Stalin's Barber

by Paul M. Levitt

  “True, but tell me: What avenues, what conduits do you have access to that will allow you to tell Christians in Russia that Mussolini will guarantee freedom of religious belief?”

  “I have access to the Catacomb Church. I am a leader in the Renovationist movement. The Russicum will put me in touch with Roman Catholics in European Russia, Ukraine, and the other Slavic countries. I even have contacts among some of the Protestant churches.”

  Playing with a wooden letter opener in the shape of a crocodile, Ciano tapped the point, the tail, on his blotter. He seemed to be calculating the advantages and risks of using Gregori Lipnoskii to spread information sympathetic to Mussolini and useful to the Fascists. Russia was fertile ground, given its size, its discontented minorities, its forced collectivization, and its antireligious laws. Every executed priest had a family, and that family had friends, and those friends had families. The chain was virtually endless. And what Gregori had said was absolutely true. The Italian government had well-placed spies who could report back on the loyalty—or treachery—of Gregori Lipnoskii, Renovationist priest.

  “You will have to be trained,” said Ciano, unscrewing the letter opener to reveal a pen and scribbling some notes on a pad. “Let us toast your new life.” He removed from a drawer a bottle of wine and some biscotti and declared, “You have been born again!”

  * * *

  Resigning from the Russicum for reasons of health, Gregori underwent special training on the grounds of an army base outside of Rome, near the airport. Schooled in the crafts of propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation, he soon felt at ease with his assignment, and his tutors found him a quick study. On Sundays, the only day of the week he could see Angelina, he took her to Orthodox services and slowly inducted her into the Russian rites for the sole purpose of marriage. He had decided that her carefree behavior actually masked a profound sadness, but of what, he knew not. By the time he found out, it was too late.

  Before leaving Rome, the couple married in Rome’s Greek Orthodox Church of San Teodoro Megalomartire. The Credulo family attended; and Gregori’s family, thinking him lost, was of course absent. During the service, Angelina held a handkerchief to her mouth to muffle her coughs, but read from the Bible with authority, as if God had cured her cough when she stepped up to repeat Holy Writ.

  To prevent the Soviets from suspecting him of treachery, the Italian secret service took a leaf from Pravda’s notebook and ran stories in the local press declaring that Gregori Lipnoskii had been unmasked as a double agent, and that the government had ordered him expelled from Italy immediately. Spared the cruelty of having to expose his students as spies, he wished them good luck sowing discontent among Roman Catholics in Russia. A few days later, an Italian military plane landed near the German-Russian border, where a car met Gregori and Angelina and sped them back to the Soviet Union.

  Litvinov, of course, wanted to know how Gregori was discovered. Basely blaming Carlo Cospirato, Gregori declared that the man worked for the Italian secret service. Days later, unbeknownst to the priest, the man who had been his friend and given him a Topolino was found dead on the outskirts of Rome. A bullet to the back of the head led the police to think that he had been a member of the Mafia because he was executed gangland style.

  When Gregori explained to Angelina the service that he had agreed to render the Italian government, she seemed pleased. Though not herself a member of the Fascist Party, she greatly admired Il Duce; and never having traveled outside of Italy, she found the prospect of living in the Soviet Union exciting. But their arrival in 1937, at the start of the Great Purges, was met with suspicion. Anyone who had been residing outside the country was tainted. In addition, Stalin regarded all foreigners as unreliable, even wives, so Angelina’s Italian roots put her in danger. At first, Gregori’s excuses kept the police from his flat. He had been working for Litvinov; he had been betrayed; he was prepared to tell the NKVD the little he knew. Then late one night, while lying in bed, he heard the elevator. He knew the rumors about such sounds. They were the heralds of a visitation. And indeed, the inevitable knock on the door followed.

