Tag: Russian Literature

The Ghosts in Isaac Babel’s 1920 Diary

I am haunted by the ghosts of lost worlds. In a sense, this is what all literature is about – taking us into the past or into another world altogether and making it real to us so that we can live in it and love it. But I do not mean that sense of lost worlds here. What I mean is the desolation, the empty space where a world once was. The world of religions in which most of us can no longer believe, or countries or spaces that no longer exist, like the Habsburg Monarchy or the Soviet Union, function in my life like ghosts. Driven by curiosity, I want to know them, but at the same time, they come to me, often against my wishes, like obsessions, to torture my mind. They gather me into conflicted mourning for what was lost.

Ukraine is a land of ghosts, and one of the greatest horrors of Russia’s invasion is that it promises the creation of more ghosts and more hauntings. When I awoke on the 24th of February last year and saw the first fires on Ukrainian soil, I was overwhelmed in a way that I didn’t think possible of myself with visions of emptiness. Empty houses, empty villages, emptied worlds.

Babel’s Ukraine

Many worlds have been lost in Ukraine. At least two of them we see in the work of Isaac Babel. The Soviet writer, a Jew from Odessa on the Ukrainian coast, described a world of gangsters and crime that seems more appropriate to America than anywhere this side of the Atlantic, in his Odessa Tales. But today I am writing about another world, the world of today’s West Ukraine, a land that at the time was the site of one of the Soviet Union’s first wars – in fact, a war before the Union really had that name at all – the Soviet-Polish War of 1919-1921.

Babel’s Red Army Cavalry, a short story cycle that is the most brilliant I have ever read, is his main work of the period. (You can read my translation of one story here). But even though it is written with plenty of cunning, and was successfully published in the USSR, it is still a work of evasiveness. Babel also kept a writer’s diary of the period, the 1920 Diary, and here he is much less equivocal about what he saw and what he experienced. Here, for readers, there is the terrible horror and curiosity of a world that is being annihilated before our eyes, a world that will be finished off some twenty years later with the invasion of the lands by German troops and later population transfers organised by Stalin.

Contested Identities – Babel and the Land

The 1920 Diary is a text about identity. In the contested land of today’s West Ukraine, Poland, and Belarus live Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, and Czechs. They speak languages ranging from German to Yiddish, Polish to Ukrainian and Russian, and practice a hodgepodge of faiths including traditional Catholicism, the Uniate faith, Eastern Orthodoxy, and of course Judaism. From town-to-town identity shifts in a way that seems scarcely believable today. But beyond this, there is Babel himself. We can read the diary, like we read the Red Army Cavalry Stories, as a site of struggle between Babel’s understandings of himself. In fact, due to its personal nature, the 1920 Diary is perhaps even better for this than the stories are.

But first, who was Babel? An Odessan Jew of course. Raised in Odessa – then the most cosmopolitan city of the Russian Empire – and briefly in Nikolaev (Mykolaiv), he was educated in Kiev (Kyiv), moved to Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) where he met Gorky, who helped him establish himself as a writer. He seems to have been fluent in at least Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and French. He wrote a little, and used to joke that he was “the master of a new literary genre, the genre of silence.” Silent or not, he managed to fall under the suspicion of the authorities and was executed under false charges by the authorities in 1940. Babel had several opportunities to emigrate from the Soviet Union, but he did not take them. Like Andrei Platonov, one element of Babel’s fascination to me lies in his attitude towards the USSR, mixing the love of its hopes and criticism of its realities.

Babel wrote primarily in Russian, but we know that some of his first stories were written in French. Like Nabokov, or Taras Shevchenko in Ukrainian literature, he was at ease not just reading, but even writing in multiple languages. The 1920 Diary is written in Russian (as was Shevchenko’s personal journal), but it is peppered with other languages, including the ever-popular refrain from the poor Ukrainians he meets: “nemae” – we have nothing left to give.

Was Babel a Jew, a Russian or perhaps even a Ukrainian, or rather a Soviet and a Communist? The 1920 Diary is a place where we can begin asking these questions.

If he refers to himself occasionally as Russian, there are certainly moments when he seems more comfortable with the Ukrainian cultural space. “Ha, what a gloomy life these Russians lead! Where is the Ukrainian mirth?” he asks at one point. His main allegiance, however, seems to be to Odessa and to the Jews. “An old Jew – I love talking with our people – they understand me,” he remarks, even as at other times he lapses into a more critical voice towards the “Yids”. He notes every town and city where he encounters the Jews and he notes the injustices of the rampaging armies towards them, from rapes to being forced to cook on the Sabbath. Besides this, it is Odessa that he longs for. “We spoke about Tiflis, fruit, sun. I think about Odessa, my soul is torn.” Whenever a character has some association with the city Babel seems to brighten.

Revolution and the Vanguard

The Red Army are in Poland to spread Communism. In the early days after 1917, it seemed as though the workers’ revolt could truly become international, and military might would help to spread it. At the time of the diary Babel is certainly a supporter of the Revolution – after all, he was accompanying the army as a propagandist – but we also see increasing uncertainties come into his voice as the war goes on and he sees what the Revolution means in practice. As he asks at one point, “We are the vanguard, but of what?” He believes that the poverty and rank destitution of many of the people he encounters can be improved under Soviet systems – “I am exasperated, I can’t contain my indignation: the dirt, the apathy, the hopelessness of Russian life are unbearable, the Revolution will do some good work here.” But he discovers that his understanding of the Revolution is not shared with the soldiers themselves.

The cavalry are predominantly Cossacks, in Babel’s case from the Kuban region in today’s Russia. At the time, before the Holodomor and related policies, the land was populated mostly by ethnic Ukrainians, and the Cossacks go around singing Ukrainian songs. “What kind of men are our Cossacks?” Babel asks of the people who are bringing Communism to the West. “Many-layered: rag-looting, bravado, professionalism, revolutionary ideals, savage cruelty. We are the vanguard, but of what? The population is waiting for liberators, the Jews for freedom—but who arrives? The Kuban Cossacks. . . .”

