What You Did Not Tell

by Mark Mazower

  The loyal orderlies, the Tartar cemetery—such touches give the scene its poignancy. But in the spring of 1920 Ira was three years old, so her memory would not have been much help and what she knew about the grim years of the civil war she had gotten thirdhand, told to her not by her mother, who spoke very little about that period in her life, nor by her aunt Nata, who had been there too, but by her youngest aunt, Niura, many years later in Paris. The pink silk dress has the ring of truth but the rest has, in Ira’s fashion, been romanticized. I have a copy of Baltermants’s death certificate—it was among the handful of papers Frouma made sure she took with her when she left the USSR a few years later—and it puts a slightly different complexion on things:

  THE YEVPATORIAN JEWISH COMMUNAL AUTHORITY hereby certifies that, on April 28, 1920, in the city of Yevpatoria, the Red Army doctor Stepan Yakovlevich Baltermants (otherwise known as Shapsel Yakovlevich) died and was buried in a Jewish cemetery, after having been taken prisoner by the White Guards. According to documents formerly presented to the Communal Authority, Dr. Baltermants did not serve in the armies of Denikin and Vrangel but spent his time as a prisoner in a staging-point hospital, where he suffered from spotted, abdominal, and recurring typhus, while being subjected to disgraceful treatment. He was freed several days before his death. He died of exhaustion after contracting cholera.

  One of the things this tells us that is unmentioned by Ira—who like her father found no pride in her ancestral faith—is that his death was registered with the Jewish communal authorities and he was buried in the Jewish cemetery. But it tells us other things too—or tries to. In fact, one can almost feel the extreme care with which the document has been worded. The dead man is said to have served in the Red Army and this is underlined by the explicit denial that he fought for the Whites. Was the denial necessary because back in Moscow in 1924, suspicions would have attached to any man who found himself in the Crimea once the Bolsheviks pulled out? Or because the suspicion was that Baltermants in particular had ended up with the Whites? Ira described him as a gambler, a man for whom the revolution itself was just another turn of the wheel, which is basically what survived of his reputation in the Toumarkine family after his death. When I asked one of my cousins in Paris about Baltermants, he knew virtually nothing about him except a label handed down through two generations—he was, said Patrick, “an adventurer.”

  I think of Baltermants dying there, watched over by his wife and daughter. At least he received a proper burial, which was something to be thankful for in those times. And perhaps this thought occurs to me because his name reminds me of the circumstances in which across the peninsula, near the town of Kerch, another Baltermants, a nephew of his, was to achieve renown in the midst of an even more brutal war two decades later.

  This was Dmitri Baltermants, who became one of the most famous war photographers in the world for his work documenting the German invasion of the USSR. It was at the beginning of 1942 when he flew into the Crimea that the events occurred which made his reputation.1 Kerch lay at the very southern tip of the eastern front and the Wehrmacht had just pulled back from it. They had held it for only six weeks, but that was all the time that Reinhard Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppe D had needed to round up the town’s several thousand Jews. They had been driven in trucks to a nearby village over several days and lined up in an antitank ditch several hundred meters long in front of submachine guns. Their corpses were still lying there in a frozen field only a little way from the airstrip when Baltermants touched down. He arrived on the scene to see grief-stricken townspeople, wrapped against the cold, trying to identify the bodies.

  As he shot two rolls of film, he tried to make sense of what was in front of him. Nothing was clear: If they were captured Red Army soldiers, how was it that their relatives were there looking for them? Why were there so many children and women? Now we know that he had come upon the gruesome work of the German execution squads that had been systematically shooting Jews across the occupied Soviet Union, the murderous pioneers of what was to metamorphose over the coming year into a completely unprecedented policy of industrialized mass killing. But in that field on the Kerch peninsula there was nothing manmade except an antitank trench filled with dead bodies. Baltermants’s now iconic images show mud, snow, water, and sky, a landscape polluted by man, and something of the horrified bafflement and slowly dawning comprehension that I imagine he and his comrades felt that day still emanates from them.

