175. Bey, Career of a Fanatic; and Bey, Stalin. A Russian translation of Stalin was published in Riga (Filin, 1932). Bey elaborated his stories of Stalin’s criminal expropriations, amid exotic pageantry, in parallel volumes: Blood and Oil in The Orient (1931) and Twelve Secrets of the Caucasus (1931). See also Rieber, “Fun with my Buddy.” When Lev was six years old, his mother, Berta Slutzkin (née Ratner), from the Russian empire’s Pale of Settlement, had committed suicide (possibly by drinking acid); Nussimbaum’s father, Abraham, also an Ashkenazi Jew but born in Tiflis, profited from the fin-de-siècle Caspian oil boom, and cashed in his wells to the Nobels in 1913, with exquisite timing. In 1917, when revolution struck, father and son fled by ship to Kizil-Su (Red Water), in Turkestan, where they allegedly lived in a cinema. Then they fled to Persia by camel caravan, briefly returning to the Caucasus (by then under Ottoman occupation), and in 1921 they boarded a refugee ship (the Kleopatra) from Batum to Istanbul. In 1932, Bey married an heiress, Erika Loewendahl (who did not know his real origins), and resettled in Vienna. Following the Anschluss with Austria, Nussimbaum-Bey would relocate in March 1938 to Italy, but then went to Los Angeles. That same year, his wife publicly denounced him as a Jew and they divorced. “He told me he was of princely Arabian heritage,” she wrote. “I learned after our marriage . . . that he was just plain Leo Nussinbaum!” Erika was herself a Jew, the daughter of a shoe magnate from Leipzig who built up the successful Berlin franchise of the Czech company Bata. In Hollywood, while Lev was developing a script for Clark Gable, Erika started an affair with an older married man, a Viennese-born Hungarian visionary named René Fülöp-Miller, who wrote in German and was an acquaintance and rival of Nussimbaum-Bey. Nussimbaum would die in Sept. 1942 of Raynaud’s syndrome, having written some sixteen books in German, most of them translated into numerous languages, on Islam, desert escapades, the global oil industry, love in the Caucasus, Judaism’s “oriental” roots, Muhammad, Nicholas II, Lenin, and Stalin. Reiss, Orientalist.
176. Beria also had his party organization publish Stalin’s 1909 “Letter from the Caucasus,” and mandated its study in educational circles. Sukharev, “Litsedeistvo,” 105 (citing Partiinyi arkhiv Institutta istorii partii pri TsK KP gruzii, f. 13, op. 10, d. 11, l. 45–6); f. 14, op. 7, d. 34, l. 10; Sbornik materialov v sviazi.
177. Tovstukha and his assistants gathered an immense volume of materials: RGASPI, f. 71, op. 10, d. 192–218, 364–73.
178. Tucker, Stalin in Power, 335n.109; Brandenberger, “Stalin as Symbol,” 249–70 (at 256).
179. Maksimenkov, Bol’shaia tsenzura, 270 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 699, l. 61: Dec. 8. 1932), 271 (l. 62). Barbusse had written two books about his travels inside the Soviet Union, and both had flattered Stalin.
180. Van Ree, Political Thought, 164; Maksimenkov, “Kul’t”; RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 3087. When Ukrainian Communists wanted to publish a pamphlet on his life in connection with the 1933 fifteenth anniversary of the founding of the Communist Youth League, Stalin balked. That same year, he crossed out references to his contributions from the theses of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism on the Bolshevik party’s thirtieth anniversary. The next year he deleted the second part of the phrases “Lenin-Stalin party” and “teachings of Lenin and Stalin” from a publication. Davies and Harris, Stalin’s World, 149–50 (citing RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 3087, l. 30; d. 3118). A 1934 Pravda essay on Turukhansk, including an image of Stalin’s exile hut, elicited his disdain (“rubbish”). RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1494, l. 6–10. When the Youth League journal Young Guard prepared a writer’s travelogue across the USSR for publication, Stalin expunged mentions of visits to his places of exile. El’-Registan, “Neobychainoe puteshestvie”; RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, 1494, l. 121–5. Trotsky had underlined in the manuscript of one of his writings: “If personalities do not make history, then history makes itself by means of personalities.” Volkogonov, Trotsky, xxxii–xxxiii.
181. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 4572, l. 1 (July 1933); Sukharev, “Litsedeistvo,” 104; Gromov, Stalin, 143–4.
