The Stalin Epigram

by Robert Littell

  Stalin had collapsed into the wicker back of his chair by now, smoking his cigarette in short agitated puffs, clearly caught up in recounting his life’s story. “Listen, I was the only one in the immediate group around Lenin who had peasant roots, the only one who had been an active revolutionist leading Bolsheviks squads in street fighting, as opposed to a shitty coffeehouse intellectual. Which made me the odd man out, the sore thumb in the superstructure. When it came to the pecking order, no one took me seriously. Well, they all underestimated me, didn’t they? That was the real secret of my rise to the top of the heap. They were lulled by my Georgian accent, they laughed behind my back at the grammatical errors I made when I spoke Russian, they took me for a country chawbacon who couldn’t survive in the big city. In the end it was child’s play to fuck over those Jews—Trotsky and Kamenev and Zinoviev, even Karl Heinrich Marx, the Vandal who had the misfortune to come from a long line of rabbis. He’s probably turning over in his London grave at the thought that someone who doesn’t really understand all his bullshit is the leader of the world Communist movement. I even outsmarted that asshole Bukharin who understood Marx’s bullshit, or pretended to. How did I do it? To begin with I took the job none of them wanted—general secretary of the Party. I did what none of them wanted to dirty his hands doing—the boring routine day-to-day chores. And so they went on theorizing and scheming and preening while I built up an apparat loyal to me and ran the country. And what did I get by way of a thank-you? After Lenin’s first stroke, he was surrounded by vultures who did everything they could to turn him against me. I’ll let you in on another secret. Days before the old man kicked the bucket, they prevailed on him to write a testament denouncing Stalin for—get this!—his crude behavior toward Krupskaya, Lenin’s hagfish of a wife who was furious with me for talking about his affairs with girls in the typing pool in front of her. Needless to say, I suppressed the so-called last testament. I keep the original, written out in Lenin’s wobbly hand, in my desk. You don’t believe me? Here”—he snatched a sheet of paper from the drawer and, waving his good hand the way I do when I recite, began to read aloud from it. “Stalin is too coarse . . . I suggest to the comrades that they think of a way of transferring Stalin from the position of general secretary . . . assigning someone more tolerant, more polite, less capricious, and so on and so forth. Well, you get the gist. Me, capricious! That’s a good one. After Lenin cashed in his chips, Krupskaya threatened to circulate a copy until I warned her, to her face, I’d appoint a new widow for Lenin if she opened her trap about the testament. You can bet the bitch shut up.” Stalin brought up a laugh from the pit of his stomach. “Just because she shit in the same toilet as Lenin didn’t give her the right to walk over me.”

  One of the several telephones on the desk rang. Stalin plucked the receiver off the hook and held it to his ear. “Agreed,” he said. “Of course they were plotting to kill Stalin. That’s what I would be doing in their shoes. As for the trial, it will lend credibility to the proceedings if foreign journalists and foreign diplomats are permitted to witness the confessions. On the matter of the opera Onegin, which I attended last night, I find it outrageous that Tatiana appears onstage in a sheer gown. Stalin is not giving instructions but merely expressing an opinion. Whatever happened to Bolshevik modesty? Send a memorandum to the director saying Stalin was overheard remarking that Ivan the Terrible, a great and wise tsar, beat his pregnant daughter-in-law for wearing immodest clothing. Let our cultural workers draw the appropriate conclusions.” Hanging up the phone, he glanced over at me. “I lost the thread of our conversation.”

  “You were talking about the people who tried to turn Lenin against you,” I reminded him.

