Alexander Liberman’s mother, Henriette Pascar, in Paris in the mid-1920s.
It could take an entire month for Semyon to travel across just one of these estates. When no train service was available between two destinations, he frequently had to traverse, by coach, stretches of land in which no human habitation would be found for several days at a time, making it essential to stock up on large reserves of bread, water, hard-boiled eggs, and cheeses. Occasionally, he would seek shelter in some monastery or convent along the way, always havens of peace and hospitality where he conversed for hours with monks and nuns, indulging the mystical streak in his character that had been instilled by his scholarly grandfather and by his friendship with the Christian-Existentialist philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev. “To me these stopovers were romance itself,” he wrote, “because of my feeling of being so far away from the main stream of life…because of the deep silence of the endless surrounding forest.” During his peregrinations, Semyon was also reminded of the harsh exiles being imposed on countless Russians due to their anticzarist activities. His travels often brought him to the town of Perm, a clearing center for revolutionaries being shipped to Siberia. There he sometimes met old friends, both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, as they were being transported in chains or under heavy police escort to their sites of detention. He tried to help them as much as he could, attending to the convicts’ supplies of warm clothing, medicine, and food, frequently lobbying local landowners to arrange for certain groups of prisoners to settle in areas less remote than Siberia. For throughout his journeys across the empire he retained most of the ideals he had held as a radical activist. He was constantly horrified by “the width and depth of the chasm separating the masses of the Russian people from the handful of landlords, bankers, and court officials ruling the country and enjoying all the rights and privileges on earth.” And by 1915, he was certain that revolution was inevitable.
There must have been a trace of unease in Semyon’s attitude toward the unfortunate revolutionary comrades he encountered during his voyages. For in the years immediately preceding the revolution of 1917, his status as Russia’s leading authority on lumber allowed him to travel in extremely luxurious conditions, more often than not in his clients’ private train cars. Little Shurik, when he reached the age of four, occasionally accompanied his father on these journeys to the estates of the high-born nobility, and these trips were immensely influential on him. In 1916, for instance, while Semyon was inspecting the Caucasian estates of Prince Oldenburg, the prince arranged for him to travel with his son in a seven-car private train. At each railroad station along the way, an imperial officer came to salute the travelers in their compartment, brought them abundant meals, and saw to it that all their desires were satisfied.
One-year-old Alex with his father, St. Petersburg, 1913.
It is to these voyages through the vastnesses of Russia, in fact, that Alex attributed the obsession with monumentality that later characterized his art and also his hedonistic taste for opulent living. He often said that his childhood travels throughout Russia were his first experiences of “extravagance and heroic scale.” This exposure to the unlimited sumptuousness of the Russian aristocracy led Alex to develop a penchant for luxury that, he readily admitted, became ingrained. He never forgot the rich velvet of these private trains’ upholstery, their red damask curtains, the electric candlesticks with little pink fluted shades in their dining cars. And above all, he remembered the lavish service his father received upon these trips. For the rest of his days, Alex Liberman, who inherited more than a measure of his father’s magnetic charm—a charm that had to do with a talent for making every passing acquaintance feel important and perfectly remembered—sought the friendship and protection of powerful men who could provide him with what he called “special treatment.” Over the years, however straitened Alex’s circumstances, he always needed considerable measures of privilege and opulence—be they in trains, hotels, his own homes—to find life tolerable.
In February 1917, five-year-old Alex, leaning out of a window in his parents’ flat in Petrograd (the new name given St. Petersburg in 1914), witnessed a scene he remembered vividly throughout his life: “Dark, black masses like black rivers going through the big avenues of St. Petersburg with red flags, chanting revolutionary songs.” That very evening, he would recall, he saw a life-size portrait of the czar being burned. “Like any child of five, I suppose I must have sensed my parents’ nervousness and terror,” he reflected decades later. “As a child brought up in the Revolution…[y]ou become prepared for any disruption—upheaval is natural.”
