Lev Navrozov’s Epitaph: Dissident, Intellectual, Crackpot

While I could see the pettiness in Navrozov’s compulsive polemics, I was impressed by his verbal brilliance and intrigued by the man himself. Then in his early 50s, Navrozov was vastly erudite, quick-witted, passionately argumentative, and conspicuously eccentric; I remember him squinting nearsightedly at his address book as he looked up his own phone number to call his wife or his address to call a cab home, the very picture of the absent-minded intellectual.

For about a year after that, Navrozov was a Novaya Gazeta regular; I translated into Russian his thrice-weekly column for the daily News World, later the New York City Tribune—part of the then-considerable media empire of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. His main focus was Soviet villainy and American naïveté, particularly that of liberals, the mainstream media, and above all the New York Times. There was plenty to criticize: Those were the days when bien pensant opinion recognized the awfulness of Communist regimes but still leaned toward moral semi-equivalence (yes, Soviet human rights abuses are terrible, but we have our own problems, and they have their own worldview that emphasizes the right to housing and health care). Yet Navrozov’s polemics often made me cringe. He exaggerated and fudged to make his liberal targets look worse, and his warnings of the Soviet threat actually did veer into paranoid fantasy. One column, as I recall, asserted that a planned Soviet takeover of Mexico in the 1960s was narrowly averted by sheer luck—based on an alleged 20-year-old teatime chat with the wife of a high-level Soviet official who had a country house next door.

Navrozov really did, in his Soviet life, have a dacha in a village reserved for the Soviet elite; his unique niche as a highly skilled translator into English allowed him almost unparalleled privilege by Soviet standards. Privately, he had loathed the Soviet regime as a barbarous slave state, and worshipped the West—and America in particular—as a beacon of freedom and civilization.

In 1972, when the Soviet Union allowed some Jewish emigration as a concession to détente, Navrozov, the son of a Jewish mother, left with his wife and teenage son—and smuggled out on microfilm a manuscript in which he hoped to reveal the true nature of the Soviet beast.

That book, The Education of Lev Navrozov: A Life in the Closed World Once Called Russia, was published by Harper’s Magazine Press in 1975. More than 600 pages long, it was roughly 10 percent childhood memoir (of just the author’s first seven years) and 90 percent social and political analysis of the Soviet system. That system, Navrozov posited, was from the start the work of ruthless gangsters for whom Communist ideology was a mere tool and whose only goal was absolute power over an enslaved populace. Moreover, he argued, just as Lenin and his Bolsheviks “conquered” Russia in 1917 because the naïve liberals in charge after the monarchy’s fall were blind to their perfidy and evil, the Soviet Union was winning against the West because Western democracies were led by equally innocent “adult babies.”

The book won plaudits from a few eminent figures, Bellow among them. But the reviews were mixed, generally commending the personal parts and the quality of Navrozov’s prose while dismissing the political commentary as shrill, simplistic and heavy-handed. Part of the negativity was very likely due, as Navrozov believed, to political bias against his supposedly extreme anti-Communism; the Carnegie Council’s Worldview journal chided him for “anti-Soviet diatribes.” And yet on the whole, I don’t think the critics—some of whom, such as the New York Review of Books’ Helen Muchnic, praised other staunchly anti-Soviet authors including Alexander Solzhenitsyn—were unfair. Navrozov’s tome does get bogged down in plodding polemical screeds and repetitive gimmicks (e.g., the monikers “pseudo-tsar-god I’ and “pseudo-tsar-god II” for Lenin and Stalin). And it is far too crude in portraying the Bolshevik revolutionaries as mere power-seekers—as if “idealistic” zealots could not be every bit as evil as baddies with corrupt motives.

To Navrozov, however, there was no doubt that his book’s lukewarm reception was a vendetta by the liberal establishment. His sense of victimhood was exacerbated by the fact that the book’s promotion was stymied by another problem: a libel suit by former Israeli premier Golda Meir.

