by Martin Amis
56 The boy told him, inter alia, about the ‘mosquito treatment’: these insects, like airborne piranha, could turn a man into a skeleton within hours. Prisoners were also strapped to logs and then bounced down the stone steps of the fortress.
57 Not deep enough. Solzhenitsyn visited the site many years later. He was there all day, and saw two barges.
58 Other doctors were implicated, and in such numbers (Conquest tells us) that they were collectively known as ‘Gorkyists’ in the prisons and camps.
End
This is how Ivan went, in 1584: ‘[he] began grievously to swell in his cods, with which he had most horribly offended above fifty years together, boasting of a thousand virgins he had deflowered’.59 The soothsayers were called in, and Ivan sought relief in the fondling of jewelry. He died while attempting to begin a game of chess:
He sets his men60 … the Emperor in his loose gown, shirt and linen hose, faints and falls backwards. Great outcry and stir, one sent for aqua vita another to the apothecary for ‘marigold and rose water’ and to call his ghostly father and the physicians. In the mean he was strangled and stark dead.
‘Was strangled’ here means ‘asphyxiated’, because Ivan died of natural causes. As, scandalously, did Stalin. He took rather longer to go. And, such was his incredible talent for death, he showed that he could kill people violently even from his coffin.
One of the hundred and more Jewish artists executed between 1948 and 1953 was the legendary actor Solomon Mikhoels. He was not arrested; he was lured, murdered, and left in the street, where a Cheka truck drove over him. The regime was content at first to decide that the death was accidental, but later it was put about that he had indeed been murdered – by the CIA, to stop him from exposing an American spy ring. Mikhoels had performed, privately, in the Kremlin. He had done Shakespeare for Stalin. He had done Lear for Stalin. I contend that this was a great historical moment. Lear was of course a totalitarian from birth – there are differences – but Lear remains the central visionary meditation on the totalitarian mind. Did Stalin’s nose twitch when he heard Mikhoels, his future victim, flaying him from the stage?
They flattered me like a dog … To say ‘ay’ and ‘no’ to everything that I said! … When the rain came to wet me once and the wind to make me chatter, when the thunder would not peace at my bidding; there I found ’em, there I smelt ’em out. Go to, they are not men of their words: they told me I was everything: ’tis a lie – I am not ague-proof.
And nor of course was Koba. Khrushchev reports him as being unwontedly cheerful on the evening of 28 February (and unwontedly drunk);61 other accounts describe a night of sombre denunciations from the head of the table, and Stalin’s silent and disgusted departure (at the usual hour: 4 A.M.). the standing dinner invitation to Kuntsevo had always been a mixed blessing. In more youthful days the Kremlin cronies had amused themselves with bun fights, songs, jokes, japes. A typical prank was the placement of a ripe tomato on the chair of the drunken Poskrebyshev (was this, one wonders, before or after his wife was shot – or both?). Stalin enjoyed the spectacle of humiliation – getting Khrushchev to dance Cossack-style, for example. But these men were already humiliated, long before 1953. By then Poskrebyshev was gone (fired, merely) and the others, particularly Beria and Malenkov, were regarded with intense suspicion. ‘I’m finished,’ Stalin had recently been heard to say to himself: ‘I trust no one, not even myself.’ Svetlana says of this period that a visit to her father would physically wipe her out for several days; and Svetlana was in no fear of her life.
On 1 March Stalin stirred at midday, as usual. In the pantry the light came on: MAKE TEA. The servants waited in vain for the plodding instruction, BRING TEA IN. Not until 11 P.M. did the duty officers summon the nerve to investigate. Koba was lying in soiled pyjamas on the dining-room floor near a bottle of mineral water and a copy of Pravda. His beseeching eyes were full of terror. When he tried to speak he could only produce ‘a buzzing sound’ – the giant flea, the bedbug, reduced to an insect hum. No doubt he had had time to ponder an uncomfortable fact: all the Kremlin doctors were being tortured in jail, and his personal physician of many years, Vinogradov, was, moreover (at the insistence of Stalin himself), ‘in irons’.
Beria, apparently fresh from some debauch, made a flying visit on the night of 1 March. But it wasn’t until the next morning that a team of (non-Jewish) doctors was assembled and set to work, spurred on by Beria’s obscenities and threats, while members of the Politburo paced about in the adjoining room. One finds oneself tending to linger over the medical documents (is it the novelty of a natural death?), with their portrait of total powerlessness. Extracts:
… the patient was lying on a divan on his back, his head turned to the left, his eyes closed, with moderate hyperemia [excess of blood] of the face; there had been involuntary urination (his clothes were soaked in urine) … The heart tones were dull … The patient is in an unconscious state … There is no movement in the right extremities and occasional disturbance in the left.
