Svetlana entered the room and, hearing Beria’s last words, went directly to him.
“What are you saying?”
“I was telling your blessed father that second-rate minds could never appreciate his genius.”
“It sounded like something else.”
“You must have misheard,” said Beria, quickly withdrawing to the other side of the room.
In his dying moments, if Stalin had any doubts about who had masterminded his death, they were dispelled when he heard Beria mutter to the three remaining Politburo members, “I saved you! Just remember, I was the one who put an end to the madness.” Then before disappearing into the hallway and out the front door, Beria called, “Khrustalev, my car!”
Stalin wondered why Malenkov was staying behind and had not left with Beria. Was Georgy, then, part of the plot or not? By remaining at the dacha, he could lead the others to believe that Beria had acted alone. For Malenkov to succeed to the leadership position, he would need Beria, but he would also need to create the appearance of distance between him and Laventry. Malenkov was the most intelligent of the group, and Khrushchev, though not as devious as Beria, the most likely to survive. His peasant cunning, a quality remarkable throughout Russian history, would vanquish the wiles of Beria.
Stalin could envision Beria sitting in the backseat of his limousine, talking through the speaker phone to the colonel at the wheel, and the two men chuckling over their success, proud of their plotting and poisoning. He could also imagine Beria making it clear to the colonel that given what he had just participated in, his life would be short—but that his sister would be spared.
While those in attendance waited in another room for the arrival of the doctors, Stalin’s mind screen focused on the man after whom he had fashioned his life, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He hoped, unlike the Iris Storm digression, he could keep this reel on track. Lenin sat on a chair next to the table with the green cloth. At his elbow was a cup of tea, with a cracker on the saucer. He was wordlessly shaking his head. Stalin could read in his expression disapproval. The prophetic voice of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible rang in his ears.
Ambition is more terrible than greed. No man can be satisfied if he stands in the shadow of another.
But he who has everything needs nothing.
No man knows the limits of human desire.
Yes, he was guilty of ambition. But is it unnatural, Stalin asked himself, to despise the person who consigns you to the dustbin and makes all your accomplishments look small? That was Trotsky. With his competitor’s death, the Vozhd was the unchallenged ruler of the Soviet Union. He had never envisioned such a victory, but then ambition knows no measure.
“I tried,” said Stalin, “to remain true to your vision.”
With labored breaths, suggesting that the old man had entered Stalin’s film in the stricken condition of his last days, Lenin haltingly answered, “Which? A classless society, a modern Russia free of priests and poverty, a transfer of land to the peasants, a multicultural country, a means for small businesses and farmers to buy and sell on the open market?”
“I killed thousands of priests.”
“Your greatest accomplishment was creating a country littered with graves.”
Feeling unappreciated, a furious Stalin weighed whether to discontinue this dialogue and cut the scene from the movie or to defend himself. He chose the latter. “Through industrialization and military might, I made a medieval country a modern one.”
Lenin countered by listing some of the social reforms that he had instituted and expected Stalin to continue: free health care and education, civil rights for women, production and transfer of goods by the workers, universal literacy and equality, social insurance for all that would cover illness, infirmities, injuries, old age, childbirth, widowhood, orphanage, and unemployment. “You couldn’t even abolish military ranks and titles, nor decorations and other marks of distinction,” Lenin ruefully observed.
“I memorialized you for the ages.”
“To burnish your own reputation. Trotsky would have seen my plans to a successful conclusion, but you cared only for personal power.”
“I hate the very syllables of his name.”
“He showed more inventiveness in a single speech and essay than you exhibited in your entire life.”
“Are you saying that you preferred him just because he could give a better speech and write a smarter sentence?”
“In truth, Josif, you were not at all intelligent.”
Stalin closed his eyes and fortified his self-pride with the thought that when he died crowds would swarm the streets, hoping to get a glimpse of the coffin; people would weep; and the pillars of the world would shake. Surely, he consoled himself, I’ll be buried next to Lenin in the mausoleum, and my body embalmed. I will live forever physically and in history. Even Genghis Khan is remembered. The forgotten are those who have contributed nothing and never played a role on the world’s stage. Better to be hated and unloved than forgotten. They can inscribe those words on my tombstone.
