Stalin's Barber

by Paul M. Levitt

  “Yes, now I remember. It all happened under Yagoda, that fool. The priest was shot, but I don’t remember what happened to Loktev.”

  “He was sent to Solovki, where he is serving a ten-year term.”

  “Which is exactly what I will propose for you two, if the Vozhd agrees. Your position as wife to the official barber won’t help you.” He banged his desk. “Stalin has already exiled the wives of many Politburo members; you will both go from my office to a prison cell.”

  He reached for his private telephone line to the Kremlin, and told the Boss whom he had arrested. After a long pause, he slammed the phone and said grudgingly, “The barber may go.”

  “And my wife?” asked Razan, extending an arm toward her.

  Beria exploded. “Albania and Palestine be damned! Did she not create a religious cult from a painting of Stalin’s mustache? Only an enemy of the people would exploit the Supreme Leader’s person.”

  Clearly, Anna’s “art gallery” had been denounced as a commercial ruse. What would the family do now?

  Before being shipped to the islands of death, as prisoners called the Solovki Archipelago, Anna went through the indignity of having to remove her clothes, submit to a body probe for hidden “instruments,” and spend a week in Lub-yanka, where Razan, like a common petitioner, was allowed to visit her once, the first day.

  Leaning over the visitor’s table, Anna whispered, “I killed once. I can kill twice. If you can get Stalin to give me an office job, Gregori and I will escape—others have—and meet you in Petrozavodsk.”

  “I’ll beg on bended knee,” he said, eliciting a smile from Anna.

  A few minutes later, as he exited the prison, two uniformed guards stopped him to say, “Poskrebyshev called,” a statement that meant of course that Stalin was summoning him. As the guards shoved him into the backseat of a black limousine, he was sure that his once privileged position as the Kremlin barber had expired, and it would no longer stand him in good stead with the Boss.

  Although Poskrebyshev sneered as Razan was led into his office by an elite NKVD officer, Comrade Ugly handed Razan the barbering bag that the barber always left with Poskrebyshev before exiting the premises. Razan was pleasantly surprised by Stalin’s warm greeting, which for the moment remained a mystery, one that quickly needed solving if he was to save his wife. Koba requested a mustache trim, and as Razan applied his skills, he noted as always that Stalin balled his left hand and thrust it into his pocket. Afterward, Stalin and the barber retreated to the settee to talk about “family matters.”

  “A shame about your wife,” said the Vozhd. “These things happen. Women just can’t be trusted.”

  “Anna could.”

  “We had our reasons,” said Stalin, reaching for his pipe.

  “She’s a good bookkeeper. And she writes a clear hand. If she could be assigned to an office, she could render the country a great service. Did I not hear you say that Solovki would operate until the advance of the Finnish Army made evacuation imperative? Anna can help, if only for a few months.”

  Stalin opened his tobacco pouch, packed the bowl, and sucked the stem. Razan remembered what Yefim Boujinski had said about an unlit pipe. He therefore took from his barbering bag a stick match, which he would have normally used to singe the hairs in Stalin’s ears. He lit the match and reached across the settee for Stalin to light his pipe. The Boss stared warily at the barber; then he smiled and sucked the flame into the bowl, blowing a cloud of smoke in the air. Razan waited. When Stalin rubbed his mustache with the stem, Razan relaxed knowing he was temporarily safe.

  To reintroduce speech and escape the stares of Stalin’s omnipresent guards, Razan asked about Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana. “She’s such a beauty, and so clever.”

  But it was the wrong subject to broach, because it provided the Vozhd an opening to ask about Razan’s daughters.

  “Where are your Natasha and Yelena? I especially remember the little girl. Such a wonderful child.”

  “On their way to Georgia for a week’s holiday.”

  “When did they leave?”

  “The day before yesterday, by train.”

  Stalin went to his desk and picked up one of his many phones. “Get me the passenger list of all those who traveled by train to Georgia in the last two days. How long will it take?” He paused. “Well, that will just have to do.”

  “If I’m not mistaken,” said a rattled Razan, “they may be motoring first to Voronezh.”

