The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (45 page)

How are things at the editorial office? My work has not been moving ahead the way it ought to. We are completely exhausted. For a whole week now I haven’t been able to sit down for half an hour to dash off a few words.

I hope things will now shape up a little.

Please write me your intentions, plans, and requirements—this will serve as a link for me to the outside world.

With Comradely Greetings, K. Lyutov

They wrought revenge on the workers in 1905. They set off on punitive expeditions in order to shoot and smother our dark slave-villages through which a fleeting breeze of freedom had blown.

In October 1917, they threw off their masks and went after the Russian proletariat with fire and sword. For almost three years they hacked at the land that had already been hacked to pieces. It looked like they were on their last legs. We left them to die a natural death, but they would not die.

Now we are paying for our mistake. His Excellency Duke Wrangel* is strutting about the Crimea, while the pitiful remnants of the Black Hundred * of the Russian Denikin** gangs are turning up in the ranks of the highly refined and most noble of Polish warriors. The ragtag and bobtail of Russia hurried to the aide of Counts Potocki and Taraszczynski to save culture and law from the Barbarians.

This is how culture was saved in the town of Komarov, occupied on August 28, by the Sixth Cavalry Division.

The valiant boys of Cossack Captain Yakovlev^ had spent the night

* Baron Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel, 1827-1928, was the commander of the anti-Bolshevik armies in southern Russia. He managed to hold the Crimea until 1920, after which the Communists forced him to evacuate his troops to Constantinople. This ended the civil war in Russia.

^ Chernosotyensi (Black Hundred), a right-wing, anti-Semitic group responsible for pogroms.

** Anton Ivanovich Denikin, 1872-1947, the son of a serf, rose in the ranks of the Russian army. After the Revolution, he became the commander of the anti-Bolshevik forces in southern Russia. In 1920 he resigned his command to General Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel.

^ A Russian Cossack, fought on the side of the Poles, and appears in Babels diary (8/28/1929, 8/31/1920), and also in the Red Cavalry stories “Czesniki” and “After the Battle.”

in the little town—the same Captain Yakovlev who kept trying to talk us into returning to the sweet and peaceful life of our villages, which have been littered with the bodies of commissars, Yids, and Red Army soldiers.

As our squadrons approached, these knights disappeared into thin air. But before they did, they managed to ply their trade.

We found the towns Jewish population robbed of everything it had, wounded and hacked to pieces. Our soldiers, who have seen a thing or two in their time and have been known to chop off quite a few heads, staggered in horror at what they saw. In the pitiful huts that had been razed to the ground, seventy-year-old men with crushed skulls lay naked in pools of blood, infants, often still alive, with fingers hacked off, and old women, raped, their stomachs slashed open, crouched in corners, with faces on which wild, unbearable desperation had congealed. The living were crawling among the dead, bumping into mangled corpses, their hands and faces covered with sticky, foul-smelling blood, terrified of leaving their houses, fearing that all was not yet over.

Hunched, frightened shadows roamed the streets of the dead town, cowering away from human voices, wailing for mercy at every sound. We came across houses over which a terrible silence hung—a whole family was lying next to an aged grandfather. Father, grandchildren— everyone in twisted, inhuman positions.

All in all, over thirty were killed and about sixty wounded. Two hundred women were raped, many of them tortured to death. To escape the rapists, women had jumped from second- and third-floor windows, breaking limbs and necks. Our medical officers worked all day without respite, and still could not meet the demands for help. The horror of the Middle Ages pales in comparison to the bestiality of the Yakovlev bandits.

The pogrom, needless to say, was carried out according to the rules. First, the officers demanded fifty thousand rubles in protection money from the Jewish population. Money and vodka were immediately brought, but still the officers marched in the front lines of the pogromists and searched the cowering Jewish elders at gunpoint for bombs and machine guns.

Our answer to the Polish Red Cross’s laments concerning Russian bestiality is: the event I have just described is only one among a thousand far worse.

The dogs that haven’t yet been completely slashed to pieces have begun howling hoarsely. The murderers who haven’t yet been completely clubbed to death are crawling out of their graves.

Slaughter them, Red Army fighters! Stamp harder on the rising lids of their rancid coffins!

