Marina Tsvetaeva’s Letter to Lavrentiy Beria, at that time the chief of the USSR’s Security Organs under Stalin. By writing this letter, the poet is trying to plead directly with Beria on the behalf of her husband and her daughter, both at that time imprisoned under obscure or/and falsified charges.
Dated: DECEMBER 23RD, 1939
Postmarked: GOLITSINO, BELORUSSIAN RAILWAY LINE, REST HOME FOR WRITERS
Comrade Beria,
I am appealing to You in regards to the matter of my husband, Sergey Yakovlevich Efron-Andreev, and my daughter — Ariadna Sergeevna Efron, arrested: daughter — August 27th, husband - October 10th of this current year 1939.
But before I could discuss them, I must tell You a few words about myself.
I am a writer, Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva.
In 1922 I left the USSR with a Soviet passport and remained abroad — in Czech Republic and France — until June 1939; that is, 17 years. Throughout that time I had no involvement in the political life of the emigre community, — I lived only for my family and my writings. I contributed myself mainly to the journals "Russian Will" and "Contemporary Notes", for some time was being printed in the newspaper "Latest News", but was removed from it in response to my overt salutations of Mayakovskiy. And generally speaking — within the emigre community I was and was known as a loner. ("Why is she not traveling off to Soviet Russia?"). In 1936, I spent the entire winter translating for the French Revolutionary Choir (Chorale Revolutionnaire) Russian Revolutionary songs, old and new ones alike, and in-between them — the Funeral March ("You've fallen as victims in ominous combat"), and out of the Soviet ones — a song from (the Soviet film comedy) "The Jolly Fellas", "Wide is that field – Polyushko", and many other ones. My songs were being sung.
In 1937 I resumed my Soviet citizenship, and in June of 1939 received permission to return to the Soviet Union. And so, I returned, alongside my 14-year old son Georgiy, on June 18th, 1939, on the steamship "Maria Ulyanova", at that time also transporting some Spaniards.
The reasons for my return to the native land — start with the passionate longing for it of my entire family: of my husband — Sergey Efron, of my daughter — Ariadna Efron (who traveled out first, in March of 1937), and of my son Georgiy who, despite having been born abroad, had since his earliest years passionately dreamed about the Soviet Union. The desire to provide him with homeland and with futurity. My own desire to work in my home. And my absolute loneliness within the emigre society, with which I had long since ceased to be connected in any way whatsoever. ...
If it's necessary to say a few words about my background — I am a daughter of the accomplished professor of the Moscow University, Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev, a philologist of Europe-wide renown (he discovered an ancient dialect, per his work entitled "The Ossky Engravings"), the founder and curator of the Museum of Fine Arts — presently the Museum of Figurative Arts. The conception of the Museum is his conception and the entire labor of the Museum's founding — the raising of monetary funds, the consolidation of original collections (among them — one of the world's best collections of Egyptian visual art, procured by my father from the collector Mosolov), selection and ordering of casts, and of the entirety of the Museum's equipment — is wholly my father's labor, a selfless labor of love and of his life's 14 final years. One of my earliest recollections: mother and father are traveling to the Ural mountains to pick out the marble for the Museum. I remember the marble samples he brought back. My father refused his officially-allocated apartment, which he was entitled to after the opening of the Museum, as its director, and instead turned it into 4 apartments for low-wage day-laborers. The whole of Moscow showed up to his funeral — all of the countless women and men who would listen to him lecture at the University, as well as at the Upper Level Women's Courses and at the Conservatory, as well as the workers at both of his Museums (for 25 years he was also the director of the Rumyantsev Museum).
My mother — Maria Alexandrovna Tsvetaeva, maiden surname Mein — was a highly-regarded and accomplished musician, as well as my father's primary assistant in the creation of the Museum. She died far too early.
That's it about me.
Now about my husband — Sergey Efron.
Sergei Yakovlevich Efron is the son of the famous Revolutionary activist for the Peoples' Will — Elizaveta Petrovna Durnovo (among the Peoples' Will members "Lisa Durnovo") and Yakov Konstantinovich Efron. (The family still keeps his prison card, from his youthful days, and marked with the following official seal: "Yakov Konstantinovich Efron. State criminal.") I was constantly hearing stories about Lisa Durnovo, recounted to me with love and admiration by Peter Alekseevich Kropotkin (*The philosopher of Anarchism and scholar - Translator's Note*), who returned in 1917. And Nikolai Morozov often fondly recalls her to this day. There are many stories about her in Stepnyak’s book “Underground Russia,” and her portrait is hanging today in the Kropotkin Museum.
Sergei Efron's childhood takes place in a revolutionary house, amid continuous searches and arrests. Almost the whole family spends time in prison: mother - in the Peter and Paul Fortress, older children - Peter, Anna, Elizavetta and Vera Efron - in various prisons. The eldest son, Peter, twice attempts to escape. He faces the death penalty and emigrates abroad. In 1905, Sergei Efron, a 12-year-old boy, is already being entrusted with revolutionary assignments by his mother. In 1908, Elizaveta Petrovna Durnovo-Efron, facing the prospect of life-long imprisonment in a fortress, emigrates with her youngest son. In 1909, she tragically dies in Paris, ”her 13-year-old son, monstrously teased by other kids at school, committs suicide. She follows him. One could read about her death in the contemporaneous issue of "Le Humanité".
In 1911, Sergei Efron and I meet. I am 17 and he is 18 years old. He is struggling with tuberculosis and remains devastated by the tragic deaths of his mother and brother. He channels a deep seriousness far beyond his years. I immediately decide that I would never, no matter what, ever separate from him and in the January of 1912 he and I marry.
