by Alexei Sayle
Kuibyshev didn’t know what to say to this — it could be a fatal trap in so many different ways. A seemingly innocent chat about puppies or mandolins with Stalin could somersault into yelled accusations of high treason within six or seven words; the General Secretary was like a serpent hiding within a coiled hose. So, having no other option available, he decided to tell the truth.
‘Nobody, General Secretary,’ said Kuibyshev. ‘As I’m sure you remember, Comrade General Secretary, it was decided at the Congress of the Academy of Science in ‘32, which you so ably chaired, that as mental problems were created by the workers’ alienation from society, and as the Soviet Union is a perfect society run according to the principles of Marxist Leninism with the workers owning the means of production, there can be no alienation and therefore no mental problems in the Soviet Union. Mental problems cannot possibly exist because that would mean our society is not perfect; which of course it is. The workers live in perfect harmony in the glorious Soviet Union which you, Comrade Stalin, have brought into being following the glorious teachings of Comrade Lenin, and thus there are no mental problems of any kind, whatsoever, at all, anywhere.
Anybody who does show any mental problems therefore must be a shirker or a saboteur and is imprisoned or shot.’ Kuibyshev paused to see how all this was going down. Stalin seemed sunk in thought, so he decided to continue, ‘Actually it occurs to me, Comrade General Secretary, that the only possibility of mental problems would be if a person were alienated from the workers’ paradise because they were not a worker but a blood-sucking Kulak or a bourgeois intellectual Kerenskyite saboteur perhaps …
Kuibyshev was pleased with this elaboration which had just come into his head. It did not do to come up with stuff if there was a witness present because you could make yourself seem cleverer than Stalin, which was a subway token to the Gulag, but on the other hand if there was no one else around then it was essential to come up with things, because then he could later claim these thoughts as his own.
The Minister for Health continued, ‘Also, of course, Psychiatry is a Jewish invention and we know that that lot are not to be trusted. So in 1933 we sent all the psychiatrists to chop down trees in the forests of Siberia where, incidentally, lumber production was reduced by thirty-five per cent on their arrival.’
‘Well who is the best of them then?’ asked Stalin.
Still living.’
Kuibyshev considered for a while. ‘None of them, Comrade Secretary General; they are all dead if they have been in the camps since ‘33.’ Then he had a thought. ‘Ooh ah, no, wait a minute — there is Novgerod Mandelstim, he came back from the United States with his entire family in ‘36 after the proclamation of the new Constitution. We didn’t arrest them all for sabotage until early this year so I suppose they might still live.’
Kuibyshev waited. Finally the General Secretary spoke.
‘If he lives, bring him to me,’ ordered Stalin.
2
A few mornings later, far to the east, Novgerod Mandelstim was trying, inexpertly, to cut down a tree in the Siberian forest. The deep snow he was standing in came up to his knees, soaking through the thin sacking of his trousers. He thought this might be the day when he lost his toes. Then the NKVD guards came for him and he thought he might lose more than that.
To his surprise, however, the guards were relatively polite, not beating him much at all. Down the track a car was waiting with its engine running and the heater turned up high. They threw him in the back of it; it was the first time he had been warm in six months. The car set off with a squeal of frozen brakes and bumped along forest roads for over an hour till they came to a narrow black road.
To his right Novgerod Mandelstim saw prisoners filling some of the holes in the road with rocks, their faces and hands were raw and bleeding. A few took a quick look to see which powerful figure was in the back of this car they were perplexed to see one of their own reflections staring confusedly back at them.
The car drove for another two hours down the black road till they came to some sort of compound with the emblems of the NKVD above its gates. The motor swung through the barrier, not slowing down and only just clearing it as frantic soldiers pushed the gates open. They were now into a large clearing, long and narrow, trailing into the icy acid mist. And here was the most extraordinary thing: a three-engined aeroplane stood on the frozen grass, red stars emblazoned on its shining silver corrugated sides, its propellers slowly spinning in the corrosive air in order to stop them freezing.
