by Mark Mazower
Pale of Settlement The zone of western Russia outside which Jews were deterred and often prohibited from settling.
Poale Zion A party based on a fusion of Marxism and Zionism that spread internationally before 1914. In the USSR it remained legal until 1928.
Revisionist Zionism See Jabotinsky.
Rothstein, Fyodor [1871–1953] Born in Kovno, settled in London in 1890 as a journalist and joined the Bolsheviks. A friend of Lenin’s, he helped found the Communist Party of Great Britain. He returned to Russia in 1920 and became Soviet ambassador to Persia.
Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party Also known as the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). Founded in Minsk in 1898, with the help of the Bund, it became the leading Marxist socialist movement in Russia.
Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania Founded in 1893 by Polish workers protesting the nationalism of the Polish Socialist Party. After 1917 its members played a leading role on the Left in Germany, Poland, and the USSR.
Soviet Trade Delegation Founded in London in 1920, before the inauguration of formal diplomatic relations between the UK and the USSR. Its home for many years was on Highgate West Hill.
Swallows and Amazons 1930 children’s story by the British writer and journalist Arthur Ransome.
Captions and Credits
Hampstead and Highgate, 1930.
Hampstead Heath, mid-1930s.
Max, c. 1926.
Vilna, railway station.
Map of western Russia, c. 1900.
Max, c. 1905.
Łódź, 1905.
“Bloody week in Łódź,” Nowości Ilustrowane [Cracow], 27 (July 1, 1905).
Max and a friend, Saratov, 1912.
Continental managers of the Yost Typewriter Company, London 1912. Max is on the far left.
St. Petersburg-Nevel-Vitebsk-Polotsk.
(L) Vera Broido, photographed by Raoul Hausmann, 1931 (Copyright © 2017 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/ADAGP, Paris); (R) Hausmann between his wife, Hedwig Mankiewicz, and Vera Broido, photographed by August Sander, 1929. (Copyright © Die Photographische Sammlung/ SK Stiftung Kultur—August Sander Archiv, Köln/ARS, New York, 2017)
Max at home, c. 1943.
Max with Zachar and his wife, Pola, and daughter, Rebecca. Vilna, c. 1914.
Max, Frouma, and Dad at the entrance to 20 Oakeshott Avenue, July 1945. (Syma Crane Archives, US Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Daily Telegraph, June 25, 1942.
(L) T. S. Eliot, 1926; (R) Kenneth Pickthorn, 1951. (Reprinted by permission of the National Portrait Gallery, London)
French-language Soviet pamphlet on the 1931 trial of the Mensheviks.
Sofia Krylenko, c. 1905.
Clinique Tarnier, c. 1905.
(L) Moise Toumarkine and (R) Maria Tourmarkine (née Berlinraut).
Alexander Baltermants, Frouma’s first husband.
“Grief, Kerch, Crimea,” Dmitri Baltermants, gelatin silver print, 1942.
19 South Hill Park Gardens.
Magdala Arms, South Hill Park.
Tsalya, Nata, Moise [Frouma’s father], Ida, Fenya, Tsalya’s wife [name not known], and an unidentified woman stand around the bier of Maria Berlinraut, Moscow, 1939.
Fenya, Frouma, and Nata with Fenya’s grandson Vladimir Shub and her daughter and son-in-law, Moscow, 1959.
(L) Herman Shub and (R) Fenya Shub, 1909.
(L) Lev (Alunya) Toumarkine, 1938; (R) Nina Toumarkine, c. 1935.
Lev Yakovlevich Berlinraut, 1938.
Dad in Moscow, 1974.
Ira in Russia, c. 1923.
The Mazower family, Highgate, c. 1936.
The National Fire Service, Highgate, 1942. Ira is first from the left in the second row.
Oakeshott Avenue. Number 20 is on the left, approximately opposite the first parked car.
Announcement of the census of Jews: Seine-et-Oise, 1941.
(L) Maurice Roy Ridley, 1912 (Balliol College Archives); (R) Benedict Humphrey Sumner, 1950 (by permission of the National Portrait Gallery, London).
Hampton Court, 1943. Dad snaps his Soviet guests.
Oxford, 1943. Cleo Birkinshaw is on the left.
Acknowledgments
The primary sources used in this book are chiefly family documents—letters, diaries, photographs—in the possession of my mother. I transcribed a long interview with my father, conducted some years before his death, and also drew upon the many letters to and from his mother, Frouma, which my cousin Patrick Toumarkine was kind enough to make available to me.
The main archival sources include the State Archives of the Russian Federation (GARF) in Moscow, notably files 102 and 124 (on Max’s and Sofia Krylenko’s revolutionary activities), 539 (Semyon and his family), 1742 (Lev Toumarkine), and 10035 (Sofia Krylenko’s rehabilitation file). The Archives générales du Royaume in Brussels, Belgium, include files 996537 (Sofia Krylenko), 1002985 (Olga Krylenko), 791610 (Vladimir Krylenko), and 912047 (Constantin de Meyer). I should also mention the Eastman archives at Indiana University; the Emma Goldman Papers at the University of California, Berkeley; the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, Netherlands; the Liège municipal archives; and YIVO in New York.
