Though he had decided to live to ninety, Stalin thought miserably, he personally could expect no pleasure from the years ahead: He must simply accept another twenty years of suffering for the sake of mankind at large.
This was how he had celebrated his birthday. On the evening of the twentieth, Traicho Kostov had been done to death. Only when the dog’s eyes glazed over could the real celebrations begin. On the twenty-first, Stalin had been feted in the Bolshoi Theater, where Mao, Dolores, and other comrades had made speeches. Then there had been a great banquet. Still later, an intimate banquet. They had drunk old wine from Spanish cellars, wine once sent in payment for arms. Then he and Lavrenty privately had drunk Kakhetinskoye and sung Georgian songs. On the twenty-second, there was a big diplomatic reception. On the twenty-third, he had seen himself portrayed on screen in The Battle of Stalingrad, Part II, and on the stage in The Unforgettable 1919.
He had liked both productions, although they left him exhausted. His role not only in the Fatherland War but in the Civil War, too, was more and more truthfully portrayed nowadays. Everyone could see what a great man he had been even then. Stage and screen now showed people how often he had warned and corrected the rash and superficial Lenin. What noble words the playwright had put in his mouth: “Every toiler has the right to say what he thinks!” And how cleverly the scriptwriter had handled that night scene with his Friend. Although Stalin no longer had such a close and devoted friend, because people were always so insincere, so treacherous. And, as it happened, he had never had such a friend, no, never, but when he saw it on screen, Stalin felt a lump in his throat (what a writer! that’s what I call a writer!): It was as if he had always wanted such a truthful and selfless Friend, someone to whom you could say out loud the thoughts that came to you in the long night hours.
But you couldn’t possibly have such a Friend, because he would have to be very, very great. And if he were as great as that, where would he live? What would his job be?
As for all those others, from Vyacheslav Stone-Bottom to Nikita the Gopak-dancer,** how could anyone take them seriously? You could die of boredom sitting at the table with them. Not one of them ever came out with a clever remark, and whenever you made a point, they all agreed immediately. At one time Stalin had a soft spot for Voroshilov, because of Tsaritsyn and the Polish campaign and because he had reported the meeting of those traitors Zinoviev and Kamenev with Frunze in the cave at Kislovodsk. But Voroshilov was a stuffed dummy with an army cap and medals, not a human being.
There was no one he now remembered as a friend. No one of whom he could remember more good than bad.
He had, and could have, no friend, but the common people all loved their Leader and were ready to sacrifice life and soul for him. That was made clear by the newspapers, the cinema, and the exhibition of birthday presents. He rejoiced to think that the Leader’s birthday had become a nationwide festival. So many birthday messages had arrived, greetings from institutions, from organizations, from factories, from individual citizens. Pravda had asked permission to publish them, not all at once but in two columns daily. Publication would extend over several years, but that was all to the good.
As for the presents, ten galleries in the Museum of the Revolution could not house them. So that the citizens of Moscow could view them freely in the daytime, Stalin paid a visit by night. The work of thousands and thousands of craftsmen, the finest gifts earth could offer, stood, lay, or hung before him, but here, too, the same cold indifference, the same apathy had gripped him. What good were all these presents to him? He was soon bored with them. Once again, there in the museum, an unpleasant memory stirred at the back of his mind, but as so often recently the thought remained vague. He knew only that it was unpleasant. Stalin walked through three galleries without choosing anything, pausing for a moment at the big television set with an engraved plate reading “To Great Stalin from the Chekists.” This, the biggest of all Soviet television sets, and the only one of its kind, had been made at Marfino. Stalin inspected it briefly, turned on his heel, and left.
But by and large it had been a marvelous occasion. His proud record! his victories! achievements such as no political leader in the world could equal! Yet for him this triumphant occasion had been hollow.
It was as though something lodged in his chest nagged and galled him.
He took another bite of the feijoa and sucked it.