The events of 1917 inevitably brought huge changes into the Liebermans’ lives. In March, upon the abdication of the czar, Semyon, his socialist beliefs vindicated, wrote letters of resignation to all the companies and landowners that had employed him and offered his services to the Petrograd Soviet. He proved to be invaluable to them; for upon the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in October 1917, the anticommunist army, which was reinforced by a large contingent of foreign troops, had occupied the Caucasus and the Donets Basin, totally cutting off the Bolshevik regime from the coal and oil supplies essential to its railroad system. The fledgling Soviet government became totally dependent on wood fuel for its railroads, and it appointed Semyon Lieberman to head a committee in charge of supplying Russian railroads with the proper amounts of timber.
In March of 1918, five months after the coup d’état which had established Bolshevik rule, the Russian capital was moved from Petrograd to Moscow. Semyon, family in tow, soon followed the government to the new capital. Notified of Lieberman’s expertise, Lenin summoned him to the Kremlin in the fall of that year. The two men felt instant trust and sympathy for each other and began a close collaboration that was to end only upon Lenin’s death in 1924.
In view of Semyon Lieberman’s openly anti-Bolshevik, even anti-Marxist, views, his survival as a high-ranking Soviet government functionary over the following seven years was nothing short of miraculous. This tells us much about the elasticity and open-mindedness of Lenin’s first years of rule, and it also speaks to Semyon’s own charisma and political agility. Lieberman was one of a handful of noncommunist spets—short for “specialist”—whom Lenin retained in his immediate entourage because their expertise was essential to the beleaguered new nation’s economic survival. In Lieberman’s case, he was made business manager of a five-man Central Timber Council, which oversaw all of the Soviet Union’s lumber resources. It is fortunate that many of his Bolshevik superiors, such as Leonid Krasin, who eventually became the Soviet Union’s first ambassador to Great Britain, were old buddies he’d worked with decades ago in Odessa or Kiev at meetings of the then illegal Social Democratic Party. In the very first years of the Soviet regime, Lieberman was even tolerated by Felix Dzerzhinsky, “the Torquemada of the Soviets,” as he referred to the dreaded Bolshevik director of the secret police, who was shrewd enough to realize the pivotal role of the spets in saving the floundering Soviet economy.
Having become an insider, Semyon attended all meetings of Lenin’s Supreme Council of Economy, the equivalent of a joint ministry of labor and industry. He was often called to Lenin’s office a half hour ahead of such meetings to discuss specific issues of timber supply, met with the leader at least twice per month, and at all times had direct access to Lenin’s private phone line at the Kremlin. He seems to have brought his son along on some of these visits, for little Shurik remembered being repeatedly impressed by the great rusted cannons at the Kremlin walls: It is to this vision of aggressive, jutting form that he traces many sculptural motifs that fueled his own artwork a half century later.
Semyon Lieberman’s vivid portrait of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin depicts a consummately shrewd, soft-spoken man who knew just how to present himself as utterly cordial and artless; a sorcerer of sorts who pretended to be always putting all his cards on the table; a wondrously charismatic listener who successfully feigned being absorbed in the problems of others. Drawing a vivid cont
rast between Lenin’s warmth and charm and Leon Trotsky’s cool arrogance, Semyon Lieberman makes it clear that for some years he was under Lenin’s spell. “Our conversations were so pleasant, they so calmed and encouraged me,” he wrote of the Soviet leader, “that I looked forward to them…with impatience.” So it is telling of Lieberman’s integrity that however seduced he was by Lenin, he was not enough of an opportunist to join the Communist Party or even to mask his reservations about Marxist theory. Lenin, in fact, seemed to appreciate the probity with which Lieberman remained loyal to his own ideals. Upon one occasion, when Semyon was being criticized for these very failings by the more doctrinaire members of Lenin’s entourage, Vladimir Ilyich, having heard out Semyon’s problems in a private session, said, “See for yourself, you wouldn’t have all these troubles if you were a member of our party!”
