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PARTISAN REVIEW
In the early 1970s, Belov embarked on a new project, a cycle of his–
torical novels about the destruction of the Russian village during the
Soviet period. This was the kind of scapegoating that the right-wing
circles within the literary establishment, the Communist Party, and the
KGB certainly encouraged, as it distracted the people from the present
by offering a salutary anti-Semitic narrative of the past. Prior to the
appearance of the complete edition, the first novel in Belov's cycle,
Kanuny: Roman-khronika kontsa 20-kh godov (The Eves: Nove/–
Chronicle of the Late 1920S,
1972-1976-1987; 1988), was published
in parts, in a regional journal, then in a publishing house with a nation–
alist orientation, then in a leading literary review
Novyi mir.
The title
refers to the time when preparations for the massive collectivization
were being mounted in the rural areas of Russia. The anti -Jewish thrust
of his novel becomes immediately apparent. From the top down to the
local level, the Party line is enforced by the Jews, who feel no connec–
tion to the land or its people.
The Eves
afforded a foretaste of Belov's potential for making histor–
ical fiction a domain of anti-Semitic myths. The real explosion came in
the next installment,
God veLikogo pereLoma: Khronika nachaLa 30-kh
godov (The Year of the Great Turn: Chronicle of the EarLy 1930s, 1989-
1994; 1994). Hailed by the right-wing critics, it portrayed collectiviza–
tion and the massive arrests, disenfranchisement, and exile of peasants
as an anti-Russian and anti-Christian conspiracy. Here is a quote from
the second paragraph, stylized as a chronicle penned by a monk: "In the
summer of 1929...the son of a Grodno pharmacist Iakov Arkad'evich
Epshtein (Iakovlev) was appointed in the Moscow Kremlin a Commis–
sar over all Christians and peasants
[nad vsemi khristiany i zem–
Lepashtsy]."
The ending borrows from the Orthodox liturgy, uses an
Old Russian instrumental case of the noun "khristianin" (a Christian),
and plays on the fact that in Old Russian the word for peasant,
"krest'ianin" was sometimes used in place of the word for Christian,
"khristianin." Belov treats collectivization as a Jewish plot, master–
minded by Lev Trotsky and executed by Jewish Bolsheviks. The Jews
are linked with satanic forces-a motif one also finds in other Russian
fiction of the 1970S and 1980s, including Leonid Leonov's last novel
Piramida [The Pyramid].
The Jewish minister of agriculture Iakovlev
carries in his briefcase pages "strewn with those signs of Satan which
programmed the life, or rather the death, of millions of people."
Iakovlev's committee on collectivization is referred to jocularly as
"zloveshchii sinklit, " roughly an "ominous gathering." An Orthodox
priest Father Perovskii says to a mid-level Jewish official in charge of
