by Mark Mazower
I spent four hours in the [O]GPU that day … As I did not have much to say, I had to compose quite a discourse—about my sister’s being critical of the present party leaders, about her calling me and my other sister, who were “honest Soviet workers,” bourgeois and philistine, about her having always been in rebellion against anything established. I oiled thick all this sort of thing because if I did not, it would seem I had things to hide, and because I knew that my sister’s psychosis made her safe. She was at the moment in an insane asylum, and had formed a protective habit of actually going crazy and getting committed whenever her rather fantastic conspiratorial activities came near to detection.5
Whether or not Sophia was really mentally ill, it is impossible to say; but this is only the first of several sources that make it quite clear she stayed more than once inside psychiatric institutions, sometimes voluntarily and later against her will. In the end, Elena was only allowed to leave Russia on the condition that she promised to spy on her sister. She agonized over whether to make the commitment until Litvinov, a worldly man, told her not to be stupid: Since she was not intending to come back to the USSR, she should say she would do it and then forget about the whole business.
For the remaining family in Moscow, forgetting what Sofia was up to was not so easy. The OGPU boss Feliks Dzerzhinsky was increasingly confident that Myasnikov’s supporters within Russia presented no threat to the Soviet regime. But he was still worried about Germany, where Sofia was spending more and more time. She had been identified as one of the links between the KAPD and Myasnikov’s Workers’ Group in Russia, and a speech she made in Berlin at an international conference found its way into their files. To judge from other OGPU reports, she may also have been involved in funding the German party.
It was in precisely these years that the teenage André’s one or two meetings with his mother must have taken place, the years when she was living in Berlin while plotting a revolution against the revolution, dodging the German police, evading Soviet spies, and leading a life in which the lunatic asylum could seem like a refuge. Their main encounter seems to have been in the summer of 1926, just before André started at Cambridge. The KAPD had had its day by then: Official German-Soviet relations were blossoming, dissident communism was being squeezed in both Germany and the USSR, and the KAPD had split into competing factions. Sofia met her son in Berlin and they spent an afternoon together. He was now seventeen and she asked him whether he would go back to the Soviet Union with her. To her annoyance, he hesitated. For the English adolescent he had become, a young man who liked rowing and was passionate about poetry, with a growing attraction to conservatism and as far as we know with no interest in revolutionary politics, no Russian, and not much knowledge of the country, the chief consideration must have been working out how not to disappoint her.
I try to picture his mother, who despite her passionately held revolutionary views seems to have had much of the grande dame in her manner, and beside her the hesitant, correctly dressed son, plus anglais que les anglais, about to enter Cambridge and the world of Kenneth Pickthorn, T. S. Eliot, and the Earl of Lincoln. After they parted, André went back to England and it is scarcely surprising that he found it hard to settle into the household at Makepeace Avenue, where Dad was an infant, enjoying the care of an infinitely solicitous mother. Sofia was evidently still in Germany at the end of 1926, which was when Benjamin went to Moscow, but some time after that she went back to the Soviet Union and to her family there. From Russia, she may have corresponded with André intermittently into the 1930s, but I wonder what she wrote about because to judge from how little he appears to have known sixty years later, most of her life was a closed book to him. By the century’s end, he seems either not to have known or to have forgotten whether his mother had been Nicolai Krylenko’s sister or cousin, how many daughters she had, and the nationality of her husband.6
In 1935 Nicolai Krylenko, the People’s Commissar for Justice, was seemingly at the height of his power. He was the chief sponsor of the Soviet chess federation and the promoter of the great international competitions between the wars, an Esperanto propagandist, an ardent mountaineer whose favorite pastime was climbing in the Pamirs, and a ferocious and pitiless prosecutor who had thrown his lot in with Stalin. But Kremlin court politics were as treacherous as ever and behind the scenes he was locked in a long and bitter power struggle with the OGPU’s successor, the NKVD, over the nature of law in the Soviet system. Krylenko sought to advance a system of regularized revolutionary justice whereas the secret police preferred to use more arbitrary and less public methods, and however far-fetched the difference might seem today, given that both served a totalitarian dictatorship, there were real winners and losers within the bureaucracy of government. The Soviet secret police’s interest in Sofia thus served a double purpose because the information that it collected on her was also useful to them for targeting her brother, an altogether larger and more important catch.
