Stalin's Barber

by Paul M. Levitt

  “The family distillery, which has of course been confiscated, looms large in his speech. He describes the copper kettles that shone like the sun, and neglects to say that some exploited workers were undoubtedly assigned the task of polishing them. At the end of each day, the floors were always swept and the office windows washed. His father apparently sat at a large desk—a sexual allusion?—from which he commanded the workforce. I get the impression that patient Federov is expressing a subconscious desire to make love to all the women who worked in the distillery. Perhaps, though, if I used Marx instead of Freud, I would discover that Benjamin wants to lord over his workers not his sexual prowess but his financial power.”

  “Arkady Gorbatov has been investigated repeatedly by the secret police, and his family background scrutinized for aristocratic leanings. But nothing criminal has been reported. My sessions with him make me think that at some time he had a girlfriend or lover who came from wealth. He once said to me, ‘I have known a woman from a loftier realm.’ Surely, he could not have intended the statement to refer to the Virgin Mary? I must make a point of telling the police to check his past romantic relations. Once Russians come into contact with the aristocracy, they never recover. Their natural dreaminess is reinforced, and they start to assume airs. I am virtually certain that Arkady knew a woman who had once enjoyed a high estate. Why else refuse to perform for the Vozhd? And even more telling, why does he insist that the Romanovs were murdered when no one knows for sure? Rumors abound, I admit, but he seems convinced they were butchered, and he identifies with Tsarist society. Marx and Lenin rightly said a man would rather die than betray his class. But what they neglected to say was the converts are the worse. Take a man like Arkady, put him in the presence of a rich woman or let him stay overnight in a country house, and immediately he is defending the very class that has oppressed him his whole life. Even if my approach is wrong, I can’t seem to make him understand that the Romanovs were no angels.

  “On numerous occasions I have told him that Nicholas and Alexandra had nothing but scorn for people like him. So what makes him insist that it would be ‘sacrilegious’—his word—to lampoon the two of them. The most unexpected details reveal what a person is really thinking. Who would have guessed that by Stalin’s asking him to perform that he would behave like a royalist? The Vozhd is right. Constant vigilance is required because some kind of heresy is always lurking in the shadows.

  “The secret police’s idea that if we allowed him to write letters he would reveal the identity of the royalist relationship, and possibly a whole underground movement, proved fruitless. He wrote to theatre managers asking if they knew the whereabouts of his parents. What I have told him is untrue: that we have been keeping tabs on his parents, and if he cooperates we will put him in touch with them. He doesn’t believe me. Or does he regard the respect that he bestows on the Romanovs as more compelling than a meeting with his family? An interesting possibility that deserves further study.”

  Before Alexei opened the last patient’s folder, he was already disposed to believe that the clinic’s mental ward held no ordinary people. They were all there for political reasons, yes, and had come from well-known families, but some part of the puzzle was missing.

  “Sviatoslav Sarkaski mystifies me the most. By his own account, the work he was doing in physics could benefit all of mankind, but he refuses to continue his research because he fears that his work could be used for devilish ends. I have tried to explain that such an argument could be made about most ideas: They can be used for good or bad. What lies beneath the surface is a distrust of the Soviets, though he won’t admit it. I have asked him would he take external exile if it were offered to him and perhaps work for England or America? He insists that he loves his country and his language, but says that his experiments in the wrong hands could put an end to planet earth. Absurd!

  “When I question how any force could destroy all living things, he merely scoffs that my training is not sufficient for me to understand. The arrogant bastard! As a matter of fact, I did very well in physics at the science institute and thought seriously of spending my life working in a lab, but my humanitarian impulses got the better of me, and I have devoted my life to securing the mental health of our people.

