The Stalin Epigram

by Robert Littell

  ELEVEN

  Nadezhda Yakovlevna

  Tuesday, the 21st of May 1934

  IT WAS MY DEAR friend Anna Andreyevna who kept her wits until mine trickled back. When we spoke of my husband’s arrest years later, Akhmatova claimed I had sobbed until the tear ducts ran dry, at which point I began seething against everything and everybody under the sun: Mandelstam for truth telling in this swamp of lies, the Kremlin mountaineer for equating the rant of a poet with a counterrevolutionary act, the moths who bred in the felt insulation of our walls, the neighbor Sergei Petrovich who had betrayed the teapot to the Cheka, myself for not having had the courage to talk my husband into a joint suicide pact when I realized he was determined to propagate his epigram. Yes, yes, I see now that we should have killed ourselves the instant we heard that late-night knock on the door. It was only after I’d gotten hold of myself that Anna and I began to think constructively. A day after Mandelstam’s arrest, we packed socks and underwear and soap and cigarettes and two hundred grams of smoked ham into a small carton and made the rounds of Moscow’s prisons to see which one might accept the package for the prisoner Mandelstam. At Anna’s suggestion we started with Butyrki, where writers and artists were usually taken for questioning. Ahead of us in line were two little girls, perhaps five and seven, wearing starched dresses and telling everyone within earshot, Mother has been arrested. Eventually a soldier turned up from a side door and led the girls away. Behind us one woman told another, We must send our children to their grandparents before this happens to them. After two and a half hours of queuing, Akhmatova and I finally reached the window only to be turned away by a baby-faced guard who went down his list and announced there was nobody by the name of Mandelstam there. The Lubyanka came next. We waited for almost two hours in a light rain, the two of us huddled under a broken umbrella, before we reached the window. And lo and behold, the guard on duty checked the name on the damp package against a typewritten list and, without a word, accepted it.

  “At least we know where he is,” I said, relishing this small triumph.

  “We also know he is alive, or was when they typed up this list,” Anna said. “I didn’t want to frighten you when we were turned away from Butyrki, but if a prisoner is dead, that’s another reason they won’t accept the package.”

  Looking back now, I remember that we were both quite astonished that we hadn’t been arrested as coconspirators, if only because our arrest would have given them more leverage with Mandelstam. I desperately tried to get in touch with Zinaida to make sure she had destroyed the only copy of the Stalin epigram in my husband’s handwriting, but whoever answered the telephone in her communal apartment off the Arbat said she was seldom to be found there these days. After I don’t remember how many phone calls I managed to get her agronomist husband on the line. Of course I couldn’t come right out and ask him if she had destroyed the poem, but I did elicit the information that she was rehearsing a new play and had most certainly not been picked up by the police. You catch me at a bad moment, he said. We are divorcing and I am in the process of moving out. As for Zinaida, she has always steered clear of anything that smacked of politics, so the idea that she might be detained by the Cheka is absurd. In point of fact, they are going to accord her a Moscow residence permit. If I were you, the last thing I would do is lose sleep over her.

  I will concede I was terribly relieved to hear that Zinaida had not been arrested; I would not have been able to look myself in the eye if our friendship had landed her in trouble with the authorities.

  While I was trying (without success, as it turned out) to track down Zinaida, Anna got in touch with Boris Pasternak and informed him of my husband’s arrest. He was overwhelmed with remorse at not having been able to talk Mandelstam into destroying the offending epigram. I never find the right words when I need them, he reproached himself. He promised to immediately contact Nikolai Bukharin to see if he could do anything. He urged me to do the same. The more of us who talk to him, the more likely it is that he will consent to stick his neck out for Osip.

  “I absolutely must have a word with Nikolai Ivanovich,” I told Bukharin’s secretary, a thin woman named Korotkova whom my husband had described (in his “Fourth Prose”) as a squirrel who chews a nut with every visitor.

  “You look pale as death,” she said. “Has something happened?”

  I could only catch my breath and nod. “Mandelstam has been imprisoned in the Lubyanka,” I said.