Novgerod Mandelstim considered now that he wasn’t going to be killed that day after all.
They put him in a seat on the empty plane, then two implacable guards came aboard and sat facing him. Novgerod noted that they were both captains in the NKVD. This got stranger by the minute: he wondered whether he had gone mad and this was some sort of long-drawn-out delusion. It felt real enough, but then he supposed delusions did, while you were having them.
The engine note of the plane changed to a roar, they bumped forward then began racing across the tundra, trees whipping along beside them, until finally they hiccupped into the air. As the aeroplane tore higher into the thin atmosphere, out of the window Mandelstim could see the many, many camps, each a white clearing in the forest, like patches of nervous alopecia in a dark green beard.
For most of the rest of that day they flew west. It was dark by the time the engine note changed again and the Illuyshin began its descent. The psychiatrist woke and looked once more out of the window. Tilted on its side was Moscow! He could see the Kremlin and Red Square clearly, the floodlights illuminating Lenin’s tomb casting long black shadows over the rest of the city.
They came into land at Sheremetyevo Airport and another car was waiting on the tarmac, its engine ticking like a bomb and white smoke curling from its tailpipe. By this time Novgerod Mandelstim had gained an idea as to where he was bound, or at least who he was bound to see: there was only one person who could magic these things. In this country it was beyond the power of the average Soviet citizen to get their hands on a potato! Never mind an aeroplane! So NKVD captains, cars, planes, and most of all the sense of purpose, the engines running, the guards waiting and ready to roll, in a land where everything was done at a lethargic half-speed if it was done at all. It had to be him.
The thing was that Novgerod Mandelstim had known him, had been in some ways his friend. Back in the days before the revolution, the sullen pockmarked little Georgian, then called Iosif Dzhugashvili, had seemed vulnerable and shy and conscious of his lower class amongst the flashing, garrulous, intellectuals who controlled the Communist Party branch in Baku. Novgerod Mandelstim had tried (Had he been patronising? He didn’t know.) to make him feel less self-conscious, had tried to include him in the debates, had given him preference in appointing him to committees (after all he was a genuine worker, one of those in whose name all this was being done), had invited him to dinner, since he always seemed half-starved; others had done the same. He had killed them all.
After 1917 Novgerod Mandelstim had watched in astonishment and at first with a little pride as Dzhugashvili, now called Stalin, had risen in the Party. In 1928 Leon Trotsky, the last of Stalin’s opponents, was sent into exile in Alma Ata and the first real terror had begun. Real in that this was the first terror which had reached into the ranks of the Party. Before this, purges, random murder and imprisonment had been a privilege of the ordinary citizen. In that same year the OGPU, forerunners of the NKVD, had come looking for Novgerod Mandelstim. Fortunately he had been warned by a ex-patient high up in the Party, who he had cured of a morbid fear of frogs, that this was about to happen and thus managed to smuggle himself and his son to the United States in the last days, before the gates slammed shut.
Thanks to the many other Jewish émigrés, Novgerod Mandelstim was able to move to the west coast of America and there he set up a psychiatric practice with another of those who had once been in the Party: G.V. Lubetkin.
Yet he was not happy. The c
orporeal decadence of the United States disgusted him, the seventeen different kinds of motor car that they had, in restaurants the little crackers they gave you that nobody ate, the gaudy suits the negroes wore at the dance halls of Compton; all of it repelled his puritan soul. Most of all he was repulsed by his patients: whining, spoilt, greedy, grownup man/woman/child without any real problems, who constantly clamoured for his attention and thought he was their friend.
