2024-04-03 21:33:22
Presents the article “Gurban Said and Stalin” by Nijat Kazimov, a publisher living in France. It should be noted that the article talks about the moments in the book “Stalin” by the scandalous writer Muhammad Asad Bey (Gurban Said).
Little was known about Stalin in Europe in the 1930s. Everyone wanted to know what kind of person was at the head of the big country in Eastern Europe. Even the communists in Europe at the time knew Stalin only as the head of the USSR and little else was known about him.
Asad Bey, nicknamed Gurban Said, was one of the rare writers living in Europe who was able to explain the portrait of Stalin that the whole world was talking about in a perfect style with his pen. He wrote a biographical book about his life from childhood to 1930. It is also one of the rare books to write an objective book about Stalin’s life in Europe during his lifetime. I was able to find a book by Muhammad Asad Bey published by Gallimard on November 30, 1931, from an old second-hand dealer in the south of France. The book you see now is the first original edition, and in just 11 years the book will be 100 years old. This book was translated from German into French by two people, Andhree Vaillant and Jean R. Kuckenburg.
In the book, Stalin’s activities are given so accurately that it seems as if Asad Bey was right next to Stalin, as close as his right hand, while writing this book. I was very interested in how he got such accurate information. Because Asad Bey, a young writer who went into permanent exile in Europe, was never so close to Stalin. But at the same time, while Stalin was being chased by the tsarist militias and hiding in his secret shelter in the basement, he smoked a cigarette and wrote until he sang a song composed by his composer friend Djorjashvili. The lyrics of the song are as follows:
Don’t cry mother,
don’t cry horse
Playing with apples
I always loved it
They got rid of our old city
They were more dangerous than the riots.
Maybe I couldn’t translate the rhyme. Because the poem was first translated from Georgian to German, and then that paragraph was translated from German to French. I also conveyed to you the song that Stalin sang when he was sad in our language.
Let’s outline a little. Or was this poem a hidden message? According to a widely spread legend, when Stalin was in prison in Bayil, the Azerbaijani folk song “Panjaredan dash ryyed” was used as a cipher. So, the papers on which the information was written were wrapped in stones and thrown through the window of Stalin’s cell, and the answer was obtained from him in the same way. At that time, our folk song “Panjaredan dashan rydy” was sung outside the cell window to ensure complete safety and to announce that the stone had been thrown in advance.
Let’s go back to Stalin’s revolutionary song. Asad Bey writes in the book that this song by Djorjashvili is gradually being memorized in the language of the revolutionaries and they sing this poem as an anthem before starting their secret meetings. The tsarist regime regards this song as support for terrorism and bans the song. But when Koba won the local battles with the Tsar’s military groups in the ancient streets of Tiflis, he began to sing this song as a victory song.
If I had not read Tom Reiss’s book, I would never have known the hatred of Stalin inside Mr. Asad. Because the book is written with facts and objectivity, not with hatred.
Why is there hatred? Because Asad Bey believed that Stalin destroyed his childhood. For this, we will travel to Asad Bey’s childhood…
When Asad Bey remembers his childhood in the famous German literary newspaper “Die literarische Welt”, he cannot place himself anywhere, because his mother was born on a train departing from Kyiv to Baku. It is true that the documents indicated that he was born in Kyiv. But the place where he was born was already far away from the territory of Ukraine. His father Ibrahim Nissimbaum was a rich oil millionaire from Tbilisi. His mother, Bassya Davidovna, was Belarusian according to the documents. But there was a big contrast. Although her husband was a well-known capitalist, Bassya Davidovna was herself a radical communist and even encouraged the Russian coal miners to revolution, organized large strikes and earned the hatred of the Tsarist system. In Tom Reiss’s The Orientalist, Muhammad Asad Bey’s hatred of Stalin is revealed here. When he was still 4-5 years old, he suddenly reported that his mother was gone and that he was not even spoken about at home. Later, Bey Asad suggests that his mother Davidovna, an oil millionaire husband, secretly transferred the wealth of her husband to revolutionary processes – more precisely, Davidovna sent the diamonds that her old husband bought her to cover the expenses of the printing house headed by Stalin. When her father Ibrahim found out about it, he considered it a betrayal of his wife to do such a thing, and Basya Davidovna committed suicide by drinking poison one day because she was separated from her friends and suffered spiritual pain.
Wow. Stop!
Capitalist Jewish father, radical communist mother, Baku mentality, European culture. When father Ibrahim realized that his communist wife was cooperating with Stalin and that he was using her relationship with her just to divide his wealth, his wife, that is Basya Davidovna, thought that she could not be with her friends and that she was married to a capitalist against his principles, and committed suicide by drinking poison. Friends, this is not a script of a Hollywood movie, all this takes place behind the walls of the Old City, smelling of sea, history and blood.
Of course, although these events are hidden from the child Asad, he feels everything and forms the genius writer of the future – Gurban Said. Asad Bey believed that without Stalin and his ideology, he would not have experienced longing for his mother, and because of this, he developed an endless hatred for Stalin. His mother left him a huge library. This library would be of great importance for his later work.
Despite all this, he writes the bestseller – “Stalin”, which was first published in German and then in world languages.
I found this book and we are currently working on it for a reprint in France. We will soon distribute this valuable book in a new cover, with a beautiful design, throughout France. I would like to tell you about the second great work I found in the archive – the book “Ahead of the Revolution” published in France in 1935 by Asad Bey and about Tsar Nicholas II, which became a bestseller in Europe in a short period of time. You can read this in my next post.
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