The Stalin Epigram (5 page)

For those of us who were on intimate terms with Comrade Stalin, it was no secret that he was waging a rearguard action against a persuasive despair. Oh, he could put on a show in public, but
most mornings found him, after yet another sleepless night, in a black mood ranting about his chronic tonsillitis or the rheumatic throbbing in his deformed arm or an ache in a tooth that the
dentist Shapiro (another Israelite for me to worry about!) had failed to alleviate during a visit to the Kremlin clinic the previous afternoon. The women in his entourage—Molotov’s
wife, the Jewess Polina; Bukharin’s new bride, the beautiful twenty-year-old Anna Larina—thought he had never gotten over the sudden death, a year and a half before, of his young wife,
Nadezhda. Of course no one spoke of this in front of him lest his legendary Georgian-Ossetian temper, which could burst like a summer squall, put an abrupt end to the conversation, not to mention
the Kremlin pass that gave you access to the court. (Everyone agreed that the absence of a serious female companion contributed to the
khozyain
’s depression; I myself had casually
offered to introduce him to one or several of my concubines, but he had declined so brusquely it discouraged me from raising the subject a second time.) The men close to Comrade Stalin—his
longtime secretary, his chief of staff, assorted members of the Politburo, even Yagoda—had another take on the situation. For them, the boss’s obsession with forcing the peasantry onto
collectives had come home to haunt him. Tales of deserted Ukrainian villages, of cattle cars filled with starving peasants, of rampaging mobs burning seed grain and killing livestock, circulated in
the Kremlin. The forbidden word
famine
was being spread about. Was Comrade Stalin, the man of steel who had held fast during the roll of the dice we referred to as the
Revolution
, as
well as the brutal Civil War that followed, losing his nerve? Was he afraid the chaos he had unleashed would spiral out of control; that the Ukrainian breadbasket would be lost forever to the Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics; that his Politburo colleagues, faced with the collapse of Bolshevik power, would plot behind his back to strip him of his leadership role—or his life?

The cigarette tobacco in his pipe seemed to settle the boss’s nerves. Sinking into the seat to the right of Gorky, he even managed to chat stiffly with the writers and editors nearest him.
“That’s a good question—our history books skim over this period of Stalin’s life because it would be unseemly for a Bolshevik to draw attention to it,” he told a
writer, speaking a rich Russian with a thick Georgian accent, using the third person form of speech he favored in public appearances like this one. “His mother—Ekaterina, thank God, is
still very much alive—is a certified saint. In those days the family lived in a dilapidated shack behind a church in Gori, a dreary sprawl of a town in a mountainous backwater of Georgia next
to the Kura River, which was so muddy fish drowned in it. She made ends meet keeping house for a local priest and taking in washing from the bourgeois housewives who lived on the side of town with
paved streets and garbage collection. The last time Stalin visited his mother—you’re not going to credit this—she asked him what he did for a living. Stalin explained that he
worked in the Kremlin and helped govern the country. She shook her head in disgust and said he would have done better to finish the seminary and become a priest. Can you imagine Stalin, a devout
atheist, as a priest!”

The
khozyain
tapped the toes and heels of his boots on the floor in a little jig, a sign that he was beginning to enjoy the conversation. One thing my boss relished was talking about
himself. It was hard to get him started, but once started, it was harder to stop him. “As for Stalin’s late and very lamented father, Vissarion,” he went on, “he was a
shoemaker by trade, a hardworking breadwinner and a model proletarian, though there is little chance he ever knew the meaning of the word. He struggled selflessly to make life better for his wife
and children. Vissarion, to Stalin’s everlasting regret, died before he could really get to know him, but his father remains a shining example of what a man should be. You asked about
Stalin’s names—his mother called him Soso when he was a kid, which is the Georgian equivalent of Joey. Later, when Stalin went underground and began his revolutionary activities, he
called himself Koba after a fictional Caucasian outlaw.”

“And where did the name Stalin originate?” a fat editor asked.

Around us the waiters were serving chilled white Georgian wine to the guests. Yusis came over with a bottle he’d selected at random from the cartons in the kitchen, uncorked it in front of
the boss’s eyes and half filled his glass. The
khozyain
wet his lips on the wine. “Koba began using the underground name Stalin in 1913, I think. Yes, yes, it was 1913. He took
the name from a bosomy apple-cheeked Bolshevik whose bed he was sharing at the time. Her name was Ludmilla Stal. He transformed the
Stal
into
Stalin
.”