I had a sore throat. I went to see the nurse of the First Squadron headquarters of the N. Division. A smoky hut, filled with fumes and rankness. The soldiers are lying on benches, smoking, scratching themselves, and using foul language. The nurse has set up shop in a corner. She bandages the wounded, one after the other, without much fuss or unnecessary ado. Some troublemakers hamper her work any way they can, each trying to outdo the other with the most blasphemous, unnatural curses. Suddenly—the alarm is sounded. The order to mount the horses. The squadron forms. We set off.

The nurse has harnessed her horse, tied a sack with oats to its muzzle, packed her bag, and ridden off. Her pitiful, thin dress flutters in the wind, and her frozen red toes show through the holes of her tattered shoes. It is raining. The exhausted horses can barely lift their hooves from the terrible, sucking, viscous Volhynian mud. The damp penetrates to the bone. The nurse has neither cloak nor coat. The men are singing a bawdy song. The nurse quietly hums her own song—about dying for the Revolution, about better days to come. A few men begin singing along with her, and our song, our unceasing call to freedom, spills out into the rainy autumnal dusk.

In the evening—the attack. Shells burst with soft, sinister booms, machine guns rattle faster and faster with feverish dread.

Beneath the most horrifying crossfire, the nurse bandages the wounded with disdainful calm, dragging them away from the battle on her shoulders.

The attack ends. The agonizing advance continues. Night, rain. The soldiers are darkly silent, only the heated whisper of the nurse, comforting the wounded, can be heard. An hour later, the same picture as before—a dark, dirty hut in which the platoon has settled down, and in the corner, by the light of a pitiable dwindling candle, the nurse keeps bandaging, bandaging, bandaging. . . .

Foul curses hang heavily in the air. The nurse, at times unable to restrain herself, snaps back, and the men laugh at her. Nobody helps her, nobody puts straw down for her to sleep on, nobody fluffs up her pillow.

These are our heroic nurses! Lift your hats and bow to them! Soldiers and commanders, honor your nurses! It is high time we distinguished between the camp girls who shame our army and the martyred nurses who ennoble it.

On June 3, 1920, the day on which the first entry of the 1920 Diary occurs (thefirst fifty-four pages of the diary are missing and believed lost), Isaac Babel was twenty-five years old\ soon to be twenty-six. He had already made a name for himself as a promising writer and journalist and had, as a war correspondent, joined the Sixth Cavalry Division, commanded by the charismatic Timoshenko (Pavlichenko, in the Red Cavalry stories), who was later to become a Marshal of the Soviet Union and Commissar of Defense.

The diary that Babel kept during his months with the Red Cavalry was a writer’s diary. Babel noted quick impressions that he intended subsequently to develop as motifs and plot lines for the Red Cavalry stories:
^c>
Describe the soldiers and women, fat, fed, sleepy”; “Describe the bazaar, the baskets of cherries”; “Describe what a horseman feels: exhaustion, the horse won’t go on, the ride is long, no strength, the burned steppe; loneliness, no one there to help you, endless versts.” At times the impressions appear in strings of telegraphic clauses that served Babel as a form of private shorthand, but when Babel is particularly taken by a scene or situation, he slips into the rich and controlled style that would mark the Red Cavalry stories.

The Red Cavalry stories that grew out of this diary shocked the world with their unforgiving depictions of the desperation and atrocities of the cavalrymen. Particularly daring was the way in which Babel depicted real people, their ranks and names unchanged, in realistic, savage, unflattering circumstances. In this diary, which was not intended for publication, Babel could afford even greater candor. The Red Cavalry stories reveal that the heroic cavalry was made up of wild and ruthless Cossacks who had a skewed notion of Communist doctrine. They were clearly not the glorious harbingers of World Revolution that Soviet propaganda would have liked them to be. This contradiction might be suggested by the stories, but the 1920 Diary states it in the clearest of terms. Babel asks, “What kind of men are our Cossacks? Many-layered: rag-looting, bravado, professionalism, revolutionary ideals, savage cruelty. We are the vanguard', but of what?”

The 1920 Diary, by virtue of its privacy, is Babel’s most sincere personal written testimony. His persona, so elusive in his fictional prose, is very clear in this private writing. We see his firm Socialist convictions, his sensitivity, his horror of the marauding ways of his Cossack companions, his ambiguous fascination with “the West and chivalrous Poland'” his equivocal stance toward Judaism, with feelings that fluctuate between distaste and tenderness toward the Volhynian Jews, “the former (Ukrainian) Yids.”