  “Yes, yes, it’s the price one pays for success,” Stalin plunged on, lighting yet another cigarette on the embers of the one that had burned close to his lips. “They tried to turn Lenin against me and almost succeeded. Ten years later the same pricks were at it again, trying to turn my own wife against me.” I could see that the mere mention of his wife had aroused strong emotions. His brow creased in pain, his eyes narrowed in irritation “Our marriage was never a bed of roses, as they say. To begin with, I was twenty-two years older and more of a father figure than a lover in her eyes. She actually left me once, running off to Petrograd with the children, but I went after her and sweet-talked her into coming home. And then, in the early thirties, with collectivization under way and nobody quite sure how things would turn out, Bukharin filled her head with cock-and-bull stories of starving children with swollen stomachs begging at train stations, of a Soviet-organized famine spreading across the Ukraine, of mass deportations, of summary executions. Looking back, I can see that Bukharin poisoned our marriage. Nadezhda and I argued bitterly. I fended off her accusations, quoting Lenin’s line—not that he acted on it himself—about the need for the peasants to do a bit of starving. The trick, he said, was not to lose your nerve. The peasants who resisted collectivization, who destroyed their cattle and horses and grain, calculated we would lose our nerve and feed them. Zinoviev and Kamenev and Bukharin and Nadezhda were losing theirs, but I wasn’t losing mine. I was the same Stalin who risked his skin robbing banks in the Caucasus, who forced the defeatist Bolshevik commanders at Tsaritsyn onto a barge and sank it in the Volga, drowning all the traitors and saving the city from the Whites. Things between Nadezhda and me came to a head at the Kremlin banquet celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the Revolution.” Stalin shook his head in dismay. “That was eighteen months ago, but the scene is so fresh in my mind’s eye it might have happened yesterday.”

  “What happened?”

  “I knew Nadezhda was in one of her dark moods the moment I put a polka on the American gramophone. Anastas Mikoyan, my Armenian Politburo pal, sashayed across the room and held out his arms to Nadezhda to dance, but she insolently turned her back on him. Anastas, who, with his little Hitler mustache fancied himself something of a dandy, shrugged off the insult and wound up dancing with Voroshilov’s wife, Ekaterina. Nadezhda snubbed my old Georgian friend Beria, the Chekist responsible for cleansing Transcaucasia of wreckers, when he tried to chat her up—she once pretended that he was known to have a weakness for raping young female athletes, but I had no reason to believe this was anything more than grist for the Kremlin gossip mill. I worked the room, making small talk with Bukharchik, as I called Bukharin—I like to give everyone in my entourage a nickname—teasing him about the age difference between him and the piece of ass Anna Larina, whom he’d been openly courting. I remember telling him, You outspit me this time, an allusion to his fucking someone even younger than my Nadezhda was when I took up with her. As stunning as Anna Larina was, she didn’t hold a candle to my wife, who looked particularly beautiful the night of the banquet. She was wearing the black dress, embroidered with rose petals, that her brother Pavel had brought back from Berlin. She’d done up her hair for once, pinning a tea rose in it. When we’d worn ourselves out dancing and singing Georgian songs, we drifted over to the long table piled with soup terrines and platters of salted fish and lamb, along with bottles of vodka with frost on them. I sat down in the middle of the table next to the film actress Galina Yegorova, the wife of a Red Army commander who had been conveniently dispatched to run a military district in Central Asia. The night of the banquet, Galina was wearing one of those low-cut dresses you see in French magazines. Have you ever caught her on the screen? She’s not much of an actress, but I am in a position to testify that she’s damn good in bed. Nadezhda sat across from me, favoring me with jealous looks every time I let my eyes wander to Galina’s tits. For some reason Molotov and Yagoda began boasting about the dizzy success of our collectivization program. Lazar Kaganovich, my railway commissar, had just come back from the North Caucasus where he’d organized cattle cars to ship peasants who refused to join collectives off to Siberia. Kosherovich, as I’d nicknamed Lazar so nobody would forget his Israelite roots, pulled a slip of paper from his pocket and began reeling off numbers. Ukraine
—145,000; North Caucasus—71,000; Lower Volga—50,000; Belorussia—42,000; West Siberia—50,000; East Siberia—30,000. I tried to shut him up but he was too drunk to spot the dark looks I dispatched in his direction. Nadezhda called across the table, What are those numbers, Lazar? His eyes were glazed over from alcohol and he didn’t see the storm coming. Why, deportations, what else? he replied. I attempted to distract Nadezhda with a toast. To the destruction of the enemies of Socialism, I called out, raising my glass. Everyone around the table raised their glasses and repeated the toast. Everyone except my own Tatochka. She sat there in simmering silence, staring at me across the table with what can only be described as hate in her eyes. If, as the peasants say, looks could kill, I would have been struck dead on the spot. Why don’t you drink? I demanded. Are you for or against the enemies of Socialism? When she looked away without answering, my Georgian temper got the best of me and I threw a handful of orange peel at her. Hey you, drink! I shouted. And Nadezhda, humiliating me in front of everyone, shouted back, Don’t hey you me. And then she turned insult into injury by storming out of the banquet hall. What could I do? She had offended me in front of the entire Politburo. You could have heard a pin drop as I settled back into my chair. I tried to pass the incident off as a domestic squabble. I am married to a fool, I said, flinging cigarette ends at the empty chair across from me. All women are torn—I gestured toward the genitals of the actress next to me—and for some reason unknown even to Marx, we have become prisoners of this tear, we serve life sentences. Yagoda had the good sense to laugh and the others followed his lead and soon everyone was roaring with laughter. Everyone except me. I’m not boring you, am I, Mandelstam? Do you want to hear the rest or would you prefer to return to your cell?”

