Book Reviews
STALIN’S BRITISH VICTIMS, by Francis Beckett
Times Literary Supplement – October 1, 2004
Andree Aelion Brooks: Russian Dance: A true story of intrigue and passion in Stalinist Moscow
Francis Beckett: Stalin’s British Victims
There can have been few places more exciting – or, ultimately, treacherous – than Soviet Moscow in the 1920s. To the glamour of the Jazz Age was added the thrill of a brave new world in the making: an egalitarian dream in which peasants could live in palaces and every human being would take part in building a Communist utopia.
While Lenin was still alive, there seemed to be everything to play for. The dotty idealism of the first Bolshevik modernizing legislation – a decree excising two weeks from the calendar, to catch Russian time up with that of the West, and a decree killing off the superfluous silent letters in the alphabet, to make writing logical – gives something of the speedy feel of the times. Revolution was a crowd-pleaser. Western socialists brought their dreams into Russia to join the Comintern. Soviet agents spread across the West, trying to win recognition for their country by any means. Idealism was part of the pull. But so was the sheer fun of being able to serve the brotherhood of man by drawing state funds to travel the world, adopt aliases, plot behind closed doors, and generally pull the wool over the eyes of the ignorant.
With hindsight, we cannot but know how badly the Soviet dream ended. So it is clear from the start that books about this era will be writings about disappointment, pain and – above all – the blindness of those who cannot bear to see the truth. Andree Aelion Brooks’s Russian Dance starts off in the overblown style of a romantic novel. Bluet Rabinoff, a rich New York wife with “wheat-coloured” hair and a tiny waist, is leaving her husband Max in 1928 for a charismatic Russian-Jewish doctor called Marc Cheftel. Her affair with the married Marc has developed over several months. She gradually discovers that he is not the innocent medic he claims, but a Soviet agent. Still, she is hopeful enough to leave behind her daughter and pursue this great love to Moscow, where she believes true happiness awaits.
Once out of New York, Brooks’s narrative becomes austere and moving. There is no luxury flat, no luxury posting: just a harassed existence in a borrowed apartment with not enough food, while, as Stalin’s grip tightens, the existence of a foreign wife puts Marc in ever greater jeopardy. In turn, the wheeler-dealing Mar is putting her in danger, by handing in her American passport and tricking her into signing a request for Soviet citizenship. There seems no way out. Historical details from the Terror of the 1930s are sketched in, as are the complexities of Marc’s behaviour – his sensibilities as a Jew brought up under the tsars and his talent for intrigue. Bluet’s letters home to her daughter – detailed, affectionate, guilt-stricken that she cannot see the child but unable to say why, and desperate to reassure her that she is loved – poignantly convey the despair felt by so many trapped in Stalin’s Russia. But this remains a love story, ending with a lovers’ parting; in it, the personal never quite becomes political.
Francis Beckett’s history of four British women whose lives are shredded by Stalin is unremittingly and intelligently political. Rosa Rust, Rose Cohen, Freda Utley and Pear Rimel had varying experiences of the land they left behind, but all four went to Russia as a response to the inequality of British life. Rust’s Communist father Bill’s desire to correct social injustice at home led him to the Comintern. Her parents’ absorption in politics gave her a very odd childhood in an adopted land that became so much hers that Russian remained her first language for the rest of her life. She spent time running wild on the street learning the tricky ways of beggar children, years at an exclusive boarding school for the sons and daughters of foreigners, and, finally, a terrifying period in which, left behind by her parents as they grew anxious about their own safety, she was deported to Central Asia with the Volga German woman who had become her substitute mother and put to work in a copper mine. When she was finally evacuated to England, to rejoin her mother, her father was too embarrassed about her politically inconvenient troubles to make them public.
Rose Cohen was an ornament of Moscow society in the 1920s – a beauty, a Comintern agent and a journalist, with a Russian husband who, after the Revolution, became a member of the Supreme Soviet Economic Council’s praesidium. Born into a Polish Jewish family who had fled to London to escape repression under the tsars, she threw herself into British Communism. Harry Pollitt, leading light of the British Communists, loved her unrequitedly all his life. Even when the arrests started, wrote Ivy, the British wife of Maxim Litvinov, the Foreign Commissar, Cohen was “always rather smug – ‘Well, I suppose they know what they’re doing, don’t you?’ She had the cowardice that comes from shutting your eyes”. Yet even Cohen and her husband vanished into the camps, leaving their son Alyosha to face life as the orphaned child of “enemies of the people.”
The intellectual Freda Utley – an upper-middle-class girl drawn to Moscow after her father lost his money- who was tactless enough to voice her anxieties about the system, lived for the rest of her life with the fear that her outspokenness had brought about her husband’s arrest. Pearl Rimel, at home having a baby, never understood what had happened to her Dutch Jewish husband in Georgia; he, in turn, was not allowed to write to her before his death or know that their son had been born. The sombre events of 1939 are set out with panache. But the book’s real strength is to follow its protagonists through the years when no one spoke of these things, right to the present day; mercilessly setting out the mental gymnastics and weasel words used by survivors’ families to avoid connecting the victims’ terrible fates with their own past ideals. By showing the effect on subsequent generations – turning some descendants into passionate McCarthyites, others into guilt-ridden deniers, and one into an investigative journalist – Francis Beckett offers more than a history of twentieth-century ideology. He attacks the sectarian spirit itself – the wish, seen in so many conflicts today, to elevate a political formula above personal needs – and the damage it does, not only to its victims but to their children and their children’s children.
ENDS