My father, the Jewish Russian writer Grigory Baklanov (born Friedman), met the end of the Second World War in Austria. He was lucky to survive the bloodiest war that had killed much of his generation of Soviet soldiers and officers. As he wrote in the introduction to the American edition of his 1979 novel Forever Nineteen, translated by Antonina Bouis, of the twenty boys in his high school class who left for the front, he alone returned alive. But in Stalinist Russia, Jewish war veterans faced the culture of pervasive antisemitism. In 1949 an editor of a literary magazine where he took his early work told him: “What’s Friedman? Maybe this Friedman was sent to us from America. Get yourself a Russian surname.”
“It was the month of May, already the sixth day as the war ended, and we were stationed in a German village, four of my scouts and I, their superior.” Thus begins Grigory Baklanov’s semi-autobiographical story published in 1962, less than two decades after the Second World War. Grigory Friedman (my father’s surname before he became a writer) was a 21-year-old artillery officer when in May 1945, his 9th Breakthrough Artillery Division of the 3rd Ukrainian Front entered Austria.
Baklanov’s story, titled after the first line “It Was the Month of May,” captures the early days of peace in the Austrian mountain village of Loosdorf. The name of the village was written on a leather belt my father brought home as a souvenir. Over the years, stropping his razor on this belt he could still read the fading “Loosdorf.” In childhood I watched him shave, but never knew what memories he associated with this village.
Untouched by the war, Loosdorf lay some five kilometers from Melk, a satellite camp of Mauthausen. It was the only Nazi concentration camp my father had come across during the war: the division’s path did not lie through the camps. He had participated in the Jassy-Kishinev offensive, advanced with his artillery division to Romania and to then Hungary where heavy battles were fought near Székesfehérvár. When they entered Austria, he was still unaware of the existence of Auschwitz and Majdanek, but remembered asking some local authority, “Where are your Jews?” As he told an interviewer in 1997 for the journal Russkij evrei (Russian Jew), he was then only beginning to figure things out.
The war was still on when his squad entered the nearby village of Schallaburg and walked through the famous medieval castle. Its owners had fled at the approach of the Soviet troops and the castle stood empty. My father spent several days there. From an upper floor of the castle, he saw Wachau valley and the blue Danube; in the mornings he watched mist rising on the river. For a man who survived the bloodiest war by chance this peaceful scenery was mesmerizing. In his memoir Life, Twice Given, published in Russian in 1999, he describes gigantic rolled carpets in the halls of the castle and a collection that fascinated him––knights’ armour, swords, antique pistols, and flintlock rifles. Days later, relocated to Loosdorf, he heard the long-awaited news that the war was over. There was spontaneous firing into the air and drinking, but disappointingly little joy. When celebrating the war’s end soldiers felt a painful void as they remembered friends who did not live to V-Day.
The story “It Was the Month of May” is written as a first-person account of a young Soviet lieutenant. The village where his squad was stationed has survived intact, for it lies at a distance from the main path of the war. Its twelve sturdy houses, barrels of homemade wine in the basements, livestock in the yards, and small wheat fields at the back are a picture of plenty. Local farmers smile good-naturedly and avoid speaking about war. They shake heads at a mention of Hitler, as if meaning to say that he alone should be held responsible. “Somehow, without reasoning, they had at once moved on to a state of peace, so simply, as if all it required was to take off their military boots and put on their homemade felt shoes, the same homemade shoes they had taken off to put on their boots six years earlier.”
The war is over, but there are still fascists in Austria. On the second day of peace the lieutenant and his scouts detain a German sergeant hiding in a wheat field. As he stands among them in his long black raincoat, they suddenly realize they have captured him in vain: “…For the first time, having captured a German, we did not know what to do with him… The day before yesterday he was an enemy, and now he was no longer an enemy or even a prisoner, and at the same time it was still strange to release him.”
Rashke, the owner of the house where the lieutenant and his soldiers are billeted, keeps company with “Herr Offizier” at breakfast. In the mornings, puffing away on his pipe, he leads “cautious conversations.” Beneath Rashke’s “homely appearance” the lieutenant spots “a carefully concealed military bearing.” It’s not established in the story whether Rashke has changed into civilian clothing as many Nazis have done and whether he was a perpetrator in the concentration camp. But this is implied: when a Polish survivor of the camp enters the village, Rashke and his family disappear.
