I've previously posted (here)
an extensive collection of the claims
(for and against) that
Stalin's third wife was Rosa, the sister
of the mass-murdering Jew; Lazar
Kaganovich.
Something which is now generally denied
by orthodox historians:
Two of Britain's leading biographers of
Stalin disagree; Seabag-Montefiore
claims
Rosa Kaganovich, Lazar's sister, died in
1924, 8 years before Stalin's second
wife
Nadezhda died/was murdered. Whereas
Robert Service insists that Lazar never
had a sister named Rosa, the sister who
died in the mid-1920s was named Rakhil.
Boris Souvarine (1895-1984) (left)
and Isaac Babel (1894-1940) were
both Jewish
Bolshevik writers. Souvarine's
family left Kiev for France when he
was only two, and
later in life he became a prominent
communist politician. Babel was a
famed Soviet
playwright, who was particularly
close with a great friend of Stalin,
Maxim Gorky.
Although Babel eventually fell foul
of Stalin, and was executed for his
Trotskyism.
An article which appeared in Dissent,
an American political magazine in 1981,
was
a "somewhat abbreviated" and translated
version of an article, written by Boris
Souvarine which appeared in the French
journal Contrepoint in
1979. In the article
Souvarine quotes the notes which he made
following several meetings with Babel
during the 1930s. At one meeting during
the summer of 1935, Babel and Souvarine
"speak of Stalin——for a change,"
Souvarine wrote:
Babel tells me that at the time of Alliluyeva's (Stalin's second wife) funeral, thousands of Chekists were posted along the streets leading from the Kremlin to the cemetery of the Monastery of the Virgins, and on the roofs of all the houses, and that all the windows were ordered shut. (I no longer know who told me that Stalin left the funeral procession en route and returned home.) Babel describes Stalin after his domestic drama as more solitary, gloomy, and closed-off than ever , and he adds—]BABEL: A woman had to be got for him. It wasn't easy. Finally, they found Rosa Kaganovich for him...
B.S.: Why not so easy?
BABEL: (Hesitating, as if reaching for and weighing his words): Ah, well ... because ... you see ... well, in a word, it-was-a-mat-ter-of-sleeping-with-him![He assumed an appalled air, and his eyes widened with horror at the idea of Rosa Kaganovich being handed over to the Minotaur of the Kremlin. The grisly vision made an impression on me, too, and for a moment we were silent, then both broke into long, nervous laughter that made us feel better....]
click
image to enlarge
LAST
CONVERSATIONS WITH ISAAC BABEL
Souvarine, Boris