Krylenko’s archrival was the lawyer Andrey Vyshinsky, a former Menshevik and by birth a Polish Catholic—two considerable handicaps in Stalin’s Russia for which he compensated by acquiring a well-deserved reputation for harshness. When he took charge of the first major trials of the Terror, his bloodthirsty talk of “mad dogs,” “degenerates,” and “vermin” made him as notorious as Krylenko had been in the 1920s. The activities of Sofia—and indeed of Elena too—gave Krylenko’s enemies plenty of ammunition to use whenever Stalin gave the green light. Nicolai’s brother Vladimir, the former mining student in Liège, had already been arrested in the terrible summer of 1937—a portent—and on January 31, 1938, Nicolai was accused in the usual fantastic fashion of sabotage, of creating a subversive organization, of plotting with Nikolai Bukharin to assassinate party leaders, and of paving the way for an invasion of the country by fascist states. Krylenko was said to have been intriguing against his own comrades even before 1917. There followed six months of incarceration and interrogations, confessions, and retractions, during which time the NKVD swept through the Commissariat of Justice that he headed, eliminating dozens of jurists. The Military Collegium of the Soviet Supreme Court decided his fate in twenty minutes at the end of July; the protocol of the proceedings was nineteen lines long and he was shot almost immediately in the Lubyanka. One of the main architects of the Bolshevik show trial, indeed one of its leading legal theorists, thus fell victim to the system he had helped to construct. From what we know of comparable cases, he may have been threatened with the death of his relatives if he did not admit to his crimes. And as in other cases, once he had confessed, the remaining Krylenkos and Meyers, or at least those still alive at that date, were at risk too. As Trotsky’s first wife, who suffered in this way, remarked of Stalin to a confidante: “In Tsarist times they did not take away the children … But this one—he wants to annihilate everyone.”
The original file on Sofia’s arrest and detention, if it still exists, remains in the hands of the FSB, the current Russian security service, and may only be viewed by a close family member without any notes being taken or copies made. But the State Archives of the Russian Federation, which are accessible, contain the rehabilitation file that was opened during the process of de-Stalinization, when, as her sister Elena had requested, Sofia’s case was reviewed. From it we learn that in 1935—the year communication had ceased between the Krylenkos and their sister Elena in America—Sofia had been sent to a psychiatric institution to the south of Moscow, the Yakovenko Hospital in the village of Mesherskoye. This was a pioneering establishment that had been founded by a radical doctor at the end of the nineteenth century. Leo Tolstoy had once visited and Anton Chekhov admired it. The hospital was set in a leafy estate with a lake and tree-lined avenues down which the inmates were encouraged to perambulate. Sofia was allowed to rent rooms outside the estate and used to take walks with her dogs to the delight of the village children to whom she appeared like a lady of prerevolutionary days. The timing suggests that Nicolai had placed her there,
sensing that his own position was in jeopardy, although whether he did so to protect her, as some in the family believed, or himself, or both, we cannot know. Equally suggestive is the fact that she was released in the spring of 1938, once he was under arrest. Back in Moscow, she was without work. Perhaps the hospital had been a place of safety.
It certainly seems so in the light of what happened next. On the evening of May 6, 1938, she took a shortcut to get from her apartment in downtown Moscow to the nature reserve where she liked to walk. Unfortunately this led her through the camp of the Comrade Stalin NKVD cavalry detachment and she was arrested. It seems a lethal kind of mistake to have made, a bit like walking deliberately into the lion’s den. It also seems odd that the distance from her apartment to the forest, Serebryany Bor, was more than ten miles—not so much a stroll as the strenuous walk of someone compelled to exercise for their own peace of mind. Perhaps Sofia was not entirely aware of what she was doing. She had been released from Yakovenko only two months earlier and the NKVD now ordered a psychiatric examination and sent her to the Serbsky Institute, which was the main supplier of forensic psychiatry to the Moscow criminal courts. (The institute had a close relationship with the NKVD and much later, in the 1960s and ’70s, it would become notorious for its role in the incarceration of dissidents in psychiatric institutions.) After being held there for several weeks, she was examined by a team of four doctors.
Their report is included in the file and it brings us, in what were obviously circumstances of enormous strain and pressure, closer to her than any other document I have been able to find, because it includes some of the things she said, at least as they were written down. She told the doctors that she had been treated in psychiatric hospitals before Yakovenko, that she had been diagnosed with schizophrenia there, and that “her relatives had mistreated and starved her.” She was described as being below average height, with a low appetite. Her “visible mucous membranes” were pale and the heart was enlarged on the left side. There were no abdominal abnormalities, her reflexes were good, and the Wassermann reaction for syphilis was negative. Her examiners reported as follows:
The subject is oriented according to time and place and considers herself mentally healthy. She exhibits a haughty behavior, answers questions with great disdain, and never answers some questions at all. She believes that her placement at the institute is inappropriate and insists on immediate discharge. She expresses fragmentary delusions of grandeur and persecution … Apparently auditory hallucinations are present—the subject systematically plugs her ears with paper and cotton wool “so that the noise in the unit does not interfere with thinking.” In the institute she keeps aloof, sometimes refuses food; she was fed via a feeding tube with great difficulty once. In recent days, she eats only sour cream and cranberries, claiming that “the water is greasy and causes vomiting: everything else clutters and hinders thinking and brings us closer to animals.”
The four NKVD doctors concurred that she was schizophrenic—whatever that really meant—and recommended she be sent to a psychiatric hospital for compulsory treatment. She was still in the hands of the NKVD when Nicolai was shot at the end of July, and the following month the NKVD decided to follow the recommendation of the doctors at the institute. As a result, along with her daughter Katerina and her sister Olga, and possibly one of Nicolai’s children, Sofia was sent to Kazan.
