For the 80th Anniversary of V-Day. A Personal Essay

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.
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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.

Ayn Rand: Writing a Gospel of Success

Rich Tenorio, a reporter for Haaretz, sent me these questions and later published an article using some of my answers: https://www.haaretz.com/life/2024-08-…. Here I’m including the Q & A in full.

Q. How did you get the idea to write this book?

In 2019, when I was commissioned to write this biography, I knew little about Ayn Rand – except that she was a divisive writer who prized capitalism. I’m not afraid of controversial topics and, besides, I was glad to be approached by Jewish Lives.

Q. How did you research the project, and how long did it take?

First, I read several major biographies of Rand, including those by Jennifer Burns, Anne Heller, and Barbara Branden. In early 2020, during the pandemic, the Ayn Rand Archives in California gave me permission to research Rand’s papers remotely. (Anne Heller, who produced Rand’s full-length biography, was denied access to these archives.) Jennifer Burns’ excellent biography of Rand focuses on her political philosophy. I completed the book in 2022, so it took me 3 years to research and to write it.

So, what’s new? The Archives hold a large cache of Russian letters to Rand, written by her immediate and extended families. I closely examined the originals comprising hundreds of handwritten pages dated from 1926 to the 1940s. These letters are important to understanding Rand’s background and influences on her work. I also received permission from John Hospers’ estate to use his letters to Rand that discuss her philosophy.

Of course, my perspective is different: unlike previous biographers, I grew up in Soviet Russia. My Jewish family had lived through experiences similar to Rand’s birth family. I examined the influences of Rand’s formative years in Russia on her life and work.

Q. To what extent has Rand’s Jewish background and/or identity been explored in previous works about her life? To what extent does your book represent a different approach? Are there any new findings about her Jewishness?

I view Rand’s ambition and achievement as typical of East-European Jewry who immigrated to America in the twentieth century (hence the epigraph in my book from Neal Gabler).
Anne Heller’s book provides some insights into Rand’s Jewishness. But because Heller was denied access to Rand’s Archives she had to rely on Barbara Branden’s biography and Rand’s apocryphal stories about her early years.

Rand grew up in a practicing Jewish family in St. Petersburg, with a Yiddish speaking grandfather. As apparent from the family letters, she knew some Yiddish. Her mother, aunts, uncles, cousins on her mother’s side were practicing Jews; her father – less so. Although Rand later rejected her faith and pronounced herself an atheist, she could not be fully free from these early influences.
Rand consulted her birth family during her work on We the Living. Ideas from her father’s letters, which I translated and quoted, are reflected in The Fountainhead. Such is the idea that “masses of mediocrities” create impediments to genuine talent. Her father’s idea that “exceptionally gifted individuals” become “prime movers” in philosophy, science, and art impacted her views.

I also examined Rand’s interest in Nietzsche from a Jewish perspective. Nietzsche‘s philosophy (anti-traditionalism and affirmation of freedom of individual choice) had appealed to early twentieth-century European Zionists, including Chaim Weizmann.

Previous biographers believed that Rand did not explore Jewish themes. Unlike others, I show that she subverted some of the most persistent Jewish stereotypes, such as moneylenders and financiers.

As we know, secular Jews prevail among the Objectivists. Rand’s major followers, “class ’43,” were descendants of East-European Jewish immigrants. They first united around The Fountainhead, which contains issues important to Jews, such as – striving for success and achieving it by overcoming all obstacles.

Q. How much of Rand’s thinking was shaped by her early years in tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union? To what extent did she use her screenwriting and authorial talents to address what she saw as the evils of communism?

Rand was never free from her experiences of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing civil war, which left millions dead through fighting, famine, and epidemics. She saw a total collapse of moral values; the evil coming from both the Bolsheviks and the Whites who opposed them. She would inevitably experience anti-Jewish hatred that always climaxed in troubled times. These early impressions explain her extreme and unyielding vision, her Manichean view of the world.

She also lived through the onset of Soviet authoritarianism and Stalinism that placed zero value on individual human life.
Rand’s anti-communism was boosted during the Great Depression when thousands of Americans headed to the “workers’ paradise.” During the “Red Decade” she worked to expose Soviet realities in her scenario Red Pawn and first novel We the Living. With this novel she was hoping to get Russia out of her system.

Instead, her absolute rejection of communism became the driving force behind everything she later wrote. It led her to renounce altruism; to use her words, “Until the morality of altruism is blasted out of people’s minds, nothing will save us from Communism.”