As Baklanov told an interviewer, in 1981, he knew back then that they were staying in the house of a Nazi. One of his scouts, going through a pile of firewood, found a bundle containing a machine gun, pistols, and a photo album, all wrapped in an oily rag. A photo showed their host in the SS uniform. His story was based on actual events and some of its prototypes were people he had met in the village. Speaking of the central episode, the discovery of an abandoned concentration camp, he said that at the time he could not place what he saw into a larger picture: “I only knew what I’d seen myself. And this story was written much later … as a way to comprehend what was happening.”
When the lieutenant arrives at a neighboring village, he learns from another officer that there is a Nazi concentration camp nearby. The officer had been looking for information about his father, who became a Soviet POW in 1941. “Yesterday, for the first time, he finally saw a German concentration camp. He walked the same route, from the camp gates to the crematorium, the way hundreds of thousands of martyrs had walked here, through the ground that had absorbed their blood. He already knew that if there was a trace of his father among their vanished footprints, no one would ever tell him about it.” In the morning the lieutenant drives back along wheat fields, pondering his friend’s words that human ashes were strewn over this land. “On the loam, ash-gray earth –– young, shiny and juicy wheat was rising, gaining strength. And I no longer could see this land, this wheat… Peace and quiet. Yet, at this time of peace many people would have to resurrect and rebury their dead and a few lucky ones would find the buried!”
Melk is not mentioned in the story, for it was one of the thousands of sites of detention and murder. Today we know that this sub-camp operated since January 1944, that inmates were transferred there from Mauthausen and Auschwitz, and that it had a crematorium. Overtime, it held 14,390 prisoners from 26 countries. Around 30 percent of them were Jews. The larger national groups included citizens of Poland, Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. Almost 5,000 inmates died in Melk of starvation, overwork, and disease. In mid-April 1945, when the camp was closed, the remaining inmates were transferred to Mauthausen and the Ebensee sub-camps where American troops liberated survivors.
A grotesque scene in the story captures “the banality of evil.” Upon returning to the village where he is stationed, the lieutenant is presented with a bill. A soldier from his platoon slaughtered a piglet and Rashke’s family is distressed. They seek compensation for an adult pig, reasoning that the piglet would have grown and gained weight. Standing over the lieutenant, Rashke’s teenaged son reads from his notebook, “again counting in my presence what the whole family has already counted. I had to make sure and see for myself that I was not deceived here, that I would be charged reasonable price for the good pork.” (This incident actually happened, recalled Baklanov: their host family presented him with such a bill.) In the evening, an emaciated Polish camp survivor enters the village. His wife was a slave labourer on Rashke’s farm and when she gave birth, the proprietor killed the baby. The young woman lost her mind, and Rashke took her to the nearby camp to be destroyed.
***
Baklanov did not stay long in Loosdorf. In 1945 his artillery division was transferred to the city of Pasardzhik, Bulgaria. There he first met Ilya Ehrenburg who arrived with a delegation of Soviet writers. Ehrenburg was enormously popular: his articles were widely read at the front and a crowd assembled beneath a balcony from where he made his address. Baklanov could not have known at the time that he too would become a writer, that his war novels would be translated across Europe, and that in 1964, he would travel with Ehrenburg to Slovakia for the 20th anniversary of their national uprising.
Baklanov was 24 when he came to see Vasily Grossman. Soon after the war he read Grossman’s powerful article “The Hell of Treblinka” and was struck by it. In 1947, he phoned the writer and Grossman agreed to read his first fictional story about the war. Grossman then lived in “Begovaya village,” a housing complex for writers and composers in Moscow’s outskirts. Baklanov ¬¬–– then Grigory Friedman –– arrived in his military shirt and boots, which he still wore for lack of money, and a civilian suit. He imagined Grossman would invite him in and they would talk about the war, but this did not happen. Upon reading the story, Grossman said simply: “Keep writing. Maybe it will work out, and maybe it won’t.” Baklanov was taken aback at first, but later thought this was the best advice one could give to a beginning writer.
