Читать онлайн "Don't Trust, Don't Fear, Don't Beg: The Extraordinary Story of the Arctic 30" - Stewart Ben - RuLit

‘Welcome to your new home.’

Yes, thinks Dima. I’m coming home.

NINE

Many a man thinks he’s shifted the course of human history from an English public house, but Maxim Litvinov actually did.

The year was 1907 and the place was a dockers’ pub in the East End of London. The Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party – one of whose leaders was Vladimir Lenin – was being held in a nearby church. Also there was Lev Bronshtein, who’d arrived in England after escaping from a Siberian prison and travelling 400 miles across frozen tundra on a sleigh pulled by reindeer. He was known to his comrades as Trotsky.

Maxim Litvinov was staying in a sixpence-a-night dosshouse with his friend, the Georgian revolutionary Josef Dzhugashvili. By day they attended the Congress together, listening to speeches and debating the party’s strategy for overthrowing the Russian tsar and instigating a communist dictatorship in their homeland. By night they drank.

Dzhugashvili had a reputation for thinking with his fists. One evening they stumbled into a pub frequented by London’s notoriously belligerent dock workers and soon the Georgian was embroiled in an argument with the locals. It soon escalated, Dzhugashvili was surrounded, and although the details of that moment are lost to history, one can imagine his life flashing before his eyes. That was when Litvinov waded in and dragged his hot-tempered friend from the pub. They escaped down a side street.[10]

Maxim Litvinov was Dima’s great-grandfather. Josef Dzhugashvili survived that night to become one of history’s greatest mass murderers. He is known to the world as Stalin.

Dzhugashvili was largely unknown to his comrades in London, but Litvinov was already a notorious revolutionary. He’d been arrested by the Okhrana – the tsar’s secret police – and jailed in Lukyanovskaya prison, from where he escaped, taking ten inmates with him.[11] He slipped over one border after another until he reached Switzerland. Later he became an arms dealer for the Bolshevik wing of the party, procuring rifles and smuggling them into Russia through Finland.[12]

A year after dragging his friend from that London pub, Litvinov was arrested[13] in France carrying a pocketful of 500-rouble notes that had been stolen in a notorious bank robbery masterminded by Stalin.[14] He was deported, returned to London and married an English woman, Ivy Low. Litvinov was still in England when Lenin and Trotsky seized power in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. He was arrested by the London government in 1918 but freed in exchange for a British diplomat who was accused of complicity in an assassination attempt on Lenin.[15] Litvinov returned to Russia and began a career as a senior Soviet diplomat.

In 1930 his old friend Stalin – by now supreme leader of the Soviet Union – appointed him Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Litvinov – real name Meir Wallach-Finkelstein[16] – worked to normalise relations with Britain and France, and persuaded America’s President Roosevelt to officially recognise the Communist government in Moscow. And all the time he was a senior figure in a regime that was purging, starving and shooting millions of its own people.

In April 1933 Litvinov’s face graced the front cover of Time magazine.[17] The Nazi government in Germany derided his Jewish ancestry, with Berlin radio referring to him contemptuously as ‘Finkelstein-Litvinov’.[18] When Stalin resolved to sign a pact with Hitler to invade and divide Poland, Litvinov’s Jewish roots presented an awkward impediment. His office was surrounded by troops from the NKVD[19] – the secret police organisation that succeeded the tsar’s Okhrana. A delegation led by Vyacheslav Molotov told Litvinov he was fired.[20] Four months later Molotov signed the pact with Hitler, Poland was invaded and the world went to war. Hitler later said, ‘Litvinov’s replacement was decisive.’[21] Asked why he had been replaced by Molotov, Litvinov said, ‘Do you really think that I was the right person to sign a treaty with Hitler?’[22]

When, two years later, Germany turned on the Soviet Union, Litvinov was rehabilitated and appointed ambassador to the United States. On New Year’s Eve 1951 he died of a heart attack, aged seventy-five.[23] Molotov later said Litvinov was ‘utterly hostile to us… He deserved the highest measure of punishment at the hands of the proletariat. Every punishment.’ He said Dima’s great-grandfather ‘remained among the living only by chance’.[24] Decades after his death, Litvinov’s daughter claimed Stalin once told Maxim he was only spared because, ‘I haven’t forgotten that time in London.’[25]

Lev Kopelev was also a Bolshevik. In the 1930s he worked as a journalist, witnessing the horrors of the Ukrainian famine caused by the forced grain requisitioning ordered by the government of which Maxim Litvinov was a part.[26] When the Germans invaded in 1941, Kopelev volunteered for the Red Army, serving as a propaganda officer.[27] He was one of millions of Soviet soldiers who rolled into Germany near the war’s end. And it was here, in East Prussia, that he witnessed atrocities committed by his nation against the defeated German civilian population.

Kopelev was deeply troubled and felt unable to remain silent. He spoke out publicly, denouncing the conduct of the Soviet armies in Germany. He was promptly arrested[28] and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for the ‘propagation of bourgeois humanism, sympathy with the enemy and undermining the troops’ political–ethical morale.’[29] In the gulag he met and befriended Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. When Solzhenitsyn came to write his novel The First Circle, he based the character Rubin on Kopelev.[30] When Kopelev was released, he approached Russia’s leading literary journal and urged it to publish Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.[31] It was a seminal moment in the Soviet dissident movement.

Lev Kopelev was Dima’s grandfather.

In 1968 Lev was expelled from the Communist Party[32] for lending his voice to protests against the persecution of other dissidents. He also spoke out against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.[33] It was a cause for which Pavel Litvinov – Kopelev’s son-in-law, Maxim’s grandson – was also prepared to pay a heavy price.

As a high school student, and even during his early years at university, Pavel was a devoted member of the Young Communist League. But by the end of his time as a student his commitment to Marxism had collapsed. Ideology had clashed with reality and he viewed Soviet society with ‘cynical indifference’.[34]

Pavel became a physics teacher. He befriended a group of intellectual anti-Soviet writers and worked for the release of political prisoners, hungrily consuming samizdat literature – banned publications which now included the works of Solzhenitsyn.[35] In 1967 he was pulled into KGB headquarters and warned he was risking arrest and imprisonment for supporting dissidents, but Pavel made a verbatim record of the interrogation.[36] It was published in the International Herald Tribune and four months later he received a telegram from ‘a group of friends representing no organisation’ who ‘support your statement, admire your courage, think of you and will help in any way possible’. The letter was signed by Yehudi Menuhin, W.H. Auden, Henry Moore, Bertrand Russell, J.B. Priestley, Paul Scofield, Sonia Brownell (who signed as ‘Mrs George Orwell’), Cecil Day-Lewis and the legendary Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.[37]