Three Russian émigrés: the fatal return

All our yesterdays have lighted

fools the way to dusty death.

Macbeth

During the current Ukraine war under Putin’s Stalinist regime, thousands of Russians—making the most crucial decision of their lives, abandoning families and jobs, possessions and money—have left their country.  They don’t know if they will ever return and are (rightly) afraid they will be punished if they do go back.

In her lively memoir The Possessed (2010), Elif Batuman asks—but does not answer—“why, in 1935, just when the purges were starting, did Babel begin making plans to bring his mother, sister, wife and daughter from Brussels and Paris back to the Soviet Union?”  Isaac Babel had to choose not only between France and Russia, security and danger, but also between staying with his family in Europe or never seeing them again.  The soldier, minister and author Boris Savinkov, and the cultured literary historian Prince D. S. Mirsky, faced the same choice and made the same decision to return to Russia—with fatal consequences.  Why did these three brilliant men become willing victims and choose their own death?

I

Boris Savinkov (1879-1925), the ruthless terrorist and underground man, was born in Kharkov, the son of a judge and member of the minor nobility.  He grew up in Warsaw, and attended universities in Saint Petersburg, Berlin and Heidelberg.  Savinkov first fought the Czarists, then the Bolsheviks.  He assassinated V. K. de Plehve, the reactionary Czarist Minister of the  Interior, in July 1904.  His anonymous, first-hand descriptions in his novel The Pale Horse (1909) give an insider’s view of the same political murder that Joseph Conrad vividly portrayed in the first chapter of Under Western Eyes (1911).  In February 1905 Savinkov also blew up the Grand Duke Sergey, uncle of the Czar.  (After the Revolution, the cross marking the spot where Sergey met his doom was removed by the Bolsheviks.)

In 1917, during Alexander Kerensky’s short-lived Provisional Government, Savinkov was Deputy War Minister and Governor-General of Petrograd.  In the Civil War of 1918, he incited a rebellion against the Reds in European Russia, captured the city of Jaroslavl on the Volga River and held it for two weeks.  He married in 1919.  Two years later he was arrested by the Bolsheviks and exiled to Vologda, 250 miles northeast of Moscow, where the young Joseph Conrad had shared the harsh exile of his Polish revolutionary father.

Savinkov’s Socialist Revolutionary Party specialized in expropriation, robberies, armed attacks, guerilla warfare and espionage in Russia.  He thought of terrorism as a deadly adventure and personal exploit, and had a martyr’s yearning for self-sacrifice.  He knew he would eventually be captured and executed, but relished the experience of mortal danger that made him feel more intensely alive.  He fought the Soviets for the right to own private property, hold free elections and abolish the Cheka, the secret police.  His idealistic aim throughout his life was to alleviate the tears and suffering of the Russian people.  Like Ivan Karamazov, Savinkov thought “if there is no God, then all is permitted.”  Like the nihilist Friedrich Nietzsche, he no longer believed in the distinction between good and evil.  Yet paradoxically, he mixed dynamite and incense, and the blood of his victims weighed heavily on his conscience.  Despite his violence, he always upheld the traditional virtues of loyalty and honor.

Savinkov had many narrow escapes from death and under his leadership his Party came close to defeating the Bolsheviks.  Distinguished enemies and friends tried to explain his complex and impressive qualities.  Tomas Masaryk, the President of Czechoslovakia, despised both Savinkov’s ruthless violence and fanatical beliefs, but helped him when he was expelled from Poland in 1921.  “Politically,” Masaryk wrote, “he under-estimated the strength of Bolshevism; philosophically, he failed to realize the difference between a revolution and individual acts of terrorism. . . .  Morally, he did not rise above the elementary notions of the blood feud.”  Like other men who disliked Savinkov’s violence but admired his idealism and courage, Karl Radek, a member of the Russian Comintern, declared, “He is so utterly the plotter, so profoundly devoted to murder and destruction as to be incapable of anything else.  And yet the man has elements of greatness.”

