The Eitingons by Mary-Kay Wilmers

Orlando Figes on a family quest into the dark recesses of Stalin's Russia

  1. The Eitingons: A Twentieth-Century Story

Since 1991, there has been a steady flow of tourists travelling to the former Soviet Union to find their roots. Most have looked for ancestors who were lost in the revolution or the Stalinist terror, victims in one form or another. Few have gone in search of ancestors who were perpetrators of the Stalinist oppression. Mary-Kay Wilmers is an exception. Not many people have more skeletons in their family closet.

The Eitingons were a wealthy clan of Russian Jewish fur traders from the Shklov and Orsha areas in the old Pale of Settlement. They fled to Moscow, as soon as it was possible for Jews to do so, following the outbreak of the first world war. The revolution of 1917 was a liberation for the Eitingons, as it was for most of Russia's Jews.

Leonid (aka Naum) Eitingon (1899-1981) was the cousin, or possibly the brother, of Wilmers's maternal grandfather, although no one can be sure. A committed Bolshevik, he joined the Cheka (the forerunner of the KGB) in 1920 and rose to become one of Stalin's "killerati", a Soviet spy and assassin in the Russian emigré communities of Harbin and Constantinople, and then Stalin's man in Spain during the civil war. He organised the murder of Trotsky, recruiting Ramón Mercader to infiltrate his home in Mexico and kill him with an ice pick. "As long as I live," a grateful Stalin said of Eitingon, "not a hair of his head shall be touched."

Max Eitingon (1881-1943) was another cousin of Wilmers's grandfather. Fondly recalled by relatives, he was a friend and colleague of Sigmund Freud, and himself a leading figure in the psychoanalytic movement in Berlin. He financed it from the immense wealth of his father's company, which enjoyed a virtual monopoly on fur exports from the Soviet Union.

By 1934, when it had contracts worth $85m with the Soviet government, the running of the company had been taken over by Motty Eitingon (1885-1956), Max's other cousin, and Wilmers's great-uncle. Her mother had been travelling with Max on a luxury liner from Europe to New York in 1935 when she met Wilmers's father, the Englishman Charles Wilmers. Motty was investigated by the FBI on five occasions between 1942 and 1954. His Soviet connections raised suspicions during the cold war, although they were probably no more than business ties.

More suspicions built up around Max because of his friendship with the singer Nadezhda Plevitskaya and her husband General Sklobin, who had been involved in the abduction of a White Russian general in Paris and the fabrication of evidence against the Bolshevik generals who were purged and murdered by Stalin in 1937. Was Max connected to Leonid? In 1988 there was an ill-tempered debate in the New York Review of Books after Stephen Shwartz claimed that Max had been a Soviet agent – a charge refuted by the historian (and former communist) Theodore Draper.

This is the morass into which we enter with The Eitingons. Mary-Kay Wilmers, the editor of the London Review of Books, has been working on this book for 20 years. She has uncovered new material on the early life of Leonid from the former Soviet archives, travelled round the world in search of leads, and considered all the available evidence with the scepticism needed for a subject dogged by many layers of secrecy, lies and misrepresentations. The trouble is that Wilmers wants to give us everything from her research, even when it goes nowhere, and to put herself into the narrative at every opportunity. The result is an over-long and sometimes self-indulgent book, which sits uncomfortably between historical writing and a literary version of Who Do You Think You Are?

Wilmers does not flinch from the dark side of Leonid – he was a cold killer – but she is disinclined to think the worst of Max. At times she reveals an angry irritation at suggestions that he might have been a Soviet agent. Wielding her pen like an ice pick, she lays into the distinguished Cambridge scholar Alexander Etkind, for example, for proposing, reasonably enough, that the money Max had given to the psychoanalytic movement had come from the Soviet government (an idea supported by the uncited memoirs of the Hungarian analyst Sandor Rado, who knew Eitingon in Berlin). In the end, the mystery of the Eitingons remains. It will not go away: the KGB archives have been firmly closed.

Leonid was arrested during the "Doctors' Plot" in 1951, when the paranoid Stalin thought he was surrounded by Jewish assassins. Refused rehabilitation after Stalin's death, he spent 12 years in jail. Visiting her relatives in Moscow, Wilmers calls on us to understand their "suffering" and to share the viewpoint of Leonid's stepdaughter, a KGB official, on the Eitingons: "My family did some ugly things but I understand why they did them." But can we really understand?

Orlando Figes's books include The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (Penguin).

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