The revolutionist, p.34
The Revolutionist, page 34
There were some members of the Old Guard who considered the Stank's deification unseemly; Lenin himself would never have tolerated it, they whispered. The poet Mayakovsky even published a poem criticizing the idea:
I'm anxious lest
processions
and mausoleums, the established
statue of worship should
drown
in oily unction Lenin's simplicity.
Well, let them worry, Stalin thought. He, Koba, was more in touch with the common people than the coffeehouse Bolsheviks with their pince-nez wedged onto their Jewish noses. He knew what the superstitious masses out there needed was an icon to pray to. He would transform Lenin into this icon. He would feed the Russian hunger for the supernatural. When the time was ripe, he would even give them a resurrection: a new Communist tsar would rise from the ashes of the dead one.
First he would have to deal with the ugly little matter of Lenin's last testament, a letter the Starik had painstakingly dictated, a syllable at a time, days before his death. Krupskaya, the old goat, was already circulating copies to members of the Central Committee. "Stalin is too rude," the old man had written. "I propose removing him from his position and appointing someone more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and considerate to his comrades."
Stalin would silence Krupskaya by threatening to publish Lenin's early love letters to Inessa; some of them were explicit enough to make a whore blush. If that didn't turn the trick, he might have to appoint someone else to be Lenin's widow in her place! As for the testament, he would explain it away as the demented ravings of a man dying from the last stages of syphilis. The disease had eaten away at the Starik's mind as well as his body. It made him imagine enemies where none existed. Are we going to let his ravings divide the Party at this crucial moment, confuse the masses when what they need is a firm hand on the tiller? And whose
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hand would be firmer than that of the Party's tried and true general secretary, the forennost Leninist in the land?
He would present himself as the spiritual heir of the fallen leader. Where Stalin stood, that was Leninism! He would begin his speech to the Congress with an oath of allegiance. We swear to you. Comrade Lenin . . .
As for the few that resisted, he would force it down their throats.
Ronzha scrambled onto the base of the statue and pulled Appolinaria up after him so they could get a better view. Stretching off down Bolshaya Polyanka were masses of people—more than anyone remembered seeing in the streets since Moscovites turned out to greet Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks at the railroad station four years before. Mayakovsky's coffin, resting on a raised platform on the back of an open flat-bed truck, came into view. Appolinaria was unable to restrain herself. "He was a propagandist, not a poet. I really don't see why we came."
Ronzha couldn't help smiling at the sight of the wreath on the coffin. It was an enormous iron flywheel bristling with hammers, screws, and bolts. The inscription, in bold gold letters on a bnght red ribbon, read: TO THE IRON POET—AN IRON WREATH.
"Perhaps I was too hard on him," Ronzha remarked. "I recognize as a colleague anyone who can put together one good poem, a couple of successful lines, even a word or two in the right order." As the truck pulled abreast, he removed his cap and bowed to the coffin, peasant style, from the waist.
The day before his death at the age of thirty-six, Vladimir f/layakovsky, the flamboyant poet who once invited the sun to have tea with him, had been heard to blurt out: "No! Everyone answers me no. Only no. Everywhere no." At ten in the morning, April 14, 1930, in his room in Lyubyansky Passage, he had taken a pistol from his desk and, holding it in his left hand, fired the single bullet in the chamber directly into his heart. A suicide note read:
Life and I are quits,
and there's no point in counting over
mutual hurts, harms,
and slights. Best of luck to all of you!
Mayakovsky's open coffin was on display for three days at the Writers' Union, and half of Moscow—so it seemed—filed past to pay homage to the optimist who had taken the Bolshevik Revolution as the dawn of a new cultural era.
At the funeral, on April 17, the worker driving the coffin toward the crematorium
THE REVOLUTIONIST
obviously had no experience with corteges. He went too fast, leaving the tens of thousands of mourners straggling along behind.