Opening his eyes, Stalin stared at Lenin, seeing not an old man but a young one, seated in his compartment on a sealed train that took him and more than thirty other exiles from Switzerland, through Germany, and into Sweden. Lenin always said that he had occupied himself writing treatises and letters, with his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, glued to the window, astounded at the absence of adult men, all of whom were presumably at the front fighting in the Great War. If the train had been stopped and Lenin arrested, all of his plans for the future would have come to naught, and Stalin could have ordered the society and portrayed the revolution in his own self-important way. Instead, he had to play by Lenin’s rules, at least at first. But once the great man died, his day was at hand. So how had Stalin come to his current pass, lying partially paralyzed reminiscing about the past?
“Comrade Lenin, tell me: When your seizures confined you to bed, were you thinking of the life to come or the one you were leaving?”
“I trust you are not alluding to heaven, the great Christian hoax.”
“No, I was wondering whether your mind was fixed on a future socialist utopia or the world you had just experienced.”
Lenin thought for a moment. “Although I spent most of my adult life plotting and planning a new society, I knew all too well the future was but a chimera and the present a whisper. It is memory that constitutes a life, an unyielding truth that makes change so terribly difficult. Even when people want to break free, they cannot easily escape their ties to the past. And in your case, the past is populated with unimpeachable witnesses to your crimes.” He paused to catch his breath. “I suspect that you are now having such thoughts, and reliving the bleak moments in your life, like parochial school and the purges. You might even be considering the cruelty you visited on others, especially women.” The Vozhd squirmed, an indication of his discomfort, which pleased Lenin, who continued in the same censorious manner. “For all our talk about emancipating women, you never really embraced the idea. If you had, you could never have inflicted on your wives and mistresses a quarry of hurt. Poor Nadya! You drove her to suicide.”
“No one has more respect for women than I do.”
“The facts, Josif! They speak for themselves. If you don’t think so, I’ll gladly explain what they mean.”
Stalin feared that Lenin would introduce the subject of his own wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. She had never liked him, and liked him even less when Lenin was dying. She had stood guard over her husband’s room, forbidding entry to all but the doctor. Stalin, trying to keep Lenin from dictating his final thoughts to his secretary, Lidya Fotieva, had spoken rudely to Nadezhda and had refused to apologize, motivating Lenin to speak poorly of him in his testament. But notwithstanding Nadezhda’s self-appointed role of lion at the gate, he had managed to poison Lenin’s tea, with the help of Lidya, who unwittingly gave him access to Lenin’s meal schedule.
“Surely,” said Stalin, “you are not harkening back to 1923, when y
our wife and I had a slight misunderstanding.”
“No, I am referring to the way you treated her after my death.” He wheezed and panted for air. “You ignored and disparaged her, even persuading Gorky to write: 'The fact is that Lenin’s wife is by nature not a very bright person, suffering from Basedow’s disease, and is therefore psychologically not very sound.’”
Stalin tried to dismiss the subject as a meaningless trifle, but Lenin was not to be appeased. “Let us,” he wheezed, “ask her.”
Confronting Krupskaya was the least safe thing to do. Stalin tried to reconceive the scene, but Lenin seemed to have the power to neutralize his wishes, because a moment later steps echoed in the passageway and a shadow could be seen coming toward them. It was a woman, walking smartly. But in a matter of seconds, she changed from a dynamic young wife into an old, stooped lady, who slowly made her way to Lenin’s side and placed a hand affectionately on his shoulder. It was Nadya Krupskaya.
Stalin forced a smile, baring teeth yellowed by tobacco. Without a word, the couple stared at him, he sitting, she standing proudly in her white peasant dress. They resembled an old-fashioned photograph, in which husband and wife strike this pose in a studio to have their picture taken.
“Comrade Krupskaya!” exclaimed Stalin, feigning gladness.
She slowly formed her words. “When I pleaded for the life of our old Bolshevik companions, you ignored me and proceeded to have them liquidated. Isn’t that the word you used, 'liquidated’? As enemies of the people. When they fought in the revolution and the Civil War they weren’t enemies. What changed? Simply because they disagreed with you, you had them shot. Is that why you had me liquidated?”
