Death at the Dacha

by Paul M. Levitt

  “Nikolai Alexandrovich, you have good taste in women. We both admire Natasha Shpiller. Quite a beauty, a real Anna Karenina. I particularly like her modesty: high-necked dark dresses, no jewelry, hardly a trace of makeup—”

  Bulganin interrupts. She chased me from the trough.

  You guffaw. “Nikolai, the lady’s man, snubbed by the famous prima donna.” You shake your head incredulously.

  Bulganin tries to treat the subject lightly, waving a hand as if your complaint is a mere bagatelle. Dear Koba, as you yourself just admitted: We both prized her. So where is the harm?

  “I prized her for her voice, and you?”

  A few gifts here and there. Nothing more.

  Moments later, you drop the mask and declare viciously: “She’s not the only Jewish performer you’ve run after. You seem to favor the Hebrew race.”

  At this point, I have inserted a direction to indicate that silence pervades the room, as Nikolai wonders whether he has the courage to remind you that numerous party officials have married Jews. But he says nothing.

  “Then I can assume your future liaisons . . .”

  You pause, knowing that Bulganin will complete your thought.

  Will not include . . .

  You harshly add: “Jews! They are a security risk, especially at this time, with murderous doctors poisoning our patriots.”

  Bulganin pulls at his goatee and, looking at the others, wanly smiles. He then engages your eyes and tamely says, Point taken.

  “Let’s have another round of drinks,” you cry, playing for time while you decide how to handle Nikita. You and Khrushchev fail to drink. “Niki?”

  I’ve reached my limit.

  Holding up your glass of juice, you proclaim, “For the Motherland!”

  Nikita weighs the danger of telling you that fruit juice and vodka are hardly equal. He fills his glass and bellows, Vashee zda róvye (subtitle: “To your health”), as he throws back a shot, remembering that on more than one occasion he has left the dacha to vomit in the woods.

  Becoming maudlin, you say: “And here’s to Nikita’s son, a Soviet hero, Leonid Khrushchev! A terrible loss. We are still searching for his body. The other pilots feel sure of the place he went down.”

  Nikita blows his nose. He is genuinely moved.

  With the fire in your belly suddenly extinguished, you sympathetically address Khrushchev as “Mikita,” your affectionate name for your Ukrainian henchman. “Mikita, come here and let me poke your pillow belly.” Khrushchev complies, and you jab him laughingly.

  Not too hard, says Nikita, or I might spill my guts.

  Everyone roars, including you, a sign that the evening will end without a dire accusation based on some invented cause. The guests then reminisce, tell jokes, take dessert, and settle in to hear at least three or four of your oft-told stories. Tonight, you conclude the evening with your 1914 affair, in Siberian exile, with Lidia Pereprygin, a girl of thirteen.

  “Although fourteen was the legal age of consent, I told her we would marry, especially after her two brawny brothers swore to tear me limb from limb. We met at a dance, and at thirteen, she could hold her liquor as well as a man. A suspicious policeman couldn’t understand why I rarely left the house. House, did I say? It was no more than a shed with straw for a mattress. Normally he found me reading and writing, neither of which he could master and therefore despised. This time he entered without knocking on the door. In fact, he burst into the room while I was knocking Lidia Pereprygin.”

  Malenkov smacks his right knee and laughs robustly, but a moment later, as often happens, your mood immediately changes.

  “He caught me with my pants down, interrupted me. As I tried to cover myself, he pointed and laughed. That’s when I went for him. He drew his saber and nicked my neck. Furious, I clenched my fists and charged.”

  Comrade Beria worshipfully adds: A villager, Taraseev, witnessed the scene and recorded it. He said Comrade Stalin was in a state of high excitement and fury and acquitted himself brilliantly.

  “I chased the bastard out the door and down the road, all the way to the Yenisei River. Laugh at me, will he! Had it not been for my bad leg, I would have caught the villain and beat him to a pulp, saber or no saber.”

  Your Politburo comrades clap, as they do on other occasions when you tell the story. In an aside, you somberly remark: “As you know, the baby died.”