  His interrogation took place at NKVD headquarters, Four Liteiny Prospekt. From adjoining rooms, he could hear the cries of prisoners presumably being tortured. But he knew from Dimitri that the NKVD scared their victims by piping into the interrogating room the taped screams of actors. His inquisitor, a bespectacled former professor of biology, introduced himself as Foma Sharok, a Muscovite. Impassive and soft spoken, he had no stomach for torture, which he assigned to the criminals in his employ. The only light in the room came from Foma’s arc lamp. Gregori sat in front of his desk. Training the light in the eyes of the priest, Foma made it virtually impossible for Gregori to see him, though Gregori could hear, in the dark, Comrade Sharok shuffling papers, a favorite trick interrogators used to make their victims think that they possessed large files of incriminating evidence. Foma began, not with an accusation, but with an assembly of facts that he hoped would slowly erode Gregori’s confidence.

  “Mr. Lipnoskii, or should I say Father Lipnoskii, you were initially recruited by Georgiy Vasilyevich Chicherin. His gentle methods, I should point out, have been replaced by more forceful ones. If we are to root out the enemies of the people, pruning is not the way to proceed, but uprooting the whole plant.”

  “What am I accused of? Nobody has told me.”

  “You are all the same—protesting your ignorance of the crimes you’ve committed.”

  “What crimes? I worked for the secret police at the Russicum in Rome and passed along my information to one Carlo Cospirato, a garage mechanic, who taught me Italian and gave me a car to use.”

  “I find it incredible that while at the Russicum, you never uncovered one spy. Although your own students hadn’t yet graduated, certainly you must have been privy to some in the field.” He paused and said kindly, “The Roman Church is far more clever, Gregori, than you might think. All spies use aliases, so it should come as no surprise that the Russicum had assigned these men code names.”

  Was Foma, Gregori worried, trying to trap him by providing him with an excuse? “Whatever I learned, I turned over to Carlo.”

  “You spent time at Farfa Abbey with monks who hate the Soviets.”

  Gregori shifted in his chair. How had Comrade Sharok found out about the abbey? “I worshipped there. The political opinions of the monks were never made known to me.”

  “Do you know a Father Maurizio?”

  “Yes, quite well. We became rather friendly at the abbey.”

  “He works for us.”

  Having no way of knowing whether Foma was telling the truth, Gregori took the safe path to avoid a possible trap. “Our discussions were always of a theological nature. At no time that I can remember did we talk about politics. In fact, we both agreed that churches, of any denomination, ought to stick to spiritual matters.”

  “Ah, then you did discuss the church’s role in society?”

  “In society, yes, but we agreed that it had no place in politics.”

  Foma said nothing—to let Gregori reconsider. But the priest remained calm. Foma knew that these priests, with their spiritual pretensions, were difficult to break. They always put their trust in a higher cause. Men who spied for money were easier to deal with.

  “So you are telling me that Maurizio is a liar? That the money we give him is wasted?”

  “I know nothing about the Soviet government’s relationship to Father Maurizio and Farfa Abbey. It all comes as a surprise to me.”

  More papers rustled. “What if we brought Father Maurizio here and he confronted you with the truth.”

  “I would be delighted to see him.”

  Foma had taken a wrong turn. He decided to try another approach. “Your wife is Italian, and her family fancies Mussolini.”

  What Foma had said was true.

  “My wife, Angelina, has never voted in an election. Her passion is for painting, not politics.”

  “W
e have been eavesdropping on your conversations. Now what do you have to say?”

  Gregori saw yet another trap being laid. Whatever he said could be used against him. For good reason, his brother had told him never to volunteer any information. “We have nothing to hide.”

  “Your wife says she misses Rome.”

  “True.”

  “Anyone who doesn’t appreciate the Soviet paradise is either mad or an enemy of the people.”

  “As a matter of fact, Comrade Sharok, she is ill, but not mentally. She has been coughing blood. We are seeing a specialist.”

  Foma decided to terminate the investigation. This priest, as far as he could determine, was harmless. If information should turn up later . . . well, the case could always be reopened.

  After months of spitting blood, Angelina was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a sanitarium outside of Leningrad. Gregori sat at her bedside, his distress and hers made all the more acute by the fact that she was in the early stages of a pregnancy.

  “Why didn’t you tell me in Italy that you suspected your cough was from consumption?”

  “I didn’t want to believe it.”

