by Mark Mazower
What I have come to believe is that after the revolution, Max almost certainly sought, so far as possible, to draw a sharp line between his business activities and any other kind of contact with the Soviet authorities for the simple reason that he still had family and friends back in the USSR who had not, and never would, join the party. And because it was hard to tell who was really doing what among the pro-Bolsheviks in London, he would have been inclined to keep his own counsel and stay away from people he did not know or trust. Another longtime Hampstead Russian, Nicolai Klishko, was a Vilna-born civil engineer who had worked for Vickers before the war. He and Max would appear to have had many things in common, not least the fact that at one point Klishko was living only a few doors down the road from him in South End Green. Yet after the war Klishko was a member of the Cheka, an organizer of Soviet espionage in Britain, and the conduit for Soviet funds to the new Communist Party of Great Britain—in the early 1920s he was in the thick of things. When I went to the National Archives to see whether the MI5 file on Klishko indicated any contact with Max, I again drew a blank. There was plenty on Klishko dating back to before the war. MI5 had been reading his correspondence, and his wife’s, but combing through half a dozen thick card folders with their record of intercepted letters, conversations, and surveillance over many years, I found no mention of Max at all, nor of anyone he might have known. All this suggested that Max’s instinctive suspicion in such matters had been reinforced by the events of 1917 and that whatever circles he had moved in before the war, once he was back in London he kept his distance from anyone too closely associated with the Bolsheviks. He had known them too well, and for too long.
CHAPTER SIX
Wood End
Time lets out its line and then reels it in again. In the early 1970s, some old family friends lived in the village of Wood End in Hertfordshire, an hour’s drive from London, and we would go out for a day in the country. Occasionally Dad would disappear next door to see their neighbors; the husband was a historian with an eye for offbeat, intriguing themes—one of his books was about millenarian cults, a later one was on ancient myths of cosmic order—and the son, still in his twenties, was already a fearsome rock journalist who had written a study of pop called Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom. What I didn’t realize until many years later was that the historian’s wife, Vera, had been the novel-devouring girl who along with her mother had accompanied Max when they fled Russia.
Nor did I then have any idea of just what a remarkable few years had followed in Vera Broido’s life. After studying art in Paris and Berlin, she found herself at the heart of Weimar’s fashionable avant-garde as the muse of the dadaist Raoul Hausmann, who paraded her around Charlottenberg to the growing irritation of his friends. He photographed her obsessively in the years that she lived in a ménage à trois with him and his wife. Eventually tiring of being a modernist pinup, Vera moved to England in the early 1930s. Her brother and father also ended up there; her mother, the perennial activist, returned to the USSR to revive the Menshevik cause but never reemerged and was shot in 1941, the same year that Vera married her historian, Norman Cohn. In the years before her marriage, Vera and her brother had been living in London, and their shared revolutionary past had kept the Broidos and the Mazowers in each other’s lives. It turned out Dad had known her since his childhood. But it was not until she was in her nineties that I finally got to meet her.
It was all thanks to a long-lost cousin of Dad’s who had resurfaced quite unexpectedly after the collapse of communism. This was Iosif, whom the family called Osya, and he was the son of Max’s youngest brother, Semyon. He had lived his entire life in Leningrad. (St. Petersburg was renamed yet again, this time as Leningrad in 1924 after Lenin’s death. It did not become St. Petersburg again until 1991.) When he came to see us in England, he was nearly eighty and it was the first time he had ever left Russia. Dad thought he’d like to hear Vera’s memories of the old days—she was older than either of them and had many memories from before the revolution—and she invited them to Wood End. I was their driver.
