by Alexei Sayle
For an hour each day he would talk to Stalin in the General Secretary’s office. Each of them sitting at an angle to the other in a comfortable armchair. Stalin had told his staff that Novgerod Mandelstim was writing a new biography of the great pilot of the Soviet State.
4
Yet, early on in the treatment, Novgerod Mandelstim was presented with an ethical dilemma which he thought no psychiatrist could possibly have encountered before in the short but colourful history of the profession.
The dilemma was this. It soon became clear to Mandelstim, from what his sole patient told him, that for the moment Stalin’s fear was considerably curtailing his murderous instincts. He could not fail to learn that deportations were down, that executions were almost as low as they had been under the Tsar, that terror and dread did not stalk the streets with the swagger that they once had. In apartment blocks in the workers’ quarters, where citizens had disappeared more frequently than a magician’s assistant, the population was stable for the first time in years.
Mandelstim sensed a little, though not all, of the things that were going on beyond the three-foot-thick walls of the Kremlin. Without the perpetual and butcherous attention of the General Secretary, the clamp of the Party on the life of the Republic began to slacken. The secret police and the army did not know what to do and the mesh of spies did not know who to send their lies to any more.
As months went by with no crackdown, so people dared a little to sing the old songs. To worship the old God. In the west, the border guards became lazy on their patrols and each night more and more dark shapes slipped through the wire and into Poland. Via Georgia and Azerbaijan the camel trains again ran trade into Turkey. To the east, in the sea off Sakhalin Island, a thousand tiny boats made for Japan in a single night as the Red Coastguard stayed in port drinking vodka and consorting with whores. In the Ukraine peasants dragged political commissars from their offices and burnt them alive in the market squares and, as was usual in times of upheaval, Jews were murdered simply because it was again possible to do so.
It thus came to Novgerod Mandelstim that if he was somehow to cure Stalin then the murder would immediately begin again. Normally he knew that the patient’s wellbeing was supposed to be the only concern of the psychiatric practitioner, but he felt he was beyond hiding behind such spineless evasions. Nothing was normal in the Soviet Union. No, he concluded: every second that Stalin remained ill, others remained well; therefore it was his duty as a human being, though perhaps not as a psychiatrist, to actually strive to make his patient worse! God knows enough of his colleagues had managed to do this without trying.
But how was it to be achieved? Especially without his patient knowing that this was what was being attempted.
In their first formal session Novgerod Mandelstim got Stalin to again go over the details of the fear that he felt for the little baker, I.M. Vosterov. After that they started talking about Stalin’s childhood in Gori Georgia. The normal psychiatric practice would be to try and point out the childhood roots of this fear, and through this understanding to alleviate it. Novgerod Mandelstim did not do this but instead constantly professed himself baffled by the General Secretary’s illness. He asserted that there could be no possible way that a violent alcoholic father and a cold over-protective mother could possibly have anything to do with their son suffering mental problems.
Often Stalin was forced to move the times of their meetings, and on several occasions desperate phone calls summoned Mandelstim to his bedroom in the middle of the night, when he’d had a particularly frightening dream. Mandelstim allowed him to do this since it was generally considered very bad psychiatric practice to allow the patient rather than the therapist to set the time and place of meetings as this placed too much power in the hands of the patient. These bad dreams that Stalin had were of great use to Novgerod Mandelstim in his project to make the General Secretary more mentally unstable than he already was. The dreams usually featured Stalin either being paralysed or unable to speak and him being menaced by a giant figure — always this person was somebody he had eliminated, such as Bukharin or Zinoviev. Generally the giant figure would be clutching a loaf or a small bread roll. Mandelstim’s response to these terrifying reveries was the suggestion that as they were so frightening Stalin should attempt to avoid them by getting a lot less sleep. To this end the psychiatrist prescribed Benzedrine tablets from the Kremlin pharmacy and within two weeks the General Secretary was a pop-eyed wreck.