  Like a guttering candle, the evening winks out. To the sound of shuffling chairs and feet, and Beria’s commanding voice, I exit the dacha to fetch the two ZIS limousines, one for Beria and Malenkov, the other for Khrushchev and Bulganin. I wait in the snow to see the guests off and to close their car doors behind them. I glance at my watch: a little after five. A few minutes later, the four Politburo members, bundled up in their overcoats, mufflers, and hats, leave the dacha, followed by you, who can’t resist giving “Mikita” one last poke in the belly before accompanying the men to their cars.

  Once the cars turn and leave, I follow you back to the dacha. You head immediately for the little dining room, saying you want to nap. Your personal attachment and a subordinate start down the hallway to stand guard outside the room. I stop them and declare: Stalin said you can all go to bed. He won’t be needing anything else. He is going to nap. I’ll stand guard.

  Well, that’s a first, says the guard and clasps his comrade on the shoulder, leading him back to the sleeping quarters and mumbling about a violation of protocol. Leaving the room unguarded and sending us off to bed! To watch who? Each other? All very strange.

  I position myself outside your door and wait. When I think it safe, I enter and find a darkened room, lit only by a small lamp next to a pink-lined divan. You are undressing. Your small appendage nearly makes me laugh. Once in your pajamas, you shuffle out of the room, presumably to use the bathroom next door. During the minute or two of your absence, I hear running water and know you are probably filling your small pitcher. From my pocket I remove a packet with three hundred milligrams of Warfarin, a tasteless, colorless anticoagulant also employed as a rat poison.

  You ask: “Who gave you permission to enter my room?” Clearly you are surprised to discover me. Before you can express your displeasure, I explain that I will be your sentinel for the next twenty-four hours and want to know how to best serve you.

  I reach for your pillow to put the puff back in it. But you misread my movement.

  Comrade Stalin, I merely aim to please.

  “Then leave at once and call my regular army guard.”

  Gladly, but before I go, permit me to ask you one question.

  “Which is?”

  Does the name Ana Rubinstein mean anything to you?

  “Nothing.”

  Comrade Beria’s files would indicate otherwise.

  You blanch and say: “Leave!”

  Before I go, allow me the pleasure of serving you and filling your glass.

  As I pour the water, I slip the contents of the packet into the glass, which I hand to you. You add several drops of iodine from a bottle on your night table. I smile, wish you a peaceful rest, and start to snake out through the garden door. But you stop me.

  “You arrived with Lavrenty but didn’t leave with him.”

  I was told to remain to ensure you have a deep and lasting sleep.

  “Will Beria send a car for you?”

  After the meeting.

  “Meeting?”

  In your Kremlin office.

  “You must be mad.”

  To decide your successor.

  CHAPTER 2

  As Stalin lay on the sofa staring at the various objects in the room, he reviewed the history of each one; although he had invested them with personal meaning, visitors mostly ignored them. Real value, he decided, issued either from monetary worth or from memory, an observation that led him to picture the four venal sycophants competing with one another to replace him. In the scene he mentally scripted, set in his Kremlin office, Beria would begin to pace the oblong room and warm
his fat ass by one of the ceramic stoves. The others would be seated at his conference table and laying claim, in Stalin’s name, to the succession; but the name of his appointed successor, which once rested in his private office safe, would be missing. The omission of the document led him to wonder whether to include a short lead-in scene, where Beria arrives at the Kremlin before the others, empties the safe, and burns the evidence in one of the stoves. Lenin momentarily came to mind. Stalin reproved himself for following his example: leaving a testament, albeit now missing. Instead, he should have declared publicly that Malenkov was his heir.

