called upon to explain his involvement, Lozovsky mirrors the ideological preferences of the prosecution. Fefer and Mikhoels, he says, came back from the United States all worked up over the idea of resettling Jews in Crimea. He, Lozovsky, was by contrast dispassionate. Editing their Crimea memo, he removed from it all wording about Jewish suffering. Jewish suffering was obvious, and also, the Jewish question had been solved definitively by the October Revolution. While Lozovsky doesn’t use the current buzz words, the contrast between Fefer and Mikhoels as nationalists and Lozovsky himself as a Bolshevik is transparent. Lozovsky’s alignment with the prosecution in these two matters did not prevent him from serving the trial as Public Enemy Number 2. Public Enemy Number 1 was Mikhoels, but Mikhoels’s dramatic utility was limited because he was dead. Lozovsky was still alive and conveniently present for both the prosecutors and the defendants. Not only was his name first in all

33 Redlikh and Kostyrchenko, Evreiskii antifashistskii komitet, 252. 34 Ibid., 255.

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court documents, he was trashed as a matter of course by virtually all defendants as the person actually responsible for their misdeeds. Defendants at the trial trashed each other routinely, not only because of stress or a desire to promote their own innocence at the expense of others, but also because of what they knew what those others had said, and signed, about them. Even Kvitko took part in this, calling Mikhoels a drunk and Hofshteyn a Zionist. But the blame Lozovsky game was paramount. “Lozovsky had an exceedingly good relationship with Mikhoels,” says Markish, adding “who sent Mikhoels to America?” Fefer calls him the “instigator” (vdokhnovitel′) behind the Jewish Antifascist Committee and nationalism.35 Lozovsky had several defenses against this onslaught. One, as we have just seen, was to stress that in matters relating to specific Jewish interests, his behavior had been dispassionate. Another was to place the blame further up along the chain of command, something that was similar to what others were doing to him but not quite, since Lozovsky’s targets were not under arrest and not Jewish. He was also correct: everything that he did had been approved by Shcherbakov and Molotov. Sending material to the United States? That was the whole point of the Jewish Antifascist Committee. Giving a banquet for the American “spy” Paul Novik? Suslov paid. Lozovsky’s oratorical skills, honed over a lifetime, were now deployed in defense of his own honor, if nothing more. Were people characterizing him as an evil instigator? A logical absurdity: “Let’s assume I’m a hidden enemy . . . let’s assume that sending materials about Nazi crimes against the Jews constitutes nationalism. So tell me: were the Nuremberg Trials under my jurisdiction?”36 Like Kvitko, Lozovsky credited the Party with raising him from nothing. In all other ways, the use to which he puts his Party background could not be more different. Kvitko, as we saw, stresses his emotional ties, and finds himself, accused by that same Party, in a kind of paralysis. But Lozovsky, responding to similar accusations of disloyalty, pulls rank on the prosecution. He, was a compatriot of Lenin (they were not); he polemicized with Lenin (they would not have dared); he refers to Lenin familiarly as “Ilyich.” His stature in the Party leads him not to acquiesce but to resist. “The Party raised me high,” he says. “If my testimony doesn’t prove to the court that everything collected in all fortytwo volumes and in the criminal indictment, everything that has been said

35 Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 29 and 32. 36 Ibid., 165.

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about me there, is at an astronomical distance from reality, then I deserve not one death penalty but six of them.”37 Lozovsky eclipses Kvitko in one more area: the taboo subject of pretrial coercion. At several points early in his testimony, he says that he had signed everything on purpose. In fact, he had lied on purpose so as to prove at trial that the testimony exacted from him was logically absurd. Toward the end of his account he becomes explicit. He signed because of . . . eight nighttime interrogations, during which Colonel Komarov kept insisting to me that Jews were a despicable, dirty nation . . . that the entire Party opposition consisted of Jews, that all Jews over the entire Soviet Union were rising up against Soviet power, that Jews want to exterminate all Russians . . . Then he said that they would shove me into the punishment cell, that they would beat me with rubber truncheons so that afterwards I wouldn’t be able to sit down. Then I decided better death than torture like that, but he told me that they wouldn’t let me die quickly, I would die slowly. “So you were scared?” responds Presiding Judge Cheptsov.38 The subject of torture is taken up by the very next defendant, Dr. Boris Shimeliovich, the former director of Moscow’s elite Botkin Hospital. The fearless Shimeliovich then eclipses Lozovsky, and does so pointedly. He didn’t like Lozovsky, who had discarded Shimeliovich’s letter in support of Crimea because it was too emotional. Shimeliovich signed only one transcript forced on him by investigators, and had no recollection of doing that. Otherwise, he says If Lozovsky was merely threatened, then I must, unfortunately, at the beginning of this examination declare, that in the course of one month ( January to February 1949), for example, with some margin of error, I received from 80 to 100 blows over a twenty-four- hour period, in total, I think, around two thousand blows. I was repeatedly subject to physical punishment, but you will be unlikely to find an investigator who will say that under these circumstances I changed my evidence.39

37 Ibid., 141. 38 Ibid., 194. 39 Ibid., 198.

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These displays of courage are remarkable in the context of a Stalinist trial. Perhaps even more remarkable are instances of moral behavior that do not relate to anybody’s self-defense and serve no purpose beyond clearing one’s conscience before death. All of the defendants except Shimeliovich and possibly Shtern slandered others during the investigation, and some continued to do so during the trial. But that was not the only behavior they displayed. When Kvitko, for example, was prompted to talk about the anti-Soviet nationalist role played by Yuzefovich, Lozovsky’s assistant, he doesn’t take the bait. He replies that he doesn’t know anything bad about Yuzefovich and alludes instead to his own shame. Yuzefovich behaves similarly when asked to testify against Lozovsky. “I was on friendly terms with Lozovsky for many years,” he says, “I don’t deny it.” I wasn’t ashamed of that and I’m not ashamed of that now. I consider Lozovsky an honorable man. I don’t believe now and in the world to come I still won’t believe that he is a criminal . . . to believe that would be the same as saying that I set out to commit crimes, and that would be the same as if I went to commit a crime, I would have to be suicidal, become the murderer of my own little daughter . . .40 The little daughter he mentions was a Holocaust orphan he had adopted. Among the apologizers is Lozovsky. The person he apologizes to at the very beginning of his testimony—meaning it was a speech he had prepared in advance—is Shtern: In the evidence that I signed (and later I will say why I signed) it is written that I knew about Lina Shtern’s bourgeois views. That is not true. I slandered her and now I apologize to her. I can’t look her in the eye because of this forced slander. I didn’t know her at all. I knew that there was somebody called Lina Shtern, a member of the Academy of Sciences, but I didn’t know her personally.

40 Ibid., 134–135. The last paragraph of Yusefovich’s testimony is another apology to Lozovsky in which he castigates himself for behaving in a cowardly way during the investigation (ibid., 141); at a closed session, he says that he was beaten (ibid., 235).

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. . . And what I said at the investigation that I knew her bourgeois views, that was slander.41 Just as unexpected, and just as much a part of this public rethinking, was the way a few defendants look back on their lives and redefine them in a way that has nothing to do with a classic Soviet narrative. By no means does everybody engage in this. Yet among those who do, the reference is often to Judaism. Up to this point in the book, Judaism has played almost no role—of all our characters, the only one who paid attention was Medvedeva, and her focus was primarily on class antagonisms in and around the synagogue. It goes without saying that the defendants at the trial were all atheists and that the court’s take on religion was preemptively hostile. When Kvitko, for example, exclaims “thank God” (that he returned to the Soviet Union in 1925), Cheptsov snaps back “So you believe in God?”42 Yet in the course of the trial, Fefer defends the Bible: “not only religious people read it.” Hofshteyn explains that, despite what the judge thinks, mourners at a memorial service are not asking God for anything; an editor, Vatenberg-Ostrovskaya, makes sure that the court knows that her father was not a “synagogue employee” but a ritual slaughterer, while for the purposes of the court it clearly made no difference. Shimeliovich also corrects the record about his father’s job in the synagogue and tells the court why: “It says there that I don’t know, don’t remember what he did there. I remember perfectly and don’t want to dishonor the memory of my parents, since from what I signed it seems like I am a son ‘who doesn’t remember.’ I don’t want to be a ‘son who doesn’t remember’ in front of my parents, and I insist that my father was a synagogue sexton.”43

41 Ibid., 151. 42 Ibid., 97. 43 Ibid., 200. Shimeliovich uses the word sluzhka; his father was probably a gabbai. In “The Judgments of David Bergelson,” East European Jewish Affairs 48, no. 2 (2018): 180–181, Harriet Murav singles out an instance at the trial when Bergelson gets lost in a memory of Tisha b’Av, the holiday mourning the destruction of the Temple. At the trial, he uses the memory to explain his nationalism, but it also, as Murav points out, unites his own personal disaster with the Jewish national one. Anna Schur (“Jewish in Form, Socialist in Content. Jewish Identity and Soviet Subjectivity at the Trial of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee,” East European Jewish Affairs 48, no. 2 [2018]: 162–163) writes evocatively of the lyricism of Bergelson’s words, and concludes that he is abandoning a Marxist viewpoint for a religious one that embraces “the inevitability of suffering and destruction” as well as eventual redemption. These persuasive arguments leave out one thing—like all the defendants who push back, Bergelson doesn’t sustain his thinking. Both at the beginning and the conclusion of his meditation on Tisha b’Av he refers to his childhood (past and overcome)

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Lozovsky is one of this group. In the “Origins” chapter, we noted his declaration, at trial, that his father knew Talmud well, wrote poetry in Hebrew, and himself taught Lozovsky Hebrew and prayers. In the context of the trial, that statement was defiant. Nobody compelled it. Unlike his ideological self-defense with respect to Crimea and the Black Book, talking respectfully about his father and admitting a connection with Jewish texts did not help Lozovsky’s case. And it had a continuation, clearly prepared in advance—it comes at the very beginning of his testimony: My last name, as you know, is Dridzo. It’s a name that has no translation in any language. When we asked Father what it meant, he said that according to a legend, transmitted from fathers to sons, one of our remote ancestors was among the 800 thousand Jews who fled Spain when, in 1492, the Grand Inquisitor Tomas de Torquemada, issued a decree regarding the forced conversion of Jews to Catholicism; if they refused, they had two months to leave Spain.44 With this statement, Lozovsky goes back in time, and redefines himself beyond the reach of the judges. As his ancestors were defiant, so too will he be defiant. Briefly but intentionally, he reframes the trial and even his incipient death as episodes in a larger history in which his account of what happened will prevail.

Shtern: “I always tell the truth” Lina Shtern had the distinction of being a successive target in two different fields—first she was attacked as a scientist and then arrested as a member of the Jewish Antifascist Committee. Her resistance in both instances was monumental. Like Lozovsky, she retained her loyalty to the Party and the state, redefining what Party principles entailed with the obvious implication that the court was violating them.

immersion in nationalism (a crime). His statement likely does reflect his deep thinking, but his framing is also significant. When he realizes what he’s said, he catches himself and emphasizes the thought crime and his distance from it. 44 Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 141–142.

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We will never know whether she saw her resistance as a strategy to influence the court or whether she pursued it as a kind of moral imperative no matter what the outcome. We do know that whatever she did, it had no effect. Like all the defendants, she had become an actor in a judicial theater. The first piece of theater ended in her demotion as a scientist (but not completely so: the Soviet Academy of Sciences was, in this case, incorrupt, and Shtern’s status as a Full Member was not taken from her). The second ended in her salvation. When everybody else was executed, she was exiled. What accounted for that is a matter of speculation. As the war ended, there had been signs of hope. Shtern had been involved in medical research using streptomycin, a potent new antibiotic discovered during the war by an American of Russian-Jewish origin, Selman Waksman.45 The story of streptomycin in the Soviet Union makes sense in the overall picture of what happened to Shtern. In the early postwar years, the drug was very difficult to obtain, and its presence in Moscow reveals quite a bit of contact between the Soviet and Western scientific elites. Knowledge about the drug seems to have been widespread within in the higher reaches of the Soviet scientific establishment. The physicist Veniamin Tsukerman, whose daughter had contracted then-fatal tubercular meningitis, managed to obtain a supply first through academic friends and ultimately through Waksman himself, who visited the USSR on several occasions in those years. Tsukerman then turned to Shtern, who treated his daughter using her (in fact, unnecessary) procedure of injecting the antibiotic into the cranium. The child lived, though she lost her hearing.46 Shtern had her own sources for streptomycin, also by necessity American. The United States had a thriving black market in the drug that her brother Bruno tapped into.47 How Bruno got the drug to Lina is something

45 Waksman’s relocation was permanent, though he retained warm feelings for the Soviet Union and visited in his capacity as a research scientist in 1946. (The Rutgers University Archives holds correspondence about this trip: box 16, folder 3: Waksman’s Trip to Russia in 1946, 1945–1946.) While Waksman received the Nobel Prize for his work, a researcher in his lab, Albert Schatz, is widely held to be equally or more responsible, and got no credit. 46 This story is told in many places, including Vein, “Science and Fate,” 202, and Boris Al’tshuler, “Tri druga,” https://berkovich-zametki.com/2006/Zametki/Nomer11/Altschuler1.htm. Both repeat the false claim that the US Congress blocked the export of the drug. Altshuler writes that Tsukerman also consulted, by phone, with doctors from the Mayo Clinic (who were in fact conducting clinical trials for Waxman)—in 1946, elite physicists had a lot of privileges. 47 On the black market and the reasons for it see Alan Yorke Yoshioka, “Streptomycin, 1946: British Central Administration of Supplies of a New Drug of American Origin with Special

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nobody discusses, though he seems to have bankrupted himself in the process. Contacts between the Shterns were permitted right up to Lina’s arrest, probably because outside of Waksman himself, there was no other way for the Soviet Union to get streptomycin; when the time came, these same contacts proved useful in establishing a charge of espionage. The streptomycin story has one more political angle. The morally uncompromising Shtern would distribute her supplies only to hospitals and research groups. At one point Svetlana Allilueva, Stalin’s daughter, appealed to her on behalf of a friend. Shtern turned her down. The first public attack on Shtern was an article published in the summer of 1947 in a subpar journal called Medical Worker (Meditsinskii rabotnik). The author had a useful Jewish surname, Bernshtein—with one Jew attacking another one, charges of antisemitism were off the table. The fact that Bernshtein’s praise of Shtern had been effusive when circumstances called for that (when asking for her help earlier, he cited her “wonderful life in productive service to science”) leaves little doubt that the attack was orchestrated.48 The subject of the attack was Shtern’s research into the blood-brain barrier. A year later—record time, according to Shtern’s colleagues—the prestigious publisher Medgiz came out with a small book entitled Against Reductionism and Reductionists (Protiv uproshchenchestva i uproshchentsev). The author was once again Bernshtein, and the reductionist was Shtern. Shortly before the book’s appearance, the head of the Academy of Sciences, Sergei Vavilov, had told Shtern that, in line with administrative reorganization, her lab, with all its equipment, was being taken from her and given to another researcher in another institution and in another city.49 Despite the loss of her working laboratory (she had been given another one, with a smaller staff, and without her equipment), Shtern was still a full member of the Academy of Sciences. So when VASKhNIL, the All-Union Agricultural Academy, invited her to speak at an ideologically menacing conference directed at medical researchers, she had to agree. At this point, her personal vulnerability was glaringly obvious. VASKhNIL was the epicenter of the fight against genetics. That campaign against science, the first of its kind in a country whose ideological mission had Reference to Clinical Trials in Tuberculosis” (PhD thesis, University of London, London, 1998), 12, 51, https://www.jameslindlibrary.org/articles/streptomycin-1946-british-central-administration-of-supplies-of-a-new-drug-of-american-origin-with-special-referenceto-clinical-trials-in-tuberculosis-philosophy-thesis-university-of-london/. 48 The quote is from Malkin, “Trudnye gody,” 165. 49 Rapoport, Na rubezhe, 248.

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been tied up with engineering and science, had begun before the war. An agricultural researcher named Trofim Lysenko had claimed that spring wheat could be conditioned to grow in the winter; this acquired trait would be passed on to future generations because counter to Mendel and later geneticists, acquired traits were heritable. Actual methods of manipulating genes were of course decades into the future. While not everyone in the Politburo bought into this, Stalin did. The advantages to Soviet agriculture were obvious. But in the world of science, Lysenko had a formidable opponent: Nikolai Vavilov, a biologist who had established a repository of seeds painstakingly collected from wild varieties around the world. Vavilov was arrested and died in prison, of starvation, in 1941. Two parts of his story have relevance to Shtern’s. First, the director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the physicist Sergei Vavilov, who told Shtern that her laboratory was being reassigned, was Nikolai’s brother. Second, the remarkable Soviet heroism that we have encountered from time to time is evident here too. During the siege of Leningrad, the staffers at the building that housed Nikolai Vavilov’s collection were starving along with the rest of the city. They did not touch the seeds. The VASKhNIL conference began on September 10, 1948 with a programmatic speech by Lysenko. He described his theory of biology as “materialist,” a designation that made it sound like a branch of Marxism-Leninism. Opponents, geneticists, were branded as non-Marxist “idealists.” He also presented his approach as Pavlovian (Shtern and the revered behaviorist Ivan Pavlov were known to be on bad terms). Shtern’s opening response was cautious and clever: she adopted Lysenko’s presumed goal of intervening in nature without touching his theory. Medicine, she said, is itself an intervention in nature. She cited the use of streptomycin against tubercular meningitis.50 At that point, something happened. Shtern went off script, launching into an impassioned criticism of Bernshtein’s book about her, which was not on the agenda at all. The chairman declared that her time was up. But before shooing her off the podium, he had one more ace in his pocket: written questions that supposedly, or maybe actually, came from the audience. Their content was precisely targeted at Shtern’s main vulnerabilities. The first was, “Academician Shtern, what is your present position regarding your earlier support of the Mendelists?” The second inquired about her attitude toward Pavlov.

