Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (20 page)

Nabokov headed to Brussels again. Doing three readings in quick succession, he saw his brother Kirill before heading on to France. In
Paris he could no longer beg a room from his cousin Nicholas, who had already moved to America with his own wife and young son. Instead, he stayed again with Fondaminsky and ended up having dinner with Ivan Bunin, who both admired and disliked his literary usurper. Nabokov was resentful of having been collared for the meal, writing to his wife of the miserable evening he had.

Trying to bond over stereotypically Russian food, Bunin succeeded only in irritating Nabokov. The Nobel laureate waxed profane and wanted to discuss the end of history—which at that point surely must have seemed as if it had already come—but Nabokov refused to engage. As they left their table, Bunin said, “You will die in dreadful pain and complete isolation.”
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The night of February 8, Nabokov read again in Paris to enormous acclaim. Heading back to Brussels without a visa, he used a trick passed on by the Socialist Revolutionaries of
Contemporary Annals
—who had themselves made a number of furtive crossings—to switch trains underground and reenter Belgian territory on the sly.
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From there Nabokov made his way back to Berlin, whose Nuremberg Laws must have made Paris seem like a haven. Jews could not hold office or vote. Sex between Jews and Germanic “Aryans” was illegal. Jews were also forbidden from entering state hospitals, parks, libraries, and beaches. They could not be journalists or doctors. Jewish professors had been removed from University faculties.
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And in the background, always playing out or threatening to, were spasms of violence. Just weeks after Nabokov returned from France, they took on a more orchestrated feel. Hitler began to build up military forces in the Rhineland along the French border, and introduced a two-year draft. It became obvious that he was planning for war.

Censorship was so widespread, however, that it was difficult for those living in Europe and America to know exactly what was happening inside Germany. Terrifying anecdotes of killings and abuse
emerged, but outside Germany many accounts were suspected of being hyperbole or written off as propaganda by pro-German Westerners.

Faced with dismal (if accurate) publicity, the German government began to foster a gentler international image, suggesting to reporters that the nascent concentration-camp system was being shuttered, and that policies against Jews had been eased. Nazi rhetoric cooled, and signs barring Jews from restaurants and other public places were removed.

It was, however, only a charade, put on with targeted coyness in the run up to the 1936 Summer Olympics. During the Weimar era, Germany had won the bid to host both the Winter and Summer Games. But with reports of political opponents in concentration camps and the increasing persecution of Jews appearing again and again in Western newspapers, Hitler feared Germany would lose its right to host, and thus a chance to show the triumphant face of the Third Reich.

A movement had already arisen urging the United States to boycott the Olympics in response to recent events. But Avery Brundage, the head of the United States National Olympic Committee, argued in favor of participation, publicly announcing his opinion that there should be a wall between sports and politics. Privately to friends, he blamed the boycott movement on Jewish special interest groups.
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In the end, Hitler not only hosted both Winter and Summer Olympics, but saw to it that they were commemorated by his favorite cinematographers. Leni Riefenstahl, who had created propaganda to rival Eisenstein’s with her 1934 movie
Triumph of the Will
, was invited to film the Summer games, using dramatic visuals that glorified the Nazi aesthetic and found endless beauty in physical power.

There was no question of whose overall agenda Riefenstahl would serve or which cause had her allegiance. But it was another matter entirely when it came to the director chosen for the Winter Olympics earlier in the year: Carl Junghans, Sonia Slonim’s old boyfriend.

