She chuckled and wished him goodbye, with a chaste kiss on the cheek.
Awkwardly, he clicked his heels and kissed her hand. Once on the road and out of sight of the cottage, he circled back and hid in some bushes to watch the light in Ana’s room—and the shed. Would she and Regina, as usual, be sharing a bed, or would Regina’s place be taken by Zalman? And if so, where would Regina sleep? Certainly not in the shed.
He waited and watched.
Fade to the Dacha.
From his sofa, the place of his confected film, his mind wandered from Zalman’s joke to the Kremlin meeting. Both the joke and the meeting rested on questionable assumptions. In the first instance, for the joke to work, the listeners had to agree that Russians hated Jews, and any Russian who said he didn’t was lying. In the second instance, his colleagues were assuming he wouldn’t recover and have the strength to respond to their traitorous behavior. But exceptions occur, whether miraculously, accidentally, or naturally. If he recovered, the conspirators could count themselves as dead.
What, he wondered, did they hope to gain? Power had its allure, but fear frequently eclipsed it. Clearly, the trials in Germany had not been lost on them. If an international tribunal were ever held, he knew whom they would blame for all those deaths. Given that his colleagues had also collaborated, they would confess to lesser crimes to escape hanging. But once the subject was introduced, the effect would be like throwing open the doors of hell: The sulfurous talk of purges would spread like a contagion. The Nuremburg trials had established new norms for guilt. If his colleagues were ever called to stand before a court of justice, he could envision their turmoil.
“From the start, I had my reservations.”
“No one, Nikita, more so than I.”
“Surely some people were guilty.”
“A mere fraction, Nikolai. As chief of police I know.”
“Stalin left us little choice. If we didn’t support him, we would have put our families at risk.”
“And you think, Georgy, the judges won’t say that Hitler’s thugs used the same excuses? Following orders is no defense. A judge will lean over the bench, look me in the eye, and say, ‘Nikolai Bulganin, have you no conscience?’”
“Well I, Lavrenty Beria, can say in all honesty that I tried to persuade Comrade Stalin to close the camps. Why are you smiling, Nikita?”
“Because you sentenced more people to death than any previous chief of the secret police.”
“That’s a lie.”
“It isn’t.”
“It is.”
As Stalin pictured this scene, he wanted to insert himself into the action and tell his cronies that they were safe as long as some other country didn’t occupy the Soviet Union—in particular, the United States. All the more reason to strike first. Incinerate them. Exterminate the seat of capitalism and save their own skins.
“I think our comrades are more to be feared than the West. Do you agree, Nikolai?”
“Of course, Nikita, but as long as we hold the levers of power . . .”
“Lavrenty and I think change is needed: reforms and easing of controls, here and in Eastern Europe.”
“Shit!” said Stalin bitterly.
Cut back to the previous scene.
Seeing a light come on in Ana’s room and the shadow of a man cross behind the kerosene lamp, he mumbled, “The enemy never sleeps. Turn your back for one second and the devil slips into your life. Zalman! Satan unleashed.” The priests were right, he thought. Satan dresses in deception. Trotsky and Zalman, both deceivers. Realizing he was conflating two subjects, Stalin chastised himself for drinking too much. He burped and sighed as the man’s shadow passed in the other direction. Seconds later, he heard a door close and someone enter the shed.
Leaving the bushes, he started back for the city. His meditations migrated to the seminary and the stories the priests told about the machinations of Satan. If he once thought Satan a fiction, he could no longer deny the existence of deceivers. But the worst deception of all, according to Father Benedict, was self-deception. The priest often referred to Aesop and his fable about the dog and his reflection. A dog, with a piece of meat in his mouth, was crossing a bridge over a stream when he happened to see his own reflection in the water. He thought it was another dog with a piece of meat, so he let go of his own and flew at the other dog to grab his piece as well. As a result, he got neither, for one was only a reflection and the other was carried away by the stream. He could hear Father Benedict saying, “The moral of the story is: Envy not your neighbor’s lot and be content with your own.”