There was an uncanny physical resemblance between Dad and Osya, and there were other family similarities too. As we motored north along the A1 out of Edgware, leaving behind the unglamorous suburbs, the golf courses, and the roadside pubs, I noticed that what they both exclaimed at were not the vistas provided by the gentle arable countryside that began to stretch away either side of the motorway but the aging concrete bridges that spanned it every few miles. Dad’s engineering training had been short-lived, but Osya knew how to design gun towers for warships and later on turned to harbor cranes as well. He had come to London proudly bearing a catalogue with pictures of the cranes he had designed, giant constructions looming over tankers in Soviet docks as if to remind us that despite the USSR’s ignominious collapse, his country had once stood for the future. There was something revelatory in his pride. It was easy to forget what the Russian revolution had really meant for people who would never, under the tsars, have been allowed an education at all. Semyon had been poor, ill, and Jewish, and in the old days, the obstacles to his son becoming an engineer would have been immense. Before the United States, it was the Soviet Union that had epitomized upward social mobility: It was thanks to the industrialization drive under Stalin that Osya’s family had enjoyed the kind of life—with a car and a small cottage in the country—that had previously been unimaginable.
Yet their suffering had been immense too. The Leningrad Metal Works where Osya had started out was an icon of socialism. Not many factories in Stalin’s Russia had enjoyed the prestige of this mammoth plant, which had been responsible for much of the country’s electrification as well as for equipping many of its tanks, submarines, and warships. Osya had been a foreman on the factory floor when the siege of Leningrad by the Germans began in 1941. He had lost thirty kilos in weight and come down with TB. It was impossible to imagine what it had been like to live through the ceaseless bombardment, the freezing cold, the hunger, the corpses in the streets, the day in the summer of 1942 when loudspeakers on street corners had drowned out the Wehrmacht guns by broadcasting the new symphony Dmitri Shostakovich had composed in the city’s honor. Osya and his family had borne their share of the tragedy. In the first winter of the siege his younger brother, Ilya, died trying to cross icebound Lake Ladoga on what they called the Road of Death. He had left with a group of workers from his factory who were being sent to Sverdlovsk, but his body had been so weakened from starvation that he had not even made it to the lake and had expired, a twenty-five-year-old man, at the Borisova Griva station, where his comrades had left behind his frozen corpse, his backpack, and his suitcase. A little later he was followed by his father, Semyon, who had been in poor health for years. Osya had been successfully evacuated to Perm with the factory, and when he returned to the city, only his mother remained.
In 1949, a letter had come from Highgate. Frouma had wanted to let them know the family news. With Stalin’s paranoia at its height, the kind of correspondence that had been intermittently possible before the war could now cause you to lose your job, or worse, and the letter got Osya dismissed from the factory. Luckily his work and wartime record spoke in his favor, and he quickly found new employment in the nearby Kirov plant. He was still there, well past the age most people in Western Europe would have retired, when Mikhail Gorbachev came into power. By then his mother was long dead and so were Dad’s parents. But Osya had not forgotten his uncle’s family in London, and somewhere in his Leningrad flat he must have kept the letter that had caused him so much trouble because he used it to get in touch with us. In May 1991, Major Colin Fairclough of the Salvation Army’s Family Tracing Service wrote to my brother David in London. He had found our name, he said, in the London phone book. Were we by any chance relatives of a commercial traveler called Max Mazower who had lived at 20 Oakeshott Avenue, London N6, in 1949? In this fashion, the cousins were reunited.
In the car Dad and Osya chatted in the fluent Russian my father r
emembered from childhood. It was one of those warm early-summer mornings that show England at its best. The fields were implausibly green. We parked in the shade outside the old cottage at Wood End where Vera lived and went into the darkened living room for tea. I remember the wooden floors, the feel of a dacha in the Hertfordshire countryside. She was happy to tell us her stories of revolution and soldiers and smugglers, but they seemed far away, the snowbound past irretrievably gone.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Afterlife
When Max arrived in Vilna at the start of 1920, the city’s fate was being debated at the League of Nations and would not be settled for another two years. It was one of the first subjects to be discussed in this new forum for international government, and in the face of Lithuanian and Russian claims, and amid an ongoing war, the Poles were keen to assert their authority in any way they could. Borders were being drawn and redrawn, and passports were a newly desirable commodity. As Max had been born in Grodno, which was now inside the new independent Poland, he was entitled to Polish papers, and it was with these that he made numerous business trips across Eastern Europe over the coming decade; he did not become a British subject until 1935. He was a man of loyalty—to his family, to his political beliefs, and to a certain vision of Russia too. But there is no indication that this loyalty extended to the country that was now claiming the territories where he had grown up. He could speak the language, but to be Polish was, for him, basically a flag of convenience.
