Stalin's Barber

by Paul M. Levitt

  * * *

  Yelena’s art teacher let her use the official photograph as a model for her class project, a painting of Stalin’s mustache. The canvas took longer than expected because Yelena had recently been studying Dutch portraits and wished to capture the essence of the mustache in the detail of the hairs, creating a chiaroscuro effect. Benjamin Levitin, her teacher, suggested that she superimpose the mustache on the Great Hall of Saint Andrew, thus juxtaposing the power of Peter the Great and Stalin. When she frowned at the suggestion, he recommended that she paint two canvases, one taking for its background the hall and the other employing a neutral landscape.

  “Let the schmuck decide for himself which he prefers.”

  “Schmuck?”

  “A term of endearment,” he said ironically, “but applied only to people who aspire to be wiser than the world.”

  “Aren’t you going to tell me what it means?”

  “No.”

  A moment later, Benjamin thought better of his reply, knowing that children go out of their way to learn the meaning of words, especially ones that are clouded in mystery.

  “Forget that I ever said it.” He clasped her hands. “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  When Yelena had finally completed both canvases, she neatly wrapped and tied them in shopping paper. Natasha collected her at school and brought her back to the embankment, where she proudly exhibited them for the family. The two women liked the one with the background of the ten gilded pillars of Saint Andrew’s Hall. Razan preferred the simplicity of a neutral background with only the black mustache filling the canvas. On the appointed day, Razan met Dimitri at the curb and, at Anna’s insistence, let him take Yelena and the paintings to the Kremlin. As before, the child was greeted with smiles. In Poskrebyshev’s office, they had to endure his stares, as well as those of the guards. At last, a light blinked on the chef de cabinet’s phone, and he told them that they had permission to enter. But unlike her previous audience with Stalin, who had behaved kindly, this Stalin brusquely asked Dimitri to leave.

  “I want to speak to the child alone, without you hovering about.”

  Dimitri handed the paintings to Yelena, kissed her forehead, and whispered, “Good luck.”

  Yelena handed Stalin her paintings. He roughly snapped the string and tore off the wrappings. His right hand held up one picture. She hoped that he would refrain from touching the canvas. To her eyes, his paw looked unwashed. Positioning the pictures on the floor against his desk, he stood at a distance, ostensibly evaluating their quality.

  “I’m glad you painted two canvases. I then have a choice. But why two?”

  The words came spontaneously. “Mr. Levitin said, ‘Let the schmuck decide for himself which he likes.’”

  “And who is this Mr. Levitin?”

  “My art teacher.”

  Stalin continued to study the paintings at a distance. Finally, he stroked his mustache and said, “May I keep them both? I’d like to sample the reaction of others.”

  “Of course.”

  “Good, you may go now.”

  He shook Yelena’s hand and closed the door behind her. Staring out the window into the garden below, he waited a few minutes before picking up the phone and ringing Poskrebyshev.

  “Nikolaevich,” he said, “your wife is Jewish. I just heard a word that sounds to me like Yiddish. If not, it’s German. Call your wife and check. The word is ‘schmuck.’” Pause. “How the hell would I know? Spell it any way you like, and call me right back.”

  The next day Benjamin Levitin disappeared.

  Statistics

  “I repeat: The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic,” said Stalin, as Razan applied talcum powder to the Supreme Leader’s pockmarks. “I learned the lesson early that it is better to kill the country’s enemies as a group than to try each man individually. But of course there are exceptions.”

  That night, Razan suffered terrible dreams. He awoke in a sweat. In a small town that looked like Brovensk, a statue dedicated to Stalin stood ready to be unveiled. When the sheet was removed, a slim rod about ten feet high held an enormous mustache, and nothing else. The people gasped. But the worst was yet to come. The mustache called his name.

  “Razan, you pity all the people removed from the house on the embankment, all the suppressed you have personally known. Every one of them traitors! Ask yourself: When ‘enemies’ are led away, do your neighbors object? No. They tell themselves that nobody would dare to shoot others without conclusive evidence against them. If people are arrested, it means it was necessary. Also ask yourself why so many people willingly let themselves be arrested and later confess.”