Despite his Communist roots, filmmaker Carl Junghans had made his way from the Soviet Union back to Berlin. On his return to Germany, Junghans had denounced the Soviets and, a little over a year later, started making propaganda for the Nazis. He directed the Germans’ 1936 Winter Olympics documentary and, later that year, assisted Riefenstahl in filming the Summer Olympics.
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When the Olympics ended in mid-August, any German pretense at easing up on Reich opponents disappeared. Over the summer the
SS-Totenkopfverbände
, the Death’s Head division of the SS, had quietly gained official designation as concentration-camp guards and administrators. By November, news stories began appearing in the U.S. and Europe describing the creation of labor camps in northwestern Germany. Six thousand prisoners were sent to reclaim 250,000 acres of marshland in land “deadly to every living being.” The Nazis claimed that the laborers were not political prisoners but common criminals; newspapers of the time noted that recent legislation had made it impossible to tell the difference. As on Russia’s White Sea Canal, the work done in the swampland by the prisoners was to be undertaken not using current engineering techniques, but through medieval methods, with spades used to dig drainage ditches and canals. Similar work, it was explained, was being done in camps across Germany.
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The inmates were housed in spare barracks without bars on the windows. Their food rations were said to be higher than in standard prisons, because of the workload, and prisoners interviewed in the camps (presumably in front of guards) told reporters that they were happier in labor camps than they would be in prisons.

The first articles on these camps portray a veneer of austere wholesomeness undergirded by vague unease. Escapes were rare, reporters were told, because of the deadly swamp conditions that lay between prisoners and the Dutch border. The barbed-wire fences surrounding the camps, “dotted with watchtowers that are equipped with searchlights and machine-guns,” no doubt also deterred escape. Visually, the labor camps reminded one reporter distinctly of the camps from the Great War.
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By 1936, the Germans had three decades of their own camp history to draw on, from the murderous forced-labor camps of Southwest Africa to internment camps from the war—not to mention the more recent experiments at Dachau and Oranienburg. Nonetheless, for a little while longer Germany would remain a relative beginner in the machinery of atrocity.
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By the early 1930s, in contrast to the increasing tone of dread in coverage of Nazi Germany, news stories on the Soviet Union ran curiously hot and cold. Horror stories continued to leak out, but tales of Russian economic miracles and a resolute march into the future still abounded in the popular press.

Nabokov had no faith in the new society that was being built on the ruins of the Russian Empire. He had already parodied Soviet dreams of progress in his writing, from a commissar teaching sociology to Leningrad schoolchildren in
The Defense
, to the new world Hermann imagines in
Despair
, in which one worker falls dead at his machine only to be replaced by his double.

But in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929 and the start of the Great Depression, faith in capitalism had declined precipitously, and many Americans were hoping that Communism might offer an alternative.
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Stories crept westward of the new industrial centers springing up throughout Russia—mining at Vorkuta in the Arctic, oil extraction on Nova Zembla, and gold at Magadan in the Kolyma region. Vladimir Nabokov might refuse to set foot in the Soviet Union, but bevies of American intellectuals, students, and reporters were willing to make their way east in his stead, eager to see the Soviet experiment in progress.

During the summer of 1935, American literary critic Edmund Wilson went on a Guggenheim fellowship to Russia, a place he had dreamed might hold answers he had not seen in his reporting on the unraveling of capitalism in the United States. Walter Duranty was known for welcoming visitors from the West to his Moscow
rooms, and after special efforts to get his visa, including an appeal for Gorky’s assistance, Wilson visited Duranty and then stayed at his apartment while the latter went on vacation.
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Some who traveled to Moscow with less of an agenda ended up profoundly disappointed. After his own visit to the U.S.S.R., seeing the sadness and surveillance of a police state, writer E. E. Cummings lost his sympathy for the fledgling state.
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But Wilson, like Duranty, seemed to note the hardships, anxiety, and even despondency of the population without being ready to shift his essential outlook as a consequence. Wilson, who understood the failures of American capitalism, still seemed to find aspects of Communist society enthralling.