Tolstoy, in his own way, had said the same thing in his story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” Six feet, Stalin brooded, was enough to bury a man but not to feed him. Greedy landowners and feckless officials had kept people poor for their own gain. A revolution, Stalin earnestly believed, would bring prosperity to all. He had devoted his life to that hope. Why then were the peasants so reluctant to join the movement?
Fade to the Kremlin.
Vyacheslav Molotov had joined the group, at their invitation, and was reminding them of Stalin’s contributions in the war against Hitler and fascism. But the others remained unconvinced.
“We were unprepared,” said Nikolai, “because Stalin refused to believe that Hitler would launch an offensive against the Soviet Union. When they told him the Germans had crossed the Russian border, he hibernated for a week to recover from the shock.”
“Our losses would have been immeasurably less had we been prepared,” added Georgy.
“And our soldiers more effective if he hadn’t purged all the top military leaders,” Nikita bitterly added.
Stalin gritted his teeth and waited, knowing that Beria would be the most ruthless.
“You’d think he fought the war single-handedly, the way he selfishly takes credit for the German defeat. We lost forty million people, counting civilians, more than all the allied countries put together.”
Molotov defended the Boss. “He industrialized the country and reordered agriculture.”
Nikita, who regarded himself as an expert on all matters touching upon agriculture, would not have failed to say, “At the cost of famines and starvation. Just look at the number of peasants who left the land. It was like a biblical exodus.”
Dissolve to previous scene
As Stalin continued walking, he could smell the soil and, in the moonlight, identify the crops. Perhaps he should have remained in Georgia and farmed. Sowing and reaping had their rewards. Stop! What was he thinking? To farm was to till someone else’s soil. Poor people like him had no access to ownership. Working for the revolutionary cause was the right choice, even though he now faced another. Since Lenin’s return on April 16 from ten years in exile, Ilyich wanted the Bolsheviks to cut all ties to the other revolutionary parties, but Stalin had been trying to form an alliance with them. Strength proceeded from numbers. If the other parties joined the Bolshevik cause, victory would undoubtedly ensue. What was the harm in seeking accord? Unfortunately, when Lenin crossed the border from Finland to Russia, he wanted to know who had been writing compromising articles for Pravda, treating the opposition with kid gloves. Yes, he and his co-editor had taken a conciliatory tone toward the other parties, even inviting the current government to take part in a unification conference, “insofar as it struggles against reaction or counter-revolution.” All for one and one for all. Where was the harm?
Fade to the Dacha.
Stalin knew that his breathing was uneven; he also knew that his concerns were exacerbating his condition. Fearing what his colleagues would say if they dredged up his role in the revolution, slight as it was, he tried not to imagine such a scene, but it came unbidden.
“In the spring of 1917, Stalin allowed room for all the socialist parties, but by the 1930s, he demanded strict conformity, though he called it unity.”
“In the name of so-called unity, millions suffered.”
“Shot or exiled.”
“No excep
tions allowed.”
As usual, Molotov, the faithful hammer, defended him, saying that Stalin was a peacemaker who could see the danger of fragmentation.
His error in trying to make peace with the other parties was that he failed to take into account the effect of Lenin’s return on the party, on the revolution, and on himself.
“Don’t you see, Ilyich,” he said, imagining what he would tell Lenin. “The Russian people want revolution. It has to come. But what they mean by revolution is the overthrow of an inept and stifling tyranny and its replacement by a more liberal system.”
Lenin would reply: “While the people suffer, you waste time and kill our cause proposing compromises. We must end the war and its idiotic patriotism, redistribute the land, cut our ties with France and England, and exploit the country’s misery. Will you never learn?”