Babel wants to see the Revolution as progress. Marxism, after all, envisions the world as tending towards Communism and peace and prosperity for all. But he realises instead that history is much more cyclical than this. A few posts ago I wrote about Gogol’s novella of Cossack violence, Taras Bulba. There the Cossacks go on a rampage throughout Ukraine and Poland, murdering Jews and Catholics and everyone else. Babel sees much the same in his own day.

“An ancient church, the graves of Polish officers in the churchyard, fresh burial mounds, ten days old, white birch crosses, all this is terrible, the house of the Catholic priest has been destroyed, I find ancient books, precious Latin manuscripts. The priest, Tuzynkiewicz, I find a photograph of him, he is short and fat, he worked here for forty-five years, he lived in one place, a scholar, the assortment of books, many of them in Latin, editions of 1860, that was when Tuzynkiewicz lived.”

Babel meticulously notes each pogrom, each act of violence against the Jews.

“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.”

“the same old story, the Jews have been plundered, their perplexity, they looked to the Soviet regime as saviors, then suddenly yells, whips, Yids. I am surrounded by a whole circle, I tell them about Wilson’s note, about the armies of labor, the Jews listen, sly and commiserating smiles,”

The betrayal of the Jews by the Soviets is something Babel is obviously upset by. He tries to console those he meets with words of the Revolution, but it becomes increasingly inauthentic as the diary goes on: “The husband: Will there be freedom to trade, to buy a few things and then sell them right away, no speculating? I tell him yes, there will, everything will be for the better— my usual system—in Russia wondrous things are happening: express trains, free food for children, theaters, the International.”

What is happening in the war is a repetition of the violence that had come again and again to the people of the region:

“The Jewish cemetery outside Malin, centuries old, the stones have toppled, almost all the same shape, oval at the top, the cemetery is overgrown with weeds, it saw Khmelnitsky, now Budyonny, the unfortunate Jewish population, everything repeats itself, once again the same story of Poles, Cossacks, Jews is repeating itself with striking exactness, what is new is Communism.”

Communism with the Cossacks? No, “they are simply an instrument the party is not above using.” Instead, Babel comes to see the war as violence and hate. “About the atamans, there had been many there, they got themselves machine guns, fought against Shkuro and Mamontov, merged into the Red Army, a heroic epic. This is not a Marxist Revolution, it is a Cossack uprising that wants to win all and lose nothing. Apanasenko’s hatred for the rich, an unquenchable hatred of the intelligentsia.” The Cossacks care nothing for the Revolution, and certainly nothing for the people Babel records them raping, butchering, and stealing from. But the Poles, too, are little better. The Jews time and again recount the double pogrom, as first the Poles, then the Ukrainian Cossacks, torture them. At one point we get a brief glimpse of the ghost of a better world, then see the present that has replaced it:

“I won’t forget this shtetl, covered courtyards, long, narrow, stinking, everything 100-200 years old, the townsfolk more robust than in other places, the main thing is the architecture, the white and watery blue little houses, the little backstreets, the synagogues, the peasant women. Life is almost back on track again. People had led a good life here— respected Jewry, rich Ukrainians, market fairs on Sundays, a specialized class of Russian artisans: tanners trading with Austria, contraband.

The Jews here are less fanatical, better dressed, heartier, they even seem more cheerful, the very old men in long coats, the old women, everything exudes the old days, tradition, the shtetl is saturated in the bloody history of the Polish Jewish ghetto. Hatred for the Poles is unanimous. They looted, tortured, scorched the pharmacists body with white-hot iron pokers, needles under his nails, tore out his hair, all because a Polish officer had been shot at—sheer idiocy! The Poles have gone out of their minds, they are destroying themselves.”

Loss

It is extraordinary that in a region where blood had only just dried from the First World War, people are so willing to spill it again. Babel notes that “more and more often we come across trenches from the last war, barbed wire everywhere, enough for fences for the next ten years, destroyed villages.” Rather than rebuilding, in poverty, the people are turning against each other. Even within the Red Army, as the war (which they ultimately lost) goes steadily worse, antisemitism increases: “Down with the Yids, save Russia!” As one soldier yells.

The Revolution, Babel realises, is not doing what it is supposed to. “I mourn the fate of the Revolution.” But an army cannot bring a revolution. Instead, “we are destroying, moving forward like a whirlwind, like lava, hated by all, life is being shattered to pieces, I am at a huge, never-ending service for the dead.” It is not Communism that they bring, but ghosts and fresh graves.

To read the 1920 Diary is to be surrounded by these ghosts. There is the Polish estate that the Cossacks loot, where Babel finds the books the owners in their hurry to leave were unable to take: “Extremely precious books in a chest, they didn’t have time to take them along: the constitution approved by the Sejm at the beginning of the eighteenth century, old folios from the times of Nicholas I, the Polish code of laws, precious bindings, Polish manuscripts of the sixteenth century, the writings of monks, old French novels.”

Babel, this most wonderful writer, lives and breathes culture. His joy at the Jewish celebrations, at the old churches and synagogues, is palpable. He sits and talks to a priest about the differences between Catholics and Uniates. He is curious about these differences, about all the peoples in the area. And as a “Russian” and a Jew, he has access to more areas than most.

