The Jewish Century

One such Jew—of small stature but “with the soul of an Odessa Jew”—was the blacksmith Jonah Brutman, who had three sons, “three fattened bulls with purple shoulders and feet like spades.” The first son followed in his father’s trade; the second went off to join the partisans and got killed; and the third, Semen, “went over to Primakov and joined a division of Red Cossacks. He was made commander of a Cossack regiment. He and a few other shtetl boys became the first of an unexpected breed of saber-wielding Jewish horsemen and partisans.”¹³⁶

Members of this breed became familiar heroes of Soviet folklore, fiction, and recollection. There are Perets Markish’s “Shloime-Ber and Azriel, a shoemaker’s sons turned Red Cavalrymen, riding to the front”; there is Izrail Khaikelevich (“Alesha”) Ulanovsky, a brawler, sailor, miner, and partisan, who did not like intellectuals and became an NKVD spy; there is the biggest man of the Stalin era, Grigory Novak, the first Soviet champion of the world (in power lifting, in 1946) and the only circus athlete to juggle seventy-pound weights; and there are legendary gangsters, drunkards, and womanizers who, “if there were rings attached to heaven and earth, would grab those rings and pull heaven down to earth.” All of them were begotten by Semen Brutman—or possibly Anatoly Rybakov’s Uncle Misha, a “recklessly generous and desperately brave” Red army commander, “broad-shouldered and burly, with a chiseled, tanned Mongol face and slanted eyes, a daredevil.” Uncle Misha had also left home to become a cavalryman. “He was a kind, devil-may-care, courageous, just, and selfless man. In the revolution he had found a faith to replace the faith of his ancestors; his straightforward mind could not stand Talmudic hairsplitting; the simple arithmetic of the revolution was more comprehensible to him. The civil war provided an outlet for his burning energy; the simplicity of a soldier’s life freed him from the pettiness of human existence.”¹³⁷

Such Jews were larger than life, but they were marginal (as most Goliaths are). The Jews who occupied the center stage of early Soviet culture were the unmistakably Mercurian incarnations of Bolshevik Reason, and thus much more familiarly Jewish. All “Party-minded” literature was about the transformation of proletarian spontaneity into revolutionary consciousness, or, in mythic (socialist-realist) terms, the taming of a recklessly generous, desperately brave, devil-may-care Red Cavalryman into a disciplined, scripture-reading holy warrior. All such proletarians had mentors, and many such mentors were Jews—partly because there were many Jews among Bolshevik mentors, but also because this was a role that called for an authentic, believable Mercurian. The iconic commissar was the consciousness to the spontaneity of the proletariat, the head to the body of the revolution, the restless nomad to the inert enormity of the masses. It made sense for the iconic commissar to be a Jew.¹³⁸

In one of the foundational texts of socialist realism, A. Fadeev’s The Rout (1926), the Red Partisan commander Iosif Abramovich Levinson is “a tiny man in tall boots, with a long, red wedge of a beard,” who looks like a “gnome from a children’s book,” suffers from a pain in his side, embarrasses himself at Russian skittles, and comes from the family of a used-furniture salesman who “spent his life hoping to get rich but was afraid of mice and played his violin very badly.” One of the men under Levinson’s command is the shepherd Metelitsa.

He had always felt vaguely attracted to that man and had noticed on many occasions that it gave him pleasure to ride next to him, talk to him, or simply look at him. He admired Metelitsa not for any outstanding socially useful qualities, of which Metelitsa did not have very many and which Levinson possessed to a much greater degree, but for the extraordinary physical agility, the animal vitality with which he overflowed and which Levinson himself so sorely lacked. Whenever he saw Metelitsa’s nimble figure, ever ready for action, or simply knew that Metelitsa was not far away, he would forget about his own physical weakness and come to believe that he was as tough and tireless as Metelitsa. He was even secretly proud that a man like that was under his command.¹³⁹

The reason a man like that is under his command is that Levinson belongs to the chosen. It was not always clear whether conscious Communists received true knowledge because they were naturally endowed with special qualities (such as an innate sense of justice or an iron will), or whether they developed special qualities as a consequence of receiving true knowledge (through sudden illumination, mortification of the flesh, or formal apprenticeship). Either way, their election as interpreters of the gospel and leaders of the masses was revealed through visible bodily signs, usually the combination of physical corruption and the penetrating gaze so typical of iconic Jews (as well as Christian saints and intelligentsia martyrs). Levinson, for one, had renounced all falsehood when he was a “feeble Jewish boy” with “big naive eyes” staring with “peculiar, un-childlike intentness” from an old family photograph. He never lost that gift: Levinson’s “unblinking eyes” could pull a man from the crowd “the way pincers could pull out a nail.” “Perfectly clear,” “deep as lakes,” and “otherwordly,” they “took in Morozka [the proletarian daredevil], boots and all, and saw in him many things that Morozka himself was probably unaware of.”¹⁴⁰

