Veniamin Sverdloff

 I never met my grandfather, Veniamin Sverdloff, who became known as "Benjamin (Benny) Swerdlow", but, I've accumulated knowledge of him from relatives and historical research.

My mother was Sophie, his youngest daughter. Veniamin (Benny) was married to a beautiful young woman named Mary Wiener. They had six children and lived in Philadelphia from 1920 to 1932.

Mary died in 1932, allegedly a suicide from poison. She was 39 years old and left behind young children. My mother was raised by her older sister, Eva, and the others survived the best they could. It was a very difficult time for them.

Even though Benny had a thriving furniture business, and was an American citizen, he returned to the Soviet Union, in 1932, where he was a public official under Joseph Stalin. He was a Commissar of Transportation and  Education.  At one point, he was President of the Red Cross of Russia.

Throughout this period of his life in Stalin's USSR, he never contacted his children. It was if he dropped off the face of the Earth.

He lived in Moscow until 1939, where he became a paper casualty of Stalin's purges. Although he was recorded as being executed, he returned to the USA in 1940, and lived in California.

As a young man, along with his admiration in Lenin, like Yakov Sverdlov, he pursued opportunities in NYC, first arriving in NY in 1913. At this time, he was business partners with an infamous character, Sidney Reilly, the "superspy", who  has been called one of the templates for the fictional James Bond. 

Ironically, in contrast to his professed beliefs in Communism, his affairs in the USA involved purely capitalist ventures. He was listed in Immigration records as being a "stock broker" and in other early records as a "banker." In RIchard Spence's book on Sidney Reilly, "Trust No One",  he states that Benny was involved in arms dealing, specifically with Remington.

He returned to Russia, around 1915, and finally immigrated with Mary in late 1916, prior to the revolution, and became a citizen of the USA.

They moved to Philadelphia. and he opened up a furniture manufacturing business, being an expert carver and craftsman, a a skill that he honed from his father Mikhail Sverdlov, and in turn, he taught his son, Julius, this trade.

 Julius, "Jules" was my favorite uncle, and he  was more like a grandfather to me. My knowledge of the Sverdlovs, and Benny came from his memory. He was already in his 20s when his father went back to the USSR, leaving the kids behind. Unlike my mother, he was very close to his dad, and idealized him. He shared great pride in his artisan craft, and joined the Freemasons, which his father belonged to, as well.

Benny and Mary's first son was Jacob, obviously named in honor of his idolized older brother, Yakov. He was hit by a trolly car when he was 10 years old, and became profoundly injured, never to hear or speak. Yet, he went to Philadelphia School for the Deaf, and did pretty well for himself. His next two sons were Charles and Julius.

My uncle Jules  loved singing, another pasttime he attributed to his father. Ironically, Veniamin, for his avid endorsement in the basic antidialectical materialism dogmas of Communism, ended his days singing in the Synagogue as one of their cantors.

It seems incongruous with who you would imagine helped to run Stalin's machine of godless iron government, but, many things about Benny seem to be contradictions. The ambiguities help make him interesting to me, but, I cannot gloss over his participation in the brutality of Stalin's dictatorship, and the suffering it caused.

A fascinating contrasting story of three brothers existed in Yakov, Benny, and their oldest brother, Zinovi Sverdlov. They were destined to have completely opposite paths in life, yet, retained familal affinities which were stronger than the political and religious ideologies and lifestyles that should have alienated them from eachother.

Benny was once as dedicated to the cause of Revolution and Socialism as his famous older brother, Yakov Sverdlov, the renown Bolshevik, credited for ordering the death of the Romanovs. as acting President of the Secretariat, the governing body of the fledgling Soviet Union.

As Yakov's younger brother, Benny took part in the activities that led to the Russian Revolution. He was first arrested with Yakov in 1905, in a protest march for Maxim Gorky's arrest.

The famous writer, Maxim Gorky, was a family friend of the Sverdlovs. It has been written that they became acquainted at the 1896 Nizhny World Fair. I believe they knew one another before then.

He formally sponsored the Sverdlov's oldest son, Zinovi Sverdlov, and Zinovi, as an adopted son changed his last name to "Peshkoff" which was Gorky's real name. Some books speculate that he adopted him because the family was poor, but, that wasn't the case, or that as a Jew, he couldn't go to secondary school, but, that wasn't the case with Yakov or Veniamin.

Mikhail's engraving business was lucrative enough to have had notable apprentices, including Genrick Yagoda, the future NKVD, secret police chief, who ended up marrying Yakov's niece, Ida Auerbach, daughter of Sofia Sverdlov. Leon Trotsky was another apprentice who worked as a chemist in Mikhail's shop.

