Arkady Vaksberg - The Murder of Maxim Gorky

T he last twenty years of Gorkys life are filled with riddles, contradictions, and many unanswered questions, but mostly with sorrow and high drama. Soviet propaganda was more than successful in its attempts to hide the truth about the life and death of the great writer. There is hardly another figure of equal renown in the past century whose life was steeped to such a degree in lies, falsifications, and suppression of the facts.

Since those most directly involved in the falsifications were connected in one way or another to Gorkys spiritual and physical destruction, and the dissemination of lies was promoted by official, state-sanctioned Gorky scholars, it was not easy to shed the ingrained stereotypes. Fortunately, the archives were opened slightly (then partially closed again) and this, along with a lifting of secrecy from many sources and documents, helped me get at least somewhat closer to the truth. The most difficult aspect was comparing what was previously known against what has been newly revealed. The resulting book presents to the reader a different Gorky, not quite similar to, yet not completely unlike, the one known by several generations of deceived readers.

The archives of the Federal Security Service (the FSB, the former KGB), the Russian Center for Preservation and Study of Records of Modern History (RTsKhIDNI, which includes the former archive of the Communist Party of the CPSS), as well as secret collections of the Gorky Archive provided the most useful sources. I consider it my duty to point out that the employees of this last archive are carrying out a very important mission, bringing to light extremely valuable documents, the suppression of which over decades can only be described as a crime perpetrated by the Communist regime against the whole world, for Gorky belongs to humanity and not to the Kremlin. Although I differ on many points with current Gorky biographers, it would be unfair not to recognize the service of those who reject the idea of a monopoly on the truth and instead help introduce previously unknown Gorky documents into the scholarly discourse.

This book is a documentary narrative concentrated on the last twenty years of an historical personality unlike any other. In many ways a book by one writer about another is necessarily subjective. But what else can any work by a writer be? In this book there is not one single fact that cannot be supported by a document or the carefully checked testimony of contemporaries. But the interpretation of these facts belongs, naturally, to the author.

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and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Published in the United States by

Enigma Books

580 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10018

www.enigmabooks.com

Copyright 2007 by Enigma Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-929631-62-9

ISBN-10: 1-929631-62-6

Translated from the Russian by Todd Bludeau

All photos courtesy of the David King Collection.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the written permission of Enigma Books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vaksberg, Arkadii.

The murder of Maxim Gorky : a secret execution / Arkady Vaksberg ; translated by Todd Bludeau.

p. : ill. ; cm.

ISBN-13: 978-1-929631-62-9

ISBN-10: 1-929631-62-6

Includes index.

1. Gorky, Maksim, 1868-1936--Death and burial. 2. Authors, Russian--20th century--Biography. I. Bludeau, Todd. II. Title.

PG3465.Z9 D43 2007

891.78/309