By Freddie Rotman

The life of Mikhail Baitalskys encompassed all the dramatic turns of the 20th century: romanticism, Stalinist terror, war, spiritual seeking, and return to roots. His legacy, created under various pen names – I. Domalsky, D. Seter, A. Aranovich, and A. Krasikov – became a unique testament to the era, immortalized in poetry, memoirs, and journalism. Meir Gelfond, a prisoner of Zion, praised Baital's poetry: "After Zionists in Russia, no poet expressed their love for Zion as passionately or emotionally."

Unlike many revolutionaries with Jewish roots, who came from poor families, Mikhail was born into a fairly wealthy merchant family in the village of Chernovo, near Odessa. At the age of fifteen, driven by youthful idealism, he volunteered for the Red Army, interrupting his studies in the fifth grade of gymnasium. This moment was captured in family history through a touching episode: his mother rode on horseback, unable to accept his departure, to search for him among those fighting in the Pasitsela area, near the town of Balta, among the "Greens".

A small detachment called the Consolidated Communist Company consisted of a platoon of Red Army soldiers, communists and Komsomol members. They were led by Vanya Nedoluzhenko, Mikhail's former classmate who fought on the German front. In battle, inexperienced Komsomols were positioned between experienced soldiers. Baitalsky and his comrades fought against a very experienced "Green" detachment reinforced with cavalry. More than half of the Communist company fell in battle.

His mother didn't find Misha at the site of the finished gunfight and hand-to-hand combat. She met him in Odessa after the uprising had been suppressed. She didn't cry but looked at the young runaway with such a look that he started to babble nonsense…

"In my youth, I was a Komsomol member and internationalist," he recalled later, "It was such a time and for a boy from a shtetl, it was like being drunk with possibilities. Nobody cared about whether you were Jewish, Ukrainian or Russian. But soon, they remembered about Jews and reminded us of it..."

Becoming one of the most active Komsomol members in the Odessa district, he simultaneously revealed his literary talent. The song "Across seas, across waves – here today, there tomorrow," written jointly with Maria Elko, appeared in the wall newspaper of the Komsomol dormitory. Set to music by an unknown composer, it spread throughout the country and became really popular, surviving to this day. The beginning of his journalistic career was connected with work in Odessa, then Bakhmut and Kharkov. As a young journalist who joined the CP(b)U in 1924, he sincerely believed in revolutionary ideals and based his Trotskyism on the so-called "Lenin's Testament".

At the end of 1922, as Lenin's health was rapidly declining, he dictated a famous message that went down in history as "Lenin's Testament" or "Letter to the Congress." In this document, he gave insightful characterizations of key figures in the party and expressed concern about the rift between Stalin and Trotsky, particularly about Stalin's increasing concentration of power. After a conflict with Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin added a postscript to the testament strongly recommending removing Stalin as General Secretary due to his rudeness and intolerance. Although Lenin's testament became public after his death, its goal was not achieved... Zinoviev and Kamenev, who formed the ruling "triumvirate" with Stalin, supported him at an emergency plenum of the Central Committee, not suspecting that by doing so they were signing their own death warrant. Thus, Lenin's last will was ignored, and Stalin, through skillful political maneuvering maintained and strengthened his power which largely determined the subsequent fate of the Soviet Union. The Trotskyist opposition in the country was eliminated. Mikhail Baitalsky, arrested in May 1929 couldn't remain free either. The charge was typical of that time, "participation in opposition activities and distribution of 'Lenin's Testament.' After several months of imprisonment he was released but only after signing a letter renouncing his participation in the opposition."

Baitalsky's first wife was Eva Pinkhusovna Shvalbe – a vibrant personality who embodied the typical Komsomol member of the early revolutionary years. She came to the Komsomol as a semiliterate seamstress, and the organization elevated her to political life and made her an active member of the collective. She combined enthusiastic zeal, complete selflessness, and absolute disinterestedness. For many years, she worked as Komsomol secretary, then in the women's department of the party committee, and later became party secretary. She evaluated every step from the standpoint of party loyalty, which permeated her whole being.

