What You Did Not Tell

by Mark Mazower

  The penultimate letter that has survived from him contained counsels of this kind as well as demands for photos of his grandchildren. But it also dealt with something else, something less happy. Frouma must have asked him for news of her older brother, Lev (Alunya). A lawyer and the eldest of the Toumarkine boys, Lev was not only a holder of the St. George Cross from his time in the imperial army, he had also been a longtime member of the Bolshevik Party before the First World War who had quit in 1914 and never rejoined. In the 1930s, this was not the kind of past that easily escaped the notice of his former comrades. Why had her parents not said anything about him? What she suspected could only be hinted at, and her father’s response was circuitous. “I cannot answer your question,” he wrote back to her, conscious that other eyes might be scanning his letter. “He doesn’t write us. I don’t know if he is angry or if something else is the matter. Let us hope he writes soon and then I will write you right away.” When Frouma sent this letter on to her Paris siblings, she added: “Dad is answering the question about Alunya—and we don’t know any more than we did, but I still have some hope that he is, maybe, alive.” Lev was not the only one. One of her brothers-in-law, her sister Fenya’s husband, Herman Shub, had been in prison for years and his fate was similarly uncertain. “Mum wrote to me,” she confided to Vitalie, “that a parcel sent him was returned to Fenya. I am afraid something happened.” Something had indeed happened: The Terror had come to Russia and to the family, and their letters traveling to and fro across Europe convey the slowly dawning and agonizing realization of a new kind of absence and what it might mean.

  In 1959, when Frouma was finally able to return to Moscow, a visit she had been cogitating for several years, it was a new era: Stalin had died, Nikita Khrushchev was in power, and Russia was opening up to the West. Frouma wanted to visit her parents’ graves and see her surviving siblings. She managed to do both and photographs from that trip show three of the sisters—Fenya, Frouma, and Nata—in Nata’s apartment on Petrovsky Boulevard, seated around a large dining table spread with a white tablecloth to mark the occasion. There are grandchildren, nephews, nieces, scattered papers, an unwrapped box of chocolates, flowers, and tea. It should have been a happy time—the long-awaited return to Russia, the family reunited after thirty-five years—but as they stare into the camera the faces are somber and one can feel the ghosts in the room. It was not only their parents who were gone. Ida, whose husband had known Max and brought him and Frouma together, had died in 1942, during the wartime evacuation to Novosibirsk. And neither Herman Shub nor Lev Toumarkine had ever returned.

  In 1959 Fenya Shub—on the far left in the photograph—still did not know what had happened to her husband. The two of them had started their life together half a century earlier, in another world, when Shub had landed his first job in 1909 in the municipal statistical office in the provincial backwater of Penza. This posting had been the unlikely launchpad not only for his career as an economist but for something much larger, something that was to transform both communism and capitalism in the twentieth century—the modern conception of the planned economy.

  Shub had been part of a team of statisticians and economists that won such a reputation for their technical skills during the First World War that at the request of the Tsarist government they were brought back to Petrograd and assigned a task of overriding national importance—to help secure the supply of food for the Russian army and the capital. Politically, Shub had started out in the Bund as a schoolboy in Minsk, and then joined the Mensheviks, as many Bundists did, so he was overjoyed when the revolution broke out in February; in later life he always celebrated the anniversary. He was elected to the city soviet—in effect for a time the country’s administration—by a regiment in the Petrograd garrison, and he began working as its economic adviser. He was close to the Mensheviks in the Provisional Government, but once the Bolsheviks seized power, they found they needed him too, especially after the civil war was over and the politburo could turn to figuring out what a peacetime communist economy should look like. Shub’s skills and experience were more relevant to that question than any of the theories to be found in Das Kapital, and by the mid-1920s, in an environment that seemed much more favorable to their ideas about holistic strategic state planning than what had existed before the war, he and other members of the old Penza team were staffing Gosplan, the central planning agency that lay at the heart of the communist economic experiment.