  “I am certainly not bored.”

  “When the party broke up, I threw an army greatcoat over my shoulders and took Galina off in one of the Packards to my dacha outside of Moscow at Zubalovo. We spent a few unpleasant hours together—she was worried that Nadezhda, in a fit of jealousy, would have her arrested. I had to reassure her that I was the only one who could authorize the arrest of someone in the superstructure. Still, the damage was done. It’s hard to fuck a woman who is not wet with desire, so we wound up playing billiards. In the early hours of the morning, Vlasik drove me home through the deserted streets of Moscow while I dozed in the backseat. I came awake as we passed through the Troitsky Gates into the Kremlin compound. I remember a light snow was falling. It had already erased the footprints of the guests who had quit the banquet hours before. Someone had left a hall light on for me, but no one was stirring in our apartment in the Poteshny Palace. My anger had accumulated, it’s true. The daily drumbeat of bad news from the Ukraine made everyone edgy. Yagoda had passed along word that Zinoviev and Kamenev and even Bukharin were spreading it about that Stalin had fucked up—they were accusing me of having launched the drive for collectivization thinking the peasants would greet us with open arms, of not having a plan to deal with the chaos in the event they didn’t. Nadezhda’s public rudeness that night had been the last straw. I stormed into her bedroom and found her, still wearing the black dress, asleep in the narrow bed she retreated to when she had the female problems that had plagued her since the abortion in the mid-twenties. Leaning over the bed, I shook her awake. Have you come to apologize for going off with that slut? she demanded. It’s you who should apologize for walking out on the supper, for embarrassing me in front of my colleagues, I lashed out at her. If you do it again, ubyu—I’ll kill you. No sooner had the words crossed my lips than I regretted them. Nadezhda was as fragile as chinaware, easily roused to hysteria and bouts of depression. It was then that she produced the small French Label that Pavel had given her along with the black dress. She was strangely calm as she removed all but one of the bullets from the pistol’s cylinder and spun it with her long elegant fingers as if she intended to play Russian roulette. Don’t push me too far, I warned. She made the mistake of taunting me. Were you hard with Galina tonight? Were you hard with the hairdresser or that girl in the typists’ pool last week? I can see from your expression you weren’t. Of course they will tell everyone, you’ll be the laughingstock of Moscow. For someone who prides himself on Bolshevik hardness, you are often limp. Here, she said, holding out the pistol, butt first, prove to the world you are as hard as your alter ego, Ivan the Terrible, who in a fit of rage killed his own son. And I did prove it. In the heat of the moment I held the pistol to her heart, Mandelstam. I held it to her heart and I pulled the trigger.”

  “And?” I asked, barely daring to breathe. “Did the firing pin fall on a bullet?”

  “And is for me to know and you to imagine,” Stalin said. “The servants discovered her body, stiff with rigor mortis, in the morning. There were bruises on her face, though I have no recollection of hitting her. The pistol and the five bullets she’d taken from the cylinder were on the pillow next to her head. Vlasik came up with a doctor who was willing to sign a death certificate listing the cause of death as peritonitis, which was the official version published in Pravda. But everyone in the Kremlin was convinced she had committed suicide.” Stalin’s eyes suddenly glistened with what I took to be inconsolability. “She broke my life,” he said so softly I had to strain to make out his words. Had I heard him correctly? She broke my life!