Yet Max possessed the ability, uncommon in those with strong ideals, to assess the political outlook unsentimentally. Despite having inclined in the old days towards Russia rather than Poland, he could see that the Tsarist empire was finished. After staying with his brother, he stopped off at Grodno and obtained official written confirmation that he had been born there, a wise and necessary precaution in an era in which statelessness meant vulnerability. No close family was left. His parents were both dead, and the half brothers and half sisters from his father’s first marriage—not that he had ever been close to them—had mostly emigrated before the war. There were distant cousins around the world: In Cook County, Illinois, a certain Abe Masover was by this time a prominent local attorney; there was a rabbi in Palestine; a couple of seamstress sisters in Buenos Aires. Apart from his young cousin in London, none of them meant anything to him.
His beloved Bund—the larger family that had in a way supplanted his own—was a shadow of what it had once been. The new borders of Eastern Europe now sliced through its old heartlands: Vilna and Grodno lay on the Polish side of the frontier, cut off from Minsk, Petrograd, and Moscow. As the movement fractured, old ideological rivals like Zionism became more popular. In Poland the Bund did reemerge between the two world wars and became a force of some consequence there, but it was now the voice of an ethnic minority in an anticommunist nation-state and its ambitions were chiefly confined to the Jews of that country.
Within the USSR Bund members faced the dilemma of denouncing Bolshevism or joining it. By 1925 slightly more than two thousand of them had moved into the party; that left the majority outside it. Lip service was paid to the Bund’s revolutionary past by the country’s rulers, and it was never an unsurmountable barrier to advancing within the nomenklatura: Two of the three key figures inside Stalin’s office serving the general secretary of the party had previously been in the Bund.1 Even so, to have remained a Bundist after the split in the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party in 1903 could raise eyebrows, and to have delayed joining the Bolshevik party after 1921 carried the suggestion of unsoundness. Because Semyon—Max’s youngest brother—never joined, for example, he was repeatedly turned down by the party for a pension despite everything he had done and endured for the revolutionary movement under the tsars.
Distinctions that have some meaning at one time can lose it later. Once the Terror came, the charge of “idealization of the Bund” led straight to the Gulag, and by the mid-1930s it made little difference whether you had thrown your lot in with Lenin or not. The fate of many of Max’s comrades was grim. Zhenia Gourvitch, one of the co-participants at the 1903 Geneva meeting, was exiled to Siberia and never returned. Another, Mark Liber, was arrested and died, probably shot, in 1937. The veteran Bundist Anna Rozental settled in Polish Vilna in the early 1920s, but when the Red Army occupied the city in 1939, she was arrested by the NKVD and deported to the USSR, where she died in a Soviet prison. The revolutionary Yiddishist Esther Frumkin, who did join the party in 1921, was shot in 1943. Moses Rafes, whom Max had known in Vilna for years, was a Bundist representative to the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies in 1917 before switching over to the communists. In 1923 Rafes published a rich history of the Bund that portrayed Bolshevism as the “Bund’s heir,” a view that was quite common then. Six years later, he changed his tune, publishing a new version that cast Bundism as an ideological deviation, but it was not enough to save him and in 1938 he too was arrested and died in northern Russia.
The final break between the Bund and the Bolsheviks came during the Second World War. In early 1943, a young Bundist called Lucjan Blit arrived in London with disturbing news that he soon communicated to Max and others. Passing through the central Russian town of Kuibyshev on his circuitous way out of Europe, he had shared a hotel room with two leaders of the Polish Bund, Henryk Erlich and Viktor Alter. Max would have known them both, distinguished figures who had turned the movement into a powerful force in Poland between the wars. Fleeing the Germans in 1939, they had been arrested and interrogated over many months by the NKVD. Erlich, the older man, had been harshly treated, but he had also found the Soviet secret police oddly interested in his views. At their prompting, he spent weeks in captivity composing a history of the Bund, and another of the Polish labor movement—extraordinary documents that survive to this day in the Russian archives.
