Isaac Babel, writer, executed by NKVD in 1940
Isaac Babel, (Исаак Эммануилович Бабель) one of the greatest Soviet short story writers, was executed by the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) in 1940. His works were purged. He was rehabilitated December 23, 1954 in the midst of "de-Stalinization" and publicly exonerated of the charges against him.
Grim wit was Babel’s trademark. He is best known for a cycle of short stories entitled Red Cavalry, a fictionalized account of his experiences as a Bolshevik war correspondent with a Cossack regiment during the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1920. —Gary Saul Morson
References:
Babel, Isaac, Peter Constantine, and Gregory Freidin. Isaac Babel's Selected Writings: Authoritative Texts, Selected Letters, 1926-1939, Isaac Babel Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries, Isaac Babel in Criticism and Scholarship. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2010.
Elie M. (2015) Rehabilitation in the Soviet Union, 1953–1964: A Policy Unachieved. In: McDermott K., Stibbe M. (eds) De-Stalinising Eastern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Ford, Andy Isaac Babel: Soviet Writer, Victim of Stalinism Socialist Alternative July 13, 2014.
Marder, Herbert. "The Revolutionary Art of Isaac Babel." NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 7, no. 1 (1973): 54-61.
Morson, Gary Saul. “The Horror, the Horror.” New York Review of Books 65, no. 2 (February 8, 2018): 28–30.