  “He likes to pace and peer out of the window through his thick binocular glasses. He reminds me of a pale shrunken monk grasping the window grating of his cell, knowing that he is vegetating, withering, drying up, wishing he had never taken holy vows. The only thing absent is a tolling bell, to summon his friends to hear a sermon sung in his honor. Like all intellectuals, he has ideas that must either find expression or become self-destructive. Every day, he scribbles numbers on a pad and debates with himself in a mumbling manner. When he arrives at some decision—who knows what?—he shreds the paper and flushes it down the toilet. Occasionally, the secret police have surprised him and gone off with his numbers, but they report that other scientists can’t decipher them. I think the man is a crypto-churchman who believes in the devil, and in his case Satan has taken the shape of formulas. I have even suggested, on the advice of the OGPU, that he resume his position in the laboratory and experiment on any idea that teases his imagination. The police reason that perhaps he’ll be drawn back to nuclear physics, and we’ll be able to use his discoveries. If he keeps shrinking, he’ll soon dissolve into a puddle, his body worth no more than a few kopeks.”

  The next sentence, one that Dr. Leshin could have easily missed (it was embedded parenthetically), read mysteriously:

  “A body is no more than a handful of chemicals, and yet when it provokes desire, what follows? The end of a career?”

  Arriving at the clinic early, Alexei asked Sviatoslav Sarkaski if the previous doctor, whose name the patients were forbidden to utter, had ever talked about the chemicals that compose a human body and how those chemicals, arranged in a certain order, trigger emotions?

  “What a strange question. Why do you ask?”

  “A hunch.”

  “Stupid man!” he replied, and walked off, mumbling, “No better than Dr. P.”

  A P., yes, but first or last or patronymic? Alexei would also have to learn the man’s medical background and current status. He felt certain that Rissa Binderova held the key to Dr. P., and that only she could dispel the cloud of unknowing that seemed to hang over the entire clinic.

  In the Most High and Palmy State of Rome

  A porter admitted the former commissar for Foreign Affairs into the Leningrad Theological Institute, a drab, depressing building, ill lit and poorly heated. The aristocratic Georgiy Vasilyevich Chicherin, who spoke numerous European languages and a few Asian ones, had been asked by the current minister for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, to handle a delicate matter. Although feeling unwell, Chicherin had come to the institute personally to inform Gregori Lipnoskii that a “catacomb priest” had denounced him as a secret adherent of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

  The autumnal crispness that day in 1935 lingered in the hallway that led to Gregori’s room, an austere, windowless cell with a table, a single wicker chair, a narrow bed, and two wall hangings: a photograph of Stalin, exhibiting his fatherly all-knowing look, and a bad pencil drawing of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. Chicherin said nothing about the open Bible and the religious literature resting on the table. He also noticed a Maxim Gorky novel, Bystander. Without being asked, he sat on the chair. Gregori paced.

  “Our informant has told us that you attended Orthodox services late at night in forest caves. We even know the secret codes and ciphers you and the catacomb priests use.” As Gregori opened his mouth to speak, Chicherin held up one finger to indicate that he hadn’t finished. “We have apprehended couriers you employed to convey messages and confiscated false identification cards made out in the names of deceased persons.”

  Gregori stood and said magisterially, “Lies! All lies! I am a Renovationist Church member faithful to the Soviet government.”

  The erstwhile minister leaned back
, folded his arms, and seemed to take great pleasure in agreeing. “You are absolutely right! All lies. But in a court of law, you’ll be convicted. If you wish to save yourself from exile, and to spare your denouncer, whom I want you to meet, you will confess to being a catacombist.”

  “Comrade Chicherin, your reputation for subtlety is well known. Surely, you have in mind more than my simple confession.”

  “Your brother Dimitri rightly described you as a clever fellow. Yes, we have an assignment for you: to work secretly for the Department of Religious Affairs to help us suppress nationalistic sentiment against the government.” He opened the Bible. “In the minds of believers, as you well know, religion and nationalism become hopelessly tangled. The pope has undercover agents in the country attempting to rouse nationalistic sentiment against the government, particularly in those Slavic and Ukrainian areas that used to follow the Roman Church. As your brother has already explained, many people still, sadly, believe in the western rites and recognize the pope.”

