What You Did Not Tell

by Mark Mazower

  The real mystery remains how, where, and when Sofia and Max met. We simply have no idea because nothing has survived to say, and apart from André himself—and perhaps in more oblique form Max’s crossed-out entry on his census form—their encounter has left no traces at all. Neither of them did enough to attract the attention of the Sûreté and I have found nothing in the police files in France. Because the period between Max’s escape from Russia sometime in 1907 or 1908 and his move to London in late 1909 are a blank, it is not even certain that Max visited Paris at the time when André was conceived, and he and Sofia may have met in Switzerland or Germany. But the circumstances are not hard to imagine. Both Sofia and Max were connected to the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, and both were in exile from the Tsarist regime. The Krylenkos were not Jewish, but religious background counted for little on the Left. Max had numerous Menshevik friends, while Sofia’s brother Vladimir was to marry a Jewish woman from Vilna.

  What we do know about Sofia is that she was a generation younger than Max and an ardent revolutionary. She came from the intelligentsia, the eldest of six children of moderately well-off parents with radical sympathies dating back two generations. There was a Decembrist grandfather, and a father who’d had his own youthful run-ins with the Tsarist police and became a liberal newspaper editor in Smolensk before he was forced to give it up. The family background was bookish and cultivated, and Sofia had been encouraged in her studies, attending the St. Petersburg Higher School for Women, an exceptional institution that held out against the deep conservatism of the Tsarist authorities to offer university-level training for women. The school was known for the radicalism of its students, and by 1905 Sofia was an active social democrat, heavily involved in local party work, disseminating revolutionary literature, and organizing agitation among workers, peasants, and army conscripts. In an iron chest in her room, she had stored hundreds of copies of illegal proclamations, newspapers, and pamphlets as well as internal party documents. After the revolution, when the police in St. Petersburg staged a raid on her circle, they found this cache and called her in for questioning. Her response was to flee via her family home in Lublin, which was conveniently located in western Russia for border crossings with the Hapsburg Empire. We know from the memoirs of Lenin’s wife that the Krylenkos—particularly Nicolai—knew how to smuggle people across the frontier in a hurry, and by 1908 Sofia was in France. Sometime in the summer of that year she became pregnant.

  I have found only one photograph of her, taken before her flight. In her file, the Russian police describe her as dark blond, with her hair parted in the middle, with dark gray eyes, of medium height, and lean. She was reputed to be fiery and striking and the photograph does convey her uncompromising nature. It is a strong face, the face of someone determined and used to getting their own way, but not one lightened by humor, and with little or no trace of the skepticism we find in Max’s eyes. Benjamin talked about “the astonishing narrowness of her stubborn character,” and this insistence on hewing her own path and remaining faithful to her political ideals, not at all uncommon among revolutionaries of her generation, was to blight the lives of her children and to have tragic consequences for her.

  The French police reckoned that there were at least fifteen hundred Russian radicals in Paris around the time she arrived in the country, many of them in lodgings in Montparnasse. Rue Lalande, the street mentioned on André’s birth certificate as Sofia’s address, was located next to the famous Cimetière du Montparnasse, north of the intersection with rue Daguerre in a neighborhood known to be frequented by Russian students. One hundred yards down the road on the corner was the house where Leon Trotsky had met his second wife a few years earlier. Number 22 had been under the surveillance of the Russian secret police for years and associates of the famous anarchist Prince Kropotkin used to stay there.

  Situated at the quiet end of the street, above where the beauty parlors and the fitness centers peter out, 22 rue Lalande is today a surprisingly imposing and neatly maintained Second Empire building. Even allowing for changes over the years, its elegance suggests that while Sofia Krylenko may have been in exile, she was not starving. The Clinique Tarnier where André was born is less than a mile away. Late one September afternoon, I meandered through the cemetery to boulevard Raspail, then along rue Vavin and into rue d’Assas, tracing most of that long street southeast in the direction of Port-Royal, in order to find the Clinique Tarnier. There were only a few cars moving past on their way towards rue de Rennes. The shuttered windows of the apartment buildings, the approaching fall, and the sounds of a student party farther down the road all made a melancholy impression upon me. The Tarnier still looks uncannily as it does in a photograph of the era, solid and well-built—it had been constructed just a few years earlier as a maternity hospital for the Paris medical school. But the revolutionary idealism of four generations ago seemed a dim memory, Paris itself diminished by the energy draining out of its once proud republican spirit over the past century, its mood defensive and soured, the French Left no longer a beacon for the country, let alone the world.