Stalin shook his head. “Not at all. I arranged for you to see the best doctors in Moscow.”
She barked a laugh. “What you arranged was for the secret police to induce doctors to poison me. First, you went to Genrikh Yagoda, head of the NKVD, and then to his successor, Nikolai Yezhov, the 'bloody dwarf,’ an apt nickname for a man responsible in the 1930s for untold deaths.”
The very thing that Stalin feared-revisiting the past—was now happening. “In a time of upheaval there are always excesses. Ilyich had a hand in such things himself. Right, Comrade Lenin?”
“Leave him be,” said Nadya; “he’s never recovered fully from his strokes and talking weakens him.” She walked to the couch. Leaning over Stalin, she spit in his face. “That hardly makes up for all your crimes, but it does give me a small degree of pleasure.” She then positioned a chair next to the prostrate Stalin, as he struggled to wipe away the spittle. “Yes, my thyroid was affected by Basedow’s disease, which some physicians now call Graves. The doctors sent to treat me always smiled ingratiatingly and gave me bottles of a vile-tasting liquid. The so-called medicines they prescribed worsened my condition and hastened my death. They contained traces of poison. How do I know? Because a pharmacist who lived in my apartment building tested the contents shortly before I died. Deny it if you haven’t the courage to own it.”
After a long pause, in which he weighed the consequences of telling the truth, Stalin admitted that he had given the order to kill her. And why not? She had turned Ilyich against him with her accusations of ruthlessness and rudeness. She had behaved like a snake in the garden, causing his expulsion from Lenin’s company and the loss of Lenin’s good opinion of his work. Women! Eve’s spawn. He had said so from the start.
Even after Ilyich’s death, she had been a thorn in his side. For fifteen years, from 1924 to 1939, she tormented him. He did not allow his other critics to live that long. As the widow of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, she was a special case. She should be thankful for the many years he ignored her protests and left her to her teaching and library work.
“It was,” he said, “out of affection for your husband that I protected you.” He turned to Ilyich. “No one has done more to advance your reputation than I. Your tomb in Red Square, which I ordered built, commemorates you and your works for all time.” Overcome by his feelings, his voice caught in his throat. “You can’t imagine how much I loved you.”
An ashen-faced Lenin, looking as if he were having yet another stroke, haltingly answered. “And you want to know why I did not return it. The answer is simple. I preferred Trotsky.”
With all the rage he could command, Stalin bled at last the poison coursing through his veins. With bulging eyes and reddened face, he hoarsely cried: “Preferred Trotsky! I killed the arrogant Jew. Preferred?
It is I who am preferred, just ask the people. I laugh at your preferences. It was my preference that hastened your death. My decision. To a man of my stature, a man all Russia calls the Vozhd, your thoughts and scribblings are nothing. I am a man beloved by the people. I am not now nor ever was interested in your social reforms. I laugh at your classless society, your modern Russia free of priests and poverty, your transfer of land to the peasants, your multicultural country, your economic policies that smack of capitalism. You can keep your free health care and education. I will decide who receives the largesse of the state.”
“Another Ivan the Terrible,” Lenin rasped.
“Yes! And like him I decide right and wrong. You can keep your civil rights for women. I know what’s best for them. You can keep your social insurance for all. I have built an Eden in which we have scientific ways of treating the ill, the infirm, the injured, the old, the orphaned, and the unemployed. As for your wish to abolish military rank and titles, you have no idea the loyalty they buy. And as for doing away with decorations and medals, I have a drawer full of them, which I wear on every formal occasion. So get out of my film! You are no longer needed or wanted.”
Lenin sneered. “Yours is a story of falsehoods. You are a perjurer, an enemy of truth. For good reason I rejected you and chose Trotsky. Him, I could love. You, no.”
Stalin howled. “Liar! I am the one who is loved. That is how this story concludes.” He began to curl up into a fetal position. “I am the one who is loved. There can be no other ending.”
FINI
Death at the Dacha Page 17