  “That’s why you often feigned gaiety.”

  “Yes, even though I knew you thought my behavior peculiar. My lungs were a constant source of worry. I felt that my life would soon end. My mother used to say we are born, and we die, and in between, we dance. Soon, I shall slip off my dancing shoes, which of late haven’t fit very well. When I laughed and teased, I was dancing on my own grave. But now the constant coughing, the blood clots, the stained handkerchiefs are heralds of death.”

  “But if I had known sooner, perhaps we could have arrested it.”

  “I didn’t want to lose you. You have no idea how many Italian men leave their wives over an illness, a lost breast, gray hair . . .”

  “Did you think I was like those men?”

  “No, but I was afraid to take the chance.”

  He squeezed her hand and said, “You won’t die! The doctors will cure you. They won’t let you get away.”

  But she did die, and with her the fetus. Gregori mourned deeply, though his family, whom he had never contacted, knew nothing. He had feared that if his stepfather ever fell out of favor with Stalin, only distance could save him, the parched priest with an ecstatic thirst, and his wife. But death, which daily enters a thousand unsuspecting homes, rendered Gregori’s precautions meaningless. In fact, the conjunction of Angelina’s passing and Stalin’s purges enabled the secret police to discover Gregori’s treachery.

  Shortly before Angelina had been sent to the sanitarium, Gregori had asked a catacomb priest about the efficacy of miracles. Told that a healer, Father Orlov, could cure consumption, Gregori had taken Angelina hundreds of miles to Totma, where the fatidic healer lived in a cave, with a pipe above ground to expel the fetidness. On the side of a hill stood the entrance, covered by an old rug. Angelina could hardly stand the odor of the pestiferous cell issuing not just from bodily waste and garbage, but from the old man himself, who had not bathed, according to rumor, for years. In the recess of one mud wall was a crucifix, several icons, candles, and a flat rock, covered with a red cloth, that supported a Bible. A kneeling mat lay before the stone. Here was where the mystic said his orisons and prayed for the recovery of the sick, but not before he laid his oily hands on the sufferer and anointed the ailing person’s head. Deus vobiscum.

  After the exorcism and healing rituals, Gregori carried Angelina through a driving rain to the horse wagon that had carried them from the train station. Her health declined noticeably on their return, and shortly, she was admitted to the sanitarium, where she inadvertently told one of the doctors about her experience in Totma, a disclosure that led the authorities to suspect Gregori, not of Fascist subversion, but of forbidden religious rites.

  During their investigations, the secret police learned from Gregori’s neighbors that he frequently entertained Ukrainian-speaking guests. The news confounded the NKVD. On further delving, they discovered that Gregori’s visitors were all former Roman priests, and that some of them were rumored to still practice their faith in private. The agent in charge of the investigation reported to Comrade Sharok, who wanted to know how these Ukrainians could afford to travel to Leningrad, stay at hostels, pay for their meals, and yet have no visible means of support. “Find out more,” he ordered.

  Picking up Dominik Boretski, one of the Ukrainians, a frail and wizened man, the police confined him to an unheated cell, fed him greasy soup, and beat him with metal rods until he confessed.

  When the NKVD showed Gregori the instruments of torture and the broken Boretski, Gregori told the secret police that he worked for the Italian secret service, in particular, the Propaganda Department, which supplied him with money and propaganda that came through the Serbian embassy. Comrade Sharok, pleased to have uncovered a traitor, was displeased to learn that his judgment of the man had proved wrong. An error of this magnitude could cost him his life. He was therefore inclined to have Gregori taken to Butovo or the killing fields at the Rzhevsky shooting range near Toksov; but after further thought, he decided a work camp would be crueler.

  A month after Angelina’s death, one year after his return to the USSR, Gregori found himself on a train for Arkhangelsk. From there the NKVD transported him to the fifteenth-century Solovki Monastery, in the Solovki Archipelago, just outside the Arctic Circle in the White Sea. The monastery’s cathedrals, churches, and houses had been converted into a camp for prisoners. It was part of the infamous Gulag. Stalin, who had not forgotten his beatings from insensitive clerics during his seminary training in Georgia, thought it fitting that priests and others of a higher calling should be imprisoned in a former religious residence that passed most of the year in ice.