Somerset Maugham, a British agent in Petrograd in 1917, found Savinkov resourceful and fearless, and called him “the most extraordinary man I have ever met.”  After Savinkov had committed two political murders, Maugham wrote: “He was finally arrested and sentenced to death [in 1906].  While awaiting his execution he was imprisoned at Sevastopol; and there, it was told me, such was the magic of his persuasive speech, he had induced his jailers to join the revolutionary ranks and contrive his escape. . . . [When I] suggested that it must have required immense courage to plan and commit those two dreadful assassinations, he shrugged his shoulders.  ‘Not at all, believe me,’  he answered.  ‘It is a business like another.  One gets accustomed to it.’ ”

In 1917 the influential Soviet writer and survivor Ilya Ehrenburg also met Savinkov, who sounded more like a ruthless commissar than a minister in a democratic (though ineffectual) government: “I spent an hour or two chatting with Savinkov.  He was now Deputy War Minister, and I no longer recognized the Savinkov of the Rotonde [café in Paris] who used to smile so wryly.  He talked about harsh measures, dictatorship and restoring order.  He called Kerensky a phrasemonger drunk with the sound of his own voice and spoke contemptuously of the Provisional Government.  ‘They’ve lost their nerve.’ ”  Vladimir Burtsev, a close friend and co-conspirator, called Savinkov “an anticommunist, an ardent anti-monarchist; an angry man, one who had evidently suffered a great deal, who had enormous ambition, an unbounded sense of his own importance, who staunchly believed in his own star, and who had enormous plans for the future.”

Winston Churchill admired men of action.  Impressed by Savinkov’s bravery and daring in his fight against the tyrannical Bolshevik regime, Churchill described him as “small in stature; moving as little as possible, and that noiselessly and with deliberation; remarkable grey-green eyes in a face of almost deathly pallor; speaking in a calm, low, even voice, almost a monotone; innumerable cigarettes.  His manner was at once confidential and dignified; a ready and ceremonious address, with a frozen, but not a freezing composure; and through all the sense of an unusual personality, of veiled power in strong restraint . . . the essence of practicality and good sense expressed in terms of nitro-glycerine.”  Churchill told Savinkov’s great friend and fellow-spy Sidney Reilly, “I always thought Savinkov was a great man and a great Russian patriot, in spite of the terrible methods with which he has been associated.”

Unlike most rough revolutionaries, Savinkov had an elegant appearance and artistic talent.  He was a correspondent in France during World War I, as Babel would be during the Russian invasion of Poland.  He followed The Pale Horse with his revealing and sensational autobiography Memoirs of a Terrorist (1917), and was introduced in fashionable Paris drawing rooms as “the man who assassinated the Grand Duke Sergey.”  The Russian painter Marevna called him “of average  height, upright and slender, with a balding head and long narrow face.”  The OGPU secret police agent who trailed him also found him physically unimpressive: “He is a slender and rather plain-looking middle-aged man, with a high forehead, thinning hair and a receding chin.”  But his sharp and penetrating eyes revealed an exceptional personality.

Vladimir Alexandrov, Savinkov’s excellent biographer, gives a fascinating account of his complicated motives during the last and most intriguing episode of his life.  Savinkov, officially proclaimed the archenemy of the Soviets, wanted to exploit the murderous struggle for power that started after Lenin’s death in 1924.  The OGPU secret police then carefully conceived and brilliantly executed an operation that deceived the experienced terrorist and lured him back from Paris to his death in Russia.

They counted on the qualities that Burtsev had noted and, Alexandrov writes, “on his ambition and egotism—on his belief that he was a unique and irreplaceable leader . . . and invented a fictitious group of conspirators in Soviet Russia who were ostensibly plotting against the regime and who wanted to collaborate with like-minded émigrés abroad.”  They said these new forces were able to rise against the Bolsheviks and that the charismatic Savinkov was the only leader who could unify the different factions of this secret and potentially powerful group.

The OGPU sent a well-trained agent to meet Savinkov in Paris.  Suspecting he might be a Soviet spy, Savinkov set various traps and the agent survived them all.  The shrewd Sidney Reilly, who’d been financially supporting Savinkov, did not believe there was evidence of a secret organization in Russia, thought the agent was indeed a spy and warned his friend not to go to Russia.  (A year later Reilly himself returned to Russia through Finland, was arrested and executed on November 5, 1925.)  Burtsev agreed with Reilly that “the very idea of a vast secret organisation in Soviet Russia was completely fantastical and that the trip would be suicidal.”  Even the Russian-born sculptor Osip Zadkine, living in Paris, had more insight than Savinkov and caustically called him “an interesting personality, but why does he make himself out so important?  Everything’s finished for him in Russia.”