Erlich had been held for more than a year when he was called in for conversations with senior NKVD officials, including their chief, Beria. They were curious about how he saw the course of the war. It was the spring of 1941, some months before Hitler launched his surprise attack on the Soviet Union, but Erlich did not hide his opposition to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, nor his view that an alliance between the USSR and the Anglo-Americans was mankind’s only hope. The secret police seemed interested in his assessment of public opinion in the West and how it might respond to such a development. Their interest was not just academic, because in the aftermath of the invasion that summer, Erlich and Alter were suddenly released, and told their imprisonment had been a mistake. Stalin—a long-standing enemy of the Bund—was now seriously thinking of using them to head an international Jewish mission to build support for the USSR abroad: he believed the Bund still commanded respect in the American labor unions in particular. The last chapter of the Bund’s long, tormented history with Bolshevism thus looked as if it might be written as a story of wartime cooperation. Instead, the tyrant changed his mind: The two men were suddenly summoned by the NKVD—Blit had been dining with them on the day the call had come—and then simply disappeared. Not until 1943 did the truth emerge: Erlich had hanged himself in his cell, and Alter had been shot. The Kremlin’s absurd justification was that they had been trying to undermine the war effort. Cynically releasing the news as the world was celebrating the Soviet triumph at Stalingrad, Stalin ensured that there was little outcry: Few in London or New York wanted to focus on this awful story. But for the surviving Bundists such as Max, the tragic end of their comrades was the final proof, if they needed any, of the chasm that divided them from communism.2
Max never returned to Russia after a last business trip in 1923. But he remained faithful to his past, and the house at 20 Oakeshott Avenue became known as a place where an old party comrade could count on a welcome. Max himself left no record of any later political activities, but one or two sources indicate that he supported the London Bundists and a group they set up, the Jewish Socialist Organisation, which funneled money to comrades in Poland a
nd helped in the East End when Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts made it seem as though anti-Semitism and fascism were gaining a foothold.3 On the fortieth anniversary of the Bund’s founding there was a large celebration in London, which several leading Polish Bund members attended. The Mazowers had a reputation for being a “good Bundist family, always willing to lend a hand,” and Max’s obituary talked about “his warm, cultured home … a meeting place for colleagues and Bundist workers.” It was as though the domestic space he had never really known as a child emerged late in his life to help shelter the remnants of a movement that had found history against it. A culture of caring for history’s losers seems more attractive to my mind than an easy identification with its winners—not least because in the end no one really wins. Few people had better reason to understand that the cult of success is only another form of escapism than the Bundists of Max’s generation.
Their ethos of solidarity lingered on to the end of the century. In 1997, celebrations marked the Bund’s centenary, and there was a lively daylong meeting that took place in a modest college hall on Holloway Road in North London. The old-timers were now the surviving representatives of the Bund from its interwar Polish incarnation rather than the original Tsarist organization that Max had joined, but of course deep allegiances and commonalities of outlook joined the generations. I spoke to several of them who had been involved in the Bund’s work immediately after the war. Meir Bogdanski was there—a Polish Bundist who had arrived in London in 1946. He remembered Max—the brown suit, the ballpoint pen in the pocket of his white shirt, his sharp brown eyes. Perec Zylberberg, a younger man who had passed through Oakeshott Avenue on his way to Canada, recalled “a warm, socialist home” and Frouma’s conversation, which was such a contrast with Max. “[He] talked much less than your mother,” he told Dad. “In fact he just used to sit there quietly listening … just a man listening. If he talked, it was a word or two.” How did he talk? “Not loud, not at all bombastic or rhetorical. When he spoke it was matter-of-fact. If he said something, you knew he had thought about it.” Zylberberg confessed that he had been puzzled by this paucity of words, which seemed to him to indicate some inexplicable abdication of will, and yet, he said, “I looked up to him.”