Death at the Dacha

by Paul M. Levitt

  “Not here. In Georgia, before I was born.”

  “And the source of your information, if I may ask?”

  “Uncle Avel.”

  “Your mother’s brother was a drunk.”

  “He swore it was true.”

  “And you believed him.”

  Putting her hands on her hips and trying to look very grown up, Nadya asked, “And what of the Rubinstein woman?”

  “Who?”

  “Her former husband came to our apartment and told us about the two of you.”

  “When?”

  “Before he left the city”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Fade to the Kremlin and Beria.

  “The records are incomplete. We can only surmise.”

  Looking troubled, Malenkov added, “And therein lies an invitation to mischief,” a statement that led Khrushchev to smartly observe:

  “Revisionist history can suit our purposes.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Although drowning in a hemorrhagic death, he remained determined to finish his film. For the sake of it, he tried to remember whether he had married Ana Rubinstein. But his mental focus blurred, and he kept conflating Ana and Nadezhda Alliluyeva. In May 1918, Stalin and Nadya had taken a train to Tsaritsyn, where Stalin was ordered to locate food supplies for the Bolsheviks during their civil war with the Whites. Her father, Sergei, had accompanied them on the train, though he slept in a different compartment. Late one night, he heard his daughter scream. When he entered the compartment she was sharing with Stalin, he assumed the worst, rape. But Nadya was hysterically laughing. Not until years later did she tell her father the joke, which concerned the diminutive size of Stalin’s stallion.

  In March 1919, at the front, amid revolutionary bullets and death, Stalin and Nadya married, though they did not officially register the union until five months later, in Moscow.

  She had worked as his personal assistant in 1917 when he embarked on his job as the People’s Commissar for Nationalities, and she had worked for Lenin. Her revolutionary fervor equaled his own, and she envisaged a life of action for herself, not one of housewifery. By 1921, with the birth of their first child, Vasily, he knew the marriage would fail. She was moody, short-tempered, restless, subject to sieges of depression, indifferent to her infant son, and desperate to continue her education, which she had cut short to marry the dashing bank robber with the long black hair. Svetlana’s birth in 1926 did not unite them, though he found great pleasure in his daughter. To escape his wife’s instability, he saw other women, and even periodically brought Ana Rubinstein from Petrograd to Moscow for assignations. Later, he simply resettled her in the capital.

  Looking back now, he could identify the precise toxins that had poisoned his marriage to Nadya: Yakov, his and Kato’s son; Artyom, the adopted son of Stalin’s late friend, Fyodor Sergeyev, who had died in a train accident; Nadya’s college friends; the ghost of his affair with Olga, Nadya’s mother; and last, but most important, Nadezhda. He knew that Nadya’s list of grievances would cite other reasons for the breakdown of their marriage. She had certainly expressed them enough times: his impulse to prove his masculinity by womanizing, his insensitivity and paranoia, his addiction to Beria’s flattery, and his need to surpass everyone else, with the attendant result that she felt forced to appear dull. She rarely mentioned the ten abortions, having no real fondness for children. As Tolstoy had said in Anna Karenina: “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” He and Nadya had found a thousand little ways to be unhappy, but he attributed the source to the mismeasure of a marriage between a seventeen-year-old girl and a forty-year-old man.

  Although assisted by nannies and cooks, Nadya found herself, at twenty years old, caring for two infant sons, her own and Artyom Sergeyev. At the time, Artyom was four and a half months old, sixteen days older than Vasily Stalin. To show their concern for the needy, Bolsheviks often adopted children. Perhaps foolishly or from an excess of kindness, she subsequently proposed that Stalin bring his son Yakov, the offspring of his marriage to Kato Svanidze, from Georgia to Moscow. At first, Stalin balked, but Nadya insisted that Yakov live with them, cared for by his father and her. Yakov was already a teenager, just seven years younger than she. Even though Stalin explained that the boy spoke Georgian, not Russian, and was steeped in the unhurried ways of Caucasian culture, she would not take no for an answer. People change, she replied. Subsequently, when Stalin reprimanded Yakov for laxity, whether in school or play, Nadya defended him. Their own son, Vasily, was feckless, causing Stalin in later years to compare him unfavorably to Artyom and Svetlana, to Nadya’s dismay. Yakov and Vasily, both destined to die young, were never close. Separated by fourteen years, they had little or nothing in common. But Vasily and Artyom enjoyed a genuine closeness. Stalin claimed to like children, but he was rarely at home, leaving their upbringing to Nadya and a nurse. Although the two sons he sired in Siberia with two different women never surfaced during his lifetime, he often wondered about their fate. Nadya knew of them only through rumors.