Watching fronn the base of the statue, Ronzha put his own interpretation on this. "Mayakovsky was always impatient. It was his redeeming feature. He entered the revolution as if it were his own home—barging through the door, flinging open windows, spewing out his Whitman-like lines, never pausing for breath, never stopping to take stock. Well, maybe he knew something after all." After a moment Ronzha added, "When my time comes, I will certainly ride events also."
Stalin was conspicuously absent from the small group that trailed after the ornate hearse, past the eroded tombstones in the cemetery behind the Novodevichy Monastery, past Gogol's grave, past Chekhov's, past the new headstone with "Mayakovsky" etched on it, to the freshly dug rectangular hole in the ground. There was no formal service, no eulogy. Businesslike civilians in blue suits and orange ties and belted blue raincoats lowered the coffin into the ground. The deceased's father, the Old Bolshevik Sergei Alliluyev, who had hidden Lenin in his apartment for several days in July 1917, picked up a fistful of dirt and tossed it onto the coffin, The others followed suit as they filed past. A man in a belted blue raincoat nodded at the gravediggers, and they began shoveling earth onto the coffin with a vengeance. They understood the sooner she was buried, the better.
The official version, published on a back page of Pravda, said that Stalin's second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, had died of peritonitis, but everyone with connections in the superstructure knew the truth. The marriage between Stalin and Nadezhda, who was twenty-two years younger than he, had been stormy from the start. In the mid nineteen twenties, after one particularly vicious blowup, she had run off with the children to her parents in Leningrad. But Stalin, by then the undisputed khozyain, or master—Trotsky had been hounded out of the Party and the country, and the other Old Bolsheviks seemed to stumble over each other to stay in Stalin's good graces—obliged her to return. In the early thirties Nadezhda began studying synthetic fibers in Moscow's Industrial Academy. There she heard of the suffering caused by the first five-year plan, launched in 1929; about the great famine of 1931, the mere mention of which was considered a state crime; most of all, about her husband's policy of collectivization of agriculture. The Party had decided to liquidate the relatively well-off peasants known as kulaks and force all the others onto collective farms where, so the theory went, they would till the land with the efficiency of factory workers on an assembly line. The only trouble with the concept was that the peasants had killed their livestock, burned their crops, and destroyed their equipment rather than turn everything over to the collectives. In the confrontation that followed, something like seven million peasants died—with bullets in the neck, or through deportation to Siberia, or as the result of the famine brought on by Stalin's policies.
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Nadezhda, the daughter of ardent revolutionists, raised the question of collectivization with her husband, but he cut her off with a remark about a woman's place being in bed. "I don't see what the peasants have to complain about," he told her another time. "Every one of them has the right to three square arshins of land— enough to dig a grave!" And he slapped his thigh in pleasure.
When classes resumed in the fall of 1932, Nadezhda discovered that several of her friends were missing; it was whispered around that they had been arrested for talking to her about sensitive matters. Political realities, along with the deteriorating relationship with her husband, sent Nadezhda into a deep depression.
At a Kremlin banquet marking the fifteenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin called rudely to her from the head of the table, "Hey, you, have a drink!"
"Don't you dare 'hey' me!" Nadezhda retorted, and she stormed out of the party. That night, November 8, 1932, at Zubalovo, their family home twenty miles from the Kremlin, Nadezhda pressed a tiny Walther pistol to her head and pulled the trigger. She was thirty-one years old.
The housekeeper found her the next morning in a pool of blood. Someone finally worked up the courage to wake the khozyain, who slept in the small room with the telephone next to the dining room.
"Josef, Nadya is no longer with us!"