50 Details about her speech come from Malkin, “Trudnye gody,” 164–165.

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Responding to this last provocation, Shtern gave in when necessary. She reminded the audience that she had known Pavlov before she came to the USSR; she had lectured about him in Geneva; her work could be considered a continuation of his. As for genetics, “I do not belong to that group of people who, the moment something happens, repent immediately and say, it wasn’t me, I wasn’t anywhere near there.”51 The one thing she does repent, more than a little slyly, is her ignorance. “Unfortunately, I must confess that I am not particularly expert in the field of genetics. That is my sin. Only recently did I learn something or other.” A faux-naïve plea of ignorance was a ploy she would reuse at the trial. Yet here, as there, she punctuated the contrition with an audacious swipe at Lysenko’s premise. “I never suspected,” she said, “that idealistic theory was the foundation for formal genetics.52 The VASKhNIL conference was a schooling that showed Shtern how to calibrate defiance and compromise. But it was not the only such schooling. A second postwar persecution, beginning a little earlier and concluding later, similarly influenced Shtern’s stance under arrest. What became known as the KR affair involved Shtern only as an observer. The object was a cure for cancer. Two biologists, Nina Klyueva and Grigory Roskin, had the idea of using the toxin of a parasite, Trypsanoma cruzi, to shrink tumors: at the time, the use of a biological agent was new and Soviet publicity ensured that it got international attention. The preparation, named KR after its developers, worked in mice. To assess its efficacy in humans, Klyueva and Roskin turned to Yakov Rapoport, a pathologist close to Shtern whom we will meet again shortly. Rapoport found that it did not work. The failure had political implications: Stalin summoned Rapoport to complain.53 Rapoport did not give in, but it didn’t matter. KR was doomed not by efficacy, but by a battle between two Soviet imperatives of the immediate postwar period: on the one hand, boast about Soviet achievement, and on the other, don’t collaborate with foreign enemies. Acting on the first imperative, the Soviets approved the publication of Klyueva and Roskin’s research in the United States, resulting in an article by Roskin in the journal Cancer Research, and almost immediately thereafter, the

51 Ibid., 165. In Russian: ne ia, i loshad′ ne moia. 52 Ibid., 166. 53 Natalya Rapoport, Stalin and Medicine: Untold Stories (Hackensack, NJ and London: World Scientific Publishing, 2020), 135–136.

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New York Times.54 In Moscow, US Ambassador Walter Bedell Smith met with Klyueva and Roskin and arranged for visas for scientists who would bring their book-length manuscript to the United States, together with the fragile preparation itself. At this point, the second imperative kicked in. Stalin, whose faith in the KR vaccine had survived Rapoport’s science, decided that disseminating it to ideological enemies was treasonable.55 On November 26, 1946, a cable was sent to New York forbidding the transfer, but it arrived a day late.56 A decision was made to blame Klyueva and Roskin. Ambassador Smith, who watched the affair unfold, noted in his 1950 memoir an additional complicating factor: Roskin was Jewish. Kowtowing to foreigners (preklonenie pered zapadom) was part and parcel of the “anticosmopolitan campaign” then targeting Jews.57 But you didn’t have to be Jewish. In February 1947, the distinguished Russian physician who had delivered the manuscript and the preparation to New York—Vasily Parin, Secretary of Academy of Medical Sciences—was arrested as a spy. In June that same year, a three-day “trial of honor” (sud chesti) held Klyueva and Roskin up for public shaming. The pair were called “antipatriots who sold out the motherland.”58 To bring the lesson to a wider public, Stalin personally called on writers to adapt it in literary form. Konstantin Simonov, editor of the literary journal New World (Novyi mir) and the same man who had replaced Grossman at Treblinka, responded with a play called Alien Shadow (Chuzhaia ten′, 1949). His less famous colleague Aleksandr Shtein worked even faster. Shtein’s play The Law of Honor (Zakon chesti, 1948) was produced in time

54 Nikolai Krementsov, “In the Shadow of the Bomb: U.S.-Soviet Biomedical Relations in the Early Cold War, 1944–48,” Journal of Cold War Studies 9, no. 4 (2007): 49; Drew Middleton, “Cancer ‘Solvent’ Tested in Russia . . . Experimenters Claim High Percentage of Success in Studies with Animals,” New York Times, October 11, 1946, 6; Waldemar Kaempffert, “From Russia Come Reports of Success with KR Treatment ‘Dissolving’ Cancer,” New York Times, July 6, 1947, 81. The 1947 article is particularly skeptical, noting that the claims could not be validated without testing in the United States. 55 Konstantin Simonov, Glazami cheloveka moego pokoleniia (Moscow: Novosti, 1988), 112–113. 56 Krementsov, “In the Shadow of the Bomb,” 53. 57 Smith’s memoir is impressively attentive to antisemitism, given that the overt campaign against Jews began after his tenure was over (he was in the USSR in 1946–1948). The connection of scientists with “cosmopolitans”—a code word for Jews—and obeisance toward the West is noted by Konstantin Simonov, writing in 1988 (Simonov, Glazami cheloveka moego pokoleniia, 113). 58 Gennadii Kostyrchenko, V plenu u krasnogo faraona (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1994), 75.

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for Ambassador Smith to note both its close adherence to the Klyueva-Roskin affair and its virulent anti-Americanism.59 But that was only the public-facing part of the story. Behind the scenes, neither Klyueva nor Roskin was touched. Their lab was given a new building and extensive funding. Alongside the 1,500 medical professionals at the trial of honor was Lina Shtern. Here again, her iconoclasm came into play: according to Kostyrchenko, Shtern was one of a small group who gave public support to Klyueva and Roskin. Later, under interrogation, she called the trial “terrible,” or “terrifying” (strashnoe delo). It served her, she said, as a warning to cut off all contacts with foreigners.60 But she was also made aware of the political significance of oncology, a field she had not previously worked in. In prison and after, she would act to leverage this. Shtern was arrested on January 28, 1949. The immediate cause was her participation in the Jewish Antifascist Committee, though, as with everyone else, her ties with foreigners were inextricably linked to accusations of Jewish “nationalism.” Because Shtern survived and two people she confided in left memoirs, we have some idea about her perception of what happened. Details about her interrogations come from a memoir written by her longtime secretary Olimpiada Skvortsova.61 Skvortsova was Shtern’s close friend as well as assistant, and the only person who answered Shtern’s somewhat imperious call to come to Jambyl, Kazakhstan, where she had been exiled, and look after her.62 Through Yakov Rapoport, who spoke with Shtern’s housekeeper Katya, we know that the arrest took place at Shtern’s apartment late at night. Shtern was calm, and may have initially believed that she was in fact being summoned to a conversation with Lavrenty Beria (no longer head of the secret police, but a formidable person nonetheless). On her way out, she was not even allowed to go to the bathroom on her own; a policewoman joined her.63 She was, however, allowed to take her jewelry. In one of the manifestations of

59 Walter Bedell Smith, My Three Years in Moscow (Philadelphia, PA and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1950), 173–174. 60 Kostyrchenko, V plenu, 75. 61 The memoirs are in Malkin’s private archive. They are not publically available, so all information comes through Malkin, “Trudnye gody,” or Malkin and Rosin, Lina Solomonovna Shtern. 62 Rapoport tells this story, noting the panic the request engendered among Shtern’s colleagues in this period of high Stalinism. He adds that Shtern’s advanced age and traumatic suffering have to be taken into account. Rapoport, Na rubezhe, 253. The name of the city is now Taraz. 63 Ibid., 252.

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procedural punctiliousness that was possible in the Soviet system, that jewelry was returned to her when she was released. She lived off it in Jambyl.64 Skvortsova (through Shtern’s former student Boris Malkin) and Rapoport both give details of Shtern’s life in prison. At times, she had interrogations for twenty-four hours straight. Sometimes she had cellmates who made her wash the floors and carry out the toilet pail. At interrogation, she was called an old whore and accused of prostituting herself while at conferences abroad. Apparently, Shtern, who was in her seventies, responded that, at her age, she would be the one who had to pay for sex—a retort that sounds just like her, and would be something to remember proudly. She was also sent to the punishment cells of Lefortovo. There she started hallucinating: a voice from childhood called to her “Lina, you will be all right, sit down.” When she tried to sit down, she was told that sitting was forbidden in daytime.65 Lozovsky and Kvitko had both experienced political crises before the trial. Kvitko’s dated back to 1925, and taught him conformity. Lozovsky’s crisis preceded the trial, and he conformed within reason—not abjectly—but without effect. By the time of the trial he understood that he faced execution, and he reacted by reverting to an earlier polemical version of himself. Shtern’s prior experience was recent, including both the VASKhNIL debacle and her observation of what happened to Klyueva and Roskin. Though the charges against her at the trial were completely different, she knew what she was up against and used her experience to calibrate a response. Her use of the Klyueva-Roskin affair is circumstantial but nonetheless striking. Here Shtern shows herself to be far from naïve: from the beginning of her incarceration, she pleaded for a pen and paper, to lay out her methodology for curing cancer. In 1951, just before the trial commenced, she finally got a pen and installments of writing paper. The historian Maria Maiofis has studied the resulting 137-page text, noting that it underwent three redactions, all by Shtern. The first, completed in January 1952, embodied the main ideas, written to be understood by a layman—say, somebody in the government. A second directly addressed Viktor Abakumov, head of the security services. Unknown to Shtern, Abakumov was already in a cell right near her, unable to act on his promise to give the world a cure for cancer made in the Soviet Union. Shtern’s third revision, written in exile or on

64 Malkin, “Trudnye gody,” 175. Ulanovskaya tells a similar story about money sent to her but not given to her while she was in the Lubyanka that was made available to her in the camp. Ibid., 98. 65 Rapoport, Na rubezhe, 255. Malkin, “Trudnye gody,” 173.

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the train back to Moscow, focuses on her personal importance to Soviet science. Maiofis stresses that all versions of Shtern’s proposal were predicated on her privileged knowledge that KR had not panned out. Shtern had an easy route for inside information: Rapoport’s wife worked in her lab. A different path for Shtern’s behavior at the trial came from her experience at the VASKhNIL conference and Bernshtein book event. While not trials, both were scripted public performances run by a prosecution. The public was supposed to share the enthusiasms of the prosecution—hence the questions from the audience. The Jewish Antifascist Committee trial was similarly run by prosecutors. That trial was of course secret, but there was a public of sorts present: three judges, the transcriber, and all the defendants. The defendants were supposed to share the enthusiasms of the prosecution, and to some extent they did that. But in all three instances—the VASKhNIL event, the book event, and the trial—the scripting proved imperfect. The prewar Terror trials had gone off as planned. The postwar events did not quite do that. Rapoport, who was present at the VASKhNIL conference, gives some examples of small but striking rebellion. The hall, he says, was full of young people who sympathized with Shtern. Shtern’s defenders at the podium—there were some, not many—were applauded; detractors were subjected to stomping feet and noise. Two of Shtern’s graduate students accepted expulsion as the price for their refusal to condemn her. Finally, the conference did not produce a resolution condemning Shtern: The Moscow Society of Physiologists, Biochemists, and Pharmacologists was somehow unable to put together a quorum.66 Courage, in this postwar period, was not the rule, but it was not impossible. The Antifascist Committee trial was also punctuated by defendants going off script. We have already seen Lozovsky and Shimiliovich play that role, in speeches that have all the marks of careful preparation. But other deviations look spontaneous. The best and most unlikely example comes from the poetinformant Fefer, the man Lozovsky called “a witness for the prosecution.”67 Offering a comment at the trial—defendants were encouraged to do that, probably in the hope that they would incriminate each other—Fefer opens with sentence loaded with prosecutorial vocabulary. “Nationalist moods,” he says, “are by definition anti-Soviet moods.” He accuses fellow defendants Bergelson and Hofshteyn of writing like nationalists, while he, to the contrary, gave his first

66 Rapoport says he was dissuaded from speaking in Shtern’s defense, possibly in an attempt to protect him. Rapoport, Na rubezhe, 251–252. 67 Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 153.

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cycle of poems the title “Russia.” Then he loses it. Talking about the closing of Yiddish institutions in the late ’30s—an antinationalist measure if there ever was one—Fefer forgets which point of view he is supposed to uphold. He says, “I felt great envy when there was a ten-day celebration of Uzbek art,” and then “with all my strength I tried to preserve Jewish institutions.”68 Fefer was not expected to be outspoken. Shtern, on the contrary, was a known hazard, likely the reason she was made to testify last. The prosecution tried to use some of Shtern’s well-known deviations against her: her concern for the safety of disarmed Jewish partisans in Belarus, her skepticism that there actually had been a wartime pogrom in England. A couple of her comic retorts from the past decade were presented at trial as evidence of treasonous thinking. Asked to name her motherland—a sacred phrase, a declaration of profoundest loyalties, obviously “Russia”—Shtern had said “the Baltics.” At a Jewish Antifascist Committee meeting, when someone proposed publishing an article entitled “What Soviet Power Gave the Jews,” Shtern suggested a companion piece. Its title was completely blasphemous: “What the Jews Gave Soviet Power.”69 Shtern’s sometimes subtle deviance at trial began with her opening statement. The trial was supposed to be a recitation of accusations and guilt. It was not supposed to present evidence to be sifted through, by anybody. Shtern’s opening statement defied that plan. During the course of the trial, she says, she changed her mind. Initially she had pleaded guilty to some charges. But now, “sitting here at court, I have come to the conclusion that I can’t accuse myself because even if I had looked closely at everything I wouldn’t have understood the whole criminality of it and therefore nothing would have changed. I also think that these volumes [the forty-two volumes of defendants’ testimony] contain a lot more than actually happened.”70 In other words, either there were crimes but she was too incompetent to understand them, or, the far more likely possibility, there were no crimes at all and the testimony was coerced. Further into the trial, she goes after conditions of interrogation: “It sometimes happened that I felt things were going badly and I might lose my mind.”71 She calls Lefortovo “the gates of hell” and says to Cheptsov, “you should go over

68 Ibid., 165. See Nakhimovsky, “Assessing Life in the Face of Death,” 192–193, for further discussion of this. 69 Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 314. 70 Ibid., 311. 71 Ibid., 332.

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there and see.”72 Responding to the very basis of the trial, she says that being a Jew—and she’s not even sure she is one-- “is taken as a crime. Why is it shameful to talk about Jews?”73 Shtern pursued a number of defense strategies. One was to distinguish her work as a laboratory scientist, where she knew what she was doing, from her activities for the Party. At the VASKhNIL conference, she had claimed ignorance with respect to genetics. Now that claim is applied to politics. Should she have been more vigilant? Vigilance (bditel′nost′) was a core Party value, but deviating from it was not quite a mortal sin. Another defense was foreignness. Trying to explain away her quip about Jews and Soviet power, she says that she has “a little bit of the French manner,” and at another point, “Sometimes I act as though I were in Geneva.”74 Shtern wasn’t the only defendant who had spent considerable time abroad. Two other defendants, Ilya Vatenberg and his wife Chaika VatenbergOstrovskaya, had been educated in New York City, Vatenberg, then Watenberg, at Columbia Law School. The Vatenbergs did not try to defend themselves by saying they were Americans: foreign ties were one step away from the espionage everyone was already accused of. Shtern, by contrast, not only brings up her foreignness—it was hard not to; she spoke Russian with an accent—but flaunts it. She may have derived strength from being different. “I am not like other women,” she says. Her singularity and her reputation seems to have spooked the court. Cheptsov at one point turns to her and tells her to stop lecturing him.75 Like Lozovsky and Shimeliovich, Shtern wanted to use her time to talk about her background. She wrote out an autobiography and got the court to let her read it out: it took an hour and a half, an entire morning session.76 Lozovsky and Shimeliovich used their backgrounds to establish an identity outside of the court and prior to Stalinist Russia. What did Shtern do? The editor of the testimony did not find her speech interesting enough to include, and now it is in the FSB archives, available only to family members. Even if it was nothing more than a long recitation of her published articles, Cheptsov, forced to listen to something he could neither understand nor control—indeed, a kind of lecture—would have found that very much off-script.

72 73 74 75 76

Ibid., 321. Ibid., 314 and 320. Ibid., 315 and 362. Ibid., 314. Ibid., 314 and 332.

