WHY DID THEY MURDER ISAAC BABEL?

WHY DID THEY MURDER ISAAC BABEL?

This is, first of all, assuming that there was logic in the years of the Stalinist terror, or that it really mattered who they arrested, exiled to labor camps, or murdered. As long as the quota was met. But some writers were arrested and killed, others not. Babel, it appears, was a firm supporter of the Revolution and the Soviet system, but that did not really matter. There are, however, several reasons for his peculiar susceptibility. Here are some of them.

Even though Jews were instrumental in making the Socialist Revolution in Russia, being a Jew at a time when scapegoats are sought is never an advantage.

Babel openly cultivated relationships with foreigners. For years his roommate in Moscow was Bruno Steiner, an Austrian engineer. Another friend was the French writer Andre Malraux. Furthermore, Babel’s first wife, along with his mother and one daughter, Natalya, lived in France and Belgium, and he took trips abroad to visit them. They refused to return with him to the Soviet Union.

Babel’s intense curiosity was dangerous. This man who “wanted to know everything” hung out with various unsavory types, including members of the secret police. He was friends with the head of the NKVD, Genrikh Yagoda. He once supposedly asked Yagoda how one was to behave, “if he finds himself in your hands.” Yagoda told him to deny everything, to reply “No” to any accusation made. 

This, as Yagoda surely must have known himself, is useless advice. They deprive you of sleep for a day or so, while beating on you incessantly, and you don’t deny anything anymore. You even write denunciations of all your friends, as Babel later was forced to do.

Babel supposedly even had an affair with Yagoda’s wife Yevgeniya, a Jewess from Odessa. In her memoir Nadezhda Mandelstam writes that her husband Osip, the great poet, once asked Babel why he was friends with Yagoda—did he wish to put his fingers on death itself? Babel replied, “I don’t want to touch it with my fingers, but I’d like to have a good sniff, to see what it smells like.”

Maybe the most important thing is this: Babel’s fiction is subversive, dangerous fiction. He described Soviet heroes, such as the soldiers in the Red Cavalry, as mindless brutes. He did not shy away from descriptions of gross violence and gang rape. He could be ironic in his fiction; true believers hate irony. 

He wrote the kind of fiction that directly challenges thinking in clichés, lazy thinking—including the simple-minded, received lazy ideas of the socialist utopia. By the 1930s the powers that be in the U.S.S.R. demanded of their writers encomiums and distortions of reality. Babel could not write the oversimplifications they wanted. He fell silent. But his body of published work, small as it was, was still there to be read and mulled over. Still as complex and incendiary as ever.