The meeting with Grossman took place during the rise of state antisemitism under Stalin. As Grossman would write in Life and Fate, Stalin raised “the very sword of annihilation” over the heads of Jews “he had wrested from the hands of Hitler.” In 1948, Grossman and Ehrenburg’s long-time project, The Black Book of Russian Jewry was banned. The year marked the murder of Solomon Mikhoels, the closure of Mikhoels’ Jewish theater in Moscow, and arrests of the prominent members of the Jewish Antifascist Committee. Baklanov, now a student at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow, witnessed the night-time arrest of his Jewish classmate, the poet Naum Korzhavin (Mandel). A decorated war veteran, Baklanov was never arrested, but there was much humiliation in being denied employment––and publication ––as a Jew. In 1949 an editor of a literary magazine where he took his work told him: “What’s Friedman? Maybe this Friedman was sent to us from America. Get yourself a Russian surname.” That’s how he became Baklanov. In 1951, he tells in his memoir, he kept unsuccessfully applying for work when a non-Jewish writer, meeting him on the street, exclaimed: “Don’t you understand that you won’t be hired anywhere?” Baklanov still had illusions about the country he had defended in the war with fascism. It took decades to express what he felt back then. His generation returned from the war as liberators, only to be overcome by fascism in their own country. “The victors, we were gradually becoming defeated,” he reminisced. “State antisemitism was growing thicker and thicker. …The word ‘Jew,’ as something shameful, was not used; in official phraseology it was replaced by the words: ‘cosmopolitans,’ ‘Zionists.’” The victory, attained at an enormous human cost, helped strengthen Stalin’s totalitarian regime.
Baklanov belonged to the generation that faced the full brunt of the German attack on the Soviet Union and of whom only few survived. These experiences determined his central themes. But with the Party controlling the arts as well as the war narrative he had to fight against the restrictions imposed by censorship. His 1959 novel, “An Inch of Land” (the English title The Foothold), was attacked by Soviet official critics for authentic depiction of the war, but was swiftly recognized abroad. Translated into 36 languages, it brought him international fame. That year, meeting Baklanov on a walk, Grossman praised this novel as “a genuine work about the war.”
Events in The Foothold take place in the spring and summer of 1944, when the outcome in the war was predetermined. In June the Allies opened a Second Front, and in August Romania signed an armistice with the Allies. With the end of the war in sight young men’s desire to survive is particularly intense. Time in the novel is packed: each moment can become the last and merge with eternity. “How far am I destined to walk ahead?” thinks the protagonist of The Foothold. “Another foot? But that foot is my entire life.”
The English translation of the novel was made by Reuben Ainsztein, the Jewish and British journalist and writer, and also the author of Jewish Resistance in Nazi Occupied Eastern Europe. Ainsztein, who was interned in a concentration camp in Spain, eventually escaped to England and served as an air gunner in the Royal Air Force –– a story he tells in his brilliant memoir In Lands Not My Own. He also translated Baklanov’s 1957 novel, South of the Main Offensive. (Unfortunately, he did not have a good grasp of Russian: his first language was Polish.)
Because each year fewer survivors remained to record their testimonies, Baklanov considered accuracy in depicting the war his primary task. Such books had a difficult path to publication because “truth from the trenches,” the term coined by Soviet critics, was unwanted. As Baklanov put it succinctly: “Our truth is that war is inhumane.” After the war Stalinists created a victorious version of events that no one was allowed to challenge. Stalin’s military purges, the destinies of millions who perished unknown or were crippled by war––these and other topics were then off-limits. In his novel July 1941 Baklanov was among the first of the Soviet writers to show Stalin’s Red Army purges on the eve of the war that became responsible for devastating losses. Following publication in early 1965, with Khrushchev’s Thaw ending, this novel was suppressed for 12 years.
After Stalin’s death antisemitism remained an undeclared government policy. One of its sinister manifestations was silencing the Jewish participation in the war. Baklanov’s older brother, Yuri Friedman, a 19-year-old history student, had volunteered for the front at the start of the German invasion. He was killed in October 1941 and was reported missing – the fate of tens of thousands. In 1957, Baklanov dedicated his first novel, South of the Main Offensive, to the memory of his brother Yuri Friedman and his cousin Yuri Zelkind, “who fell heroically” in battle. Znamya magazine where the novel was coming out pressed him to remove the dedication. Although Baklanov repeatedly refused, the dedication was secretly removed from the final proof. The author restored it in subsequent editions. (When I mentioned this incident at the Jewish Museum where I took part of my father’s archive, the curator wondered how the editor’s decision was motivated. There was no official explanation, of course. Soviet Jews had to remain invisible, and this policy especially concerned their involvement in the war.)