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Not everything that Shtern said at trial was unorthodox: like every other defendant, she emphasized her loyalty. She reminds the court that she celebrates her immigration as a second birthday and declares, contrary to a lot of evidence, that she never experienced even the slightest discrimination on the part of the USSR. But taken as a whole, in full cognizance of moral luck and her, or anyone’s, limited vision, her behavior was remarkable. After her return to Moscow, Shtern spent a few days with Rapoport and his family. In his memoirs, Rapoport takes care to say that Shtern’s recollections were brief and rambling; she was obviously traumatized. Though he could not have known this, because the trial transcripts appeared only in 1994, what he wrote down was correct, sometimes word-for-word. Shtern remembered her quip about the Baltics. She remembered Lozovsky’s characterization of Fefer as “the witness for the prosecution.” And she remembered Lozovsky’s apology to her—a moral gesture that, as he had hoped, outlived the trial and its terrible consequences.77

Grossman: Scientists and Old Bolsheviks Grossman’s reporting from Stalingrad and other battle zones had made him into a national figure. When he returned home, he wrote a novel that he meant to encompass the Soviet experience in war and before the war, within commonly accepted ideological bounds. He called it “Stalingrad.” The book is a standard social-realist historical epic that focuses on one family and radiates outward. It was good enough to be nominated for a Stalin prize, but encompassed a political time bomb: Grossman had intertwined that family with a handful of Jewish characters. That a daughter of that family, which had roots in the Bolshevik elite, would be married to a Jewish physicist, from the intellectual elite, was a fact of life outside literature. Elites married elites. Lozovsky intermarried; Lozovsky’s children intermarried; Lidia Chukovskaya’s husband was a Jewish physicist. Grossman’s vision was, in other words, realism but not socialist realism, an ideological category. This deviation made the novel’s path rocky. On its first encounter with ideological gatekeepers, the book’s title was changed from “Stalingrad” to “For the Just Cause” because the future Nobel

77 Rapoport’s account of what she said is in Rapoport, Na rubezhe, 253–255. The deviations from the transcript are proofs of the veracity of his notes. Shtern does not recall saying her homeland was “the Baltics”—she remembers saying “Riga” (same idea). Rapoport doesn’t believe that she was actually on trial, but nevertheless gives her account of it.

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Prize winner Mikhail Sholokhov questioned the right of someone named Grossman to represent the Soviet people. Grossman was advised to make the Jewish characters less prominent and to give his Jewish physicist a Russian boss. (He complied but, in his no-holds-barred sequel, he made the new character a maverick who refused to work on the atom bomb.) The second encounter started well: the book was nominated for a Stalin prize. Then it was taken off the list, and became the object of a blistering editorial in Pravda. The vilification of Grossman’s book, which was all about its infection by Jewish characters, takes up one-third of Pravda’s back page: a huge amount of journalistic real estate in a newspaper that didn’t have many pages. Grossman anticipated arrest. While he was not arrested, the experienced changed him. His sequel, Life and Fate, would encompass the Soviet experience in war and before the war with few ideological bounds, all of these of Grossman’s own making. The Jewish characters remained. The Holocaust, as we have seen, became a part of the book along with Soviet wartime antisemitism. Grossman then made a tactical decision that nobody has been able to explain: instead of giving the manuscript to a comparatively liberal publication, he sent it to a hardliner. The manuscript was turned over to the police. Grossman’s apartment was raided and all known copies confiscated and made to disappear (two well-hidden ones remained). He was told that the novel would not see the light of day for a hundred years. Grossman lived long enough to understand what had happened to his colleagues on the Jewish Antifascist Committee. They do not become characters in Life and Fate, but they are memorialized there. In the chapter that directly precedes the description of the battle of Stalingrad, he warns that the victory about to happen would seal the fates of many kinds of people, some for good (the inmates of Auschwitz and Buchenwald) and some for ill (Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars, and Chechens, among many others). The only individuals he calls out by name, in a single sentence, are Professor Vovsi—Mikhoels’s cousin, whom we will meet in the next chapter—and Grossman’s own martyred colleagues: Mikhoels, Zuskin, Bergelson, Markish, Fefer, Kvitko, and Nusinov. He writes—he could only have guessed, at that point—that they were executed. He was mistaken about Nusinov, a literature professor who died in prison before the trial. The only other figure from the trial who appears is Lozovsky, in a different context and much less sympathetically. His execution is unmentioned. Lozovsky’s dilemma at the trial, the dimensions of which Grossman could not have known, is mirrored in his novel in the lives and fates of three fictional Old Bolsheviks. (Grossman’s novel is structured through recurring patterns

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of three.) Like Lozovsky, the three fictional characters exhibit the classic Old Bolshevik traits of ideological conviction and uncompromising strength of will. We have seen that set of characteristics celebrated by Kvitko in his narrative poems “In the Red Storm” and “Years of Youth,” and by Grossman himself in the story “Four Days.” Now, Grossman takes the trope somewhere else entirely. Orchestrating the lives of his fictional heroes, Grossman asks what happens when their convictions are challenged. What happens when he places them in the Gulag (Abarchuk), in a Nazi labor camp (Mostovskoy) or under interrogation in the Lubyanka (Krymov). Can a man who was a Bolshevik for forty years understand what his dream of social justice led to? Will he follow an order even if it is unjust? Will he die before he understands himself? Grossman’s fictional Old Bolsheviks do not do what Lozovsky does—maintain his beliefs and renounce his accusers. Powerful as it was, Grossman’s imagination simply didn’t take him there. Still, like Lozovsky, the three fictional heroes are tested in the face of death. The first Old Bolshevik to face that test is Abarchuk. In his Gulag barrack, he has witnessed a murder. The perpetrator is a criminal and therefore doubly dangerous—criminals were part of the informal power structure of the Gulag, a situation that Grossman knew from his conversations with people who had been freed after the death of Stalin. The camp operations officer asks Abarchuk to name the murderer, appealing to his duty as a Party member—a status the camp has removed from him until that moment. Abarchuk is a Bolshevik; he wants to be seen as a Bolshevik; and he tells the truth. He refuses the offer of a transfer to another camp. That night he is murdered. Before this feat of willpower, Abarchuk had a chance to rethink his ideology, but he did not take it. The second Old Bolshevik, Mostovskoy, is a German prisoner of war in a Nazi camp. He is confronted by representatives of two different moral philosophies. The first is a fellow prisoner, a Russian who is something of a Christian (Grossman gives him the name Ikonnikov) and something of a pacifist-Tolstoyan—the “something of ” is an important distinction, as Grossman at this point rejected any kind of systematic belief system. Ikonnikov choses execution over working to construct a gas chamber. Mostovskoy will of course not follow him in this, but his story is not over. Ikonnikov passes his written testament on to Mostoskoy; this is discovered, and he is called in to his camp commandant, a fictional Nazi named Liss. A similar confrontation between a Bolshevik prisoner and a Nazi commandant had been described in a popular short novel, and later film, by Grossman’s nemesis Sholokhov. In that story (The Life of a Man [Sud′ba cheloveka], 1957) and film (1959), both out before the completion of Life and Fate, the Bolshevik

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cowers the Nazi by his courage and prowess at drinking. In the Life and Fate version, the Nazi Liss offers Mostovskoy something more abstract and considerably more enticing. Liss’s offer is an invitation to a world of cynical thinking, in which ideology is for the little people and power rules. In that world, there is no difference between Nazi and Bolshevik: both have power and despise the weak. Will Mostovskoy become Liss’s companion in cynicism? He will not. But his exit from the novel is nonetheless compromised. Two rebellions are underway in the camp, one by a captured Red Army officer with whom Mostovskoy sympathizes, and one by an infiltrator sent by the Party. Mostovskoy learns that the Party group has put the brave officer’s name on a list of prisoners to be sent to Buchenwald. Mostovskoy is shocked by the betrayal, but he does not object. His last words in the novel express his loyalty to the Party’s decision. We find out later that his name was also put on a list for Buchenwald. The third Old Bolshevik is Krymov. One of the striking features of Life and Fate is that despite its huge cast of characters, people’s paths never precisely repeat: there are a lot of prisoners, but it is through Krymov’s eyes alone that we experience the mechanics of arrest. Judging from the great numbers of memoirs that appeared after Life and Fate, this was a process about which Grossman was very well-informed. In the Lubyanka, the same prison that housed Lozovsky, Shtern, Kvitko, and the rest for three years, Krymov is interrogated and beaten. He does not, however, break. Unlike Abarchuk and Mostovskoy, Krymov manages to rethink his past. This moral triumph is not entirely his own doing: he is able to act as he does because he feels the love of a woman who has reappeared in his life and sacrificed her own wellbeing for his. This woman, Zhenya, declares officially that she is his wife, which lets her send him a package of food. Zhenya’s gesture is part of a series in which women in the novel save other people, often strangers, through spontaneous expressions of non-romantic love. The story does not, however, end here. Grossman is a realist, and so he creates a situation in which Zhenya sacrifices someone else as well as herself. That other person is her lover, Colonel Novikov. The fictional Novikov is perhaps the most sympathetic of all the varied characters that inhabit Grossman’s book. Not only is he responsible for the victory at Stalingrad, but he brings it about while caring for his soldiers, which was not a common feature of Red Army leadership in that time of national crisis. For a few minutes, Novikov defies Stalin himself. That heroic act, together with the chain that leads from him to Zhenya to the arrested Krymov, is more than enough to bring him down. Novikov is arrested and we never see him again.

J e w s , S c i e n t i s t s , a n d t h e Tr i a l o f t h e J e w i s h A n t i f a s c i s t C o m m i t t e e , 1 9 4 4 – 1 9 5 2

Life and Fate also takes up the persecution of Soviet scientists: Lina Shtern’s story. Grossman’s focus is physicists, not biologists, which makes him compress time, moving an incident that occurred after the war to 1944. His main character here is Viktor Shtrum, whom we met in the previous chapter as he read a letter from his mother in the Berdychiv ghetto. Viktor has spent the early years of the war evacuated with his laboratory. Suddenly the lab gets called back to Moscow: their research is germane to the development of a Soviet atomic bomb. Viktor has triumphed. But in the novel, as in life, the push for the bomb gets tangled up with rising state antisemitism and the outsized percentage of Soviet physicists with Jewish backgrounds. Viktor is subjected to ethnic slurs. His science is called “idealist” and derivative of Einstein, as opposed to materialist and derivative of Marx. We just saw how very similar language was applied to Shtern. Jews on Viktor’s staff are fired, as was attempted with Shtern. Then, suddenly, there is a retake. Biologists were expendable, but physicists were not. Viktor’s lab is restored. He has personally triumphed—but that moment, as we will see in the next chapter, doesn’t last.

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Jews, Doctors, and Aliens The rise of antisemitism and its companions—anti-Westernism (in particular anti-Americanism) and antiliberalism in the arts—unfolded at the same time. They were a similar product of postwar state paranoia, which pushed the Soviet Union on an inward path and into an ideological straightjacket. At the war’s end, everybody hoped for liberalization. That is not what they got. The three subjects of this chapter were all affected in one way or another. Ulanovskaya was arrested over contact with foreigners. Grossman was on a list for arrest and also compromised himself; he changed in profound ways. As Leder’s job put her in daily contact with translators and editors attached to the Jewish Antifascist Committee, she understood the meaning of their sudden absence. Her thinking also changed. Fear traveled through newspaper pronouncements, and also through rumor. The disappearance of prominent writers and political figures attached to the Committee was hard to hide, and rumors spread beyond the Soviet Union. In the United States, they reached Paul Robeson, the Black American singer, political activist, and general polymath, whose knowledge of languages included Russian and Yiddish. Robeson knew Fefer and Mikhoels, and unlike other leftleaning Americans, he understood what was going on and acted on it. As a friend of the Soviet Union, he had been invited to give a concert in Moscow, broadcast live on radio—which he concluded by singing a Yiddish song. Horrified officials cut the song from the recording, but the memory remained. It became an entry in the Jewish calendar for those dark years, for once, a bright one. The oscillation between hidden and public antisemitism shifted to resoundingly public in Stalin’s final persecution, known as Doctors’ Plot. On January 13, 1953, a communiqué from TASS, printed in Pravda, announced the arrest of “a terrorist group, uncovered some time ago by the organs of state security.” This group of “spies and murderers masquerading as doctor-professors” had as its goal the assassination of Soviet state officials. Among the

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doctors (not all of them Jews—the Kremlin gave itself cover) was Mikhoels’s cousin Miron Vovsi, the former chief internist of the Red Army. Before officials shut it down in the wake of Stalin’s death, the Doctors’ Plot was the impetus for an orgy of street-level antisemitism. But that was not the only problem. A more far-reaching threat was couched in a rumor that Soviet Jews would be rounded up and sent to Siberia. A Jewish figure we haven’t looked at—the political cartoonist and memoirist Boris Yefimov—lays out what might be called the classic scenario. The doctors, writes Yefimov, “were supposed to be delivered from the trial to a public execution on Red Square,” which would serve as “a prelude to the total deportation of their ethnic group to the remote Siberian camps.” Yefimov held to the end of his life the conviction that the Jews were spared “only because Stalin unexpectedly even for himself departed for another world.”1 Under the circumstances, it was hard to avoid a bit of black humor. Had those who lived through it not forgotten their religious childhoods, they would have appreciated that Stalin’s stroke took place on the Jewish holiday of Purim. Like the Purim story, which celebrates the downfall of an antisemite close to power, the deportation narrative was a myth whose tenacity reflected Jewish experience. With genocide a recent memory, it was rational to anticipate the worst. In this case, though, the rumor had no factual basis. Gennady Kostyrchenko, who knows more about the subject than almost anybody, makes the point that Soviet archives show no trace of deportation planning for Jews— unlike the well-documented deportations of Ingush and Crimean Tatars that were carried out during the war.2 This is not to say that a lot of people, including people in the government, didn’t fan the rumor mill themselves. They had all sorts of reasons for emphasizing their privileged knowledge, and the Jewish subjects of this chapter were primed to take them seriously. A second event, also related to the Doctors’ Plot, loomed large in the lives of those who encountered it first-hand. While it also, inevitably, gave rise to frightening rumors, its core was real. As the Doctors’ Plot unfolded in the press, Stalin ordered the preparation of a letter vilifying the doctors to be signed by

1 Boris Efimov, Desiat’ desiatiletii: o tom, chto videl, perezhil, zapomnil (Moscow: Vagrius, 2000), 448. Efimov, who at the time of his death in 2008 was the world’s oldest Jew, wrote three memoirs, each progressively more liberal. 2 Gennadii Kostyrchenko, “Deportatsiia—Mistifikatsiia,” Lekhaim 9 (September 2022), https://lechaim.ru/ARHIV/125/kost.htm#_ftn9. Among the sources that repeat the rumor is Alexandra Popoff ’s biography of Grossman (Popoff, Vasily Grossman, 3).

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fifty-nine Jewish luminaries. The letter was intended for Pravda, and Grossman was one of the luminaries. There were two drafts, both preserved in archives. The first one, dated January 26, 1953, directs its wrath at the “band of doctor-murderers” and their “monstrous crimes.” The political-ethnic identity of the murderers is laid bare: “Jewish bourgeois nationalists, recruited by the Zionist organization ‘Joint,’ a subsidiary of US intelligence.” (The American Joint Distribution Committee had worked to support Jewish farming in Ukraine and the Crimea in the 1920s.) Over the next paragraphs, the letter reiterates the connection of Zionism to American imperialism. But there is another possibility: the Soviet Union, where Jews, for the first time in history, can realize a “free, joyous life and limitless development in every area of science and art”—precisely those areas of endeavor the signatories were chosen to represent.3 The letter concludes with a call to every honorable Jewish laborer to fight against Jewish bourgeois nationalists. This draft does not mention deportation. Neither does the second, dated February 20, whose rhetoric is so restrained as to be almost polite.4 This time, Jewish workers are invited to “think over some questions” of Jewish interest. The doctor-murderers don’t even make an appearance until paragraph nine (to be sure, this time the two non-Jewish names have been excised). The main continuity in the two drafts is the anti-Israel invective. Israel is, “like every bourgeois country in any part of the word, a kingdom of exploitation,” which works for the benefit of Jewish millionaires. By contrast, the whole world knows that “the peoples of the Soviet Union, above all the great Russian people” saved the Jews from total annihilation. In conclusion, all Jews should unite against “Jewish millionaires and billionaires, the ringleaders of Israel, and world Zionism.”5 At some point—the chronology is a little unclear—the Jewish notables were called into Pravda to sign. Ilya Ehrenburg, who was recruited separately first at his dacha and then at his apartment, is famous for not signing. He instead wrote to Stalin. Ehrenburg’s letter argued that Jews were already assimilated and should not be singled out as a people; it also referred to global opinion.6 In his memoirs, completed just before his death in 1967 and composed with some

3 “Proekt obrashcheniia evreiskoi obschestvennosti v ‘Pravdu’, 1-ia redaktsiia,” Al′manakh Rossiia XX vek, https://www.alexanderyakovlev.org/almanah/inside/almanah-doc/55576/. 4 Kostyrchenko, in “Deportatsiia,” also makes the point about the shift in rhetoric. 5 “Proekt obrashcheniia evreskoi obshchestvennosti v ‘Pravdu,’ 2-ia redaktsiia,” Al′manakh Rossiia XX vek, https://www.alexanderyakovlev.org/fond/issues-doc/69188. 6 For the story of Ehrenburg’s recruitment and refusal, as well as a translation of his letter, see Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (Tuscaloosa, AL and London: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 272–276.

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restraint, Ehrenburg calls the Pravda letter “truly insane.”7 At that point, his refusal to sign was already a legend. But which draft did Ehrenburg see? In his memoirs, Ehrenburg dates the Pravda letter to late February, as a sequel to that same newspaper’s attack on Grossman, which appeared on February 13. His conflation of the two events makes sense: the attack on Grossman and the “insane” letter were serious threats, related in their overt antisemitism. But the draft that he saw must have been the earlier one, because his letter is dated February 3.8 The mild late February draft, which warns Soviet Jews about their loyalties, is not much different from the anti-Israel essay Ehrenburg himself had published in Pravda in 1948.9 So it is not surprising that when given this revision, he did sign. The fact of his signature did not get around, nor did Ehrenburg refer to it in his memoirs. He didn’t have to: drafted a mere ten days before Stalin’s stroke, the letter was never printed. The incident remained under wraps, a matter of Jewish rumor and, for Grossman, long-standing guilt.