The End of the Story

Yet Babel is out of place. In some twenty years this world, already aflame, will be ruined completely. The Ukrainian UPA, now celebrated as national heroes in that country, will collaborate with the occupying Nazi German government to slaughter as many as 100’000 men, women and children, Poles and Jews and any Ukrainians who dared intermarry or believe in Soviet ideals, in an act of terrible ethnic cleansing. The Poles retaliated with just as much force, to the delight of the occupying German forces who could leave the resistance to wear itself out on self-slaughter. As for the Jews, caught in the middle, they were systematically murdered even if they escaped the UPA and the Poles. A bit further East, Babel’s Odessa, with about 30% of its population Jewish, was more or less emptied of them and began a precipitous decline similar to that of Trieste, which I wrote about last year. Finally, Stalinist population transfers made West Ukraine unrecognisable, shunting Ukrainians and Poles and other ethnicities around so that the multiethnic, multicultural, world of the diary became just a dream. Lviv, today that most “Ukrainian” of cities, only became ethnically Ukrainian in this period. Before it, Lwów was mostly a home for Poles and Jews.

I came away from the 1920 Diary just so desperately sad. There was a world here, and human savagery ruined it. I despise the nationalists who have destroyed culture here and elsewhere, whether they be Ukrainian or Russian, British or German or French, they are all my enemies. Babel, the Jew from Odessa, writing in Russian, multilingual and ever curious, was a hero of literature and his time. This land, which has only recently become Ukraine, gave birth to some of the most extraordinary literary figures the world has known – Schulz, Babel, Gogol, Shevchenko, Bulgakov, Lispector – to name just a few of them. But as for the ghosts of writers stranded in today’s quite understandably nationalistic Ukraine but did not write in that language or belong to that culture, who now will tend to their graves? With a world of mixed language, mixed culture, mixed identity, safeguarding heritage can only be a communal, collective effort, and matters of culture must not be left in the hands of the nationalists, who cannot even successfully look after their own.  

Alexander Herzen’s idea of Justice in My Past and Thoughts

Alexander Herzen was a radical socialist thinker of Russian extraction, best known for his newspaper The Bell. I have written about him and his thoughts on this blog before, after reading Aileen Kelly’s biography of the man, The Discovery of Chance.

Herzen was not just a radical thinker, he was also a talented writer, with his massive My Past and Thoughts as worthy a monument to Russia’s 19th century as anything by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Turgenev. This is a memoir, taking us from the author’s birth in 1812 to his later life in London. It is hard to find in English, and hard to find in a modern Russian edition too for the matter, but there are some old Oxford World’s Classics versions of the text for those who are willing to search them out or stumble upon them, the first of which, entitled Childhood, Youth and Exile, has prompted this particular post.

We may come to Herzen’s writings from different paths. Perhaps we want to see a different vision of Russia and its potential to the one we see in the religious nationalism of Dostoevsky, the ascetic pacifism of the later Tolstoy, or the wishy-washy liberalism of Turgenev. But there is a better reason to read this book and one that places My Past and Thoughts next to the great works of Russia’s 19th century – it is a brilliantly humane, sympathetic work that covers the ground the writers mentioned above occasionally seem not to know exists.

In Russia, Progress

The two sections in this book deal with Herzen’s youth and university years, and then his first experience of exile. There is a temptation, one I had to struggle with when writing about Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, just to write a blog post about how little has changed. But this is a terribly pernicious way of thinking that forces us into a kind of historical fatalism that is unworthy of us, and of the people whom we ignorantly aim to criticise. Still, I had to give a chuckle on reading this dialogue after Herzen has been led out onto the street following his arrest:

“Who is that?” I asked, as I took my seat in the cab.

“He is a witness: you know that the police must take a witness with them when they make an entrance into a private house.”

“Is that why you left him outside?”

When Russia’s secret police raided my flat, one joyous September morning in 2019, they did at least allow the witnesses to come in. I do not think they had any practical use, however, and the report that the officers drew up, sitting at the kitchen table, with me and my then girlfriend standing awkwardly in our pyjamas, bore little relation to the actual facts that they must have felt they had been dragged out of bed early for nothing. But the witnesses were at least allowed in the room, and therefore we must give progress its dues.

Justice and Humour

Moving on from this little joke, justice is a central theme of My Past and Thoughts. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it occupied the thoughts of a man who was exiled both within his country, ultimately ending his days alone far from it. In the work Herzen’s approach is twofold – the first is to draw our attention towards injustice, and the second is to remedy it, as much as he can. In this he might seem to be following those other Russian writers whose greatness we identify vaguely as being of a piece with their loosely defined “sympathy”, but I find Herzen’s treatment of the matter, and his heart, much more convincing. In this, perhaps, the autobiographical nature of his text is key.

The first thing that sets Herzen apart is his interest in systems. Dostoevsky liked to find sympathy for unlikely characters, but he was always careful to keep his magnifying glass focused on the ideological systems of the mind, not the practical systems that states live upon. Here is what Herzen has to say about an uncle:

“On his return to Russia, he was created a lord-in-waiting at Moscow – a capital which has no Court. Then he was elected to the Senate, though he knew nothing of law or Russian judicial procedure; he served on the Widows’ and Orphans’ Board, and was a governor of hospitals and other public institutions. All these duties he performed with a zeal that was probably superfluous, a love of his own way that was certainly harmful, and an integrity that passed wholly unnoticed.”

I hope readers have chuckled to themselves at this. My Past and Thoughts is one of the funniest books I have read, with a grand sense of comedic timing. But what does this paragraph say? It describes a man getting positions that aren’t right for him, thus causing havoc.

Let’s hear Herzen’s evidence on torture and the effectiveness of Russian state power:

“Peter III abolished the torture-chamber, and the Russian star-chamber.

Catherine II abolished torture.

Alexander I abolished it all over again.

Evidence given under torture is legally inadmissible, and any magistrate applying torture is himself liable to prosecution and severe punishment.”

This is ridiculous, yet again. I am reminded of the satirist, Saltyakov-Shchedrin’s famous quote that “the strictness of Russian laws is tempered somewhat by the fact that obeying them is optional.”

