Leonid Andreyev stands before one of his own drawings, 1909.
A few months ago, I wrote about Leonid Andreyev’s final book, Satan’s Diary. This is an extraordinary work that probably inspired Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.
What’s remarkable about Andreyev’s book is that it describes rich Americans’ role in the Russian Revolution via the fictionalized account of ‘Henry Wondergood’. Wondergood is actually Satan, who masquerades as a billionaire philanthropist from Illinois. The history which Satan’s Diary describes is dangerous to talk about even today.
The only non-fiction book I’m aware of that tries to explain rich Americans’ involvement in setting up the Bolshevik government is Anthony Sutton’s Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. It’s not often discussed in ‘safe’ historical research, because that type of ‘research’ is usually funded by bequests from wealthy philanthropists. From AnthonySutton.com:
Professor Richard Pipes of Harvard said in his book, Survival Is Not Enough: Soviet Realities and America’s Future (Simon & Schuster;1984): “In his three-volume detailed account of Soviet Purchases of Western Equipment and Technology . . . [Antony] Sutton comes to conclusions that are uncomfortable for many businessmen and economists. For this reason his work tends to be either dismissed out of hand as ‘extreme’ or, more often, simply ignored.”
However, if you study Soviet/Russian literature it’s pretty hard to ignore rich Americans’ and Brits’ support of the Bolsheviks: the best Russian writers were drawn to the cynicism and hypocrisy behind the new government in Moscow.
Leonard Andreyev was a child of the revolution who ended up being ‘eaten’ by it, much like Vsevolod Meyerhold. Andreyev’s literary patron in the USSR was Maxim Gorky, a close friend of Lenin and the state’s literary gatekeeper. This is how Countess Tolstoy described Andreyev’s writing:
“The poor new writers, like Andreyev, succeed only in concentrating their attention on the filthy point of human degradation and uttered a cry to the undeveloped, half-intelligence reading public, inviting them to see and to examine the decomposed corpses of human degradation and to close their eyes to God’s wonderful, vast world, with the beauties of nature, with the majesty of art, with the lofty yearnings of the human soul, with the religious and moral struggles and the great ideals of goodness– even with the downfall, misfortunes and weaknesses of such people as Dostoyevsky depicted… In describing all theses every true artists should illumine clearly before humanity not the side of filth and vice, but should struggle against them by illumining the highest ideals of good, truth, and the triumph over evil, weakness, and the vices of mankind… I should like to cry out loudly to the whole world in order to help those unfortunate people whose wings, given to each of them for high flights toward the understanding of the spiritual light, beauty, kindness, and God, are clipped by these Andreyevs.”
I hope readers will see why debased writing is useful for revolutionaries; this type of art aggravates discontent and demoralization which can then be deflected onto the targeted ‘regime’. I recommend reading the “Politicized Warfare: ‘Black’ and ‘White’ Propaganda” section of this University of Warwick essay.
Enemy soldiers were fed a diet of dance music, seedy entertainment and soft pornography (interspersed with advice on malingering) through one such ‘black’ station known as the ‘Soldatensender Calais’. Crossman even claimed that there was an ‘Astrological Programme’ whose audience inside Germany probably consisted of about forty individuals at most, but which it was believed was popular with senior members of the Nazi Party.33 Its aim was to play on the fact that many senior Nazis were known to have an interest in astrology, feeding them gloomy astrological predictions about their military campaigns.
Andreyev was celebrated by powerful revolutionaries as long as he was on their side, but when Andreyev became disillusioned with the Bolsheviks, he was blacklisted and forced into exile. By 1919, Andreyev had become a dangerous liability to the Bolsheviks and their American supporters.
The Soviet authorities are famous for how closely they spied on, and how cunningly they controlled artists under their sway: the sad fate of Bulgakov is a testimony to this. When Andreyev ran to Finland, did his spook handlers just disappear too?
I invite readers to examine the character of Andreyev’s American translator, Herman Bernstein, who wrote this preface to his 1920 edition of Satan’s Diary:
PREFACE TO SATAN’S DIARY
Leonid Andreyev’s last work was completed by the great Russian a few days before he died in Finland, in September 1919. But a few years ago the most popular and successful of Russian writers, Andreyev died almost penniless, a sad, tragic figure, disillusioned, broken-hearted over the tragedy of Russia.
A year ago Leonid Andreyev wrote me that he was eager to come to America, to study this country and familiarize Americans with the fate of his unfortunate countrymen. I arranged for his visit to this country and informed him of this by cable. But on the very day I sent my cable the sad news came from Finland announcing that Leonid Andreyev died of heart failure.
Reading that excerpt made my hair stand on end. Why? Andreyev fled Russia for Finland ready to warn Americans about what was really going on in Bolshevik Russia. He told his translator, Herman Bernstein, about his intention to talk in America; Bernstein took charge of the travel arrangements which, strangely, dragged on for over a year. A few days before Andreyev was finally set to go, he died of heart failure.