  “Whose automobile?”

  “Natasha knows several government officials with cars. One of them—I don’t know who—was driving there to visit family.”

  Stalin picked up the phone again. “Find out which of our people has left by motor for Voronezh.” With a wide grin, he returned to the settee. “I just want to be sure that your family is safe.”

  Having no room to maneuver outside the question of daughters, Razan asked, “Did you ever take Svetlana to Georgia to show her around Tiflis and where you were born?” He hoped that in memory lay truth.

  “I showed her the seminary where they tortured me and made me an atheist.” Stalin put his pipe aside and, leaning back, engaged in what he liked best: sermonizing. “The presumed purpose of any religion, besides preparing our souls for eternity, is to make the earth, physically and morally, as hospitable as heaven. But how do we make the earth a paradise and mankind moral? The Jews thought that monotheism would put an end to the constant warfare among polytheists as to which god was the true one. But the Christians, who built on the Old Testament, earned Jewish contempt by lapsing into polytheism with their tripartite God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Once Christianity became the state religion, believers fought not over the end result—they all believed in a heavenly paradise—but on how to arrive at that glorious goal. In short, they fought over process and ceremony, or, as the churches call it, rites and liturgy.

  “One church council after another, both Catholic and Protestant, argued about how to practice a particular religion. Should we emphasize baptism or the Eucharist? Should we hold Saturday or Sunday holy? Should we require confession? Should we impose a hierarchy between God and the people or allow direct worship? And so on, and so on. Do you know why these minor details became so important in church doctrine and politics? Because differences define people.”

  Was this the reason for Stalin’s venomous split with Trotsky and others, and the awful purges? Was it to stake out his own claim to the unalloyed Communism? Any bacterium of difference, any atom of dissent, had to be extirpated. How else could one achieve purity?

  “What I discovered,” continued Stalin, “was that the Orthodox Church in one respect was right. It insisted that example was a language that anyone could read. And how was that example administered? Through punishment! The church taught through constant beatings, and worse. They burned heretics and nonbelievers at the stake, skinned them alive, disemboweled them, put out their eyes, and lopped off ears, noses, and hands. But although we find it abhorrent that the church countenanced physical abuse, the undeniable truth is that beating was the church’s most effective cure for errant behavior and belief. It is the very means that parents use to cure their children of independence and assure that they will follow in the parents’ footsteps. And so I condone beatings, severe ones, terrible ones, to eliminate heresy. Now do you see?”

  Razan had asked about Svetlana and Tiflis and earned himself a lecture on how to instill obedience. But as long as Stalin focused on the past, Razan was safe in the present. “You suffered in Georgia, as all your biographers say, but you must also have some good memories.”

  “Not many. In Tiflis, behind the splash of colors and the sonorous syllables, every group maneuvered for political gain. The city was a seething pot of intrigue. No person was free of the taint of being a shpik.” Stalin coughed and expectorated into a spittoon. “You’ll never guess where I was first introduced to spying. In the seminary. The priests were always trying to expose our inner life and fee
lings. No violation of student privacy was too great for them.”

  Suddenly, Razan had a disconcerting insight. Stalin had, in his own way, turned the Soviet Union into a seminary, but with this difference: Koba had supplanted God.

  “As a young man, to survive in Georgia, one had to understand konspiratsia. In fact, I would even say that konspiratsia explains the culture and soul of the Soviet Union, with its many nationalities and political groups and religious sects, all colluding and plotting.” Expanding on the importance of rooting out conspiracy, he quoted approvingly a chilling sentence from Sergei Nechaev’s Revolutionary Catechism: “All tender feeling for family, friendship, love, gratitude, and even honor, must be squashed by the sole passion for revolutionary work.” At that moment, Razan concluded that in trying to choke out conspiracy, Stalin had choked out life instead. No wonder that an outraged Dostoevski had written Demons in reply to Nechaev’s nihilism.

  Stalin lit a cigarette and then resumed lecturing, presumably for Razan’s benefit. But why? If the trouble was not Anna or her family, perhaps Stalin was merely trying to confirm his identity. But which one, the real or the counterfeit? And would they both talk in this manner? Razan listened closely for a misstep that might give a clue.