But Savinkov thought “there was nothing left for him in Europe.”   He had lost patience with the inactivity of the anti-Bolshevik émigrés, as he had with the Kerensky government and the White armies that had failed to seize the initiative and defeat the Reds.  Bent on self-sacrifice, he believed that his death would provide an inspiring example: “I’m going to Russia to die fighting the Bolsheviks.  I know that if I’m arrested,  I’ll be shot.  But I’ll show those who live here in the emigration how one should die for Russia.”  Bruce Lockhart, another British spy in Petrograd in 1917, admired Savinkov and thought “behind that tortured brain there was some grandiose scheme of striking a last blow for Russia and of carrying out a spectacular coup d’état.”

Unaware that a close friend had been captured and betrayed him to the Soviets, Savinkov, accompanied by the OGPU agents, crossed the Polish-Russian border at midnight on August 15, 1924.  They travelled by wagon through a dense forest and reached an apartment in Minsk the following morning.  As several men with machine guns rushed in to arrest their still-armed captive, Savinkov realized that he’d been tricked.  In 1918 the Cheka had complimented him for creating an organization that ran with “clock-like precision”. Now, with impressive self-control, he remained coolly professional, returned the compliment with “Neatly done!” and asked if he could finish his breakfast.

Savinkov’s show trial, with its predetermined verdict, publicised the crimes and recantation of the prize captive.  By arrangement with the Bolsheviks, he publicly but unconvincingly renounced his lifelong beliefs and declared, “I acknowledge without reservations the Soviet regime and no other.”  A photo taken during his trial shows the bald Savinkov standing before the Stalinist court, wearing an ill-fitting double-breasted suit and surrounded by twelve uniformed guards, one of whom peers at him from behind a flag.  In the left foreground a clerk and a woman with a peasant-style kerchief are bending over a desk and taking notes of the proceedings.  Four stern military officers, wearing frogged-front uniforms and seated at a cloth-covered table, are about to condemn him to certain death.  After his propagandistic statement, the sentence was commuted to ten years’ imprisonment—and he was secretly assured that he would be pardoned.

An American journalist who visited his cell was astonished by its luxury: “It was a beautifully furnished room with thick carpets on the floor, a large mahogany desk, a blue-silk-upholstered divan, and pictures on the walls. . . . He behaved like a wealthy and gracious host receiving visitors.”  Even more surprising was that his lover, who’d accompanied him to Russia, was granted permission to spend the nights in his cell.

On May 7, 1925, after a plein-air outing to a local park, an example of his unusual privileges and freedom, Savinkov was escorted back to Lubyanka prison.  Alexandrov had noted that Savinkov “did not like heights.”  But when his guards were temporarily distracted, he threw himself out of an open fifth-floor window, crashed onto the asphalt courtyard and was instantly killed by the impact.  Some scholars believe that Savinkov was pushed out of the high window, but Alexandrov argues that he committed suicide.  Always idealistic and sacrificial, Savinkov no longer believed the Soviet promises and concluded “that he had lost his gamble and would never be freed. . . . His suicide was the only blow he could make against the regime.”

II

Isaac Babel (1894-1940) was born into a Jewish family in Odessa, the Crimean port on the Black Sea.  Short, stocky and with thick eyeglasses, he studied finance in Kiev, moved illegally to St Petersburg in 1916 and became a protégé of Maxim Gorky, who published his first stories.  After the Revolution of 1917 Babel joined the Russian army on the Romanian front, and worked for the Cheka; in 1918-19 he went on grain-extorting expeditions to Ukraine to feed the starving people in Moscow.

From June to September 1920—the most crucial months of his life—Babel was a journalist attached to General Semyon Budenny’s Cossack Cavalry, who invaded Poland after World War I and fought on horseback with swords and rifles until they were defeated.  He wrote battle reports, interrogated prisoners and treated the wounded.  Bullied and mocked by the soldiers, Babel was a horrified witness to burned villages and slaughtered peasants.  He achieved great fame and favor with his Red Cavalry stories in 1926.  But his condemnation of the brutal Cossacks infuriated Budenny, who exclaimed that “Babel invents things that never happened, and throws dirt at the best Communist commanders.  He fantasises and simply lies,” and demanded his execution.  Nevertheless, Babel survived and joined the Russian elite, travelled abroad, owned a Ford car with a chauffeur and had a dacha in the writers’ colony near Moscow.