In this union of two committed communist, two children were born: son Vil (abbreviation from the name, patronymic and surname of the great leader), and daughter Nina.

In the early 1930s, Baitalsky moved to Moscow, where his journalistic talent was recognized.
He became a staff member of "Evening Moscow" and "Izvestia". Working under Nikolai Bukharin, he saw the mechanisms of Soviet propaganda from the inside, witnessing the creation of the image of Stalin as the "leader of all peoples". He observed editors being instructed to enlarge the leader's forehead in photographs, which later became part of his official iconography.

The murder of Kirov in 1934 became a turning point in Baitalsky's fate. Due to his record in his personal file of supporting Trotskyists, he was dismissed from the newspaper. His family life also suffered a split. To avoid further persecution, Mikhail Davidovich took up a job as a mechanic in a factory in Lyubertsy. However, this did not save him – in May 1936 he was arrested a second time. After intensive interrogations, he received a five-year sentence in labour camps and was sent to Vorkuta where he underwent the terrible "Kashketin inquiry," but miraculously survived.

The name Kashketin entered history as Skomorovsky, a lieutenant of state security, with a tragic and sinister fate. In autumn 1936, he was diagnosed with schizoid neurosis and dismissed from service in the security organs, being recognized as a third-group invalid. But in January 1938, an unexpected turn occurred when, by personal order of Commissar Yezhov, he not only returned to service, but was also appointed head of the operational group for combating Trotskyism at Ukhtpechlag, where his true role became even more terrifying – organizing mass executions, including those of Baitalsky's friends from the Odessa Komsomol, Lipenzon, Krayny, and Maximov… However, fate spared the life of Baitalsky – he miraculously escaped execution, remaining one of the few survivors of this tragedy. The beginning of the Soviet-German war found him in Kirov, where he had been exiled after his release. His family also found refuge there. His children, sent by Eva Pinkhusovna from Moscow in September 1941, his brother and parents with their grandchildren, managed to escape Odessa before it was occupied. Despite the difficult conditions and struggle for survival, Baitalski found time to read poetry to children, trying to fill gaps in their education, reading Heine, Blok and other poets.

Despite the stigma of being an "enemy of the people" and the old but still terrifying death sentence, Baitalsky asked to go to the front. His military career began with conscription through the Zhdanovsky District Military Commissariat in Kirov. At the end of July 1943, he was wounded and sent to an evacuation hospital. After recovering, in December of that same year, he joined the 384th Reserve Rifle Regiment. From deep within Russia, Baitalysky made his way to Berlin, where he ended the war. It was there that he realized the true scale of the European Jewish Holocaust for the first time. Mikhail Davidovich fought courageously, though as an enemy of the people, he never received recognition.

After the war, Baitalsky's marriage with Eva Schwalbe ended. His first wife died in 1947. Despite life's hardships, the former prisoner and war veteran continued to write poetry. After demobilization in 1946, he started translating his beloved Heine's poems into Russian.
Taught by bitter experience, he tried to live quietly, following the camp's wisdom of "keeping his head down." He worked as a mechanic in the Krasnodar region, first in Akhtari and then in Yeisk. However, in May 1950, he was arrested again for allegedly continuing opposition activities. The sentence was ten years in prison.

His new term began at the "sharashka" in Marfino, the same closed design bureau that Alexander Solzhenitsyn later described in his novel "The First Circle". Then, Vorkuta transformed into a city over the past decade, but retained all the attributes of camp life, including barracks, watchtowers, convoys, hunger, and exhausting mining work. It was during this time that the former communist, working in the mines, underwent a spiritual transformation, meeting a group of Zionist prisoners. Meir Gelfond, whom he met in the medical unit, became a fateful figure in his life. During this period, Mikhail Davidovich wrote poems that existed only in his memory, as writing anything down would have been too dangerous due to the Soviet version of "the final solution to the Jewish question".