  “We need order—poryadok—at any cost. Even if we have to spy and open people’s mail. Every shpik engages in perlustratsia. And why not? All these sacred intellectuals are nothing but traitors. I hate them. Mandelstam was one of them, a predatel, who satirized me in verse. His punishment will serve as a warning to others.”

  Thinking the meeting over, Razan thanked the Vozhd for his “immeasurable insights” and prepared to leave. But before he could reach the door, Stalin replied coldly, “Comrade Shtube, do not counterfeit. You have no talent for it. Bring your daughters to the Kremlin. I wish to speak to them. If you try my patience, your wife will be assigned to hard labor.”

  Bravely, Razan said, “I will need two gate passes for them.”

  Stalin picked up a desk phone and ordered one for Natasha Shtuba and the other for Yelena Shtuba. Razan corrected him.

  “Natasha von Fresser and Yelena Boujinskia.”

  Stalin repeated the correction to Poskrebyshev, smiled, and said, “It’s done!”

  * * *

  He now knew why Stalin had let him remain free. Ironically, his liberty was limited to betraying his daughters. As he pondered his plight, he wondered what hidden meanings lay in Stalin’s words “It’s done.” Koba was famous for making statements that he later claimed meant one thing and not another. What was “done”? Anna’s assignment to a desk job, the issuance of passes, the betrayal of his daughters, his own fate? And didn’t “done” mean finished, completed, settled? He couldn’t think of a single thing that was accomplished, except for the two passes that he would collect from Poskrebyshev. Perhaps even more worrying was the word “It’s.” He had heard no antecedent; he couldn’t think of a reference point. “It’s” was singular and had to harken back to some subject. Which one did Stalin have in mind?

  Walking to his apartment through the snow gave him time to sort out his thoughts, all the while listening to the footsteps of his government shadow. What if the tail chose to perch outside his door; how could Razan then reach his daughters? Instead of proceeding directly to his flat, he made for the barbershop, ostensibly to talk to Kasarov, the corpulent Cossack in black boots and Turkish fez trailing a red tassel, with whom he exchanged haircuts. Behind the shop were a storeroom and an unguarded door that opened on the loading dock at the rear of the building. Here he maneuvered his steps. Once out of sight, he made his escape.

  Just as Anna had said, her daughters had taken refuge with Natasha’s friend, whose family owned a house so dilapidated that the authorities refused to requisition it, even though positioned only two blocks from Gorky Street. He knew to be careful. Entering a restaurant, he ordered a meal, and left through the kitchen. Leaning against the wind, he finally arrived at the address on the note, a cellar apartment. A short, pretty, blond woman answered the door, Resonia Zeffinoskia. Razan introduced himself. A moment later, Natasha and Yelena appeared, both of them dressed and shod warmly against the cold of the basement and the damp earthen floor. Water dripped from a pipe wrapped with a rag. In the sole window, under the low ceiling, a geranium struggled to survive. The seedy and dated furniture had probably been purchased during the reign of the last Tsar. Razan thought of Tirana and his parents’ house. Was there anything so sad as a faded and torn brocade that was once lovely?

  Before Razan could say a word, an excited Natasha blurted, “Stalin has a double! I know. It’s in Babel’s novel.”

  Razan, who had long kept the secret of the political decoys, asked Natasha what in particular the manuscript said.

  “It’s unfinished, but it’s about a man with an iron hand who rules a small mountain kingdom in Georgia. Babel describes him as having a droopy mustache, pockmarked face, bad teeth, and a limp. He even gives him a pipe. When the man is exiled to Siberia, he pays a look-alike impostor to take his place. One of them spends a few days in Balagansk with a Jew, Abram Gusinski. Which one is unclear.”