Perhaps one of the other left-wing parties was a better fit for him. He began to doubt Lenin’s wisdom. Ilyich’s genius, if he had any, lay in the practical area. He knew how to get things done; he knew how to put theory into practice. Imagination? None. He just faithfully followed Karl Marx. Stalin shuddered, fearing to fall into error. A single line of thought was like a single path through the forest, easier to follow and less likely to lead one astray. That was the seminary’s appeal. Stick to the true and tried. Fundamentalists don’t agonize, agnostics do. The true and tried. Orthodoxy makes everything clear; atheism is anarchy. The true and tried.
Cut to Stalin’s Pravda office in Petrograd. Night.
His office, functional but tiny, held two wooden desks and chairs, as well as two ancient Royal typewriters. A small bookcase and wooden filing cabinet comprised the amenities. The lighting was poor. Bulbs dangled from wires and a single window looked down on the street.
Stalin sat at his desk seething about Lenin’s charge that he was compromising the Bolshevik party line. If formally charged with this apostasy, he would diplomatically argue that schism could be remedied through concord; in particular, he would write a theoretical piece identifying the common ground shared by all the revolutionary parties. If they could start from there, they could redirect the tributaries and create one mighty stream. He liked the metaphor of a stream but worried that it lacked precision. Better to come right to the point. He typed:
Let us take stock. Instead of our democratic socialist parties exaggerating their differences to establish their individual identities, we should begin by enumerating our similarities. The Western and Eastern churches failed to do so and split, needlessly, in 1054. They still remain split. Let us not make the same mistake. Communism can flourish as one faith in both the east and the west.
Before he could type another word, he realized that he had no answer to the old question: What if people want to go their own way? While differences might be permissible for different countries, how many forms of communism can you have in a single country? Only one.
Inevitably he was led back to the need for compromise, but Lenin wouldn’t hear of it. When Ilyich wrote his essay “What Is To Be Done?” he concluded that the readiness to make concessions led to a theoretical hodgepodge, and the willingness to let each revolutionary group “freely decide” their own path invited anarchy.
Stalin removed the sheet of paper from his typewriter, tore it up, and dropped the pieces in the rubbish bin.
Ever after, he regarded that night as the dark night of his soul. Either he would become Lenin’s acolyte and totally commit to the party line or join the opposition. Unable to sleep he walked the city streets until morning, arriving at the office feeling physically exhausted and spiritually spent. But he had reached a decision. Never again would he flirt with dissent. He would expunge compromise and flexibility from his political vocabulary—but first he would wait to see what rewards capitulation brought him. To his surprise, Zalman was waiting in the hallway to see him. What followed next was wholly unexpected. Zalman tried to dissuade him from pursuing Ana.
“Her background, her education, her family ties—all militate against a happy union.”
“She’s an independent woman and a Bolshevik. She knows her own mind. I can see why you’d like to reconcile, but even with Regina on your side, it’s unlikely to happen.”
“Let me explain,” said Zalman.
His exposition left Stalin nonplussed. Ana’s family was proudly Jewish; her mother came from Warsaw and her father from Minsk. She had two sisters and four brothers, all observant, except for her and a younger brother who emigrated to America. Her father had inherited a general store from his father, but regarded himself as a scholar unsuited to shopkeeping. His wife, therefore, maintained the store. He sat each day wrapped in cigarette smoke and a shawl, his bald spot covered with a Turkish fez, poring over his books, convinced that in the texts lay secret meanings. His knowledge of Old Church Slavonic was good enough to enable him to take issue with modern bible translations that he felt missed the essence and arcana of the first five books of the Old Testament. As he studied, he smoked one cigarette after another, producing not knowledge but ashes. During his marriage, when asked what his father-in-law did, Zalman would answer, “He’s an ash manufacturer.”
The children, Zalman continued, all went to religious schools, and then the boys joined the military and the girls married. Zalman had known Ana since they were children. Both families assumed they would marry, and they did, quietly in the rabbi’s living room, eschewing the trappings of orthodoxy. Were they suited? Zalman admitted they were not. She, a voracious reader, involved herself in politics, especially after hearing a lecture by a man called Trotsky. Zalman occupied himself with the winery, until the tsarist government confiscated it, after which his life was subject to the sound of a sewing machine’s foot pedal. Zalman and Ana grew apart. Although the birth of Regina briefly united them, the presence of the child could not satisfy her restless mind.
She asked for a divorce. He complied, to the dismay of both families. Then one day she disappeared with the child. Her whereabouts remained a mystery until Belia Skilowitz wrote that Ana and Regina had come to stay with her and Yalek. A year later, a desolate Zalman started to court a rich widow with a young son, from a neighboring village. Zalman knew about her wealth but not her greed. One day, on the way to her house, he saw her standing on the shore of a lake near her property. She was watching her son swim. Suddenly the boy cramped and cried out for help. His mother, seeing some peasant boys who worked on her property, called out to them to save her son. Cruelly underpaid, these boys despised the lady of the house. One of them asked, “How much?” and she replied, “A penny . . . maybe more” The peasant boys turned and walked away, leaving her son to drown. Zalman, unobserved, stood at a distance and watched the calamity unfold. He never came back. The next day the boy’s body was recovered, and the peasants lost their jobs. Such was life in the small villages. Zalman could therefore understand why Ana had left; he even understood that his provincial mind could not provide Ana with the intellectual stimulation she craved. So what made him think he could succeed now where he had failed before?
Relatives of his had availed themselves of the Baron de Hirsch Fund to sail for America and start a new life. Ana had a brother living in New York City. He wished to do the same, taking Ana and Regina with him. In America she would be free of family and cultural restraints. The opportunities were limitless.
Without saying that Zalman’s parochialism would not be cured by a sea change, Stalin asked Zalman whether life in a new country would be enough to persuade Ana.
“We’ll see.”
“Meaning?”
“I’ve made my proposal, and she has agreed to think it over.”
At that moment, Stalin’s mind could barely sort out what he had heard: America, Zalman, Ana, immigration, emigration, Regina, Baron de . . . who?
“Where does marriage fit in, before leaving or after arriving?”
“She said that decision would have to wait.”
“Have you any plans?”
“To start
anew. I can easily find work and go to school at night.”
“You can attend school here and work for the Bolsheviks. Given what you said about the miserly lady who failed to save her son, we could use you. To start over in America means learning a new language, habituating yourself to a new culture, working for capitalists, leaving behind family and friends. Is that what you want?”
“That’s only one side of the coin.”
“If you’ll permit me to make a suggestion . . .”
“Please do.”
Stalin removed a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Zalman, who politely explained that he never smoked.
“Pity. It’s a good Turkish tobacco.” Stalin lit a cigarette, inhaled, and slowly expelled the smoke as he spoke. “Before you uproot other people, I would suggest you travel to America alone to see if the country lives up to its promise. If it does, you can send for your family later. That’s what millions of other immigrants do. It’s less expensive that way, also less risky for Ana and the child. Should you need additional money for your trip, I can probably ask the party to support you, with the promise that you’ll work for our cause in America.”
Stalin complimented himself on his inventiveness. Rubbing his hands as if he had just completed a good day’s work, he asked Zalman what he thought of making the journey alone.
“You can really help financially?”
“We can. Our goal is worldwide revolution. To achieve that end, we’re willing to help.” Stalin paused for emphasis. “Of course,” he added in a mocking tone of voice, “if you don’t feel up to the challenge . . .” and then broke off. “As soon as you arrive in America, send me a mailing address. You can write me in care of this office. I’ll see to it that whatever funds you need will be sent.”
Zalman left. A fortnight later, while visiting Ana, Stalin learned that Zalman had returned to Ukraine, but not before saying goodbye to Ana and Regina. She related that initially he had tried to persuade her to leave Russia with him for “the Golden Medina,” but after his trip to Petrograd, he had conceived another plan: to travel alone. Although pleased by his decision, she had no idea why he had changed his mind. The last she heard from him came via telegraph. She received a wire that said: Depart train for Bremen, then board ship for America. Will write. Love, Zalman.
Death at the Dacha Page 6
