Budyonny was not a Cossack, but he grew up on their land, loving their ways, aspiring to their skill in the saddle and with the sabre. In 1903, at the start of his military career, he married Nadezhda, a beauty from a farmstead in a local stanitsa, a Cossack settlement. She later ran a medical unit in the Cavalry Army. Like a Cossack ataman, Budyonny was known to his men as ‘Batka Semyon’, ‘Little Father Semyon’. To be close to them, he had to look kindly on, even share in, their habits of plunder and insouciant brutality. ‘The First Cavalry Army … destroyed the Jewish population as they went,’ read a report to Lenin, which he marked ‘for the archives’. As Stalin built his own power against Trotsky, consolidating a military faction loyal to himself in the aftermath of the Civil War, reports of looting and pogroms carried out by Budyonny’s cavalry in Poland in 1920 were carefully suppressed. Like Voroshilov’s, Budyonny’s loyalty to Stalin was absolute. This seems to have created a lasting bond with Molotov, to whom Budyonny would always send greeting cards on national holidays, hailing his disgraced comrade in an ever more shaky hand from across the courtyard of No. 3.
When we moved into No. 3, one of the stories our landlord told me with most relish was of how Budyonny’s Cossack first wife had died in the house of a shot to the head, and how his second wife, a loose-living and beautiful opera singer named Olga (whom Budyonny met when taking a mineral water cure at Essentuki soon after his first wife’s death), had been arrested in 1937 and sent to the Gulag. Before then, I had been more familiar with the Marshal’s name from Isaac Babel’s Cavalry Army than from history books. Like Kutuzov or Napoleon, kept for ever vivid in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Budyonny’s image – white smile, trousers embroidered with shining silver, chestnut mare – is preserved in fiction.
An Odessa-born Jew, Babel moved from the south to Moscow with his family not long after ‘Batka Semyon’ and his Cossack bride moved into No. 3. In the summer of 1920, under the name Kiril Lyutov, the bespectacled writer had accompanied Budyonny’s horseback army into Poland, watching the killing, asthmatically inhaling the dust of battle, sleeping in shtetls and Polish manor houses, writing in his notebook, true to the new aesthetic of the fact. In 1923, Babel’s laconic and exquisite Cavalry Army stories were published, to immediate acclaim, in Lef and Red Virgin Soil. Budyonny reacted with hatred, threatening to hack the author to pieces with his shashka, his long sword, it is said. Cavalry Army was a libel against Cossacks, the Red General raged in a newspaper article of protest, whose title – ‘The Womanishness (‘Babizm’) of Babel in Red Virgin Soil’ – punned on Babel’s name. Babizm was the worst insult Budyonny could muster for the writer from Odessa who had become suddenly famous in literary Moscow by portraying him and his men as bandits, marauding Scythians.
Babel’s prose is at once opulent and spare, intimate and detached. He sees war with the eye of an aesthete. Atrocity is set among the beauty of the landscape, described in imagery of extravagant violence. The orange sun rolls across the sky ‘like a severed head’; the evening cool drips with the smell of ‘yesterday’s blood and slain horses’. Babel writes of the instinctive life of warriors from the fascinated perspective of the educated outsider, unable to ransack or kill. ‘I’ll never be a real Budyonny man,’ he noted in his diary after watching the Cossacks loot a village. ‘I took nothing, although I could have …’ At the end of Cavalry Army, in ‘Argamak’, the writer’s ‘dream is fulfilled’. He has learned to sit in the saddle: ‘The Cossacks stopped following me and my horse with their eyes.’
The critic Vyacheslav Polonsky suggested that Babel not only rode with Budyonny’s Cavalry Army, but also served the Cheka. In the early 1930s, he was part of the Moscow elite, and lived in a favoured apartment with his common-law wife Antonina Pirozhkova, an engineer on the Metro. He socialised with the chiefs of the secret police, Yezhov and Yagoda. Nadezhda Mandelstam thought that Babel visited the Chekists in their own homes because he wanted to find out what they smelled like, what death smelled like. (He was arrested in 1939 and taken to the Lubyanka. In January 1940 he was shot, the day after his ‘trial’ for Trotskyite activities and espionage.) Polonsky considered that Babel’s almost sadistic interest in blood and death and killing was a limitation of his writing. From the start, Babel had assiduously collected material about violence and attended executions.
In his 1920 diary, which could not be published until the end of the Soviet era, Babel made observations on certain ‘terrible truths’ about relations between men and women on the margins of battle. ‘All our fighting men – velvet capes, rape, forelocks, battles, revolution and syphilis,’ he noted, ‘all the soldiers have syphilis … the scourge of the soldiery, Russia’s scourge.’ He expressed genuine admiration for the army nurses: ‘It’s a whole epic, the nurse’s story … our only heroes are heroines.’ In the city of Zhitomir, at night on the boulevard, he reflected on the fixed composition of the urban sexual chase, and its sadness: ‘Four avenues, four stages: getting acquainted, chatting, awakening of desire, satisfaction of desire … I’m tired and suddenly I’m lonely, life flows past me, and what does it mean.’
Among the many voices in the Cavalry Army stories – of priests, rabbis, Bolsheviks, anarchists, plunderers, turncoats, a pregnant Jewish woman, giggling Cossack nurses, and Sashka, a stallion-riding Amazon – is the speech of Budyonny himself:
Budyonny, in red trousers with a silver stripe, was standing by a tree … ‘The scum will squeeze us’, the commander said with his dazzling grin, ‘we win or we die. There’s no other way. Understood?’
‘Understood,’ answered Kolesnikov, opening his eyes wide.
‘And if you run – I’ll shoot you,’ the commander said, smiling …
From the wide street in Rostov that bears his name, I imagined Budyonny, newly installed in No. 3 with his Cossack wife, when the row with Babel began. The premises of Babel’s publisher were just around the corner, on Vozdvizhenka. The horseman from the steppe had settled in a nest of intellectuals, of alien codes, of babizm. It was in their new life as Bolshevik grandees in Moscow that the strain in the childless marriage began to tell. Many of the other Party wives were sophisticated intellectuals; many were Jews. Perhaps the city apartment building felt even stranger and more unsettling to Budyonny and the war-hardened Cossack wife who had shared his military campaigns than the battlefield had felt to Babel. Stories of her death vary. One says that the General had taken out his loaded pistol the previous night when he had seen a suspicious group of men in the courtyard. Another, that Budyonny had drawn his Walther and cocked the trigger when a gang approached him as he walked alone down Nizhny Kislovsky on his way home from a meeting. As he was undoing his shoes in the hallway, so the family story says, Nadezhda took the gun from the commode, held it against her temple, said ‘Look, Sema,’ and pulled the trigger.