Nadezhda Ulanovskaya: Foreign Connections When we last saw Nadya and Alyosha Ulanovsky, in the immediate postTerror years, they had become hidden critics of the regime. Fear made sharing opinions difficult: at the conclusion of chapter four, we saw a conversation between Ulanovskaya and a colonel that blossomed but never repeated, and another between the Ulanovskys and the Old Bolshevik Aron Solts, who cut it off because he didn’t trust them. Nadya and Alyosha continued to work for the military, because while there were clearly highly compromised places to work, like the secret police, there was no place that was not compromised at all. For the Ulanovskys, as for many, the war was a surprise. Survival itself was a surprise: at the moment of the invasion, Nadya’s mother was in Moscow, about to take the children to Odessa, where all of them would have been killed. Instead, she took them east to Chelyabinsk, utilizing Nadya’s ties to the Frunze Military Academy to secure a spot in the official evacuation. For a long time, Nadya did not hear from them. Alyosha was at the front—demoted to captain

7 Il′ia Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn′ (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1990), 3:228. The full text of his book did not appear until 1990. His reference to the Pravda incident says he can’t yet tell the whole story. 8 Stalin himself discarded (archived) it on February 3. 9 Il′ia Erenburg, “Po povodu odnogo pis′ma,” Pravda, September 21, 1948, 3.

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because of his arrest in Denmark—and for a long time she had no news of him, either. He would be wounded. Their son, who never figures in the memoirs, would die at the front. The outbreak of war dimmed the Ulanovskys’ skepticism about the Soviet Union. Nadya supported Stalin; she counted on him; she remembers dreaming about him “with love.”10 To do her part in the fight against Hitler, she went to see Lozovsky. Her credentials were impeccable, and Lozovsky’s press department needed foreign language speakers who could comfortably handle the journalists from other countries who had descended on Moscow. “American aid,” Lozovsky told her, “depends on how journalists portray things.”11 One other thing about her visit to Lozovsky stands out. Nadya had not envisioned working directly with foreign journalists, fearing the repercussions on Alyosha’s career “after.” “Will there even be an after?” asked Lozovsky.12 Along with Lozovsky and the rest of the government, Ulanovskaya evacuated to Kuibyshev. Moscovites, she remembered, stayed in place out of pride, though “why Jews were leaving, everybody understood.”13 In fact, some did and some didn’t; the only thing to rely on was rumor and personal interpretation. In Kuibyshev and later in Moscow, foreign journalists were focused on the war and also on their hotel-based social lives. The state made sure the foreigners lived well. In turn, they passed on food to their Soviet interpreters, whom they also paid under the table. And often slept with, an aspect of surveillance that the Soviets deployed without the Westerners knowing or seemingly caring. Nadya was unusual in that she did care. Both in Kuibyshev and later after her return to Moscow, she observes the conduct of the young women and their clueless Western contacts. She also intervenes, describing with uncharacteristic moral satisfaction how she persuaded one young woman to leave the correspondents’ hotel and never again show her face there. Those who stuck around were often arrested; she would meet many of them in the Gulag. Nadya’s fate was also sealed by a foreign journalist, though differently. Despite her renewed patriotism, the question always before her was to talk or to lie. Talking to Walter Kerr of the New York Times about Koestler, she wanted very much to ask him for a copy of Koestler’s anticommunist Darkness at Noon, but feigned indifference. In general, when journalists asked about the Terror,

10 11 12 13

Ulanovskaia and Ulanovskaia, Istoriia odnoi sem′i, 152. Ibid., 151. “Da budet li eto ‘posle’?” Ibid. Ibid., 154.

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she maintained that Russians had all “moved on.”14 In retrospect, the lie made her ashamed. But the journalists were outsiders. One journalist did seem to her like “one of us.” This was Godfrey Blunden, an Australian whom she calls “Jeff.” Blunden had grown up in a leftist family, and become a skeptic: a familiar situation that created mutual trust. But Blunden did not understand Soviet conditions, and given what ensued, neither did Ulanovskaya: perhaps nobody could have anticipated what appears, in retrospect, to be inescapable. Blunden asked to go to a real Moscow apartment. Nadya brought him to see two friends of hers, women who lived together in a small room. In the novel Blunden published after the war, one of these women was Jewish (not so in life); there are arrests and accounts of interrogations. The apartment in the novel was precisely the apartment Nadya had introduced him to, which proved easy for authorities to pinpoint. A Room on the Route came out in October 1946, with Lippincott. The blurb on its second edition calls it “a tense, skillfully told story,” a view that is hard to share, though it should be noted that the American edition went through two hardcover and at least one paperback printing.15 Soviet recriminations began immediately. Under interrogation, one of the Moscow women betrayed the other, who was then arrested.16 Then, because of the novel, Nadya herself was arrested. Blunden knew nothing. The person who finally contacted him, in Paris, was Mary Leder’s American sister, shortly before her own visit to Moscow in 1959.17 Nadya nowhere blames Blunden for what happened to her. The midwar and postwar period of the Ulanovskaya memoir reflects a growing awareness of Jewish specificity, even though the Holocaust is not addressed—except, as just noted, in her comment about Jews fleeing Moscow in 1941. Unlike Kvitko or, still more, Shtern, she was not compelled to face and react to what was happening. Nonetheless, two things come up, both linked to state antisemitism. The first is about discrimination: at the Institute of Foreign Relations, where she resumes English teaching late in the war, there are no

14 Ibid., 152–153. 15 The second edition came out in February 1947, and the third edition, in 1951. See Godfrey Blunden, A Room on the Route (New York: Lippincott and Bantam, 1951). 16 How could that betrayal have happened? Nadya’s explanation is that the betrayer had married; she had something to lose, and became cautious. 17 The reference to Mary Leder is excised (“with . . .”) from the first, 1984, edition that this book otherwise cites. It appears in full in the third edition, available online, but without pagination; the reference is in chapter nine.

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Jewish students, “not even the children of top bureaucrats.”18 The second relates to a conversation with the New York Times’s Cyrus Sultzberger. “Nadya,” says Sultzberger, “you are someone I trust. Is it true what they are saying about state antisemitism in the USSR?” She denies it—and then, in prison, remembers the encounter with anguish. “How could I have let myself speak out, blather freely with people I didn’t know—but it was Jews that I betrayed?” She tells her interrogator: “I didn’t betray my homeland, but my people.” This is a singular comment, a marked shift.19 Nadya was arrested in February 1948, less than a month after Mikhoels was murdered. Her Jewish origins didn’t have anything to do with it, though the Soviet Union had long replaced Bolshevik internationalism with a barely veiled ethnic nationalism in which Jews would always be foreign. Still under interrogation, she understood that Alyosha had also been arrested when she had to answer questions about his nationality. The conditions of her arrest were similar to those of Shtern, Kvitko, and Lozovsky, incarcerated in the Lubyanka in those same years. Interrogations went on all night, and, in the daytime, she had to sleep sitting upright. She tells her interrogator, “I have nothing to confess. I refuse to answer questions. You want to execute me? Go ahead.” He says: “Execute you? Obviously. But first you will tell us everything.”20 She looked for ways to kill herself. Later, like Shtern, she observed a descent into madness. But she was mostly lucid, and a dispassionate observer of her own shifts from defiance to obedience and then back to defiance. She told the interrogator about her “fabulous” youth, her devotion to Soviet power, and her doubts beginning in 1937.21 She remembers a point at which she could not go on. She named names, knowing that she was engaging in betrayal. Then she resisted, and was sent to the punishment cells of Lefortovo. If there is one trait that distinguishes Nadya Ulanovskaya from the other subjects of this book, including the resistors, it is her desire to know, something much more profound than curiosity. She tells the investigator, “If it weren’t for my children, I wouldn’t be sorry that I ended up with you, because now I know everything to the end.”22 Once she is put into a communal cell, and, straight through her years in the Gulag, she wants to learn what happened to other

18 19 20 21 22

Ulanovskaia and Ulanovskaia, Istoriia odnoi sem′i, 88–89. Ibid., 188. Ibid., 195. Ibid., 230. Ibid., 106.

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women. She becomes a collector of stories, so much so that, as the memoir moves forward, she herself recedes. In the parts of the narrative in which her own story dominates, we see the totality of her break with her ideological past. Nadya equates this break, and indeed her ability to resist, with an acquired fearlessness. Fearlessness certainly figured in her revolutionary years, but in its Gulag incarnation it is unaccompanied by ideology. Unlike Lozovsky and Shtern, who retained their belief in Marxism, though not, in the end, Stalinism, Nadya Ulanovskaya discards Marxism in its entirety. Replacing it is a devotion to justice that is not thought through, but rather instinctual. A devotion to justice is the through-line in her retelling of other people’s stories, and also in some stories she tells about herself. A striking instance comes in a confrontation with criminal prisoners, who preyed on politicals. The phenomenon is a staple of Gulag literature, and plays a role in Life and Fate. But Nadya’s own intervention has the most in common with Lozovsky’s. Like him, or at least his fictional alter ego, she subdues the criminals on behalf of her fellow politicals, using only words and the power of her presence. She is aware of that power. Writing about a different incident, she notes that she “had already come to the conclusion that in life there is nothing more terrible than fear. And I really was not afraid.”23 The Gulag was in many ways isolated and timeless, but the camp had a “wall newspaper,” and prisoners could stop by and read it. What Nadya records from it reflects the two calendars, Soviet and Jewish, that structured the world view of so many people of her background and generation. In all, she notes five incidents. Three are from general history: the “fall” of Czechoslovakia (in other words, its turn to Communism), Stalin’s break with Yugoslavia, and Stalin’s death. The two events on the Jewish historical calendar both relate to the Doctors’ Plot: first its inception, and then the announcement that the doctors had been freed. With respect to Jewish issues, the camp was a microcosm of outside. The Doctors’ Plot figured primarily as freedom to engage in open antisemitism. Some remarks (“Jews have it so good under Soviet power, and look what they did”) reflect the talking points of the unpublished Pravda letter; they were widespread. The idea of Jewish doctor-murderers made the rhetoric more precise. But it was not only defenders of Soviet power that hated Jews: opponents of Soviet power blamed Jews for creating it. That point of view—not expressed

23 Ibid., 268.

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as openly—was also a feature of life outside. So was generosity. The same Ulanovskaya who records remarks like “Hitler failed in one thing only—he didn’t kill all the Jews” also notes that when the doctors were freed, “Russians and Ukrainians were joyful.”24 The freeing of the doctors was, of course, a consequence of the death of Stalin. That event was the harbinger of Ulanovskaya’s return to Moscow.

Mary Leder: Endgame In the early postwar period, the Leders were in Berlin. Abram’s job, with the military, was to censor German-language publications in Soviet-occupied Germany. The job paid well, and Mary didn’t work; she wandered. Her first impression, rather like that of Ulanovskaya’s colleagues in occupied Poland, was of a consumer paradise. And of an artistic one as well: Berlin had theater, films, and radio, including American radio. For a long time, the Leders had an apartment to themselves, a Western norm that was, for Soviet urbanites at their level, an unimaginable luxury. Mary could walk freely into the Western sector, where she was savvy enough to mail letters to America, though she could not receive them there. Berlin was not perfect: an underside to the German orderliness was rampant prostitution. But being outside of the Soviet Union forced a comparison. With time on her hands, Mary read Gogol’s Dead Souls. She had last seen that book, in English translation, as a high-school student in California. Now, reading in Russian, she saw the roots of Russian disorder going back half a century, seemingly endemic. The Soviet Union was far away, and expectations of postwar liberalization were strong. For people who were paying attention, the first crack in that expectation were the attacks on Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko, a poet and a satirist, both revered. A different threat hit closer. One night, when Abram was at work, the Soviet military police banged on her door. When Mary refused to open in the absence of her husband, they tried to break it down (wryly, she reports that it was a German door, and didn’t yield). The next day, Abram went to the military police and was met by invective that he reported as unmistakably antisemitic.

24 Antisemitism: ibid., 279–280. Its opposite: ibid., 282.

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Shortly after this happened, they were ordered back to the Soviet Union— unexpectedly, because Abram had been an officer before the war, and officers were not being decommissioned. She attributed the order to a problem with foreigners, which she remained, despite the Soviet passport. Then, as they packed up, a Soviet officer who had been placed in their apartment—their solitude was also short-lived—advised her not to return, citing the antisemitism he had observed when visiting his family in Ukraine. Abram had no family left, and she was American. Why go back? Mary brought up the conversation with Abram. The dilemma it posed was not staying in Berlin, but the nature of the advice. Was the officer a provocateur? And if so, should they report him? It was a classic moral-political question, which they resolved by doing nothing. They met the former officer later in Moscow, when it became clear that he had only their welfare in mind. At that point, he told them one more thing: Abram had lost his Berlin post because he was a Jew. All Jews administering the Soviet occupation were being sent home. Back in Moscow, the vulnerabilities of the two Leders intertwined unpredictably. Mary got a job at the Foreign Language Publishing House, but Abram proved unemployable because Mary was suspect as a foreigner. Their friend Ahsia, recruited as an informer just as Mary had been—and reacting in the same way, trying to give no information—said that Abram needed to get a job, any job, as soon as possible.25 Mary assumed that she was the liability. Abram, she writes, “became a nervous wreck. He was convinced that if I were arrested and imprisoned, I would die.”26 Like Ulanovskaya, Mary records a dual calendar, half general and half Jewish. She read Stalin’s break with Tito (1948) as a general menace, like Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb in 1949. But the death of Mikhoels was a threat to Jews, along with the 1952 Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia and the Doctors’ Plot the following year. She records rumors, like the desecration of a Jewish cemetery outside Moscow. One event that figures prominently in SovietJewish histories, the arrival of Golda Meir and subsequent demonstration at Moscow’s main synagogue, she does not mention—which lends credence to what she does. Because she reports no interest in the establishment of the state of Israel, it is interesting to see the attention she pays to Ehrenburg’s article in Pravda

25 The spelling of the name is Mary’s. Ahsia (Asya) was also a friend of Maya Ulanovskaya. 26 Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia, 292.

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some months later, warning Soviet Jewish readers that Israel has nothing to do with them. The article, which took up four columns, laid out the Soviet case against Israel. First, the country was being “invaded” by “Anglo-American capital” (as Ehrenburg wrote, it was actually being invaded by Arabs). Second, Jews in Palestine owed their survival to Stalingrad (the idea, presumably, being that if Germans had not been defeated at Stalingrad, they would have tried again to invade Egypt). It concludes with a warning to local Jews: “The ‘Jewish Question’ can be resolved in one way only: by the obliteration of the ‘Jewish Question.’”27 Ehrenburg’s biographer Joshua Rubenstein sees the letter as embodying a subtle message to Soviet Jews following the demonstration of solidarity with Golda Meir. Mary read it as a threat. She had for herself refuted Ehrenburg’s argument about Soviets solving “Jewish question” at the time of the death of Mikhoels. What she came to see is that assimilation was impossible, a “hoax.”28 Her analysis of the situation is no worse than anything anybody else has come up with before or since: Soviet Jews had pursued assimilation; it hadn’t worked; and now they had no knowledge of any part of Jewish culture or history. A Jewish event that she notes in particular was Robeson’s concert at Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Hall. She and Abram listened to it on the radio and heard Robeson’s concluding Yiddish song. Never Say (Zog nit keyn mol) was a song of the Warsaw ghetto. Speaking to the audience in Russian, Robeson dedicated it to the memory of Mikhoels.29 His words were removed from subsequent rebroadcasts along with the song itself, but both remained in memory as an indelible gesture of solidarity. Soviet Jews may have lost ties to most of Jewish culture, but they retained at least a symbolic awareness of Yiddish and a painful familiarity with the recent and unmentionable Holocaust. Robeson knew what he was doing. According to his son and biographer, Paul Robeson Jr., in April 1947, he had been invited to the Soviet Embassy in Washington to speak with Andrei Vyshinsky, the Purge Trial prosecutor who was then Deputy Foreign Minister. Robeson Jr., a Russian speaker, was asked to translate—either because Robeson’s Russian was not up to diplomatic exchanges or for parity with Vyshinsky, who had his own translator. The point for us is that Robeson Jr. was present. He reports that Vyshinsky wanted Robeson, whose contacts with Jews, particularly Fefer, were well-known, to

27 Erenburg, “Po povodu odnogo pis′ma.” 28 Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia, 297. 29 Dedication to Mikhoels from Paul Robeson Jr., The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: Quest for Freedom 1939–1976 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010), 153.

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come out with a statement warning Soviet Jews against Zionism. Robeson countered that “the loyalty of Soviet Jews was not in question.”30 Right before his concert, Robeson had demanded to see Fefer, who had been, as he suspected, arrested for some time (actually, December 24, 1948). The two met in Robeson’s hotel room. Robeson Jr.’s version of this famous encounter, from his father, was that the two managed a lighthearted conversation for the sake of hidden microphones, while exchanging messages on paper. At the trial, the formidably gifted poet was obsequious toward the prosecution and combative toward his fellow defendants. But here, at great personal risk, he told Robeson that Mikhoels had been murdered by Stalin.31 Around Mary, people were disappearing. She notes the arrests of both Ulanovskys, and of Leon Talmi’s son, a translator whom she and Abram knew in Berlin. She had been working with Talmi until an hour before his arrest: they worked until midnight; Talmi was taken at one in the morning. She notes when another Antifascist Committee member, Chaika Vatenberg, did not show up at work. But while she understood what was happening, her fellow SovietAmericans sometimes did and sometimes did not. An outsider’s perspective was not an invariable guarantee of clarity. Her American friends took one precaution: they stopped writing home. Mary decided on the opposite strategy, writing frequently on the assumption that should she abruptly stop, her parents would understand that something was wrong. She was mistaken in that. Her parents took her unbroken correspondence as a sign that everything was fine. For herself, she noted a sharp change in awareness. Earlier, she understood repressive state policies as contrary to the interests of the Soviet Union: the position taken by Lozovsky and Shtern at the trial. Now these policies made her angry. She kept in her head a list of people who had been arrested. On a trip to the Caucasus, a rare vacation, somebody pointed the Leders to the Turkish border. “There are mountain passes there that have been used for centuries,” he said—the second time that she records this possibility of escape. Abram pulled her away.32 Abram was also the one who told her about the Doctors’ Plot. He was monitoring the newspapers; she was not; he woke her up. That they understood the implications is, at this point in our story, obvious. Mary also records

30 Ibid., 123–124. Vyshinsky’s translator then softened Robeson’s words. He was corrected by Robeson Jr. Robeson himself was so rattled that he asked his son to write out for him the lyrics of Ole Man River, his standard, which he was about to sing. 31 Ibid., 153. 32 Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia, 322.