Who was Herman Bernstein?
Herman Bernstein, just prior to being made ambassador to Albania by Herbert Hoover.
Herman Bernstein wasn’t just any old translator, but a deeply connected political operator within the Wilson and Hoover administrations. Herman Bernstein was the Wolf Blizter of his day; he was sent with the American Expeditionary Forces to Russia to ‘report’ on the war much like Winston Churchill ‘reported’ on the Boer War and Nick Denton ‘reported’ on the fall of communism in Hungary for the FT. Herman Bernstein was a propagandist who worked for the same interests that backed Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover: wealthy, Anglo-American financiers and other assorted billionaires. Henry Wondergoods.
I propose, readers, that Andreyev was being watched– and probably ‘contained’– by friends of the Bolsheviks overseas and that Bernstein was one of these ‘watchers’.
Bernstein was a very busy man in the years leading up to Andreyev’s death. He was sent to cover the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 as well as the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, where Germany was unjustly saddled with crushing reparations payments to the UK and France. (New York financial interests were heavily represented throughout the post-WWI peace negotiations and had spies in the US delegation who leaked confidential treaty information to favored bankers back in NYC. )
Apart from his journalistic work, Bernstein made a career out of leaking documents, a set of which were published by Alfred Knopf in 1918 as The Willy-Nicky Correspondence: Being the Secret and Intimate Telegrams Exchanged Between the Kaiser and the Tsar which included a foreword by Theodore Roosevelt (US president 1901-1909). This leaked correspondence painted the Kaiser as a monster at a time when Anglo-American elitists were working hard to prove that Germany was solely responsible for WWI and therefore justify their demand for crushing ‘reparations’ payments. The economic privation caused by these reparations, and the economic mismanagement they resulted in (people were starving in Germany), is often credited with fueling the rise of National Socialism. Regular readers will remember that Alfred Knopf was a favored publisher amongst the FDR/Churchill spy network.
Alfred Abraham Knopf, publisher of Herman Bernstein and British ‘illegal’ spy Roald Dahl.
Bernstein ran amongst the highest levels of Anglo-American war propagandists. Bear this in mind when you evaluate the attention Bernstein paid to Andreyev in 1919: it was extremely important to America’s power elite to sanitize what Andreyev might say. The political import of Andreyev’s message was on par with painting Germany as the aggressor in WWI.
Why haven’t we all heard of Satan’s Diary?!
Bernstein had excellent literary connections in Russia and the United States, both before and after the Bolshevik Revolution. He corresponded with all the big names, from Count Tolstoy to Leon Trotsky. Bernstein’s contacts meant he had extraordinary access to writers like Andreyev, for whom he became a literary gatekeeper responsible for translating much of Andreyev’s work into English– eight works between 1909 and 1923. Andreyev was a literary superstar who needed careful ‘handling’.
Bernstein served his masters’ interests so well that Hoover made him ambassador to Albania from 1930-1933. He spent the rest of his life championing Zionism and the state of Israel.
When I read that excerpt from the preface to Satan’s Diary, I don’t hear a concerned friend of Andreyev. I hear the words deft behind-the-scenes operator who’s just solved a problem for his bosses. It’s not good for men like Bernstein to have disillusioned Russian revolutionaries talk about ‘Henry Wondergoods’ to the conservative American masses.
IF Bernstein was a gatekeeper, why not have Andreyev’s work burned? Why take on the dangerous task of translating it into English? Andreyev was a very celebrated author; people outside of the intelligence community knew about what he was writing and his views. A book by Andreyev simply couldn’t just disappear– that’s why Andreyev was so dangerous once he became disillusioned. The next best thing for Bernstein and his patrons was to control the reception of Satan’s Diary: one way to do this was to control how it was translated. If you read Bernstein’s preface, it’s full of nebulous phrases like: [Andreyev was] “disillusioned, heart-broken over the tragedy of Russia”; [Satan's Diary is an] “absorbing satire on human life”; or “He [Andreyev] portrayed Satan coming to this earth to amuse himself and play”.
All of those phrases are grotesque generalizations designed to obfuscate: Andreyev was disillusioned specifically with Bernstein’s friends the Bolsheviks and their billionaires; Satan’s Diary is a satire of the Bolshevik government’s hypocritical funders; and Satan came to do exactly as the Bolsheviks’ American funders did. Bernstein’s weasel-words remind me of Bill Colby’s attempt to push blame for his drug-dealing off onto ‘the CIA in general’!
I wish that I had a copy of the original Russian version of Satan’s Diary; given the provenance of Bernstein, I can’t help believe that the Russian version is far more cutting and explicit in its satire of America’s ‘great and good’.