  That Way Madness Lies

  Arriving early, Alexei slipped off his overcoat and paced the lobby waiting for Basmanaya. The checkered orange-blue linoleum and the furniture reminded him of clinics in Leningrad. Apparently, one factory supplied them all. The linoleum had escaped the floor molding and started to curl. Wherever he looked, he saw shoddy workmanship. Except for sports and ballet, which the Soviets excelled in, the country was hurting. Biology had been allowed to languish under the direction of that quack Lysenko. Psychiatry had been impoverished by the disparagement of the Vienna school and its replacement by the Bolshevik belief that once people were well housed and fed, mental illness would disappear. In fact, the proliferation of labor camps and denunciations had turned the country into an asylum inhabited by cowed citizens too terrified to speak their minds or ask innocently, “Can you tell me why my husband was arrested?”

  The official Soviet policy of pretending that the country was nothing short of paradise meant that people who killed themselves were said to have died from accidents, disease, medical misadventures, or causes unknown. How could a great country, one that had produced Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoevski, Chekhov, and Tolstoy, have made an art of prevarication? Had Pushkin not warned his countrymen about chimeras; had he not said, “The lie that elates is dearer than a thousand sober truths”? The Bolsheviks had turned Pushkin inside out and ruled the country shamelessly with self-serving deceptions, such as the belief that the USSR was heaven on earth.

  In Ward One of the clinic, doctors treated outpatients and short-termers with general ills. Alexei strolled through the double doors into the ward, with its familiar sounds of alarm bells, buzzers, ringing phones, trolleys, shuffling feet, medical announcements, waiting-room patients, and commissars demanding immediate attention for themselves or their family. One such person, standing at the front desk and puffing on a cigar, was insisting on news about his wife’s condition. She had been rushed to the clinic with appendicitis. Asked to snuff out his cigar, he reacted indignantly.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “No,” said the admitting nurse, “but I know that cigar smoke is not good for the patients. It carries into the rooms.”

  Undeterred,
the man removed an enormous wallet and flashed a card. “Now,” he said triumphantly, “you know who I am!”

  The woman, who clearly had Caucasian blood in her veins and the temperament to match, told him to sit down with the rest of the people waiting to hear about family and friends. Waving the card under her nose, he asked peremptorily:

  “Did you read it?”

  “Whether you are General Tukhachevsky or Commissar Ivan Iashkov, you will have to wait for the doctor. When he arrives, I’ll tell him you’re here.”

  The end of Ward One led into a greenhouse, which Soviet doctors had built in the belief that patients who grow and tend plants are more likely to recover quickly. Peeking into the greenhouse, Alexei saw all manner of flowers and a gardener watering some ferns. He introduced himself to the man, who identified himself as Lazar Exter, an exile serving five years for a punning joke about Stalin. His long hair, freckled face, sunken eyes, and thin waist—his belt, secured in the last hole, hung down like a tongue—made Alexei think of the grave digger’s scene in Hamlet. Was this Yorick come back to life?

  Judging from the health and variety of the plants, Alexei could see that Lazar loved his flowers and had received training in horticulture. For a few minutes, the men stood and chatted; then Lazar led Alexei into the humidity shed, virtually an enclosed world of ferns and mosses and mushrooms and orchids and ivy that gave the shed the feel of a womb. On one of the potting tables rested a hot plate and teapot. Lazar offered Alexei a cup of herbal chai, but the doctor declined; he would shortly be meeting the director.

  “Not a bad fellow,” said Lazar, “but a bit of a buffoon.”

  “And Dr. Leshin?”

  “An officious putz.” Alexei stared. “A Yiddish word for prick.”

  “Useful.”

  “If you call Leshin a putz, he’ll know what you mean.”

  “How often do the patients stroll through the greenhouse?”

  “It depends. First of all, they have to be ambulatory or have a wheelchair. I’ve detected a pattern. The greater the depression or sadness, the more often they visit.”