Q. Can you discuss to what extent antisemitism motivated Rand to speak up about her Jewish background and identity?

Rand had said that she only felt Jewish when faced with anti-Semitism. But even then, it was a struggle to identify herself as a Jew. Here is a story that, as far as I know, appears in my book for the first time. In the 1960s Rand resigned as a speaker for WBAI-FM radio station. She explained her resignation in an unsent letter: “The specific reason is that WBAI permitted an obscene anti-Semitic ‘poem’ calling for the killing of Jews, and an obscene utterance, praising Hitler’s atrocities, to be broadcast over its facilities.” From the agonized drafts of this letter I gathered that anti-Semitism concerned her deeply and that her ethnicity mattered to her even as she said it didn’t.

Q. How sympathetic a figure did you find Rand to write about? How eager were people to speak about her?

Rand is not a sympathetic character. Highly ambitious, single-minded, goal-oriented people rarely are. Her persuasiveness and energy drew followers to her. Later her fame and love of controversy made her the subject of many biographies.

Q. Can you discuss the impact of Rand’s works and views today, including with regard to presidential politics this year?

Rand’s Manichean view of the world, her rejection of the middle road and compromise, well describe our contemporary scene—not only in presidential politics. Rand advocated moral absolutes, and that’s what we have today: the mentality of good versus evil. Each political party has its own uncompromising vision of what’s good.

The traditional bipartisan approach to solving problems has been replaced by confrontational argument. Were Rand alive today she might very well have enjoyed this approach.

Q. Can you discuss your own background and how much any of Rand’s background resonated with yours?

Like Rand, I feel Jewish when faced with anti-Semitism. I fully relate to her anti-communism, but not to her rejection of altruism, which I think is apparent from my book.

I grew up in the family of Russian secular Jews. My paternal great-grandfather, Iosel’ Gertz Kantor, was a merchant who had arrived in Russia from Lithuania. Before WWI he received permission to open a business in St. Petersburg. This was a time when only “privileged” Jews—wealthy merchants and those with “useful” professions (like Rand’s grandfather Berko Kaplan, a skillful tailor) were allowed to settle in the Imperial capital.

My paternal grandfather, Yakov Friedman, was a Jewish trader, who in the 1920s, during the New Economic Policy (NEP) established by Lenin, opened a business in Voronezh. When Stalin later cracked down on the NEP, my grandfather’s business was expropriated and he was exiled to Kurgan, Siberia, along with his family. This is where my father spent his early childhood. Rand’s father’s business was expropriated after the Bolshevik Revolution, which gave her a taste of what Communism was about. Her novel We the Living depicts the years of the NEP that she witnessed while in Russia.

Q. Is there anything I have not brought up that you would like to mention?

I think you covered the major issues. Since you asked about my background, here is a bit more information. My late father, Grigory Baklanov (his real name – Grigory Friedman), was a Russian Jewish novelist and participant in WWII. His novels were translated into 36 languages and have appeared in English (e.g., Forever Nineteen, translated by Antonina Bouis).

Should Wars Always Take Us by Surprise?

As Albert Camus aptly observes in the novel The Plague, “There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet, always wars and plagues take people equally by surprise.” On February 24, 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine came unexpectedly for most. We had known about Putin’s brutal war in Chechnya, his invasion of Georgia, his bombings of Syrian infrastructure, and of his long hybrid war in Ukraine. Why weren’t we paying attention?

In fact, information about Putin’s imperial ambitions and wars of conquest has been around for two decades. Anna Politkovskaya, a prominent investigative journalist who reported extensively on the war in Chechnya, warned us of Putin’s dream to restore the Soviet empire and of Russia’s relapse into authoritarianism. In her book Putin’s Russia, published in London in 2004, she wrote that Putin’s regime dismisses the value of human life: “In Russia holding on to power is more important than saving soldiers’ lives…” She also reported on brutality and incompetence in the Russian army “where beating the hell out of someone is the basic method of training.” Putin’s war in Ukraine is a mirror image of his war in Chechnya, and Politkovskaya’s writings shed light on the many developments that surprise us today. Thus, two decades ago, Russia’s brainwashed majority did not condemn the war Chechnya, which Putin presented as a war on terrorism; society went along with state propaganda and felt no need to protest. Politkovskaya writes, “Our society ignored what was really going on in Chechnya, the fact that the bombing was not of terrorist camps but of cities and villages, and that hundreds of innocent people were being killed.” Putin’s propagandists peddle “a completely fake reality,” she explained. For the same reason, most Russians today do not denounce the war in Ukraine.