  But the result was that when bitter disputes began over the pace of industrialization—the very debates that fueled Stalin’s rise to sole power—Gosplan, with its large number of former Mensheviks, was at the eye of the storm and an easy target. Shub and others questioned the planning targets the regime wanted to set, but to Stalin there was no such thing as disinterested technical expertise: Disagreement implied opposition and conspiracy, especially when it emanated from a group whose long-standing reservations about Bolshevism were common knowledge. In 1929 Shub had just left for a new job in the Moscow regional statistics office when he was arrested by the OGPU, imprisoned in the Lubyanka prison, and then exiled to Kazakhstan. Eventually Fenya managed to get permission to go with the children to visit him; the local planning boss valued Shub’s skills and allowed them to live together in a dacha near Almaty. She always remembered how on her birthday she and the children had been serenaded by her husband and some old friends of his, former Bundists, Mensheviks, and other fellow exiles, singing revolutionary songs from the Tsarist days.

  Worse was to come, much worse. In 1931, with Nicolai Krylenko prosecuting, there was a trial of the so-called Bureau of the Union of the Organization of the Mensheviks, and Shub was brought back to the Lubyanka to testify against his old chief who was one of the defendants. It was an important stage in the development of the public show trials that were to flourish later in the decade, and there was enormous pressure on the prosecutors to conjure up a plausible target. Shub was supposed to be a star witness.

  Years earlier, Shub and Krylenko had been comrades within the Social Democratic Workers’ Party; indeed Shub had once hidden Krylenko at his father’s house in Moscow to protect him. In 1931 this counted for nothing. He was accused of working for “the counterrevolutionary Menshevik organization” from within Gosplan, of wanting to reestablish capitalism, and of sabotaging Soviet economic development through incorrect planning estimates and prognoses. Despite torture, sleep deprivation, and all the other tools used by the Soviet secret police, he refused to cooperate in what he called their “comedy.” There were a few hurried, whispered meetings with his wife, who managed to visit him in jail in Moscow. But after his former boss at Gosplan, Vladimir Groman, and others succumbed to the pressure, Shub received a new sentence and spent the last few years of his life being transferred between the secret police prison in Yaroslavl north of Moscow and the special isolator unit reserved for hard-core political prisoners at Verkhneuralsk. Even there, more than one thousand miles from Moscow, two hundred miles by sledge from the nearest railway, Fenya fought her way to see him. Only when he was moved to the NKVD prison in Chelyabinsk did visits of any kind become impossible. On October 2, 1937, the local NKVD reviewed his case and described him as an implacable opponent of the Soviet Union, disobedient even inside prison. He was obviously a man of enormous courage. He was ordered to be shot and the sentence was carried out three days later at seven in the evening. Fenya never gave up hope that he was alive. In 1962 a letter came with the official notification of his death although the certificate falsely claimed he had died of heart failure; she died shortly afterwards and the full truth did not emerge until 1991.1

  Frouma’s brother Lev, the eldest of the Toumarkine boys, had vanished too; he had been arrested by the NKVD on February 7, 1938, after being denounced. He was not as high profile a figure as Shub but, as someone who had left the party out of disgust at their methods in power, he too had been vulnerable. His fate also suggested some of the other, more intimate ways in which the Terror could wreak it
s havoc. In the family, the story was that the person who had denounced him was his wife, Vera, which was possible because of an earlier tragedy that had fatally compromised relations between the couple. In August 1936, their fourteen-year-old daughter, Nina, had suddenly and unexpectedly died of dysentery. She had been at a summer camp and a harrowing letter from Moscow to Frouma describes the entire episode: the sudden onset of the illness while her friends are playing, her rapid weakening and last painful agonies, her unexpected death at home. Nata, who had been studying for her medical exams, only arrived in time to prepare Nina’s corpse for the funeral so that she could lie in her favorite dress and her Young Pioneer tie with a bouquet of flowers in her hand. It was the worst thing to have happened in the family for a very long time. Lev’s heart was broken and in his grief he told his mother that he felt he had no reason to go on living. He spent most evenings at the cemetery after that, summer and winter, for hours at a time, even when the temperature plummeted. Relations between him and his wife became poisonous because he blamed her for having been drunk and not having noticed how sick Nina was. Did she really denounce him, as Frouma and the others believed? In any event, he had all but lost the will to live when on April 27, 1938, he was sentenced to death—the charge sheet comprised espionage, terrorism, and counterrevolutionary activity; one wonders if those letters to and from London and Paris played any part in his conviction—and he was shot at the Kommunarka execution ground the same day.