  He could imagine the four of them, lacking an official proclamation from him, parading their credentials to make a case for themselves. Beria surely knew that the others, to say nothing of the country, would not allow another Georgian to serve as General Secretary of the Party. He would therefore recommend a stalking horse, Malenkov. So the very person Stalin would have picked probably had the best chance to succeed him after all. But Stalin knew better than to give short shrift to the others and included them in his musings. Who, by cunning and cruelty, would rise to the top? Take Bulganin, for example. Khrushchev might support him, but no one else would. And Nikita, what of him? He’d know that his rough manners and lack of education would disqualify him, at least in the first round of voting. The men would fall to squabbling, and then Beria would suggest that before making up their minds, they ought to agree on principles. Did they want to continue Stalin’s line or did they want to change some of his policies? Or all of them? That would lead to a discussion of Stalin himself, a fraught subject. Koba started to mentally write the dialogue for the movie, which would feature several flashbacks. Given that the speakers were virtually indistinguishable, identities hardly mattered.

  “He made himself out to be a hero of the revolution but missed all the fighting.”

  “He was sitting in his Pravda office or at Bolshevik headquarters in Mathilda Kshesinskaya’s mansion.”

  “His very presence in Petrograd at that time was an accident.”

  Flashback: The Mansion, located at 2-4, Ulitsa Kuybysheva.

  As Stalin is leaving, he comes face to face with a young, dark-haired woman entering the building. She is leading a child by the hand. He doffs his workman’s cap. She smiles.

  “I’ve never seen you here before,” he says.

  “It’s rarely I come.”

  “Have you a minute?”

  “I’m just dropping off a report.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll wait.”

  “Always glad to meet a fellow Bolshevik.”

  When she returns, he asks whether she has seen the house.

  No, her visits are infrequent and she never lingers, owing to the nature of her work.

  He explains that this mansion was originally home to Mathilda Kshesinskaya, the prima ballerina at the Mariinskiy before the Revolution, and Nicholas II’s mistress before he became Emperor. Stalin’s camera pans the art nouveau house: its asymmetrical design, which combines an enfilade of reception rooms with a winter garden and rotunda.

  “Let me show you the White Hall, once used for social receptions and for the ballerina’s professional training.”

  “What happened to Mathilda?”

  “Rumors abound. The likeliest is that she plans to live in Paris with her longtime lover, Andrei Vladimirovich, another Romanov scum.”

  Although he wants his script to touch upon his life in Petrograd, with the dialogue issuing naturally and the characters behaving as one might expect, at the back of his head, he can hear Beria at the Kremlin meeting telling the others: “Well we might ask where Stalin was during the months of May and June 1917, when Lenin and Yakov Sverdlov were working tirelessly to organize the revolution, work that our fearless leader took credit for? Had Yakov not died—damn that 1919 influenza epidemic—you may be sure that Stalin would have ordered his death. After all, no one outshines the Vozhd. The asshole!”

  Flashback: May and June 1917, when Stalin courted Ana Rubinstein.

  After he shows her the mansion, they stroll along Nevsky Prospekt, past the Kazan Cathedral, to a tea room, where he buys the child a sweet. The room has small round tables, a low ceiling, brown walls, an open fireplace, a china closet exhibiting fine ceramics, and an upright piano, at which a young woman plays romantic music. Over tea, Stalin learns that she arrived in Petrograd a few years before and is living with relatives on the outskirts of town. The child is hers, Regina, five years old. When he asks what brought her to the mansion, now Bolshevik headquarters, she says that she has long been affiliated with the underground.

  Stalin laughs. “You must have gone deep underground because I never saw you at the mansion before.”

  “I keep my distance, for security reasons.”

  “Tell me about yourself . . . and the child. I have a young son, Yakov, living with family in Georgia.”

  “And your wife?”

  “Dead.”

  I’m sorry.

  “In Tiflis. Very sad.”

  “If you wish to speak of it . . .”

  “My story can wait. Tell me yours.”

  She does.

  Her name is Ana Rubinstein. She grew up in Ukraine, in a shtetl. From what she says, he surmises she was born around 1890, which would make her twenty-seven. In 1910, she married Zalman Kostiovsky, a Jewish wine distiller, who inherited the business from his father. But when the tsar appropriated Jewish distilleries, Zalman had to find other work. As a child he had learned to sew from his mother, so he took up tailoring.

  “On September 28, 1911, Regina was born. A year later, the marriage failed and my daughter and I came to St. Petersburg. Occasionally, Zalman visits us.”