  Playing the devil’s advocate, Razan asked Natasha a series of questions. After all, in the Soviet Union, one could never be sure of what was real and what was not. Even the idea of the “Soviet” changed from one day to the next. First, it was rule by the proletariat, then rule by the Politburo, and currently rule by one person. To know the truth was virtually impossible. Unlike a scientist whose belief proceeds from knowing, a Politburo commissar knows from believing—in the Vozhd. What did Babel or Natasha or Razan or anyone else really know? Nothing lent itself to proof, especially since facts were always being revisited and truth revised; for example, although the world thought that an American discovered the North Pole, Stalin declared in 1936 that the real discoverer was a Russian, Otto Schmidt.

  “How can you be sure it’s not just a fiction? Babel earned his bread making up stories.”

  “As soon as this manuscript was confiscated, Babel was arrested and Gusinski was shot. I saw the papers myself in the archives.”

  Razan patiently explained, “For the sake of argument, let’s say Babel is right. And let’s say a double actually stayed with Gusinski. How does one tell them apart?”

  “The decoy, according to Babel, has a circumcision and Stalin does not.”

  “Strange,” Razan said, reflecting on his time in the Kremlin. “All the years I have been shaving the man’s face, listening to his voice, trimming his beard and mustache and ears, I have never seen any part of him unclothed. He takes great care to hide his body. Hmm.”

  “What are you thinking, Papa Shtube?”

  With an eye on Resonia, whom he felt, like everyone else in the country, must be treated with suspicion, he replied, “Let us say some madman discovered the real Beloved Leader and killed him.” Natasha raised her eyebrows, not at Razan’s suggestion of an assassination but at his diction. Beloved Leader indeed! “When has the killing of a country’s leader ever led to anything other than mass retaliations and the murder of innocents?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I am asking whether knowing Stalin has a double really matters?”

  Natasha was silent.

  “If Stalin should die, a double could turn out to be worse.”

  Now was not the time to disclose private thoughts, not even in the presence of family. In some ways, family members were the worst. They caused loved ones to let down their guards and say forbidden things. But once they possessed confidential information, who could predict how they would behave, given the rewards they might reap?

  “I am thinking,” said Razan slyly, “that Babel is being fanciful. I remain unconvinced. After all, what if Stalin had himself cut?”

  Resonia added, “If both men behave abominably, as you have suggested, Comrade Shtube, it’s a Hobson’s choice.”

  The barber mused. In the devious world of the Soviets, most of the commissars wer
e interchangeable; they were merely distinctions without a difference. Razan smiled wordlessly at the blond curly-headed Resonia, put his arm around Natasha, and led her aside. “Besides the novel, which you’ve read, have you ever seen any official archival documents with details of Gusinski’s Siberian exile? His death won’t tell us anything, but his life might.”

  “We have Gusinski’s statement to the secret police. He pleads friendship with Stalin and begs for permission to write Koba. And he recalls an ice fishing episode they shared.”

  At once, the barber dropped the subject of a decoy, handed Resonia a roll of rubles, and asked her to take Yelena to Gorky Street to buy a number of items. When Resonia and Yelena had left, he told Natasha that he had cause to believe that Dimitri couldn’t be trusted.

  “I know what you’re thinking, and for a long time, I agreed. But in the archives, I could find no trace of treachery. In fact, Dimitri has been to this apartment before and never revealed its location.”

  “That was then; now is now. When you stole secret papers bearing on Stalin and his henchmen, you committed a capital crime. Koba will no doubt see in the theft a conspiracy and will order the arrest and torture of everyone involved, starting with Dimitri. The confession a man makes under torture is, sadly, often self-serving.”

  “What you are saying does not sound like my brother.”

  “Let’s hope I am wrong.” He spoke in short breaths. “To escape, I will need your assistance.” He handed her a piece of paper. “It’s all written down here. Memorize the details and then burn the note.” He pecked her on the cheek and hugged her goodbye. As always, she slightly stiffened her back; after all, Razan was not her real father. Stepping outside the apartment, he paused in the cold air to consider what Natasha had told him. His head was a carousel of ideas, going round and round, up and down. He buttoned his coat and pulled on his cap in readiness for the wind. After a few steps, he stopped. A smile lit up his face. He had been struck not by a celestial flash of light but by the obvious. Abram Gusinski’s ghost would provide the means to unmask the real Stalin.