Ignorant of the extent of the suffering around him, Wilson attended a Red Army banquet and theater performances. In Leningrad—formerly St. Petersburg—he passed, unknowing, near Nabokov’s old home, visiting St. Isaac’s Cathedral and then the Peter and Paul Fortress.
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Wilson understood on some level that conditions were repressive; when he met with critic D. S. Mirsky, he confided that the country felt like a prison. In other places, however, Wilson’s Soviet diary caught the spirit of Duranty himself. He wrote of finding himself sitting in Moscow at the “moral top of the world where the light never really goes out.” On his return to the U.S., Wilson played down the authoritarian feel of the Soviet Union and puffed up the romance of the historic moment.
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Wilson should have known better. By the time of his visit, new repression had already begun to bare its teeth. Stalin lieutenant Sergei Kirov had been assassinated on December 1, 1934, and his death had served as the pretext to launch a new wave of trials and executions. While Kirov’s body lay in state—in the same room where the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries had taken place—sixty-six people had been rounded up, tried by troika tribunals resurrected from a dozen years before, and immediately executed.

From the first days of the purges in Russia, émigrés drew parallels between Stalin’s handiwork and the Night of the Long Knives
in Germany. Even before Wilson had left the U.S. on his way to visit Russia, novelist John Dos Passos had suggested to him that the Soviet response was out of control. Wilson had countered that such brutality was a legacy inherited from the Imperial era and might fade over time.
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But in the days and weeks that followed, additional trials and dozens more executions were reported. Those who had calmly accepted the admiring characterizations of Stalin along with Duranty’s genial aphorism that “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” began to wonder how far the Russian leader would go to eliminate dissent. Official Soviet accounts framed those executed as operatives in a massive conspiracy, saying the “chief instigator and ringleader of this gang of assassins and spies was Judas Trotsky.” But interviewed in New York at the Soviet Consulate in 1934, a Soviet official reassured reporters that no new reign of terror would begin, because “there is no one left to purge.”
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New candidates were found. In the months and years that followed, the killings continued, swelling the ranks of the dead. Stalin tried to consolidate his authority, resurrecting the national affection for the Tsars and forming a cult around himself that borrowed from their legacies, using the burgeoning Great Purge as an indiscriminate cudgel. In 1937 and 1938, the two deadliest years, more than 670,000 people would be executed and as many imprisoned, all sacrificed to the nightmare travesty of a workers’ paradise.

The dead are not nameless. Maxim Gorky’s life ended in 1936 under mysterious circumstances. Secret police official Gleb Bokii, whose name graced the steamer that carried so many thousands to their doom on Solovki, was shot in November 1937 in the basement of the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. Alexander Tarasov-Rodionov, the Soviet novelist who met with Nabokov in Berlin to entice him back to Russia, was arrested in 1937 and died in a camp soon after. Osip Mandelstam, who had preceded Nabokov as a student at Tenishev School, mocked Stalin in a biting poem that led to his end in a transit camp in 1938. Arrested after one too many visits from Westerners,
Russian historian D. S. Mirsky—alternately ridiculed and lionized by Nabokov—would die in the Gulag in 1939.

And fate finally also caught up with those Socialist Revolutionaries whose executions had been halted in 1922—and whose show trial under Lenin provided the precedent for the tribunals of the current purges. Abram Gotz, the key defendant in that trial, was shot in 1937.

Gotz outlived some of those responsible for his conviction. Lev Kamenev, to whom credit must be given for the notion of making the Socialist Revolutionaries permanent hostages, was executed in 1936. Judge Georgy Pyatakov, chief of the tribunal that sentenced them, was convicted of somehow flying to Oslo to confer with Trotsky and the Nazis; he was put to death in January 1937. Nikolai Bukharin, who had led the mob rioting against the Socialist Revolutionaries, was executed the following March. And that July, Nikolai Krylenko, the lead prosecutor so many years before, was given twenty minutes for his own trial before being found guilty and shot on the spot.
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Soon after the end of the 1936 Summer Olympics, Germany signed a pact with Italy, then just a few weeks later allied itself with Japan. International opinion shifted from talking about whether there would be war to predicting when it would start.