“Stalin—man of steel,” Gorky said approvingly.

“Wonderful story,” an editor diagonally across the table from Comrade Stalin said. “Can I print it in my newspaper?”

My boss bristled. “Out of the question,” he snapped. “We Bolsheviks pride ourselves on being modest, on discouraging a cult based on our persons.”

While the waiters were distributing silver trays piled high with small salmon wedges, I had Yusis retrieve from the boot of my Packard the straw hamper containing the food that had been prepared
at a Cheka laboratory and then sealed and marked
Certified free of poisonous elements
. The
khozyain
, who was something of an expert on poisons—he once informed me that prussic
acid smelled like burnt almonds, hemlock like a rat’s nest, oleander like chocolate, arsenic like a decomposing supper—categorically refused to eat at public receptions unless he broke
the seal and opened the hamper himself. Reaching around him, I set the box down on the table. Comrade Stalin slit the seal with one of his nicotine-stained fingernails and sniffed at the cold
perozhki
filled with ground pork before popping one into his mouth.

At the head of the table, Gorky climbed to his feet and tapped a knife against a bottle of mineral water. “Everyone talks about Lenin and Leninism, but Lenin has been gone a long time. I
say, long live Stalin and Stalinism!” he called, raising a wineglass over his head. “Long life, energy, wisdom and stamina to triumph over the many enemies of the first Socialist state
on the planet Earth.”

In an instant the guests were on their feet. “To Comrade Stalin,” they cried in chorus and drank off the white wine.

Stalin wagged a pinky at Gorky. “How can you say that? Lenin was a fist, Stalin a little finger.” The guests at Stalin’s end of the table who heard the comment broke into
applause.

I took a turn around the kitchen to be sure the servants with Israelite surnames had been sent home. When I returned to my post near the
khozyain
, I discovered he was telling a joke; the
boss could charm the skin off a snake if he put his mind to it. “If you’ve heard it before, stop me,” he informed the guests within earshot. “So: A Turk asks a Serb why they
were always waging war. ‘For plunder,’ the Serb responds. ‘We are a poor people and hope to win some booty. How about you?’ the Serb asks. ‘We fight for honor and for
glory,’ the Turk replies. At which point the Serb says”—the
khozyain
started to chuckle at his own story—“he says, ‘Everyone fights for what he
doesn’t have.’ ”

“Everyone fights for what he doesn’t have,” Gorky repeated, and he burst into peals of girlish laughter. The guests around Stalin slapped the table appreciatively. After a
moment someone asked if the
khozyain
thought Soviet Communism would spread to other industrialized countries.

Comrade Stalin was in his element now. “When we Bolsheviks took power,” he said, “several of the more naïve comrades thought our uprising would spark revolutions across
capitalist Europe—someone even suggested, half jokingly, that we ought to construct a high tower on the frontier and post a lookout to keep an eye peeled for world revolution. Stalin, who
believed in constructing Socialism in one country at a time, Russia first, told them such a scheme would have the advantage of providing permanent employment for at least one worker. Well, you get
the point. Which countries are ripe for revolution? Certainly not America, where everyone is too busy accumulating wealth, or holding on to what they’ve already accumulated, to take to the
streets. The French are too preoccupied with eating and drinking and fornicating to make a revolution. As for Great Britain, the English are unable to rebel against the king because revolution
would involve ignoring signs that prohibit walking on lawns.”

“That leaves the Germans,” Gorky offered.

“Every child knows the Germans would be incapable of storming a railroad station without first purchasing tickets to the quay,” the boss said with a smirk.

The people around Comrade Stalin, seduced by the
khozyain
’s conviviality, began to relax. Mikhail Sholokhov, sitting across from my boss on Gorky’s left, wanted to know if
there was any truth to the rumor that the Central Committee was thinking of renaming Moscow
Stalinodar
.

“I can reveal—though it must go no further than this room—that the subject was raised, but Stalin flatly refused.”

Sholokhov, a favorite of Comrade Stalin’s, asked the boss which in his opinion was the highest art, prose or playwriting or poetry. Stalin gave this some thought. “Clearly poetry is
head and shoulders above the other arts. Stalin talked about this very question the other day with the American writer Dos Passos, who is visiting us in connection with the Writers’ Congress.
Dos Passos agreed with my formulation and quoted the British novelist Maugham, something to the effect that the poet makes the best of the prose writers look like a piece of cheese. That is also
Stalin’s opinion.”