  Widowed before she was thirty, and with nothing for her remaining in the Crimea, Frouma took her daughter back to Moscow where the city was slowly returning to life under its new rulers. With the help of one of her sisters, she managed to find a lowly position in a government ministry. Her family had never thought much of her first husband, but they gladly helped her now, and it was through another sister that she and Max met. This must have been in 1922, or thereabouts, the time of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, and there was a British trade mission in Moscow, even though there were as yet no formal diplomatic relations between the two countries. “Citizen Mazower” (according to his Soviet permit) had given up his association with the Yost Typewriter Company and was traveling on behalf of a Sheffield steel manufacturer that made equipment that they had been exporting to Russia for decades. He took a room at the old Hotel Europe in Petrograd, the grandest in the city, and looked up his brother and some of his old friends. One of them, a man he had known before the revolution, was the husband of Frouma’s sister Ida. And so, on a visit to Moscow, he and Frouma were introduced.2

  They did not have much time to get to know each other, but people made big decisions fast in those days and both of them were decisive. Frouma could see behind Max’s taciturn exterior and she could tell that even though, like her first husband, he was nearly twenty years older than she was, that was about all the two men had in common: Max was not as dashing as Baltermants, and he did not have the monied background; far from aspiring to the romance of an army uniform he was an antimilitarist, much more dependable and no less courageous. His political views were in keeping with her family’s. But his combination of loyalty, competence, and realism were probably more important than politics: He was not the type of man to leave her for the gambling tables or anything else. And underneath the reserve, there was a dry humor and warmth and a capacity for commitment. She knew next to nothing about England—her family’s ties were with Germany and France—but by 1924 it did not take genius to see that life in Bolshevik Russia as the widow of a suspect former Tsarist officer was not going to be easy. Anyway, Frouma had always had an adventurous side.

  For his part, Max must have suspected that the thaw in relations between the USSR and England would not last, and that conditions might soon become impossible for him in Russia. He had savings in London and in Frouma he knew he had found the person to help him make a real home. He was approaching fifty, and both of his brothers had long been married. He began planning for their life together, in his usual efficient and understated way. He came to Russia for a few weeks in December 1923, and when he returned to England, he had a wedding ring made for her. He evidently intended to go back to Moscow to help her leave, but when he applied for a visa in the spring of 1924 he was unexpectedly turned down by the consulate in London—only now, as the different pieces of this story come together, does it occur to me to wonder whether the OGPU knew about his prewar relationship with Sofia Krylenko and whether his association with her played any part in the rejection—and Frouma and Ira were left to get out of the USSR by themselves. Max was never to set foot in Russia again; Frouma had to wait more than thirty years before she could return.

  Frouma’s family was close-knit but because of their nomadic upbringing, the Toumarkine children were used to uprooting themselves and making a home somewhere new. “Une valise dans la tête, une valise dans le couloir” was a family maxim. Somehow Frouma managed to get a visa for Ira and herself for a weekend trip to the Baltic port of Riga. Max was waiting for them and they wasted no time, marry
ing in a civil ceremony in an office above the central post office. Although both had been born subjects of the tsars, Max entered his citizenship as Polish and Frouma as Soviet Russian, which is what it would remain on paper for the next decade—they only acquired British nationality in 1935. Two weeks later they were in London, and on December 4, by which time Frouma was pregnant, they had a religious wedding ceremony at which Max pledged to “honor and cherish” his wife and to support her “as it becometh a Jewish husband to do.” It is the one distinctively religious ceremony I can find to associate with either of them.

  For a year or two, Max had been lodging in a double-fronted house at the bottom of Hampstead Heath, and he now brought Frouma and Ira there. It must have been a strange contrast to what they had left behind. In Moscow, everything was shabby from the years of war, run-down and in flux. The grand apartment they had been living in had been taken over by their servants and strangers, a turning upside down of the old order that Ira, who was eight at the time, never forgot: Mother and daughter, both suffering from malaria, had had to share a single room with Frouma’s parents. The apartment where Frouma and Max had been introduced, her sisters’ place, was in a once grand art nouveau block on Ulitsa Prechistenka, the road beloved by Moscow’s aristocracy that leads straight from the Kremlin to the Novodevichy Convent. As if to demonstrate the death of the old order, Prechistenka itself had just been renamed Kropotkinskaya, after the renowned anarchist. The continuities of life in the English capital must have been a surprise, the rows of Victorian villas testifying to the serene hegemony of the metropolitan middle classes. This house in South Hill Park was Max and Frouma’s first home in London and the place where Dad was born the following summer, in June 1925. By a strange coincidence, I used to pass it on my way to see Dad when he was in the Royal Free Hospital, a month or so before he died. Heading off Highgate Hill through Fitzroy Park, and cutting over the Heath between the ponds, once you came down off Parliament Hill and turned into the sliver of an alley that runs between the houses into South Hill Park Gardens, number 19 was right in front of you.