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the reactions of those people—significantly, Jewish Communists of American origin, people she worked with—who either did not understand or sided with the government. A person she names was her immediate superior at TASS, where she was then working—a woman named Aerova. Mary knows her as a Russian-born ex-American Jew, whose Russian was “atrocious”; she does not know her real name (it was Manya Reiss). When Mary arrived at the office after the announcement, Aerova/Reiss accosted her. “The scum,” she said. “They give all Jews a bad name. They ought to be shot.”33 Mary also records the rumor of deportation, which she did not at the time believe. Like the Doctors’ Plot itself, it ended with the news of Stalin’s death. On that morning, Mary was working the morning shift, alongside Aerova/Reiss, whose reaction in this case was like most people’s. “What will happen to us now? What will happen to our country without Stalin to watch over it?”34 In some ways, Mary and Abram felt similarly. They had no love for Stalin, but they feared that what would come after would be worse.

Lilianna Lungina: Reality and Rumor When we last saw her in the late 1930s, Lungina was a student at the Literary Institute. There was a lot of good in her life—young people, culture, a holiday in Koktebel—but also, at that same institute, students stood up at meetings and denounce their parents who had disappeared. And her father died, leaving her with regrets that she failed to pay enough attention to him. At twenty-one, alone with her mother, Lungina had to choose between aiding the war effort like her girlfriends or trying to protect her mother by finding a way to evacuate. A missing part of her memoir is what happened to her mother, so active in St. Petersburg in World War I and still more so in Paris, where she organized a theater and then, overcoming vast difficulties, repatriation to the USSR. Just as we don’t learn what Zinovy Markovich was thinking, so we don’t know what was burdening Maria Liberson. Born in 1890, Liberson was only fifty-one at the start of the war, and fifty-four when she died, before it ended. There was good reason for her to be depressed. We know only that she was helpless.

33 Ibid., 327. 34 Ibid., 328.

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Evacuation took them to Naberezhnye Chelny, on the Kama River east of Kazan. As their presence was unofficial, they bartered clothes for a room; when their clothes ran out, they lost the room. They were saved by an extraordinary act of kindness: the editor of the local newspaper where Lilya found a job built them a bedroom in the newspaper’s offices. Evacuation reframed her view of the Soviet Union. She was sent to a local collective farm—on horseback: she had to learn how to saddle a horse and how to ride it. Conditions were horrendous, but reporting on them was out of the question. Why did the newspaper send her, then? For local color. The unintended result was that she saw what urban people often failed to see, conditions in the countryside. And living in Naberezhnye Chelny, she saw backward into history: the town had been built on the Siberian convict road. After the first year, in secret—initially—from her mother, Lilya got onto a train and spent some time in Moscow. Her trip was clandestine, her stay was illegal, but illegality, as Mary Leder also saw, was everywhere. The tenants in Lilya’s and her mother’s Moscow apartment had taken over their rooms and stolen everything in them; she wrested one room back. On her return, she went to work in a laboratory that was supposed to check on the strength of vodka. To ensure a good analysis, peasants brought potatoes, which the laboratory personnel roasted or boiled right there. No analysis was done at all. By design or by virtue of their remote setting, Lilya and her mother seem to have been cut off from the rest of the country. They had no radio and read no newspaper; they did not know about the battle of Stalingrad. Writing about that pivotal moment, she refers to Viktor Nekrasov’s novel In the Trenches of Stalingrad and Grossman’s Life and Fate. Unlike all the other memoirists, she says nothing about the destruction of Jews, even in Poltava, where both of her parents had spent their childhoods. The subject of Jews comes up only in reference to wartime antisemitism, which she learns about, back in Moscow in the winter of 1943, from a close friend in the army. Tell her mother or not? She decides to hold off, “I was afraid she would remember pogroms and all of that.”35 When she does, her mother falls into a panic. Her mother’s death in March 1944 left her entirely alone. She was taken in by friends, and then into graduate school by a professor who whispered to her that he was not antisemitic. The remark assumed that antisemitism was the new norm. But there was also hope. Everybody, she writes, believed that

35 Lungina and Dorman, Podstrochnik, 170.

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the “gulp of freedom taken in by the victorious army would play out in life, and life would become better.”36 That was, obviously enough, a dashed expectation. At the same time, Lungina insists that good things happen and people can be resilient. These attributes of life and human possibility are how she frames her story, both for her own understanding and for the sake of her young audience: an ethicalpedagogical pose that, of all our subjects, she shares only with Grossman. Yet in her own life, there was indeed a stroke of luck: on New Year’s Eve 1947, she met her future husband Semyon Lungin, the theater and film director. Otherwise, the events she records are overwhelmingly grim. The postwar campaign against writers and composers (Akhmatova, Zoshchenko, Shostakovich, Prokofiev) was not confined to its famous targets; it filtered down, requiring active compliance from people well below them in status and visibility. At a department meeting at the university (the Literary Institute had been folded into the Humanities Faculty of Moscow University), graduate students were obliged to condemn Akhmatova and Zoshchenko. Lungina knew she would not have the strength to keep her hand down when everybody else’s went up. She left, loudly pleading a migraine: a moral compromise, of which she felt ashamed. Then there were the Jews. The campaign against Jews had a private dimension, too. People tossed off antisemitic comments in her presence, assuming that repressing Jews was a matter of social equity for Russians. A non-Jewish friend of her uncle’s, a Nobel-prize winning chemist, explained to her blandly that “if we don’t support Russians, then Jews will take over.”37 This sentiment was of course, as common in the United States as it was in Russia, except that the American version—especially in higher education—receded precipitously under government pressure at exactly the same time as the Soviet variant flared.38 Newspapers and journals undertook what Kostyrchenko calls “the search for national purity in the arts.”39 Jews who had assumed Russian pseudonyms 36 Ibid., 177. 37 Ibid., 214. 38 Norms against Jews in American higher education were first broken in the postwar period by actions taken by Nelson Rockefeller, as governor of New York. Private colleges resisted, but caved in after threats that they would lose government funding. For a case study, see Marit Vangrow, “A Hidden Barrier: The Quota System that Inhibited Jewish Life at Colgate, in Repression, Reinvention, and Rugelakh: a History of Jews at Colgate, ed. Alice Nakhimovsky (Syracuse: Colgate University Press, 2019), 3–40. 39 Gennady Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina: vlast’ i antisemitizm: novaia versiia v 2 chastiakh (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2015), 191.

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were outed; all were designated “rootless cosmopolitans.” As a literature student married to a theater director, Lungina saw the theater version unfold both from the outside, on the pages of Pravda and other journals, and also behind the scenes. The official attack was not against playwrights or actors, but specifically theater critics, some of whom Lungina knew. The problem was that they had failed to celebrate the products of socialist realism (in Lungina’s rendering “You, Comrade Stakhanov, are an excellent worker, and we are even better; let’s have a contest”).40 As the critics were not ethnically Russian, the offended playwrights had a vehicle for complaint, and they used it. On the surface, this was a binary conflict: Russian playwrights versus Jewish critics. Beneath the surface, it was complicated—or, as Lungina puts it, “Kafkaesque.” One of the critics, Konstantin Rudnitsky, ghost-wrote, for money, the article targeting himself and his Jewish colleagues. A different Jewish critic, Yakov Varshavsky, had ghost-written one of the socialist-realist plays that the critics then disparaged. Called to prove it, he showed that the characters were all named after people who lived in his building.41 Then Lungina turns to a story about Mikhoels, and the black humor vanishes. Shortly before he was murdered (nobody in theater circles, she said, believed it was an accident), her husband Sima Lungin went to visit Mikhoels’s Yiddish theater to check out the stage: there was a plan that his own Stanislavsky theater would take over the building. When he got there, he understood his complicity. He walked down a corridor, and Mikhoels called to him. The great actor was sitting in his office, his head in his hands. Lungin said, “it’s only the matter of a few performances.” Mikhoels looked at him with bitter irony and addressed him in Yiddish. Lungin didn’t know Yiddish. “It is shameful, young man,” said Mikhoels, “not to know your own language. Zay gezunt [goodbye].”42 Then repressions hit closer. Lungin lost his job at the Theater Institute. The father of their friend Ilya Nusinov disappeared: this was Isaak Nusinov, the fifteenth arrested member of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, who died in prison before the trial. Another friend, on the admissions committee of the Physics-Mathematics Department at Moscow University, said that he and his colleagues were advised to give Jews bad grades on the entrance exam.

40 Lungina and Dorman, Podstrochnik, 197. 41 Ibid., 198. 42 Ibid., 202–203.

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When the Doctors’ Plot broke, Lungina had a job as a French instructor at VOKS (the same Cultural Relations Society that had arranged for Roskin’s cancer manuscripts to be forwarded to the United States). She hadn’t seen the news. Somebody in the accounting department broke it to her: “I didn’t expect this from you people. You people turned out to be murderers.”43 She had not, she said, paid attention to her Jewish identity before. Now she paid attention. From the daughter of the “court specialist in Party history” Isaak Mints, she heard about the Pravda letter. Mints, reported the daughter, was preparing a letter to Stalin, which was supposed to be signed “by the most famous Jews.” (He did not in fact write the letter, though he figures prominently in memoirs of people who were called in to sign it.) Lungina understood from her friend that the signatories confessed “the criminality expressed by them and their fellows against the Russian people and socialism, and asked to be able to redeem themselves.”44 As we saw earlier, this was not a feature of either preserved draft, but it is one that is often cited. Either a third draft has disappeared, or rumor efficiently replaced text with quite plausible subtext. Other rumors concerned deportation. A journalist friend told her that the workers of the Stalingrad Tractor Factory had voted—unanimously, as was the way—to support a resolution calling for Jews to be deported. Two playwright friends said that when they asked to be paid for a play they had written for the army, the general who had commissioned it gave the order to pay them for only for a month, after which: “. . . they’ll put them on trains and send them off to Siberia.” Another friend, an actor flying to performances in Siberia in a small plane, was told “You see those barracks? Those are for you.” “What do you mean, for us?” said the actor. “They’re going to deport you there. There’s a government order.”45

Vasily Grossman: A Novel and a Letter In 1943, with the battle of Stalingrad barely over, Grossman set out to anchor it in fiction. To understand what happened to that book, it helps to remember the unusual role of literature in Russian society, which began in the nineteenth century and lasted, with all its perversions and maybe because of them, through the twentieth. Literature was the truth-teller. The state shaped and suppressed

43 Ibid., 215. 44 Ibid., 216. 45 Ibid.

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it because people saw it in that light. As the battle over Grossman’s Stalingrad novel raged, one of his main opponents, the Writers Union chair Alexander Fadeev, committed suicide. In his suicide note, Fadeev wrote that he could not go on living because “the art to which I have dedicated my life has been ruined by the self-righteously ignorant leadership of the Party and can no longer be restored.”46 In Life and Fate, the sequel to Stalingrad, Grossman wrote what he wanted to write. Stalingrad still has political constraints, though not as many as the literary establishment would have wanted. Grossman’s book mirrors the structure of War and Peace, the classic account of the first Great Patriotic War in 1812. Unlike Tolstoy’s central family, Grossman’s is not aristocratic, though its deep revolutionary roots make it something of a modern equivalent. Also, there is a Jewish son-in-law, Viktor Shtrum, and a Jewish family friend, the doctor Sofia Levinton. Konstantin Simonov—the same man who had been tapped to write about Treblinka in Grossman’s place—was then the editor of the literary journal New World. He held Grossman’s manuscript for a year and then rejected it. Simonov’s position as editor then went to the poet Alexander Tvardovsky, whose relationship with Grossman was complicated. But when Tvardovsky first read the text, his reaction was iconically Russian. He ran to Grossman’s apartment to congratulate him. There followed an evening of “kisses and drunken tears.”47 Then reality set in. Tvardovsky laid out three objections: the book was too gloomy; there wasn’t enough in it about Stalin; and there were too many Jews. At one point, Fadeev advised removing Shtrum altogether.48 Tvardovsky suggested making him a military supply officer. “And what position would you give Einstein?” objected Grossman.49 Tvardovsky passed the manuscript on to the writer Mikhail Sholokhov, a member of the New World editorial board. “Who did you put in charge of writing about Stalingrad?” asked the future Nobel laureate. “Are you out of your minds? I’m against it.”50 Oddly, considering it was already 1950, Sholokhov’s transparent antisemitism did not carry the day. The editorial board agreed to publish the book, with some adjustments. Grossman was to include a chapter

46 Aleksandr Fadeev, “Ne vizhu vozmozhnosti dal′she zhit′,” May 13, 1956, Rossiiskaiia gazeta, May 12, 2015, https://rg.ru/2015/05/13/pismo.html. 47 Semen Lipkin, Stalingrad Vasiliia Grossmana (Ann Arbor, MI: Arcadia, 1986), 30. 48 Garrard and Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev, 224. 49 Lipkin, Stalingrad, 30. 50 Ibid., 31.

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about Stalin. He needed to demote Shtrum (Grossman did not act on this one) and give him a mentor, a much greater scientist, Russian by nationality. Finally, Grossman could not call the book “Stalingrad.” Fadeev suggested “For a Just Cause” (Za pravoe delo), from a phrase used by Molotov. When Robert Chandler translated the novel into English, he restored “Stalingrad.” The book’s appearance—serialized, as was the practice, in the New World—was a sensation. The magazine sold out; people waited to read it in the library. It was briefly on the list for a Stalin Prize. Then, on February 13, 1953, precisely a month after the announcement of the Doctors’ Plot, Pravda ran an enormous article, spread over two pages, laying out the official line. The novel is praised for some things, but excoriated for its smattering of Jews. The author (Mikhail Bubyonov, a well-known socialist realist) doesn’t use the word Jew, because he doesn’t have to. The characters’ last names make that fact selfevident. He simply notes that the novel’s central family is not only uninteresting in itself but includes two even more uninteresting characters. One is a professor, Viktor Shtrum. The other, present “in the capacity of family friend,” is a doctor, Sofia Levinton: the context of Jewish doctor did not need further elaboration. And then Bubyonov drives his point home: “And it’s this family that V. Grossman puts forward as a typical Soviet family, worthy of being at the center of an epic about Stalingrad.”51 This could have been a prelude to arrest, and indeed Grossman was already on a list for arrest, over his association with the Jewish Antifascist Committee. Like so many others, he was saved by Stalin’s death. But one more fateful incident took place before that happened: Grossman was called in to sign the Pravda letter against the Jewish doctors. Grossman’s close friend Semyon Lipkin gives the account, which is similar to those of other signers. When he got the call, the two friends were together, in hiding at Lipkin’s dacha. The dacha had no telephone: Grossman’s wife came to retrieve him. Based on Lipkin’s account of its contents—the doctors are murderers who deserve the most severe punishment, but there are many good Jewish people—the letter Grossman was given was the first redaction. And he signed it. He carried the shame of that act for the rest of his life, a shame exacerbated by the fact that, as far as he knew, his friend and rival Ilya Ehrenburg had not signed. Grossman’s own retelling appears in Life and Fate. The signer is Viktor Shtrum, whose story embodies the kind of roller-coaster Grossman endured

51 Pravda, February 13, 1953, 4.

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over his novel, but with higher stakes and a different, more compromised, end. Viktor is a physicist. Grossman compresses time to include in his war novel both the planned repression of physicists (1948–1949) and the signing of a letter supporting the arrest of Jewish “doctor-murderers” (1953). In the novel, the repression of Viktor at his institute is accompanied by antisemitic smears and the firing of two Jews who work in his lab. Then—as was the case with the actual physicists—the relevance of Viktor’s work to the developing atomic race causes the situation to suddenly reverse. Stalin calls him on the telephone, something the actual Stalin was known to do. The reversal lifts Viktor’s spirits but batters him morally. When he is called to sign the letter condemning the Jewish doctors, he cannot resist. He understands his own submissiveness, but he can’t battle it; the weight of the state is too great. He thinks, as Grossman did, of asking for some time to reflect, but realizes that would only prolong the torture. Then there is another blow: he finds out that a scientific rival of his—a friend of sorts whom he had always thought of as weak—had not signed. Viktor’s acquiescence is praised by his wife Lyudmila (“you did what you had to do”52). This is cold comfort: Lyudmila, who refused to give refuge to Viktor’s mother, is not a moral arbiter. Her intervention links Viktor’s personal cowardice at the start of the war to his political cowardice now. And, with this, his role in the novel ends. Faced with two deeds he cannot take back, Viktor thinks about his mother and hopes that he can redeem himself through her strength.