  In his dream, Rubin Bélawitz, Razan’s rotund childhood confidant from Albania, appeared and said those who confessed believed that for their own sacrifices to matter they had to support the party. It was beyond their power to admit that the great experiment had gone wrong. To further the work of the party, they even confessed to crimes they had never committed.

  The mustache spoke again. “Production and crop failures mean only one thing: Enemies of the people not only exist but thrive everywhere. Believe me, Razan, the Supreme Leader does not make mistakes. Others do. In any case, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

  The townspeople agreed, shaking their heads and muttering, “Death to the traitors.” When Razan asked the farmers and factory workers why they denounced their neighbors, they admitted to settling scores with their bosses, taking possession of furniture and apartments they coveted, getting back at faithless lovers, and gaining entry to Communist groups by denouncing their parents.

  The mustache said, “You have heard the word of the people.”

  Razan replied, “But how can you explain the hundreds of thousands languishing in jails for no legal reasons?”

  Suddenly storm clouds gathered, and the wind blew violently. The statue toppled, and the mustache landed in a puddle of mud.

  * * *

  That evening, as Razan removed an offending hair from Stalin’s upper lip, the barber asked, “And who are these maggots wrecking our country? By now the west ought to know how much you love the people.”

  At once Razan realized the statement’s latent irony, but would Stalin? The Boss said nothing as Razan applied alcohol to his ears and lit a match.

  Although consecrated by savage conviction, Stalin often assumed a gentle manner, using his pipe as a prop, or singing a favorite Georgian song, “Soliko,” or inviting questions, all the better to disarm and identify his critics. “I see you are troubled, Comrade Shtube. How may I put your mind at ease? Ask me anything.”

  “Some of my neighbors . . . they work for the government and display your photograph. They seem harmless enough. Unlike fleeing kulaks, they have papers and permission to live in the city.”

  Stalin lowered his voice, a sign of danger. “No one is harmless, Razan. From plotters to priests, everyone has a secret life. In every heart, ventricles pump the Judas germ.”

  If Razan fell from favor, he knew that Poskrebyshev would love to see him and his family on a condemned list, which he could happily stamp “Suppress,” a euphemism for liquidation. The barber quickly asked Stalin to tell him about his daughter, Svetlana, whom Razan extolled for her beauty and intelligence.

  “Her copybook poems,” said Stalin contemptuously, “are a bad imitation of Akhmatova. Poets!” Stalin complained. “I have to correct their meter and rhymes. They are all pretenders.”

  So the rumor was true. Stalin did edit verses before they saw print. Historians, of course, required a tight rein. Everyone knew that Soviet history had to conform to Stalin’s view of its purpose and his role in it. But poetry? No wonder people said that before long the Boss would be comparing himself to Pushkin.

  “Much of what currently gets scribbled is rubbish. I ought to know. In my youth, I wrote poems. A number of them were even published. But I do not claim for myself the exalted title of ‘poet.�
� A good critic, yes. The trouble is that because the Soviet people love literature, innumerable poseurs call themselves poets.”

  Razan knew that you could die for writing a single unorthodox line or a politically incorrect metaphor. It was best to write nature poetry and not have to worry about a taboo subject destined to be airbrushed out of history. Boris Pasternak had learned that lesson.

  “Comrade Shtube, we have often talked about safe topics, but we have made it a point, perhaps wisely, never to talk about any political figure.” At this moment, Razan instinctively knew that Stalin was going to ask him whether he approved of the show trials. “Vyshinsky,” he said. “Andrei Vyshinsky. From the point of view of the man in the street, people like yourself, how is our chief prosecutor regarded?” Razan had come close. Although most everyone inside the Kremlin knew that the confessions of the condemned during the show trials had been obtained through torture, Vyshinsky proudly declared that “confession of the accused is the queen of evidence.”