Levinson’s clairvoyance, however acquired, allows him to “conquer his frailty and his weak flesh” as he leads the often reluctant people to their salvation. Ideologically, he did not have to be Jewish (most of the elect were not), but there is little doubt that for reasons of both aesthetic and sociological verisimilitude, canonical Jewishness seemed an appropriate expression of the Bolshevik vision of disembodied consciousness triumphing over “Oblomov’s” inertia.

“Only here, in our country,” thought Levinson, quickening his pace and puffing even more ferociously at his cigarette, “where millions of people have lived for centuries under the same slow, lazy sun, languishing in filth and poverty, plowing with antediluvian wooden plows, believing in an angry and stupid god—only in a country like this can such lazy and weak-willed, such good-for-nothing people be born. . . .”

Levinson grew very agitated because these were his deepest, most intimate thoughts; because the defeat of all that poverty and misery constituted the only meaning of his life; because there would have been no Levinson at all, but somebody else, had he not been moved by an overwhelming, irresistible desire to see the birth of the new man—beautiful, strong, and kind.¹⁴¹

It is for the sake of creating a perfect human being—Apollonian in body and Mercurian in mind—that Levinson steels himself for doing what is “necessary,” including the requisitioning of a weeping farmer’s last pig and the killing of a wounded comrade too weak to be evacuated. The price he has to pay is as terrible as it is mysterious: “personal responsibility.” Clearly analogous to Christian sin, it was both inescapable and ennobling; the greater the personal responsibility for acts ordinarily considered evil, the more visible the signs of election and the inner strength they bespoke. Demonic as well as Promethean, Bolshevik commissars “carried within them” the pain of historical necessity.¹⁴²

In The Commissars by Yuri Libedinsky (Fadeev’s fellow “proletarian writer” and himself a Jew and a commissar), civil war daredevils are brought together for a special course on military discipline and political education. The man in charge of military training is a former tsarist officer (“military expert”); the chief ideologists are the frail but unbending Jews Efim Rozov and Iosif Mindlov. Both are sickly, stooped, pale-lipped, and bespectacled; both “give up hours of sleep to reading Marx”; both know what is necessary; and both have the inner strength to get it done. Rozov, the head of the district’s political department, had been a watchmaker’s apprentice when, in March 1917, he saw those “bent, immobile figures” for the last time. “Still, the watchmaker’s patient and careful dexterity had become a part of his being and proved useful for his work and struggle.” He had become the craftsman of the revolution, the Stolz to its many Oblomovs. “He was different from the unhurried local people. Skinny and short, Rozov moved quickly, abruptly, but without scurrying around, like a knife in the hands of an experienced carver.” His mission is “to look over the commissars as if they had been weapons after a battle, make sure they were not dented, cracked, or rusted, and then sharpen and temper them for the next battle.”¹⁴³

All revolutionary detachments needed someone like that. In A. Tarasov-Rodionov’s Chocolate (1922), the martyred Chekist Abram Katzman is stooped, sallow, bespectacled, and hook-nosed; and in Vasily Grossman’s “Four Days,” the grim Commissar Faktorovich

despised his feeble body covered with curly black fur. He did not pity or love it—he would not hesitate for a second to ascend a gallows or turn his narrow chest toward a firing squad. Since childhood, his weak flesh had given him nothing but trouble: whooping cough, swollen adenoids, colds, constipation alternating with sudden storms of colitis and bloody dysentery, influenza, and heartburn. He had learned to ignore his flesh—to work with a fever, to read Marx while holding his cheek swollen from an infected tooth, to make speeches while suffering from acute stomach pains. And no, he had never been embraced by tender arms.

It is Faktorovich, however, who, through sheer courage, hatred, and faith, saves his comrades from captivity and uncertainty. For “although his child-sized long underwear kept sliding down ridiculously and his camel-like Hebrew head trembled on its tender neck . . . , there was no doubt that strength was on the side of this true believer.”¹⁴⁴

Nor was there any doubt about the source of true strength in one of the most celebrated poems about the civil war, Eduard Bagritsky’s “The Tale of Opanas” (1926). An imitation of Shevchenko’s “tales” and Ukrainian folk epics, the poem rethinks and finally resolves the traditional Cossack-Jewish confrontation by translating it into the language of social revolution. The commissar and head of the “requisitioning detachment” Iosif Kogan does what is necessary by confiscating peasant food and executing those who resist. The confused Ukrainian lad Opanas deserts the detachment and ends up joining the army of the peasant anarchist Nestor Makhno.