It is relatively late in the diary that Babel’s optimism about the Soviet Union’s chances of winning this war begins to fade. In the final entries, as Babel and his colleagues return to Russia on the fleeing propaganda train in mid-September of 1920, the war has been lost, the Soviet Union dfeated.

Within days, the Red Cavalry was to go into reserve. Babel had chronicled its last great campaign.

June 3, 1920. Zhitomir

Morning in the train,* came here to get my tunic and boots. I sleep

* The Polit-otdel train, equipped with a printing press and radio station, sent to the front for the ideological education of the troops.

with Zhukov,Topolnik,* its dirty, in the morning the sun shines in my eyes, railroad car dirt. Lanky Zhukov, voracious Topolnik, the whole editorial crew unbelievably dirty people.

Bad tea in borrowed mess tins. Letters home, packages off to Yugrosta,^ interview with Poliak, operation to seize Novograd, discipline is weakening in the Polish army, Polish White Guard literature, packets of cigarette paper, matches, former (Ukrainian) Yids, commissars—the whole thing stupid, malicious, feeble, talentless, and surprisingly unconvincing. Mikhailov copying out Polish articles word for Word.

The trains kitchen, fat soldiers with flushed faces, gray souls, stifling heat in the kitchen, kasha, noon, sweat, fat-legged washerwomen, apathetic women—printing presses—describe the soldiers and women, fat, fed, sleepy.

Love in the kitchen.

Off to Zhitomir after lunch. A town that is white, not sleepy, yet battered and silent. I look for traces of Polish culture. Women well dressed, white stockings. The Catholic Church.

Bathe at Nuski in the Teterev, a horrible little river, old Jews in the bathing boxes with long, emaciated legs covered with gray hairs. Young Jews. Women are washing clothes in the Teterev. A family, beautiful woman, husband holds the child.

The bazaar in Zhitomir, old cobbler, bluing, chalk, laces.

The synagogue buildings, old architecture—how all this touches my soul.

Watch crystal, 1,200 rubles. Market. A small Jewish philosopher. An indescribable store: Dickens, brooms, and golden slippers. His philosophy: they all say they’re fighting for truth yet they all plunder. If only one government at least were good! Wonderful words, his scant beard, we talk, tea and three apple turnovers—750 rubles. An interesting old woman, malicious, practical, unhurried. How greedy for money they all are. Describe the bazaar, the baskets of cherries, the inside of a tavern. A conversation with a Russian woman who came over to borrow a tub. Sweat, watery tea, I’m sinking my teeth into life again, farewell to you, dead men.

* Babels colleagues, reporters for the Krasny Kavalerist {The Red Cavalryman).

^ The Ukrainian division of ROSTA, the Soviet news service agency from 1918 to 1935.

Podolsky, the son-in-law, a half-starved intellectual, something about trade unions and service with Budyonny,
¹
I, needless to say, am Russian, my mother a Jewess, what for?

The Zhitomir pogrom carried out by the Poles, and then, of course, by the Cossacks.

After our vanguard units appeared, the Poles entered the town for three days, Jewish pogrom, cut off beards, they always do, rounded up forty-five Jews in the market, took them to the slaughterhouses, torture, they cut out tongues, wailing over the whole town square. They torched six houses, the Konyukhovsky house, I went to take a look, those who tried to save them were machine-gunned down, they butchered the janitor into whose arms a mother had thrown an infant out of a burning window, the priest put a ladder against the back wall, and so they managed to escape.

The Sabbath is drawing to a close, we leave the father-in-law and go to the tsaddik. Didn’t get his name. A stunning picture for me, though the decline and decadence are plain to see. Even the tsaddik— his broad-shouldered, gaunt body. His son, a refined boy in a long overcoat, I can see petit bourgeois but spacious rooms. Everything nice and proper, his wife a typical Jewess, one could even call her of the modern type.

The faces of the old Jews.

Conversations in the corner about rising prices.

I cant find the right page in the prayer book. Podolsky shows me.

Instead of candles—an oil lamp.