  Korotkova had a good heart. She took my hand and squeezed it. “Nikolai Ivanovich has a full schedule this morning but I will somehow work you in.”

  And she did, between two editors who emerged from his office jotting notes on a pad and a woman waiting to wheel in a trolley with the linotype slugs of Izvestiya’s front page locked into a wooden frame. When he caught sight of me, Nikolai Ivanovich drew me over to the couch. “Pasternak has already been to see me,” he said in a muffled voice. (Did he fear that microphones had been planted in his walls?) “What has that husband of yours done now? Mandelstam hasn’t written something outrageous, has he?”

  Bukharin was a slight man with a ruddy goatee that in happier times lent him a raffish air. These days he had the preoccupied appearance of someone with a terminal illness. He’d been expelled from the Politburo in the late twenties, but his absence from the inner circle had apparently not poisoned his relationship with Stalin, who anointed him editor of Izvestiya and let him keep his Kremlin apartment despite the occasional friction between them. Still, rumors had been circulating in Moscow that Bukharin’s days were numbered; that if Zinoviev and Kamenev were brought to trial, which many thought of as a probability, as opposed to a possibility, to save their skins they would implicate Nikolai Ivanovich and that would be the end of him. I felt terrible bringing my troubles to someone who had so many of his own. But what was I to do? He still had the ear of Stalin. If only he would consent to put a word in.

  “Nothing more outrageous than the poems you know,” I told Bukharin, stretching the truth for fear he wouldn’t dare lift a finger for Mandelstam if he knew what was in the epigram. “I come to you, Nikolai Ivanovich, as my last and best hope.” And I went on to describe the life Mandelstam had been reduced to living: borrowing money to make ends meet, reading his poems aloud in return for cigarettes; making the rounds of editors who, when he managed to get past the secretaries, invented one excuse or another for not publishing his work. I spoke of the heart palpitation that had rendered Mandelstam’s health fragile. I even described how he had fabricated a copy of Stone to sell to an editor who was buying up original manuscripts for the new Literary Fund Library. “You helped Osya’s brother in the early twenties,” I pleaded. “You must absolutely help Osya now.”

  Bukharin listened so intently the cigarette in his mouth burnt down and singed his lips and he had to spit it out and grind the end under his heel on the floor. “Times have changed,” he said. “These days I am not confident I can help myself.”

  I had steeled myself to come away empty-handed, but tears welled in my eyes. He produced a handkerchief and awkwardly offered it to me. “Control yourself, I beg you, Nadezhda Yakovlevna,” he said and, pacing back and forth in his enormous office, he bombarded me with questions. “Have you attempted to see him?” he demanded.

  I explained that, thanks to Akhmatova, we had discovered he was being held in the Lubyanka, but visits to relatives in prison were out of the realm of possibility—they hadn’t been allowed for years. I could tell from the expression on Bukharin’s face that this came as news to him.

  “What article are they holding him under?”

  “The usual one for political prisoners, Article 58,” I said.

  Bukharin paled. “Anti-Soviet propaganda, counterrevolutionary activities—that’s a bad omen. If only it had been a lesser charge . . .” He let the thought trail off, then came back at me with another question. “What was the rank of the senior Chekist who arrested Osip?”

  “What difference does that m
ake?”

  “The higher the rank of the arresting officer, the more serious the case, the worse the fate of the prisoner.”

  “He claimed to be a colonel,” I said.

  Bukharin shook his head in despair. “The fact that they sent a full colonel is a not good sign. Most Article 58 prisoners are arrested by captains, majors at the most.”

  The telephone on his desk rang. Striding over, he brought it to his ear. Turning his back on me, lowering his voice, he spoke urgently into the mouthpiece. I thought I heard him pronounce Mandelstam’s name. “Don’t hold up supper—I will be home late,” he said, and he hung down the phone.

