The Stalin Epigram

by Robert Littell

  The khozyain tapped the toes and heels of his boots on the floor in a little jig, a sign that he was beginning to enjoy the conversation. One thing my boss relished was talking about himself. It was hard to get him started, but once started, it was harder to stop him. “As for Stalin’s late and very lamented father, Vissarion,” he went on, “he was a shoemaker by trade, a hardworking breadwinner and a model proletarian, though there is little chance he ever knew the meaning of the word. He struggled selflessly to make life better for his wife and children. Vissarion, to Stalin’s everlasting regret, died before he could really get to know him, but his father remains a shining example of what a man should be. You asked about Stalin’s names—his mother called him Soso when he was a kid, which is the Georgian equivalent of Joey. Later, when Stalin went underground and began his revolutionary activities, he called himself Koba after a fictional Caucasian outlaw.”

  “And where did the name Stalin originate?” a fat editor asked.

  Around us the waiters were serving chilled white Georgian wine to the guests. Yusis came over with a bottle he’d selected at random from the cartons in the kitchen, uncorked it in front of the boss’s eyes and half filled his glass. The khozyain wet his lips on the wine. “Koba began using the underground name Stalin in 1913, I think. Yes, yes, it was 1913. He took the name from a bosomy apple-cheeked Bolshevik whose bed he was sharing at the time. Her name was Ludmilla Stal. He transformed the Stal into Stalin.”

  “Stalin—man of steel,” Gorky said approvingly.

  “Wonderful story,” an editor diagonally across the table from Comrade Stalin said. “Can I print it in my newspaper?”

  My boss bristled. “Out of the question,” he snapped. “We Bolsheviks pride ourselves on being modest, on discouraging a cult based on our persons.”

  While the waiters were distributing silver trays piled high with small salmon wedges, I had Yusis retrieve from the boot of my Packard the straw hamper containing the food that had been prepared at a Cheka laboratory and then sealed and marked Certified free of poisonous elements. The khozyain, who was something of an expert on poisons—he once informed me that prussic acid smelled like burnt almonds, hemlock like a rat’s nest, oleander like chocolate, arsenic like a decomposing supper—categorically refused to eat at public receptions unless he broke the seal and opened the hamper himself. Reaching around him, I set the box down on the table. Comrade Stalin slit the seal with one of his nicotine-stained fingernails and sniffed at the cold perozhki filled with ground pork before popping one into his mouth.

  At the head of the table, Gorky climbed to his feet and tapped a knife against a bottle of mineral water. “Everyone talks about Lenin and Leninism, but Lenin has been gone a long time. I say, long live Stalin and Stalinism!” he called, raising a wineglass over his head. “Long life, energy, wisdom and stamina to triumph over the many enemies of the first Socialist state on the planet Earth.”

  In an instant the guests were on their feet. “To Comrade Stalin,” they cried in chorus and drank off the white wine.

  Stalin wagged a pinky at Gorky. “How can you say that? Lenin was a fist, Stalin a little finger.” The guests at Stalin’s end of the table who heard the comment broke into applause.

  I took a turn around the kitchen to be sure the servants with Israelite surnames had been sent home. When I returned to my post near the khozyain, I discovered he was telling a joke; the boss could charm the skin off a snake if he put his mind to it. “If you’ve heard it before, stop me,” he informed the guests within earshot. “So: A Turk asks a Serb why they were always waging war. ‘For plunder,’ the Serb responds. ‘We are a poor people and hope to win some booty. How about you?’ the Serb asks. ‘We fight for honor and for glory,’ the Turk replies. At which point the Serb says”—the khozyain started to chuckle at his own story—“he says, ‘Everyone fights for what he doesn’t have.’ ”

  “Everyone fights for what he doesn’t have,” Gorky repeated, and he burst into peals of girlish laughter. The guests around Stalin slapped the table appreciatively. After a moment someone asked if the khozyain thought Soviet Communism would spread to other industrialized countries.

  Comrade Stalin was in his element now. “When we Bolsheviks took power,” he said, “several of the more naïve comrades thought our uprising would spark revolutions across capitalist Europe—someone even suggested, half jokingly, that we ought to construct a high tower on the frontier and post a lookout to keep an eye peeled for world revolution. Stalin, who believed in constructing Socialism in one country at a time, Russia first, told them such a scheme would have the advantage of providing permanent employment for at least one worker. Well, you get the point. Which countries are ripe for revolution? Certainly not America, where everyone is too busy accumulating wealth, or holding on to what they’ve already accumulated, to take to the streets. The French are too preoccupied with eating and drinking and fornicating to make a revolution. As for Great Britain, the English are unable to rebel against the king because revolution would involve ignoring signs that prohibit walking on lawns.”

  “That leaves the Germans,” Gorky offered.

  “Every child knows the Germans would be incapable of storming a railroad station without first purchasing tickets to the quay,” the boss said with a smirk.

  The people around Comrade Stalin, seduced by the khozyain’s conviviality, began to relax. Mikhail Sholokhov, sitting across from my boss on Gorky’s left, wanted to know if there was any truth to the rumor that the Central Committee was thinking of renaming Moscow Stalinodar.