Mikhail and Elizaveta were able to educate their children. They weren't exactly nobility, but, they weren't poor.

Since Yakov and Veniamin were able to go to secondary schools, the purpose for Zinovi's adoption seems more complex. I've discussed with Maxim Gorky's relatives the idea that Zinovi may have been Maxim's natural son with Elizaveta Sverdlova, and they agree that it could be very possible.

The resemblence between Zinovi and Maxim is much closer than Zinovi and his brothers or with Zinovi and his father Mikhail.

Zinovi converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity, which would be highly unusual for a son of a Jewish merchant, for just the opportunity to go to college. Zinovi's conversion wasn't superficial. He considered himself a Christian, his inspiration for life being credited to the classic book, by Tomas Kempis, "Imitation of Christ."

Under any typical circumstances, someone like Zinovi, who converted to Christianity, would be completely shunned by his family, but, he retained a close relationship with my grandfather. When my parents were married, he brought Zinovi to the affair. They were impressed! He had considerable charisma, and was a gracious and lovely man.

 My mother was exposed to Zinovi enough to have fond memories of him, but, for all of Zinovi's many accomplishments, he always represented himself to be  merely a "playwright and actor." They knew he was "famous" but, never connected him to being a General, Statesman and Ambassador to China.

To contrast the three brothers, born in consecutive years, Zinovi left the family, to initially follow the Socialist writer, Gorky, until he rejected the Communists and wound up in France, as a soldier in the French Foreign Legion. He became estranged from Gorky for a decade or more, but, wound up reconciling his differences with Gorky, and his brothers, after the Revolution and first world war.

Zinovi, became a war hero in WWI, in the French Foreign Legion, as a Major. He wrote a biography of his military experiences in the 1920s called, "The Bugle Sounds." It was literally the basis, and inspiration for "Beau Geste" and the screenplay was based on his life and book. 

Unlike his brother Yakov Sverdlov, the ultimate proletariat hero, he  embraced a privileged life in France, marrying blue bloods, and was welcome in all aspects of European aristocratic circles. Where Winston Churchhill despised Yakov Sverdlov, he admired Zinovi. 

Veniamin, the youngest, bounced between an affinity for wealth and class, and his lifelong affiliation with the Bolshevik revolutionaries, and their idealogies.

In 1926, Trotsky wrote a belated tribute to Yakov Sverdlov, who died in 1919, at 33 years old. It was a magnificent portrait of him, and he dedicated it to Veniamin and Sara, the two Sverdlov's who were living in the United States. It was apparent that while Veniamin was pleased to enjoy a fruitful life in Philadelphia, the loyalties and connections to the Socialists were always on the flip side.

He returned to the USSR, and seemed to reject his American life, even his own family. In the 1930s, Stalin became increasingly more unstable and paranoid, persecuting the very comrades he once stood shoulder to shoulder with. He clearly had a problem with the Sverdlov family, because, most of them were at the very least, imprisoned and persecuted. Some like Genrick Yagoda were executed. 

According to "official" records, he sentenced Veniamin Sverdlov to death in 1939. Obviously, he didn't die, but, was exiled back to the USA.  I've discussed this with several historians, who were familiar with Stalin's propensity to have symbolic executions. By sparing his life, he had more control over him. He became a kind of ghost, and the psychological effects were amenable to Stalin's purposes for him.

Back in the United States, he had a comfortable enough life. He had a nice home, enjoyed singing in the synagogue, and  tried to mend fences, reaching out to his children.

I've read my mom's correspondences with him in the 1950s. He came to visit her, but, my dad had a visceral hatred for him, that he didn't understand, himself. He wouldn't let him spend a night under his roof, and he didn't. My brother remembers him, and he reconnected with my Aunt Eva, and my cousins got a chance to know him.

In the mid-50s, he retreated from the West Coast, and ended up staying with my Uncle Chuck in Cincinatti Ohio. There, he opened up to his grandson about his family, and Yakov Sverdlov, who he took pride in all those years later. I believe he was paranoid by the McCarthy mess. 

He was an extremely complex man, with a complicated life, and I cannot even begin to describe him adequately, but, this is a brief sketch of who he was, and his family, who are better known in Russia.

(My  bio may seem like it's all over the place, but, it's difficult to frame these people's lives without lengthy explanations. Like aliens from another planet, it's hard for me to create a recognizable nexus that makes sense to us in this day and age.)