52 Grossman, Zhizn′ i sud′ba, 586; Grossman, Life and Fate, 839.

8

What Happened Next Kvitko and Lozovsky were executed by the Party they had done so much to support. What they said matters to history, but it had no effect on their fate. Lozovsky, at least, knew that. Lina Shtern—who also knew—was allowed back to Moscow after the death of Stalin. Stalin’s death came just in time for most of the victims of the Doctors’ Plot, like her friend Yakov Rapoport, but too late for her own codefendants. She lived until 1968, and continued to work in her lab and organize conferences. After unburdening herself to Rapoport, she said nothing about her ordeal. When asked specifically, she shrugged it off with a joke. Her correspondence with her close friend, the Jewish-oriented children’s novelist Aleksandra Brushtein, reveals two members of the Soviet elite concerned for each other’s wellbeing and offering attention and gifts. The only holidays mentioned, with no irony, are Soviet ones. Lungina became well-known as a translator from Swedish and other Scandinavian languages, particularly of Astrid Lindgren’s Pipi Longstocking. Literary translation was an important profession in the Soviet Union, where it was held to exacting standards and seen by readers as a window on the wider world. Her husband Semyon was a noted screen-writer in the 1970s and ’80s, and their sons Pavel and Evgeny are film directors. She died in 1998, a whole decade before the release of the TV interview on which she appears so vividly. Ulanovskaya was freed from the Gulag in 1956. Her daughter, the Soviet dissident activist Maya Ulanovskaya, was arrested in 1952 for participation in an anti-Stalinist group. Both women emigrated to Israel in 1973. Nadezhda Ulanovskaya’s memoir was completed in 1980 and published, in Russian, in a small New York publishing house in 1982.1 In her introduction to that edition, Maya Ulanovskaya notes the similarity between her parents’ drive to foster the

1

The English transation (Ulanovskaya and Ulanovskaya, The Family Story) came out in 2016.

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revolution and hers to share their fate as Soviet political prisoners. Nadezhda Ulanovskaya died in 1986, and Maya in 2020. Among the people to welcome the Ulanovskys back to Moscow was Mary Leder. She recalls in her memoir that Nadya, in particular, spoke freely about the circumstances of her arrest and her experiences in the Gulag. Mary Leder herself remained in the Soviet Union until her husband Abram’s death in 1959, after which she began to press for an exit visa. She returned to America in 1965 where she wrote her memoir, confessing in its final section that she felt at home nowhere. Medvedeva died in 1986. Her notebooks were passed on to her grandson, the Israeli historian Michael Beizer, who published them first in Russian and then, with my translation, in English. One oddity that she does not reveal, but that Beizer does, is her return to Judaism, beginning in the war. In Beizer’s own childhood, his grandfather—still a member in good standing of the Communist Party—prayed in a talith and tfillim. It was from their grandmother that the children heard Bible stories, and saw a little bit of Jewish practice. Their home became a repository of Jewish sacred texts, brought to them by neighbors who did not know what to do with them. Medvedeva’s diary remains one of a vanishingly small number of accounts of Jewish life in Russia, and then Soviet Russia, written by someone without education or visibility. She herself had no agency: her notebooks were her agency. It gives me great pleasure to report that her grandchildren prospered. The remainder of Grossman’s life was taken up by his novel Life and Fate, the similarly audacious Forever Flowing and the gentler Peace to You (Dobro vam), about a trip to Armenia. As we have seen, Life and Fate takes up many of the same characters as its predecessor Stalingrad. This time, however, their stories are shaped by what Grossman saw as the moral dilemmas of his time, mediated though a profound sense of his own personal failure. The history of Life and Fate, first chronicled by Grossman’s friend Semyon Lipkin, has been retold many times. When the novel was finished, Grossman sent it to the Banner, figuring, improbably, that its conservative editor would have the more guts than Tvardovsky of the liberal New World, which had rejected Stalingrad. His hope has been dismissed as impossibly naïve. But he also had a plan B, which involved hiding two typescript copies with friends who did not know about each other. One typescript went to Lipkin, who knew not to keep it at home. Another went to a woman who lived in a communal apartment and had no connections to literary circles.

What Happened Next

While those two copies survived Grossman’s death, what happened to all the other ones was shattering.2 Instead of publishing the book, or even returning the manuscript to Grossman, the Banner editor Kozhevnikov sent it straight to the Central Committee. A decision was made to destroy the manuscript, though not the author: this was February 1960, four years after Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” initiating de-Stalinization. In accordance with the new liberalism, KGB operatives raided Grossman’s apartment and seized every typescript they could find. Then they went to the apartment of Grossman’s typist, where they took everything related to the manuscript, down to the carbon paper. The liberal part was that the author himself remained free. Grossman wrote personally to Khrushchev, whom he had known from Stalingrad, asking for the novel’s “freedom.” It represented, he said, what he believed to be truth; it reflected his thoughts, feelings, and sufferings; and literature is by definition personal and subjective. He got a response of sorts: the Kremlin’s chief ideologist Mikhail Suslov declared to him in a personal meeting that the book would not see the light of day for two or three hundred years. Grossman died in 1964, aged fifty-eight, of kidney cancer. Despite the solicitiousness of friends, particularly Lipkin, who arranged a trip to Armenia that resulted in the luminous travelogue Peace to you, his mood was dark. According to Popoff, hours after his death, his apartment was searched.3 The typescripts of Life and Fate survived. In the mid-1970s, the distinguished—and soon-to-be émigré—writer Vladimir Voinovich arranged for them to be microfilmed, with help from Andrei Sakharov; an Austrian diplomat got them out, presumably through diplomatic pouch, and passed them on to the émigré scholars Efim Etkind and Shimon Markish.4 Markish, the son of the Yiddish poet and Antifascist Committee defendant Peretz Markish, persuaded the Swiss publisher L’Age d’homme to print the book. L’Age d’homme was an anticommunist publisher with large readership among the older, pre-Jewish waves of Soviet emigration. The “pre-Jewish” part is not irrelevant: readers objected to the book on the familiar grounds that Grossman was anti-Russian. Despite everything, the book triumphed. Shrunk down to a tiny-print edition, it made its way back to the USSR as tamizdat: dissident literature, published abroad. The eminent translator Robert Chandler published the English

2 The story is told most accurately in Popoff, Vasily Grossman, 303–316. My own 1991 retelling, which I got from Shimon Markish, is inaccurate. It’s possible that nobody wanted to tell the story in full, to protect those who helped. Markish himself received the manuscripts. 3 Popoff, Vasily Grossman, 306. 4 The detail about the diplomatic pouch is mentioned ibid., 311.

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version in 1985 and a second edition in 2006. Its first appearance in the Soviet Union, a result of Gorbachev’s liberalization, came in 1988. Life and Fate, as we have seen, comprises a social and moral evaluation of its age. Its particular focus is on the way in which characters get absorbed into the state machine, either through conviction, or sheer amoral careerism (embodied in the astonishing character Getmanov, who falls outside of the scope of this book, and also by some of the Nazis). It is held together thematically in many ways: by its varied stories of war (the same theme, many variations), and by its focus on how individuals succumb to the state and how, in isolated cases, they extricate themselves. Grossman’s book rejects all institutionalized ideologies and religions, but it is not cynical. It showcases the redemptive nature of human kindness— rare enough to be realistic, common enough to dispel despair. Some of the characters who exhibit this kind of extraordinary, altruistic kindness surprise themselves. Yet Grossman is realist enough to show that the consequences of altruistic behavior are not good for everyone. The character Zhenya saves her ex-husband Krymov, who is under arrest and in extreme peril. The problem with Zhenya’s act is not that she risks her own safety, which is her choice. But that choice means forsaking a good man, Colonel Novikov. He is arrested; no one will save him. Grossman’s wonderful biographers John and Carol Garrard write that Life and Fate has no structure.5 As generations of my students can attest, this is simply not true. Life and Fate groups its main characters in sets of three, all of whom start out at a similar point, but radiate outward. The first set, brought over from the Stalingrad novel, is composed of three people who are captured together by the Germans: the doctor Sofya Levinton, a Jew; the driver Semyonov; and the Old Bolshevik Mostovskoy. Their fates are determined by their ethnicity (“nationality” in Soviet-speak) and the intervention of chance: will someone of surpassing empathy intervene to save them? The first of the three whose fate is sealed is Mostovskoy; he is sent to a prisoner-of-war camp and will be shot. Mostovskoy’s prevailing ideology is Bolshevik-internationalist, so it makes sense that he is interned together with people of many nationalities. Sofya Levinton is sent to a death camp. Grossman uses her story to counter the idea of Jewish cowardice: before the doors to the

5 Garrard and Garrard, introduction to the second edition of The Bones of Berdichev, Kindle edition loc. 327 and 340.

What Happened Next

gas chamber are sealed, she attacks a guard. The driver Semyonov ends up in a Ukrainian village, where he is taken in at much peril by a peasant woman who passes him off as a relative. Russians were not welcome in Ukrainian villages, where they—people who spoke like Semyonov, Grossman says—were the instruments of collectivization. The old woman ignores this. Seeing before her a suffering individual, she bathes him, like a child. Grossman’s overriding concern in Life and Fate is moral reckoning: will his characters look back on their conduct and their beliefs and repent? The religious association is not accidental: the book carries a religious, though agnostic, understanding of transgression and repentance. At the center of this theme is a triad of Old Bolsheviks we examined in chapter six. Grossman views them as the progenitors of everything that went wrong in the Soviet state. Will they acknowledge what they did? Abarchuk, in the Gulag, does not. He is fearless and self-controlled, but also blind to the guilt that Grossman gives him the opportunity to confront, in the person of a dying peasant. Mostovskoy, in the prisonerof-war camp, goes a step further than Abarchuk, but in the end, he capitulates to the orders of the underground Party and sends someone he respects to his death. Only Krymov, saved by a token of Zhenya’s love, rethinks. Shimon Markish, who not only brought Grossman’s novel to publication but was the first to write about it, pointed out that the only saving grace in Grossman’s idea of the world is irrational kindness. Krymov’s ex-wife Zhenya, and Khristya, the Ukrainian woman who saves Semyonov, embody this idea. Most of the characters who act on irrational kindness are women, but some are men who engage in what we would think of as feminine behavior. Grossman is quite precise about this: in the same way as the peasant woman Khristia bathes the driver Semyonov, so the orderly to another of the book’s heroes, Major Beryozkin, bathes him in a cauldron, in a bunker, and brings him back to life. Because Grossman, inevitably, looks back to Tolstoy, his novel follows War and Peace in incorporating expository summaries of how the book should be understood. One of these is a testament by Mostovskoy’s fellow prisonerof-war, Ikonnikov. Ikonnikov contends that all religions start out with a good idea, but become corrupt; irrational kindness alone remains exempt because it is not institutionalized. Ikonnikov himself engages in an act of irrational kindness—or at least, irrational resistance—when he refuses to work on the foundations of a gas chamber. Everyone else does as they are told, including a priest (“What can we do,” he says in a mix of languages, which I will not reproduce

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here, “we are prisoners in a camp.”)6 When Ikonnikov’s testament is found with Mostovskoy’s things, he renounces the text, and with it, Ikonnikov’s idea. Ikonnikov’s testimony is a straight polemic, one of two places where the usual mechanics of fiction are suspended. We looked at the other one in chapter six, but it is worth reiterating here. Briefly, and significantly, just before the chapters about the Holocaust, Grossman refers to himself in first person as a sinner. Who will render judgment, he asks—and answers, only a sinner like himself. Looking at his life—because he has given us that opening—we can see what his sins are: his abandonment of his mother and his signing of the Pravda letter. In Life and Fate, he passes both of these acts onto Viktor Shtrum, the physicist who is (if any character has that role) the novel’s hero. Viktor doesn’t get absolution in the book. What he does get is the possibility of continuation and change. Grossman appears to have granted himself the same, and the results were his final works: Life and Fate and Forever Flowing. We could add also the travel narrative Peace to You, an appreciation of Armenia, which includes a striking, and unpublishable, passage of gratitude toward Armenians for acknowledging the suffering of Jews. At the beginning of this book, we looked at Thomas Nagel’s concept of moral luck. Life and Fate is quite explicit about a different kind of luck, what we could call run-of-the-mill luck, the kind that for no reason bathes a life in light. One of the book’s loveliest characters, Major Beryozkin, is always lucky. He is brought back from illness through the love of his orderly.7 And at the end of the book—Grossman doesn’t name him, but a good reader can easily guess— Beryozkin is reunited with his family. His barely veiled appearance gives the book not only a hopeful end, but one explicitly connected with Russia: beryozka means “birch tree.” But Beryozkin is an episodic character. In the novel as a whole, bad luck is more common. When Zhenya saves Krymov, her lover Colonel Novikov is collateral damage. This bad luck damages him irreparably. He loses his selfconfidence and his political enemies pounce; he gets arrested and we never hear from him again. Love of the altruistic, non-romantic kind is vital in Grossman’s view of the world, but it is not sufficient. The good Jewish doctor Sofya Levinton cannot save the little boy David. David himself had a life full of bad luck. Creating

6 Grossman, Zhizn′ i sud′ba, 203; Grossman, Life and Fate, 304–305. 7 The orderly bathes him, just as the peasant woman Khristya does for the driver Semyonov. Grossman also uses doublets to hold his novel together. The mirroring always introduces a surprising element. In this case, the caregiver is male.

What Happened Next

David, destined to die in the gas chamber, Grossman was imagining his own parallel life: he gave him his own birthday. Looking at himself and around him, Grossman does not see bad luck as morally exculpatory. He looks, as Nagel advised, at the situation of people in a concentration camp—and also, in a different section of the book, at Jews in a ghetto. Some of these doomed people compromise, some betray others, some acknowledge brotherhood, and a very few, like Sofya Levinton, are courageous even when courage doesn’t have a point. He also imagines the lives of the camp guards to understand for himself and his readers what brought them there. But for him, explanation is not an excuse. When Sofya’s eyes meet those of a camp guard whose story we have followed, she hates him; so, ultimately, does Grossman. Grossman disliked Lozovsky. He gives him, by name, a walk-on role in Life and Fate in which Lozovsky is an unfeeling bureaucrat—had he known about Lozovsky’s courage at the trial, perhaps he would have rethought. Jewish victims of the Doctors’ Plot are mentioned, though fictionalized (had Grossman chosen real ones, he might have hit on Shtern’s friend Rapoport). Kvitko also gets a brief mention, as a martyr. As with Lozovsky, Grossman did not know about Kvitko’s dilemma at the trial. There is nobody in the novel who, like Kvitko, accepts the limits placed on him, tries to do good, and cannot understand why his love is not reciprocated. The campaign against Shtern as a scientist is echoed in Life and Fate in the story of Viktor Shtrum. So important was it for Grossman to bring up the repression of science, that he compresses time to have make it occur during the war. Unlike biologists, physicists were ultimately let off the hook because the state needed a hydrogen bomb. Grossman uses this fact to bring his hero Viktor back into the state’s good graces. Morally, this causes Viktor to fail. In his case, the love of the regime is a piece of moral bad luck. The remaining subjects of this book do not play a role in Grossman’s novel—except perhaps for Medvedeva, an ordinary Jew among the many who are background to the stories of Sofya Levinton and Viktor’s mother, killed by Nazis in the Berdychiv ghetto. As capacious as the novel is, the novel has no character who is a spy, or a translator, or an unwitting pioneer in Birobidzhan. Lungina, Ulanovskaya, and Leder tell their own stories. Doing so, they are attuned to their individual fallibility and to the progress of their understanding. All of them convey what it is like to be swept along. Extricating oneself is difficult, and contingent, but it is the core of all their stories, the most important thing they have to pass on to us.