  Gregori, ambivalent about the Roman Church, though not about Greek Catholicism, tried to take the measure of this well-known man. Comrade Chicherin, a distant relative of Pushkin, loved classical music and particularly Wagner. He also exhibited a fondness for Gregorian chants, like the ones he heard upon entering the putative seminary. The simplicity of the musical line reinforced his own tastes. Although illness had caused him to leave office a few years before, he took on special assignments for Litvinov in religious matters. Having negotiated successfully in the 1920s with the Vatican, he had the temperament and diplomatic skills to deal with Roman machinations. A handsome man, with a mustache and meticulously trimmed pointed beard, he had a high forehead, soft eyes, thinning hair, and a somewhat bulbous nose. His dress always included a white detachable Fremont collar, a starched shirt, a vest, and a suit. Thoroughly westernized, he had used family wealth to help the revolutionary cause in the belief that modernization in Russia would not take place until the old regime had been replaced.

  Without animation, Gregori said, “You and Dimitri want me to work as an agent for Rome.”

  “Precisely! But first you will have to confess your crime.”

  “That,” replied Gregori emphatically, “I cannot do. Deceit may suit the government, but not my Christian principles.”

  “As I said, I want you to meet your denouncer. His name is Peter Filatov. Years ago, he taught theology in a Moscow monastery. He now works on behalf of the proletariat.” He paused. “Lovely Bible.”

  Gregori’s first impulse was to say that he had no stomach for consorting with Christian denouncers, but waited to hear Chicherin’s final words on the subject.

  “The best way to serve the Renovationist cause,” he said, closing the Bible, “is to keep it from Roman designs: bringing back the old ways and expelling the new. I would remind you what the Russian archbishop called Renovationists: ‘A sewer of the Orthodox Church.’”

  * * *

  The Nevsky Monastery, converted in 1932 into a Museum of City Sculpture, also housed offices, institutes, a warehouse, and a small room set aside for secret police meetings. Gregori Lipnoskii and Peter Filatov arrived at virtually the same time. The room, wired to record even whispered conversations, also held a hidden camera in case the participants, wary of being bugged, wrote notes. But Peter Filatov, after their initial introduction, spoke candidly. His tall, skeletal appearance looked, quite accurately, as if it were incapable of hiding a secret. Where, among the skin and bones, would he hide it?

  “My own confession was untrue in every word. They said that if I did not confess to helping the Roman Church, my family and I would disappear. After I agreed to sign, they said they wanted the names of others involved in the so-called plot. ‘Others?’ I asked. ‘Make them up if you have to,’ they yelled. So I gave them names, including yours, even though I knew you were innocent of conspiring with Rome.”

  “Why mine?”

  “They suggested it.”

  “They?”

  “The Office of Religious Affairs. Two men interrogated me.” He buried his head in his hands. “They said that if an Orthodox priest admitted to having entered into secret relations with Rome and signed a statement, it would pass unnoticed. The danger to the nation would appear greater if the state-supported church, the Renovationists, were conspiring with the Vatican. Then no one, not even the favored, could be trusted.”

  Gregori had lent himself to the Renovationist movement to preserve the Russian Church and to try to discover those Orthodox priests who pretended to resist the government while actually reporting to them, a practice dating back to the Tsars. Under Nicholas II and his predecessors, priests were agents of the state, a condition they swore to in their ordination oath. Even though church law banned disclosing what passed in the confessional booth between parishioner and priest, the church often reported draft dodgers, prospective recruits for the armed forces, and any antistate information. Gregori may have shown fealty to Stalin for endorsing the Renovationist Church, but he showed a greater fealty to his Lord in matters of conscience, truth, and Orthodoxy.

  “What will happen,” he asked Peter, “if I refuse to sign?”

  “They will shoot me and my family.”

  “But the regime is terrified of creating religious martyrs. Your death would undermine their efforts to sway believers.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting one thing?” said Peter, as Gregori studied him. “I don’t want to die, nor does my family.”

