The more people he relieved of their lives, the more he feared for his own. His brain invented many valuable improvements in the security system, such as, for instance, that the names of those on guard duty should be posted only one hour before the guard was mounted, and that each squad should be made up of soldiers from different barracks at a considerable distance from one another; when they met on guard duty, they would be seeing each other for the first time, and for twenty-four hours only, so that they would not be able to plot anything. His villa had been built like a labyrinthine mousetrap. There were three stockades, and their gates were not in line with one another. He had arranged for himself a number of bedrooms, and his bed was made up at the last moment, immediately before he retired.
All these precautions were dictated not by cowardice but by prudence. Because his person was of inestimable value to the history of mankind. Other people, however, might not realize this. And so as not to make himself a conspicuous exception, he prescribed similar precautions for all the lesser leaders, in the capital and in the provinces, forbade them to go to the bathroom without attendants, ordered them to ride in a gaggle of three indistinguishable vehicles. . . .
Painfully reminded of the Populist Revolutionaries’ portraits, he stood stock-still in the middle of the room, looked around at Abakumov, and said, wagging his pipe in the air: “What are you doing for the protection of Party cadres?”
Following it with a malignant look, a hostile look, screwing his head to one side.
With his blank notebook open, Abakumov raised his behind from his chair in deference to the Leader (but did not stand up, knowing that Stalin liked people to keep still when they talked to him), and succinctly (because the Boss considered lengthy explanations insincere) and unhesitatingly began talking about something that he had not been expecting to talk about. (Ever-readiness was most important in this context; Stalin might interpret any hesitation as proof of malicious intent.)
“Comrade Stalin!” Abakumov’s feelings were hurt, and his voice trembled. He yearned to use the more intimate “Iosif Vissarionovich,” but this form of address was discouraged as presumptuous; no one must claim intimacy with the Leader, put himself almost on the same level.
“What else do we, the security apparatus, exist for, what is our whole ministry for, if not to make sure that you, Comrade Stalin, can work and think and lead our country without anxiety?”
(Stalin had said “the safety of Party cadres,” but he wanted to hear only about himself, and Abakumov knew it.)
“Not a day goes by without me checking, making the necessary arrests, taking a good look at the situation!”
Stalin was still studying him closely, head on one side, like a doubtful raven.
“Tell me,” he asked thoughtfully. “Are there still cases of terrorism? Haven’t we seen the end of them yet?”
Abakumov sighed deeply.
“I wish I could tell you that there are no cases of terrorism, Comrade Stalin. But there are. We have to render them harmless . . . in the most unexpected places.”
Stalin closed one eye, and his other expressed satisfaction.
“That’s good,” he said, nodding his head. “I can see you’re doing your job.”
“What is more, Comrade Stalin. . . .” Abakumov, rules or no rules, could not bear to remain seated while the Leader stood, and he rose halfway from his chair, without unbending his knees completely (he never went there in elevator shoes). “What is more, we never let these things mature to the stage of actual planning. We nip them in the bud while they’re still just a notion! We use Section 19!”
“Good, good.” With a soothing gesture Stalin waved Abakumov back to his seat (he didn’t want that great hulk looming over him). “So you think there are still malcontents among the masses?”
Abakumov sighed again.
“Yes, Comrade Stalin. A certain percentage.”
(He would have looked pretty foolish if he had said there were none! If there were none, who needed him and his entire organization?)
“You’re right,” Stalin said with feeling.
His voice was hoarse, wheezy, dull.
“I see you know your job at State Security. You know, some people tell me there’s no discontent, everybody who votes in elections votes for us, so everybody’s satisfied. What do you think of that?” Stalin grinned. “Political blindness! The enemy hides his face, votes for us, but he is not content! Five percent, would you say? Or maybe eight?”
(This perspicacity of his, this self-critical realism, this refusal to let the incense go to his head, were qualities which Stalin particularly prized in himself!)
“Yes, Comrade Stalin,” Abakumov replied with conviction. “Five percent. Perhaps seven.”
Stalin continued his journey round the study, circling the desk en route.
“That is a weakness of mine, Comrade Stalin.” Abakumov was getting bolder. His ears had cooled down. “I am incapable of complacency.”
Stalin gently tapped the ashtray with his pipe.
“What about the younger generation? What is their attitude?”
Answering these questions was like juggling with knives. . . . You only had to cut yourself once. . . . Say “good,” and it would be “political blindness.” Say “bad,” and you “lack faith in our future.”
Abakumov spread his fingers and refrained from speaking too soon.
Stalin did not wait for an answer. “We must show greater concern for the young,” he said, his pipe tapping an emphatic accompaniment. “We must be particularly hard on the bad habits of young people!”
Abakumov sat up and started writing.
Stalin was carried away by this thought, and his eyes lit up with a tigerish gleam. He refilled his pipe, lit it, and began striding about the room much more vigorously than before.
“You must intensify your observation of student attitudes! Weed out whole groups, not just individuals! And you must go to the limit permitted by the law: twenty-five years, not just ten! Ten is like sending them to school, not to prison! Ten is fine for schoolboys. Once they start shaving, it’s twenty-five! They’re young enough! They’ll survive!”