Though physically unattractive, Babel was catnip to the ladies and had a complicated love life.  He married his first wife, Yevgenia Gronfein, in 1919, but she left the unfaithful Babel in 1925 and moved to Paris.  He visited her and they had a daughter, Nathalie in 1927.  He missed his wife and daughter terribly, wanted to see the girl grow up and begged them to join him in Russia.  In November 1934 and April 1935 he told them: “Material conditions are improving here with amazing speed.  I am sure that Natasha could be incomparably better brought up here than in France and it is becoming senseless to remain there. . . . In Moscow I have an income that would enable my family to live not only passably but regally in comparison with their present life, as far as clothing, food, housing, summerhouses, medical care, seaside places and Natasha’s education go.”  But Yevgenia despised and feared the Soviet regime and wanted to study art in Paris.

As the regime became more oppressive in the late 1930s Babel deviated from the Party line and was forbidden to publish his work.  Since he couldn’t write about what he wanted to write, he didn’t write at all and became what he called a “master of the genre of silence.”  Maxim Gorky arranged for him to leave France, where he’d attended a writers’ conference, and finally return to Russia in 1935.  Babel had been living in Moscow with his common-law wife, Antonina Piroshkova, and they had a daughter, Lydia.

When Gorky died in June 1936, Babel lost his powerful patron and protector, became dreadfully vulnerable and was now in danger for many reasons.  He was Jewish, and had criticised Stalin’s favorite military unit.  He also had a dangerous affair with the wife of Genrikh Yagoda, ruthless chief of the secret police.  When Yagoda fell from power and was executed, Babel was linked to the wife of an enemy of the people and became guilty by association.

Stalin took authors seriously, feared their power and persecuted them.  He not only corrected the manuscripts of novels he had cleared for publication, but also signed the death lists and sent 1,500 writers to execution or the Gulag.  Thousands of victims had been tortured in Lubyanka prison and the best Soviet writers were extinguished.  Between 1925 and 1941 Osip Mandelstam died in a prison camp; Sergei Yesenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Marina Tsvetaeva committed suicide.  (Savinkov, Babel and Mirsky were among the writers who died between 1925 and 1940.)  Whenever torturers failed to extract immediate confessions, Stalin would ask, “Is this a hotel or a prison?”

Yet Babel was interested in Stalin as a fascinating monster and dangerous fictional subject.  His daughter Nathalie observed that “Babel was a man of bewildering contradictions who . . . sometimes deluded himself” and could be blind to reality.  In September 1935, two years after four million peasants were starved to death during the officially organised Ukrainian famine, he declared, “I feel fine, am seeing interesting things and visiting collective farms; they are becoming the mainstay of Soviet life.”

Enjoying his privileged life, Babel didn’t expect to be arrested.  On May 15, 1939 at 5 A.M., when Babel was in the writers’ colony, four secret policemen came to his flat in Moscow and woke up his wife Antonina.  They thoroughly searched the place and drove with her to his dacha. The police searched it and seized all his manuscripts.  Hoping that his international reputation might save him, he whispered to his wife “inform Malraux” and ask him to help.  He immediately regretted that his mother in Belgium would no longer get his letters. Referring to their late-night raids, he joked to his captors, “I guess you don’t get much sleep, do you?”  They drove him through the gates of Lubyanka, he got out of the car and entered the massive door guarded by two men, and his wife never saw him again.

Nathalie noted that the Soviets kept detailed records of all their victims: “when they were arrested, what questions they were asked, what crimes they confessed to, what sentences were inflicted and how they were carried out.”  Babel was accused of Trotskyism, terrorism, and spying for Austria and France.  It was not enough to confess, he had to denounce others.  During his eight months in prison, after beatings and torture,  he falsely accused his close friends André Malraux, the film director Sergei Eisenstein and the writer Ilya Ehrenburg.  He later retracted his confession and asked his interrogators “to take into account that, though in prison, I committed a crime.  I slandered several people.”