Politkovskaya was assassinated in Moscow on October 7, 2006; her murder, timed to coincide with Putin’s 54th birthday, sent a message to all journalists that honest reporting would not be tolerated. In her book A Russian Diary, released posthumously in 2007, Politkovskaya chronicled the country’s transformation into a lawless state run by the Kremlin mafia. Introducing this book, journalist Jon Snow asked rhetorically, “How did it happen that our leaders so steadfastly ignored what they knew Putin was up to? Was it the hunger for gas?” In fact, Western politicians turned a blind eye to the war in Chechnya, which helped Putin consolidate personal power.

The current war in Ukraine was both preventable and predicted: the conflict at the heart of Europe was slowly burning for eight years. Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and hybrid war in Ukraine’s east came as a direct response to the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity. In February 2014 Ukrainians overthrew the Kremlin’s puppet government, choosing a path towards democracy and the union with Western European nations.

Putin’s nemesis, the liberal politician Boris Nemtsov who had denounced Russia’s invasion of Eastern Ukraine, was assassinated on February 27, 2015. Russia’s former first deputy prime minister, Nemtsov was an outspoken critic of Putin’s regime and was preparing a report on the hybrid war in Ukraine, which he called a crime with no statute of limitations. In one of his interviews he accused Putin of waging this war with a single goal “to maintain power at any cost.” Hours after Nemtsov’s final interview to Echo Moscow radio station, in which he demanded “an immediate end to the war with Ukraine” he was shot dead near the Kremlin walls. In this last interview he described Putin’s war policy as “insane, aggressive, and deadly” for Russia and Ukraine alike.

Politkovskaya’s and Nemtsov’s grasp of political reality took years to fully appreciate. Both were marginalized during their lives, but left influential legacies. As Philip Short writes in his recent biography Putin, “Nemtsov acquired a symbolic importance after his death which was disproportionate to his role before he died.” Having mentioned this biography, I should also say that Short absolves Putin of any involvement in Nemtsov’s murder: “Putin had no conceivable reason for wanting Nemtsov killed.” This mammoth 1,082-page biography gives Putin undeserved credit, portraying him, at the start, as a liberal-minded politician, even “a Westernizer.” Putin’s transformation into a hardliner is said to have been conditioned by the strongmen from the KGB, military, and enforcement agencies (whom Putin himself brought to power), as well as America’s foreign policy and NATO’s enlargement. I believe Putin would not disagree with this account.

I found Garry Kasparov’s 2015 book Winter Is Coming (the title echoes Politkovskaya’s words about Russia’s “political winter”) more thought-provoking than Short’s biography. A former World Chess Champion and political activist, Kasparov perceives “two stories behind the current crisis. The first is how Russia moved so quickly from celebrating the end of Communism to electing a KGB officer and then to invading its neighbors. The second is how the free world helped this to happen, through a combination of apathy, ignorance, and misplaced goodwill.” Kasparov had accurately predicted that Putin’s annexation of Crimea and his war in Eastern Ukraine “will only stoke his appetite for more conquests.” Like Politkovskaya before him, he had identified Putin’s “dangerous turn to ethnically based imperialism.” Years before Putin’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Kasparov alerted us to the threat: “Those who say the Ukraine conflict is far away and unlikely to lead to global instability miss the clear warning Putin has given us.” Western politicians took too long to read Putin’s character and intentions. Europe’s dependency on Russian oil and gas may explain their continual appeasement and overlooking of Putin’s corruption and brutal wars.

So, should wars always take us by surprise or can we learn to read early signs? We live in a nuclear age and the outcome of the war in Ukraine concerns all of us. The damage from actions of a single dictator, like Putin, can be far greater than climate change.

 

Of Historical Memory and Forgetting

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera recalls a comment by the Czech historian Milan Hübl that “the first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”

It was with this intention––to make people forget their country’s history––that on December 28, 2021, Russia’s Supreme Court ordered the liquidation of Memorial International. Formed in 1989 during Gorbachev’s glasnost by the physicist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov, it was the oldest human rights organization working to uncover the truth about the Soviet past and to commemorate millions of victims of Stalin’s terror.

During its three decades of existence Memorial collected archival information to establish museums and monuments to the gulag victims. The Russian state and its powerful bureaucracy worked against them by prohibiting archival access and hindering efforts to remember.

Despite such hindrance Memorial and its volunteers amassed millions of names in its database and published memory books. I worked at the library of Memorial International in Moscow while researching Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century. This library is stacked with memory volumes, produced by every region of Russia and the former Soviet republics––Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltic states. The books containing names and brief information about the repressed fill an entire reading room. This is where I first fathomed the scale of Soviet repressions.