Though in the short term this brought benefits to the people in the Soviet Union in that executions were almost down to zero, in the longer run it was a turning point of the wrong kind. Stalin, being no fool, even in his confused state, though he continued to more or less trust Mandelstim, was still suspicious of the fact that he was feeling so much worse after weeks of continuous treatment.
Mandelstim replied with the same responses his colleagues had been using since the birth of analysis: always darkest before the dawn, got to get worse before it gets better, without pain can there be gain? Blah blah blah. Unfortunately Stalin chose to self-medicate and reduced his intake of the amphetamine pills to a level where he was merely distraught. Perhaps taking control of his situation in this small way helped the General Secretary because from this point, despite all the psychiatrist’s efforts, inexplicably Stalin began to get better.
One day Novgerod Mandelstim was attempting to probe in the most roundabout way whether what the General Secretary might be feeling for Vosterov was love. After all, he thought to himself, what could be more terrifying for a mass murderer than feelings of affection and desire? It appeared to Mandelstim that all that Stalin did he was able to do because he felt no empathy for other people; his narcissism placed him at the centre of the world and nobody else mattered, nobody else suffered as he did. So for him to be in love, for somebody else to matter, would be profoundly disabling for the dictator. In addition there were the social implications. The love of one man for another was a secret profoundly buried under the black earth of over-protective, smothering Mother Russia. It did not appear, not in literature, not in the ever-present sentimental folk songs, not in the conscious minds of the people; it was profoundly invisible. To raise the possibility of it with an ordinary Soviet worker was to risk a knife in the ribs, so how would Stalin react? However, when he mentioned the name of the little baker Mandelstim noticed that Stalin did not give quite such a large shudder as usual. Mandelstim felt something close to panic at this. Quickly he switched to a line of questioning that in the past had provoked a welcome increase in Stalin’s anxiety.
These enquiries involved forcing the General Secretary to talk about the three different people that he had been. In the beginning there had been Iosif Dzhugashvili, the shy pockmarked seminarist in Tblisi; then came Koba the folk hero, the idealist who wished for a better world; and finally came Stalin, the man of steel. One tentative theory Novgerod Mandelstim had was that perhaps it was Dzhugashvili, the child, who was leaking through somehow, who was trying in some way to deflect Stalin from the murderous path that the third man had embarked on. Mandelstim had also in the past wondered if this was why he himself had always been inclined to address the General Secretary as ‘Koba’, the idealist he had been in the days before the revolution in Baku. Mandelstim imagined himself trying to talk to the man in the middle, the referee in the wrestling match between the child and the monster.
In their earlier sessions Stalin, when questioned about the lives of Dzhugashvili and Koba, had admitted that there were huge gaps in his memory of the early years. Though he retained in his brain the structure of every committee and sub-committee and steering group in the jellyfish tentacles of the Communist Party, he couldn’t recall where he went to school, what his boyhood dog’s name was or who it was that Koba had first killed: was he a little man with a black moustache? So again Mandelstim began asking Stalin to try and bring back memories of his childhood in Gori. At first there was the usual gratifying unease but suddenly he said, ‘Anton! His n
ame was Anton!’
‘Whose name was Anton?’ queried Mandelstim.
‘My dog in Gori, his name was Anton,’ said Stalin and smiled a terrible smile.
The only consolation that Mandelstim could take from the hour they spent together was that Stalin did not yet know he was getting better, but if he did not succeed in making his patient regress then that realisation would not be long in dawning.
Through the month of May the daily meetings continued and though Novgerod Mandelstim tried every trick he knew, Stalin continued to improve, to become calmer, and in becoming calmer he again began to sign the deportation orders. The trains began to run again, the spies began to get their orders, the execution squads cleaned their rifles and strode out again into the dawn.
One day Mandelstim was summoned as usual but when he got to Stalin’s office it was empty.