On January 26, 1940 Babel’s twenty-minute trial took place in the private chambers of Lavrentiy Beria, head of the secret police.  The sentence was decided in advance and Babel was condemned to death by firing squad.  His last futile words were “I am innocent.  I have never been a spy.  I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union.  I accused myself falsely.  I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others.  I am asking for only one thing—let me finish my work.”  The next morning at 1:30 he was shot in the head, his body was burned with all his manuscripts and diaries, and the ashes were thrown into a communal grave.  The temporarily surviving writers soon fought for possession of his dacha.

After his arrest and predetermined guilt, Babel’s existence was completely obliterated.  His translator Peter Constantine wrote that Babel “became a nonperson in the Soviet Union.  His name was blotted out, removed from literary dictionaries and encyclopedias, and taken off school and university syllabi.  He became unmentionable in any public venue.” But he was officially exonerated, transformed from an unperson to a real person, just after Stalin’s death, in 1954.

Malraux recalled that the recklessly outspoken Babel had “an unfortunate tendency to say what he thinks of the economic, political and social situation in the USSR.”  He breathed the unmentionable odour of death in Russia, knew that “life was being destroyed” and that he was “present at an endless funeral.”  But Ilya Ehrenburg recorded that in Marseilles in 1927 Babel declared, like the old Slavophiles, “Spiritual life in Russia is nobler . . . . Life in the sense of individual freedom is fine here, but we Russians pine for the wind of great thoughts and great passions.”

Nathalie offered a perceptive summary of Babel’s complex motives, both realistic and idealistic, for returning to his roots and inspiration in Russia.  He valued his fame, sympathized with his Russian compatriots and was driven by sacrificial heroism: “He always refused to emigrate; his sense of honor and love of the limelight demanded that he stay among his own people.  Babel was well aware of the cruelty of the Stalinist regime. . . . Nothing, however, could shatter his feelings that he belonged to Russia and that he had to share the fate of his countrymen.  What in so many people would have produced only fear and terror awakened in him a sense of duty and a kind of heroic fatalism.”

III

All three exiles were born at the edge of the Russian Empire: in Ukraine or the Crimea.  They were intelligent and courageous, and had extensive military experience. All were important writers who felt both Russian and European and were at home in France.  Mirsky’s father had been the czarist Minister of the Interior in 1905; Savinkov had been Kerensky’s Deputy Minister of the Interior in 1917.  In the Civil War following the Revolution, both Savinkov and Mirsky had fought with the Whites and been defeated by the Reds.  They were impoverished exiles, fluent in several languages and living in squalid rooms.  Both were intimate with a colleague’s wife, and warned of  mortal danger by close friends.  Savinkov, who wanted to overthrow the Bolsheviks, was deceived by them and lured back to Russia; Mirsky believed in the Bolsheviks and went back willingly.

Prince Dmitri Svyatopolk-Mirsky (1890-1939) was born on his family’s vast estate in Ukraine.  His ancestors belonged to an older dynasty than the ruling Romanovs and his father was very close to the Czar.  Dmitri studied Oriental languages at Saint Petersburg University, and was an officer in the elite Guards before and during World War I.  In 1916 he had a mysterious two-week marriage to a nurse in his wartime hospital.  He fought with General Denikin’s White army in 1919-20; escaped from Russia in 1921; and until 1932 was lecturer in Russian at King’s College, London University.  He declared himself a Communist in 1928 and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1931.  Mirsky introduced English readers to Babel’s stories in the Nation and Atheneum of January 23, 1926.  He translated Babel’s “The Story of My Dovecote” into English and laid the foundation for his reputation in the West.  In the late 1920s he also arranged an Italian visa for Babel to visit Gorky in Sorrento.  In 1932 he returned to Russia and became a Soviet citizen.  In the early 1930s the solitary bachelor had his only love affair, with Vera Suvchinskaya, the divorced wife of his close friend.  Arrested on June 3, 1937, he was convicted, sent to the Gulag and died there.  In 1962 the charges against him were declared “without foundation” and he was, like Babel, rehabilitated.

Mirsky came from the aristocratic class that had been extinguished by the Bolsheviks.  They considered the rare survivor alien and offensive, a marked man and doomed enemy living a posthumous existence.  Tall, dark and bearded, he had hideous teeth.  His main pleasures were heavy drinking, from vodka to champagne, and expensive gourmet meals when he left England for annual holidays in France.  Back in Russia he lived, with smelly soap and no bath, in squalid Dostoyevskian lodgings.