O Ukraine! Our native land!

Autumn’s golden harvests!

In the past, we joined the Cossacks,

Now we join the bandits!

Opanas kills, robs, loots, and drinks (“Beating Communists and Yids— / What an easy job!”) until he is ordered to shoot the captured commissar. Torn by doubt, Opanas suggests to Kogan that he try to escape, but Kogan only smiles, straightens his glasses, and offers Opanas his clothes. The shot rings, and Kogan falls down into the dust, “nose first.” Tormented by remorse, Opanas confesses his guilt to a Bolshevik interrogator and is sentenced to be shot. The night before the execution, he is visited in his cell by Kogan’s ghost, who smiles sternly and says, “Your life’s road, Opanas, / Ends beyond this threshold. . . .”¹⁴⁵

All these commissars were perfect heroes both because they were Jewish and because they had left their Jewishness behind. Or rather, it was their Jewishness that had allowed them to break with the past. Levinson had “ruthlessly suppressed within himself the passive, languid yearning” for a promise of future happiness—“all those things he had inherited from the humble generations brought up on mendacious fables.” Mindlov’s wife Leah Sorkina (who died of consumption and revolutionary exhaustion) “had easily abandoned her ancestors’ religion—relentless, incomprehensible, and overburdened with tiresome ritual.” Some went further. According to M. D. Baitalsky’s memoir, the Cheka agent Khaim Polisar “confiscated his father’s hardware store for the needs of the revolution.” While Grossman’s Faktorovich was a Cheka agent, he arrested his uncle, who later died in a concentration camp. “Faktorovich remembered how his aunt had come to the Cheka office to see him and he had told her of her husband’s death. She had covered her face with her hands and said: ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’ ”

After Stalin’s death, Grossman would return to the character of a Jewish true believer in Forever Flowing. Faktorovich would not change (except for the name), but Grossman’s language would:

Was it the age-old chain of abuses, the anguish of the Babylonian captivity, the humiliations of the ghetto, or the misery of the Pale of Settlement that had produced and forged that unquenchable thirst that was scorching the soul of the Bolshevik Lev Mekler? . . .

He served the cause of good and the revolution in blood and without mercy. In his revolutionary incorruptibility, he threw his father into prison and testified against him at a Cheka Collegium meeting. Grimly and cruelly, he turned his back on his sister who begged him to help her husband who had been arrested as a saboteur.

In all his meekness, he was merciless to the heretics. The revolution seemed to him to be helpless, childishly trusting, surrounded by treachery, the cruelty of villains, and the filth of lechers.

And so he was merciless to the enemies of the revolution.¹⁴⁶

This was a view from the disillusioned future. In the first decade of the revolution, the Bolshevik scorching of the soul was a matter of strength, pride, duty, and “personal responsibility.” The soul was being scorched because it had to be—because it was necessary.

In 1922, another proletarian writer, A. Arosev (a childhood friend of V. Molotov and future head of the Soviet Committee for Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries), published a novel entitled The Notes of Terenty the Forgotten. One of the characters is the Cheka agent Kleiner, who does not wash very often, always wears the same leather jacket, sleeps on an old trunk, and has the smooth face of a eunuch.

Kleiner belongs to a special breed. He is a “Chekist” from head to foot.

Perhaps he is the best specimen of that breed. Future generations may not remember his name. His monument may never be built. And yet he is a very loyal man. He is full of a hidden inner enthusiasm. He may seem dry. His conversation is also dry, yet he inspires you when he talks. The sound of his voice seems childish, yet strangely alluring. They say that he has smiled only once in his whole life, and even then to bad effect: while informing an old lady about the execution of her son, he smiled accidentally out of nervousness. The old lady fainted. Kleiner has never smiled again.¹⁴⁷

One of Kleiner’s ideas is to project executions onto a large screen outside the Cheka building. “It would be a kind of cinema for everyone,” he says.

“You mean like in America?”

“Yes, yes, exactly. To teach the people a lesson. So that they’d be scared. The more scared they are, the fewer people we kill . . . I mean . . . execute.”

. . . “But such spectacles would only corrupt the people,” I said to Kleiner.

