In 1932, after numerous requests he was permitted to visit his estranged wife Yevgenia in Paris in 1932. While visiting his wife and their daughter Nathalie, Babel agonized over whether or not to return to Soviet Russia. In conversations and letters to friends, expressed longing at the thought of being "a free man," while also expressing fear at no longer being able to make a living solely through writing. On July 27, 1933, Babel wrote a letter to Yuri Annenkov, stating that he had been summoned to Moscow and was leaving immediately. Babel's common - law wife, Antonina Pirozhkova, recalled this era as follows,

"Babel remained in France for so long that it was rumored in Moscow that he was never returning. When I wrote to him about this, he wrote back saying, 'What can people, who do not know anything, possibly say to you, who knows everything?' Babel wrote from France almost daily. I accumulated many letters from him during his 11 month absence. When Babel was arrested in 1939, all of these letters were confiscated and never returned to me."

After his return to Russia, Babel decided to move in with Pirozhkova, beginning a common law marriage which would ultimately produce a daughter, Lidya Babel. He also collaborated with Sergei Eisenstein on the film Bezhin Meadow, about the informer Pavlik Morozov, and worked on the screenplays for several other Stalinist propaganda movies. According to Nathalie Babel Brown,

"Babel came to Paris in the summer of 1935, as part of the delegation of Soviet writers to the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture and Peace. He probably knew this would have been his last chance to remain in Europe. As he had done numerous times during the last ten years, he asked my mother to return with him to Moscow. Although he knew the general situation was bad, he nevertheless described to her the comfortable life that the family could have there together. It was the last opportunity my mother had to give a negative answer, and she never forgot it. Perhaps it helped her later on to be proven completely right in her fears and her total lack of confidence in the Soviet Union. My mother described to me these last conversations with my father many times."

During a visit to Berlin, the married Babel began an affair with Yevgenia Feigenberg, who was then a translator at the Soviet embassy. Simon Sebag Montefiore has dubbed Yevgenia an, "irrepressible literary groupie." According to Babel's interrogation transcripts, she began her seduction of the writer with the words, "You don't know me, but I know you well." Even after Yevgenia married NKVD boss Nikolai Yezhov the affair continued and Babel frequently presided over Mrs. Yezhov's literary gatherings, which often included such luminaries as Solomon Mikhoels, Leonid Utesov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Mikhail Koltsov. On one such occasion, Babel was heard to say, "Just think, our girl from Odessa has become the first lady of the kingdom!"

In her memoirs, Antonina professes complete ignorance of her common law husband's affair with Mrs. Yezhov. Babel informed her that his interest in the Yezhovs was, "purely professional," and was tied to his desire to understand the Party elite.

In retaliation for Babel's affair with his wife, Yezhov ordered the writer placed under constant NKVD surveillance. As the Great Purge began during the late 1930s, Yezhov was informed that Babel was spreading rumors about the suspicious death of Maxim Gorky and alleging that his former mentor had been murdered on orders from Stalin. Babel had also been heard to say of Leon Trotsky, "It's impossible to imagine the charm and strength of his influence on anyone who encounters him." Babel further commented that Lev Kamenev was, "...the most brilliant connoisseur of language and literature."

As the number of Purge victims skyrocketed, however, Nikolai Yezhov's overenthusiastic pursuit of suspected "enemies" began to be thought a liability by Stalin and his inner circle. In response, Lavrenti Beria was assigned as Yezhov's assistant and swiftly usurped the leadership of the NKVD. According to Montefiore,

"The darkness began to descend upon Yezhov's family where his silly, sensual wife was unwittingly to play the terrible role of black widow spider: most of her lovers were to die. She herself was too sensitive a flower for Yezhov's world. Both she and Yezhov were promiscuous but by then they lived in a world of high tension, dizzy power over life and death, and dynamic turmoil as men rose and fell around them. If there was justice is Yezhov's fall, it was a tragedy for Yevgenia and little Natasha, to whom he was a kind father. A pall fell on Yevgenia's literary salon. When a friend walked her home to the Kremlin after a party, she herself reflected that Babel was in danger because he had been friends with arrested Trotskyite generals: 'Only his European fame could save him.' She herself was in greater danger."

On May 15, 1939, Antonina Pirozhkova was awakened by four NKVD agents pounding upon the door of their Moscow apartment. Although surprised, she agreed to accompany them to Babel's dacha in Peredelkino. Babel was then placed under arrest. According to Pirozhkova,

In the car, one of the men sat in back with Babel and me while the other one sat in front with the driver. "The worst part of this is that my mother won't be getting my letters," Babel said, and then he was silent for a long time. I could not say a single word. Babel asked the secret policeman sitting next to him, "So I guess you don't get too much sleep, do you?" And he even laughed. As we approached Moscow, I said to Babel, "I'll be waiting for you, it will be as if you've gone to Odessa... only there won't be any letters..." He answered, "I ask you to see that the child not be made miserable." "But I don't know what my destiny will be." At this point, the man sitting beside Babel said to me, "We have no claims whatsoever against you." We drove to the Lubyanka Prison and through the gates. The car stopped before the massive, closed door where two sentries stood guard. Babel kissed me hard and said, "Someday we'll see each other..." And without looking back, he got out of the car and went through that door.

According to Peter Constantine,

"From that day on, Babel, one of the foremost writers of his time, became a nonperson in the Soviet Union. His name was blotted out, removed from literary dictionaries and encyclopedias, and taken off school and university syllabi. He became unmentionable in any public venue. When the film director Mark Donskoi's famous Gorky trilogy premiered the following year, Babel, who had worked on the screenplay, had been removed from the credits."