Like Edmund Wilson, who met Mirsky in Moscow in the summer of 1935 and wrote an excellent essay about him (Encounter, July 1955), he was an intelligent, perceptive, erudite, multilingual literary critic and historian.  Wilson wrote that Mirsky’s “learning and his information were enormous, exact and wide-ranging,” and his book on Pushkin stimulated Wilson to learn Russian.  Wilson concluded that Mirsky “was a gifted and heroic person, and his fate was one of the tragedies of the Stalin dictatorship.”

A Russian writer who also met Mirsky that year provided some lively details:

“I find him extraordinarily nice.  Broad education, sincerity, literary talent, the most absurd beard, absurd bald head, a suit that though it’s English is unkempt, worn and baggy, and a peculiar manner of listening—after every phrase uttered by the person he’s talking to he utters a sympathetic ‘ee-ee-ee’ (a pig-like squeal in the throat)—in all this there’s something amusing but endearing.”

The English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who met Mirsky in Moscow in October 1932, explained why Mirsky was allowed to survive for five years, that he had a formidable capacity for alcohol, and that he dogmatically denigrated English writers who had once been his friends:

He was always invited to Moscow receptions to show any foreigners present that a prince could survive unhurt under a dictatorship of the proletariat. . . . Mirsky always turned up, I think largely for the free champagne.  He was a great drinker, and not too well provided with money.  In any case he only earned rubles—by writing articles in the Literaturnaya Gazeta tearing to pieces contemporary English writers like D. H. Lawrence, T. S . Eliot and Aldous Huxley, to whom, in conversation, he would always refer to as “Poor Lawrence!” “Poor Tom!” “Poor Aldous!”

Muggeridge also described the astonishing transformation from Right to Left of Mirsky’s political views:

In the civil war he had fought with the Whites, afterwards living as an exile in Paris, and associating himself with the most extreme reactionary views.  Then, he came to London, where, inevitably, he became a professor, and was commissioned to produce a book on Lenin [1931].  In the course of working on it he came to see his subject as an enlightened saviour rather than, as heretofore, a degraded villain.  So he changed from being a prince to being a comrade. . . . Mirsky had pulled off the unusual feat of managing to be a parasite under three régimes—as a prince under Czarism, as a professor under Capitalism, and as an homme-de-lettres under Communism.

Karl Marx had predicted the inevitable breakdown of capitalism, and the Wall Street Crash in October 1929 seemed to confirm his prophecy.  While America and Europe were sunk in the Depression, the Soviet Union, with their promising Five-Year Plans, seemed to be forging ahead to a glorious future.  Between 1931 and 1934 the Fabian Socialists—George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Sidney and Beatrice Webb—had visited Russia and even met Stalin.  Mirsky’s superb biographer G. S. Smith writes that they saw Russia as a Utopia, “made pilgrimages to worship at the shrine” and cranked out propagandistic tracts extolling the virtues of the Communist régime.  In June 1931 Mirsky, mimicking the Party line, absurdly told Gorky, “there is neither humanity nor culture outside the Communist revolution.”  Smith observes that Mirsky, who “never believed in liberal democracy . . . respected and argued the necessity for strong, even ruthless, leadership.”  He had “no moral objection to violence” and accepted “the most repugnant facets of Stalinism.”  Though he understood and approved of the murderous system, he did not realize it would destroy him.

Wilson suggested that Mirsky’s political conversion and return to Russia were based on his aristocratic background, his worship of power and his misguided patriotism: “still keeping something in his bones of the old barbaric overlordship, he is not necessarily revolted by Stalin.  I found [his return] quite comprehensible, given Mirsky’s  . . . love of Russia and his self-identification with her destiny, that he should stride from the arrogance of the prince to that of the commissar.”  Mirsky felt he was performing “a service to the national culture and a service to the new Russia.”

