Lost in the Bargain

“I’ll be waiting for you,” she said, almost at the door of the Lubyanka prison in Moscow. “It will be as if you’ve gone to Odessa ... only there won’t be any letters.” Those were among the last words of Antonina Pirozhkova to Isaac Babel, her common-law husband and the father of her child.

It was the summer of 1939. Babel had just been taken into custody by Stalin’s henchmen for his alleged involvement with Trotskyists and spying for France and Austria. He was executed less than a year later.

Pirozhkova, who died this month at the age of 101, worked tirelessly to keep Babel’s memory alive and to discover the true history of his incarceration and murder. She was also the last living link to a different Russia: A place that once prized the odd and the unusual; a place with a skepticism about grand narratives of national greatness. Pirozhkova was witness to a different kind of Russian identity: multinational, modest and secure in its own sense of self.

By the time Pirozhkova met Babel in 1932 he was already at the pinnacle of his literary career. In his “Odessa Tales,” he had recreated a fictional version of the city of his childhood, the Ukrainian port that was the legendary home of bent cops, Jewish gangsters, and men-on-the-make. Babel was writing about his hometown in the twilight years of the Russian Empire, but his Odessa was in fact the new Soviet Union in miniature. It was a city struggling to slough off an old system and create a new one, while at the same time trying to unite nationalities and religions that had too often come to blows.

His brief career as an embedded journalist had cemented this reputation. During the Russian Civil War, he served as a correspondent inside a Bolshevik Cossack cavalry unit. He saw villages burned and peasants displaced, often with little justification. The casual violence of irregular warfare found expression in his greatest literary achievement: the short-story collection “Red Cavalry.”

Babel’s role was to be a witness to the dark underside of the revolution — the searing violence rather than the glories of the workers’ movement. In “Red Cavalry,” churches and synagogues are smashed. People are run down on horseback. Looted clothes and valuables produce military units that look less like an army than a wandering carnival.

“Babel rifles through women’s second-hand underwear,” his old Cossack commander complained in a public denunciation of his work. “He throws dirt on the best Communist commanders.” But that was part of Babel’s vocation — to take politicians, military men, and ideologues down a peg.

Lenin and Stalin knew that you couldn’t build a new society without destroying the old one. Babel’s contribution was to show how much was lost in the bargain.

Pirozhkova, an engineer by profession, came into Babel’s life only after the turmoil of revolution had given way to the bureaucratic violence of Stalinism. He already had a wife and child safely ensconced in Paris. In Moscow and Odessa, Pirozhkova became his companion. She recalled the vibrant and absurdist artistic life that struggled up through the cracks in Stalinism. When the secret police finally came to arrest Babel, Pirozhkova channeled her grief into a heartbreaking pinpoint of worry: that in captivity he would never be able to get his morning tea.

Babel’s arrest was part of the massive purge of intellectuals that accompanied the broader attack on Soviet society under Stalin. Babel’s real crime was not subversion or dissidence but something far more dangerous to Soviet mythmakers: skepticism.

Babel was Odessan by birth and, in a way, by vocation. He was a man of the borderlands who spent his early life moving between worlds: Jewish and Russian, czarist and Bolshevik, army and artistic. He viewed them all with a certain detachment and a wry smile.

That was the world that Pirozhkova knew, and one that her reminiscences of Babel helped to keep alive. To a nation now rediscovering its global influence, her years with Babel ought to be a poignant reminder of the paths Russia has repeatedly chosen not to take.

Charles King, professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University and author of the forthcoming book Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams.