Red Cavalry and Other Stories

"This is a fictionalised account of the expedition of the Red Cavalry – the Soviet expeditionary force – which in 1920 attacked Poland, hoping to reach Warsaw and establish a Soviet government. Babel was sent with the Red Cavalry as a reporter for a propaganda newspaper, and it’s based on his diaries. Red Cavalry begins with the Cossack troops crossing the River Zbrucz. After crossing, the narrator sees the sun rolling on the horizon like a lopped off head, and then you know that it’s not going to be comfortable. The book is made up of autonomous stories in which the central narrator is Lyutov, who’s obviously standing in for Babel, because he’s bookish and wears glasses. They are not always about Lyutov – sometimes he just reports or pretends to be reporting, and sometimes they are about how he works with the Cossack troops. Lyutov is Jewish – it is not always clear if the Cossacks know that. Cossacks, of course, practice the sport of killing Jews whenever they can. So Lyutov and Babel are in a very awkward position of at the same time being presumably loyal to the Revolution and to their comrades the Cossacks, and also to the tradition of Jews, and of non-violent engagement with the world. Lyutov does not adapt: he says he does not have that most basic of capabilities – to kill a man – and he fails as a Cossack in more ways than one. It is an incredible piece of literature. Babel has an aesthetic that corresponds to not only his sensibility, but also to his awkward circumstance. You can sense the conflict between the sentences: they don’t flow smoothly, logically from each another; there’s a dialectic of narration, and you can sense the discipline. It was tricky for him: how to bear witness to things, how to talk about the fact that Cossacks were killing Jews, without being sent before a firing squad. Well, yes – although in the 1920s Babel apologised to the Cossack leader, Budyonny, and said the book was a mistake. But then he stayed put and never wrote anything like that again, vegetated as a writer, and was shot eventually. His last recorded words were to the NKVD agent who picked him up. Babel said to him, ‘You’re pretty busy these days.’"

"This is largely the tale of a particular Red regiment of cavalry, bumbling through south-east Russia and the Polish countryside. They are supposed to be fighting the Poles but, like WWI, there is this endless advance and endless retreat and a lot of fascinating ideological ambiguity, the casual brutality of the Whites and Reds, the fact that it was absolutely taken for granted that obscene things would be done to prisoners and the execution of prisoners was the norm. He shows how war made everything absurd – these people engaged in war take on a different sense of what is normal and they become deranged. It’s a very human and fascinating book – an exceptional guide to the Russian Revolution and the feelings of the soldiers who don’t want the Tsar, who want the Poles to leave them alone and who have a basic peasant attitude to land. That’s what won the Revolution – No Tsar, No War, No Landlords. It’s a brilliant guide to how the Tsarist army began to become the Red Army in February 1917 and it helps us to see how the soldiers felt on the eve of Revolution. It’s brilliant stuff. He has a calm, clinical, minimalistic style and he’s non-reactive. He’s not saying, “How horrifying!” He’s just calmly showing what it was like. He did serve himself – in 1920 he joined the Red Cossacks in a short war against Poland."