Александр Николаевич Афиногенов

Alexander Afinogenov (4 April {O.S. 22 March} 1904, Skopin, Ryazan Oblast, Russian Empire — 29 October 1941, Moscow, USSR) was a Soviet playwright and editor. He was married to US-born ballerina Evgenia Afinogenova, née Jeannette Schwarz (1903—1948), who expatriated to the Soviet Union circa the late 1920s. Afinoghenov died at only 37, killed by a stray bomb splinter during one of WWII air raids, days before his scheduled departure to the USA on the "Sovinformburo" assignment. Born in a small town in the central part of Russia, Aleksander studied journalism in Moscow and enlisted in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU, "КПСС") in 1922. Afinoghenov quickly climbed the party ladder, joining the leadership of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) by the early 1930s; he got elected to the general committee of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934 — one of the most prestigious and desirable posts for literary "apparatchik." Just two years later, Alexander Afinogenov became the victim of the notorious Inner Purge ("Внутренняя чистка") campaign targeting the early "revolutionary comrades" and Communist Party leaders. Following the spring 1937 arrests of Genrikh Yagoda (1891—1938), former Director of NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), and prominent literary critic Leopold Averbakh (1903—1937), several other writers and bureaucrats even remotely associated with them, including Afinogenov, got publicly condemned in the "Pravda" newspaper, expelled from the Party, and fired from the Writer's Union. After the arrests of his former colleagues Vladimir Kirshon (1902—1938) and Bruno Jasieński (1901—1938), Aleksander saw his imminent demise; his diary in September 1937 had imaginary dialogues with interrogators and drafts for the courtroom's final words. Mysteriously, Afinogenov slipped through the cracks and never got arrested. Barred from publication and public activities, he retrieved to Peredelkino, a settlement in Moscow suburbs where many writers had summertime "dachas;" Aleksander befriended Boris Pasternak around that time, one of the few public figures who wasn't scared away by Afinogenov's "persona non grata" status. By February 1938, he was formally rehabilitated and reinstated in the Communist Party. As the Second World War began, Afinogenov became the chief of the Literary Division at "Sovinformburo." Alexandr and his wife got a special appointment to lead the US agitation efforts to open the Western Front. In October 1941, just days before the scheduled departure, Aleksander died at the Central Committee headquarters on Staraya Square — killed by a stray bomb splinter during one of the Moscow air raids. His widow, Jenny Afinoghenova, went to the United States alone. In September 1948, on her way back from New York City to Odesa, she died in an accidental fire in the Black Sea on board the passenger steamer Pobeda ("Victory"). The ship carried thousands of flammable nitrate film movie reels and phonograph records, and the tiny spark on the cargo deck led to a massive fire, killing two crew members and 40 of 310 passengers.