  “I can reveal—though it must go no further than this room—that the subject was raised, but Stalin flatly refused.”

  Sholokhov, a favorite of Comrade Stalin’s, asked the boss which in his opinion was the highest art, prose or playwriting or poetry. Stalin gave this some thought. “Clearly poetry is head and shoulders above the other arts. Stalin talked about this very question the other day with the American writer Dos Passos, who is visiting us in connection with the Writers’ Congress. Dos Passos agreed with my formulation and quoted the British novelist Maugham, something to the effect that the poet makes the best of the prose writers look like a piece of cheese. That is also Stalin’s opinion.”

  Gorky, his voice pitched higher than usual, said, “I cannot say I agree—”

  The boss sucked noisily on his dead pipe. “Nobody asks you to agree,” he said in a tone so silkily pleasant Gorky couldn’t fail to understand that he had ventured onto a limb. The khozyain didn’t appreciate being contradicted in public; he once confided to me that it came close to being a criminal offense.

  When the waiters got around to setting out bowls of fruit and biscuits, the khozyain rapped his Dunhill on the table. “Comrade writers,” he called. Whatever conversation there was in the room faded instantly. “So: You will surely be wondering why you were invited to share Gorky’s hospitality on this particular February afternoon. We thought there was something to be gained by giving you, who are among the most prominent Soviet writers and editors, a preview of the new cultural policy the Politburo is about to promulgate in connection with the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers. We are in the process of redirecting the Party line from modernism to what we call Socialist realism. What is Socialist realism? Henceforth, it is the obligatory aesthetic for the visual arts, for the theater and the cinema, for all forms of creative writing. Socialist realism recognizes that there is no such thing as art or culture in the abstract. All art, all culture either serves the Revolution and the Party or it doesn’t. Socialist realism proclaims that art in all its forms must be realistic in form and Socialist in content—it recognizes that writers are engineers of the human soul and as such have a moral obligation to inspire the Soviet proletariat to dream Socialist dreams.”

  At the far end of the long table a young short story writer raised a finger.

  “There is no need to ask permission to speak,” Comrade Stalin instructed him. “Here we are all equals.”
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  The young man scratched nervously at the stubble of a beard on his broad peasant’s face. “I would like to ask Comrade Stalin how a writer—working in the obligatory aesthetic of Socialist realism—is to deal with the question of collectivization. If we are to be realistic in form, we must portray the chaos, the distress . . .”

  The only sound in the room came from outside the windows of the villa—automobiles klaxoning impatiently near a construction site at the foot of the hill. The khozyain leaned forward in order to get a better look at the speaker. “What is your name, comrade?”

  “Saakadze, Sergo.”

  “Saakadze, Sergo,” the boss repeated amiably. “Stalin thanks you for your intervention. So: Inasmuch as collectivization of the peasants has been a catastrophic success, a certain amount of chaos and distress was inevitable. When a great Socialist homeland moves to eliminate waste and poverty on a grand scale, stuff happens. You—the cultural workers who have the responsibility of justifying collectivization to the masses—must weigh the chaos and distress against what is being accomplished, and this must enter into your realistic portrait of the events in question. Collectivization is what makes industrialization possible. To slow down the tempo of collectivization will cripple industrialization, and that in turn will mean that our Socialist Republics will lag behind the West. And those who lag behind wind up in the dustbin of history. One only has to think back to Old Russia—because of her military, cultural, political, industrial and agricultural backwardness, she was constantly being defeated. By the Mongol khans. By the Polish-Lithuanian gentry. By the Anglo-French capitalists. Comrades, let us look reality in the eye. We are behind the leading industrial countries by half a hundred years. We must make up this difference in ten years—either that or perish. This Adolf Hitler has a ravenous appetite—mark my words, when he finishes stuffing himself in the West he will turn eastward. We must be ready to welcome him with cold steel. Stalin and his Politburo colleagues believe we are capable of catching up before the inevitable war with Nazi Germany breaks out. You must never lose sight of the fact that we are armed with irrefutable scientific Marxism, which allows us to foresee the future and to divert the course of history. The capitalists live off religions that promise heaven after earth, we are holding out the prospect of heaven on earth. Our factory and our farm workers will be rewarded in this world for their labor, not in some afterlife.” My boss aimed his index finger in Saakadze’s direction. “You ask how you are to deal with collectivization. Take your cue from Mikhail Aleksandrovich here.” With an effort Comrade Stalin stiffly raised his crippled arm to indicate Sholokhov across the table. “Take your cue from his masterly novel about collectivization, Virgin Soil Upturned. Stalin has read it twice. Comrade Sholokhov manages to dramatize Marx’s aphorism about the absolute idiocy of rural life as it was organized under the tsars.”

  Gorky nodded in vehement agreement. “If the enemy does not surrender,” he said, looking around at the writers and editors, “he must be exterminated.”

  Comrade Stalin said reproachfully, “Comrade Gorky, nobody aside from you has said anything about extermination.”

  Gorky blanched. “I let myself get carried away by the justice of our cause,” he mumbled.