But of course, Herzen was a man who experienced the justice system first-hand. For him, punishments were not optional. He does not merely laugh at the injustice or get us to laugh at it. Laughter breaks down our defences, and it is then that we are made to see the horror, that, “the Russian system of justice and police is so haphazard, so inhuman, so arbitrary and corrupt, that a poor malefactor has more reason to fear his trial than his sentence.”

Herzen himself is lucky, as the son of a nobleman. His time in prison is boring, but not overly miserable, though he struggles with the noxious gases floating through his cell. This is what a peasant has to go through:

“The enquiry went on just as enquiries do in Russia: the peasants were flogged on examination, flogged as a punishment, flogged as an example, and flogged to get money out of them; and then a number of them were exiled to Siberia.”

Statistics and Serfs

The Russian Empire was a country which was not working. One of the funniest sections concerns Herzen’s work on statistics for the remote town of Vyatka, now Kirov. The challenge in producing statistical analysis for the past ten years, as requested by the Ministry of the Interior itself, was that one also had to produce data for the past nine of those years where none actually existed. But once the determination to record things has taken root, there comes the matter of actually recording them correctly. I consider myself to be slightly poor at maths, but Herzen has convinced me I am at least better than a petty functionary in a remote province in the Russian Empire.

“Persons drowned: 2

Causes of drowning unknown: 2

Total: 4”

Or a particular favourite, “Under the heading ‘Morality of the inhabitants’ this was entered: ‘No Jews were found living in the town of Kay.’”

This is stupid. At another point, an old officer tells the story of the abduction and murder of a Moldavian woman, which was requested by his commander out of jealousy. The officer grabbed her and threw her over a bridge into a river, where she drowned. Herzen thinks of this neither as a funny story nor an example of the wondrous power of duty.

“I was horrified by the childlike indifference with which the old man told me this story. He appeared to guess my feelings or to give a thought for the first time to his victim; for he added, to reassure me and make it up with his own conscience:

‘You know, Sir, she was only a benighted heathen, not like a Christian at all.’”

Serfdom is also an enemy here, and one that we will probably be familiar with at this point from the likes of Turgenev, whose criticism of the system in the Sportsman’s Sketches made him famous. However, what Herzen writes seems more direct because of its unambiguous basis in reality. We read of a serf whose devotion was great, but who once sold some of his master’s wood in 1812 – when he had no way of contacting his master under Napoleonic occupation – in order to avoid starvation. After Herzen’s uncle, whose serf he was, returns to his estate, he discovers the sale, nullifies the past service of the serf and removes him from his office, throwing him and his family into poverty. Yet what is the serf’s reaction? “The old man, now paralysed and walking on crutches, never failed to visit us, in order to make a bow to my father and talk to him” – about none other than his old master. This kind of innocent devotion, even after a terrible punishment, strikes us as insane. But it is the insanity of an awful system, and Herzen makes us well aware of it.

We learn the practical methods of serf control, things like the punishments a master could hand out, and the practicalities of exiling a peasant into the army. We learn how much money a servant is paid, for each role, as well. This kind of granular information, absent from the great novels of the period, fills their downtrodden, half-hidden from view characters with new blood.

What justice is within Herzen’s power to give?

So much for injustice, in all its varied forms – exile, bad governors, serfdom, inefficient and cruel government ministries – for I could go on but will not. Readers looking for continuity between the Russia of today and the Russia of the past may enjoy ample shocking stories of corruption and the impossibility of removing it, and the use of insanity as an excuse to remove problematic characters from view. But I said that Herzen’s intention in My Past and Thoughts is twofold – he also seems to aim at rectifying some of these injustices, or at least softening them.

This statement gives the best indication of what he means to do: “This publicity is the last paltry compensation to those who suffered unheard and unpitied.” He aims to make aware of the miseries of those whose names vanish from the record, whether serf or friend. Herzen dedicates a whole, lengthy chapter to Alexander Vitberg, an architect who found royal favour and then lost it, ending up exiled in Vyatka alongside him. He ends the chapter thus: “’Poor martyr,’ thought I, ‘Europe shall learn your fate – I promise you that.’” These and other phrases indicate Herzen’s feeling of duty towards his friends. “I should record here some details about Polezhayev,” – the emphasis is mine. Here are some others: “Kohlreif returned to Moscow, where he died in the arms of his grief-stricken father.” “After writing the preceding narrative, I learned that Sungurov died at Nerchinsk.”

Death, death, death. There are no happy endings here. Even those who survive, like the Polish exiles, are still victims of exile. But Herzen gives them a voice, an identity as individuals. Here is a touching moment from a parting visit to a Polish exile: “After dinner he came up to me with his glass in his hand, embraced me, and said with a soldier’s frankness, ‘Oh, why are you a Russian?’ I made no answer, but his question made a strong impression on me.” This is, indeed, a quote that makes you pause.

Herzen identifies the injustice of systems, but he never condemns groups. My Past and Thoughts is a collection of stories about individuals – corrupt governors, inane petty officials, heroic friends, desperate serfs – but not groups. He is aware, as some of us never are enough, that people are individual people, and it is as individuals that we must attempt to deal with him.

I quote at length a paragraph of his on the subject, to give a sense of how he writes, and his spirit:

“Nothing in the world can be more stupid and more unfair than to judge a whole class of men in the lump, merely by the name they bear and the predominating characteristics of their profession. A label is a terrible thing. Jean-Paul Richter says with perfect truth: ‘If a child tells a lie, make him afraid of doing wrong and tell him that he has told a lie, but don’t call him a liar. If you define him as a liar, you break down his confidence in his own character.’ We are told that a man is a murderer, and we instantly imagine a hidden dagger, a savage expression, and dark designs, as if murder were the regular occupation, the trade, of anyone who has once in his life without design killed a man. A spy, or a man who makes money by the profligacy of others, cannot be honest; but it is possible to be an officer of police and yet to retain some manly worth, just as a tender and womanly heart and even delicacy of feeling may constantly be found in the victims of what is called ‘social incontinence’”.