Half a million Jews fought in the Red Army during the Second World War; 135 of them were awarded the highest title of Hero of the Soviet Union. While Jews were a small Soviet minority, they attained a fourth highest number of awards for valour. By the end of the war, this information became a Soviet taboo. In 1945, journalist Miriam Zheleznova (Aizenshtadt), who worked for the newspaper Eynikayt of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, published a list of names of Jewish heroes; it was swiftly reprinted in Europe and the United States. In 1950 Zheleznova was arrested and charged with “disclosure of information, criminal connections to the leaders of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and espionage.” She was sentenced to death by the Military Collegiate of the Supreme Court of the USSR and executed in November.
The myth that Soviet Jews did not fight in the war, but instead were safely doing business in the rear was promoted by nationalists and Stalinists. In 1941 Ehrenburg wrote to Grossman that he had heard the following remark from the writer Mikhail Sholokhov. “You are fighting,” Sholokhov told him, “but Abram is doing business in Tashkent.” Ehrenburg called Sholokhov “a pogrom-monger.” Grossman replied to Ehrenburg: “I think about Sholokhov’s antisemitic slander with pain and contempt. Here on the South-Western Front, there are thousands, tens of thousands of Jews. They are walking with machine-guns into the snowstorms, breaking into towns held by the Germans, falling in battle. I saw all this.” Baklanov was outraged when another famous Russian writer validated this falsehood in the twenty-first century––a story that will be told later.
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Baklanov was born in 1923, in the ancient Russian city of Voronezh (also the place of Osip Mandelstam’s banishment in the mid-1930s). His early years were marked with tragedy: his father, Yakov Minaevich Friedman, a disenfranchised Jewish trader, committed suicide in 1933. In the 1920s Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP) to help revive the economy ruined by the civil war. Legalization of private enterprise was a temporary measure: the communists could never recognize freedom of trade. The government remained in control and in 1926 Stalin launched his first major assault on the NEP. The state was driving out private traders, first by increasing taxes and later by depriving them of political rights. That year the category of disenfranchised was broadened to include “those who trade and have traded.” As Golfo Alexopoulos writes in Stalin’s Outcasts, “Jewish communities tended to be the hardest hit by disenfranchisement after the government assault on private trade.” From 1927 to 1930 a series of severe laws against the disenfranchised stripped them of basic rights, turning all those who helped revive the economy into outcasts. Thousands were arrested, deported, evicted from their homes and denied work, food rations, and medical assistance. In 1928 Yakov Friedman was deported with his wife and two young sons, Grigory and Yuri, to Kurgan, Siberia, where they remained for three years.
In his 1995 novel And Then Come the Marauders, the most autobiographical of his works, Baklanov depicted what he remembered of his family’s time in deportation. The protagonist’s father, a lishenets (disenfranchised), is harassed by the authorities and continuously fired from temporary jobs. His mother, a dentist, is prohibited from making a living (disenfranchisement affected families) and has to receive her patients secretly, while dreading inspections. .
Baklanov’s mother, Ita-Chaya (Ida) Kantor, was a dentist. She was born in Lithuania, to a family of a successful Jewish merchant––information that had to be concealed in Soviet times and was recently discovered through archival search. Before World War I, Baklanov’s maternal grandfather, Iosel’ Gertz Kantor, received permission to open a business in St. Petersburg. This was a time when only “privileged” Jews—wealthy merchants and those with “useful” professions were allowed to settle in the Imperial capital. At birth, Baklanov was named Gertz after his late grandfather; yet, did not know basic facts about Kantor’s background and profession. He was orphaned at twelve when only two years after his father’s suicide, his mother died of pneumonia.
When in June 1941 the Nazis invaded the USSR, Baklanov, aged seventeen was finishing high school and working at an aviation plant in Voronezh. Although too young to be drafted and exempt from active duty by his employment, he managed to get enlisted, and was fighting first as a soldier at the Northwestern Front and later, as an artillery officer at the 3rd Ukrainian Front. In 1943 they fought in the same regions where in our days Ukrainians confronted Putin’s invading armies. Baklanov was badly wounded near Zaporizhzhia, but returned to the front after six months in hospitals. Later, as a writer he believed in describing what he himself had witnessed, so these battles determined the geography of his war novels.