  Public confession of political or religious wrongdoing, Gregori knew, served an indispensable purpose. When individuals declared themselves guilty, the state had no need to stamp them as social pariahs and run the risk of martyring them.

  “Peter, if I admit guilt, I help the state crush opposition, political and religious, and undermine our church’s efforts to attract the faithful.”

  Peter sighed, “Yes, but abstractions are not reality.”

  “What we know to be real,” replied Gregori, “is that when people confess to plots against the state, the organizations they belong to are often exterminated. If I sign a statement conceding that your charges are true, the only way to save my own life is to agree to spy for the Soviets.”

  “The Vatican would protect you as a man denounced for his true beliefs. Who will protect me, if not you?”

  To save Peter’s life, Gregori agreed to become a Soviet agent. While espousing Latin rites, he would try to insinuate himself into the Russicum and spy on Rome, transmitting to Moscow the names of underground priests.

  Before Peter Filatov was led off to prepare himself for his next “official” assignment, he hugged Gregori and, in whispered words, begged his forgiveness. Gregori returned to the institute and waited, using the time to school himself in the writings of Catholic hagiography. It took a few months before the Department of Religious Affairs could fabricate and circulate the story of Gregori Lipnoskii, ostensible Renovationist, who deviously belonged to the Catacomb Church, while furtively promoting nationalism among Ukrainians and Slavs to promote the Roman cause.

  Chicherin had told Comrade Dimitri Lipnoskii it was a “dastardly business” before sending him to Leningrad to tell his brother that the fate of the family hung in the balance. The brothers had never been close, though both ironically had found work that required absolute obedience to a higher authority. As soon as Dimitri came into Gregori’s presence, he could detect Gregori’s unease.

  “You are not yourself, Gregori. Is it the idea of spying that troubles you or something else?”

  “I had hoped to take orders and enter the priesthood.”

  “For our purposes, all the better.”

  “But I also want someday to marry. And you know the rule. A married man can become a priest, but a priest can’t marry.”

  “A widower can do both. We will arrange your files to read that you were once married and that your wife died.” He studied the room, which seemed to him as cold as his brother’s religion. “You will have to le
arn Italian. And the Fascists . . . well, it won’t be easy.”

  “As a priest, I can inure myself to any test. Let us forget the subject. Please tell me about our dear mother.”

  * * *

  When Anna picked up her copy of Pravda downstairs, she saw on the front page, in large print, the headline: “Traitorous Priest Flees the Motherland.” The first sentence of the accompanying article identified the priest as “Gregori Lipnoskii.” With her heart wildly beating, she flew to the elevator, burst into her apartment, cried out for Razan, and threw herself on the couch, declaring, “Our days are numbered.” He reached for the paper and studied the article. His own legs grew wobbly. As Anna’s eyes closed, he sat down on the floor next to the couch, rubbing her hands and her head. When she showed no response, Razan thought she had either suffered a seizure or a heart attack. From the liquor cabinet, he took a bottle of brandy and poured some of the liquid into her mouth.

  Slowly she revived. Wanly smiling, she advised that they should be prepared for a visit from the secret police, who in fact came that same afternoon. Driven away in a black Packard, they entered the grounds of Lubyanka Prison and quickly found themselves sitting in a room reeking of cigarettes. An interrogator, with nicotine stained hands and teeth, had been assigned to their case.

  “You know why you’re here,” said the man, “so let us not pretend. What do you know about your son’s escape and when did you know it?”

  Razan hoped that Anna’s steely nerves would eclipse his fears.

  “We know nothing,” said Anna. “I confess: My heart cries. Our son is as dead to us as he is to you.”

  “Dead,” mocked the man, as he extinguished one cigarette and lit another. “Dead! He can cause us more harm than a bomb-throwing terrorist. In fact, he is a saboteur on a grand scale. With what he knows about religious conditions in our country, he can cause a schism as great as the one in 1054 that divided the church.”