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 Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 He settled in New York City where he quickly learned that there was no market for his eloquent and powerful English language attacks on the Soviet Union. To this day, he writes without fear or favor or the conventions of polite society. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian.
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Since I regarded, when living in Soviet Russia, the Soviet arts and humanities as cultural and/or political prostitution, I began to make a living as the first (and last) Russian translating Russian classical literature into English without ever having lived in any English-speaking country. All of my colleagues were emigres to Soviet Russia from the English-speaking countries, and one of them, a charming, lively, witty English lady named Rosie, was a great-granddaughter of Marx.
She was married to an important functionary of the Communist Party of Canada who was ipso facto a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. I was in my twenties, she was in her sixties, but my conversations with her had all the signs of sinful erotic seduction — I was leading an English descendant of Marx into the mortal sin of the English heritage of Magna Carta and Habeas corpus. When I spoke, she was a study of inner struggle between her Marxist duty and the unfathomably pleasurable sin of returning to her English roots of Magna Carta and Habeas corpus.
It was 1956. Stalin had died in 1953, on the eve of his Final Solution, that is, the deportation of all Soviet Jews to “an uninhabited area.” The shock lingered.
“Rosie,” I would whisper, Serpent-like, “I spent last summer at a tiny country house, in which there was nothing readable by way of books except your great-grandfather's complete works. So I read or at least looked through them, volume by volume. A brilliant and erudite man.”
I told her that if all members of society agree to distribute their private wealth among the poor, as Christ advises to that young man — remember? — it can be argued, as Christ and Marx did, that the resulting society, call it Christian or Communist or Marxist, will be better than a “society of property inequality,” as Marx called it.
“But do you know what I didn't find in these volumes?” I continued respectfully. “Any tribute to Magna Carta. Of course! Marx was a German. He or Luther or Hegel or Nietzsche did not notice Magna Carta. But you did read about it in your English school books of history, didn't you? Rosie, this is what I know by heart: 'No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way harmed, nor will we send upon him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.' Do you want to hear this in Latin? Rosie: this is the year of 1215!”
“You are horrible!” she would respond, flushed, excited, surrendering to the temptation of criticizing that oppressive conformity in which she had spent all her life as a great-granddaughter of great Marx.
Now I could “develop my attack,” as the military say. “Every society, whether Christian or Communist or Marxist, and no matter how much better than any other society, must be protected against tyranny, be it that of traditional hereditary absolutism or the dictatorship of the proletariat. If it is not, tyranny, that is, the tyrants' interests, may become the raison d'être of that society.”
Rosie had one stronghold she would not surrender. She believed that the general proposition of Marx (and Engels) that inequality in property, wealth, money distorts or destroys all human relations from the cradle to the grave is the crucial truth. “You do not understand it because you have never lived in the West where 'money is everything.' We did not understand this country either until we had been living in it.”
Once, during my ideological seduction of Rosie at the publishing house, her husband called, and she cooed with him in a very low passionate voice and covering the receiver with her hand so that I heard only the word “darling,” she cooed every few seconds. Every age thinks itself young and an age ten or twenty years older hopelessly old and asexual. To one of the female editors of my age, Rosie noted that should that young girl live to Rosie's age, she would understand that she had not known love before.
Rosie invited me, her ideological seducer, to dinner in their cozy apartment to loosen up the orthodox Marxist (actually, Soviet!) rigidity of her husband, with whom she was in love erotically, but wanted to make him more lovable ideologically.
The beginning of the dinner was auspicious. In an undertone, as though speaking of a family matter of no interest to me, she asked her d-a-a-r-l-ling how his Party meeting came off. “We've elected a Tweedledee instead of a Tweedledum,” he said.
She glowed. What a freethinker her husband actually was! She repeated his answer for me lest its scathing political sarcasm be lost. Surely I, her ideological seducer, could liberate ideologically her already quite freethinking husband, whom she would then love both erotically and ideologically. But a minute later I froze. It was 1956: the Soviet armor had crushed (literally) the Hungarian uprising. And her husband expressed his approval of it casually and matter-of-factly as an event beyond any doubt or debate.
Every nation or creed assumes itself universally right. Thus the post-Roman European countries once believed that the rest of the world should be converted to Christianity, while the Arab countries that it should be converted to Islam. Soviet Russia had converted Eastern Europe to socialism, but — would you believe it? — some fascists in Hungary rose up in arms against socialism! Today the Bush administration and Natan Sharansky of Israel want to convert Iraq (and the entire world for good measure) to democracy, while “the supreme leaders” of China want to convert the world to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
Should I have argued with Rosie's husband to show him that (Soviet) socialism was not the blissful future of the entire world, as he assumed? But if he approved of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, what was my life to him? Certainly he could rush to the “organs of state security” and ask them where the hell they had been looking. “A certain Russian has been brainwashing my wife for years! At a dinner she had invited him to, he said what only our worst enemies could say. We sent our brave tankmen to fight those fascists in Budapest, while a fascist in Moscow has been allowed since 1952 to brainwash my wife!”
Apart from the danger of the “organs of state security,” my attempt to liberate ideologically Rosie's husband would have led at best to a row and a break between them. So I steered the conversation accordingly. She understood and played up to me. Together we told a very funny story about how the head of the English Department spoke in Russian at a conference of translators, and. . . .
We parted friends. True, Rosie had to love her husband only erotically. Not ideologically. But you cannot have everything.
For more information about Drexler's Foresight Institute and its lobbying in Congress, see www.foresight.org
To learn more about the Chris Phoenix report, suggesting a “nano Manhattan Project,” go to crnano.org.
For information about the Center for the Survival of Western Democracies, Inc., including how you can help, please e-mail me at navlev@cloud9.net.
The link to my book online is www.levnavrozov.com. You can also request our webmaster@levnavrozov.com to send you by e-mail my outline of my book.
It is my pleasant duty to express gratitude to the Rev. Alan Freed, a Lutheran pastor by occupation before his retirement and a thinker by vocation, for his help in the writing of this column.
Lev Navrozov's (navlev@cloud9.net] new book is available on-line at www.levnavrozov.com. To request an outline of the book, send an e-mail to webmaster@levnavrozov.com.
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