Two books were invaluable: My East Is Gorgeous by Ira J. Morris and Daughter of the Revolution by Vera Broido, both of which contain accounts that I have drawn upon or cited directly. Other sources include Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment; Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary; Gill Bennett, Churchill’s Man of Mystery: Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence; Oleg Budnitskii, Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917–1920; Andrew Cook, Ace of Spies: The True Story of Sidney Reilly; Corpus: Within Living Memory, edited by M. E. Bury and E. J. Winter, for André’s recollections of Corpus Christi College in the 1920s; Documents Concerning the Destruction of the Jews of Grodno, 1941–44, volume 1, edited by Beate and Serge Klarsfeld; Max Eastman, Love and Revolution: My Journey through an Epoch; T. S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 4: 1928–1929, edited by Valerie Eliot; Victor Erlich, Child of a Turbulent Century; Naum Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties: Names to Be Remembered; Miklós Kun, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait; Lars Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921; Ivan Maisky, Journey into the Past; David Matless, Landscape and Englishness; Vladimir Medem, The Life and Soul of a Legendary Jewish Socialist: The Memoirs of Vladimir Medem, edited by Samuel Portnoy; Monnika Minninger et al., Antisemitisch Verfolgte registriert in Bielefeld, 1933–45, which mentions Ida Roepert; Benjamin Nadel, “Bundism in England,” Jewish Socialist, 6–7; Leo Pasvolsky, The Economics of Communism; Arthur Peacock, Yours Fraternally; Polin 6: Jews in Łódź, 1820–1939, edited by Anthony Polonsky; Kevin Quinlan, The Secret War Between the Wars: MI5 in the 1920s and 1930s; Helen Rappoport, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile; Rudolf Rocker, The London Years; Gabriella Safran, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-sky; Karl Schlögel, Moscow, 1937; Andrew Thorpe, The British Communist Party and Moscow, 1920–1943; Henry Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia from Its Origins to 1905; Nick Toczek, Haters, Baiters and Would-Be Dictators: Anti-Semitism and the UK Far Right; Scott Ury, Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry; David Vital, A People Apart: A Political History of the Jews in Europe, 1789–1939, which has a good discussion of the Gomel pogrom on pages 530–31; Claudia Weill, Les Cosmopolites: Socialisme et judéité en Russie, 1897–1917; Nathan Weinstock, Couleur espérance: la memoire ouvriere juive autour de 1900; and The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century, edited by Gabrielle Safran and Steven J. Zipperstein.
I am grateful to the following for their assistance: Nile Arena, Lilly Library, Indiana University; Nick Baldwin, Great Ormond Street Hospital archives; Christophe Bechet; Jennifer Bell; Gill Bennett, Lillah de Bie, University College School; James Billington; Adam Bosiacki; Lalage Bown; Anthony Camp; Anna Carlen; Tanya Chebotarev; Michel Closquet, Archives of the Ville de Liège;
Deborah Cohen; Robert Crossley; Phil Dykes; Candace Falk, Emma Goldman Papers, Berkeley; Jean-Francois Fayet; Katie Giles, Kingston University Archives; Tatiana Glezer; J. H. Goldthorpe; Barbara Gray, King Edward VI School archives, Chelmsford; Ernest Hecht; Henley Henley-Smith, Highgate School; Peter Holquist; Sonia Hood, Friends School, Saffron Walden; Philip M. Hudson; Lucy Hughes, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; Anthony Ismailoff; George Jones; Rosie Kennedy; Oleg Khlevniuk; Mark Kidel; Peteris Kimelis; Anna Kisselgoff; Tim Knebel, Sheffield Archives; Steve Kotkin; Tamara Lansky; Natalia Malihina, Memorial Society, Moscow; Richard Meunier, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital; Alan Montefiore; Mark Nowogrodzki; Julie Parry, People’s History Museum; Bert Patenaude; James Peters, Manchester University Archives; Silvio Pons; Richard Ramage, St. Antony’s College, Oxford; Melvin Richter; Anna Sander, Balliol College, Oxford; Nicholas Shakespeare; Peter Slezkine; Daniel Snowman; Belinda Spinaze, Fryer Library, University of Melbourne; John Stewart; Filip Strubbe, Algemeen Rijksarchief, Brussels; Sacha Toumarkine; Susan Trackman, the archives of Highgate Scientific and Literary Institution; Jane Tucker; Alexei Tumarkin; Annabel Valentine, Royal Holloway Archives; Godfrind Vinciane; Tony Watson; Nadine Werner, Walter Benjamin Archive; Joshua Zimmerman; and George Zukerman.
A very special thanks to Riccardo Mario Cucciolla, Victor Petrov, Gil Rubin, and Carolina de Stefano for helping me in the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Moscow archives, since without them much of this would have remained unknown; to my cousin Boris Kobrinsky for sharing so much of his knowledge about the family in Moscow; and to Jane Gorjevsky and Tarik Amar for translations from the Russian. Rina Turner provided translations from Yiddish. My brother David helped with his great expertise in all matters Yiddish. I am indebted to Mike Allen, Elizabeth Donaldson, Barbara and Jack Dunitz, Richard Jefferies, Andrei M., Anthony Platt, Patrick Toumarkine (both for conversation and for sharing the letters from Frouma to her brother and sister, his father and aunt), and Mike Walker for their great kindness in fielding questions from a (to most of them) complete stranger about events that happened more than sixty years ago. I owe a great debt to Peter and Gilly Wesley for opening up 20 Oakeshott Avenue with such charm and helpfulness. My thanks to Marwa Elshakry, Constantine Giannaris, Kostas Kostis, Peter Mandler, John Palatella, Rachel Phipps, Alexander Star, Inigo Thomas, and Simon Winder, and to my colleagues in the Heyman Center Fellows seminar for reading earlier drafts of this manuscript and suggesting improvements. Judith Gurewich has been a publisher sans pareil, who brought the acutest of editorial eyes to my words. It has been a privilege working with her and the whole Other Press team. I end by thanking Mum, Dave, Ben, and Jony for their immense and unquestioning support without which this book would not have been written.
THE BEGINNING
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ALLEN LANE
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First published in the United States of America by Other Press, LLC 2017
First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 2017
Copyright © Mark Mazower, 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover image: Antiqua Print Gallery / Alamy Stock Photo
ISBN: 978-0-241-32137-9