  “That was my wife,” he told me. “Anna Larina is shaken by the news of Mandelstam’s arrest but she begged me not to get involved. Someone as well known as Osip Emilievich could only have been arrested with the knowledge of Stalin. It is quite likely that he was arrested on the instructions of Stalin. There is enough contentiousness between us without adding Mandelstam to the list of things Stalin holds against me, so my wife advised.”

  I rose to me feet and handed the handkerchief back to him. “She’s right, of course,” I said. “It was thoughtless of me to put you in this situation.”

  Bukharin threw an arm over my shoulder and accompanied me to the door. “We live in—” He racked his brain for the appropriate word. “We live in grim times. Koba,” he went on, referring to Stalin by his Bolshevik nom de guerre, “is not the man he was when Lenin was alive. He sees himself surrounded by potential enemies, he suffers from pathological suspiciousness, he trusts no one, he schemes to turn one against the other, to divide and liquidate. He sided with Kamenev and Zinoviev against Trotsky, then with me against Kamenev and Zinoviev. When I was no longer useful to him, he threw me out of the Politburo and the Central Committee. I tell you, it will be a miracle if any of the old Bolsheviks survive.”

  “Thank you for seeing me, Nikolai Ivanovich.”

  “You were right to come,” he said quickly. “One must do what one can to starve the beast. I will raise the subject of Mandelstam’s arrest with Koba.”

  I had all to do not to burst into tears again. “Words fail me,” I murmured.

  He managed a pained smile. “Let us both hope they don’t fail me.”

  TWELVE

  Nikolai Vlasik

  Wednesday, the 22nd of May 1934

  THERE WAS NO LOVE lost between me and the so-called darling of the Party, Nikolai Bukharin. On my all-time shit list, he was right up there with that Pigalle doorman Maksim Gorky. Bukharin’s squeamish take on the usefulness of Red terror, his foot-dragging on collectivization, his patronizing attitude toward the khozyain, his intellectual arrogance all rubbed me the wrong way. Even Lenin, in his famous testament, felt obliged to concede that Bukharin was weak on dialectics. I don’t have the foggiest idea why my boss put up with this smug son of a bitch. Maybe it was, as Yagoda once suggested, an attraction of opposites—Stalin was everything Bukharin wasn’t, which is to say someone who had the balls to follow his instincts where they led, as opposed to the spineless coffeehouse Marxist who didn’t want to soil his manicured fingernails constructing Socialism. In the end I suppose the unlikely friendship, if friendship it was, could be chalked up to the khozyain’s lingering admiration for book learning, an acquired taste that dates back to his brief stint at a seminary when he was young. To this day, Josef Vissarionovich keeps a stack of books on his desk and another on his night table, and I’m here to tell you they aren’t there for decoration. Many’s the time the boss, plagued by insomnia, would curl up in a reading chair, his nose glued to a book on the Napoleonic wars or ancient Greece or the Persian shahs or The Last of the Mohicans. Which is how I’d find him when I came by with newspapers in the morning. I mention all this to explain why, when Bukharin showed up in the anteroom outside Comrade Stalin’s hideaway office—without phoning ahead to ask for an appointment, mind you—I was predisposed to give him a hard time.

  “Raise your arms,” I instructed him.

  “Raise my arms?”

  “Which words don’t you understand? Raise? Your? Arms?”

  “Why would I want to raise my arms?”

  “Nobody gets in to see Comrade Stalin unless I pat them down for weapons.”

  “You’re not serious, Vlasik. Since when am I suspected of wanting to assassinate Stalin?”

  “I was born serious and become more so as I grow older. Either raise your arms or get out.”

  Mortified, Bukharin slowly lifted his arms over his head. And I just as slowly frisked him, starting at the armpits and working my way down his trousers to the ankles, then back up the inside of his legs to the crotch. I spared him nothing. When I’d finished, he barged through the door into the khozyain’s office. I followed him inside and took up a watchful position with my back against the door, my arms folded across my chest.

  “Koba, I most strongly protest against this indignity,” Bukharin burst out.

  Comrade Stalin, sitting behind his desk, pushed aside the pile of state papers wrapped in newspaper. “What indignity are you talking about?”