Yes, the people loved him, but the people’s faults were innumerable. Left to itself, the people was good for nothing. You need only ask yourself who was to blame for the retreat in 1941. Who retreated? The people, who else?
That was why he ought not to be celebrating, or lying around, but getting down to work. Thinking.
Thinking—that was his duty. At once his lot and his punishment. He had to live another two decades, like a prisoner serving a twenty-year sentence, with no more than eight hours’ sleep in the twenty-four; that was all he could manage. All those other hours he must struggle through, as though he were dragging his aging, vulnerable body over sharp stones.
Hardest of all for Stalin were morning and early afternoon. While the sun was rising, shining merrily, reaching its zenith, Stalin slept in darkness, shuttered, secluded, secret. He awoke when the sun was already declining, losing strength, toward the end of its short one-day life. Stalin had breakfast at about three o’clock in the afternoon but began to come to life only toward evening, when the sun was setting. In the hours between, his brain was warming up, waking sullenly, distrustfully; he could make only negative and prohibitive decisions. Dinner began at 10:00 p.m. A few favored members of the Politburo or foreign Communists were usually invited. Four or five hours were painlessly killed over a steady succession of dishes, drinks, jokes, and discussions, and at the same time his mind picked up speed and the impetus for the creative legislative thinking of the second half of the night was generated. All the major decrees that kept the great state on course took shape in Stalin’s head after 2:00 a.m. and never later than dawn.
That time had come around again, and a decree conspicuously lacking in the body of the law was ripening. He had made fast forever almost everything in the land, stopped all movement, dammed all currents, all two hundred million knew their place, but the kolkhoz system had sprung a leak. This was all the stranger because the general situation on the farms was conspicuously good—witness the films and novels on the subject—and anyway Stalin often talked to collective farmers himself on the platforms of rallies and congresses. Nonetheless, like the perspicacious and unceasingly self-critical statesman he was, Stalin had forced himself to look still deeper. One of the obkom*** secretaries (subsequently shot, he believed) had let slip that the farms had one dark side: Old men and women enrolled in the thirties worked ungrudgingly, but an unconscientious element among the young tried when they left school to obtain passports by fraud and to sneak off to the towns.
Education! What a mess they had got into with, first universal seven-year, then universal ten-year education, with those “children of cooks” who now went to university. Lenin in his irresponsible way had muddled matters, recklessly littering the place with promises, which had since become a crippling burden to his successor, to Stalin. “Any cook must be able to administer the state,” but how had Lenin pictured this in concrete terms? Did he mean that the cook, instead of cooking on Fridays, would take her seat on the oblast executive committee? A cook was a cook; her job was to prepare dinner. Governing people was a rare skill, a task that could be entrusted only to special cadres, cadres specially selected, trained, and tempered, highly disciplined. Management of the cadres themselves must rest in a single pair of hands, the practiced hands of the Leader.
Why not write it into the statutes of each collective farm that since the land belongs to it in perpetuity, everyone born in a particular village automatically acquires membership in the farm at birth? Represent this as a right and an honor. Launch a public-relations campaign immediately: “A Further Step Along the Road to Communism,”
“Youth’s Inheritance—the Collective Granary,” . . . well, the writers would find the best way to put it.
Somehow his mind was not on his work today. He felt unwell.
There were four short knocks, or rather not so much knocks as a muffled sound, as if a dog was pawing the door.
Stalin pulled a lever near his couch, the safety catch clicked, and the door opened slightly. No curtain hung in front of it (Stalin did not like anything that hung loosely, anything with folds in which someone could hide), and he could see the bare door opening just wide enough to admit a dog. It was, however, at the upper, not the lower, end of the gap that a head appeared; that of the bald though still-young-looking Poskryobyshev, who wore a permanent expression of honest devotion and unbounded eagerness to serve.
Though it worried him to see the Boss lying down, half covered with the mohair shawl, he did not ask about his health (Stalin disliked such questions), but said almost in a whisper: “Iosif Vissarionovich, you made an appointment with Abakumov for half past two. Will you be wanting to see him?”
