Lev Navrozov, translator and Soviet dissident . By Richard Sandomir New
York Times . NEW YORK - Lev Navrozov, a literary translator in the
Soviet Union who smuggled out his study of Lenin and Stalin's campaigns
of terror when he emigrated to the United States in 1972, died Jan. 22
in Brooklyn. He was 88. His son, Andrei, said he had been suffering
from Parkinson's disease. Mr. Navrozov's contempt for Lenin, the leader
of the Bolshevik Revolution, and Stalin, his brutal successor, arose
out of intellectual loathing, not of a personal history of exile or
repression. In his book, "The Education of Lev Navrozov: A Life in the
Enclosed World Once Called Russia" (1975), he described Lenin as a
"barbarian" unworthy of his country's deification. "He had to enserf
every soul psychologically," he wrote. "He had to destroy inside every
soul all the psychology of independence that had been accumulating
throughout the history of Russia. The book, which was partly
autobiographical, was praised by philosopher Sidney Hook and historian
Robert K. Massie. But in The New York Review of Books, Helen Muchnic, a
scholar of Russian literature, wrote that Mr. Navrozov, "carried away
by what is certainly justifiable disgust for the inequities, cruelties,
and hypocrisies of a barbarous despotism," had "allowed his hatreds to
overflow the banks of rationality. Nonetheless, Saul Bellow, in his
novel "More Die of Heartbreak" (1987), placed Mr. Navrozov among the
dissident writers Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Maximov, and Andrei
Sinyavsky as "commanding figures, men of genius, some of them. A legal
battle with former Prime Minister Golda Meir of Israel occurred over a
short passage in the 628-page book. She demanded that its publisher,
Harper's Magazine Press, delete a passage suggesting that as Israel's
envoy to the Soviet Union she had given Stalin a list of Russian Jews
who would fight for Israel. All the Jews, Mr. Navrozov wrote,
"disappeared" at the hands of Stalin's "organs of state security. A
similar accusation by Mr. Navrozov in Commentary magazine led Meir to
file a $3 million libel lawsuit against the publication. She dropped
the suit when Commentary published a statement asserting that it
believed her denial. Mr. Navrozov, who had defended himself in the
lawsuit, remained angry about the contretemps years later. In 2002, he
wrote on the conservative website Newsmax that her lawsuit had forced
his publisher to "freeze my book instead of selling millions of copies
of it. If she had continued with her lawsuit, he said, she would have
been revealed as "an unscrupulous, wily politician who had destroyed
the immigrants' book and sued me for $3 million in order to conceal her
blunder. Mr. Navrozov was born in Moscow on Nov. 26, 1928, the only
child of Andrei Navrozov, a writer, and the former Dina Minz, a
neuropathologist. He attended the Institute of Foreign Languages at
Moscow State University and later translated into English works by
Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Alexander Herzen, and Mikhail Prishvin. As a
well-regarded translator, he lived comfortably with his wife, the
former Muza Gerasimova, an English-language editor of scientific texts,
and his son in a country house near that of Soviet diplomat Andrei
Gromyko. "Despite our seemingly tranquil life, away from Soviet
realities, we became more and more despondent and dissatisfied with our
senseless existence," he wrote on WorldTribune.com in 2012. "Something
desperate was brewing in our minds. After moving to an apartment in
Moscow, Mr. Navrozov and his family left the Soviet Union in 1972 with
help from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and American real estate
developer Daniel Rose. They settled in Riverdale, in the Bronx. Mr.
Navrozov was pugnacious and passionate. In 1980, after accusing The New
York Times of having become a "quasigovernment newspaper catering to
practically all decision-makers in the country," he took out an ad in
the paper to announce the creation of a nonpartisan group with the aim
of developing a daily "adversarial" competitor to The Times. He
scheduled a news conference at the Waldorf Astoria hotel to announce
the formation of the group and promised to let Times representatives
"grill him. The group apparently never got far. Mr. Navrozov wrote for
Commentary about Soviet affairs for several years after his arrival in
the United States; in later years, he wrote prolifically for Newsmax
and WorldTribune.com. His primary focus shifted from the threat posed
by the Soviet Union to Western democracies to the one posed by China.
He believed that liberal, socialist ideas harmed democracy. More
recently, he cautioned that the Affordable Care Act was reminiscent of
Soviet-socialized medicine. "Obamacare will destroy the delicate fabric
of existing free-market medical services," he wrote in 2012 on Newsmax.
In addition to his son, he leaves a grandson. His wife died in 2015.
Andrei Navrozov said that his father's politics did not evolve in the
years since he came to the United States. "What changed was his mode of
presentation," he said. "He wanted to be accessible and talk to wider
audiences. It's like he started to speak in a populist voice in his
columns. He was speaking to the common man, but he didn't know a common
man.
