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Lev Navrozov Archive
Thursday, January 21, 2010

From a villa better than Gromyko's in the USSR to a N.Y. apartment and freedom

Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972. His columns are today read in both English and Russian. To learn more about Mr. Navrozov's work with the Center for the Survival of Western Democracies, click here.

In Soviet Russia, I could not publish anything I wrote. A writer was to publish only variations on Soviet propaganda, which he or she would have to sign by his or her name. This was as impossible for me as it would be for a young girl expecting the love as described in great Russian poetry to become a prostitute.

  

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Since I and my wife knew English as well as our native Russian, because of our love for the English-speaking (free) countries, I began translating Russian classical literature into English, and the Soviet Publishing House of Literature in Foreign Languages sold my translations abroad and paid me well: the House valued me as a source of foreign currency.

Thus, I became so rich, as the first and last Russian who had never lived in an English-speaking country but was able to translate Russian classical literature into English, that I and my wife bought a three-storied villa in the Russian countryside. Even tourists from the English-speaking countries we invited for dinner were impressed. As for Soviet Russians, the wife of Gromyko, at one time the "President of Soviet Russia," complained that our villa (they could see from their abode) was better than theirs, with which the "Soviet government" provided them. A certain Navrozov (what was he, a translator?) with his family had a better villa than theirs. She bitterly concluded that even the Soviet society was still far from being fair.

In the midst of our happiness, as great as happiness can be in an unfree country, there was an apparently insane rumor, which turned out to be true. During the détente, to show how free Soviet Russia was, contrary to Westerners, who called it a "police state," etc., the Soviet rulers (read: "owners") of Russia selected several hundred prosperous Soviet Russians wishing to emigrate and permitted them to emigrate! The first such case since the early twenties!

But God thought our life in Russia was insufficiently paradisical and ascended myself, my wife, our son (now a poet), and my mother (my father was killed in WWII) into paradise--New York, New York.

My wife and I loved all English-speaking countries because they were free. But what would happen to these countries in our world where Russia and China have become totalitarian? The United States was the most militarily powerful of the free countries, and we associated this country with the protection and defense of the free world.

One of our dinner guests in our villa in Russia had been an American tourist Daniel Rose, a real estate developer, who owned a 22-storied building in New York, in which he reserved for us an apartment. Recently we have received a New Year postcard from him and his wife. Once you ascend to paradise, God knows how to arrange it all. The crucial "detail" of my life in New York is that I am now free to write what I want, and my first essay, entitled "Getting Out of Russia," which I wrote during our Moscow-New York ascension, was printed by the known and respected "Commentary" magazine (October 1972).

In 1975, Harper's Magazine Press published, with all the rave reviews expected, my 628-page volume entitled "The Education of Lev Navrozov" I had smuggled out of Russia. Volume 2 was ready, but I have not published it. Now it seemed to me that the epoch of lifelong works of many volumes was over. Instead, I began to write weekly (three-to-four pages) columns.

I had been living in Russia, a country which lost its freedoms in October 1917, though some "experts on Russia" believed that Russia that had been living under tsars would be the last country to listen to a Westerner like Marx. The free world of today may lose its freedoms as well, contrary to predictions, as did Russia in October 1917.

As a totally improbable miracle, I was now living in freedom. I had to help the free countries to preserve their freedom and possibly share their freedom with the now unfree countries.

But was my intention realistic? I wanted Americans to understand that the way they elect the U.S. president had nothing to do with how the British nominate their prime minister in Britain. In the last 20 years, critical to the survival of the free countries, the U.S. "general elections" have been electing nincompoops and/or traitors as "U.S. presidents." Decades ago it was not fatal, since the United States was defended by the two oceans and Canada against, for example, Hitler's invasion. But now the owners of China are developing outer space war, and outer space is above the United States, as it is above all countries. Today the U.S. nincompoops and/or traitors elected as the U.S, presidents mean the death of the United States and hence of all free countries, to the triumph of the People's Republic of China, created by Mao, possibly the most murderous slave owner in the world history.

It is so easy to ignore me for the benefit of numberless American professors and top officials. "What is he? A translator of Russian classical literature who ran away from Russia?"

In the past 20 years, America has been running helter-skelter to its doom. Take, for example, the three U.S. Presidents in the past 20 years. Let me just say about President Clinton that his photograph appears on the book cover (in the company of General Chi, who declared that from 100 million to 200 million Americans will be poisoned or infected in a Chinese attack) and within the book "Red Dragon Rising," published in 1999. He never expressed any suspicion of China's phenomenal military growth. President George W. Bush, without noticing China except for exchanges of pleasantries with its owners, tried for six years to conquer Iraq (population 26 million, as against about 300 million of the United States). The goal was to get Iraq's oil. Instead, he got shoes thrown at him by an Iraqi journalist. Obama has pronounced himself a "partner" of China, which is preparing for WWIII to make its power global, and adorning the White House Christmas tree last Christmas was the ornament of Mao, the most ruthless tyrant in the history of tyranny who founded the "People's Republic of China" and was its first dictator, who 60 years ago initiated China's military growth able to make it a global empire.  


Lev Navrozov can be reached by e-mail at navlev@cloud9.net. To learn more about and support his work at the Center for the Survival of Western Democracies, click here. If you intend to make a tax-exempt donation to the non-profit Center, please let us know via e-mail at navlev@cloud9.net, and we will send you all relevant information. Thank you.

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