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213

Index

A

Abakumov, Viktor, 169 Academy of Medical Sciences, 167 Academy of Sciences, 53, 111, 131n24, 160, 163–65 Agitation work, 19, 30–31, 46, 57, 61. See also Propaganda Akhmatova, Anna, 187, 193 Alafuzov, Ivan, 31 Alafuzov Factory, 30–32, 47 Alexander II, Emporer, 52 Allilueva, Svetlana, 164 All-Union Agricultural Academy. See VASKhNIL Alma-Ata, 124 Almaz, Nadezhda, 111 Alter, Wiktor, 120–21n2 Altman, Ilya, 148n10 Altshuler, Boris, 163n46 Am Olam, 72 Amsterdam International, 46 Amur, river, 71 An-sky, Semen (Rappoport, Shloyme), 28n35 antisemitism, 3, 11, 38, 42, 77n49, 96, 121, 124, 127, 130–32, 134–36, 138–39, 145– 47, 164, 167n57, 174, 177, 179–80, 182, 184–88, 192–93, 196, 198 Argentina, 73, 110 Arkhangelsk, 112 Armenia, 200–1, 204 Artillery Academy. See Frunze Military Academy Atlases family, 99 Auschwitz, 174 Averikhin, captain, 102 Avdeenko, Aleksandr, 155n29 B Babel, Isaac, 19, 95–96 Babushkin, Galya, 78–79 Babushkin, Yefim, 78–79 Babyn Yar, 120 Bakh, Aleksei, 51

Baku, 49 Baltics, the, 119, 171–173 Baltimore, 68, 69n22 Banner (Znamia), journal, 120, 140–41, 200–1 Barton, Charlie. See Minster, Leon Battelli, Frederic, 51 BBC, 132 Beethoven, Ludwig, 98 Beevor, Antony, 140, 141n47 Beizer, Michael, 55, 200 Belarus, 14, 50, 71, 113, 119, 132, 171 Bengelsdorf, Mikhail (Moyshe), 73, 75–76 Bengelsdorf, Sergo, 71–72, 74, 76 Berdychiv, 109–10, 120, 137, 139, 143, 177, 205 Bergelson, David, 23, 74, 123, 154, 161– 62n43, 170, 174 Beria, Lavrenty, 111, 146, 168 Berkman, Alexander, 59, 78 Bernshtein, Alexander D., 164–65, 170 Berlin, 24, 29, 36–38, 47, 58, 63–64, 83–86, 94, 153, 187–88, 190 Bialik. Chayim Nachman, 36 Bible, the, 161, 200 Birobidzhan, 3–4, 8, 57–58, 71–76, 79, 205 Black Book, 121–22, 132, 134, 141–43, 147– 48, 152, 156–57, 162 Black Sea, 119 Blunden, Godfrey, 184 Boborykin, Pyotr, 30 Bolshevik, 7, 13, 24, 26, 29–33, 44–46, 51, 55, 60–61, 81, 90, 97–100, 109, 114–15, 150, 155–57, 173, 175–76, 185, 202. See also Old Bolshevik Borisoglebsk, 135–36 Botkin Hospital, 159 Brodsky, Lasar, 53 Bronstein, Matvey, 43 Brownsville, Brooklyn, 67 Brushtein, Aleksandra, 199 Bubyonov, Mikhail, 197 Buchenwald, 174, 176 Buckley, William F., 64n9

216

The Dream of Social Justice and Bad Moral Luck

Budnitsky, Oleg, 109n41 Buenos Aires, 73, 75 Bukharin, Nikolai, 52, 107, 132, 153 Bukharin-Rykov trial, 52, 153 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 6n1 Bulletin of Experimental Biology and Medicine, The, journal, 131 Butyrka, prison, 111 Byron, George Gordon, 30

C

California, 56, 71, 73, 75–76, 85n60, 101, 187 Canada, 122 Cancer Research, journal, 166 Catherine the Great, empress, 81 Caucasus, 190 Cendrars, Blaise, 85n60 Central Asia, 145 Central Committee of the Party, 134, 146, 155–56, 201 Chagall, Marc, 36 Chamberlain, Joseph Austen, 90 Chambers, Esther, 61 Chambers, Whittaker, 58, 61, 64–67 Chandler, Robert, 140n43, 197, 201–2 cheder (primary religious school), 15–17, 20–21, 23n27, 28–29, 58. See also religious upbringing Cheka (secret police), 55, 61, 168, 179, 182. See also Ministry of State Security Cheptsov, Alexander, 130, 151, 153–54, 159, 161, 171–72 Chelyabinsk, 182 Chiang Kai-Shek, 37 China, 47, 57, 62, 72 Chistopol, 124 Chuikov, Vasily, 141 Chukovskaya, Lidia, 124–25, 173 Chukovsky, Kornei, 22–23, 43, 95, 124–25, 150, 152 collectivization, 3, 10–12, 62–63, 65, 72–73, 78, 106–8, 112, 119–20, 122, 136, 144, 147, 181, 192, 203 Columbia University, 12, 150–51 Columbia Law School, 172 Comintern, 46, 69n24, 70n27 Committee of Jewish Writers, Artists, and Scientists, 122 Communism, 6n1, 7, 46, 66, 84n60, 105, 116, 134, 150, 154, 186 Communist Party, 9, 36, 76, 93, 101, 200 Conquest, Robert, 90 Copenhagen, 69 Courland, 50

Crimea, 72, 94, 115, 122, 146, 156–57, 159, 162, 181 Crimean Project, 72, 122, 146–47, 156–57, 180–81 Czechoslovakia, 47, 186, 188

D

Danylivka, 26 Dawn, literary journal, 24 death camps, 9, 119–20, 122, 132, 134, 139, 143, 175, 200, 202–3, 205 Denmark, 69–70, 103, 106, 183 Depression, 1, 63, 71, 75, 86, 105 Der Emes, newspaper, 121, 123 Der Emes, publishing house, 148 Der Fraynd (The friend), newspaper, 15 dissident movement, 45, 49, 62, 67, 125, 199, 201 please don’t restore—can’t have the ‘s Diaghilev, Sergei, 86 Dinamo factory, 76–79, 100 Dinezon, Yankev, 19n13 Doctors’ Plot, 11, 179–80, 186, 188, 190–91, 195, 197, 198–99, 205 Dodin, Lev, 140n42 Don, river, 112 Donbass, 111–12, 156n29 Dostoevsky, Fedor, 13 Dreiser, Theodore, 63 Dridzo, Abram, 27–28, 162 Dridzo, Vera, 32, 48, 129

E

Egypt, 189 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 86, 121–22, 124, 141–42, 147–48, 157, 181–82, 188–89, 197 Einstein, Albert, 122, 177, 196 Engels, 134 Erlich, Henryk, 120–21n2 espionage, 5, 9, 61, 67, 69–70, 76, 103–4, 151, 156, 164, 172 Estraikh, Gennady, 12, 36n1, 42n17, 43, 95, 145 Etkind, Efim, 201 Europe, 13, 50–51, 57, 62, 74, 92, 131, 136 Eynikeyt (Unity), newspaper, 121, 123, 125, 141

F

Factory work, 30–32, 42–43, 47, 56, 76–79, 112, 116, 195 Fadeev, Alexander, 112, 156n29, 196–97 Famine, 10–11, 24, 26, 31, 44, 63–64, 78, 86–87, 106, 119, 136, 143–44, 165 Far East, 71, 73, 75. See also Birobidzhan

Index

Fareynikte Yidishe Komunistishe Partey (United Jewish Communist Party), 81 Fedin, Konstantin, 156n29 Fefer, Itsik, 95, 122, 148–49, 151–52, 157–58, 161, 170–71, 173–74, 179, 189–90 Fineberg, Joe, 102–3 Finland, 135 First Moscow Trial, 48–49, 106 Five-Year Plan, 63, 84, 89 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 92 Foreign Language Publishing House, 100, 102, 133, 188 Fourth Department. See Military Intelligence France, 7, 47, 58, 80, 84, 86, 92 Frunze Military Academy, 104, 106–8, 182 FSB (Federal Security Service), 45n27, 46n30, 172

G

Garrard, Carol and John, 12, 110–11, 114n50, 137–39, 202 Genesis, 141n45 Geneva, 7, 32, 35, 51–53, 83, 110, 153, 166, 172 Genocide, 63, 119, 122, 134, 142–43, 156, 180. See also Famine German Communist party, 37, 63, 85, 91, 95 Germany, 8, 37, 46–47, 61, 80–82, 86, 119, 187 Gershuni, Grigory, 32 Gestapo, 69n24 ghetto, 120, 137, 139, 143, 177, 189, 205 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 30 Gogol, Nikolai, 187 Goldfaden, Avram, 23 Goldman, Emma, 59–60, 78 Goldman, Abram. See Sherman, Nicholas Gorbachev, Mikhail, 202 Gordin, Jacob, 23 Gorky, Maxim, 45, 83, 92 Goslitizdat, publishing house, 155 Great Britain, 90, 122–23 Great Patriotic War (Napoleonic War), 196 Grodno, 108, 132 Gromyko, Andrei, 148 Grossman, Katya, 110–11 Grossman, Semyon Osipovich, 110–12, 116 Grossman, Vasily, 4–10, 12, 25, 90, 93, 107, 109–16, 120, 124, 134, 136–48, 155, 167, 173–77, 179, 180n2, 181–82, 192–93, 195–98, 200–205 Grossman, Yekaterina Savelievna, 110–11, 120 Guber, Boris, 112 Guber, Olga Mikhailovna, 112–13

Guibbory, Achsah, 1 Gulag, 6–7, 65n11, 69, 76, 89, 113, 129, 138, 148, 175, 183, 185–86, 199–200, 203 Gulf of Finland, 119

H

Ha-Melits (The advocate), newspaper, 15 Hamburg, 7, 37, 41–42, 46, 61, 152 Hebrew, 14–15, 23, 27, 36, 39n8, 50, 58, 80, 82, 85, 162 Heine, Heinrich, 30 Higher Women’s Courses, 50, 82 Himmler, Heinrich, 141 Hiss, Alger, 64 Hitler, Adolf, 86, 91, 119, 121, 124, 183 Hofshteyn, Dovid, 95, 97n15, 148–49, 154n27, 158, 161, 170 Holocaust, 3, 5, 10–11, 13, 16, 39, 94, 119, 121, 134, 142–43, 146, 154, 157, 160, 174, 184, 189, 204 Holoskovo, 20 Hunger. See Famine

I

IKOR ( Jewish Colonizing Organization), 73 Ilf, Ilya, 47, 77n49, 89 Imperial Russia, 7, 110 India, 116 industrialization, 62, 67, 76, 83, 89, 112, 115– 16, 119. See also Five-Year Plan Industrial Party trial, 89 Institute of Foreign Literature. See Literary Institute Institute of Foreign Relations, 184 Institute for Infectious Diseases, 52 Institute for Physiology, 53 Israel, 20n17, 62, 69n23, 145, 181–82, 188– 89, 199 Izvestia, newspaper, 41

J

Jambyl, 168–69 Jefferson, Thomas, 72 Jerusalem, 116 Jewish Antifascist Committee, 4, 8, 26, 28, 43, 50, 67, 69, 71, 101, 120–25, 130, 132, 134, 141–42, 145–47, 148n10, 151, 153, 156, 158, 162, 168, 170–71, 174, 179, 190, 194, 197, 201 Jewish Antifascist Committee trial, 4, 101, 145– 49, 151–53, 161n43, 170–74, 190, 194 Jewish Enlightenment, 15, 27, 82 Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 122, 146, 181

217

218

The Dream of Social Justice and Bad Moral Luck

Jewish Peasant, The (Evreiskii krest’ianin), journal, 73 Jewish Socialist Bund, 110, 114, 120n2 Journal of Jewish Enlightenment (Vestnik evreiskogo prosveshcheniia), 82 Judaism, 35, 161, 200

K

Kalinin, Mikhail, 27 Kama, river, 192 Kamenev, Lev, 106 Karelia, 112 Kataev, Ivan, 112 Kaunas, 96 Kazakevich, Emmanuil, 96–97 Kazakhstan, 136, 168 Kazan, 29–31, 192 Kerr, Walter, 183 KGB (Committee of State Security), 201 Khaldei, Yevgeny, 119 Kharkiv, 31, 41–43 Kharkiv tractor factory, 42–43 Khimki, 101 Khotimsk, 14, 17–18, 19n13, 136 Khrushchev, Nikita, 201 Kirov, Sergei, 48, 105 Klier, John, 13 Klintsy, 14–15, 18, 55–56, 136 Klyueva, Nina, 166–70 Knorring, Vera, 1, 12 Koestler, Arthur, 150, 183 Koktebel, 94, 191 Koller, Sabine, 12, 38–39 Komsomol, 48, 50, 76, 93, 101, 103, 134 Kostyrchenko, Gennady, 168, 180, 181n4, 193 Kozhevnikov, Vadim, 201 Kozodoi A., 36n1 KR, vaccine, 166–67, 170 Kremlin, 90, 180, 201 Krestinsky, Nikolai, 52, 83, 90, 153 Kronstadt, 60 Krupskaya, Nadezhda, 32, 48, 129 Krylenko, Nikolai, 91 Krutikov, Mikhail, 12, 43, 91 Kuibyshev, 156, 183 Kvitko, Betti, 24, 36n1, 37–38, 124 Kvitko Etele, 95, 127, 154 Kvitko, Leyb, 4–8, 10, 12–14, 17, 20–26, 28, 35–43, 52–53, 69, 73, 90, 95–99, 101, 105, 113, 115, 120, 122–29, 142, 145–47, 149–55, 158–61, 169, 174–76, 184–85, 199, 205 Kultur-lige, 36 Kyiv, 16, 21, 23–24, 36, 42, 53, 81, 95, 120, 124

L

LaGuardia, Fiorello, 120 L’Age d’homme, publishing house, 201 Lasker, Emanuel, 91 Latvia, 50, 57 Leder, Abram, 103, 132–34, 187–91, 200 Leder, Mary, 4, 6, 8–9, 47, 57–58, 71–80, 99–105, 120–21, 132–33, 137, 145, 151n19, 179, 184, 187–88, 190, 192, 200, 205 Lefortovo, prison, 123n9, 169, 171, 185 Lenin, Vladimir, 7, 31–33, 35, 44–46, 48, 51, 59, 97n14, 98, 110, 129, 151, 158 Leningrad, 37, 48, 56, 71, 112, 135, 165 Levina, Slava, 1 Levitin, Boris, 77 Levitin, Yefim, 77 Liebknecht, Karl, 46 Liepaja (Libau/Libave), 50 Lipkin, Semyon, 137–39, 197, 200–1 Lippincott, publishing house, 184 lishentsy, 55, 77 Literary Institute, 94, 191, 193 Literaturnaia gazeta (The Literary Gazette), 112–13 Lithuania, 96 Littlepage, John D., 84 Litvakov, Moyshe, 41–42, 101, 123, 152 Litvakova, Eda, 101 Lomonosov Institute. See Moscow University Lozovsky, Galina, 28n35, 156’ Lozovsky, Natalia, 1, 12 Lozovsky, Solomon (Dridzo), 4, 6–8, 10–14, 17, 21, 26–33, 35, 43–49, 53, 57–58, 61–62, 65, 67, 69, 81, 84, 90, 99, 108, 111, 120–23, 129, 145, 148–51, 153, 155–60, 162, 169–70, 172–76, 183, 185–86, 190, 199, 205 Lozova, 28 Lubyanka, prison, 7, 151, 169n64, 175–76, 185 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 83 Lungina, Lilianna (née Markovich), 4, 6, 8–9, 57–58, 79–87, 90–94, 111, 120, 191–95, 199, 205 Lungin, Semyon, 193–94, 199 Lungin, Pavel, 199 Lungin, Evgeny, 199 Luxemberg, Rosa, 46 Lyons, 47 Lysenko, Trofim, 165–66

M

Maiofis, Maria, 169–70

Index

Magnitogorsk, 112 Malenkov, Georgy, 156 Malkin, Boris, 52, 129, 131n24, 168n61, 169 Manley, Rebecca, 136 Markish, Peretz, 12, 95, 121, 123, 149, 154, 158, 174, 201 Markish, Shimon, 12, 109, 201, 203 Markovich, Zinovy, 79–85, 89–91, 94, 111– 12, 191 Markovich, Maria (née Liberson), 81–82, 84–86, 91, 191–92 Marseille, 62 Marx, Karl, 19, 73, 177 Marxism / Marxist theory, 4, 7, 13–14, 16, 19–20, 26, 29–30, 35, 43, 45–46, 51–52, 72–73, 84n60, 100, 112, 115, 146, 150– 51, 161n43, 165, 186 Mayo Clinic, 163n46 McCuistion, William, 69n24 Mechnikov Medical-Biological Institute, 52 Medical Worker (Meditsinskii rabotnik), journal, 164 Medgiz, publishing house, 164 Medvedev, Abram, 29, 54–55, 135–36 Medvedev, Gessel, 135 Medvedeva, Doba–Mera, 4, 6–8, 10, 12–21, 23, 26–28, 30, 35–36, 53–56, 81, 96, 117, 120, 135–37, 161, 200, 205 Medvedeva’s aunt, Gesia, 15–16, 18, 54, 135–36 Medvedeva’s father, Izrail-Velka, 14–20, 27–28, 53–54, 81 Meir, Golda (Meyerson), 145–46, 188–89 memoirs, 4–6, 8, 11–12, 14, 16, 23, 26, 28, 30, 36n1, 37, 38n4, 47, 50, 57, 60–61, 64–67, 71, 77, 80, 82–83, 86, 99–100, 102, 105, 107–8, 117, 124, 167–68, 173, 176, 180– 84, 186, 191–92, 195, 199–200 Mendel, Gregor, 165 Mensheviks, 29, 110–12 Mexico, 66, 122 Middle East, 145 Mikhlin, Yevsei, 75, 78, 99–101 Mikhlin, Lisa, 76, 78, 99–101 Mikhoels, Solomon, 43, 74, 121–23, 145, 147, 149, 152, 157–58, 174, 179, 185, 188–90, 94 Mikoyan, Anastas, 103 military draft / service, 28–29, 40–41, 55, 81 Military Intelligence, 101, 103–4, 107 See also Razvedupr Minaev, Yevgeny Petrovich, 42 Mining Institute, 81, 89 Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), 149

Ministry of State Security (MGB), 50, 169, 179 Mink, George (Mindowski, Godi), 46, 65–66, 69–70 Minsk, 76n47, 147 Minster (Mintner), Leon, 65 Mints, Isaak, 195 Modernism in arts, 5, 19n13, 24, 35–36, 38, 43, 86, 95–96, 125 Mogilev Gubernia, 14, 66 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 50, 66n14, 119, 158, 197 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 41, 108, 119, 129, 133 Montessori method, 82 Morgn Freyheyt, newspaper, 69 Moscow, 4, 8, 11, 37, 42–43, 50–52, 59–61, 64–65, 67–69, 71, 75–76, 78–80, 83–85, 90–92, 94–95, 100–1, 103, 106, 111–12, 124, 133–34, 137–40, 146, 159, 163, 167, 170, 173, 177, 179, 182–84, 187–89, 192– 94, 199 Moscow News, newspaper, 65 Moscow University, 51–52, 101, 130, 134, 193–94 multilingualism, 7–8, 14, 23, 29, 37, 50, 57–58, 60–61, 80, 82, 91, 101, 179, 183, 199, 203 Murav, Harriet, 12, 39, 161n43 Mykolaiv, 96