“Vladimir Ilyich,” Semyon replied, “Bolsheviks, like singers, are born, not made.” “Ilyich,” as Lenin was also called by his entourage, ended the meeting, as he always did, with a cordial handshake and a warm smile.
Within a year or two of the Liebermans’ arrival in Moscow, Alex’s mother, Henriette, was also finding good fortune with the new regime. She had immediately been struck by the number of hungry, restless children roaming through the streets of the Soviet capital. Orphaned, homeless, or made vagrant by their parents’ lengthy workdays, they were beginning to present a vast social problem. As a way of getting them off the street and channeling their energies, she conceived the idea of a children’s theater. The proposal found favor with one of her former lovers, Anatoly Lunacharsky, an enthusiastic supporter of avant-garde art (and of Mayakovsky), who was then serving as Lenin’s people’s commissar for education. In 1919, Lunacharsky secured funds for Henriette to set up the first government-run children’s theater. At first, she merely sat on the theater’s advisory board, which included the legendary stage director Konstantin Stanislavsky. But within a year she became the director and sole decision maker of the enterprise. In the following four years, during the heyday of Vsevolod Meyerhold and the Moscow Art Theater, when Europe’s most advanced artistic movements thrived in Russia, she commissioned some of the country’s most prominent painters and designers to create sets and costumes for her plays, which included adaptations of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, Kipling’s Jungle Book, and Hans Christian Andersen tales. Tickets were free. The four-hundred-seat theater was always filled. Henriette persuaded professional actors to volunteer their services and to answer the children’s questions after each show. Sandwiches were passed out to the young audience, many of whose members may well have gone hungry for days.
Meanwhile, Shurik, a skinny, anxious, often ailing boy, was more often than not roaming the streets himself, overlooked by his perpetually busy parents. He endeared himself to children his age by giving them food stolen from his parents’ kitchen. He joined in young vagrants’ often dangerous games, which were held in a rubble-filled lot in back of his family’s apartment building. “We played at warfare and threw stones and bits of broken dishes at each other,” he remembered decades later. “Many of us were bloodied up. Whoever won the battle would shit in the enemy’s trenches.” In Henriette’s fictionalized memoir, the heroine’s young son spends most of his time at his mother’s theater, helping to paint sets and handing out sandwiches to the hungry children, often rushing backstage to tell Mama how much he loves her. But in fact, young Shurik spent no more than a few hours per week at the theater, and much of the time he felt as abandoned as the homeless boys he befriended. And although he loved opera and ballet, he was terrified rather than attracted by the experience of being onstage. When he was nine, his mother insisted that he learn to perform publicly and had him coached by a member of the Bolshoi troupe. As he faced his audience at the appointed time, he burst into tears and ran offstage. It is to this episode that Alex traced his lifelong dread of public speaking, a duty he managed to avoid throughout his career.
Shurik had many other severe discipline problems. His parents had different views about his education. His father wanted him to go to a regular school. His mother, who believed that imagination was central to children’s education (“fantasy, dreams, and folktales” seemed to be her pedagogical credo), wished him to be tutored at home. At first, his father prevailed. Shurik was enrolled in a school on the opposite side of town and given a sandwich every morning to take along for lunch. But instead of taking the tram, as he was supposed to do, he gave the sandwich to a truck driver in exchange for a ride to school. (The first, nearly fatal ulcer hemorrhage Alex suffered at the age of nineteen might well have been caused by those years of systematic, daily hunger; his disdain for walking—and for all forms of public transportation—never abated.)
Once he got to school, Shurik’s behavior grew to be totally anarchic. He lifted girls’ skirts, assaulted other boys, insulted his teachers. His instructors found him so unruly that he was expelled and had to be tutored at home, just as his mother had wished him to be. A variety of instructors were hired—and left in dismay after being kicked, punched, and spat upon by the boy, whose favorite trick was to lock his teachers, one after the next, in his parents’ closet. Moreover, at the age of nine and perhaps beyond it, Shurik continued to wet his bed at night and occasionally to shit in his pants. Such incontinence led to the only beating he remembers his father ever giving him—a sound thrashing with a leather belt, imposed while his mother, in the next room, shrieked for her husband to desist.