The trouble stemmed from Navrozov’s August 1974 Commentary article citing Meir as an example of baneful “innocence” vis-a-vis the Soviet regime. According to Navrozov, when Meir served as Israel’s envoy to the USSR in 1948-49, Stalin asked her for a list of Soviet Jews who wanted to fight for Israel; she obliged, and the would-be volunteers were duly sent to the gulag. (This story, long circulated among Soviet Jews, has never been confirmed or disproved; the former refusenik Yuli Kosharovsky, author of a comprehensive history of Jewish activism in the USSR, believed that it may have been a KGB-planted rumor.) An indignant Meir denied the charge and demanded an apology. Navrozov stood by his claim but toned it down for the book, which mentioned only that Stalin “was said to have suggested” the list. In July 1975, Meir filed a $3 million lawsuit against Navrozov and the magazine; she later added a complaint against Harper & Row, seeking deletion of the offending sentence.

The next year, Meir dropped the suit after the American Jewish Committee, Commentary’s publisher, issued a statement endorsing her denial. Navrozov, who had intended to represent himself in court—but never followed up on his threats to countersue and produce corroborating evidence—was left with the firm belief that Meir’s suit forced Harper & Row to “freeze” his book and robbed him of a best-seller.

In the early 1980s when I worked with Navrozov as a translator, he was tangentially involved in another legal tussle—this one between his son Andrei and Yale University over a publication called the Yale Literary Magazine. The younger Navrozov, a 1978 Yale graduate, had purchased the prestigious but moribund magazine for $1 and, with help from right-of-center donors, revived it as a stylish quarterly journal of highbrow conservative counterculture. Along with non-modernist art and literature, the new Yale Lit featured social and political commentary—including the work of Navrozov père, whose snark-laced 1980 essay excoriating the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books as twin bastions of intellectual phoniness scandalized many alums.

The powers that be were not amused. Yale promptly enacted new rules requiring organizations with “Yale” in their name to be registered with the university and run by undergrads. The Lit was the obvious target, and Andrei Navrozov argued, not unreasonably, that the main motive was distaste for its politics. He lost the battle, and the magazine, in 1985; a promised relaunch under a different name never happened. (Eight years later, Navrozov fils, by then a refugee in England, published a book asserting that American liberals had outdone Stalin in muzzling freethinkers; hyperbole is clearly a family vice.)

A decade after his arrival in the U.S., the elder Navrozov found himself largely exiled to the fringes of even conservative discourse. His last piece for Commentary ran in 1980; a brief stint as a contributor to St. John’s Review, a literary quarterly, ended after an exceptionally nasty piece trashing John Updike and Philip Roth. The Washington Times, the more respectable sister publication to the New York City Tribune, rarely picked up his columns. The planned further volumes of The Education of Lev Navrozov did not materialize. When I last saw Navrozov in 1988, speaking at an event on Russian émigrés and Soviet reform for an émigré audience in Manhattan, he had descended into full crankdom, loudly berating another panelist as a “bogus professor” and bragging about his aristocratic descent on his father’s side.

Our paths crossed once more in the early 1990s, when Navrozov turned up in the newly freed press in the new Russia—with articles that could be generously described as contrarian. He portrayed America as a land of crass commercialism where justice was for sale. He branded George Orwell a hack who played to the philistine masses’ Cold-War fears of Stalin as Hitler redux (yes, really). He seemed to blame Nazi Germany’s Jew-hatred on Freud, who had defiled sacred bourgeois values by sexualizing the mother-child bond. After some hesitation, I wrote about Navrozov’s bizarre self-reinvention in the “Russian Presswatch” column I was then doing for The American Spectator. He fired off a letter, accusing me of a “diabolically sly” attempt to damage his career out of spite because he had once nixed me as his translator (he hadn’t).