With her death, the last thread linking Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, universally known as Stalin, to the real world snapped. Family friends—most of them more attached to Nadezhda than to Stalin—gradually stopped coming around. There were no more boisterous after-lunch games of gorodki on the front lawn, with Stalin playfully squinting as he took aim at the bowling pins and exploding with pleasure when his eye turned out to be sharper than anybody else's. More and more moody, he retreated behind the walls of the Kremlin. There, surrounded by sycophants, he brooded about his enemies—and his potential enemies. He had always half-jokingly compared himself to Ivan the Terrible. Now, he noted, without a trace of humor in his voice, that Ivan had been shattered by the death of a young wife; that Ivan, convinced that she had been poisoned, had revenged himself on everyone around him in order to be sure the real culprit didn't escape unpunished.
Stalin, too, thought that his wife had been poisoned—poisoned against him! The guilty, once again, must not go unpunished.
It was about this time that Lady Astor, on a private visit to Moscow, asked Stalin in that offhand way the English upper classes had of baiting the devil, "When are you going to stop killing people?"
The interpreter froze. Stalin insisted the question be translated. And then, in the offhand way Bolsheviks had of telling the truth as if it were an outrageous falsehood, he replied, "When it is no longer necessary."
Stalin swept up to the Hall of Columns in one of his four bulletproof Packards—two 276
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had been sent ahead and one would follow behind, so that would-be assassins could never be sure which he was in—moments before they were scheduled to seal the coffin. Surrounded by security guards, he strode across the hall to the bier. The members of the Politburo—whom Stalin privately referred to as "his kittens"—made way for him. Stepping up to the open coffin, Stalin gazed at the body. Then, apparently overcome by emotion, he leaned forward and kissed Sergei Kirov on the cheek. The gesture had distinctly Sicilian overtones.
At the Seventeenth Party Congress earlier in 1934, Kirov, the Communist boss of Leningrad, had emerged as the darling of the Party, an eventual successor to Stalin. The suggestion struck Stalin as unmitigated treason. To make matters worse, Kirov was a moderate on matters of policy and strategy, and easily the best orator the Party had had since Trotsky. Rumors circulated that some delegates already talked of pushing Stalin, who was fifty-five years old, out of his principal post, that of general secretary of the Party, and handing it to the young Leningrader, if not at this congress, then at the following one.
In the end, the delegates never worked up the nerve to confront Stalin, but they gave Kirov an ovation that left no one in doubt about his popularity.
Eleven months later Kirov was walking through the corridors of Smolny, Leningrad Party headquarters, when a man shot him in the back with a Nagant revolver. Learning of the murder, Stalin raced by special train from f/loscow to personally unravel "the rich threads of treason" in the affair.
"They made me do it," a frustrated, alcoholic Party hack named Nikolayev replied when Stalin personally questioned him about the murder. "They gave me months of target practice. They told me that ..."
His use of the word "they" provided Stalin with the excuse he needed to launch a purge that made Ivan the Terrible look like a prince of the church. Before the week was out, thirty-seven Leningrad "White Guards," including the unfortunate Nikolayev, had been sentenced to death for terrorist acts against officials of the Soviet regime. In Moscow another thirty-three victims joined them. Within a month, Zinoviev and Kamenev, two Old Bolsheviks who had participated in the October Revolution and later aided Stalin in his rise to power, had been sentenced to prison terms for encouraging terror. They would eventually be retried on more serious charges, and executed. Gradually the wave of arrests spread across the country; in Leningrad alone, some thirty thousand people were rounded up within a few months of Kirov's murder.
Each arrest would result in a confession, each confession would spiral into a new wave of arrests. Before it was over, Stalin would wipe out the Old Guard almost to the man. Hundreds of thousands would be shot. Millions would be packed off to Siberian camps. Only a handful would ever find their way back. The Great Purge, as it came to be known, would run its course only because the prisons could not hold more people. But by then, the boss must have calculated, the traitors who had poisoned Nadezhda against her husband would have fallen victim to this orgy of punishment.
ROBERT LITTELL
As the cattle cars hauled the prisoners off toward "Asiatika" and points east, a four-line ditty made the rounds. It was not sung, only whispered.
Hey, fresh tomatoes, Hey, want a cucumber? Stalin killed Kirov, Got him in the corridor.