N

Naberezhnye Chelny, 192 Nagel, Thomas, 9, 204–5 Nakhimovsky, Alexander, 1, 12 Nakhimovsky, Anatoly, 1, 12 Nazi invasion, 10, 96, 120, 122–23, 132, 133– 35, 137, 142, 157–58, 205 Nazism, 29, 41, 63, 69n24, 119–20, 128, 131, 135, 137, 143, 175–76 Nekrasov, Viktor, 192 Netherlands, the, 47 New Economic Policy (NEP), 55, 62 New Haven, 71 Newman, Roberta, 1, 12 New Life (Novaia zhizn′), newspaper, 45 New World (Novyi mir), magazine, 167, 196– 97, 200 New York, 6–7, 16, 37, 46, 54, 58, 61, 63–68, 69n22, 86, 91, 105, 122, 146, 151, 167, 172, 193n38, 199 New York Communist Press, publishing house, 152 New York Times, newspaper, 106, 167, 183, 185 Nice, 86 Nizhnyaya Tunguska, river, 32

219

220

The Dream of Social Justice and Bad Moral Luck

Nobel Prize, 163n45, 173–74, 193, 196 Novik, Paul (Peysach), 69, 158 Novosibirsk, 112 Nuremberg Trials, 141, 157–58 Nusinov, Ilya, 194 Nusinov, Isaak, 123n9, 174, 194

O

occupied territories, 11, 108, 119–23, 136, 157, 187–88 Odesa (Odessa), 19n13, 59, 120, 133, 182 Ogonyok, magazine, 109 Old Bolshevik, 27, 30–31, 47–49, 52, 55, 78, 81, 85n60, 99–100, 107, 135, 155, 173– 76, 182, 202–3 Ordzhonikidze, Sergo, 76n47 Orsk, 136 Ostrovsky, Semyon, 161 Ozerov, Lev, 10 OZET (Society for the Settlement of Jewish Toilers on the Land), 73

P

Pagis, Dan, 142 Palchinsky, Pyotr, 89 Pale of Settlement, 13, 50, 53–54, 56, 77, 119–20 Palestine, 20, 58, 73, 74n40, 76, 82–83, 85, 122, 146, 189 Paperno, Irina, 1, 11 Parin, Vasily, 167 Paris, 8, 31–32, 47, 61, 80, 85, 184, 191 Party member, 4, 9, 11n5, 29, 37, 52, 64, 78, 81, 95, 125, 152, 155, 175, 200 Paulus, Friedrich, 140 Paustovsky, Konstantin, 113 Pavlov, Ivan, 52, 165–66 People’s Will, political movement, 51 Pennsylvania, 68 Pereval, writers’ group, 112 Perovskaya, Sofia, 52 Peter and Paul Fortress, 30 Petliura, Symon, 55 Petrov, Evgeny, 47, 89 Petrovsky, Miron, 38n4 Philadelphia, 65 Platonov, Andrei, 89 Plekhanov, Georgy, 7, 51, 110 Podolsk, 66 pogrom, 13–4, 17–19, 24, 37, 39n7, 82, 96, 124, 125, 171, 192 Poland, 13, 16, 187 Politburo, 11, 148, 155, 165 Poltava, 80–82, 85–86, 192

Poltavskaya, Klavdia, 92–93 Popoff, Alexandra, 12, 181n2, 201 Pravda, newspaper, 84, 107, 111, 113–14, 174, 179, 181–82, 186, 188, 194–95, 197, 204 preschool day-care for children, 7, 15, 21, 31, 82, 104, 134. See also cheder Prevost, Jean-Louis, 51 Profintern, 46–47, 61–62, 65, 69n24, 111 Prokofiev, Sergei, 43, 74, 193 Propaganda, 63, 65, 73, 82, 123, 130, 135, 146, 151–52, 156 Purin, Vasily, 167 Purim, 180 Pushkin, Alexander, 30

Q

Quota system, 7, 16, 50, 80–81, 177, 193n38. See also Pale of Settlement

R

Radio Svoboda, 76n47 Rapoport, Yakov, 52, 129, 166–70, 173, 199, 205 Razvedupr (Intelligence Directorate), 62, 65–66, 70, 101–2, 104 Red Army, 38, 41, 97, 113, 146, 176, 180 Red Banner of Labor Prize, 95 Red Cross, 70 Red International of Labor Unions. See Profintern Red Star (Krasnaia zvezda), newspaper, 140–41 Red Square, 90–91, 180 Red World (Di royter velt), journal, 41 Reiss, Manya (Aerova), 191 religious upbringing, 3, 14–16, 20–22, 24, 27, 50, 58, 77–78, 80–81, 110, 127, 138, 150, 161, 180, 202–3 Revolution, 1, 3–4, 7, 10, 19, 24–26, 33, 39, 44–46, 55–56, 59–62, 77, 81, 90, 96, 98–99, 106, 111, 150, 157, 200 Riga, 132–33, 173n77 Robeson, Paul, 122, 179, 189–90 Robeson, Paul Jr., 189–90 Rockefeller, Nelson, 193n38 Rosenbliett, Philip, 66–67 Roskin, Grigory, 166–70, 195 Rostov, 133–34 Rubenstein, Joshua, 148n10, 189 Rudina, Viktoria, 107–8 Rudin, Yakov, 107 Rudnitsky, Konstantin, 194 Rykov, Aleksei, 52, 153

Index

S

Sabbath, 16, 85 sabotage, 49, 62, 84, 89, 116, 135. See also wrecking Sacco and Vanzetti Factory, 112, 116 Sakharov, Andrei, 201 Santa Monica, 73 Schatz, Albert, 163n45 school education, 7–8, 15, 21, 23, 28–31, 50, 74, 80–81, 83, 85–86, 91–94, 110 Schur, Anna, 161n43 Searchlight (Prozhektor), magazine, 42 self-education, 7, 23, 26–28, 81 Senderovich, Sasha, 1, 72n36 Serebrovsky, Aleksandr, 85n60 Shakhty trial, 62, 84, 89 Salant, Yankl, 1, 12 Shamberg, Abram, 17, 48n38 Shamberg, Valentina (née Malenkova), 156 Shamberg, Vladimir, 26–27, 29, 45, 46n30, 129, 155–56 Shanghai, 7, 62, 64 Shcherbakov, Aleksandr, 121, 123, 156, 158 Shchors, Nikolai, 55 Sherentsis, David, 110–11, 114 Sherman, Nicholas, 70 Shimeliovich, Abram, 161 Shimeliovich, Boris, 150, 153, 159–61, 170, 172 Shneer, David, 12, 42n17 Sholem Aleichem, 19n13, 54, 74, 76 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 43, 48, 147, 193 Sholokhov, Mikhail, 174–75, 196 show trial, 5, 48, 52, 90, 101, 106, 111, 130–31, 145–49, 151, 153, 155–62, 166–73, 180, 185, 190, 205 Shtein, Aleksandr, 167 Shtern, Bruno, 50, 163–64 Shtern, Lina, 4–8, 10, 19, 27, 35, 50–53, 57–58, 83, 90, 99, 101, 110, 120–21, 124, 129–32, 135, 145, 148–50, 153, 155, 160, 162–66, 168–73, 176–77, 184–86, 190, 199, 205 shtetl, 4, 7, 10, 13–14, 20, 23, 26, 36, 40, 59, 96–97, 99, 121, 125 Shtor, a scientist, 130–31 Shvartsman, Oyzer, 97 Siberia, 11, 30, 32, 47–48, 78, 112, 116, 180, 192, 195 Sikorsky, Igor, 67 Simonov, Konstantin, 141, 167, 196 Sinclair, Upton, 63 Skvortsova, Olimpiada, 168–69 Slansky trial, 188

Slezkine, Yury, 48n38, 108n37 Slonimsky, Nicholas, 83 Smith, Adam, 72 Smith, Walter Bedell, 167–68 Sochi, 27 Social Democrats, 29–31, 37, 45, 63 socialist realism in arts, 5, 43, 95–96, 110, 113, 173, 194 Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiles, 48, 78, 99–100 Society of Old Bolsheviks, 48, 100. See also Old Bolsheviks Society of Physiologists, Biochemists, and Pharmacologists, 170 Solts, Aron, 83, 107–8, 182 Sormov, 112 Sorrento, 83 Soviet Army, 29, 81–82, 120, 122, 129, 140– 41, 146, 154 Soviet Civil War, 10, 13, 24, 37–38, 55, 58, 77, 97, 106 Soviet-Finnish War, 129, 135 Soviet-Polish War, 13, 55, 113–14 Soviet Union, 4–5, 8, 15, 35, 37, 42, 57, 63, 68, 71, 74–75, 83–84, 86–87, 92, 94, 98, 104, 108, 116, 119, 121n2, 122–23, 126, 135, 142, 145, 152, 154, 157, 159, 161, 163–64, 169, 179, 181, 183, 185, 187–88, 190, 192, 199–200, 202 Sovinformburo, press agency, 120, 123, 155–56 Spain, 162 Spanish Civil War, 66 Spartacist Uprising, 46 Stakhanov, Aleksei, 194 Stalin, Joseph, 3–6, 10–11, 31, 42–43, 48–50, 62, 64–65, 84n60, 89–90, 92–93, 96, 97n14, 100, 103, 106, 112–13, 119–20, 121n2, 128, 131–32, 138, 151, 155–56, 164–67, 173–76, 179–83, 186–88, 190– 91, 195–99 Stalingrad, 75, 79, 134, 140–41, 146, 173–74, 176, 189, 192, 195–97, 201 Stalingrad Tractor Factory, 195 Stalinist trial, 10, 160 Stalin Prize, 132, 173–74, 197 Stanislavsky theater, 194 Steffens, Lincoln, 65 St. Petersburg, 1, 12, 30, 50–51, 81–82, 89, 140n42, 191 Stravinsky, Igor, 86 Strievskaya, Nina, 52, 129 Strievsky, Alexander, 129 Strong, Anna Louise, 65

221

222

The Dream of Social Justice and Bad Moral Luck

Stumpfe, Herbert, 141, 143 Sultzberger, Cyrus, 185 Suslov, Mikhail, 158, 201 synagogue, 27, 98, 146, 161, 188 Switzerland, 7, 71, 84

T

Talmi, Leon, 101, 151, 190 Talmi, Vladimir, 151n19, 190 Talmud, 27, 28n35, 162 Tartakov, 106–7 TASS, press agency, 119, 134–35, 179, 191 Tbilisi, 49n40 Tchaikovsky Hall, 189 Tel Aviv, 85 Temple, the, 161 Tenth Party Congress, 44n26 Terror, 3–4, 10, 11n5, 43, 48, 53, 79, 89–90, 92–94, 97, 100–1, 104–8, 112, 115, 117, 128–29, 148, 155, 170, 182–84 Teumin, Emilia, 149, 152 Thaw, 108 Theater Institute, 194 Third Communist International. See Comintern Thompson, Craig, 67 Tikhonkoe. See Birobidzhan Time Magazine, 67 Tisha b’Av, 161n43 Tito, Josip Broz, 188 Tolstoy, Aleksei N., 156n29 Tolstoy, Lev, 139, 196, 203 Torquemada, Tomas de, 162 Treblinka, 141–43, 167, 196 Trifonov, Valentin, 108 Trifonov, Yury, 49n38, 108 Trotsky, Leon, 49, 66, 72 Tsukerman, Veniamin, 163 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 125 Tukhachevsky, Mikhail, 113 Turgenev, Ivan, 52 Tvardovsky, Alexander, 196, 200 Tychina, Pavlo, 41, 43

U

Ukraine, 24, 26, 37, 50, 55, 65, 71, 87, 97, 112– 13, 119–20, 140–41, 143, 146, 181, 188 Ukrainian Hetmanate, 55 Ulanovskaya, Maya, 59n1, 67–68, 104, 199– 200 Ulanovskaya, Irina, 68 Ulanovskaya, Nadezhda (Fridgant, Esther), 4, 6–9, 19, 20n17, 37, 47, 57–71, 76, 78–79, 85, 90, 99, 101–9, 120, 132, 156, 169n64, 179, 182–88, 199–200, 205

Ulanovsky, Alexander (Alyosha), 8, 37, 46, 58–71, 76, 78–79, 85, 99, 101–9, 182–83, 185, 190, 200 Uman, 23–24 United Kingdom, the, 122 USA, 1, 8, 13, 20, 50, 54, 57–59, 63–66, 68, 70–73, 79, 84, 91, 102–3, 110, 122–23, 131, 148–49, 157–58, 163, 166–67, 179, 181, 187, 193, 195, 200 US Communist Party, 65 US Congress, 163n46 US Patent Office, 67 USSR, 8, 41, 52, 63, 67, 69, 71, 72n36, 73n38, 85, 91, 104–5, 129, 131, 148n10, 152, 157, 163, 166, 167n57, 173, 185, 191, 201 Uzbekistan, 111

V

Vail, Boris, 69 Varshavsky, Yakov, 194 VASKhNIL (All-Union Agricultural Academy), 164–72 Vasserman, Lyuba, 76 Vatenberg, Ilya (Watenberg), 150–51, 172 Vatenberg-Ostrovskaya, Chaika, 101, 161, 172, 190 Vavilov, Nikolai, 165 le Vavilov, Sergei, 164–65 Vein, Alla, 51, 52n47 Vienna, 50 Vilnius, 107 Voenizdat, publishing house, 141 Voinovich, Vladimir, 201 VOKS (Cultural Relations Society), 195 Volga, river, 120, 134, 140 Volhynia, 65 Volodarsky, Boris, 69n24, 70n26, 70n31 Voloshin, Maksim, 94 Vorkuta, 111 Vovsi, Miron, 174, 180 Vyshinsky, Andrei, 108, 153, 189, 190n30

W

Waksman, Selman, 163–64 Warsaw, 86–87, 189 Washington, 189 WASP, party, 65 Weimar Republic, 37, 46, 83, 85 Weinberg, Mieczyslaw, 43, 147 West Chester, 68 White Sea Canal, 89, 116 Winchevsky, Morris, 42n17 Winter, Ella, 65 World War I, 13, 32, 55, 81, 133, 191

Index

World War II, 1, 3–4, 10–11, 50, 107, 110, 119–20, 123, 130–31, 133, 135–36, 140, 146, 156, 163, 165, 173–74, 177, 179–80, 183–84, 195, 200 wrecking, 49–50, 89–90, 111. See also sabotage Writers Union, 95, 124–25, 137, 196

Yiddish culture, 3, 28, 36 Yiddish theater, 21, 74–75, 194 YIVO, 16 Yugoslavia, 70, 186 Yuzefovich, Joseph, 160

Y

Zarudin, Nikolai, 112 Zhdanov, Andrei, 155 Zhemchuzhina, Polina (née Karpovskaia, Perl), 66n14 Zhytomyr, 65 Zinoviev, Grigory, 106 Zionism, 3, 8, 19–20, 40, 72, 158, 181, 190 Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 187, 193 Zuskin, Veniamin, 12, 74, 123, 146, 174 Zuskin-Perelman, Ala, 1, 12, 146, 149

Yakir, Iona, 97, 99, 113 Yefimov, Boris, 42, 180 Yevsektsia, 36, 42 Yezhov, Nikolai, 108, 111–12 Yiddish, 1, 3, 5, 7–8, 12, 14–15, 19, 21, 23, 25n29, 28, 36–37, 39–41, 42n17, 43, 50, 58, 60, 68–69, 71, 73–77, 80–82, 95, 111, 116, 121–23, 127, 133, 141, 145, 153–54, 171, 179, 189, 194, 201

Z

223

“If you were arrested and interrogated by the NKVD in Lubyanka, how would you act? In telling not only the WHAT but also exploring the crucial WHY, award-winning author Alice Stone Nakhimovsky brings posthumous justice and dignity to the martyrs of socialism. In eight dramatic story-biographies, she fixes on truth in the face of humanity’s most painful cruelties.” — Brian (Yossi) Horowitz, Sizeler Family Chair Professor, Tulane University

“The Dream of Social Justice and Bad Moral Luck provides parallel stories of eight men and women—all of them Jews—who lived and died under catastrophic historical circumstances, the 1917 revolution, World War II, the Holocaust, and several waves of Stalin’s terror, forced to make difficult moral choices. The results were out of their control. A historical study, carefully researched, this book will fascinate diverse readers who wonder how people lived and acted in ‘dark times.’ Superbly written, enhanced by the author’s gentle irony, it speaks to those who negotiate the political and cultural landscape we inhabit today.” — Irina Paperno, author of Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams

“This book by Alice Nakhimovsky makes a superb new addition to the growing library of studies of Soviet Jewry, which is not surprising, considering Nakhimovsky’s status as one of the founders of the field of Russian-Jewish literary studies. The stories Nakhimovsky tells—from the poet Leyb Kvitko to the writer Vasily Grossman—illuminate the hopes and tragedies of the lives of Soviet Jewish intellectuals under Stalin, enriching immensely the readers’ understanding of this complex and pivotal epoch.” — Marat Grinberg, Professor of Russian and Humanities, Reed College

“Alice Nakhimovsky’s new book writes new history of Soviet Jewish culture by focusing on individuals who both created it and fell victims to Soviet policies towards it. Focusing on eight people, three men and five women, including writers Vassily Grossman and Leyb Kvitko, scientist Lina Shtern, translator Lilianna Lungina and others, the book offers insights on career trajectories, difficult choices and dilemmas of these talented individuals. By avoiding the old-fashioned lenses of suppression or totalitarian ideologies, or imposing measures of identity, the book is an excellent example of what happens to a historical writing when people are placed front and center, rather than as illustrations to broader phenomenon. Nakhimovsky’s study is deeply researched, extraordinarily insightful, and beautifully written. I cannot recommend it highly enough!” — Anna Shternshis, Al and Malka Green Professor of Yiddish Studies, University of Toronto