  In 1909, when André was born, Paris had regarded itself as the center of civilization and the future belonged to the Left. Or so many on the Left believed. It was the era of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, of terrorist bombings and the assassination of empresses and presidents, and the police across Europe were nervous and looking out for anarchists. The Belgian police were especially well organized, and thanks to their files we know that after André’s birth Sofia did indeed move with him to the industrial fortress city of Liège. Not an unusual choice: It was a major steel producer and home before the First World War to many Russians, most of them attending its mining and engineering school. Sofia’s younger brother Vladimir was studying there and his presence may have been one draw for her. But Liège attracted Russians for another reason as well because it was a supplier of small arms for the revolutionary underground and the local police kept a “Russian” file for those they had under surveillance. Sofia’s name is not listed there, but other records show her changing residence several times as she moved from Montparnasse to prosperous Boulogne-sur-Seine, where she spent some months, and then across the Belgian border to the village of Tilff, a riverside rural retreat just outside Liège, where she probably rented rooms in a suburban villa. Given the depth of her political involvement in St. Petersburg, and from all we know about her later activities, I find it hard to imagine she was not still frequenting émigré revolutionary circles.

  In these archives, I was also able for the first time to find out about the figure of de Meyer, and to my surprise, the man André thought was a “Belgian doctor” turns out to have been neither Belgian nor a doctor but a fellow Russian with a police file larger than Sofia’s. Fittingly, his name shifts across archives and alphabets—sometimes de Mayer or de Meyer, sometimes von Meyer, and sometimes, in proletarian Russia, simply Meyer. Twenty-three years old in 1909—two years’ Sofia’s junior—Konstantin von Meyer (identified thus in his Russian papers) had been born into military nobility: His father was a retired general whose passion in life appears to have been painting dogs and hunting and battle scenes. Konstantin had moved to Belgium in 1909 and two years later—about the time when Max was listing himself in the U.K. census as a married man and a father—he was living openly with Sofia and her little boy. He had graduated from the St. Petersburg commercial college in 1907, or so he told the Belgian police, and left Russia the following year for Paris with an allowance from his father. In the spring and summer of 1909, he and a couple of blue-blooded friends had been on a bicycling tour in Spain when they had been detained and held in jail as anarchists. They had found themselves in the middle of a full-blown insurrection that had exploded in Barcelona; martial law had been imposed and for weeks afterwards the country had been under lockdown, with checkpoints everywhere. Was their presence there at that time a coincidence? It is hard to say. If so, was it also a coincidence that the address Konstant
in gave for his stay in Paris the year before was a hotel on boulevard Saint-Marcel that happened to be where Lenin and his entourage would lodge briefly a few months later?

  What clinches it surely is one last scrap of evidence. From Spain he had gone briefly to Geneva to drop off his bicycling companions. What was the address there? the Belgian police asked him later that year: 27 rue Caroline, he told them. As we know from other sources, this was the address of the Imprimerie Ouvrière, the main press used by Bolsheviks and other revolutionaries for their clandestine literature. The likelihood is thus that von Meyer was caught up in the activities of the Russian Social Democrats abroad and was the more valuable because he had not come to the attention of the police back home. He may have been doing someone—Sofia perhaps?—a favor by distributing illegal pamphlets in Spain, a well-known center of radical ideas with one of the most powerful anarchist movements in Europe. In any case, after their release, he said good-bye to his friends in Geneva and went to Liège, where in October 1909 he began studying at the university. In the autumn of 1911 Sofia became pregnant by him and moved with him into an apartment in a little brick house in town with a nice view of a suburban park, awaiting their baby. Three-year-old André was with them.