  In 1935, Andrei Yanuarievich Vyshinsky had been appointed prosecutor general of the USSR, and in 1936, he was appointed chief prosecutor of the Moscow treason trials. A year later, he still cast an ominous shadow across the law courts. His words were often quoted admiringly.

  I think it is clear to all now that these wreckers and diversionists, whether they be Trotskyites or Bukharinites, have already long since ceased to be politically in tune with the workers. They have turned into an unprincipled band of professional wreckers, disgusting diversionists, spies, and murderers. It’s clear that these men must be rooted out and destroyed without mercy.

  Stalin waited to hear Razan’s judgment.

  Warily, the barber said, “A good Bolshevik, a professor of law, and a rector at the University of Moscow . . . how could such a person not be highly esteemed?”

  Stalin chuckled. “You Jews are all Talmudists. What you have just said can be taken, of course, to mean that any man with his qualifications cannot be well regarded. Is that not so?”

  “You would make a good Talmudist yourself, Dear Leader.”

  “From whom do you think the Orthodox and Latin churches learned their catechisms: Saint Thomas Aquinas. And where did he learn his? I will tell you. Partly from Aristotle, but mostly from the Jews.” He fondled his mustache and waited for Razan to respond.

  “I am not as well versed in religion as you are, but I did not intend to answer in a compromising manner.”

  Stalin smiled. “Then tell me, what do you think of Vyshinsky? But before you speak,” he muttered, “I will tell you my thoughts. The man began life as a Menshevik. I distrust his words, which he never uses in the service of reconciliation but only cruelly and vituperatively to score points against his opponents. Do you agree?”

  “Words indeed can hurt rather than heal.”

  “But is he hurting our cause or helping it?”

  “It depends on the situation,” said Razan, inwardly cringing.

  “I didn’t know you were a relativist.”

  “Isn’t every good Bolshevik?”

  “Absolutely not! Bolsheviks, like Christians, know right from wrong.” He held up a hand mirror. “Sin and goodness differ.”

  Razan tried humorously to dismiss the subject. “But as you said, Supreme Leader, I am a Talmudist.”

  Removing the barber’s apron and tossing it aside, Stalin led Razan by the arm to his office window. “You see out there? At this moment, numerous assassins are plotting my death. I would prefer to share with those people what I share with you: mutual affection and respect.” Razan beamed. “But misbehavior cannot be ignored. Study history, Comrade Shtube. I read it every night. Learn how great nations fail owing to treachery.”

  What Razan knew for certain was that Stalin at the February and March Plenum of 1937 had unleashed a ferocious purge of his own people. But the arrests had actually started in 1934, with the murder of Sergei Kirov, who headed the Leningrad Bolshevik Party. Some said that Stalin had ordered him killed for opposing Koba’s wish to liquidate critics and kulaks, and for putting the Leningrad Party in opposition to Stalin. Dimitri Lipnoskii called Kirov’s death “the seminal event” that unleashed Stalin’s demonic spirit. Executions in the thousands followed, but slowly. Although Razan had no reason to doubt Dimitri’s assessment, the barber had noted that the purges began in earnest right after the 1934 Night of the Long Knives in Germany. Hitler had decapitated those who might challenge his power. It appeared as if Stalin was imitating Hitler. Ezhov, no fool, knew how to endear himself to Stalin. He fueled the purges by exacerbating Stalin’s native Georgian fears of conspiracy, insisting that even the most innocent-seeming people were actually spies, two-facers, and enemies of the people. No one was to be trusted.

  As a precautionary measure, Stalin ordered all of Kirov’s close Leningrad associates killed and most of the members of the Leningrad Party shot. From 1933 to 1938, the size of the party was cut in half. The years 1937 to 1939 were the worst. Every day, Pravda reported the names of “enemies of the people.” Either a terrible germ had infected the country and was causing wholesale madness and slaughter, or the anti-Soviets, from Trotsky to the monarchists, had gained control of millions of minds, persuading them all to become wreckers. Potential assassins, according to Ezhov, lay in wait around every corner. If the dwarf was hoodwinking only the Vozhd, why did most of the Russian people believe that the country was indeed in the grip of a mass conspiracy, one that required the most ruthless countermeasures? Razan was told that in those two years, one million were shot and two million died in the camps. Were they all enemies of the people?