The war ended, but it continued to dwell within him: “I saw the war anew, all those years, and days, and hours, and months, while a single hour was often longer than many lives.” In his novels Baklanov recreated historical events that left few survivors. The battles, in which he participated, had not played a decisive role in the Second World War. They barely entered war chronicles, and their participants were forgotten, so it was vital to leave a record: “… I could not allow for all that I had seen and known to disappear without a trace. I dreamed about it at night. And I already knew that the only way to get rid of it was to write.” Each of his short novels would take him about two years to write and dwelling on the events brought their deeper understanding. “And many things are revealed to you in people, in the very course of life, and you are amazed at times: you were there, you saw it, how could you not grasp the meaning of what was happening?”
After my father’s death I sorted his papers and vast library in Moscow. Among histories on the Second World War, a well-read Soviet eight-volume edition of the Nuremberg Trials, I found two issues of Mezhdunarodnaya zhizn’ [The International Life] magazine for September and October of 1961. They contained articles on the Eichmann Trial, with my father’s copious markings on many pages. Soviet reactions to the trial are little known, so the issues of the magazine were eagerly received at the Jewish Museum in Moscow. The Soviet press had at best obscured (and at worst denied) the Jewish aspect of the Eichmann trial and while information about the Nazi atrocities did appear, the victims were designated simply as “people.” My father had a good grasp of Soviet politics and would connect the dots. I believe it’s not incidental that his story “It was the Month of May” appeared in early 1962 after he followed reports on the Eichmann Trial. He usually sought information from many sources, which he compared. His reading led him to think over the events he witnessed in Austria.
In the 1960s Baklanov was approached by several film directors, including one from West Germany, who wanted to buy rights to “It Was the Month of May.” He refused these offers: a number of movies that were based on his works previously have dissatisfied him. But when in 1969 a talented director, Marlen Khutsiev, read the story, his conception coincided with Baklanov’s. The script they collaboratively produced included the theme of the Holocaust that was only implied in the story. The television film, of the same title, came out in 1970. Its finale deals with Jewish suffering through images and music. Famous photographs of the Nazi era pass repeatedly on the screen and the melody from Sonny Bono’s song “Mama” renders the sorrow. A boy from Warsaw, Tzvi Nussbaum, stands with his hands raised: a look of desperation and terror. Naked Jewish women during the liquidation of the Mizocz ghetto in Western Ukraine wait in line before execution. We see faces of Buchenwald inmates on liberation day. The camera switches to a busy street in postwar Poland and shows people immersed in their daily lives. We see faces of tourists as they walk through the museum of a former concentration camp, of a tourist taking pictures of the memorial statues while chewing gum. Grief, etched in stone –– and the photographer’s indifference. A montage of images from the Nazi era with contemporary scenes carries a message: do we remember the past as not to repeat it?
Baklanov’s works were not part of the Soviet mainstream, and during the Brezhnev stagnation and re-Stalinization era official critics rarely mentioned him. But he was actively sought when the state needed genuine voices for its harassment campaigns. After the defeat of the Arab states in the Six-Day War, followed by mass emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel, Soviet media were fighting the “international Zionist network.” Newspapers and radio broadcasts were filled with anti-Israel propaganda and prominent Jews were sought to condemn Zionism. Baklanov was at home, working on the script for Khutsiev when his phone started ringing off the hook. When he silently picked up the receiver, he was yelled at: “Why are you not answering the phone?” It was not hard to guess what was happening. He collected his papers and typewriter and headed for Khutsiev’s apartment. The two drove to Bolshevo, a rest-home outside Moscow reserved for Soviet cinematographers where they worked on the script undisturbed.
There were other state campaigns and pressure to conform, as in August 1973, when writers were sought to sign an open letter to Pravda condemning “anti-Soviet actions and speeches” of Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He did not sign it and was later shocked to see names of respected writers among the 31 signatories. When in December, The Gulag Archipelago came out in the West, the Party demanded a united condemnation of the book that nobody could read in the USSR because it was banned. First, factory workers and other collectives had to denounce it and later it was the writers’ turn. “That’s when they would remember me,” Baklanov reminisced. “Calls from the editorial offices would pour in. Usually, a sweet female voice would inform me that so-and-so and so-and-so had already responded and written to them about Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, expressing indignation; they had no doubt that I would join. …My answer was standard: I have not read this book by Solzhenitsyn, send it to me, I will read it. …. There would be a long pause. And the voice grew cold: but do you believe our newspaper? I explained patiently: I have a rule –– not to speak about what I have not read…. But I saw that they would not leave me alone, it is impossible to allow a man to take charge of his own conscience…Your conscience does not belong to you.” They never succeeded in having him conform, so official critics would silence his books.