In 1996 Putin declared that “Russia’s return to totalitarian past is possible.” Upon becoming president in 2000, he worked to recreate the Soviet Union and Stalin’s image as a great leader. Since then Memorial had been continuously harassed and finally branded a “foreign agent,” a ubiquitous term in Putin’s Russia, used against members of the political opposition, NGOs, independent media, and historians and meant to put their activities outside the law. The pretext for shutting down Memorial was its alleged failure to display the “foreign agent” label on some of its materials. The real charge brought up during the December hearings by the Prosecutor General’s representatives was that Memorial was “creating a falsified image of the USSR as a terrorist state.”

Russian authorities still refuse to recognize the obvious fact that throughout seventy years of its existence the USSR WAS A TERRORIST STATE. (Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror and The Harvest of Sorrow, and Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine provide plentiful evidence.) Nations tend to embellish their pasts, but in Russia a coherent Soviet history has never existed. There is always a newer version crafted to suit a current leader.

Totalitarian states prohibit thinking and remembering. Keeping a memory becomes a crime. Under Stalin people were physically annihilated and airbrushed from group photographs. Under Putin Stalin’s crimes are being erased from public memory and books are written to praise the dictator and his secret police.

Yuri Dmitriev, historian and former head of Karelia’s chapter of Memorial, had uncovered thousands of names of Stalin’s terror victims. He located mass graves in the forests Sandarmoh (where fifty-eight nationalities lie buried) and Krasnyi Bor, and turned these places into public memorials. In December 2016 Dmitriev was imprisoned on trumped-up charges. https://dmitrievaffair.com/ During his third trial, which took place on the eve of Memorial’s liquidation, his jail term was extended to 15 years.

In her book Never Remember Masha Gessen tells a story of a woman, Elizaveta, who was a baby when her parents were exterminated under Stalin. Elizaveta’s terrified relatives destroyed family photographs. All she had left from her family was an album with no pictures inside. Elizaveta spent decades searching for information about her parents, eventually discovering that her mother, an actress, was killed during a mass execution in Sandarmokh. In Russia her story is typical.

Gessen had traveled to the killing grounds of Sandarmokh and through major sites of Russia’s extended gulag. Her book is dedicated to historical memory, the subject she discusses with Irina Flige, head of St. Petersburg’s chapter of Memorial. As Flige remarked, in Russia there is no “clear line separating the present from the past. That’s when you can say, ‘After the Holocaust,’ for example. But we don’t have that break—there is no past, only a continuous present.”

Proper remembering hasn’t happened, so Russia remains trapped in its past. The nation is again prevented from learning its history. How will it fare without a historical memory? The answer is suggested in the opening of this blog post.

Grigory Baklanov’s Forever Nineteen and Other Novels

“I was seventeen and finishing high school when the war broke out. 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 (…) I came back after the war, in the winter of 1946. None of my family was there. My two older brothers had been killed––one near Moscow in 1941, the other in the Ukraine.

I looked up a former classmate, and she and I went out to the only surviving restaurant in the city. Heavy snow fell outside the windows. I watched it fall across the street into our old apartment through the collapsed roof, onto the smashed beams and floors, through the iron supports of the balcony. My whole life had been spent in this house.

Voronezh has been rebuilt (…), but the city we knew and loved is alive only in our memory. 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.”

This is a piece from Grigory Baklanov’s introduction to the American edition of his novel Forever Nineteen. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis, the novel was described by The New York Times as a “piercing account of a Russian soldier’s experiences during World War II,” which “belongs on a shelf next to, say…Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.” [http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/23/books/children-s-books-history-357189.html].

Grigory Baklanov (born Grigory Friedman, 1923-2009) had volunteered for the front in 1941, at 17; he met the end of the war in Austria. He belonged to the generation of young people who faced the full brunt of the German attack on the Eastern Front and of whom only 3% survived.

Unlike Vasily Grossman, who had been a war correspondent, Baklanov had experienced WWII as a soldier and artillery officer. His depiction of the war is more personal than Grossman’s in Stalingrad, and has a different angle: rather than describing famous battles, Baklanov depicts ordinary soldiers’ experiences.

Baklanov debuted in 1959 with the novel The Foothold [An Inch of Land]. Soviet critics relentlessly criticized him for depicting the war from an ordinary soldier’s perspective, a depiction that conflicted with the official propagandist version. Although attacked in his homeland, this novel was swiftly recognized in the West as a genuine work about the war. Published in 36 countries, it brought the writer international fame.

Written as a first person account, The Foothold is a short novel. The events take place on the Eastern Front in spring and summer of 1944. The Allies have already opened a Second Front, and this predetermines the outcome in the war, but not the destinies of young men defending the bridgehead. The novel conveys their love of life and their intense desire to survive. Time in the novel is packed, reflecting the narrator’s calm realization that each minute of his life can be his last. The novel ends with a lyrical scene: the narrator holds a Moldavian boy on his lap and looks at the horizon where a new battle is being fought; he thinks that if he lives to the end of the war, he’d want to have a son.