  As in the case of Fenya’s husband, the family was not informed what had happened to him, and his father, well over eighty, traveled east to try to find out. The letters between him and Frouma about Alunya had thus been in a kind of code, conveying only this: that they had no idea what had become of him.

  There was a third Terror victim in the family—Frouma’s cousin Lev Berlinraut. The mug shot that the NKVD took of him after his arrest is a striking contrast with that of his cousin and namesake, Lev Toumarkine. The latter looks haunted, resigned, already half dead after his daughter’s death the previous year. Berlinraut’s face is gaunt but there is a spark of defiance and energy in the eyes, an alertness. It is as though he had been expecting this day of reckoning and was ready for it. And it would not be surprising if he had, for Berlinraut was an intellectual and an activist who had been intimately involved in some of the key moments of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Like Herman Shub and Lev Toumarkine, Berlinraut had walked the revolutionary tightrope—Marxist but non-Bolshevik—after 1917, but in his case a passion for politics had tested the limits of the possible. He had been that rarest of creatures, a non-Bolshevik political activist in the Soviet Union.

  Berlinraut had been a leading member of a left-wing party called Poale Zion whose origins went back to the turn of the century. Fusing Zionism and Marxian socialism, its leading thinker, Ber Borochov, had argued that assimilation was a dead end. The Bund, with its stress on the here and now, had it wrong, he said. Jews would be limited in opportunity anywhere that they lacked political power, and their minority status would always prevent them from becoming a properly organized working class. It was only in a Jewish-run Palestine that a genuine Jewish proletariat could come into being and hasten a socialist revolution. This new vision of proletarian Jewish nationalism spread rapidly. By 1905, at the age of nineteen, Berlinraut was a member of Poale Zion’s central committee and a trusted confidante of Borochov, whose writings he would later edit. When the bespectacled, well-educated, clean-shaven young Muscovite attended a regional party meeting in Minsk, he seemed to the local activists to have come from a different world: At home in Russian (thereby impressing most of his audience, who were much more at ease in Yiddish), he struck one of them as resembling “the son of a good family who had fallen into a gang of thieves.”2 By the time the First World War broke out, he was a prominent figure on the left wing of the party. In early 1918 he negotiated with the Germans over national rights for the Jews of Russia, and at the same time he was elected to the central committee of the Soviet preparliament—at that time effectively the country’s executive—which put him, for a brief period, at the very apex of power in the revolutionary state. The following year, as the party spokesman on nationality matters, he pushed for Poale Zion’s adherence to the Comintern, and when the party split on this issue, he did not leave for Palestine as many others did but stayed with the small Leftist fraction that remained in Russia, independent but tolerated. In effect, although he surely would not have put it so starkly, he had opted for Marxism over Zionism. One of his comrades, a Russian Jew from Plonsk named David Gruen, had already made the opposite choice, emigrating to Ottoman Palestine where he was active in the local Poale Zion branch in Jaffa. Much later, known by his Hebrew name as David Ben Gurion, he would become Israel’s first prime minister. In the guise of its pro-communist faction, Poale Zion was one of the very few political parties permitted an autonomous existence inside the Soviet Union, and until 1928 Berlinraut was listed in the Moscow phone book as one of the party’s designated representatives. It was only when the Kremlin decided to create a homeland for the Jews in Siberia on the Chinese border at Birobidzhan, its own contribution to the long history of Jewish settlement schemes, that the OGPU closed Poale Zion down.