In 1913, Sergei Efron enrolls at the Moscow University, the Faculty of Philology. But the War begins and he goes to the front in the role of a brother of mercy (*a male nurse*). In October of 1917, he, after recently graduating from the Peterhof Ensign School, fights in Moscow, joins the White Army's ranks and immediately goes to Novocherkassk, where he is one of the first 200 people to arrive. Throughout his entire service in the Volunteer (*White*) Army (1917 - 1920) - he continuously remains in active service, never sitting out at headquarters. He is wounded twice.
All of the above, I think, had already been gathered by you from his previous questionnaires. But here's something that might not be as well-known: he not only refused to shoot a single prisoner of war, but would actively save every single person he could from being executed, instead conscripting them into his machine gunner squad. The turning point in his personal ideological convictions was the occasion when he happened to observe the execution of a Red Army commissar. In front of his eyes was the commissar's face. And it was the face with which this commissar met his death which made the decisive impact. As he would say, “At that very moment, I realized that our mission went directly against that of the Russian Peoples'.”
“But how does a son of Lisa Durnovo’s turn up in the ranks of the Whites, and not the Red Army, in the first place?” — For whatever it's worth, Sergey Efron saw his service in the White Army as his life's fateful mistake. I will add that this mistake was not his alone. Whereas he was a very young man during his service, countless older and fully developed persons served alongside him. In the Volunteer Army, he thought to have recognized the salvation of Russia and a power of truth. When he realized that he was wrong, he disavowed his former views completely and absolutely - never once looking back.
But back to his biography. After the White Army - he starves for a while in Gallipoli and Constantinople, and, in 1922, settles down in the Czech Republic, in Prague, where he enters the University - to graduate from the Faculty of History and Philology. In 1923, he founds the student magazine In One's Own Ways (unlike the rest of the student magazines, which presumably must have been walking, and doing everything else, in others' ways) and then founds the only Student Union based on Democratic principles, unlike the existing pro-Monarchist ones. In his journal, he - the first in all of the Russian emigration - begins reprinting abroad Soviet prose (1924). From this moment onwards, his “leftward-veer” steadily increases.
Having moved to Paris in 1925, he joins a group of Eurasianist theorists, becoming one of the editors of Versty magazine, from which the whole emigration would jointly recoil. If I am not mistaken, it was since 1927 that Sergei Efron was being widely taunted by fellow immigrants and nicknamed "Bolshevik". He then founds the newspaper Eurasia (it is in its pages that I salutated Mayakovsky, who was at that time giving lectures and readings in Paris), which the emigration would refer to as overt Bolshevik propaganda. The "Eurasians" eventually split: right-wing versus left-wing. The left-wing, headed by Sergei Efron, was soon decommissioned as an entity, merging with the Pro-Homecoming Alliance.
At what point exactly Sergey Efron began to engage in active Soviet work, I don’t know. This, however, should be known to you from his previous profiles. I think it must have been around 1930. But what I do reliably know and am sure of is the reality of his passionate and unwavering faith in the Soviet Union and its future, and of his passionate service. How glad he was whenever he read in the newspapers about the latest Soviet achievement! How radiant he would grow after learning about even the slightest of its economic successes! ("Now we have this and that ... Soon we will have this and that and that..."). With me here I have an important witness of all this: our son, who had grown up to the sound of such exclamations, which is all that he would hear ever since he was five years old.
(*After the arrests of Sergey and Ariadna Efron...*), I appealed to the Literary Fund, and we (*Georgiy Efron, Tsvetaeva's son and she) were given a room for 2 months, at the Writers' Rest Home in Golitsyn. After the arrest of my husband, I was left completely without means. Fellow writers had arranged for me a number of translations from Georgian, French, and German. Even when I was in Bolshevo (Bolshevo station, Northern Railway, Village of Novy Byt, cottage 4/33) I translated a number of Lermontov poems into French for the Revue de Moscou and International Literature. Some of them have already been printed.
I do not know what my husband is being accused of, but I know that he is not capable of any betrayal, double-dealing, duplicity, or treachery. I've known him - from 1911 to 1939 - for almost 30 years, but I knew then what I still know about him ever since our first day together: that he is a man of the greatest purity, a champion of the most genuine values of sacrifice and responsibility. Friends and enemies alike would say the same thing about him. Even in exile, in an environment most hostile to his being, no one accused him of bribery or any form of corruption, and even those unsympathetic to him would rationalize his communism as "blind enthusiasm." Even the detectives who searched us were amazed at the poverty of our home and at the stiffness of his bed (“How?! Did Mr. Efron truly sleep on this bed?”). Everyone spoke of him with great reverence, and the investigator himself simply said to me: - "Mr. Efron was an enthusiast, but enthusiasts can also be mistaken..."
But he literally lacked even the possibility of being mistaken about anything here, in the Soviet Union, because throughout the two years since his return here, he was continuously sick and would hardly get to leave the house at all.
I will conclude this appeal with a call for justice. The man whom I'm speaking up for had served his homeland and the idea of communism with his entire soul and body, with the truth of his word and the sureness of his deed. Moreover, he is seriously ill. Frankly, I do not know how much longer he has left to live - especially after a shock such as this. It will be terrible indeed were he to perish while remaining wrongfully accused.
If this arrest is the result of a private denunciation — and is, as such, based on what must be altogether dishonest and maliciously selective, incomplete materials — then you would be better served by instead checking more closely into this denouncer.
And if this is indeed a mistake, then I am begging you, please correct it before it's too late.
Marina Tsvetaeva