Titans of History

I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union. I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others … I am asking for only one thing—let me finish my work.

Isaac Babel

The Soviet author Isaac Babel ranks alongside the Frenchman Maupassant (indeed he wrote a story called “Guy de Maupassant”) as one of the most gifted short-story writers of all—and his fate was even more tragic. Babel’s passionate, tender, original, sensual, violent and witty stories exemplify the beauty and power of the genre. His gift as a writer is encapsulated in the comment of his friend the poet Osip Mandelstam: “It is not often that one sees such undisguised curiosity in the eyes of a grown-up.”

Babel was born in the Jewish streets of the cosmopolitan port of Odessa in the Ukraine. The Jewish underworld of gangsters, whores and rabbis he observed there is vividly depicted in his Tales of Odessa. Babel’s life was spent defying persecution. As a child, he had seen Odessa’s Jews murdered in a pogrom. When he moved to St. Petersburg to study literature—a city where Jews were banned along with “traitors, malcontents and whiners”—he had to assume a false name.

Babel fought briefly on the Romanian front during the First World War, but he was injured and discharged. It was his experiences as a correspondent for the Red Army’s savage and primitive Red Cossacks during Lenin’s 1920 war to spread revolution into Poland that inspired his greatest collection of short stories, Red Cavalry. These tales of the brutality of war made Babel, in the words of his daughter, “famous almost overnight.” However, various Soviet commanders close to Stalin were disgusted by the frank and rambunctious portrayal of the Red Cossacks and became dangerous enemies.

Babel flourished in the relative liberality of the 1920s, but as Stalin’s Terror intensified, he ceased to write as a sort of protest: “I have invented a new genre,” Babel told the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934, “the genre of silence.” In the 1920s his wife and daughter had moved to France, his mother and sister to Brussels; but despite increasing repression and censorship Babel kept faith with Russia’s revolution and chose to remain. He was a raconteur and bon viveur. He was also fatally fascinated by the Terror and rashly but characteristically set about writing a novel about the secret police. Babel had had a long affair with the flirtatious wife of Nikolai Yezhov, Stalin’s secret-police boss at the height of the Terror. When Yezhov fell from power, his wife was driven to suicide and all her lovers, including Babel, were dragged into the case and destroyed.

In 1939 the Soviet secret service arrested Babel at his cottage in the writers’ colony of Peredelkino, leaving behind his new wife and baby. Interrogated and tortured, he confessed to a long-held association with Trotskyites and to anti-Soviet activity. Tried in prison, he was shot on Stalin’s orders for espionage in January 1940. His family was told that he had died in a Siberian prison camp. In 1954 Babel was posthumously cleared of all charges. His reputation as a great writer has risen steadily ever since.

YEZHOV

1895–1940

If during this operation, an extra thousand people are shot, that’s not such a big deal.

Nikolai Yezhov, 1937

Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov was the dwarfish Soviet secret policeman who organized and coordinated Stalin’s Great Terror, during which a million innocent victims were shot and millions more exiled to concentration camps. Such was the frenzy of arrest, torture and killing under Yezhov’s sometimes meticulous, sometimes drunken control that this murderous witch-hunt was known as the Meatgrinder.

Born in a small Lithuanian town to a forest warden (who also ran a brothel) and a maid, Yezhov only had a few years’ schooling before going to work in a factory. He joined the Red Army after the Revolution and served during the Civil War. He was a shrewd, able, tactful and ambitious party administrator and personnel expert. By the early 1930s, he was close to Stalin, in charge of all party personnel appointments and a central committee secretary. A colleague noted that “I don’t know a more ideal worker. After entrusting him with a job, he’ll do it. But he doesn’t know when to stop.” But this suited Stalin, who called his new favorite “my blackberry”—a play on the word yezhevika.