  Berlinraut was not only a party activist; he was also a scholar, a trained economist, and a writer. In 1912 he wrote a study of the sociology of a Russian Jewish community that remains a classic. But his interests and commentary extended far beyond purely Jewish matters. Under the pseudonym R. Arski, he published a stream of articles and books, including an instant study of the crisis of 1917. These revealed an impressive intelligence that combined commitment to the proletarian cause with a critical realism all his own. And courage too: He was not afraid, for instance, to warn Lenin in print that rushing into a total nationalization of the economy was premature. Leo Pasvolsky’s 1921 The Economics of Communism, the first serious Western study of the subject, describes him as “one of the best of the Soviet economists.”

  We do not know why Berlinraut was arrested. But with his political background, his independence of mind, a sister living in Germany, and his own range of foreign contacts—he had spent time in Berlin in the early 1920s, and his daughter was a German literary expert who found a niche as a librarian at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, the body entrusted with the definitive publication of the works of the founders—he was clearly vulnerable. Berlinraut was working at a state mining company’s Moscow office when he was arrested in late March 1938 and charged with membership in a counterrevolutionary terrorist organization. He was sentenced to death on June 14 and shot the same day on the Kommunarka execution site, where by late 1941 at least 4,700 people had been killed by “special duties officers” of the NKVD. It was only after the Second World War that the family learned he had been killed.

  That family gathering in Moscow in 1959 was the beginning of renewed communication among the Toumarkine children. Tsalya was by then an eminent pediatrician with solid Kremlin connections. Herman and Fenya’s children included a son who was on the way to becoming one of the Soviet Union’s most eminent theater critics; Ida’s daughter was an aircraft engineer in the space program, who lived in the closed city of Zhukovsky. The Terror had struck the family, but the Toumarkines had risen in Soviet society nonetheless.

  Long after Frouma’s death, it was Dad’s turn to make his first visit to Russia and he took me with him. The Brezhnev years were a time in which all revolutionary energy had long since ebbed away from communism. In those days I was going to school in Burnt Oak, a working-class North London suburb with its own kind of dystopic grimness and random aggression. A Clockwork Orange was no fantasy. I remember the gaggles of skinheads lurking under the bridge by the station in the mornings, the scent of class hatred and violent distraction in the air. I used to make my way off the train past the cottages that lined the streets of the Watling Estate, an interwar planners’ dream of socialized capitalism, which had worn worse than most and which already seemed to have its
best days behind it. The estate had been dubbed “Little Moscow” by nervous middle-class North Londoners between the wars, but a week in the real thing was enough to provide a sobering perspective. Our Russian relatives made a loving fuss of Dad and me, and the feasting seemed endless, but in my mind I associate our trip with the emptiness of the dark Moscow boulevards and the snowdrifts piled up around the entrances to the drab apartment blocks on the city’s outskirts. It felt more like an expedition than any kind of return and I was happy when we got home. In London I sat in the warmth of our living room. We played the somber opening of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony on the gramophone, Mravinsky’s Melodiya recording, its quality traduced by the rough paper cover, about the only thing we had found in the shops that we wanted to bring back with us.

  Nata, the last surviving Moscow sister, was familiar to us because she had been able to get to Paris more than once. Natalia Magnitova, to give her married name, was by this time retired as a military doctor, and army life and three husbands and years of caring for their parents and hers had exhausted her. But that was not the half of it: Hers was a story that embodied so many of the incredible paradoxes of existence in the Soviet Union, I could scarcely believe it when, years after her death, I learned that although she had been a doctor, she had been working not in the Red Army, but in the NKVD; indeed, it was more or less in the years when first Shub and then her brother Alunya disappeared into its clutches, that she was supervising Gulag prisoners building the Volga-Don canal. And there was more: it was in those harrowing conditions that she met one of the convicts, a zek, and married him—this was her third husband, an engineer called Magnitov, who had spent years in the camps before his release.