This displacement caused him to fill his son’s head with stories of the Motherland. He pointed out at every opportunity the bovine materialism of the Americans, he contrasted this with the nobility of the Russian citizen; he compared the cheap jangling music with the poetry that lived within the soul of every Russian: Pushkin, Chekov, Dostoyevsky — Tolstoy versus Roy Rogers. There was no contest. Maybe this was why the lad had not prospered; despite his obvious intelligence somehow little Misha had not done well at college and had left early. In the years of the Depression he could only get work as a clerk in the accounts department of the Goodyear Rubber Company, and he had married a little girl from Yekaterinburg rather than one of the ten-foot-tall Californian women who ranged the sunburnt streets. So when in 1936 Novgerod Mandelstim heard about the new Constitution, he resolved to return to the Soviet Union. The provisions in this Constitution when it was adopted by the Party Congress included universal suffrage, direct election by secret ballot and the guarantees of civil rights for all citizens, including freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, the right of return for refugees without persecution, freedom of street demonstrations and the right to personal property protected by law. Later on Mandelstim reflected that it might as well have promised a new type of gravity and perpetual freedom from farting for all the difference it made, but by then it was too late; they were all in the net.
The ‘36 Constitution had caused a very favourable impression abroad; liberal people said, ‘Now the terror is over, maybe it was necessary, who knows? Now it is over, though, the Soviet Union will rejoin the world.’ They said this because they wanted it to be so, they couldn’t believe that free little crackers was the best that mankind could be.
So Novgerod Mandelstim told his son he was returning to the Motherland but that he didn’t expect him to come too. However, as he had secretly hoped, Misha said that he longed too to touch again the dark earth of Mother Russia. Therefore Novgerod Mandelstim, his son, his daughter-in-law and his three grandchildren all returned to the Soviet Union. They were sure that if things went wrong their US citizenship would protect them.
‘Hello, Koba,’ he said to Stalin, deliberately using the name of the Georgian folk hero that the General Secretary had adopted before he became Stalin, the man of steel.
‘Hello, Mandelstim,’ replied the emperor of two hundred million souls. ‘It’s damned good to see you, old friend.’
‘It’s good to see you too, Koba, especially since I thought I was going to lose my toes this morning.’
‘Well now you are here and your toes are safe.’
‘For the moment, yes, yes they are,’ said the psychiatrist. ‘What do you want of me, Koba?’
‘Straight to the point as always. So be it. Well, Comrade Psychiatrist Novgerod Mandelstim, I have a small problem.’ And the most powerful man in the biggest country on earth told Novgerod Mandelstim about his small problem with the little baker from behind the Leningrad Station.
3
When he had finally admitted to himself that he needed help in sorting out his problem Stalin had felt better immediately. While they were locating Novgerod Mandelstim the psychiatrist, Stalin day-dreamed on what it would be like to confide in another person. All his life Stalin had hidden his thinking behind a thick curtain, his power rested in the fact that his enemies (which meant every living individual in the land and some dead ones) never knew what was going on in his brain, what he was going to do next. To tell all that was in his head to Novgerod Mandelstim, what would that be like? He had no idea. But maybe it was what he needed. To relieve the pressure like a valve, the terrible pressure of trying to make a better world for everybody. ‘Oh,’ he thought, ‘how we suffer, us Russians. I suppose it is in our nature. But what have I done that life should be so hard?’ Cautiously he tried thinking about I.M. Vosterov. There came immediately a terrible spasm of fear that forced him to clutch on to his desk in order to remain standing. ‘But perhaps,’ he thought afterwards, examining the fear, ‘it might have been a little reduced already.’
Then another thought came to him, that maybe he didn’t need Novgerod Mandelstim at all. He wondered if in some way the little baker was a kind of personal demon of his who could be placated by gifts, just as the ancients made sacrifices to their gods. Even as it came to him this notion seemed absurd to the General Secretary, but he also realised that by now he would try any stupid thing to ease the fear. Armand Hammer, the American who was the only supplier of reliable pencils in the Soviet Union and who bought all their oil, had recently given Stalin as a gift a half-sized metal negro that, via a patented Edison wax cylinder arrangement in its stomach, sang slave songs and negro spirituals at the switch of a lever. Stalin promptly ordered the NKVD to have this object delivered to the apartment of I.M. Vosterov.