Iosif Vissarionovich unbuttoned the flap of his breast pocket and pulled out a watch on a chain (like all those of his generation he detested wristwatches).
It was not yet 2:00 a.m.
The heavy lump was still there in his stomach. He didn’t feel like getting up and changing his clothes. But he could not relax his grip on any of them; the slightest weakening would be felt at once.
“We’ll see,” said Stalin, wearily blinking. “I’m not sure.”
“He might as well come. He can wait,” Poskryobyshev said, nodded three or four times, then froze again, looking expectantly at the Boss. “Have you any further instructions, Iossarionych?” No instructions could be read into the languid, lifeless gaze that Stalin turned on him. But Poskryobyshev’s question had struck a sudden spark from his erratic memory, and he asked something that he had intended to ask long ago but kept forgetting.
“What about the cypresses down in the Crimea? Are they being cut down?”
“They are, Iossarionych.” Poskryobyshev nodded confidently, as though he had been expecting this very question and had just rung through to the Crimea to inquire. “Around Massandra and Livadia a lot of them have been felled already, Iossarionych!”
“Have a report sent in just the same. In code. Make sure there’s no sabotage.” The unhealthy yellow eyes of the All-Powerful looked troubled.
One of his doctors had told him earlier in the year that cypresses were bad for his health and that he needed air impregnated with the aroma of eucalyptuses. Whereupon Stalin had given orders for the Crimean cypresses to be felled, and eucalyptus saplings to be imported from Australia.
Poskryobyshev acknowledged his orders and also undertook to find out what was happening about the eucalyptuses.
“Right,” said Stalin, satisfied. “You can go for now, Sasha.”
Poskryobyshev nodded, backed toward the door, inclined his head once more, then withdrew it and closed the door. Iosif Vissarionovich operated the remote-control lock again. Clutching the shawl, he turned onto his other side. And continued paging through his Biography.
But recumbency, a slight chill, and indigestion had lowered his resistance, and he surrendered helplessly to dark thoughts. What rose before him now was not the dazzling and preordained success of his policies but his ill luck in life and all the enemies, all the obstacles with which fate had sought to bar his way.
* * *
* Young Pioneers: A mass organization established in 1922 for Soviet youths from ten to fifteen years old.
** Vyacheslav Stone-Bottom and Nikita the Gopak-dancer: Stalin refers to two of his principal deputies. Vyacheslav Molotov was known to sit working as long as his boss required; Nikita Khrushchev, of peasant stock, was alleged to have been repeatedly asked by Stalin to perform the Gopak squat dance.
* * *
*** Obkom: Soviet shorthand for an Oblast Committee of the Communist Party.
Chapter 20
A Study of a Great Life
TWO-THIRDS OF A CENTURY. The beginnings lost in a blue haze. And who then could have imagined in his wildest dreams how it would end? Looking backward, it was difficult to resurrect and believe in the beginning.
He had been born to a life without hope. An illegitimate son, registered in the name of a drunken, penniless cobbler. An illiterate mother. Grubby little Soso forever splashing about in the puddles near Queen Tamara’s hill. How could such a child ever escape from the depths of degradation, let alone become ruler of the world?
But the author of his existence had pulled strings; and, although he did not belong to a priestly family, the boy had been admitted, contrary to the established practice of the church, first to a church school, then, still more remarkably, to a seminary. From the highest point of the blackened iconostasis, the God of Sabaoth sternly summoned the novice prostrate on the cold stone flags. Oh, how zealously the boy had entered into the service of his God! How unreservedly he surrendered himself! In his six years of schooling he crammed into himself as best he could the Old and New Testaments, the Lives of the Saints, and church history, and he was a punctilious altar boy.