Interrogated under torture, Babel confessed that his "creative impotence, which has prevented me from publishing any significant work for last few years," was, "deliberate sabotage and a refusal to write." This, however, was not enough for Stalin and his minions. In his confession paper, which still contains blood stains, Babel "confessed" to being a member of Trotskyist organization and being recruited by French writer Andre Malraux to spy for France. He named Sergei Eisenstein, Ilya Ehrenburg and Solomon Mikhoels as co-conspirators.

Despite months of pleading and letters sent directly to Beria, Babel was denied access to his unpublished manuscripts. In October 1939, Babel was again summoned for interrogation and denied all his previous testimony. A statement was recorded, "I ask the inquiry to take into account that, though in prison, I committed a crime. I slandered several people." This led to further delays as the NKVD frantically attempted to salvage their cases against Mikhoels, Ehrenburg, and Eisenstein. According to Nathalie Babel Brown,

"...his trial took place on January 26, 1940, in one of Lavrenti Beria's private chambers. It lasted about twenty minutes. The sentence had been prepared in advance and without ambiguity: death by firing squad, to be carried out immediately. Babel had been convicted of 'active participation in an anti - Soviet Trotskyite organization,' and of 'being a member of a terrorist conspiracy, as well as spying for the French and Austrian governments.' Babel's last recorded words in the proceedings were, 'I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union. I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others... I am asking for only one thing -- let me finish my work.' He was shot the next day and his body was thrown into a communal grave. All of this horrific information was revealed in the early 1990s...

According to Simon Sebag Montefiore, Babel's ashes were buried with those of Nikolai Yezhov and several other victims of the Great Purge in the necropolis of Moscow's Donskoi Monastery. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a plaque was placed there which reads, "Here lie buried the remains of the innocent, tortured, and executed victims of political repressions. May they never be forgotten." The grave of Yevgenia Yezhov, who committed suicide in a mental institution, lies less than twenty paces away.

According to the early official Soviet version, Isaak Babel died in the Gulag on March 17, 1941. His archives and manuscripts were confiscated by the NKVD. Peter Constantine, who translated Babel's writings into English, has described the writer's execution as "one of the great tragedies of twentieth century literature."

On December 23, 1954, during the Khrushchev thaw, a typed half sheet of paper ended the official silence. It read,

"The sentence of the military collegium dated 26 January 1940 concerning Babel, I.E., is revoked on the basis of newly discovered circumstances and the case against him is terminated in the absence of elements of a crime."

Babel's works were once again widely published and praised. His public rehabilitation as a writer was initiated with the help of his friend and admirer Konstantin Paustovsky, and a volume of Babel's selected works was published in 1957 with a laudatory preface by Ilya Ehrenburg. New collections of selected works by Babel were published in 1966, 1989 and 1990. Still, certain "taboo" parts such as mentions of Trotsky were censored until the Perestroika period shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The first collections of the complete works of Babel were prepared and published in Russia in 2002 and 2006.

After his rehabilitation, Antonina Pirozhkova spent almost five decades campaigning for the return of Babel's manuscripts. These included Babel's translations of Sholem Aleichem's writings from Yiddish into Russian, as well as several unpublished short stories and novellas. According to Pirozhkova,

As Babel put it, he worked on Sholem Aleichem to "feed his soul." Other "food for the soul" came from writing new stories and the novella "Kolya Topuz." He told me, "I'm writing a novella in which the main character is a former Odessa gangster like Benia Krik. His name is Kolya Topuz and so far, at least, that's also the name of the novella. I want to show how this sort of man adapts to Soviet reality. Kolya Topuz works on a collective farm during collectivization, and then he goes to work in a Donbass coal mine. But since he has the mentality of a gangster, he's constantly breaking out of the limits of normal life, which leads to numerous funny situations." Babel spent a great deal of time writing, and he finished many works. Only his arrest prevented his new works from coming out."

However, even requests by Ilya Ehrenburg and the Union of Soviet Writers produced no answers from the Soviet State. The truth was not revealed until the advent of Perestroika. According to Pirozhkova,

"In 1987, when so much was changing in our country, I again made an official request that the KGB search for Babel's manuscripts in its underground storage areas. In response to my request, I was visited by two KGB agents who informed me that the manuscripts had been burned. 'And so you've come in person to avoid giving me a written response to my request, am I correct?' 'How could you think such a thing? We came here to commisserate. We understand how precious Babel's manuscripts would be.'"

After her husband's return to Moscow in 1935, Yevgenia Gronfein Babel remained unaware of his other family with Antonina Pirozhkova. Eventually, however, she was cruelly informed by Ilya Ehrenburg during the 1950s. Ehrenburg then asked Yevgenia to sign a false statement to the effect that she and Babel had divorced. Enraged, Yevgenia Babel spat in Ehrenberg's face and then fainted.

Her daughter, Nathalie Babel Brown, believes that Ehrenburg did this under orders from the KGB. With two potential contenders for the role of Babel's widow, the Soviet State clearly preferred Babel's common - law wife Antonina to his legal wife Yevgenia, who had emigrated to the West.

Although Babel's play Maria was very popular at Western European colleges during the 1960s, it was not performed in Babel's homeland until 1994. The first English translation appeared in 2002, translated by Peter Constantine and edited by Nathalie Babel Brown. Maria's American premiere, directed by Carl Weber, took place at Stanford University two years later.

Although she was too young to have many memories of her father, Nathalie Babel Brown went on to become one of the world's foremost scholars of his life and work. When a Norton Anthology of his writings was published in 2002, Nathalie edited the volume and provided a foreword. She died in Washington DC in 2005.

Lydia Babel, the daughter of Isaak Babel and Antonina Pirozhkova, also emigrated to the United States and currently resides in Silver Spring, Maryland.