It’s surprising that Virginia and Leonard Woolf, with no first-hand experience or insider’s knowledge of Russia, were more perceptive than Mirsky about the dangers of return.  They saw that he was doomed and heading for an agonising death.  In her diary of June 28, 1932 Virginia predicted his fate but could not save him: “Mirsky was trap

mouthed; opened & bit his remark to pieces: has yellow misplaced teeth; wrinkles his forehead; despair, suffering, very marked on his face.  Has been in England, in boarding houses for 12 years; now returns to Russia ‘for ever.’  I thought as I watched his eye brighten & fade—soon there’ll be a bullet through your head.”

Leonard gives a more detailed account of their meeting in 1931.  When confronted with reality by his well-meaning friends, Mirsky did not explain his motives and insouciantly ignored their warnings:

By that time one knew something of the kind of life (or death) that an intellectual might expect in the Russia of Stalin.  It seemed madness, if not suicide, for a man like Mirsky voluntarily to return to Russia and put himself in the power of the ferocious fanatics who could not possibly have the slightest sympathy with or for him.  We knew Mirsky well enough to say so.  He was extremely reticent, shrugging it all off with some platitude, but he left us with the impression of an unhappy man who, with his eyes open, was going not half, but the whole, way to meet a nasty fate.

Smith notes that in Moscow, unlike London, Mirsky was “isolated, unsociable, self-enclosed, and had no real friends.”  Wilson gave some reasons for Mirsky’s arrest in 1937.  Like Babel, he’d lost the support and protection of Gorky, who’d died in 1936; again like Babel, he lacked self-restraint and offended his powerful enemies; and he became the natural prey of the envious mediocrities who controlled Soviet literature.

Mirsky was rightly accused of serving in the White army, teaching Russian to British intelligence officers and not reporting this training to the Soviet authorities.  But he was falsely accused of actively serving in British intelligence and spying for Britain in the Soviet Union.  Convicted of “suspected” but not actual espionage, he was sentenced to eight years in a corrective labor camp.

Accustomed in his youth to princely luxury, Mirsky had a more protracted and agonising fate than the quick dispatch of Savinkov and Babel.  Kolyma, the coldest inhabited place on earth, was the most notorious and terrifying Gulag camp.  Between 1932 and 1953 three million prisoners, mining gold and cutting timber in the cruelest conditions, died there of starvation and disease.  A fellow prisoner reported that Mirsky suffered mental anguish and grieved endlessly about his self-induced torments.  He regretted “his turn to the new faith and his coming to Russia, cursed Communism, made fun of his own illusions.”  The frail intellectual was first assigned to logging but could not meet his quota, then served more leniently as a night watchman, then was too sick to work.  Degraded and brutalised, injured and diseased, he died on June 6, 1939 from inflammation of the intestines.

Though these men were quite different, they had similar reasons for returning to Russia.  All three victims had suspicious and potentially fatal backgrounds.  They had spent many years abroad and developed close friendships with foreigners.  Savinkov, who actively opposed the Reds after they took power, was deceived by the OGPU; Babel expected to return to his former prestige, privileges and wealth; Mirsky thought he’d be welcomed as a valuable aristocratic trophy and cultural hero.  They were deeply attached to the language and culture of their native Russia, and felt a patriotic solidarity with the motherland.  All three engaged in and suffered from what George Orwell called “doublethink”: simultaneously accepting two contradictory beliefs as truth.  Rational thought fought with suicidal impulses as they risked their lives and signed their own death warrants.  Babel and Mirsky felt guilty about their past “crimes” and naively accepted the promises of the Bolshevik regime.  They retained an idealistic belief in the wisdom of Stalin and believed in the future of Soviet Communism.

These tragically self-deceived Russians resembled the millions of men, driven by sacrificial and heroic fantasies, who rushed to be slaughtered when the Great War broke out in 1914.  All three assumed they would be forgiven for past crimes, though Stalin was not known for his compassion.  All failed in their high-minded goals: Savinkov to overthrow the government, Babel to write his greatest works, Mirsky to exalt Soviet culture.  All were tormented by having engineered their own destruction: by suicide, firing squad or Gulag.  As an officer tells the dangerously deluded narrator of Babel’s story “Argamak”: “You’re trying to live without enemies.  That’s all you think about, not having enemies.”

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has had 33 of his 54 books translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six continents.  He’s recently published Thomas

Mann’s Artist-Heroes (2014), Robert Lowell in Love (2015) and Resurrections: Authors,

Heroes—and a Spy (2018).  His book on his friend James Salter will be out in the spring of 2024.

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