“What? What did you say? Corrupt? You are full of prejudices. Peter the Great sent Russian students to the Stockholm anatomical theater and ordered them to tear the corpses’ muscles apart with their teeth, so they’d learn how to operate. I bet that didn’t corrupt them. What is necessary does not corrupt. Try to understand. What is necessary does not corrupt.”¹⁴⁸

Kleiner himself is incorruptible because he is necessary. “They will probably never build a monument to Kleiner, but they really should: he spent his whole soul on the revolution.”¹⁴⁹

They did build many monuments to Kleiner’s commander, Feliks Dzerzhinsky. One used to stand outside the Cheka building in Moscow. Another is Eduard Bagritsky’s poem “TBC,” in which the pale knight of the revolution appears before a feverish Young Communist poet. “Sharp-angled face, sharp-angled beard,” Dzerzhinsky sits down on the edge of the bed and talks to the young man about the heavy burden of the “three-edged frankness of the bayonet,” about the need to cut through the “crusty gut of the earth’s routine,” about the moats closing in over the heads of the executed, and about the “signature on the death sentence spilling out of the hole in the head.” And then he intones some of the age’s most famous lines:

Our age is awaiting you out in the yard,

Alarmed and alert as a well-armed guard.

Go, stand by its side, don’t hesitate.

Its solitude is at least as great.

Your enemy’s everyone you meet,

You stand alone and the age stands still,

And if it tells you to cheat—then cheat.

And if it tells you to kill—then kill.¹⁵⁰

The culmination of the story of Jewish commissars in Soviet literature was the famous history of the construction of the White Sea Canal, 1931–34. The book was produced by thirty-six writers (including Gorky, M. Zoshchenko, Vs. Ivanov, Vera Inber, V. Kataev, A. Tolstoy, and V. Shklovsky). The canal was built by labor camp inmates (“reforged” thereby into socially useful citizens). The construction was run by the secret police (the OGPU, the successor to the Cheka). All the top leadership positions were held by Jews: G. G. Yagoda, the OGPU official in charge of the project; L. I. Kogan, the head of construction, M. D. Berman, the head of the Labor Camp Administration (Gulag); S. G. Firin, the head of the White Sea Canal Labor Camp; Ya. D. Rappoport, the deputy head of construction and of the Gulag; and N. A. Frenkel, the head of work organization on the canal.¹⁵¹

As portrayed in the History, these people were in much better health than their civil war predecessors, but they had lost none of their essential attributes: consciousness, restlessness, ruthlessness, promptness, precision, prodigious powers of penetration, and the optional Jewishness as a confirmation and possibly explanation of all the other attributes. They were the last representatives of the Heroic Age of the Russian Revolution: the age that preferred mobility to stability, boundlessness to borders, proteanism to permanence, consciousness to spontaneity, exile to domesticity, artifice to nature, necessity to beauty, mind to matter, Stolz to Oblomov, those who could not swim to those who could. It was the Mercurian phase of the revolution, in other words; the German Stage without the Germans; the Jewish Age.¹⁵²

No icon better expresses the essence of that age (Kultura 1, in Vladimir Paperny’s terminology) than El Lissitzky’s Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. The “three-edged frankness of the bayonet” and the “sharp-angled face” of Feliks Dzerzhinsky were aimed at the “crusty gut of the earth’s routine” and indeed everything dull, round, or predictably rectangular. According to one of the prophets of the revolutionary avant-garde, Vassily Kandinsky, the triangle was more “sharp-witted” than the square and less philistine than the circle. It was also much more Mercurian than Apollonian, and therefore—stylistically—much more Jewish than Russian. Jewishness was not the only way of representing the triangle, but it was one of the more familiar and aesthetically convincing. Levinson’s “red wedge of a beard,” Mindlov’s angular movements, Rozov’s knifelike figure were all references to the traditional and pervasive iconography of Mercurianism. According to one of Ilya Ehrenburg’s characters (a Chekist), Lenin might be a sphere; Bukharin was a straight line; but Trotsky, “the chess player and the chief of the steppe hordes, disciplined and lined up under the banner of the twenty-one theses of some resolution—that one is a triangle.” And according to Arosev’s Terenty the Forgotten, “if I were a futurist artist, I would represent Trotsky as two downward-pointing triangles: a small triangle—the face—on top of a large triangle—the body.”¹⁵³

One obvious reading of the wedge-over-circle imagery is violence (“beat the whites”); the other is sex (love). Eduard Bagritsky portrayed both. His poem “February,” written in 1933–34 and published posthumously, is about “a little Hebrew boy” who loves books about birds (the same birds, presumably, that adorned Galina Apollonovna’s robe and inhabited Efim Nikitich Smolich’s realm of “nature”):

Birds that appeared like weird letters,

Sabers and trumpets, spheres and diamonds.

The Archer must have been detained

Above the darkness of our dwelling,

Above the proverbial Jewish odor

Of goosefat, above the continuous droning

Of tedious prayers, above the beards

In family albums . . .

As a young man, he falls in love with a girl with golden hair, a green dress, and “a nightingale quiver” in her eyes, “all of her as if flung wide open to the coolness of the sea, the sun, and the birds.” Every day, as she walks home from school, he follows her “like a murderer, stumbling over benches and bumping into people and trees,” thinking of her “as a fabulous bird who had fluttered off the pages of a picture book” and wondering how he, “born of a Hebrew and circumcised on the seventh [sic] day,” has become a bird catcher. Finally, he gathers up his courage and runs toward her.

All those books I’d read in the evenings—

Hungry and sick, my shirt unbuttoned—

About birds from exotic places,

About people from distant planets,

About worlds where rich men play tennis,

Drink lemonade, and kiss languid women,—

All those things were moving before me,

Wearing a dress and swinging a satchel . . . .

He runs beside her “like a beggar, bowing deferentially” and “mumbling some nonsense.” She stops and tells him to leave her alone, pointing toward the intersection. And there,

Fat-bellied and greasy with perspiration,

Stands the policeman,

Squeezed into high boots,

Pumped up with vodka and stuffed full of bacon . . . .

Then comes the February Revolution, and he becomes a deputy commissar, a catcher of horse thieves and burglars, “an angel of death with a flashlight and a revolver, surrounded by four sailors from a battleship.”

My Hebrew pride sang out as clearly,

As a tight string stretched out to its limit.

I would have given much for my forefather

In his long caftan, his hat with a fox tail

From under which, like a silvery spiral,

His earlock crawled out, and a thick cloud of dandruff

Floated over the square of his beard,—

For him to be able to spot his descendant

In this strapping fellow who loomed like a tower

Over the bristling guns and the headlights,

Over the truck that had shattered midnight . . . .

One night, he is sent to arrest some gangsters, and there, in a suffocating brothel reeking of face powder, semen, and sweet liqueur, he finds her—“the one who had tormented me with her nightingale gaze.” She is bare-shouldered and bare-legged, half asleep and smoking a cigarette. He asks her if she recognizes him, and offers her money.

Without opening her mouth, she whispered softly,

“Please have some pity! I don’t need the money!”

Throwing her the money,

I barged into—

Without pulling off my high boots, or my holster,

Without taking off my regulation trench coat—

The abysmal softness of the blanket

Under which so many men had sighed,

Flung about, and throbbed, into the darkness

Of the swirling stream of fuzzy visions,

Sudden screams and unencumbered movements,

Blackness, and ferocious, blinding light . . .

I am taking you because so timid

Have I always been, and to take vengeance

For the shame of my exiled forefathers

And the twitter of an unknown fledgling!

I am taking you to wreak my vengeance

On the world I could not get away from!

Welcome me into your barren vastness,

In which grass cannot take root and sprout,

And perhaps my night seed may succeed in

Fertilizing your forbidding desert.

There’ll be rainfalls, southern winds will bluster,

Swans will make their calls of tender passion.¹⁵⁴

According to Stanislav Kuniaev, this is the rape of Russia celebrated by “the poet of the openly Romantic ideal Zionism who does not distinguish between messianic ideas and pragmatic cruelty.” According to Maxim D. Shrayer, this is “a dream of creating harmony between the Russian and Jewish currents in Jewish history, . . . a dream, if you wish, of a harmonious synthesis, which would lead to the blurring of all boundaries, i.e., to the formation of a Russian-Jewish identity. . . . Sexual intercourse with his former Russian beloved is the modicum of the protagonist’s revenge upon and liberation from the prerevolutionary world of legal Jewish inequality and popular anti-Semitic prejudice.” And according to the protagonist himself, this is his revenge on the world he “could not get away from”—the world of “goosefat,” “tedious prayers,” and “cloud[s] of dandruff.” The Jewish Revolution within the Russian Revolution was waged against “the shame of exiled forefathers” and for the “Hebrew pride” singing like a string; against the Russia of fat cheeks and for the Russia of Galina Apollonovna. It was a violent attempt to conceive a world of Mercurian Apollonians, a Russia that would encompass the world.¹⁵⁵