  As soon as I learned the address, I felt a strange, indefinable sensation: I realized it was in the middle of a web of other places with some powerful associations of their own for me. The little enclave of South Hill Park was, when I went to school across the Heath in the mid-1970s, a shabby residential backwater. The North London line trains ran behind the gardens on its southern perimeter, and the terraced streets had not yet been tarted up by global billions and retained the slightly dingy pride of a city living on its past. Just uphill from the station was a pub, the Magdala Arms, in whose garden my schoolmates and I celebrated our liberation from the sixth form over a pint. It was a place with a seedy kind of fame because outside it one Easter Sunday twenty years earlier a nightclub manageress called Ruth Ellis had fired a Smith and Wesson at her lover David Blakely, shooting him five times, and becoming the last woman in the United Kingdom to be hanged. The streets above the pub were mostly Victorian, but a girl I knew lived in an angular modern house a little way up the road with huge windows in the living room that had a view over the ponds. Nearby was Nassington Road where, a decade later, my first girlfriend had her top-floor digs when she left university; it was the early Thatcher years, and the electricity meter was insatiable, and mattresses were strewn on the floor. The attic rooms were dark and cramped, and we were thankful for the Heath on our doorstep: Marriage and divorce lay ahead. Only fifty yards up the street, though I did not get to know him until later, one of England’s most eminent historians, Eric Hobsbawm, was living in a large hospitable home filled with books and sofas and drinks. He befriended me, as he did many other young scholars, and when he died at a great age, I went back to the house and had tea with his widow and looked at the shelves on which the fundamental texts of Marxism-Leninism shared space with Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici and worn Everyman Classics. The fusion seemed characteristic of that part of North London on whose slopes two or three generations of bookish émigrés from the Continent had raised their children and made bonfires and raked leaves. The pull of local associations and memories, which I thought had mostly grown out of the circumstances of my life and my own choices and affections, it turned out had originated before I had been born.

  And not only before my birth but before Dad’s as well. The one thing Dad knew about the house in South Hill Park was that it had been known to his parents as “the Engineer’s Delight.” He had no idea why. What he did not know was that the house’s owner had been another Russian Jewish immigrant to England, an engineer named Maxim Kogan, whose life, like Max’s, had been shaped by the travails of the Jews in the Tsarist empire.

  The mass emigration that followed the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 and the first wave of anti-Jewish riots in the empire had attracted enormous attention worldwide and led to around 1.5 million Jews migrating to the United States alone. A decade later, after new police raids were launched in Moscow to expel Jews illegally resident there, the star New York Times reporter Harold Frederic published a detailed indictment of Tsarist despotism. Knowing no Russian, Frederic had relied for details on a Moscow informant, Maxim Kogan, by then nearly fifty and already secretly passing damning material on the anti-Semitic outrages of the Tsarist authorities to the London-based newspaper Darkest Russia. It is the first mention of him I have been able to find.

  It was probably as a result of his contacts in the international press that the following autumn Kogan was invited by one of the wealthiest men in Europe, Baron Maurice de Hirsch, to help sort out a philanthropic initiative. Hirsch had founded an organization called the Jewish Colonization Association because he was keen to find ways to solve the problem of Russian anti-Semitism. Like many at that time he believed colonial settlement was the answer. Ottoman Palestine was one option, but it was complicated by Sultan Abdul Hamid’s lack of enthusiasm for stirring up trouble in his Arab provinces. And in that epoch when it seemed a simple matter to dispossess the world’s primitive peoples and rational to resettle the empty lands of the earth with civilizing emigrants, plenty of other potential venues for a Jewish homeland presented themselves—Uganda, Cyrenaica, South America, New Jersey, even the western United States and Manitoba were all seriously considered for mass colonization at one time or another. Baron Hirsch’s scheme involved Argentina—he dreamed of settling millions of Jews from the Pale there eventually—and after meeting Kogan, he hired him to sort out the scheme’s teething troubles and make it work.