  “Your bodyguard insisted on searching me like a common criminal before he would let me into your office,” he sputtered.

  I’d been around the khozyain long enough to see he had all to do to keep from smiling. “Compose yourself, Bukharchik,” he said, the tips of his mustache dancing on his cheeks, his eyes glinting with mirth. “It has nothing to do with you personally. Yagoda has decided that nobody can be permitted into my presence without first being searched for firearms. I was against the measure, but Yagoda insists it is a necessary precaution, given the current situation.”

  “What situation?” Bukharin demanded.

  “Comrades thought to be close to me are known to be openly echoing Trotsky’s critique of collectivization, which must be seen as an attack on Stalin’s leadership.”

  “Since when has it become a crime to criticize one policy or another?” Bukharin, uninvited, sank into the upholstered chair under the arched reading lamp. A photograph of Comrade Stalin in the very same chair, a book open on his lap, a pipe in one of his fists, had been published several months earlier in a popular weekly magazine; I know this detail because one of my concubines had cut it out and taped it to her vanity mirror. “In the days after the Revolution,” Bukharin was saying, “everyone was free to criticize Lenin in private. The only taboo involved raising the matter in public—of challenging the collective infallibility of the Party—once a policy had been decided.”

  “I have absolutely nothing against criticism made in private,” Comrade Stalin said, “as long as it is made to my face and not behind my back.” He lit a Kazbek Papirosi on the end of the one between his lips. “Why is it every time I see you we get into an argument?”

  “I wasn’t aware that this was the case.”

  The khozyain shrugged. “You surely didn’t drop by to compare Lenin’s style of leadership with mine. What brings you to my wing of the Kremlin on this rain-soaked day, Bukharchik?”

  Bukharin pulled a silk handkerchief from a jacket pocket and mopped his brow. “I want to talk to you about the arrest of the poet Mandelstam.”

  “In the matter of Mandelstam, I, of course, had nothing to do with his arrest. Yagoda, who signed the warrant, informed me about it after the fact. He has apparently been charged with anti-Soviet propaganda and counterrevolutionary activities under Article 58 of the Penal Code.”

  Bukharin leaned forward in the chair. “Mandelstam is a first-class poet, Koba, a credit to Soviet culture, but for some time now he has not been quite . . . normal.”

  “I understand he has confessed to the charges against him,” the khozyain told his uninvited guest.

  “Pasternak got in touch with me about Mandelstam. He is extremely distressed about this. He and Mandelstam are personal friends.”

  Dropping Pasternak’s name into the conversation caught Stalin off guard. He scraped the chair back from the desk and, removing the cigarette
from his mouth, brought it up to his eyes and studied the thin plume of smoke drifting toward the ceiling. I was aware my boss had a certain esteem for Pasternak—it dated back to his wife’s suicide and the perfunctory letters of condolence that flooded the press at the time. I happened to have brought around the newspapers the morning the news of Nadezhda’s death (attributed, if memory serves, to peritonitis) was published. I found the khozyain in a foul mood, the rheumatic throbbing in his deformed arm having kept him up most of the night. Flipping open the newspapers, he read aloud the trite letters of condolence, his voice dripping with scorn. Accept our grief at the death of N. S. Alliluyeva . . . a bright candle tragically extinguished . . . a comrade who will be sorely missed. That sort of thing. And then he stumbled across a short letter signed by Pasternak, who had apparently refused to add his name to the banal communication from the Union of Writers, preferring to publish a note of his own. The khozyain snipped Pasternak’s letter out of the newspaper and kept it on his blotter for months. As far as I know it may still be there. I can confirm that Pasternak’s letter, which read like a telegram and reeked of sincerity, was the single expression of condolence that brought any comfort to the shattered Stalin. As he took to reading it aloud in my presence every morning for weeks, I pretty much remember what Pasternak said: The day before her death was announced, I thought deeply and intensively about Stalin; as a poet—for the first time. Next morning I read the news. I was shaken, as though I had been there, living by his side, and had seen it. Boris Pasternak.