  He runs a hand over his black closely cropped beard and weighs whether to inquire further into her divorce. Instead, he chooses the safer route and asks her about shtetl life.

  She explains that Jewish holidays govern their calendar and culture: Shavu’ot, Simchas Torah, the Fast of Esther, Tisha B’Av, Sabbath, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, Shemini Atzeret, Pesach, Sukkot, Hanukkah, Purim, and others. Traditional observance and customs hold them hostage.

  “For example, in my village a devout and observant Jew wished to travel to a distant city on the Sabbath, but to do so he needed the rabbi’s permission. ‘You wish leave to desecrate the Sabbath?’ asked the incredulous rabbi. ‘I wish to reach Kiev so that I can bend over the body of my murdered son and rend my garments in mourning.’ The rabbi sighed and said, ‘Even for God we must make exceptions.’”

  “Meaning?” asks Stalin.

  “Good question. You can interpret his answer either way. The bereaved father chose to understand it as permission and traveled on the Sabbath, to the chagrin of the village.”

  Regina, sitting quietly, swivels in her chair and whispers to her mother loud enough for Stalin to hear: “Are you talking about Uncle Yosel?”

  “Yes,” Ana replies, patting her daughter’s hand.

  “Clever child,” observes Stalin.

  “Nothing escapes her.”

  “Your life in the shtetl sounds like mine in the seminary, a life encased in stone.”

  Ana tells her daughter to look in the showcase window at the sweets, and to pick one. After Regina leaves the table, Ana shakes her head remembering. “What I have to say isn’t for a child’s ears.” She watches her daughter make her way to the front of the tea room, and then she turns again to Stalin. “It’s personal.”

  “I understand.”

  “We lived with Zalman’s parents. I would sit despondently, feeling the emptiness of days past and of those to come. I knew I ought to do something, but didn’t know what or how. Every night I went to bed thinking that perhaps I’d know the next day, but nothing changed. In the morning, I would wake to find myself in bed with Zalman Kostiovsky, and I was still his wife. This I knew: I had to escape, even if by means of poison.”

  “So you left.”

  “One morning, I packed Regina’s clothes and min
e, flagged down a droshky, and paid the driver to take us to the train station. I had written to my relatives in St. Petersburg. We were met at the station and took a carriage to a small cottage south of the city. We are still there. Regina and I share a bed in the guest room. When her father comes, he sleeps in the shed. You are welcome to visit.”

  “I will.”

  Stalin pictured a cottage out of Chekhov, which from the outside suggests a tranquil happy life, but on the inside we find disappointment and thwarted ambitions. The seminary had taught the boys that the sacraments were an outward sign of an inward grace. Sancta simplicitas! Little did the priests know about the smiling face and despondent heart! Chekhov knew.

  Regina returned exhibiting a grin and a chocolate stain across her mouth. Across the room, the pianist played a romantic song, “Hey, Little Apple.”

  Before parting, Ana gave him directions and shook his hand. Regina tried to follow suit, but Stalin, to her delight, lifted and spun her in the air.

  That night he slept poorly, twisting and turning, tortured by thoughts of Ana’s dark eyes, raven hair, lissome figure, and revolutionary spirit. The next day, he made inquiries at Bolshevik headquarters to learn more about her. She was, indeed, a member of the underground, responsible for organizing women’s groups in support of the Bolsheviks and distributing antiwar leaflets. She had, on several occasions, found herself in a tsarist paddy wagon. Each time she arrived in court, the magistrates dismissed her case as unworthy of serious consideration. The courts had larger fish to fry. Most surprising of all, she was a crack shot, trained by the Bolsheviks in case of guerilla warfare.

  Three days after their encounter, he wrote asking for permission to visit.

  After waiting a fortnight and hearing nothing, he feared she had no further interest in him. When her answer did arrive, she explained that she had been in Germany working for the Party. Now that she was back, yes, by all means, he should come, but warned that Zalman was also expected. If he didn’t mind seeing her in the presence of her aunt and uncle and former husband—“the more the merrier,” she had written—he should plan to spend a day. She suggested a date for the following week.