  Sergo Saakadze started to raise a hand to speak again, then like a child caught violating a rule hurriedly retracted it. “Comrade Stalin, anyone who keeps an ear to the ground knows that famine is spreading to large areas of the Ukraine, yet according to Pravda the Soviet Union continues to export grain. Why aren’t we rushing food shipments to the hardest-hit areas instead of exporting to the West?”

  The khozyain surveyed the faces around the table. “Our comrade is a good storyteller,” he declared. “He invented the fiction of famine to frighten us.” His heavy-lidded gaze fell on Saakadze. “What do you write—fables for morons? Where do you get your information?”

  “I get my information from my mother and my father, who live in”—here he named a district in the Ukraine and a village in that district. “I myself was born and raised in this village. Thanks to Bolshevik policies of egalitarianism, I finished secondary school and was admitted to university in Kiev, where I now teach. I have been a member of the Party since before Lenin’s death. According to the law on collectivization, kulaks who have children teaching in state schools are exempt from forced collectivization. Nevertheless my parents were subject to the harshest repression by Chekists. So I ask you, Comrade Stalin, why my parents, who are small plot owners, what Party propagandists call kulaks, were not exempt from expropriation and forced collectivization as the law specified?”

  I could tell from the boss’s body language that he was irritated—his shoulders were listing to starboard, his feet were flat on the floor, he was chomping on the stem of his pipe as if he couldn’t wait to suck on a cigarette. “The fact is that collectivization went better and faster than we had anticipated,” he finally said. “At which point our people on the ground, dizzy with success, committed occasional excesses—they mistakenly identified a small number of middle peasants as kulaks, they used intimidation to force them into collectives, they confiscated their seed grain and cattle. Still, Stalin can tell you that the overall policy of collectivization is the right policy at the right time. Write down your name and that of your mother and father, as well as the name of their village. Stalin will have his people look into the matter. If it is determined that a wrong was done your parents, we will set it right.”

  Minutes later I accompanied a riled khozyain through the kitchen and the laundry room to the waiting automobile. One of Yagoda’s Chekists held open the back door. Comrade Stalin handed me the piece of paper with Saakadze’s name on it. “Fuck his mother,” he said in an undertone, a soggy Kazbek Papirosi glued to his lower lip. “How did the prick get invited?”

  “Gorky.”

  The khozyain was not pleased. “It is the moral equivalent of wrecking to challenge collectivization or raise the specter of famine in public. Have the Organs check him out.”

  THREE

  Fikrit Shotman

  Tuesday, the 3rd of April 1934

  AS WIVES GO, AGRIPPINA was as good as most and better than many, but once she set her mind to a thing, you could lose money betting you would hear the conclusion of it anytime soon.

  “I am able to read you like an open book, Fikrit. When you stare out the window like that, fogging your reflection with your breath, you’re not hanging on my every word, you’re not even in the same room with me. You’re back in the mountains of Azerbaidzhan. You’re wrestling boulders out of that riverbed behind your father’s shed and hefting them onto an oxcart, you’re digging in your heels and dragging the ox that’s dragging the cart to get both of them up the embankment onto the flat.”

  She was not wrong. I was homesick not so much for the sweet air of Azerbaidzhan or the song mountain rivers sing when they rush over boulders, I was homesick for simpler times when you could live by the sweat of your brow without worrying that some city folk or other would cast everything you do, everything you say, in a bad light.

  “Wishing you were back in Azerbaidzhan won’t get you back to Azerbaidzhan,” Agrippina said, and though she was only a little more than half my size and not even half my weight, she took a firm grip on my wrist with both her small hands and pulled me over to the bench at the foot of our bed, and pushed me down so that I was sitting on it and she was kneeling at my feet. “Listen up, Fikrit. Pay attention. Brains are not your strong suit so you need to concentrate on each word as it comes out my mouth. Let’s go over it again from the beginning. Before we go to sleep, we need to shape out what you will say when they come sucking around with their questions.”

  “What makes you so sure they’re going to come around?”

  “You were denounced at the meeting of the circus cooperative, and by no one less than the bearded lady who sleeps with the Chekist representative in the front office. He is bound to file a report, that’s what Chekists do for a living. The people he r
eports to are bound to come nosing around. That’s the way it worked when they carted off Dancho the magician for throwing darts at a target he painted on a page of a magazine—how was he to know Stalin’s photograph was on the back of it? So begin with the European championship in Vienna.”

  “I told you that part. I took fifty dollars U.S. from the assistant coach of the American team to let the American Hoffman win the dead lift competition. The only reason I took the money was because he already held the world dead lift record at 295 kilograms. The most I’ve done was 285 kilograms, so he was going to go and win anyhow. Where’s the harm?”

  “You used the fifty U.S. to buy the steamer trunk from the porter at the hotel, who found it in the basement storeroom where it was abandoned by a traveling salesman who left without paying his bill.”

  “I don’t see that we need to bring the fifty U.S. into it,” I told Agrippina. “We can say the trunk was an added and additional bonus prize for when I won the silver dead lift medal.”