In 1920, the Liebermans, like everyone in Moscow with the exception of the very top-ranking members of government, began to suffer the consequences of the city’s enormous recent expansion and of its growing shortage of living quarters. Ordered to share their apartment with two other working-class families, they were reduced to two rooms of their own. Moreover, their coresidents’ violent, drunken quarrels made life increasingly intolerable. Little Alex remembered seeing one inebriated tenant beating his wife mercilessly as he chased her all over the apartment, including the Liebermans’ rooms; Semyon realized that such behavior presented the worst possible example to his already troubled child. (Even the fairly decorous Liebermans occasionally succumbed to the temptation of alcohol. Alex remembers coming home from one of his street-gang jaunts one evening to find his parents lying on the floor of their bedroom, totally drunk—the turmoil of life in cramped communal quarters had apparently led them to capitulate to a neighbor’s offer to share a pail of vodka.)
The only escape from the chaos of communal living available to the Liebermans was a little cottage a few hours by train from Moscow, which they were given access to because its former owners had been exiled or liquidated. There, Alex ran freely through fields and pastures and seemed far calmer and happier. He remembers beautiful etchings of ancestors in gilt frames and a field of wildflowers through which his mother’s brother, Naum, rode his horse bareback. Decades later, the phrase “We’re going to the country!” was one that my stepfather always spoke with a smile of pleasure and anticipation. From the time I first knew him, in his midtwenties, “the country” was a green place in nature that allowed him to escape from the agitation and responsibilities of the city week and inevitably brought him a measure of serenity and peace.
But in 1920 Moscow, the week inevitably resumed with the tedium of lessons and tutors, and Alex’s unruly response to them. His “hysteria,” as his parents referred to his fractious behavior, became increasingly problematic, and Semyon began consulting doctors. They all advised him that his son suffered from severe psychological problems. And a few physicians who were old friends of Semyon suggested, confidentially, that he not only get the boy out of their crowded, turbulent flat but out of the Soviet Union altogether. Lieberman began to give that idea serious consideration.
Nineteen twenty was a banner year for the young Soviet Union’s economic status: A few European nations began to lift their embargoes, making it possible for the country to resume trade with foreign powers. It was natural that th
e multilingual Semyon Lieberman, the country’s foremost specialist in lumber, would be one of the citizens included in the Soviet Union’s first trade mission abroad; it was headed by his close friend Leonid Krasin. The mission was to travel to Great Britain, which was then led by Liberal Party leader David Lloyd George and was the first country to renew commercial relations with Soviet Russia. The delegation, which reached London in the fall of 1920, comprised some twenty experts in various areas of commerce, only five of whom were non-Bolshevik spets. These delegates were the first Soviet citizens to be allowed into the country since the revolution, and they were often presented humiliatingly in the British press as “savages who eat with their knives” and “clean their noses with their fists.” Mortified by these boorish views of their new society, the Soviet delegates spent a great deal of time replenishing their wardrobes and studying the niceties of British society manners before heading home.
The next country to issue an invitation to Soviet economic specialists was Germany, and this time Lieberman was sent out as a one-man delegation. By then, he had played an important role in shaping Lenin’s New Economic Policy, a program to reconstruct the Russian economy through limited reintroduction of capitalistic practices and foreign trade, and Russia’s timber industry was more in the limelight than ever. Arriving in Berlin, Lieberman learned, to his delight, that for the first time since the revolution his passion for luxury was being satisfied: A suite had been reserved for him at the city’s most sumptuous hotel, the Esplanade. As Semyon moved in, he was startled to learn that some thirty-five rooms in the hotel were occupied by timber importers from all over Europe—Norway, Sweden, Belgium—who had come to negotiate with him. It was clear that he had gained recognition, abroad as well as at home, as the chief spokesman for the Soviet Union’s most lucrative industry.
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