Yes, there it was in his Biography, a snapshot of Dzhugashvili wearing a gray cassock with a round, buttoned collar before he was expelled. There was no color in his boyishly oval face; he looked exhausted by prayer. His hair, grown long in readiness for his ordination, was carefully parted, humbly smeared with oil from the icon lamps, and combed down right over his ears. Only his eyes and his tense brows hinted that here was a novice who might someday be an archbishop.
But God had disappointed him. Time had left behind the odious, sleepy little town where the Medzhuda and the Liakhva meander among rounded green hills. In noisy Tiflis clever people had realized long ago that God was a joke. And the ladder up which Soso was so tenaciously climbing led, he now saw, not to Heaven but to a pauper’s garret.
He was at a boisterous and bellicose age; he longed for action. Time was passing, and nothing had been achieved! He had no money to go to university, obtain a government post, or set up in business. Instead, there was socialism, which turned no one away, socialism, which was used to seminarians. He felt no inclination toward any art or science, he lacked the know-how to become an artisan or a thief, he was not successful enough with women to become the lover of a rich lady, but Revolution summoned all men, received them with open arms, and promised them a place.
At his own suggestion his favorite photograph of himself had been inserted at this point in the book. There he was, almost in profile. He was wearing . . . not exactly a beard or a mustache or sideburns; he simply hadn’t shaved for quite a while, and beard, mustache, and sideburns had run together in a picturesque manly growth. He was all eagerness, all aspiration, but he did not yet know to what. What a likable young man! A frank, clever, energetic face, not a trace of the fanatical novice. Free now of the lamp oil, his hair had sprung up and flopped forward to conceal what was perhaps a rather unsatisfactory feature, his low, sloping forehead. He was poor; his jacket had been shabby when he bought it; a cheap checkered scarf was draped around his neck with bohemian abandon, covering his unhealthily narrow chest in lieu of a shirt. One of many such young men in Tiflis, surely doomed to tuberculosis.
Whenever Stalin looked at that photograph, his heart filled with pity (for no heart is altogether incapable of it). How difficult everything had been for him; the whole world was against that splendid young man, his only shelter a cold but rent-free closet at the observatory after his expulsion from the seminary. (He had wanted for safety’s sake to combine the two things, and for four years had attended Social Democratic study groups while continuing to say his prayers and recite his catechism, but they had expelled him just the same.)
Eleven years of prayer and genuflection had gone for nothing. . . . All the more resolutely did he transfer his youthful energies to the Revolution!
But Revolution, too, had proved a disappointment.
What sort of Revolution was it, anyway, in Tiflis? Bigheaded braggarts playing games in a wine cellar. You could get lost in this anthill of nonentities. They had no concept of advancement by regular stages or of seniority. It was just a question of who could outtalk whom. The former seminarian came to hate those chatterers more than he hated provincial governors or policemen. (Why be angry with them? They earned their salary honestly and naturally had to defend themselves, but there was no excuse for these upstarts!) Revolution? Among Georgian shopkeepers? It would never happen! And now he had cut himself off from the seminary, lost what should have been his way in life.
The hell with it anyway, this so-called Revolution, all these paupers, workers who boozed their wages away, sick old women, people cheated of a few odd kopecks. . . . Why was he supposed to love them and not his young, clever, handsome, unappreciated self?
It was only in Batum, when he led a couple of hundred people (including the idly curious) along a street for the first time that Koba (his Revolutionary nickname) felt the thrill of power. People were following him! After that first experience he never forgot the taste of it. This was the life that he was made for, the only sort of life he could understand: You speak, and people have to do what you say; you show them where to go, and people have to go there. There is nothing better than this, nothing finer in the world. Riches are nothing in comparison.
A month later the police bestirred themselves and arrested him. Nobody feared arrest in those days. It meant very little. You were in custody for two months, and when you were let out, you were a martyr. Koba behaved admirably in the common cell and encouraged the others to treat their jailers with contempt.
But they hung on to him. All his cellmates went and were replaced by others. He was still inside. What, after all, had he done? No one was punished so severely for an insignificant demonstration.
In the First Circle Page 16