Gorky, his voice pitched higher than usual, said, “I cannot say I agree—”

The boss sucked noisily on his dead pipe. “Nobody asks you to agree,” he said in a tone so silkily pleasant Gorky couldn’t fail to understand that he had ventured onto a limb.
The
khozyain
didn’t appreciate being contradicted in public; he once confided to me that it came close to being a criminal offense.

When the waiters got around to setting out bowls of fruit and biscuits, the
khozyain
rapped his Dunhill on the table. “Comrade writers,” he called. Whatever conversation there
was in the room faded instantly. “So: You will surely be wondering why you were invited to share Gorky’s hospitality on this particular February afternoon. We thought there was
something to be gained by giving you, who are among the most prominent Soviet writers and editors, a preview of the new cultural policy the Politburo is about to promulgate in connection with the
First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers. We are in the process of redirecting the Party line from modernism to what we call Socialist realism. What is Socialist realism? Henceforth, it is the
obligatory aesthetic for the visual arts, for the theater and the cinema, for all forms of creative writing. Socialist realism recognizes that there is no such thing as art or culture in the
abstract. All art, all culture either serves the Revolution and the Party or it doesn’t. Socialist realism proclaims that art in all its forms must be realistic in form and Socialist in
content—it recognizes that writers are engineers of the human soul and as such have a moral obligation to inspire the Soviet proletariat to dream Socialist dreams.”

At the far end of the long table a young short story writer raised a finger.

“There is no need to ask permission to speak,” Comrade Stalin instructed him. “Here we are all equals.”

The young man scratched nervously at the stubble of a beard on his broad peasant’s face. “I would like to ask Comrade Stalin how a writer—working in the obligatory aesthetic of
Socialist realism—is to deal with the question of collectivization. If we are to be realistic in form, we must portray the chaos, the distress . . .”

The only sound in the room came from outside the windows of the villa—automobiles klaxoning impatiently near a construction site at the foot of the hill. The
khozyain
leaned forward
in order to get a better look at the speaker. “What is your name, comrade?”

“Saakadze, Sergo.”

“Saakadze, Sergo,” the boss repeated amiably. “Stalin thanks you for your intervention. So: Inasmuch as collectivization of the peasants has been a catastrophic success, a
certain amount of chaos and distress was inevitable. When a great Socialist homeland moves to eliminate waste and poverty on a grand scale, stuff happens. You—the cultural workers who have
the responsibility of justifying collectivization to the masses—must weigh the chaos and distress against what is being accomplished, and this must enter into your
realistic
portrait
of the events in question. Collectivization is what makes industrialization possible. To slow down the tempo of collectivization will cripple industrialization, and that in turn will mean that our
Socialist Republics will lag behind the West. And those who lag behind wind up in the dustbin of history. One only has to think back to Old Russia—because of her military, cultural,
political, industrial and agricultural backwardness, she was constantly being defeated. By the Mongol khans. By the Polish-Lithuanian gentry. By the Anglo-French capitalists. Comrades, let us look
reality in the eye. We are behind the leading industrial countries by half a hundred years. We must make up this difference in ten years—either that or perish. This Adolf Hitler has a
ravenous appetite—mark my words, when he finishes stuffing himself in the West he will turn eastward. We must be ready to welcome him with cold steel. Stalin and his Politburo colleagues
believe we are capable of catching up before the inevitable war with Nazi Germany breaks out. You must never lose sight of the fact that we are armed with irrefutable scientific Marxism, which
allows us to foresee the future and to divert the course of history. The capitalists live off religions that promise heaven
after
earth, we are holding out the prospect of heaven
on
earth. Our factory and our farm workers will be rewarded in this world for their labor, not in some afterlife.” My boss aimed his index finger in Saakadze’s direction. “You ask
how you are to deal with collectivization. Take your cue from Mikhail Aleksandrovich here.” With an effort Comrade Stalin stiffly raised his crippled arm to indicate Sholokhov across the
table. “Take your cue from his masterly novel about collectivization,
Virgin Soil Upturned
. Stalin has read it twice. Comrade Sholokhov manages to dramatize Marx’s aphorism about
the absolute idiocy of rural life as it was organized under the tsars.”