  With the young children mewling, pulling, kicking, and screaming, Stalin gladly absented himself from the Kremlin apartment. Among his confidants was Ana Rubinstein.

  “It’s a madhouse,” he complained, “bedlam. No discipline. She lets them run wild.”

  “And you?”

  “It’s the woman’s job. I’m too busy with other things.”

  Ana’s weekly telephone calls provided Stalin with a sounding board. He keenly looked forward to them and wished that she had settled in Moscow. In one conversation, he confided that he had lost interest in Nadya and found her limited. She bored him. “Her old revolutionary ardor is gone. She’s become a conventional housewife. I need more.” When Ana reminded him that the secret police very likely tapped all his calls, he dismissed her concern, saying Beria had provided him with a safe phone, namely a private line available only to Stalin. In her best coded language, Ana tried to warn him to trust no one, and to limit his candor.

  Taking Ana’s advice, he spoke little in their succeeding conversations of family matters, though he could hardly escape them and felt compelled to include them in his movie. Every time he looked at Yakov, who closely resembled his mother, he saw Kato, and the resemblance never ceased to tear at his heart. Consumed with guilt, he could not stand being reminded of her death. Even Yakov’s gentleness brought Kato to mind, reason enough for Stalin to insist that the boy steel himself against the hardships of life. “You’re too soft,” he’d complain, eventually driving the lad to enlist in the military, which led to an early death. Artyom, on the other hand, embodied everything that Stalin wanted to see in his own sons: resolve, discipline, cleverness, and courage. Alas, opposites invite comparisons; hence Stalin frequently compared Artyom to Yakov and Vasily. Had he known that Artyom would outshine his own flesh and blood, he might not have adopted him. His invidious comparisons led the boys to vie for Stalin’s esteem. But the more Yakov and Vasily tried, the more they exhibited their failures, increasing the worth of Artyom and exacerbating Stalin’s frustrations.

  The Vozhd guessed that this was just one of Nadya’s reasons for enrolling as a chemistry student in Moscow’s new Industrial Academy to study synthetic fibers and to train as an engineer. Other reasons undoubtedly included her loneliness and boredom, to say little of their heated fights about parenting, which led her to briefly take the children to Leningrad to live. But Stalin ordered them home. By 1929, she had had her fill of motherhood. She wanted to prove her worth through her studies and party activism. Not for her the term baba. The babushkas were busybody grandmothers, the exact opposite of the new Bolshevik woman. She prided herself on her intelligence, which Stalin had once valued, even praising her judgment. That was then; now she had to face the truth that both she and Stalin had failed as parents, and her strengths lay elsewhere. At the Industrial Academy, her teachers and fellow students admired her sensibility and analytic skills. She ne
ver told anyone the identity of her husband and refused to be chauffeured to school. She presented herself as modest and serious, qualities that drew other students to her with their secret sorrows. From her classmates she learned of the famine in Ukraine, which the newspapers failed to report and which Stalin denied. Her innocence and political naiveté vanished on hearing her school friends, and led her to wonder how she might mitigate this horror.

  She kept a diary, which she knew that Stalin frequently read. Perhaps she could write something that would make him take note, since talking to him did no good. Her lack of literary imagination initially inhibited her, but then she decided that to some extent all writers lie. She would also. But at least her lie would embody the truth. She wrote in her diary that on the way to school she met a gaunt, legless beggar, pushing himself on a wheeled board. He asked for a kopek. She replied that in the socialist paradise, all beggars rode horses. He then told her a story, which he claimed originated in Ukraine. If she thought it worth a kopek, she could pay him when he finished.

  An elderly man married a young woman. For all the difference in years between them, they lived happily. (Stalin was convinced that Nadya was alluding to them.) She bore him one child, a son, a quiet child. In the crib he was silent and still. But then, so too were the parents. They spoke softly to one another. One day, the old man left the collective to run an errand. In the city center he bought his wife poppy seed cakes. When he returned, he saw the pleasure he had given her, and left the room so she could not see the tears in his eyes. Then the famine came. At night he would wake and stare at his sleeping wife and child, both of whom looked like skeletons. The old man died first, two days before the baby, to whom he had committed every last food scrap and crumb. In the spring, the three starved corpses were found together in their rotting rags.

  Nadya opened her purse and handed the beggar two kopeks for “enlightening” her.

  She subsequently heard that scenes of this kind were repeated thousands of times in some of the richest agricultural lands in the world. How can this be, she asked Stalin? When he failed to respond, she answered for him. Appropriations. Government-mandated food deliveries. These people died from hunger so that the party faithful and other functionaries could live well.

  ******

  Stalin redirected his thoughts to the Kremlin, where he could imagine the exchange bearing on Nadya’s death. With his own life slipping away, his colleagues, except for Molotov, would speak freely and alike.

  - According to the maid, she left a suicide note.

  - Gone.

  - He undoubtedly destroyed it.

  - But we have her diary.

  - He must have overlooked it.

  - What do you suppose he said when he read the entry about the beggar and the famine?

  - We needn’t guess. He told me.

  After reading the passage, Stalin seethed. He sent for Nadya. When she arrived, he exploded. Shaking the diary as if expecting the words to fall out, he thundered, “Who told you this traitorous lie? The names of your friends? A legless beggar, indeed. Shit! Undoubtedly you heard this canard at school. I will have all the offending students expelled.” And he did, ushering Armageddon into his married life.

  The shouting and swearing could be heard throughout the Kremlin. Her screams sounded like those of a mad woman. He, in return, threatened to destroy the entire college.

  “Call your friend, Beria” she said. “He’ll tell you in a thousand soothing ways how right you are and how wrong I am.”

  “Even your own family says you’re unstable. Schizophrenic is the word they most often use to describe you”

  “And you, what are you? A paranoid maniac. An insecure little man—and little in more ways than one—who cannot have his picture taken with others unless he’s standing one step higher than everyone else.”

  “Your own mother told me not to marry you. She said your gypsy blood made you crazy.”

  “What else did she tell you?”

  “That you might be my daughter.”

  Her eyes widened, crazed with fear, bringing to mind a vision of hell from Hieronymus Bosch. Seeing the terror in her look, he quickly added:

  “Just a bad joke. I didn’t mean it”

  She pulled at her hair and screamed, “Are you telling me I’m the sister of my own children?” Then she howled like a wounded wolf: “I am damned!”

  Afraid of what she might do to herself and trying to assuage her weeping grief, he took Nadya in his arms and pacified her, saying, “Do you remember on summer evenings at the dacha at Zubalova, we’d stroll in the woods arm in arm? We’d walk slowly and silently, both lost in thought. At such times,” he chuckled, “we must have looked like two people mutely making their way to a funeral. What were you thinking?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Whether you loved me or not. But I was pleased to have you at my side.” She wiped away her tears and asked, “And you?”

  “Us.”

  “What were your feelings?”

  “You know how hard it is for me to talk about emotions. That’s for women”

  She buried her face in his shoulder, clearly seeking succor and solace. “Do you remember one night I was terribly sick and you put me to bed and comforted me? And I said, 'So you love me a little, after all?’”

  “Nadya, have you any idea the pressure I’m under trying to govern a country with hundreds of ethnic groups, each wanting to speak their own language and worship their own way? To bring a semblance of coherence to the country, the Politburo agreed that Russian would be the official language and most churches shuttered. Otherwise, we would have complete chaos. I sympathize with the Dutch. They built walls to keep out the sea. We, too, are trying to prevent a flood, one of biblical proportions.”

  He persuaded her to take a sedative and go to bed, though he knew that he had bought only a temporary peace. Their arguments needed no reason. And as always, after an altercation with Nadya, he sought the praise and comfort of Beria’s flattery. The cunning courier, the epitome of Oriental perfidy, always knew how to bolster Stalin’s shaky ego. He became Stalin’s surrogate mother, unconditionally admiring him. Just as Stalin had taken his mother’s admiration as his due, he expected others to idolize him. He refused to be corrected. Any error was someone else’s fault. Having imbibed his mother’s character, he was stubborn and strict, thin-skinned and unbending. Convinced that beatings dispelled recalcitrance, and death removed opposition, he had no reluctance to use both, blinding himself to the fact that ideas may outlive death.

  For all his seminary training—or because of it—Stalin acted on Dostoevsky’s observation that if there is no God, then everything is permitted. Being a non-believer in charitable behavior and humane principles gave him a free hand. He also subscribed to Beria’s dictum: “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”

  These attitudes made life in the Kremlin unbearable for Nadya. She so hated Beria that she forbade his coming to their apartment. After having agreed to her demand, Stalin broke his promise. One wintry day, the two of them, visibly drunk, clomped into the apartment to conduct some business. With their wet galoshes parked at the front door, they sat at the dining room table, arrayed with government telephones, talking about “enemies of the people” Nadya listened from another room. When Beria left, she followed Stalin into his little office, which also served as his bedroom. He had already stretched out on the divan where he slept.

  “How could you bring that man here when you agreed not to? Both of you . . . smelling of drink.”

  “No theatrics, please. You’re overwrought.”

  “And you are addicted to flattery. Beria tells you what you want to hear.”

  “Which is?”

  “That you’re a second Lenin, a genius.”

  A ferocious argument ensued. He remembered it as their worst, even taking into account their last supper on the fateful night of her death. She broke his vanity mirror, threatened to slit her wr
ists, and flung herself against the wall, falling to the floor, where she pawed at the rug as if in the throes of a seizure. Of all the untold number of scenes running through his head, this one rarely left his sight.

  Finding her balance, she slowly shuffled out of his study and went to her bedroom. He followed, his shirttails trailing behind his tunic. Her bed, neatly draped with her favorite shawls, contrasted with the unkempt Stalin. He burped. She turned away and stood looking out the windows, which faced the Alexandrovsky Gardens. In spring they exuded the scent of roses. A non-drinker, she detested the smell of alcohol. Stalin reeked.

  “You’re contaminating my bedroom with your stale breath.”

  He burped again and sat on her bed. She grabbed one of the shawls, a green one, and wrapped herself in it, as if to fortify herself against Stalin’s fumes.

  With slurred speech, he said, “You’re deranged. Your own mother thinks so.”

  “And yours filled you with hot air and made you think you were fit to be a tsar. The poor woman didn’t have the courage to tell you that you had . . .”

  “Go ahead and say it. I was born with . . .”

  “I hate your self-pity.”

  “You once laughed and pointed.”

  “On the train.”

  “Your father crashed into the compartment.”

  “I was only seventeen.”

  Stalin took one of her shawls and, treating it as a babushka, tried to inject some humor into the situation. He pretended to be an old lady, cackling: “I think I’ll move to Budapest for the warm weather. What do you think?”

  Without any trace of a smile, she readjusted her shawl and also pretended to be a babushka, but without altering her voice to sound like a crone. “Question: What’s three hundred meters long and eats tons of potatoes every day? Answer: A queue of Russian babushkas waiting to buy meat.”

  Stalin threw his shawl on the floor. “One day you are going to push me too far.” He growled. “You know how hard I am working to increase meat production and the grain harvest. It’s no joke. Do you understand?”