Baklanov’s anti-Stalinist novel July 1941 is his best work by many accounts. It has never been translated into English. After the initial publication in 1965 July 1941 was suppressed in the USSR for 14 years. In this novel Baklanov broke a major Soviet taboo by depicting insurmountable Soviet losses in 1941 as a direct result of Stalin’s mass purges of the Red Army. Explaining the idea of the novel, Baklanov remarked, “I wrote about the people’s tragedy, and about the greatest crime that resulted in millions of dead, millions captured prisoner––of whom the greatest criminal of all, Stalin, had said, ‘We have no prisoners, we have only traitors.’” In July 1941 the army of General Shcherbatov becomes encircled and perishes at the fault of an incompetent military commander, who is Stalin’s protégé. Like The Foothold, this novel is short, condensed, and memorable.

Baklanov’s other novels (in English translation) include The Moment Between the Past and the Future (London & Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994). Translated by Catherine Porter, it portrays the end of Brezhnev’s stagnation era, which preceded Gorbachev’s reforms.

During Gorbachev glasnost Baklanov became the editor of Znamya literary magazine and published a number of previously suppressed works, such as Vasily Grossman’s travel account An Armenian Sketchbook and Georgy Vladimov’s novel Faithful Ruslan.

 

Vasily Grossman: A Story of One Photograph

This spring, one year after my biography Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century came out, I received a letter from the Literary Museum in Moscow. A curator wrote they were preparing an exhibition and came across a photograph they long believed to have been taken of Grossman in Armenia in 1961. This photo had appeared in my book and numerous other books and articles and was associated with the year when Grossman’s major anti-totalitarian novel, Life and Fate, had been confiscated by the KGB. Shaken by this tragedy—his labor of many years had been seized from him by the state—Grossman traveled to Armenia to collaborate on the translation of someone else’s novel. The photo of a gloomy Grossman appeared to have captured his despair after losing his life’s work. As it turns out, the photograph has a different meaning.

This picture was made ten years earlier. Grossman himself had signed it on the back: photo by Ryumin, Moscow, 1951. According to the museum curator, Grossman was on a tour of the Kremlin when the photographer from the Russian Information Agency had made the shot. Grossman is shown standing near The Grand Kremlin Palace, formerly the tsars’ Moscow residence. The design in the background (wrongly believed to be Armenian) corresponds with the distinct stonework of the ancient Palace of Facets, adjacent to the Grand Kremlin Palace. Grossman stands at the spot known as the Red Porch (destroyed in the 1930s, it was rebuilt in the post-Soviet era).

Grossman is looking up at the onion domes of the Kremlin’s ancient cathedrals. The curator sent me an enlarged picture of Grossman’s upper face. The reflection in his glasses is that of the onion domes in the Cathedral Square.

So, here is the actual story behind the photograph. In 1951, when Grossman took a Kremlin tour, he was struggling to push his novel For a Just Cause (Stalingrad in the English translation) to publication. Stalin was still alive, soon to launch his final campaign against the Jews. Grossman, only forty-six, looks exhausted after years of battling Soviet editors and censors who demanded endless changes and rewrites from him. Publication of his novel, the first part of Life and Fate, was held up: his editors dreaded displeasing Stalin.

Incidentally or not, at this time of uncertainty Grossman came to the place where Russian tsars had been crowned and anointed, and which had become the axis of Soviet political power. In his novel Everything Flows, which he began in 1955, Grossman would write about Russia’s unfortunate legacy of political oppression and of “a thousand years of” of Russia’s slavery. Possibly, it was with these thoughts that Grossman was looking up gloomily while near the Grand Kremlin Palace.

On Influential Books

What makes a book influential? I believe it’s a message that can withstand the test of time. Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill a Mocking Bird appeared when social and racial tensions in America were high and its message about shattered innocence with an appeal for compassion impacted audiences. But has the world changed to become more tolerant and less divided? The novel’s continuing popularity proves that it hasn’t, that Harper Lee touched on an enduring theme. In 2006 To Kill a Mocking Bird topped the list of British librarians who were asked to name a book every adult should read before they die (https://www.theguardian.com/books/200…).

Library lists of twentieth-century influential titles may differ. Selections made by the Boston Public Library––and I’ll speak here only about several works of literary fiction and non-fiction––include George Orwell’s 1984 , The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. These books have influenced our collective consciousness, their titles became household words.

Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl appeared in 1947, shortly after the end of the Second World War and well ahead of major Holocaust studies and memoirs. It has accomplished what later volumes could not. Anne Frank’s tragic fate affected us personally, deeply, and unforgettably; through her story we could grasp the unfathomable nature of the Holocaust and the fate of millions. In the midst of today’s global conflicts this book will continue to live on, acquiring new meaning and importance.

Numerous books have been written about fascism and communism, the twentieth-century’s plague; however, few titles had the capacity to capture international audiences and become classics. In 1984, when I was still living in Moscow, my friend gave me a samizdat copy of George Orwell’s dystopian novel. That year marked a unique literary anniversary of Orwell’s 1984. Orwell’s book was still banned in the USSR: its publication only became possible at the height of Gorbachev’s glasnost. Back then, reading it in Russian, I was unaware that its translation had been secretly commissioned by the Communist Party Propaganda Department for distribution among a select few. In an Orwellian turn of events the Big Brother and the Ministry of Truth controlled what Soviet people should read. But a copy of Orwell’s novel slipped into samizdat. Soviet readers viewed 1984 as a close portrait of their tyranny, along with the fear and conformity it inspired. Although Orwell had never lived in a totalitarian state, he intuitively captured its nature: “a boot stamping on a human face––forever.” Published in 1949, his novel supplied metaphors and terms we use today.

Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, launched in the West in December 1973, produced, in Robert Conquest’s words, “an almost unprecedented, worldwide impact” on audiences. It revealed the truth about the hidden empire of deadly Soviet prison camps and changed the way communism was perceived; the term “gulag” entered nearly every language. Although books about Soviet concentration camps had appeared before Solzhenitsyn’s, The Gulag Archipelago provided overwhelming evidence and changed the minds of millions about the socialist paradise. Solzhenitsyn’s indictment of the Soviet political system exploded in the West during Cold War; the fact that the author was an ex-inmate still living in the USSR gave his work tremendous moral authority.

In 1958, the year Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Edmund Wilson extolled his novel Doctor Zhivago as “one of the great events in man’s literary and moral history. Nobody could have written it in a totalitarian state… who did not have the courage of genius.” At the time, Vasily Grossman’s incomparably more scathing novel, Life and Fate, was unknown. Written almost simultaneously with Pasternak’s, Grossman’s work was a powerful testimony about crimes of the Communist and Nazi regimes, which he presciently compared. An early chronicler of the Gulag and the Holocaust, Grossman put the two totalitarian systems on trial.

In 1961, after Grossman bravely attempted publication of Life and Fate in a Moscow journal, his novel was seized by the KGB. The Soviet authorities correctly considered this work more dangerous than Pasternak’s; they compared its potential impact to a nuclear bomb, and vowed to keep it suppressed for 250 years. In the event, they managed to postpone publication until the Gorbachev era––enough to reduce the initial effect of Grossman’s message. The novel’s reputation and influence grew slowly over the years. Today it has become recognized among the most important works about the calamitous twentieth century. In the West it has influenced scholars researching the Second World War, Ukraine’s famine, and the Holocaust. In post-Soviet Russia, where comparison between Nazism and Stalinism remains illegal, the book could not become influential.

Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century

This Q & A was compiled by the author herself.

Q. What prompted you to write Vasily Grossman’s biography?

A. If I had to answer in one sentence––Vasily Grossman’s subject matter. To use James Atlas’ words about Edmund Wilson, Grossman “offered a large canvas on which you could draw a map of the twentieth century––the ideal subject for a big, ‘definitive’ biography.” This line comes from Atlas’ memoir The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale. In fact, Grossman’s novels Life and Fate and Everything Flows capture the twentieth century along with its calamities brought about by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes––World War II, the Holocaust, Ukraine’s famine, and the Gulag. Each of these topics may take a lifetime to explore, but I felt I could approach them through Grossman. As Atlas remarks, a biographer’s biggest reward is a chance to educate yourself while reconstructing someone else’s world.

Q. Writing a book is a marathon. What kept you going?

A. I had a sense of personal connection to Grossman’s themes. My birth family of Russian Jewry had suffered under Stalin and Hitler. My mother’s family––her uncle, aunt, and cousin––were liquidated during Stalin’s Great Purge. Her other uncle was shot as a Jew in Nazi-occupied Kiev. Earlier, while living in Kharkov and Kiev in the 1930s, my mother and grandmother witnessed Ukraine’s famine.

World War II is also not a remote event for my generation. My father had fought on the Eastern front; his brother and cousin were killed in battle. After the defeat of German fascism, Stalin launched his own anti-Semitic campaign, so my father, a war veteran, was, as a Jew, denied employment. In Life and Fate, commenting on postwar Soviet politics of state nationalism and antisemitism, Grossman writes that Stalin raised over the heads of Jews “the very sword of annihilation he had wrested from the hands of Hitler.”