  There was a tap on the door. The bodyguard Vlasik stuck his head into the room. “I have Yagoda’s overnight list,” he said. Stalin jerked his head, summoning him forward. Vlasik set several sheets of paper down on the desk. “Both Yagoda and Molotov have signed off on it,” he said, uncapping a fountain pen and offering it to the khozyain. Stalin eyed the fountain pen suspiciously. “Was that made in Soviet Russia?” he asked. “Germany,” Vlasik said, mortified. Stalin’s eyes narrowed in displeasure. Ignoring the fountain pen, he selected a red pencil from a jar filled with pencils. Then he ran a forefinger down the list, occasionally crossing out a name, muttering something about how terror to be effective must be random, scrawling Za—Approved, along with his initial on the top right-hand corner of each page when he’d finished with it. “Who is Akaki Mgeladze?” he asked at one point. “He’s the Abkhazian you nicknamed the Wolf.” “The commissar I sent to straighten things out in Georgia?” “That’s the one.” Stalin drew a line through his name and moved on. He asked about two other people he couldn’t place. When Vlasik reminded him, Stalin left both their names on the list. “What have we here?” the khozyain exclaimed. “Mandelstam, Osip Emilievich.” He looked over at me. “You will be interested to know that Yagoda has included you for execution. He may be right. I have read your shitty little epigram. When all is said, you should be shot for writing a lousy poem.” With my heart racing, he pretended to discuss the problem with his bodyguard. “What shall we do with this Mandelstam? On the one hand, I don’t want to go down in history as the one who cut short the life of a Russian poet. On the other hand, it sets a bad precedent if I am seen to dither—people will mistake me for Lenin. So what will it be? Execute or isolate and preserve?” Sucking on his cigarette as he weighed the alternatives, the khozyain, to my everlasting relief, scratched a line through my name and, initialing the last of the pages, handed them back to Vlasik. “Tell Yagoda I haven’t made up my mind about Mandelstam. He can add his name to tomorrow night’s list. I’ll decide then.” “Will that be all?” the bodyguard asked. “There’s one more thing,” Stalin said. “Find out what became of a girl I once knew named Pelageya Onufrieva.”

  TEN

  Zinaida Zaitseva-Antonova

  Monday, the 20th of May 1934

  THE LAST THING I expected was a reward, but the Organs are known to treat collaborators generously, which is understood to be one of their ways of encouraging collaboration. So I can’t say it came as a surprise when the Chekist buttonholed me in my dressing room after rehearsal one night and announced, We are eager to show our gratitude for your loyalty to Stalin and the Revolution. It isn’t every day that someone delivers evidence of tr
eason written out in the traitor’s own hand. Several propositions rolled off the Chekist’s tongue. An external passport and authorization to travel to Paris or Rome? Better roles in bigger theaters? A monthlong all-expenses-paid vacation at one of those plush Black Sea hotels frequented by the nomenklatura? I favored the visitor with one of what Mandelstam called my shamefaced glances. I was only doing my duty as a Soviet citizen, I demurred shyly. I ask for nothing. The Chekist, an older gentleman whose lips barely moved when he spoke, smiled as if we shared a secret. Several gold teeth in his lower jaw glistened with saliva. Surely there is some service the state can offer you to make your life easier, he insisted. His tone managed to convey that my continuing to refuse could be misconstrued; could be taken to mean I had second thoughts about having collaborated in the first place. I honestly felt I had no choice but to accept. Which is why I averted my eyes in embarrassment and admitted, in the husky tone actors use on stage when they want to convey reluctance, Perhaps there is one small thing. And I raised the delicate question of my risking the loss of my twenty-two square meters in the communal apartment off the Arbat and my Moscow residence permit if I divorced my husband. He pulled a small pad from his pocket and made a note to himself. Proceed with the divorce, he instructed me. Leave the matter of the apartment and the residence permit in our hands. He rose to leave. I saw him to the door and held out my hand. How can I thank you? I asked. Curiously, he didn’t shake it. There is no need to thank us, he replied. It is a point of pride with the Organs to take good care of the people who work for us. His words caught me by surprise. A retort spilled from my mouth before I knew what I was saying. I wasn’t aware that I worked for you. He smiled indulgently, the way one would at a child who has uttered something vulgar, and said, We don’t believe in one-night stands.