Isaak Babel - Arrest, Torture, and Execution

Arrest, Torture, and Execution

On May 15, 1939, Antonina Pirozhkova was awakened by four NKVD agents pounding upon the door of their Moscow apartment. Although surprised, she agreed to accompany them to Babel's dacha in Peredelkino. Babel was then placed under arrest. According to Pirozhkova: "In the car, one of the men sat in back with Babel and me while the other one sat in front with the driver. 'The worst part of this is that my mother won't be getting my letters', and then he was silent for a long time. I could not say a single word. Babel asked the secret policeman sitting next to him, 'So I guess you don't get too much sleep, do you?' And he even laughed. As we approached Moscow, I said to Babel, 'I'll be waiting for you, it will be as if you've gone to Odessa... only there won't be any letters....' He answered, 'I ask you to see that the child not be made miserable.' "But I don't know what my destiny will be." At this point, the man sitting beside Babel said to me, "We have no claims whatsoever against you." We drove to the Lubyanka Prison and through the gates. The car stopped before the massive, closed door where two sentries stood guard. Babel kissed me hard and said, "Someday we'll see each other..." And without looking back, he got out of the car and went through that door. According to Peter Constantine,

"From that day on, Babel, one of the foremost writers of his time, became a nonperson in the Soviet Union. His name was blotted out, removed from literary dictionaries and encyclopedias, and taken off school and university syllabi. He became unmentionable in any public venue. When the film director Mark Donskoi's famous Gorky trilogy premiered the following year, Babel, who had worked on the screenplay, had been removed from the credits."

Interrogated under torture, Babel confessed that his "creative impotence, which has prevented me from publishing any significant work for last few years," was, "deliberate sabotage and a refusal to write." This, however, was not enough for Stalin and his minions. In his confession paper, which still contains blood stains, Babel "confessed" to being a member of Trotskyist organization and being recruited by French writer Andre Malraux to spy for France. He named Sergei Eisenstein, Ilya Ehrenburg and Solomon Mikhoels as co-conspirators.

Despite months of pleading and letters sent directly to Beria, Babel was denied access to his unpublished manuscripts. In October 1939, Babel was again summoned for interrogation and denied all his previous testimony. A statement was recorded, "I ask the inquiry to take into account that, though in prison, I committed a crime. I slandered several people." This led to further delays as the NKVD frantically attempted to salvage their cases against Mikhoels, Ehrenburg, and Eisenstein.

According to Nathalie Babel Brown,

"...his trial took place on January 26, 1940, in one of Lavrenti Beria's private chambers. It lasted about twenty minutes. The sentence had been prepared in advance and without ambiguity: death by firing squad, to be carried out immediately. Babel had been convicted of 'active participation in an anti-Soviet Trotskyite organization,' and of 'being a member of a terrorist conspiracy, as well as spying for the French and Austrian governments.' Babel's last recorded words in the proceedings were, 'I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union. I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others... I am asking for only one thing -- let me finish my work.' He was shot the next day and his body was thrown into a communal grave. All of this horrific information was revealed in the early 1990s...

According to Simon Sebag Montefiore, Babel's ashes were buried with those of Nikolai Yezhov and several other victims of the Great Purge in the necropolis of Moscow's Donskoi Monastery. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a plaque was placed there which reads, "Here lie buried the remains of the innocent, tortured, and executed victims of political repressions. May they never be forgotten." The grave of Yevgenia Yezhov, who committed suicide in a mental institution, lies less than twenty paces away.

According to the early official Soviet version, Isaak Babel died in the Gulag on March 17, 1941. His archives and manuscripts were confiscated by the NKVD. Peter Constantine, who translated Babel's writings into English, has described the writer's execution as "one of the great tragedies of 20th century literature."