The neighbours watched from behind their curtains and felt a little cheered. It made a change to see the NKVD carrying somebody into a house, even if it was a metal negro. Nonetheless, in a society so conditioned to abrupt and brutal change, no happy sense endures and within the hour a rumour started to go around the neighbourhood that all workers were going to be sent to the camps and liquidated: henceforth their jobs would be performed by metal negro robots. (‘What was wrong with Russian robots,’ many complained, ‘instead of these black metal monkeys?’)
Stalin waited for the half-sized metal negro to be delivered then thought about I.M. Vosterov. Instantly he fell to the floor and Novgerod Mandelstim’s journey from the camps began.
‘I see,’ said Novgerod Mandelstim after he had heard the story. ‘And you wish me to treat this fear that you feel?’
‘Indeed, that’s what I’ve dragged you all the way from bloody Siberia for.’
‘There will be a price.’
‘There always is. You know I always think ahead, Mandelstim two or three moves, just like you Jews, always thinking, thinking. This is what I propose. Your son, his wife and two of the three children still survive… for now. If you treat me successfully they will be released from prison and allowed to leave the country, along with yourself.’
Novgerod Mandelstim laughed a genuine, hearty deep laugh, the first in a long time. He said, ‘You forget, I know you, Koba. I allowed myself to be deluded once but I know you and I know a little of your mind. If I treat this fear of yours successfully you will kill me and my family the instant you feel well, despite any promises that you have made. Patients when they are in the grip of their illness always think they will be grateful, but when you have brought them back into the light they kvetch about the bill. You, especially, will be no different.’
‘You’re a damned idiot!’ shouted Stalin. ‘Don’t you understand that I could easily have the children brought here and tortured in front of you?’
‘Then my heart would be full of hate for you, Koba, and I would not be able to treat you, even if I wanted to.
Stalin thought for a long time. ‘Damn! What are your terms then, bastard?’
‘My son, his wife and his children are to be flown immediately to the United States. When I have spoken on the telephone to them and to one of the émigrés, Raskalnikov or Lubetkin, then I will begin treating you, not before.’
‘Why the hell should I do this?’
‘Because you want to be well again. Who knows? It might be part of your treatment.’
‘Will it be?’
‘I don’t know, Joseph; you will have to do it and find out. For once you do not hold all the cards and you are not holding the dealer’s family prisoner. You cannot control events this time, no matter
how hard and from how many angles you think about them.’
The General Secretary grunted, he pressed a button under the desk and one of his personal guard came in. Mandelstim was taken to a room within Stalin’s suite of apartments and locked in it. A cold meal and a bottle of vodka waited for him on a table. There was a clean suit, shirt and tie in his size hanging in the closet.
Three restless days later he was taken by another guard to an office which contained only a desk and a chair. On the desk was an olive-green telephone. After a minute or two the phone pingled in a muted fashion. With his hands trembling, Mandelstim picked up the handpiece. He felt as if it weighed a thousand pounds.
‘Misha?’ he said.
‘Father?’
‘Oh my son, I am so sorry for what I’ve put you through. I was such a fool. This place is … is hell.’
‘One of my daughters is dead.’
‘I know. Where are you now?’
‘We are in Lubetkin’s house in Beverly Hills.’
‘Are you safe?’
‘There are Pinkerton men with shotguns all around, guarding the house.’
‘Then you are safe for now.
‘Will you be coming too, Father?’
‘I don’t know, son. Let me speak to Lubetkin.’
The older man came on the phone. ‘Hello, Mandelstim,’ he said. ‘Is he there listening?’
‘In another room I expect he is, yes.
‘He will hunt them down if they are not hidden well.’
‘I know it.’
‘Don’t worry. They will be hidden well; we have learnt how to do these things over the years.
‘Say goodbye to Misha, Natalia and the children for me.
‘I will.’
‘Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye.’
The treatment began the next day.