I grew up in Moscow where Grossman spent much of his life. My parents and I lived in the apartment building where Grossman had a studio and kept part of his archive. Our house was among the addresses where in 1961 the KGB confiscated copies of Grossman’s novel, Life and Fate. My father, the novelist Grigory Baklanov (Friedman), brought his first fiction about the war to Grossman and later studied in his creative writing seminar. During Gorbachev’s glasnost my father became editor of Znamya literary magazine and published Grossman’s splendid Armenian memoir and short prose, and also published his wartime diaries as a separate volume.

Q. Vasily Grossman died in 1964. Why are his works relevant today?

A. Grossman wrote about state nationalism, the rise of totalitarianism, and antisemitism, topics that today remain among the most discussed. In Life and Fate the Nazi officer Liss says, “Nationalism is the soul of our epoch.” We are now witnessing the rise of nationalism in America, Europe, Russia, and China, and these words can be read as a warning from history.

In the 1950s both Grossman and Hannah Arendt elucidated on the nature of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. As Timothy Snyder points out in Bloodlands, “The Nazi and the Stalinist totalitarian systems must be compared, not so much to understand the one or the other but to understand our times and ourselves.” We are observing a strong comeback of far-right populist governments in Europe and elsewhere; in her award-winning book, The Future Is History, Masha Gessen even argues that totalitarianism has reclaimed Russia.

Because Grossman was a banned writer, his major works have only appeared after much delay. In the past two decades interest in his ideas has been steadily rising. Grossman’s novels are now recognized as a valuable historical source, a testimony about the twentieth century and the global evil perpetrated by totalitarian regimes. His powerful 1944 article, “The Hell of Treblinka,” became part of the evidence at Nuremberg. Today it continues to provide insights into the Holocaust, which Grossman was among the first to fathom and to chronicle.

Q. Martin Amis referred to Grossman as “a Soviet Tolstoy.” Do you agree with this description?

A. Yes and no. As a war novelist Grossman had undoubtedly experienced Tolstoy’s influence: his research notes for Life and Fate reveal that he used the structure of War and Peace as a blueprint. Written with epic sweep, Grossman’s novel also includes war parts and peace parts. Like Tolstoy, he depicts historical figures alongside fictional characters; his narrative switches between global events and family occurrences. Grossman, however, was not imitating Tolstoy. He was leading a dialogue with his predecessor and, as he states in his notes, intended to show “how life changed over 100 years.” Grossman’s protagonists fight in Stalingrad; are marched to a gas chamber, and, like the physicist Victor Shtrum, work on the Soviet nuclear program.

Actually, it was not merely Tolstoy’s greatness as a novelist that had inspired Grossman to model his epic Life and Fateon War and Peace. He saw in Tolstoy an example of a writer who was driven by the moral imperative to tell the truth. Having testified about Nazi crimes in Treblinka, he realized the pressing need to also make the world aware of the crimes of Stalinism.

In 1952, after three years’ battling with Soviet editors, Grossman succeeded in publishing a censored version of the novel For the Right Cause (this was the first part of Life and Fate). The initial reaction was positive: critics hailed it as “a Soviet War and Peace.” A few months later, For the Right Cause was attacked in the Soviet press and a political campaign against Grossman was launched, nearly ending in his arrest. Unlike Tolstoy, Grossman lived and wrote in a totalitarian state and many of his topics were the strictest Soviet taboos. In 1960 Grossman produced his uncompromising anti-totalitarian novel, Life and Fate. His attempt to publish it in the USSR was an act of desperate bravery and defiance.

Q. How will your book affect what we know about Grossman?

A. This book will come out 23 years after a single English-language biography by John and Carol Garrard. It’s drawn from my archival research, published and unpublished memoirs, letters, and interviews. My biography amasses the latest information about Grossman and his subject matter. I read everything Grossman had produced, including his early works, which were usually dismissed by biographers. My research helped me discover, for example, that Grossman’s beliefs in freedom and democracy were lifelong and that the Jewish theme was also conspicuous in his early works. My biography traces his life and ideas from the beginning, and I show how the war and the Shoah moved him to openly oppose the state.

I’ve always tried to unveil myths in my books, and this biography dispels a number of myths. Ehrenburg’s remark that Grossman was born under the star of misfortune has been given too much attention. Although there was tragedy in Grossman’s life, he was fortunate to survive Stalin’s mass purges and the war––despite reporting from Stalingrad and Kursk, the site of the largest tank battle in history. When discussing the confiscation of Life and Fate we need to know that this violent action was not unprecedented in the Soviet Union. The epilogue of my book tells the story of Georgy Demidov, a writer and Kolyma survivor, whose manuscripts were seized by the KGB and who was also deprived of the means to complete his testimony about the Gulag. In contrast, Grossman was able to produce his most uncompromising novel, Everything Flows, which became his political testament. One needs to remember that the list of Soviet literary martyrs is extraordinarily long. It includes writers murdered by the regime––Isaak Babel, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pilnyak.

