Why Stalin killed Babel by Anastasia Piliavsky

On the occasion of Holodomor Remembrance Day, I cannot shake the question of where Ukrainian literature and cinema are about the horrors of collectivisation, of which the Holodomor was a part. Those who were not yet deported, “dekulakised,” and dumped into the Siberian snow were finished off by starvation. While I await recommendations for reading and viewing, let me suggest three short stories by the Ukrainian writer Isaak Babel: “Hapa Huzhva,” “The Great Well,” and “The Cradle.” The last one is attached.

A few words about the “Babel case,” whose memory, in his native city, the Regional Military Administration together with the Institute of National Memory has recently designated as a “symbol of Russian imperial policy” from which Ukraine’s cultural and informational space must be “protected.”

The myth that Babel was killed in 1940 because of Red Cavalry does not stand up to the facts. Red Cavalry was published in the 1920s, and more than a dozen years passed between its publication and Babel’s execution. After publication, Babel was shielded from Budyonny and Voroshilov’s attacks by Gorky. Even then, Stalin—who loved Babel’s Odessa stories—showed little interest in the case, and a dozen years later even less so. Stalin, being a gangster, especially liked Benya Krik. Perhaps this is where the “criminal myth” of Odessa begins to be spun—only a small fraction of what Babel actually wrote about the city—first in the USSR and later in Putin’s Russia, where this myth is endlessly promoted in films and TV series.

So what, then, frightened Stalin so much that he decided to swiftly eliminate a famous writer who was married to Antonina Pirozhkova, the engineer of five Moscow metro stations?

Three stories have survived about Babel’s months living in the Ukrainian village of Velyka Stanytsia (the “Great Well” in his stories), where he witnessed collectivisation first-hand. The horrors of collectivisation are described no less starkly than the pogroms in The Dove-Dovecote. Kolyvushka hacks his own horse with an axe and turns white overnight, like Gogol’s Khoma after a witch’s night.

The rest of the manuscripts perished in the Cheka cellars along with Babel. But from what we do know, it is clear that he was working on a major project, most likely a novel-in-stories in the style of Red Cavalry, this time about collectivisation. The three surviving stories are obviously part of that project. This is evident not only to biographers, but also from Babel’s last words in the “funnel,” preserved by his wife Antonina in her memoirs: “They didn’t let me finish.” One speaks like this only about something important. Stalin understood that Babel’s pen was scratching, that he was writing something big, terrible, and not about Budyonny at all—but about him. And so he did not let him finish.

Such, then, is our “symbol of Russian imperial policy”—a man who paid with his life for a literary feat undertaken in the name of truth about the fate Stalin dealt to Ukrainian peasants.

Questions for the Institute of National Memory.

Where is the resistance to the erasure of Babel’s memory in Odessa?

Where is the promotion of these stories?

Where is their translation into Ukrainian?

Where is the Ukrainian Babel Prize for works on collectivisation?

Where is the Institute’s memorial work on collectivisation at all?

Where is the support for writers and filmmakers who could tell this story?

I can allow that the Institute’s leaders may not have read these stories. I can allow that this is not a time when anyone has the bandwidth for literature. But if so, then it is also not the time to make decisions about commemorating Ukrainian writers whose works, right now, cannot even be read—let alone thoughtfully discussed.

Although the attached story is short—only a little longer than this post.

https://www.migdal.org.ua/times/52/4807/?fbclid=IwY2xjawOPmVtleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFJUm00YVU2a25YaFlabFUzc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHmSnoTFlsw67DcEpLAvN8MvO1Y4wWCdk7hk_eNKPZxgfv-YIeMK8JObvFk_F_aem_PDrMX5jvUNuZsnKvogMDiA