Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
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This one by Boris Frezinsky, Writers and Soviet Leaders, describes the relationships between the communist intellectuals and the ruling élite. It’s a fascinating subject and a great book, and there are great photos in it too: Gorky, Lenin, Mayakovsky, Trotsky. It’s mostly documents. He writes introductions to every section – for example, the relationship between Ilya Ehrenburg and Nikolai Bukharin who was Ehrenburg’s friend and patron. And then he publishes letters and so on. It’s interesting to see characters and find out what they were really like: who turned out to be a coward and who possessed great will and courage in this very dangerous time, the 1930s.
Now, Writers and Soviet Leaders.
This one, by Boris Frezinsky, describes the relationships between the communist intellectuals and the ruling élite. It’s a fascinating subject and a great book, and there are great photos in it too: Gorky, Lenin, Mayakovsky, Trotsky and so on.
What sort of shape does the book take?
It’s mostly documents. He writes introductions to every section – for example, the relationship between Ilya Ehrenburg and Nikolai Bukharin who was Ehrenburg’s friend and patron. And then he publishes letters and so on. So it’s a rare thing. It’s interesting to see characters that people think they know and then find out what they were really like: who turned out to be a coward and who possessed great will and courage in the face of this very dangerous time, the 1930s.
In particular I was struck by Ilya Ehrenburg, who was the great ideologist of communism and the Soviet state whom the Soviets used so effectively during the war as a cultural link between Russia and the West. Bukharin was a very powerful man, one of the original Bolshevik revolutionaries. Ehrenburg had been his schoolmate and loved to send him all sorts of complaints, about how Pravda was shortening his articles, how he hadn’t been paid enough money. At first you think he’s not a nice person, that he’s a bit of a shit. That’s your initial impression. But then when Bukharin gets into terrible trouble, Ehrenburg refuses to speak against him at his trial and takes a great risk to do this. And for the rest of his life he tries to do whatever he can for Bukharin’s widow. He even tried to write a chapter on Bukharin in his memoirs. Of course, he wasn’t allowed to, but he still manages here and there to insert a paragraph about this person who was his great friend.
Which archive did he draw his material from?
That’s a very good question. He worked mainly in the literature and art archive, the RGALI archive. Then he worked in the archive of the history of Moscow. But it’s mainly the RGALI that he looks at because, of course, a lot of stuff on his subject would be in the KGB archives at the Lubyanka. But there’s no way of getting in there.
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Dr Lyubov Vinogradova was born in Moscow in 1973. After graduating from the Moscow Agricultural Academy and later defending a PhD in microbiology, she took a second degree in foreign languages, choosing English and German. In 1995 she was introduced to Antony Beevor and helped him research Stalingrad. Since then she has worked on many other research projects with Antony Beevor and other English-speaking writers and also her own projects. She is the co-author (together with Anthony Beevor) of A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army. She says American victims of the Great Depression came to Russia to find jobs and support their families in the 1920 and 30s. ‘The Soviet authorities used all sorts of tricks to get them to take up citizenship. They were told that they had to hand over their American passports temporarily and they never saw them again. And then they lost any rights that American citizens have or legal grounds to be protected. It was a great tragedy.’