  Razan, for whom seeing was believing, had recently begun to admit another source of comprehension: feeling. He was letting his thoughts grow from his gut. Although he had never seen a show trial, had never seen a so-called wrecker, had never seen people confess, had never seen Leonid Zakovsky’s guide to torture, had never seen a person subjected to “French wrestling” (frantsuskaya borba), or the zhguti (the “special club”), or the dubinka (the truncheon), or the conveyor belt (constant interrogation), or sleep deprivation, he had seen—and felt in the pit of his stomach—Alexei Ivanovich Rykov’s last moments with his daughter. One March day at dusk, while Razan paused at the front of his building, set to depart for the Kremlin, a black sedan pulled up at the curb. A minute later, Rykov appeared leaning on his daughter’s arm. She led him to the car. He was dressed in a suit, tie, vest, and unbuttoned overcoat. The back door of the black limousine opened, though no one appeared. Rykov turned to Natalya. They shook hands awkwardly, said nothing, and then kissed formally, three times on the cheek. Rykov climbed into the car, which drove off toward the Kremlin. Natalya left the sidewalk and stood in the middle of the street watching the Black Maria disappear. Just before it turned the corner, she began to run after it. When she turned back, she was crying.

  Razan clasped her in his arms, as she buried her face in his shoulder. She related her father’s last minutes. “Once he heard, he asked me to look after mother. Her stroke occurred when the attacks on him became more ominous. ‘Tell her I’ve gone for a walk,’ he said, ‘and telephone Poskrebyshev for the precise time. I want to dress properly. It won’t do to appear disheveled, which is a sign of fear.’ I called, and Poskrebyshev said, ‘The car is on the way now.’”

  No friend or member of Rykov’s family ever saw him again. Tried and convicted, he died March 15, 1938. When Razan heard from Natalya that Rykov had kept a list of prominent Bolsheviks who had been suppressed, the barber copied it, later adding other names.

  * * *

  Although Razan wished no man or woman ill, he knew that many of the “suppressed” were merely dull apparatchiks, but others, like Kirov, exhibited an admirable independence of mind. Did they not know that entering the cage of a wild animal greatly increased their chances of being eaten? This truth applied to him as well, so by 1939, after his long service, all his senses were attuned to trouble, and his byword was caution. Instead of joining Stalin in
telling stories or exchanging jokes, he rationed his words and excused himself from social events that at one time he and Anna would have attended. Even knowing that Stalin had a double, he still couldn’t definitively prove, given the behavior of the man whom he barbered, whether this man was the real Vozhd. It was a mark of the man’s genius that for all his identifiable characteristics—pockmarks, decaying teeth, stale alcoholic breath, withered left arm, pudgy fingers, bad leg, Georgian accent, and love of movies—he might be only a decoy. Who, then, actually engaged the world’s leaders?

  The entire Soviet apparat, and especially the State Security Division, pretended, of course, that Stalin was but one man. In fact, Razan never heard a whisper to the contrary. Of all Stalin’s secrets, the closest held by the apparat were the names of his decoys. But unbeknownst to Natasha, she had the name and background of one among her purloined papers. It was embedded in Babel’s unfinished novel, which she had microfilmed and hidden in Yelena’s stuffed panda.

  Razan decided that the crisis over Yelena’s painting, followed by the confiscation of photographs depicting the work, had to do with Stalin’s identity and affected Yelena’s safety. His wish to protect Yelena became an obsession and, like Jean-Paul Marat’s rash, had to be scratched. The question that Razan couldn’t answer was whether the authorities wanted the official portrait to portray the real man or a decoy. He could see arguments for both sides. If an assassin had Stalin in his sights, all the more reason for promoting the false over the genuine. But given the personality cult that Stalin reveled in, he would want his beaming face peering down on his beloved people from every poster and wall. But Razan’s frequent attempt to discover the real Stalin failed.