  Kogan was no fool and quickly saw that what Hirsch regarded as teething troubles were in fact fundamental problems with the whole idea. He lasted barely six months before quarreling both with the colonists and with his megalomaniac backer and heading back across the Atlantic. As he understood, the costs were too high, and the odds of climate, terrain, and morale were stacked against success. Eventually several thousand Jewish settlers (many of them coincidentally from Max’s hometown of Grodno) were housed in two hamlets called Moisesville and Mauriceville in honor of their benefactor. Today a few Jewish gauchos still roam the Argentinian pampas and what is left of Moisesville remains a fading testimony to the limits of extreme wealth to solve the world’s problems. After Hirsch’s death, the Jewish Colonization Association decided that if it wanted to help Russian Jewry, it needed to support them elsewhere—in Brazil, Cyprus, Romania, Turkey, Palestine, and above all Russia itself.3

  With his Argentinian adventure behind him, Kogan did exactly what Max would do later: He made his way to London and acquired British citizenship. He became a consultant to the new automotive industry before the First World War and a fixer for British business in Russia, and eventually he and his wife bought the house in South Hill Park. Max moved in as a boarder around 1921 or 1922. But in the summer of 1924, shortly before Max returned from Riga with Frouma and Ira, Kogan died at nearly eighty. Did his widow perhaps harbor hopes her lodger Max might find more than mere lodgings in the Engineer’s Delight? Had she been jealous when Frou
ma turned up on the doorstep? That, I think, was the hidden meaning in the phrase Dad had remembered from childhood.

  An unwelcoming landlady was only part of a difficult start for Frouma in London. She spoke little or no English and missed her family in Moscow acutely. She was pregnant and unwell and having to cope with the demands of two difficult children. André was about to start at university. Eight-year-old Ira was struggling—the German her nanny had taught her was of no use now—and she and her stepfather were temperamentally very different. Then Dad was born, leaving Frouma seriously ill with peritonitis for several weeks. Max, upon whom domesticity had abruptly descended in force, dived into his wartime savings and commissioned a large house to be built on the new Holly Lodge Estate at the corner of Makepeace Avenue and West Hill. As soon as it was ready, the family left South Hill Park and made the move across the Heath to Highgate. Dad, the youngest member of the household, and the only one—apart from Alice the maid—to be born in England, was not yet a year old. Many years later, after his mother’s death, his aunt Niura told him that Frouma had been so homesick that if it had not been for him, she would have gone back to Russia. In a new country, her baby was her anchor. It was a responsibility hardwired into him from a time before consciousness.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Highgate

  A strong Russian connection has attached itself to Highgate over the years. Guryev, a phosphates magnate, is reportedly the current owner of the mansion that stands at the top of West Hill—a dour monstrosity called Witanhurst whose twenty-five or more bedrooms make it, one is told, the largest private house in London after the queen’s. Lower down, the perimeter of Beechwood House is patrolled by the billionaire Alisher Usmanov’s security guards. Decades before the neighborhood turned into what sociologists of global real estate refer to as Alpha Territory, the Soviet trade delegation down the road was lodging its employees in houses on the Holly Lodge Estate, some fifty families at least by 1971 when many of them were fingered for expulsion by the British government. Unlike the billionaires they did not hide away. They swam in the Men’s Bathing Pond on Hampstead Heath along with the Hasids, the ex-NCOs, and the sun worshippers, and they were a familiar presence at the Duke of St. Albans at the bottom of West Hill where locals complained that they did not drink much and spoke Russian all the time. Many of them were KGB, and it was common knowledge locally that MI5 ran a safe house across the way to keep an eye on them.