Conclusion

Herzen was, it is hard to deny from these pages, a thinker with the right spirit. In this first part of My Past and Thoughts, there is little philosophy, but there is the spirit upon which that philosophy will later be built. That spirit is enough. It is the spirit of love for one’s comrades and a recognition of the individual’s non-negotiable value and the importance of hearing about their lives, instead of deciding on the basis of their membership of arbitrary categories. Where other thinkers of the time were willing to allow for mass suffering to achieve some distant utopian goals, even condoning murder, Herzen always saw people, even his enemies, as people first. That makes My Past and Thoughts not only entertaining but a wise and worthy book too.

Exile and Emigration – An East Slavic Destiny

I write this piece in the United Kingdom. I left Moscow myself, somewhat unwillingly, on the 5th of March. I was the last Englishman I know to remain in the city – all of my friends had left a long time before me. I went from Vnukovo Airport to Istanbul, where I spent a few days in limbo, before heading back to London and thence to my home. There was a certain historical irony in being in that Turkish city, where a hundred years ago so many exiles from the carcass of the Russian Empire were languishing in fear and uncertainty, alongside a new generation of equally scared and confused travellers, strangers in their country and perhaps now strangers in any country on the face of the earth.

The hotel was full of voices speaking Russian. Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians – for everyone Istanbul was neutral territory. On the second day I met with a friend of a friend who had arrived in the city at the same time as me. We were both writers, and as we walked beneath the vast spaces of the Hagia Sophia he told me a story that is not uncommon for people from Russia, of time spent in custody, of threats and difficulties. He had been involved in organising opposition activities in Saint Petersburg, but current events had forced him and his girlfriend to seek safer pastures. I had dinner with them and with another young couple that evening.

For none of us Istanbul was a final destination. The friend of a friend was heading on to Tbilisi, where a lively Russian community has sprung up; the other couple were on their way to Israel; and I was on my way back to London. The atmosphere was tense – none of us knew whether our credit cards would work, as Visa and Mastercard had just announced restrictions on cards issued in Russia. At the same time, there was that peculiar melting of boundaries that always marks a crisis. Everyone seemed closer, friendlier. A young family stopped us as we were eating our kebabs on the street to ask whether the cards were blocked already, and whether Western Union was still working. A certain solidarity, a feeling that we were all in this together. There are worse feelings to have.

The Russians and their East Slavic brothers and sisters are a people who seem perpetually on the move. In this they have much in common with their neighbours, the once nomadic Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz. But unlike those great horsemen of the Central Asian steppe, the Russian people’s movement has always been at least partly political in nature, and rarely without an element of force. Exile and emigration, internally and externally, are concepts without which the Russian people can be difficult to understand, and the present turmoil and flight of a reasonable chunk of the country’s educated population prove that these concepts will continue to be useful for thinking about the people and its destiny for some time yet.

Exile, both the punishment inflicted by the tsars, and the punishment inflicted by sensitive souls upon themselves, are topics that effortlessly break through the bounds we may attempt to dam them into and could easily make for an entire book if we aren’t careful. I aim to be. The myriad forms that emigration took and the fruits that it grew and sometimes saw rot deserve more than only the brief look that I’ll be able to give them here. But I hope this piece will give a sense of the world of historical Russian exile and the meanings it contains while also showing how my experience transiting through a world of luggage and blocked credit cards connects to it.

Russia expanded to cover the space it does through conquest and colonisation. The Russian settlers who manifested a destiny analogous to that of their American counterparts differed from them in their failure to truly settle the land. In his fascinating book, Internal Colonization, Alexander Etkind notes the way that the speed of Russia’s eastern expansion meant that it failed to leave new territories populated. Fur and fish kept people moving, largely because wherever these resources were found the Russian settlers found a way of exploiting them until they were almost exterminated. Then, either they continued moving eastwards, or their lives degraded into a desperate attempt at subsistence farming.

Alongside the hunters, Russia’s clergy also supported the easterly movement of people. Monks fled the towns as far as they could, monasteries were established by the monks or around them, and towns grew up around the monasteries, forcing the cycle to repeat. In addition, as with America, religious dissent – in this case Russia’s schismatics, the Old Believers – also motivated people to seek out safer shores, far from hostile government structures.

Rounding out the trinity there were the criminals. Exile was a means of the sovereign to demonstrate his or her power. Many of us know the story of Dostoevsky’s “execution”: before he wrote his major novels, the Russian was involved in a radical organisation, the Petrashevsky Circle, and was caught and sentenced to death. Just at the moment when the soldiers raised their rifles to end his life, however, a horseman arrived to declare that the conspirators were pardoned and instead destined for exile. In a way, exile was more humiliating than execution, because it demonstrated that the Tsar had power over life as well as death – he could take life and also refuse to see it taken, so to speak. 

Around three hundred thousand Russians were in exile towards the end of the nineteenth century, in a “system” that barely deserves the name. Of those three hundred thousand, about a third were apparently on the run at any given time. There was no money or men to keep them where they were supposed to be, meaning that Siberia was a hive of banditry. There was little economic development – the exiles were supposed to help with this, but instead they brought criminality with them. Unsurprisingly, punishing people turned out to be an ineffective way of persuading them to create healthy communities. What work there was, tended to be temporary – things like building railway lines – meaning that the life of an exile was generally miserable and poverty-stricken.

