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.

BABEL IN PEREDELKINO

Boris Pasternak's Dacha in Peredelkino; Now a Museum Devoted to Pasternak

BABEL IN PEREDELKINO

Isaac Babel seems to have been afflicted with a near lifelong writer’s block. After he had published Red Cavalry and the Odessa stories, he spent the remainder of his life trying to get the writing juices flowing. He wrote screenplays, but never really seemed to like that kind of writing. He preferred the short story form. He had a way of dropping out of view for weeks at a time, and no one knew where he was. He often fled to the boondocks, where he would take a room in a small village, living with some old woman. There he would write. Or try to. Sometimes he would move in with friends, or stay in a hotel for several weeks.

He met Antonina Pirozhkova for the first time in the summer of 1932. They began living together at the very end of the year 1933, and stayed together until May, 1939. After they had a child, Lida, some of Babel’s bizarre behavior was toned down, but never completely.

He hated having discussions about literature and often preferred the company of workers, peasants, and oddballs to the company of fellow writers. He hung out around the hippodrome in Moscow, where he could indulge his love for horses, and his interest in the people who rode them and trained them.

Babel belonged to the Union of Soviet Writers and was widely recognized as one of the best writers of fiction in the country. That gave him the right to a villa in Peredelkino, a writers’ colony some twenty kilometers from Moscow. “Villa” is probably too grand a word. When Babel and Pirozhkova moved to Peredelkino in April, 1938, the small cottage was badly in need of repair. They ended up living there for only one year.

Babel had resisted moving to Peredelkino for some time, but was assured that he could live there without close association with the other writers. When asked how he was liking it in Peredelkino, Babel replied, “Being in the midst of nature is wonderful, but there’s something terrifying about the realization that dozens of people to the right and left of you are sitting there composing.”

Babel had trouble working in Peredelkino, just as he had trouble working practically everywhere. Pirozhkova writes that he was tormented at Peredelkino by graphomaniacs, who kept bringing him their writings and asking his opinion. Babel was too polite to tell them what they wrote was bad; he tried to encourage them. So they would rewrite their stuff and then bring it back to him again. Babel at Peredelkino took to answering the telephone in a woman's voice, "No, he's not home. No, he's gone out."

Babel spent his last happy year in Peredelkino, where he was arrested in the middle of the night, May 15, 1939, and taken to Lubyanka Prison. The recent documentary film, “Finding Babel,” shows Babel’s grandson, Andrei Malaev-Babel, on a journey to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of Babel’s death. Andrei travels  back to Ukraine and Russia, visiting places where his grandfather had lived and had his being.

One of the places Andrei goes, in seeking the great writer’s roots, is Peredelkino, Babel’s last place of civilized residence on earth. He arrives at the location of the small cottage/villa only to find it gone—replaced by a chic new edifice, complete with high walls, obviously the domain of some nouveau riche Russian. 

Andrei rings the doorbell at the gate, and all the bodyguards come out. He tries to explain to them who he is and what he is there for. These men appear never to have heard of Isaac Babel. Not only do they not admit him to the property. They threaten the photographers with the video cameras and then bodily remove Andrei from the premises.

Much of the land in this lush pine forest now appears to have been bought up by the new Russian ruling class of the rich. A commentary on the meretricious new capitalist Russia that has replaced the socialist Soviet Union of Babel’s time. Everything in Mother Russia changes; and everything stays the same. At least in Putin's Russia they are no longer arresting, torturing, murdering writers as a matter of course.