In the new millennium, Navrozov found a new American home at the ultraconservative, decidedly lowbrow site Newsmax (whose founder Chris Ruddy was a longtime fan). Many of his columns focused on his new cause, the danger of Communist China’s military expansionism; some were standard conservative opinions, denouncing Obamacare as socialism or praising Mitt Romney’s tough stance toward Russia. But there were other things: claims that Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic was an innocent framed for war crimes, or that Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with September 11. Each column ended with a promo for Navrozov’s book-in-progress titled “Out of Moscow and Into New York: A Life in the Geostrategically Lobotomized West in the Age of Terrorism and Post-Nuclear Superweapons,” available to interested publishers for “a substantial advance.” When Navrozov stopped writing in 2013, likely due to failing health (he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s), no one noticed.

Navrozov was, without question, an enormously gifted and, in his own way, brilliant man; his first two Commentary pieces, “Getting Out of Russia” (1972) and “On Soviet Dissidence” (1973), were superb and still bear re-reading. His slide into irrelevancy had a great deal to do with his personal quirks; but it offers a larger lesson, too. The problems Navrozov saw in American elite/establishment culture—the pseudo-liberal pieties, the phony evenhandedness that slips into moral equivalency between imperfection and evil, the knee-jerk biases and groupthink—were quite real, and still are. But for all their flaws, establishment norms can act as a check on other things: fact-free or flimsy claims, wild speculation and conspiracy theories, the degeneration of debate into crude name-calling.

Navrozov’s sad evolution also points to the role of resentment and personal grievance in anti-establishment rebellion—the conservative version of victimhood politics. His broadsides against the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books, and their then-nearly unchallenged rule over the literary marketplace, contained entirely valid points; but it was always hard to tell to what extent the critique was driven by palpable bitterness over the treatment of his own book. There is little doubt that resentment also drove his attacks on successful writers from Updike to Brodsky, the Soviet exile whom Navrozov depicted as a shrewd self-promoter and darling of the liberal media. (His hostility also extended to Solzhenitsyn, whose politics couldn’t have been further from those of Western liberals.) Some of Navrozov’s grievances were well-founded: the Yale Lit saga was a fairly clear example of the liberal academy acting in an illiberal and unprincipled way to suppress a conservative irritant. But the liberal establishment can be a convenient scapegoat for personal failures and humiliations.

One can only speculate what direction Navrozov’s allegiances would have taken in the age of Donald Trump. Would he have seen Trump and Trumpism as a triumph of the vulgar mass culture he despised at least as much as he did the liberal elites, and denounced Trump’s flirtations with Vladimir Putin as the latest in Western gullibility? Would he have cheered Trump’s war on the political establishment and the “fake news media” and felt a kinship for Trumpian paranoia and conspiracy-mongering? Would he—at least if he had been younger—have acquired a cult following himself, making a comeback as a Russian-American Alex Jones? Would he have been drawn to the “neo-reactionary” wing of Trump support that scorns not only left-wing liberalism but liberal democracy itself?

We’ll never know. But if Navrozov’s son can be seen as an heir to his legacy, his career offers a disturbing postscript to his father’s. A novelist now living in Italy, and formerly an editor and writer for the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles, the younger Navrozov also spent three years, 2009 to 2012, blogging for the liberal Russian magazine Snob. In August 2012, he posted a piece titled “Epistle to the Jews.” The gist of it was that Jews have always been hated because they act superior to others, that Hitler was a “punishment” for their arrogance, and that, far from learning humility, the Jews have raised their smugness to new heights by subjecting the West to politically correct tyranny, outlawing racial slurs and mandating compassion for “cripples and sodomites.” In the ensuing firestorm, the post—which Snob deputy editor Ksenia Sokolova called “a revolting obscenity”—was taken down, and Andrei Navrozov was banished from the site.

The senior Navrozov’s life shows that the journey from dissident to crackpot is often shorter than we might like to think. His son’s career is a reminder that this journey can also lead down some very dark paths.