The image that we typically have of exiles in Siberia does not much conform to this image, aside from the poverty. Our main reference points are the political prisoners, such as Dostoevsky himself – educated, interesting men and women who were exiled for their beliefs. They are easy enough to romanticise, after all. Many Poles were exiled after the failed uprisings against Russia of 1830 and 1863, but the chief example has to be the Decembrist generation. The Decembrists launched a failed military uprising against the Tsar in 1825, with the goal of making Russia more liberal. Although he was begged by many to show clemency, the Tsar had several of the conspirators – almost all wealthy aristocrat officers – hanged. The others, however, were sent to Siberia.

They were followed by their wives, creating an enduring image of womanly self-sacrifice of the sort that Russian literature in the 19th century simply adored. At the same time, their principled stand for the kind of Russia that many young aristocrats wanted to see meant that the Decembrists were a heroic example for many generations to come. Tolstoy envisioned War and Peace as but a prelude to a novel on the Decembrists themselves, but he never managed to write that second novel, though he assembled a mass of notes and even met with Prince Sergei Trubetskoy when he was released from exile in 1856. Meanwhile Pushkin, thankfully, escaped punishment but knew many of the conspirators well and wrote about them too. In reality, though, at most the political prisoners made up only a small fraction of the total exiles – about ten percent at most.

Later, the radicals of the mid and late 19th century in Russia were really the first generation to voluntarily seek exile beyond Russia’s bounds. Men like Alexander Herzen, about whom I’ve written, chose such a life. Others, such as Bakunin, who ended up in Europe after fleeing via Japan and America from Siberia, had less choice in the matter. In exile, these men attempted to continue their revolutionary activities as best they could, but with limited success. Herzen died, after his publication The Bell had long since lost its readership, seemingly rejected by his homeland. As for Bakunin, he just bickered with the socialists. It was not until the tumultuous days of 1917 that a Russian revolutionary exile abroad could consider coming back to finish his or her work, as Lenin did.

In the 20th century, as the Russian Empire collapsed and was reborn as the Soviet Union, those leaving the country became increasingly diverse – no longer were they revolutionaries, but ordinary (well – aristocratic, educated, and rich) people who felt fundamentally alienated by the changes their country was undergoing. Many left as the Revolutions were ongoing, as much as three million men and women in total; others were informed by the new state that they were not welcome anymore. In late 1922 the Soviets exiled hundreds of intellectuals aboard what later became known as the “philosophers’ ships”, such as the German steamship Oberbürgermeister Hakken, which brought them from Petrograd (Petersburg) to Stettin. They were exiled not because of counterrevolutionary activities, but merely because they had the potential to become enemies of the revolution later on.

At first, they congregated in Berlin – as many as 250’000 of them were there by 1922 – producing a lively Russian cultural scene with daily newspapers and much more, all being produced in that language. Later the emigrants moved westwards, to Paris and beyond. Major writers of that period include Nabokov, Khodasevich, and Bunin (who won the Nobel prize, the first Russian to do so, in 1933). Nabokov moved to America, Bunin stayed in France, and Khodasevich died early enough not to have to worry about where to go next, though his young wife, Nina Berberova, ended her days in America in 1993, having outlived the beast they had sought to escape.

Many writers and artists found they could not bear to be outside of their homeland, and returned there, such as Andrey Bely, or Marina Tsvetaeva. Sometimes this return proved too much. Tsvetaeva died by her own hand after being suspected of spying. Not that artists found staying in the Soviet Union to be a better approach – after all, Esenin and Mayakovsky killed themselves, Mandelshtam and Babel were shot, and Akhmatova all but had to give up writing poetry during the darkest days of the Terror. We are grateful that she and her friends had great memories, else we should never have received such brilliant if heartrending works as her Requiem. 

Among later waves of emigrants, the most striking is that of the Jews, who were finally allowed to leave for Israel in 1971. Later on, Israel became a mere staging post on the way to New York for them. When I travelled to the United States last year, spending an unhealthy amount of time among Russians (by which I mean here Jews and Belarusians and Ukrainians as well as Russians, as a matter of convenience), the vast majority of them were the children of that generation of emigrants or those that came slightly later, in the period of relative freedom after the collapse of the Soviet Union when Western states believed, perhaps naively, that these people and their newly-formed states were above suspicion. Now emigration is much harder, and for the time being people must make do with Israel and Turkey, with Georgia and Armenia, with Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

In Medieval Europe, the writer Eva Hoffman notes, exile was among the worst punishments a human being could suffer. To be cast out of your town was to have those bonds of work and family and society which together conferred your identity upon you torn away, leaving you completely naked. To be an exile was to lose yourself. Russian exiles today are faced with a similar predicament, a certain misunderstanding by everyone they encounter. Whereas in the days of Dante nobody outside your town knew who you were, nowadays everyone thinks they know who a Russian is (either brainwashed or bloodthirsty, and guilty to boot), and has little time to listen if you tell them that is not the case.  

To be a Russian abroad now is not the same thing as it is to be among thousands or millions of refugees. The aitishnikis, or highly-skilled IT workers Moscow has spent years cultivating, number at most a few hundred thousand. The nervous little oppositionists, the fleeing journalists, are all in possession of a certain amount of money and status, and most are from the two capitals, Petersburg, and Moscow. There are too few people abroad now for someone to successfully disappear, and anyone who seems friendly may well be an agent, sent to gather information. The sense that we are all in this together is only a single strange question away from being a sense that we are all out only for ourselves.

In the 1920s, the exiles and émigrés expected to go back. The 1922 Rapallo Treaty, which formally established diplomatic ties between the Soviet Union and the European states, came as a terrible blow to a generation who had been, as the saying goes, living on their suitcases. Suddenly things seemed a lot more permanent. Suddenly it became necessary to build a life, rather than live within the ruins that one had brought with them of the old one. Whether or not the present situation will last much longer than this blog post, I cannot say. But few of the people I met expected to spend more than a few weeks abroad. I fear that they may be disappointed. 

