Exiting the party was as painful as entering it had been joyous. Like any cult, the movement endowed its adepts with a feeling of purpose that supplanted the anomie of modern life. To leave was to lose an entire network of friends and colleagues, to be cast adrift, to adopt the status of apostate. But as signs of Soviet anti-Semitism became indisputable, Chimen’s faith started to waver. His wife bolted in 1956; two years later he followed suit, having reached “the psychologically devastating conclusion that if he was wrong about how the Soviets were treating the Jews, he was probably also wrong about many of his other assumptions about life in the USSR.” A few years later he wrote Isaiah Berlin about “the tragedy of us intellectuals. We are the ineffective forces in society: the Lenins, Titos, Maos, Castros triumph, and we poor liberals are cast aside.” Decades later, Abramsky writes, his grandfather decided to clean up his catastrophically messy upstairs study. The one thing he absolutely insisted upon extruding was his yellowing pile of Communist party writings: “into a big, black rubbish bag went the papers, one after the other. Once the bag was filled, Chimen double-knotted it, as if he were trying to seal away toxic waste.”

Essentially, it had taken Chimen decades to arrive at truths that figures such as George Orwell, Isaiah Berlin, George Lichtheim or Jacob Talmon had divined much earlier. “Totalitarian Messianism,” Talmon wrote in 1952, “hardened into an exclusive doctrine represented by a vanguard of the enlightened, who justified themselves in the use of coercion against those who refused to be free and virtuous.” Chimen resisted his friend’s conclusion, but by the 1970s, he had wholly sobered up. He had embarked on a personal intellectual detoxification program of immersing himself in Maimonides and Spinoza. “To be is to do, and to know is to do,” Spinoza said. Chimen abandoned the grand illusion of Soviet communism and embraced liberal universalism. Now Chimen could confidently write to Berlin that freedom was much broader than the putative liberation of the working class by a self-appointed historical vanguard. It meant “freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement to other men—all other senses of freedom are an extension of this.” Though Abramsky does not explore this theme, it does seem likely that Chimen, in embracing classical liberal tenets, also finally came to terms with the country he had landed in after fleeing Russia.

As Adam Smith noted in the Wealth of Nations, there is something ennobling about the kind of acquisitive pursuit that Chimen engaged in as he sought to preserve the past in his own home. The book-collecting impulse has been mocked as far back as classical times in Aristophanes’ comedy Frogs. But Smith had it right: “Noble palaces, magnificent villas, great collections of books, statues, pictures, and other curiosities, are frequently both an ornament and an honor, not only to the neighborhood, but to the whole country to which they belong.” By that lofty standard, Chimen Abramsky, after a shaky beginning, compiled a very honorable record indeed in his adopted country.

While Chimen did not believe in the efficacy of prayer, Abramsky indicates that towards the end of his life he felt that “the great religious traditions going back thousands of years that held his ancestors in their web of rituals, beliefs, and shared experiences were as close as he could get to touching immortality; he came to believe that homage to the past was a guarantee of a future.” Certainly Abramsky’s own homage to the past in the form of this book devoted to his grandfather’s life also helps to ensure that his remarkable saga will not soon be forgotten.

Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of the National Interest.

Image: John Cookson