If the Serbsky was, in the words of one scholar of Soviet psychiatry, “the gates of hell,” Kazan was hell itself for someone in Sofia’s predicament. Five hundred miles east of Moscow, the city housed what a later writer describes as “the oldest and most terrible” psychiatric prison hospital in the USSR. In 1935 a ward had been created there for convicted criminals and in 1939 the whole institution was taken over by the NKVD because Serbsky had become so crowded. This takeover marked the first step towards the much more extensive involvement of psychiatry in the Soviet police state after the war: The commandant and doctors were all NKVD employees, barbed wire and high brick walls surrounded the hospital, and all communication with the outside world was strictly censored. It was very different from the leafy Yakovenko estate and there were horrors inside; indeed according to one source, in the winter of 1941–1942 all the patients there died of hunger and cold. Sofia may have been among the victims—whether she was interned there or living with her sister and daughter, in any case she did not survive the war and she died in what her file describes as a prison hospital. Long after her death and after years of forced residence in Kazan, her daughter Katerina was eventually released and allowed to return to Moscow where much much later, when she was an old lady, she would finally meet the half brother she had never seen. The eldest daughter, Natalia, who had been born in Liège in 1912, was alive in the mid-1950s, but her subsequent fate is unknown.
As the Cold War ended, and an aging André learned more about his Russian connections, the putative Hapsburg officer father that he had tried out on Dad was jettisoned and replaced with a new version. André came to believe that his real father had actually been Sofia’s husband, Konstantin von Meyer, and that he had been von Meyer and Sofia’s first child so that their two daughters back in Russia were his full sisters. In the last few years of his life, he began using the von Meyer name and patronymic.
The idea that he was descended from Konstantin von Meyer, the son of Russian military nobility of distinguished lineage, and not Mordkhel Mazower, the typewriter-selling suburban ex-revolutionary of modest Russian Jewish stock from the Pale, would have seemed attractive to the elderly André, given what we know of his political opinions. It was also not impossible, especially as it turns out that Konstantin was indeed living in Paris in early 1908 and 1909 around the time that Sofia became pregnant with André, and in lodgings on the other side of the Jardin du Luxembourg, less than a mile away. Konstantin may even have known Sofia earlier, in Russia. Had he in fact followed her to Paris in the spring of 1908 after her flight from St. Petersburg?
Pater semper incertus est—the father is always uncertain—was a long-standing principle in Roman law, enduring for centuries into the era of DNA testing. If Max was not André’s father, that might help explain André’s sense of discomfort in Oakeshott Avenue. But if Konstantin was, some other questions remain to be answered. Although André was born in early 1909, Konstantin and Sofia only started living together in 1911. Why did they wait until André was nearly three—odd behavior on the face of it if he was their son, given that they were in the same country for much of that time and not living far apart. And even more oddly, why did they send him to England in December 1912 rather than bringing him back to Russia with them and their daughter? The family story that it was too difficult to smuggle him in does not hold water: André had Russian papers when he was sent to England, so his status was regular, and even if getting him back across the imperial border would have been awkward for Sofia, who may have left Russia illegally, Konstantin’s papers were in order and he could have traveled back with his son without hindrance. So could André’s grandmother. Or was André sent to London because Konstantin felt embarrassed about fathering a son out of wedlock? But he did not feel embarrassment about Natalia, his daughter, who was also born before her parents got married. Indeed he and Sofia did not marry until some time after the birth of their second daughter. The inescapable conclusion is that neither Konstantin nor Sofia wanted to keep André with them.
Equally puzzling is why Max—who had a widowed mother and two younger brothers in Vilna to worry about, none of them well-off—would have agreed to bring André up if he wasn’t his son. Max comes across as a man who took his responsibilities very seriously, but he was not, I think, someone to incur unnecessary burdens voluntarily—he had enough of his own, especially knowing he would be traveling abroad on business for many months of the year. So while the idea was not impossible, it did not seem to make much more sense than the alternative, especially since Max and Konstantin would seem to have had next to nothing in common.
Except, m
aybe, affection for André’s mother. Sofia had left Russia in a hurry in 1907 because of her revolutionary activities, and she and Max met when they were both in exile. There is a story that Max was in love with Sofia, even that he may have proposed to her. It is impossible to say how true that was but what is certain is that on the 1911 census form he says he was married, which would seem to refer to Sofia. They were not married, but perhaps Max at one time wished they were. Had they, perhaps informally, become engaged? Could it be that after Sofia had André in the spring of 1909, Max believed the baby to be his? Or even if he did not, did he feel, at any rate, that he owed her and her baby—whomever the father was—some kind of care, especially as both his life and hers had been so fraught with flight and unpredictability? Later that year he went to London and found a job, perhaps anticipating that mother and son would join him only to find that in fact Sofia had no such intention. While he was giving up his life as an activist, she was intensifying hers. A few months later she began living with Konstantin in Liège—which may or may not have been their first encounter. Then she became pregnant and had his daughter.