Mandelstim knew what this meant; he sat there for the hour then returned to his room. Later the psychiatrist asked his NKVD guard for some sort of small bag which was delivered to him an hour later. Mandelstim packed into this bag the few possessions he had acquired in the past months, some books on psychiatric treatment, a small souvenir samovar from the 16th Congress, a couple of surprisingly high-quality pencils with ‘Property of the Kremlin’ printed on them, then lay in his underwear on the bed for the rest of the day and into the long night.
The next day Novgerod Mandelstim was again taken by his guard to Stalin’s office. This time the General Secretary was in place, sitting behind his desk, though he remained there rather than taking his spot in the armchair from which their therapeutic encounters had generally been conducted. Nevertheless, in a hopeless gesture, Mandelstim took his usual place in the other armchair and waited for Stalin to speak. Finally he said, ‘Yesterday, instead of our usual session I went down to the bakery behind the Leningrad Station. When the workers came out for their lunch I saw a certain person. I did not faint, I regarded him as I would regard any Soviet worker.’
‘So I have cured you?’
‘It would appear so.
‘Are you grateful?’
Stalin smiled. Strangely Mandelstim found himself smiling too, because you had to admit Stalin did have a nice smile. Mandelstim wondered whether people constantly underestimated this terrible creature because of the simple fact that he looked like a nice man. In Stalin’s case nature’s warning system had failed to work: it was as if the rattle of the snake had started playing sweet music, as if the bright, danger-signal red of the poisonous berries had faded to the fuzzy yellow of a delicious peach.
Stalin said, ‘Each worker performs his allotted task within the great Soviet society because he is part of the inevitable process of proletarian advancement. There is no call for gratitude, gratitude is a bourgeois sentiment that has no place in the glorious workers’ state.’
During one of their sessions two months before, when the dictator’s anxiety had been at its highest, Novgerod Mandelstim had asked of Stalin, ‘Koba, why have you killed everyone?’
Stalin thought for a while, considering it a reasonable question. Then he said, ‘They threatened my position.’
The psychiatrist asked, ‘And why is that bad?’
‘I am the only one who can ensure that the revolution continues.’
‘But what is the point of it all? The people live in terror, Joseph, millions still starve in the Ukraine, the camps are full to overflowing and the guards indulge in the worst behaviour that humans are capable of.’
‘But one day everything will be better.’
‘When will that be?’
‘When everything is better.’
Now in their final meeting Novgerod Mandelstim stated, ‘You said you would let me go back to America if I treated you successfully.’
Again that infectious, charming smile. ‘You have looked deep into my mind, Novgerod Mandelstim. Do you really think that is likely?’
‘No it is not likely. So what is it for me now? Back to the camps?’
‘No, not the camps.
‘No I thought not.’
5
In a blood-splattered yard in the Lubyanka they tied him to the wall. As the firing squad of eight NKVD soldiers, with long Mosin Nagant rifles on their shoulders, marched in, commanded by an ineffectual little NKVD sergeant, Novgerod Mandelstim began to speak. The execution party all tried to close their minds to what he said; the deranged speeches of those tied to the wall made them uncomfortable, they said all kinds of crazy things.
Novgerod Mandelstim said to them, ‘I am a psychiatrist, the only one in this deranged country. Over many months I have been examining Comrade Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union —’
The sergeant shouted to block Mandelstim out, ‘Come on, you men, line up here at the double…’
‘— and I have come to the conclusion that he is insane.’
‘Zorophets, are you listening to me? I’ll have you on a charge if you don’t jump to it smartly!’
The psychiatrist had to raise his voice to speak over the sergeant. ‘I have a question for you.’
‘Now men, rifles to the ready position. Kruschev, do you know what the ready position is? Good.’
Novgerod Mandelstim shouted, ‘The name of his insanity is paranoid psychopathy. That is the name of what he is: a paranoid psychopath, a mad man.’
‘Aim.’
‘But what, I wonder, is the name for a person who unthinkingly carries Out the orders of a paranoid psychopath?’
‘Fire!’