Khodasevich memorably wrote that he carried “eight little tomes, no more / and in them lies my homeland now”, but we can only get by on Pushkin for so long. Cut off from the rest of Russia, in the 1920s and 30s exile literature had to adapt to survive. In the case of Nabokov, by far the most famous exile, the Russian tradition he embodied had to shift from Russian to French, and finally to the English language. Later, less well-known exiles contributed in their own way to this strange parallel tradition. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, all the energy and dynamism returned back to the homeland, as a new generation of writers grew up – the Pelevins and Sorokins of this new world.

We tend to romanticise exile. To see it through the lens of literature is as faulty as trying to see something through a veil. We are distracted by the beauty of shivering contours, failing to see what they conceal – loneliness, rootlessness, despair. I remember the way that Joyce’s asking the wealthy Lady Gregory for money affected me when I was a bit younger: “though I seem to have been driven out of my country here as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.” Or else Stephen Dedalus’s words in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile, and cunning.”

These are fighting words, the kind of words that buoy one up. We learn of the success of exile – Joyce, Henry James, Nabokov, my dear Conrad – but not the failures. The failures never reach the page; they end their days in untended graves. For many, exile is at least partly choice. We call these people émigrés, conferring a certain grandeur to their struggle. There’s a certain respectability to it. In Odessa, then enjoying a brief spot outside the borders controlled by Moscow, Bunin set up a little salon, complete with artists and writers and readings and all the proper little arguments that help create a world. The émigré, the exile, becomes a symbol for the culture they’ve left behind and its willing receptacle. It seems all right with them.

The truth is more complex, even for the writers. Eva Hoffman quotes Joyce Carol Oates: “for most novelists, the art of writing might be defined as the use to which we put our homesickness”. Far from our home, we have to decide what to make of it. We cannot remove it from ourselves. Hoffman uses the wonderful phrase, which to me is positively redolent of the world she left behind in Poland, that “loss is a magical preservative.” (I am imagining crooked old women dressed in shawls packing their memories into little jars, which they place alongside the preserved tomatoes and pickled cucumbers in their larders).

Sadness is hard to avoid. Andre Aciman writes that “an exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss”. We crave the stability that only our memory of a lost and irretrievable home can provide. Sometimes it is too much. In Sebald’s The Emigrants, all four of the emigrants his narrator encounters end up dead – and two of them to suicide. Even if we don’t choose to end our lives, still we can get lost in our past lives. A writer can make their entire identity the loss of a past identity. And indeed, one need not be a writer at all. Suddenly I remember Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment, drunk in a tavern and telling his story to Raskolnikov. He is an exile from the civilized world, and he tries to find his meaning in describing and relating that very exile from its beginning to its inauspicious end.

If not sadness, there is another refuge in cynicism and aloofness. Edward Said writes that “to live as if everything around you were temporary and perhaps trivial is to fall prey to petulant cynicism as well as to querulous lovelessness.” Hoffman, meanwhile, notes that we can get enamoured by our own unrootedness, our own otherness. Instead of getting lost in a lost world, we get lost avoiding getting involved in the world before us. And whatever the hard exterior we may create, in cynicism there always lies a certain failure to connect, that certain terrible loneliness yet again. Hoffman says ultimately true bravery, even as an exile, consists of trying to put down roots, however foreign the soil, and reconnecting with the world as best we can.

There is a tension between stories of exile that centres upon nationalism. Charles Simic, born in Belgrade, asks what the forces are that drive people away: “fifty years ago it was fascism and communism, now it’s nationalism and religious fundamentalism”. Our current crisis is driven by an idea of Russian nationalism that bursts the borders of the Russian Federation and floods all the lands once within its former influence, to all the people speaking a language it considers its sole property. Without that nationalism, there would be no conflict, and the Russians of Istanbul and Tbilisi would perhaps still be at home, grumbling at the authorities, occasionally getting arrested, but living in the country of their birth.

Against this idea of nationalism as a problem, Edward Said meanwhile, writes that it is the very thing that saves us from exile’s uprootedness. “Nationalism is an assertion of belonging in and to a place, a people, a heritage. It affirms the home created by a community of language, culture, and customs; and, by so doing, it fends off exile, fights to prevent its ravages”. I imagine that Said means here that rather milder nationalism we prefer to call patriotism. And indeed, today we are witnessing in Russia’s near abroad proof that men and steel are nothing without hearts inside them, and that a phony aggrandising nationalism counts for very little against that spirit that comes when people are defending their malaya rodina, a phrase that means one’s home in the smallest sense – a plot of land, a village, a little life.

And yet, for all the heroism we day by day witness in Ukraine, there can be no doubt that there would be no conflict at all, no special military operation, were there no nationalism. Nationalism began the conflict, and it shall end it. I think back to the country whose collapse in 1991 Simic refers to in that quote. Once the Soviets built a system for transferring people in bulk, a refugee machine; now, their absence has left a vacuum for another great destructive force. It is wrong to say that there were no ethnic tensions in the later periods of the Soviet Union, but certainly things were better then than now. Assimilation, the creation of a new people – the Soviet people – was perhaps the greatest experiment of a century of experiments, and its most noble failure.

If nationalism binds us safely to our lost homeland during our exile, then it stands uneasily opposed to cosmopolitanism, which is perhaps the willing renunciation of any home at all. At that word I think of wealthy men and women jetting about Europe and further afield, wintering here, summering there, working in some nameless profession, sending their children away to boarding school, and never letting themselves settle long enough in a place to have to worry about buying a potato masher. Which anyway would be a job for one of the staff to sort out. Of course, the picture I have described is not really cosmopolitanism, or at least not all that that word means. There are also academics, meeting at conferences, there is the colourful linguistic hodgepodge of a bunch of Europeans abroad, more varied in shade and hue than a bird of paradise. As with nationalism itself, cosmopolitanism has two meanings.