Baklanov was not a dissident: those who spoke out against the Soviet regime were deported or imprisoned. He chose to remain in the country where he was born and to pursue his own path. He lived his life through his books and occasionally felt, as he remarked in an interview in 1982, that everything he wrote comprised “a vast single book about my generation, and also about the time in which it had lived and is living now.” His 1979 novel Forever Nineteen, translated by Antonina Bouis, was a tribute to the men who remained forever young; as he wrote in the preface to an American edition, “We had twenty boys and twenty girls in our class. Almost all the boys went to the front, but I was the only one to return alive. Our city, Voronezh, the ancient Russian city on the steppes, perished under the bombs, was destroyed by the artillery, and was blown up by the Germans when they retreated. I came back after the war, in the winter of 1946. None of my family was there. …And only in our memory are people who no longer exist still alive and still young. I wanted them to come alive when I wrote this book. I wanted people living now to care about them as friends, as family, as brothers.” His generation of young men had perished “without a trace,” leaving no progeny. In his words, one of the most tragic consequences of the war was in their complete disappearance.
When the Gorbachev era dawned, Baklanov felt there was a chance for democracy to succeed. As he wrote in his memoir, he viewed the changes that had begun in the country “with the greatest hope.” In 1985, during the VIII Congress of Soviet Writers that took place in the Kremlin, Alexander Yakovlev, “the godfather of glasnost,” asked Baklanov how he felt about perestroika –– will the reforms take root? Baklanov replied, “If there is an economic plan, they will succeed.” Yakovlev, a former ambassador to Canada where he was exiled 1973 for criticizing state nationalism in an article, was at this time a senior aid to Gorbachev, responsible for implementing reforms. A war veteran, he had read Baklanov’s books, including travel accounts to Canada and America where he had given lectures, and this inspired trust between the writer and a senior Party official. In the winter of 1985–86 Baklanov came out to see Yakovlev at a state dacha. As head of the Central Committee’s Propaganda Department, Yakovlev oversaw production of state reports and speeches. For the writer these meetings were a chance to learn a different side of life. He was struck with the level of surveillance at the dacha where even a top government official had no privacy. When they took walks together, security men followed not far behind.
Glasnost became the most successful of Gorbachev’s domestic reforms. Newspapers and magazines began to publish exposés of Soviet history, of Stalin’s gulag, and of the war in Afghanistan. The nucleus of a civil society was born through the efforts of liberal journalists, writers, and human rights activists who pushed for greater openness. Baklanov joined the fight for press freedom. In 1986, he became the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Znamya (the very one that had published “The Hell of Treblinka”). Glasnost was not attained overnight: political censorship existed until the collapse of the Soviet Union, and publication of previously suppressed works required overcoming official resistance. He received threats in the mail, and there were occasions when the KGB men sat in his editorial office attempting to intimidate him. During the Gorbachev era Soviet readers craved for truth about their country’s past and the magazine’s circulation rose to 1 million. It published some of the best literature that the Soviet authorities had been suppressing for generations, such as Evgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We; Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of the Dog; Boris Pilnyak’s The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon; Vasily Grossman’s travel account An Armenian Sketchbook and his wartime “Notebooks,” and Georgi Vladimov’s anti-Stalinist novel Faithful Ruslan. Zamyatin’s novel, an early prophesy of totalitarianism was written in 1921 and banned by the Bolsheviks. Following its publication in the West it later inspired George Orwell’s 1984. Grossman’s brilliant travel account to Armenia, written in 1962, contained a passage referring to the Holocaust. Grossman refused to publish his work without these lines, which Soviet censors demanded he delete.
In the fall of 1990, when Andrei Sakharov’s Reminiscences were coming out in Znamya’s several issues, his widow Elena Bonner came to see Baklanov. Having recently returned from a trip to Israel, she spoke of an 18-year-old woman in Tel-Aviv who had said she grew up without experiencing antisemitism. Bonner belonged to the same generation as Baklanov; a decorated war veteran and a lieutenant in the medical service, she also ended the war in Austria. During Stalin’s final campaign, against the Jewish doctors, she was expelled from her job for her comments about the “Doctors’ Plot.” In the 1990s xenophobia was again blossoming in the USSR and Baklanov’s magazine received antisemitic letters and threats. In September 1989, he appealed to Gorbachev, asking him to prohibit antisemitic propaganda by the extreme nationalist organization Pamyat’. Signed by poets Evgeny Yevtushenko and Bulat Okudzhava, among other influential people, the letter failed to move Gorbachev. With no political will to stop anti-Jewish hatred from spreading, it spilled out to the streets.