Abakumov scribbled. The first cogs in a complex machine began to turn.
“And you must put an end to the rest-cure conditions in political prisons! Is it true what Beria tells me, that political prisoners get food parcels?”
Abakumov was pained. “We’ll eliminate them, Comrade Stalin! We’ll put a stop to it!” he exclaimed, writing away. “That was a mistake on our part, Comrade Stalin! I’m sorry!”
(It was indeed a blunder! He should have raised it himself!)
Stalin faced Abakumov, feet wide apart.
“How many times do I have to tell you? You ought to know by now. . . .”
He spoke without anger. His eyes, stern no longer, expressed his confidence in Abakumov; he would learn the lesson, he would understand. Abakumov could not remember Stalin ever speaking to him so simply and so kindly. His feeling of apprehension had abandoned him; his brain was working like that of a normal man in normal conditions. A departmental matter had been causing him as much discomfort as a bone in his throat; out it came at last. His face brightened.
“We do understand, Comrade Stalin.” (He spoke for the whole ministry). “We do understand: The class struggle will continue to grow more acute! All the more reason, then. . . . Put yourself in our position, Comrade Stalin. . . . We are tied hand and foot in our work by the abolition of capital punishment! We’ve been cudgeling our brains for two and a half years. . . . There’s no way of documenting executions. So when somebody has to be shot, we must produce two versions of the sentence. Then again, we can’t show the executioners’ payment in the books, and our accounts get in a muddle. Besides, we’ve got nothing to threaten them with in the camps. We badly need capital punishment! Please, Comrade Stalin, give us back the death penalty!” A cry from a loving heart. Abakumov pressed his palm to his breast and gazed hopefully at his dark-faced Leader.<
br />
Stalin gave him perhaps the slightest of smiles. His bristling mustache trembled, but not alarmingly.
“I know,” he said softly, understandingly. “I’ve been thinking about it.”
Amazing man! He knew everything! He thought of everything before he was asked. Like a god hovering over them, he anticipated men’s thoughts.
“One of these days I will give you back the death penalty,” he said thoughtfully, looking deep into the future, perhaps years and years ahead. “It will be a useful educational measure.”
Of course he had been thinking about it! This past two years or so he had regretted more than any of them that he had yielded to an impulse; to show off to the West, he had been false to himself, behaved as if people were not rotten through and through.
Yet all his life, that had been his distinctive characteristic as a statesman: Neither dismissal, nor systematic harassment, nor confinement in a madhouse, nor imprisonment for life, nor banishment, had ever seemed to him an adequate way of dealing with persons known to be dangerous. Death was the only fully reliable answer. Only the death of the criminal could confirm the reality and fullness of your power.
If the tip of his mustache twitched indignantly, there was only one possible sentence: death.
His scale included no lighter penalty.
Stalin withdrew his gaze from the bright distant future and turned it on Abakumov. Squinting from beneath lowered lids, he asked: “But aren’t you afraid you might be the first to be shot?”
The word “shot” remained almost unspoken; his voice sank to a faint murmur, as if the thought went without saying.
But it chilled Abakumov to the core. His Dear Leader, his Beloved Leader, stood over him, just out of reach of a straight punch, studying every little line in the minister’s face, to see how he would take the joke.
Not daring either to stand or to remain seated, Abakumov raised himself slightly on tensed legs, his knees trembling from the tension.
“Comrade Stalin! . . . If you think I deserve it. . . . If it’s necessary. . . .”
Stalin’s gaze was wise and penetrating. He was quietly turning over in his mind the inevitable second thought about any of his henchmen. Alas, there was a fatality which men could not defy: The most zealous of aides must sooner or later be disowned and cast off. Sooner or later they all compromise themselves.
“Quite right!” he said, with an indulgent smile, as though complimenting Abakumov on his ready understanding. “When you deserve it, that’s when we’ll shoot you.”
He waved his hand, urging Abakumov to sit down. Abakumov made himself comfortable again.
Stalin thought awhile and then began speaking in a tone more friendly than the Minister of State Security had heard from him before.
“There will be plenty of work for you shortly, Abakumov. We shall be carrying out another exercise, like the one in 1937. The whole world is against us. War has long been inevitable. Ever since 1944 it has been inevitable. And before a great war there must be a great purge.”
Abakumov ventured a protest.
“But Comrade Stalin, aren’t we putting enough inside already?”
“You call that putting enough inside?” Stalin waved his hand, good-humoredly deprecating. “When we do start putting them away, you’ll really see something! When the war comes and we move forward, we’ll start putting Europe inside! Strengthen the Organs!** Strengthen the Organs! All the staff you need! Pay them what you like! I shall never refuse you!”
Then a benign dismissal.
“Right, off with you for now.”
ABAKUMOV DIDN’T KNOW whether he was walking or flying as he crossed the waiting room to collect his briefcase from Poskryobyshev. He had a whole month of life before him, and it might even be the beginning of a new era in his relations with the Boss.
True, there had been a threat. He might be shot himself.