The first, connected to exile again, is this sense of rootlessness. Simone Weil wrote wisely that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul”, but that does not mean that everyone is aware of it. Those wealthy people, who I am in some sense an example of, are missing something. Their souls are withered and shrunken. If we allow ourselves no connection to a people or place, and I must discount the connection that can form to a favourite ski resort or Greek island as a tad inauthentic, then that has a definite negative effect upon our morality. We cannot develop the ability to care for others when we prevent ourselves from putting down the roots that would let us connect to them. The only connections we would be able to form are those to other people in the same position as ourselves, with the result that what little moral thought we would be capable of would be directed solely at looking out for people like us. Taken this way, cosmopolitanism leaves us stunted and distances us from others. It leads to the same emptiness as exile does with its cynicism.

There is another side to cosmopolitanism, however. The ability and willingness to put down roots everywhere allows every place to be a home. Seeing everyone as a member of a great community expands our moral horizons, rather than shrinking them. It fights off that loneliness and cynicism which otherwise would consume us. And it need not destroy the culture that we bring with us – not at all. We may have our own opinion about the successes and failures of multiculturalism, but there is no denying the theoretical potential of this kind of cosmopolitanism to keep an exile alive, spiritually speaking.

Many of the older Russians I met in America still spoke little to no English, even though they had made millions and millions of dollars. None of the Russians I met, fleeing their country now, seemed intent on learning Georgian or Hebrew or Turkish. In the latter case we might forgive them by remembering that they are not sure whether theirs is an exile or not. At the border, of course, many of them declare that they are simply going on an extended holiday. None of us guessed back at the end of February that things might drag on. But the problem with a community of one’s compatriots abroad is that they can distract us easily from the much bigger and much richer community that they are parallel to in that new country.

Putting down roots is the thing. Wherever we are, we have to find those things that will keep us tethered to the world. Culture is one tool alongside friends, family, work, religion, and so many others for achieving that. But I do think that culture is perhaps among the worst tools. A sense of one’s cultural superiority, which many Russians (perhaps rightly) feel, is the kind of thing that prevents them from having any interest in the culture of the soil where they have found themselves. It can protect the spirit from knocks, but it cannot provide much tethering. While reading about the experiences of Russian exiles abroad I was amused and saddened by the failures of the different generations to connect to one another. They all have a different culture, even a different language, creating an atmosphere of suspicion. One is accused of being an FSB spy, another of arriving simply to earn a bit of money. This one’s language is so fusty it makes one want to sneeze, that one’s is so rough and slangy it’s practically incomprehensible to an educated human being.

Culture might help us survive the journey abroad – like Khodasevich’s tomes of Pushkin did for him – but when we arrive, we need to do something else to ensure our survival. We must attempt to find things worth holding on to that connect to us as individuals, not as representatives of this or that class or country. And this is no small challenge. I wonder how many of the Russians I know will manage it. I wonder whether I will manage it myself, whenever I get back to Russia, or whenever I find a place I want to put my own roots down into.

We return to the beginning of the piece. For the Russians, the Belarusians, the Ukrainians, (forced) movement has been a part of their lives for a long time, whether it was the exile enforced by a commune upon a peasant in the 19th century, or the population transfers dictated by the central government in the 20th. Unlike the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, the perpetual movement of the East Slavs rarely came as a choice. And the worst thing about exile is that it rarely gives birth to the conditions that might prevent its repetition – instead, it creates a generation of homeless men and women, detached from the world, and lost within it.

The conditions that created exile need to be changed from within a country. Perhaps that was why I felt a certain discomfort sitting in that café in Istanbul with the two young couples. To flee is often the easy option. When emigration is a choice, as it is with these Russians, it has to be weighed up against the alternative – staying put. In all honesty, their repeated comments about maintaining the opposition from abroad sounded just as delusional as Herzen’s hopes for coordinating the radicals from London in the middle of the 19th century. We tell ourselves things like this to keep ourselves alive, but such narratives rarely have the constitution needed to survive outside the bodies that thought them up. Still, this thought should not be taken too far. People have enough difficulties as it is.

Exile is a terrible thing, with its loneliness and cynicism and stuntedness of the spirit. For those of us who do not have to experience it, it is easy to focus on the positives, in particular the way that exile’s representatives enrich our world. We forget that for those representatives, as Said writes, “the achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever”. And for most people fleeing their homeland there are no achievements whatsoever, just a broken life. We can romanticise it, as we romanticise those radical figures abroad like Herzen or those deep in Siberia, like the Decembrists. But that romanticising comes at the cost of ignoring the reality that millions of people face. Right now, today.

The world has changed, and yet at the same time it has much in common with the world that the exiles of the early 20th century inhabited. Nabokov, Bunin, and all the rest are known to me and you because history has filtered them free from the masses they were once blended in to. But they too were once mere members of a crisis, a refugee crisis, though perhaps back then we would not have used that phrase. If we consider the millions of refugees fleeing westwards across Europe at this very moment, then we can’t quite so easily focus on those figures who history will perhaps choose to have our children remember. Whatever individuals we see now, whoever’s story we hear, theirs will be a story connected inseparably to that destiny of flight. That is good. It kills our romanticism and fills us with horror. We see only hunger and thirst and uprootedness, and not those potentially redeeming features, those dimly lit rooms and poetry recitals.

And if ever there is a horror which it behoves us to confront without the illusions we enjoy from the comfort of our armchairs, then this is it.

This was a long piece and in no way perfect. I would be grateful to hear readers’ thoughts in the comments.

If you still wish to read something after all this, there are various representatives of exile huddled within this blog’s pages. In particular, consider my piece on Nabokov’s Pnin, my translation of Bunin’s “Cold Autumn”, and my post on Sebald’s The Emigrants.