In 1993, aged 70, Baklanov resigned from the magazine and pursued another cause. Still during the Gorbachev years, Antonina Bouis, who had translated Baklanov’s Forever Nineteen, introduced him to George Soros. As Baklanov recalled, Soros had asked him, “What needs to be done to strengthen Gorbachev’s positions?” He responded: “Support glasnost.” After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s economy was in free fall and support was needed for cultural and scientific institutions. In the 1990s Baklanov served on the board of Soros’ “Cultural Initiative” program. The Open Society Foundation helped finance libraries, university internet centers across Russia, and scholars.
On December 11, 1994, five years after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russia’s first democratically elected leader, Boris Yeltsyn, launched a war on Chechnya. Attempting to prevent bloodshed, Baklanov appealed to Yeltsin through the national Izvestia newspaper with a front-page address. He urged Yeltsin to invite Chechnya’s President, Dzhohar Dudaev, to Moscow and resolve the conflict diplomatically. A small breakaway republic within the Russian Federation, Chechnya had aspired for independence and had Moscow given it more autonomy, a degree of self-rule, tens of thousands of lives would have been saved. Yeltsin, however, was persuaded that “a small victorious war” would help raise his dismal approval ratings, which fell that year to single digits. The war on Chechnya was officially termed the “restoration of the constitutional order,” a falsehood that imitated official Soviet labels. (In 1968, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was obfuscated as “fraternal assistance”; the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan –– as “the fulfilment of international duty.” Putin, who in 1999 would re-launch the war on Chechnya, called it a “counterterrorist operation.”)
As the war on Chechnya continued unabated, Baklanov saw the return to a Stalinist mentality when human lives had no value. As he wrote in his memoir, “Only in a terrible dream could one have dreamed that after the tragedy of Stalin’s epoch, so many times officially condemned… after the madness of the Afghan war, our government would venture to bomb Grozny ‘in defense of the Constitution’ and would annihilate their own people on their own land, launch an undeclared war…. How many legless, armless, maimed children, both Chechen and Russian, were left after this criminal war! How many have died under the bombs!” This was Russia’s first televised war––and as he watched images of the destruction of Grozny, the memory of the Second World War, which he was lucky to survive and which he hoped would never be repeated, haunted him.
Baklanov wrote not only about the war, but always with thoughts of his generation. While The Foothold and Forever Nineteen portrayed it in youth, the novel The Moment Between the Past and the Future, translated by Catherine Porter, traced the lives of those who had survived the war and were tested with a Soviet culture of corruption and conformity. His 1995 novel And Then Come the Marauders takes the reader through the epochs of Stalin, Brezhnev, Gorbachev’s perestroika, and the collapse of the USSR. The protagonist, a war veteran and writer in his 60s, is same age as the author when he wrote the book. The novel’s idea is reflected in this character’s words: “After a combat the battlefield belongs to marauders.” Through this image the author explains how successive regimes, beginning with Stalin’s, used Soviet victory in the war for political gain. The harshest work he had ever written, it deals with the reemergence of Stalinism and neo-fascism in post-Soviet Russia.
The main action takes place in the 1990s, a transitional time when most Russians were living in poverty and many emigrated to Western countries, including Germany. In an interview in 1992 Baklanov said, “You may hear today, ‘Why did you have to win the war? They live better than us [in Germany].’ We did not lose the war, but we lost the peace. They are better off not only because we helped them to overthrow fascism, but because fascism remained in our own country. … Stalinism was strong…and Stalinism was not elsewhere––it was within us. We were young and sincere; we believed.”
Both the German and Russian nations have experienced totalitarianism. But unlike Germany, Russia was not able to liberate itself. The Soviet state betrayed the memory of the fallen, neglecting to even bury the remains of tens of thousands. The main insult was given to those disabled by the war: beginning in 1948, cities across Russia were purged of war amputees: under Stalin, severely disabled war veterans, who supported themselves by begging at train stations and on streets, were deported to Valaam, an archipelago in Lake Ladoga, where they had to die in isolation.