  A few weeks before Sofia was due to give birth, her highly energetic and efficient mother came out from Russia to help. This was the redoubtable Olga Krylenko, whom Benjamin was to meet under very different circumstances in Moscow more than a decade later. Olga got there in time for the arrival of a little girl called Natalia, her first granddaughter, in June 1912. The following February, when she was old enough to travel, Natalia was taken back to Russia. Since we know that Sofia, Olga, and Konstantin also returned, it is probable that Natalia went with one of them. The really odd thing is that André did not. Instead, on December 9, 1912, he was brought to London—I do not know by whom—where he began his new life in England. He was three years and nine months old, with a stranger for a father and a dimming recollection of speaking French that explains why he regarded it later on as his mother tongue. It is a frustrating age, old enough to have fleeting memories—a vision of snow in a garden, a woman bicycling down a street—but too young to be able to make sense of them properly. He was never to live with his mother again, and he would only see her briefly on two occasions many years later.

  Back in Russia, Sofia and Konstantin remained together. They had a second daughter, Katerina, in July 1914, and then got married that November, a couple of months after the outbreak of war, in a small church in St. Petersburg. I am guessing, since Sofia like many revolutionary activists of her generation did not attach much importance to marriage, that they did it for the children because Konstantin was on his way to the front. Or perhaps taking his name in some way facilitated her residence in the city. One of her witnesses at the ceremony was later a Bolshevik commander in the Caucasus, so she at least, and possibly her husband too, were faithful to their Leftist affiliation, even in church. Thereafter, Konstantin von Meyer disappears from the scene and all I have been able to ascertain is that he fought on past the collapse of Tsarist rule. As so often, on which side is unclear. The Krylenko family version that they gave Benjamin in Moscow in 1926 was that Konstantin had died fighting for the Bolsheviks, but by then they needed to say that. It is equally possible, given his family’s background, that at some point he joined the Whites. His father, the painterly general, is said, according to one source, to have survived the revolution and ended up in Paris.

  The First World War utterly transformed the prospects not only for Russia but for the Krylenko family when Sofia’s younger brother Nicolai, who had until this point been studying law and serving occasionally as Lenin’s chess partner, was catapulted almost overnight into a position of enormous power. The speed of his ascent is hard to comprehend. In 1916 he was arrested as a draft dodger; by late 1917, he was the commander in chief of the Russian armed forces.

  This extraordinary turn of events came about because General Nikolai Dukhonin, his Tsarist predecessor, refused Lenin’s order to open peace negotiations with the Germans. Ensign Krylenko, a committed Bolshevik, was appointed to replace him. It must have been one of the fastest promotions in history and its impact was immediate. Arriving at the Russian general staff headquarters at Mogilev with an escort of Bolshevik sailors, Krylenko forced Dukhonin’s surrender and had the general brought aboard his train to talk. A large and angry crowd gathered outside, and when Krylenko refused to give him up, Dukhonin was dragged out and beaten to death. (Or, as in another version—eyewitness accounts diverge—he was shot.) It was one of the more egregious revolutionary lynchings and it made headlines across Europe before it was overtaken by the much larger news that Russia was pulling out of the war. As the Bolshevik delegation arrived to parley with the Germans at the great fortress in Brest-Litovsk, Dukhonin’s comrades fled south to begin the White counterrevolution. An uneasy peace settled on the eastern front, and in March 1918, Krylenko left the army to set up a new system of revolutionary justice. It was the start of a career spanning nearly two decades at the top of the Soviet legal system that made him one of the most powerful, and most feared, figures in Russia. I wonder now whether the killing of Dukhonin, which he had witnessed at close quarters, in any way influenced his subsequent commitment to establishing revolutionary courts and thereby—as he at least saw it—rescuing socialist law from the taint of mob rule.