1
Moscow, 1935
D
^^ loated crystals of snow had been floating down like tiny para-■^ chutes for most of the day, blanketing the streets, forming graceful drifts at the sides of buildings, muting the whine of the pile driver spiking rusted steel stanchions into the foundations of the apartment building going up across from where the trolley stopped. Wearing the cap trimmed with "Stalin fur" (which was to say no fur at all) Ludmilla had given him on his forty-third birthday. Zander limped along in the gutter, where the snow had been packed down by government cars and pedestrians. They were lucky to live on Petrovka Street, one of the few blocks in Moscow that looked as if it could have been transplanted from Old St. Petersburg. The houses on both sides had sculptured entrances and large bay windows with lace curtains on them. Inside there were high ceilings on the bel etage and working fireplaces everywhere and doors that disappeared noiselessly into walls.
Ludmilla had been the one to find the apartment. "Zander, you won't believe this," she had cried breathlessly after racing back from her academy at lunch hour to make sure he got on to it right away, and she had described the two rooms that the parents of her best friend had just abandoned. The father, a professor of French at the university, had been questioned by the NKVD. Taking the event as a warning, he had decided to return to Frunze and accept a position as a guide in a local museum.
Zander and Ludmilla had lost their old apartment on Chkalov Street months before when the building was condemned to make way for a new hospital. They had farmed out their furniture with friends— the love seat with Tuohy and Arishka, the American rolltop desk with
ROBERT LITTELL
Sergeant Kirpichnikov and Serafima, the mirrored armoire with Ronzha and AppoHnaria, the four kitchen chairs and the folding bridge table with Alyosha Zhitkin, the gilt-framed full-length mirror with Zander's sometime mistress, a motion picture actress named Misha—and lived like gypsies, a week with "folding bridge table"—they had taken to referring to people by the furniture they were guarding—two weeks with "mirrored armoire," two days with "rolltop desk" because neither Zander nor Ludmilla could put up for long with Melor. Having stumbled on the Petrovka Street apartment. Zander had gone through the motions of filling out the appropriate forms in triplicate and submitting them to the appropriate clerk at the appropriate office, but he didn't think he had a hope in hell of getting it. Ludmilla—behind Zander's back—asked Tuohy to use his influence. One phone call from him and it was theirs.
Stamping his boots to get the snow off. Zander let himself in the front door with his latchkey, and examined the open wooden box under the mail slot. As usual there were several books for the old Jew who lived on the ground floor. Religious Jews deposited the books on the doorstep as if they were abandoned orphans, or when they were thin enough, slipped them through the slot into the mailbox, knowing that the old Jew considered any book with the name of God in it sacred and not to be destroyed. Zander once amused himself counting the stacks, and estimated that there were something like twelve thousand volumes stashed around the house—in the basement behind the coal bin, along one wall of the corridor leading to their door, along the corridor with the communal toilet at its far end, under the kitchen sink, in the closets, not to mention the old man's room, in which his narrow wooden bed seemed menaced by the piles of books towering above it on all sides. The neighbors who lived above them put up with the old man's idiosyncracy because, with so many books around, they were able to swipe as many as they wanted to light their cooking fires, or feed whole volumes into their tiled stoves when coal was impossible to come by.
Zander noticed several letters in the mailbox. He thumbed through them and pulled out one addressed to him. There was no stamp on it, meaning it had been personally delivered. The handwriting was slanted and bold, and Zander didn't recognize it. He held it up to the light bulb overhead and saw what appeared to be a sheaf of thin blue-lined paper. There was writing on it, but he couldn't make it out through the envelope.
"That you, Alexander.^" Ludmilla was leaning over the second-floor banister. "Hurry on up. I have a million things to tell you. I see you didn't find vegetables." She closed the apartment door after him
THE REVOLUTIONIST
and helped him off with his overcoat. "I want you to be the first to know," she said, her eyes a sea of seriousness.