Q. It took you four years to produce this book. Any regrets?

A. It pains me to see the clichéd image on my book cover. This picture of Grossman, made in the burning Berlin in 1945, has been repeatedly published. I provided the publisher with a little known picture of Grossman in his study, but it was rejected “as not dramatic” enough. I believe a cover is important. It gives the first impression about the book. Regrettably, someone in the marketing department, who did not even read my book, decided the cover’s outcome.

Notes on Political Correctness

In January 2018 the conservative National Review magazine published a piece The Most Ridiculous PC Moments of 2017 . The comedian and television personality Katherine Timpf commented on eleven nonsensical episodes of political correctness on campus and elsewhere.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article…

“Novelists are now employing ‘sensitivity readers’ in order to make sure that they don’t portray fictional characters from other communities in an inaccurate way. Note: No one actually knows how to portray a fictional person ‘accurately,’ because fictional people do not exist. In all seriousness, this trend is a terrifying one that threatens to ruin the art of fiction as we know it.”

I believe the comedian is right. Political correctness has gone too far. It threatens freedom of expression at universities and in publishing.

Thus, the PC people propose we stop studying Shakespeare and Mark Twain. They intimidate writers and publishers by setting off online outrage against books they deem offensive. But the definition of “offensive” is vague. It can be endlessly stretched. This is why hiring “sensitivity readers” will not always work. Someone who looks for cultural stereotypes will find them between the lines.

When in 2009 my book, Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography was being published, my editor insisted on removing the word “black” from the following paragraph: “A famous tragedian of the day, the black American actor Ira Aldridge, was on tour in Russia and his performance in Moscow was not to be missed.” Ira Aldridge was playing Othello, so I failed to understand how this could be offensive and did not budge. In the end, my editor, who threatened to delay my book’s publication, backed off.

Today there’s also much ado over the issue of cultural appropriation. I find this issue highly confusing and debatable. A few years ago at a writers’ conference an aspiring Canadian writer, a German immigrant married to an aboriginal man, asked whether she can write a fictional story about her neighbors on an Indian reserve. She said she attempted to publish her stories, but was always refused––not because her stories were bad, but because of the cultural appropriation issue. She argued that she did not write outside her immediate experience: she lived with an aboriginal man next to the reserve. “Does the Canadian government prohibit writers of non-aboriginal ancestry to explore aboriginal subjects?” she asked.

When it comes to cultural appropriation I also want to ask seemingly naïve questions. What does it mean to write outside one’s own cultural experience? Journalists, scholars, artists, and writers have always explored unchartered territories with success. (As in the Shakespearean play cited above.)

The best and most comprehensive nineteenth-century dictionary of the Russian language was compiled by Vladimir Dahl, neither an ethnic Russian nor a trained lexicographer. Dahl, whose father was Danish and whose mother was of mixed German and French ancestry, had served in the Russian Navy and was later trained as a military doctor. Yet, his dictionary of the Russian language informed generations of writers, including Vladimir Nabokov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Some of the most influential books on Ukraine’s famine were written by Robert Conquest and Anne Applebaum, also the author of the Gulag. Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine has just been named the 2018 world’s best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs.

For centuries foreigners produced illuminating and astute travel accounts. George Kennan’s Tent Life in Siberia captures ethnographies and histories of Siberia’s native peoples. This book continues to inform audiences, and no one yet complained about cultural appropriation.

Are we traveling less in the age of globalization? Can we travel and can explore another culture but cannot write about it? Was Life of Pi, Yan Martel’s best-selling novel about India, cultural appropriation? The truth is––nobody cares.

Yet, a Canadian editor of Write magazine Hal Niedzviecki was forced to resign for urging white middle-class writers to explore “the lives of people who aren’t like you.” In 2017 a campaign of shaming was launched against him and his supporters.

Would these PC people shame the French post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin for his Tahiti paintings?

This March I learned that the Cambridge Dictionary will include the term “cultural appropriation” and will define it as cultural theft.

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/…

Actually, writers and artists do not steal from other cultures––they create their own work, which enriches us globally.

Cultural appropriation strikes me as a brainchild of a radical minority, empowered by social media.

I grew up in the Soviet Union, and the notion of enforced “political correctness” brings back the memory of political censorship.

Do we want censorship in the free world?