The novel suggests that in a country where the ideology of Stalinism was never defeated, the emergence of neo-Nazism becomes inevitable. In the ending the protagonist, a war veteran, is killed on a Moscow street by a gang of Russian neo-Nazis. The novel came out in time for the 50th anniversary of the V-Day. In May Baklanov spoke in an interview about the marches of neo-Nazis with swastikas on their sleeves in Moscow and Petersburg; the sale of Hitler’s Mein Kampf by the Kremlin walls. Speaking on behalf of his generation, those living and those who had perished to free the world from fascism, Baklanov wondered, “Have we forgotten what the war was about?… Or is ‘our,’ Russian fascism, better than German? Fascism…doesn’t know national distinctions.”
Interviewed by Obozrevatel (Observer) magazine, in 1995, he was asked how could it happen that fifty years after victory in the war, Russia was facing a fascist threat from within? Why hasn’t it developed immunity?
“Where would it have come from?” Baklanov replied. “Our system created all the prerequisites for the inculcation of fascism. This post-war antisemitism, as if adopted from the German… And the system of selection and promotion to positions – how did it differ from Hitler’s? The same system of purity checks, not only of class, but also racial… And the deportation of nationalities? Wasn’t this a prerequisite for fascism – didn’t we act as fascists towards the Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush?”
“What’s fascism to you? An ideology of aggressive nationalism?”
“Much more than that. It’s a complete asphyxiation of life. A complete asphyxiation of an individual. The delight of the slaves. They’re ready for the yoke!… And every slave is given power over the inferior.”
In the 1990s he repeatedly traveled to Israel where he befriended Amos Oz. He visited universities, was impressed by kibbutzim, and admired the country where agricultural work, along with military service were respected professions. In Yad Vashem, he wrote in his memoir, he was moved particularly by the Children’s Memorial where “every minute a voice speaks a child’s name, day after day, year after year. Of the six million Jews exterminated by the Nazis, one and a half million were children. And maybe the most overwhelming is the children’s hall. In total darkness five candles are burning, reflected by numerous invisible mirrors, and you stand as if in the center of the Universe, in the cosmos, where souls are hovering above you, below you, and everywhere are countless stars – lights in cosmic darkness…. And the voice counts down the minutes, reading and reading children’s names.”
Russia is a country without a historical memory: it made the victory in the war into a central myth, but failed to honor its fallen soldiers. Baklanov’s brother and cousin, among numerous others, have no grave.
I look at my father’s photograph in the Negev: he’s come to the land of his ancestors. He did not make Aliyah and was not religious, but said that he had always known he was a Jew. Russian was the language he spoke and wrote, but as a child, he heard his parents speak Yiddish. Born after the Revolution, he grew up, like others in his generation, believing in the proclaimed ideals of racial and social equality. After the war the state never allowed him to forget he was “the other.” In his seventies, he witnessed the rise of neo-fascism in Russia. Addressing the world’s oldest prejudice at the end of his life, he produced a nonfictional work, “The Idol” (Kumir); it appeared in 2006, in Mezhdunarodnaya evreiskaia gazeta (the International Jewish Newspaper). In it he created a profile of a Russian Nobel Prize winning writer who, upon achieving celebrity, questioned the extent of Jewish suffering and disputed Jewish heroic participation in the Second World War.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s two-volume study Two Hundred Years Together, a history of Jews in the Russian Empire came out in 2001–02 and was widely criticized as a biased work. Baklanov had met Solzhenitsyn and publicly defended the need to publish Cancer Ward when it circulated in samizdat. Solzhenitsyn’s latest work repelled him. Solzhenitsyn repeatedly quoted the very antisemitic falsehood according to which Jews were hiding from the war in Tashkent and argued that since “most Slavs” believed this, there must be some truth in it. Baklanov responded that “the peoples’ perceptions of each other are not formed by themselves, they are instilled in them.” While Solzhenitsyn “cannot be condemned” for his private dislike of Jews, “the word, spoken and written, is a deed; in the beginning of all deeds, and of bloody deeds, was the word.”
Earlier, in 1997, in an interview to the newspaper Russkij evrei (Russian Jew), Baklanov reminisced how in a front-line hospital a wounded Jewish infantryman told him that he kept hearing at the front that “Jews don’t go to war.” This was almost anecdotal, since both served in the front lines. As he had written in “The Idol,” “Antisemitism is inexhaustible, all the more so because it is profitable, for many: careers have been and are being built on it, fortunes have been made on it.” Like Bonner, Baklanov wanted to believe that Israel, surrounded by enemies, would keep its people safe from the ancient hatred. He died in 2009, which saved him from learning about the worst massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023.