6
And what became of I.M. Vosterov? Remarkably, the fate of the little baker from behind the Leningrad Station was the only element of Mandelstim’s plan that could be judged an absolute and total success, though of course he would never know it. Throughout Stalin’s reverse treatment Mandelstim had striven to keep the object of Stalin’s terror, the little baker, alive. After all it was not inconceivable that Stalin might suppress his dread for the few seconds that it took to have somebody ordered dead in the Soviet Union. To this end the psychiatrist took every opportunity to plant the idea in the dictator’s brain that terrible things would happen to him if any harm came to I.M. Vosterov. For some reason this, of all things, stuck.
As long as he lived — and he lived a long time — the little baker was watched over, day and night, by a special KGB squad of elite officers whose sole duty was to keep him from any kind of danger. A Chechen who tried to rob I.M. Vosterov late one night in the Arbat district was amazed to find himself clubbed to the ground by three silent men who rose from the dirty snow, crippled him with professional dispatch and vanished back into the night. To the quaking, confused I.M. Vosterov what happened on that night to him and the robber seemed like one of the old legends that were told about Koba, the Georgian Robin Hood.
The Vosterov squad became a much sought-after posting within the KGB until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Just as a soldier had been posted for fifty years to watch over an empty patch of ground in a forest where once Catherine the Great had wished to protect a pretty flower, so the children and grandchildren, the nieces and nephews of I.M. Vosterov were all guarded over by legions of ruthless silent men whose sole mission in life was to protect Vosterovs. Constantly swapping fleets of long black cars followed them wherever they went, beautiful women (all of them fourth Dan or above in long form Karate) offered themselves up to the male Vosterovs as wives and mistresses; the females were also exceedingly lucky in the snaring of handsome husbands with ill-defined day jobs that left them a lot of time on their hands to organise picnics, trips to the circus and excursions to first-aid demonstrations.
Nothing bad ever happened to a Vosterov and they all grew up to believe that the world was a benign and happy place where good things happened to good people and bad people had swift and certain justice meted out to them by kindly strangers.
THE MAU MAU HAT
It was spring when he came, the yellow hammers were darting over the fields of winter wheat a
nd Sam the farmer was out for the first time that year, poisoning wild flowers in the lane.
When he was poisoning wild flowers Sam always wore what looked like a rubber diving suit, on the back of which were twin canisters, with a spray hose attached that he worked with a lever up and down. Like aqualungs of death they were, those canisters, if you were a Bee Orchid or a Bluebell.
The two things Sam the farmer liked were killing things that he didn’t get a grant for keeping alive and grabbing land, especially on a nice spring day.
The narrow muddy lane that bordered my house, the lane where Sam stood in his space suit, was solely an access road that ran to the dilapidated asbestos sheds and concrete hard standing that lay behind my home. The sheds were where Sam housed whatever poor creatures he was being subsidised to torture that year: pigs that he sold as pork to the American airbases, hens, sheep, elephants, unicorns. Thus the lane belonged to him, but right up against the lane ran my fence, the side fence of my long front garden, so Sam’s road had only a narrow verge. A few months after I moved to the village Sam offered to mend my fence for me, it was falling to pieces in places.
He did a fine job of fixing it but without me noticing he also moved it a foot into my garden, so that Sam now had a fine wide verge. The rest of the village despised me for being so easily duped, for not even noticing that I’d been robbed of a precious twelve-inch-wide strip of grass, for continuing to wave and smile hello to Sam and Mrs Sam as they sat in lawn chairs on their slate smooth grass, in front of their three-car garage. It confirmed their opinion of me as an effete fop.
Nevertheless since that event Sam had felt a strange, uneasy sensation concerning the theft that he had never identified to himself as guilt, farmers knowing only four emotions: self-pity, greed, jealousy and inclinations towards suicide. Certainly since then, in a forgetful sort of way, he had looked out for my interests, if they didn’t conflict with his own. He never gave me the land back though.