  Especially in the early days, the Russian revolution had something of the quality of a family affair. Elena Krylenko worked for Maxim Litvinov in the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. Her younger sister, Olga, was secretary to Politburo member Lev Kamenev. (Kamenev himself was married to Trotsky’s sister, whom he had met at a Bundist gathering in Paris more than a decade earlier.) In 1918 Sofia found a position—presumably through her brother—running the office that supervised the new revolutionary tribunals on behalf of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee, the highest organ of Soviet government. She never joined the Bolsheviks, but that was no obstacle: most of her colleagues in the department were not Bolsheviks either. The revolution must have seemed initially to be the fulfillment of everything she had been working towards and she threw herself into it. Eastman described her as an “intemperate rebel”—he knew one when he saw one—who “went in for conspiratorial agitation in its most dangerous forms.” On a requisitioning expedition in Kiev for the Bolsheviks, she narrowly escaped capture and execution by the Whites. But then her view of things changed, and changed dramatically. It happened when Bolshevik sailors rebelled against the Soviet regime at the naval base at Kronstadt in 1921 and the government suppressed the uprising at the cost of hundreds of lives. Sofia, like many others both inside and outside the party, was disturbed by this and felt that the violence of the response betrayed authoritarian tendencies on the part of the country’s new rulers.3

  Bolshevism was rather less of a united church than historians make out, and by this time it was not only the opposing parties who were critical of the regime. There were protests from the Left as well and many Bolsheviks openly attacked Lenin for selling the workers out and assailed his New Economic Policy for opening the country up to Western capitalism. They criticized the government’s reliance on bureaucrats and experts, and questioned what had happened to the rule of the proletariat. Lenin was not impressed. He slammed what he called the “infantile disorder” of “left-wing communism” but that did not silence the dissenters. Among the most troublesome of the critics was a metalworker from the Urals, Gavril Ilyich Myasnikov, no bleeding-heart liberal but a longtime Bolshevik who in 1918 had orchestrated the Cheka murder of Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, the designated successor of Tsar Nicholas II. After Myasnikov continued to denounce the Bolshevik government, his revolutionary credentials failed to protect him, and he was expelled from the party, then arrested, and eventually sent abroad to Germany. There a new party had emerged called the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD) as an ultra-Leftist counterweight to the official Communist Part
y of Germany (KPD). The KAPD felt that Lenin’s USSR was not revolutionary enough—it was a halfway house, insufficiently proletarian: “Insofar as it calls for the expropriation of capitalists, it was a proletarian organization for the suppression of capitalism but insofar as it preserved parliamentarism, unions, the dictatorship of the party and of managers, it was a bourgeois entity created to preserve capitalism and to restore it.” One implication was that the Moscow-based Comintern was the wrong vehicle for international Bolshevism: It was contaminated by its counterrevolutionary origins and likely to lead the workers of Europe to defeat. A purer, more revolutionary Comintern was needed—a Fourth International. Sofia’s ideas ran on similar lines and she was energetically supporting the KAPD’s efforts. If her family was worried, as Benjamin reported, they had cause to be. This kind of work on the extreme Left was not only dangerous for her; it was potentially lethal for those related to her back in Moscow.4

  Not only was Sofia intransigent and extreme in her views but she was—as this suggests—reckless in a way only the utterly uncompromising could be. Having nearly gotten her sister Elena shot in Kiev in 1919—Elena had been arrested by troops looking for Sofia and was saved only at the last minute—she got her into serious trouble again three years later. Elena was in Italy working as a secretary for Maxim Litvinov, by now the Soviet deputy commissar of foreign affairs, at the Rapallo Conference. This diplomatic meeting is remembered chiefly for the rapprochement Litvinov helped to engineer, to everyone’s astonishment, between Soviet Russia and Weimar Germany. It was the moment the USSR came in from the cold, and alarm at the agreement could be found not only in capitalist circles in England, France, and the United States but among the dissident communists as well. For them Rapallo confirmed their worst suspicions about what Lenin was doing—moving away from the true revolutionary path by playing the same old diplomatic games as his predecessors. Sofia asked Elena to use the diplomatic bag to bring a letter from “an old friend” back to Russia. When the letter was intercepted by the OGPU, it turned out to be KAPD agitprop. The OGPU was too adroit to overlook a gift like that, and two years later, when Elena sought permission to leave Moscow to go to London with Eastman, she was called in for interrogation and found that what they wanted to question her about was Sofia: