Death at the Dacha

by Paul M. Levitt

  Iris Storm asked, “And the point of your story, Istomina?”

  “The kids. Josif really had eyes for just one. His own two sons died young, Yakov in the war, Vasily from drink.”

  As much as Stalin wished to keep his imaginings under control by mentally reining in the actors, he could see them, like so many free-spirited thespians, going off in all directions. His movie now bore no relationship to his original conception. He had lost control of the narrative. Ever since officially coming to power in 1929, he had ruled for twenty-four years with an iron fist and controlled all the outlets of information. And yet, his own movie had slipped away from him, bursting the bounds of his dominion. With his brain refusing to follow his orders, anything could happen. In the script he hoped to show the world, Valechka knew better than to speak of family matters, but Iris Storm had set the female spirits loose. To talk about Svetlana was allowable, but not his sons. He hadn’t failed his boys, they had failed him. Stalin never failed! Just ask his followers.

  “Then you don’t think well of him as a parent?” Iris asked.

  Valechka equivocated. How could she think poorly of the man whom she adored? “Affairs of state,” she said. “How could badgered Josif look after the country and the kids? No man could.”

  “Did the boys love their father?” asked Iris.

  “The adopted one, Artyom, worshiped him.”

  “And his own?”

  “That’s a different story.”

  “Strange,” Iris observed.

  “Not really,” continued Valechka. “You know the saying, ‘A boy is a noise with dirt on it.’”

  “No, I never heard that before.”

  “Yakov, so they tell me, was the spittin’ image of his mother. Every time Josif looked at him, he saw his first wife, who died an awful death. Memories! We can’t escape them.” She sighed and reached into her apron pocket for a handkerchief to dab her tearing eyes. “Now Vasily was another story. Spoiled from the start. Lazy. Poor at school. A bully who got in fights with classmates. At the dinner table, Josif would slide a glass of wine to him and order him to drink it. Josif said it was an Italian custom. Well, before the boy had left his teens, he was a drunk.”

  Nadya came to Vasily’s defense. “He was a good baby. Hardly any trouble at all. From an early age, his father expected him to behave like an adult and follow in his footsteps. The boy wanted to live his own life. Ha! Try doing that while living with Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili.”

  Ana Rubinstein sat pensively picking imaginary specks from her angora sweater and charcoal twilled woolen skirt. Obviously nervous, she bit a cuticle and examined her fingers, which she splayed on the table. At last, she spoke. “I suppose it’s because I didn’t live with him that we got on so well. But I do have some questions for Josif. Before I ask, though, let me speak on his behalf.” She then recounted how Stalin’s largesse had saved her life and her daughter’s. Living in Leningrad, she and Regina found themselves, like others in the city, besieged for 900 days by the Germans during the war. Stalin housed them in an elite neighborhood on Vasilievsky Island, saw to it that they received food packages, and saved them from the starvation that cost 800,000 lives.

  “I owe my life to him,” she said, “but still I cannot remain silent for this hearing.” She unclasped her purse and withdrew an envelope. “This letter,” she said, “has long haunted me. Shortly after Hitler came to power in January 1933, the Bolsheviks posted me to Berlin, where I conducted undercover work.” For a moment, she studied the letter. “My contact in Berlin, a secretary friendly to our cause, sent me this. It concerns a sensitive subject, one that I’m not sure Comrade Stalin’s health will allow him to confront.” She paused and looked at Iris Storm.

  “Please, continue,” said Iris. “This court is open to every source of information we can uncover.”

  Stalin had no idea what Ana was alluding to. In his script he had only pleasant thoughts about her. She might yet insist on his greatness. But this court had not been convened to celebrate his achievements; it was to ask him questions heretofore unvoiced and forbidden.

  Dear Ana,

  The German high command is convinced that Stalin admires Hitler, especially his ruthlessness in removing anyone he regards as a threat to his authority. Apparently, Stalin congratulated Hitler after the night of the long knives, when Hitler ordered a bloody purge of his own political party, assassinating hundreds of Nazis he feared might become political enemies in the future. He particularly marked for death Ernst Rohm, leader of the Nazi Storm Troopers (SA), whose four million members had helped bring Hitler to power. According to his aides, Hitler feared the SA would replace the regular army and threaten his authority. He also feared that some of the SA had taken his early “National Socialism” propaganda to heart and could thwart his plan to suppress workers’ rights in exchange for German industry making the country war-ready.

  Ana asked ruefully, “Sound familiar, Josif? Isn’t this the same plan you followed in killing off Sergei Kirov and the original Bolsheviks who made the revolution? You saw them as potential rivals. Consequently the purge.”

  Stalin had long wondered when someone would see the connection between Hitler’s bloodbath and his own. Hitler, in fact, had indirectly praised the death of Kirov and the ensuing purge when several years later he spoke to the Wehrmacht a week before the Germans invaded Poland. Stalin had received a secret copy of the speech, in which Hitler said:

  There are only three great statesmen in the world, Stalin, I, and Mussolini. Accordingly, I shall . . . stretch out my hand to Stalin . . . and undertake the redistribution of the world with him. [I order you] to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?

  At the time of Kirov’s assassination, Stalin told himself that the Russians would forget; they would become oblivious. And eventually they did. After all, every family was home not only to victims but also to perpetrators.

  Ana spread the letter on the table and continued. “The purge caused the death of members of my family in Ukraine, though I didn’t learn until years later of the notorious 1937 order Number 00447 that called for the mass execution and exile of ‘socially harmful elements’ as ‘enemies of the people.’ A million died from executions, but at least two million died from the famine that was entirely avoidable.”

  The ingratitude of this woman, seethed Stalin. Unlike the millions sentenced to die, he had saved her and her child. Lodged them. Given her work. Well, he said to himself: In ten or twenty years’ time, who’s going to remember all the riffraff we liquidated? No one! In the end, the mass of people will say that those we shot and exiled got what they deserved.

  “In some cases,” said Ana, “the number arrested and executed was determined by quota. To show their loyalty and pride of country, some officials exceeded the number.”

  Stalin focused fixedly on her face so he could skewer her with his eyes. They alone still functioned normally. But she stonily ignored his Medusa look. She then proceeded to tell him of the corruption and venality that proceeded from order Number 00447. Stalin could see the secret police chief, Yezhov, smiling at the thought of ridding the country of political enemies under the veil of calling them anti-Soviet conspirators.

  Ana explained that many of those entrusted with the responsibility of rounding up enemies of the people informed their intended victims in advance. Not surprisingly, the condemned offered officials money or other valuables, like jewels, to have their names removed from the lists. One such person actually had the courage to report an official for accepting bribes. The official’s defense? He planned, he said, to take the money—for the good of the country—and still have the person removed. Then he in turn offered a bribe to the secret police, who took the money and promised him leniency. The result: The police shot both the whistleblower and the official. Is this how Soviet justice worked, she wanted to know? Why had Stalin called
forth these fiends?

  Stalin formulated his defense. Ana had never experienced devils in the flesh, as he had, eliciting night sweats and fever and panic. Although he regarded himself as a father to his people, he knew that hatred of him persisted, and that he could never earn the respect of those who questioned his competence and legitimacy and were secretly plotting against him. But he could command their obedience through fear. The priests had taught him that lesson at the seminary. Beating and spying were their principal weapons. He could beat his country into submission and spy on the population to unearth any deviation. The tsar had used the Okhrana and the priesthood to report on subversive behavior. The tsar’s mistake was leniency. When his agents found wrongdoing, the offender was merely bundled off to Siberia. Lenin didn’t do much better, even though he had appointed Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Polish strongman, nicknamed Iron Felix, to head the secret police, renamed the Cheka and then the OGPU. Executions and death-inducing labor were Stalin’s proud additions to the secret police, which became the military and security arm of the Bolshevik Communist Party, responsible for innumerable liquidations.

  Additionally, Stalin hoped to control not only actions but also thoughts, the source of actions. Spying, he decided, was not enough. He therefore directed his scientists to undertake a way of reading people’s minds. Though his scientists failed to invent such a machine, he settled on beating as a means to reveal a person’s thinking. The great value of beating was that even if innocent, the person would confess to harboring seditious ideas.

  He himself was not innocent on this account. His own dossier indicated that he had at one time supported different political parties and had lent himself to different factions. But woe to those who remembered his changing loyalties.

  Ana, however, remembered. She reminded him, to his chagrin, that he treated Hitler as an ally and refused to believe that Germany had attacked the Soviet Union. “You were even willing,” she said, “to purge Jews from your government to please Hitler.”

  He found it painful to admit that her accusations were true, and that his judgment of Hitler was badly mistaken, never entertaining the possibility that the cold-bloodedness that had initially attracted him to the Fuhrer would eventually be turned against him. But in the example of Hitler, he found justification for his own brutal behavior. Hitler had merely reinforced his belief that all his former comrades, all those whom he had purged, were capable of the same treachery. Reason enough to kill them. Stalin’s mind began to blur. Ana’s words came to him in disconnected sentences.

  “Poland . . . dismemberment . . . you take the east . . . Hitler the west. Innocents died . . . my aunt and uncle . . . cousins”

  Shaking off his confusion, he thought, “What an innocent” Didn’t eastern Poland once belong to Russia-before 1920? He was just reclaiming for his country former Russian possessions. Poland naturally brought to mind the non-aggression pact with Germany and the treachery of Hitler. Would Ana, who had opposed the pact, reproach him for agreeing to sell raw materials to Germany and carve up Poland and the Baltic states? But her objections were the least of his fears. What if the Politburo got cold feet and decided to restore those states to their former status? He could hear the arguments in the Politburo and see the principals as his mind screen cut to the Kremlin, where Molotov had been summoned to talk about the non-aggression pact.

  ******

  Stalin guessed that, at this moment, his colleagues were convinced he wouldn’t recover and relished revisiting his missteps. But why give a corpse an enema? His past mistakes had been rectified. Hadn’t Soviet forces driven out the Germans and made Poland a communist satellite?

  “Comrade Beria doesn’t think the Soviet occupation of Poland is worth the price,” said Malenkov. “We could end the Cold War with a stroke of the pen.”

  “Any concessions to America,” Molotov replied, “will merely encourage our enemies. Moreover, we need buffer states to keep the Americans from our borders.”

  “I disagree,” said Beria. “The gratitude of those countries that we free, and the goodwill of the West, will surely provide the protection we need.”

  “Rubbish!” thundered Khrushchev. “You are talking rot. Only a fool marries off a son without expecting a dowry in return. Gratitude and goodwill are just airy phrases. Have you lost your mind, to say nothing of your spine?”

  Bulganin seconded that observation with the comment that too much Russian blood had been spilled to give away an empire the equal of the tsar’s.

  Yes, Stalin thought, never give away what you can sell. The West will pay dearly for what you wish to give them for nothing. Don’t be fools. The Baltics are one thing, the eastern countries another. The former are too small and too weak to present a danger, not so the latter.

  Malenkov called for a vote. “We have three possibilities. One, withdraw our troops from all occupied countries. Two, withdraw them from only the Baltics. Three, maintain the status quo.” He gave each of the Politburo members a piece of paper, asked them to vote, and then collected the papers. “All three suggestions fail, though number two has one yes and one abstention. Let us make clear to the world that Stalin’s policy remains unchanged.”

  A relieved Stalin returned his focus to Iris Storm and the trial.

  Iris resumed her interrogation. “Undoubtedly, Comrade Stalin, you assume a conspiracy has led to your current state.”

  Stalin nodded. “A straight line. History will look back and see it ran from Trotsky to the men who plotted my death.”

  “Events never occur in a straight line,” said Iris; “they are discrete. We then piece those events together, give them shape and form, and call it history. Narratives are the stuff of novelists. Historians have merely copied the art. How each of us responds to an event is a relative matter, and how we construct a through line is the test of our literary skill. Do we, for example, start with small events or large, wars or people, winners or losers, politicians or peasants, social affairs or political? The figures of speech or tropes we use to embellish our narrative exhibit our storytelling skills. You have chosen as your trope konspiratsia.”

  “It’s everywhere around me,” he insisted, explaining that in Georgia, conspiracy lurked in the bazaars, the streets, the mosques, the churches, the police, and the government ministries, turning one group against another. Consequently, all the different ethnicities wanted their own separate piece of Georgia: the Ossetians, the Abkhazians, the Yazidis, the Greeks, the Kists, the Azerbaijanis. “You name the group. There are more than I can list. Georgia is a gallimaufry of loyalties and faiths. You might say that from each of them I learned the workings of conspiracy. I therefore have good reasons for my suspicious nature.”

  “That is merely the story you tell yourself. To make sense of the disparate parts of our lives, we tell ourselves coherent stories, but the telling is all make-believe. That is why history books will differ in the way they represent you, but the one point of agreement will be your paranoia.”

  “I just explained. All my life I have been surrounded by enemies and spies.”

  “As I said, that’s your story. Your first wife tells another. Let us hear from her, Ekaterina Svanidze.”

  Recognizing that in Iris he faced a formidable foe, Stalin asked to speak first. Sympathy, not history, was now needed.

  “I never loved anyone as dearly as I loved Kato,” Stalin pleaded, reaching out his one good hand as if he wished to hold one of hers, but she remained seated at the table, immobile, looking down at him. “Kato, tell them how I loved you! Speak on my behalf.”

  The beautiful Kato, she of the dark hair and eyes, of the almond skin and gentle disposition, she who was his heart’s desire, slowly shook her head as if undecided what to say.

  “This role I find myself cast in, assessor of my former husband, leaves little room for improvising. Sworn to tell the truth, I sit here wondering whether I was dreaming when I married Josif or am I dreaming now? And what can I say about a marriage that began in every healthy way
and ended in sordid illness? Most of our marriage I spent alone, with Josif writing during the day and inciting strikes at night.”

  She testified that at first Josif was always at her side. He would accompany her to the marketplace and meet her on the street after work to walk her home. When he discovered she was pregnant, he never abandoned her. Not all men behaved so well. Although he hated the church, he agreed to a religious marriage ceremony. But shortly after they wed, his devotion to revolution eclipsed his familial responsibilities. He regularly disappeared to foment unrest among the working classes. Subversion excited his blood; home life did not.

  “I shortly realized he was married to revolution and not to me. His real bride was konspiratsia, not Kato.”

  Stalin cared for her too much to object to her view of him. But with an entire country under the heel of a tsar, surely freeing millions of people mattered more than pleasing a wife.

  “I tried telling him that marriage is a revolution. We change one state for another. It alters our lives.” She smiled at Stalin and spoke directly to him. “Apparently, though, you preferred political upheaval to domesticity.”

  “My work . . . the interruptions.”

  “I made no demands on you.”

  “A crying baby.”

  “A new life.”

  “To write my articles and pamphlets I needed silence.”

  “Then you should have renounced the world and become a hermit.”

  “I virtually did.”