But of course that was only a joke.
* * *
* Pood: Pre-Revolutionary unit of weight equal to 36.11 pounds.
** Organs: A nickname for the Soviet secret police, with its vulgar double entendre intended.
Chapter 22
The Emperor of the Earth
THE GREAT RULER, aroused by great thoughts, strode mightily about his night study. Music swelled within him; an enormous brass band provided the accompaniment to his march.
Discontented, eh? Let them be! They always had been discontented, and they always would be.
But Stalin had a passing acquaintance with an uncomplicated version of world history, and he knew that given time people will forgive all bad things, indeed forget them, or remember them as good. Whole nations behaved like Queen Anne in Shakespeare’s Richard III: Their wrath was short-lived, their will infirm, their memory weak, and they would always be glad to give themselves to the victor.
The crowd was, as it were, the stuff from which history was made. (Make a note of it!) It shrank in one place only to swell in another. So there was no need to treat it gently.
The reason why he had to live to ninety was that the struggle was not over, the building was not finished, the times were uncertain, and there was no one to take his place.
He must wage and win the last world war. Exterminate like gophers the Western Social Democrats and all persistent pests throughout the world. Then, of course, he must raise the productivity of labor. Solve all those economic problems. In short, build Communism, as the phrase went.
In that context, by the way, completely incorrect ideas had entrenched themselves. Stalin had thought it over recently and reached clear conclusions. Naive and shortsighted people pictured Communism as a kingdom of plenty, of freedom from necessity. But that would be an impossible social order; at that rate Communism would be worse than bourgeois anarchy! The first and main characteristic of true Communism must be discipline, total subordination to authority, and strict execution of orders. (The intelligentsia must be kept under particularly firm control.) Second, “plenty” must be modest plenty, not even sufficiency in fact, because overprosperous people fell into ideological disarray, as could be seen in the West. If a man does not have to worry about food, he escapes the material pressure of history, being ceases to determine consciousness, and everything is topsy-turvy.
So, when you came to think of it, Stalin had built true Communism already.
This could not, however, be announced, or people would be asking, Where do we go next? Time went on; the whole world was in motion; one had to have somewhere to go.
Obviously it never would be possible to announce that the Communist society had been built. That would be a methodological error.
Now there was a man for you—Bonaparte! He was not frightened by the barking of Jacobin yard dogs; he declared himself emperor, and that was that.
There was nothing bad about the word “emperor.” It meant “commander,” the man who gave the orders. That was in no way incompatible with world Communism.
What a splendid ring it would have! Emperor of the Planet! Emperor of the Earth!
On and on he marched, while the brass bands played.
Someday, maybe, they would discover a preparation that would make him—him alone?—immortal. No, they would be too late.
But how could he abandon humanity? To whose care could he leave it? They would get in a muddle, make mistakes.
Very well, then. He would build more monuments to himself, bigger ones, higher ones (technology wouldn’t stand still). Erect a statue on Kazbek, erect a statue on Elbrus, with their heads always above the clouds. And then, so be it, he could die, the Greatest of the Great; none was his equal; there was no one in the history of the earth to compare with him.
Suddenly he stopped.
On earth, yes, . . . but what about up there? He had no equal here, of course, but what if you raised your eyes higher, above the clouds; what about there?
He began pacing again, but more slowly.
This was the one doubt that sometimes insinuated itself into Stalin�
��s mind.
On the face of it, the facts had been proven long ago, and all objections refuted.
All the same, there was some obscurity.
Especially if you had spent your childhood in the church. If you had gazed into the eyes of icons. If you had sung in the choir. If you could chant “now lettest thou thy servant . . .” right now without a slip.
Just lately these memories had for some reason become more vivid in Iosif’s mind.
His mother, as she lay dying, had said, “It’s a pity you didn’t become a priest.” He was the leader of the world proletariat, the unifier of Slavdom—and in his mother’s eyes a failure.
Just in case, Stalin had never spoken out against God; there were plenty of orators without him. Lenin might spit on the cross and trample it; Bukharin and Trotsky might mock. Stalin held his tongue.
He had given orders that Abakadze, the inspector of seminaries who had expelled the young Dzhugashvili, should not be harmed. Let him live his life out.
And when, on July 3, 1941, his throat had dried up and tears had come into his eyes—tears not of terror but of pity, pity for himself—it was no accident that the words that forced their way from his lips were “brothers and sisters.” Neither Lenin nor any of the others could have uttered those words, intentionally or otherwise.
His lips had spoken as they had been accustomed to speak in his youth.
Nobody saw him, nobody knew, he had told no one, but in those first days he had locked himself in his room and prayed, prayed properly, except that it was in a corner without icons, prayed on his knees. The first few months had been the hardest time of his life.
At that time he had made a vow to God: If the danger passed and he survived in his post, he would restore the church and church services in Russia and would not let believers be persecuted and imprisoned. (It should never have been allowed in the first place; it had started in Lenin’s time.) And when the danger was over, when Stalingrad was behind him, Stalin had done all that he had vowed to do.
In the First Circle Page 21
