Lenin's Private War : The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia (9781429969727) by Chamberlain Lesley

Author:Chamberlain, Lesley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429969727
Publisher: Macmillan

But after he resigned he went hungry and by the end of summer 1921 Jakobson was back in the Soviet mission in Prague, part-time, as ‘a free-lance worker’ until 1928. Nabokov claimed he was a spy.32 This speculation remains unproven, but certainly Jakobson, having been a Kadet in his teens, was in his early twenties pro-Soviet, even though he had had to run from Soviet power.

Fear of secret Soviet infiltration caused the same Russian community in Prague that shunned Jakobson also to turn against Lenin’s patent enemy Sorokin. Despite his appointment as Professor of Sociology at the Charles University, Sorokin left in 1923 after only ten months to take up a post at the University of Minnesota.33 Sorokin was not remotely pro-Soviet, but the letter to Pravda in November 1918, in which, sitting in a provincial GPU cell facing a potential bullet, he renounced his will to fight against Bolshevism, counted irrevocably against him. The book Sorokin published in 1923, Sovremennoe sostoyanie Rossii (‘The Current State of Russia), may have been partly an effort to establish a correct perception of his views in the wider world. Only six years after the Russian Revolution he argued that its chief consequence was the degradation of the Russian population.

Feeling the cold wind blowing from Russian Prague, Sorokin spent most of 1923 learning English. From his temporary Cernoýice home, ten miles from Prague, he would pace the open countryside committing long lists of vocabulary to heart. There he was observed by another misplaced man, Dalmat Lutokhin.34

It was even more difficult for thirty-eight-year-old Lutokhin to find a job because almost immediately he arrived he counted as a Communist. The expatriated Russians wanted him neither in Berlin nor in Prague. After giving a talk in Berlin, where he attributed his late arrival to rheumatism, Gorky’s old friend was marked down as ‘impossible’ by Prokopovich.35 He also didn’t make the right political noises when he arrived in Prague in May. Struve and Izgoev took him to breakfast at the favourite haunt of Russians in the Czechoslovak capital, ‘The Slav Hotel Beranek’ on Tyl Square in Vinohrady, and came away disappointed.36 One of the few Russians in Prague who would receive Lutokhin, apart from his host Sorokin, was Rozenberg, whom Lutokhin grudgingly called ‘another old idealist’.37 This white crow in the emigration’ and veteran journalist and publisher declined Lutokhin’s suggestion to report positively on Communist Russia. In Prague Lutokhin sided with Sorokin until Sorokin went to America. After that Sorokin became Lutokhin’s chief ideological enemy.38

A third character marginalized in Prague, the one man adored there by Lutokhin but whom Prokopovich likewise branded a Communist, was Peshekhonov. He was a gifted economist and quite able to head the Economic department at the Institute for the Study of Russia which he and others founded in Prague in April 1924. But the quality of the Institute’s output paled beside that of Prokopovich’s Economic Bureau and its ideological slant was evident. ‘The institute was an SR organization’, which might not have been

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