Diagnosis: hypertonic disease, generalized atherosclerosis with predominant damage of the cerebral blood vessels, right-handed hemiplegia as a result of middle left cerebral arterial haemorrhaging; atherosclerotic cardiosclerosis, nephrosclerosis. The patient’s condition is extremely serious.
Because the patient, in other words, had had a massive stroke. The doctors applied leeches – four behind either ear, contentedly and innocently sucking the bedbug’s blood. Magnesium sulphate was administered by enema and hypodermic. Stalin’s right side was paralysed; his left side twitched at random. Over the next five days, as the doctors trembled over their work, Vasily Dzhugashvili would sometimes stagger in and shout, ‘They’ve killed my father, the bastards!’ At 9:50 P.M. on 5 March Stalin began sweating heavily. His blue face turned bluer. Svetlana watched and waited. This is her valediction:
For the last twelve hours the lack of oxygen became acute. His face and lips blackened … The death agony was terrible. He literally choked to death as we watched. At what seemed like the very last moment, he opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry, and full of fear of death … [Then] he suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something up above and bringing down a curse on all. The gesture was incomprehensible and full of menace.
What was he doing? He was groping for his power.
Stalin was dead – but he wasn’t yet done. He had always loved grinding people together, pestling them together, leaving them without air and space, without recourse; he had always loved hemming and cooping them, penning them, pinning them: the Lubyanka reception ‘kennel’, with three prisoners for every yard of floor space; Ivanovo, with 323 men in a cell intended for twenty, or Strakhovich, with twenty-eight men in a cell intended for solitary confinement; or thirty-six in a single train compartment, or a black maria packed so tight that the urkas can’t even pickpocket, or the zeks trussed in pairs and stacked like logs in the back of the truck – en route to execution … On the day of Stalin’s funeral vast multitudes, ecstatic with false grief and false love, flowed through Moscow in dangerous densities. When, in a tightening crowd, your movements are no longer your own and you have to fight to breathe, a simple and sorrowful realization asserts itself through your panic: that if death comes, it will be brought here by life, too much life, a superabundance of life. And what were they all doing there anyway – mourning him? On that day well over a hundred people died of asphyxiation in the streets of Moscow. So Stalin, embalmed in his coffin, went on doing what he was really good at: crushing Russians.
59 This and subsequent quotes are from an account by Sir Jerome Horsey of the Muscovy Company in London.
60 ‘All saving his king, which by no means he could make stand in his place with all the rest upon the plain board’ (Horsey’s note, which sounds too good to be true).
61 Stalin, it seems, drank moderately by Russian standards. But he postponed giving up smoki
ng (cigarettes and pipe) until the fruitlessly late date of 1952.
Negative Perfection
While preparing for the demonstration trial of the SRs, Lenin wrote to the People’s Commissar of Justice (May 1922):
Comrade Kursky!
As a sequel to our conversation, I am sending you an outline of a supplementary paragraph for the Criminal Code … The basic concept, I hope, is clear …: openly to set forth a statute which is both principled and politically truthful (and not just juridically narrow) to supply motivation for the essence and the justification of terror, its necessity, its limits.
The court must not exclude terror. It would be self-deception or deceit to promise this, and in order to provide it with a foundation and to legalize it in a principled way, clearly and without hypocrisy and without embellishment, it is necessary to formulate it as broadly as possible, for only revolutionary righteousness and a revolutionary conscience will provide the conditions for applying it more or less broadly in practice.
With Communist greetings,
LENIN
‘Terror is a powerful means of policy,’ said Trotsky, ‘and one would have to be a hypocrite not to understand this.’
Both men, we see, are anxious to avoid being hypocritical.60 No, let us not have any hypocrisy. Terror, if you must. But let us not have any hypocrisy. Lenin’s letter to Kursky elaborates on an earlier suggestion: ‘Comrade Kursky! In my opinion we ought to extend the use of execution by shooting (allowing the substitution of exile abroad) to all activities of the Mensheviks, SR’s, etc.’ Looking at the thing from the PR point of view, Lenin goes on: ‘We ought to find a formulation that would connect these activities with the international bourgeoisie.’ His italics; and his hypocrisy. State terror is state hysteria; any attempt, however coldly undertaken, ‘to legalize it in a principled way, and without hypocrisy’ will turn out to be hypocritical. And how do we construe Trotsky’s pronouncement? One would ‘have to be a hypocrite,’ he argues, ‘not to understand’ that ‘terror is a powerful means of policy.’ ‘Not to understand’, here, is a euphemism for ‘not to act on’: his political opponents, after all, don’t mind his understanding it. Trotsky ought to have used the word ‘sentimentalist’ in place of ‘hypocrite’. Everyone knows that terror is unsentimental. We still need persuading that terror is unhypocritical. More generally, we take it on board that Lenin and Trotsky were alert to the danger of hypocrisy.
In fact, of course, hypocrisy boomed under the Bolsheviks, like hyperinflation. I do not intend it as a witticism when I say that hypocrisy became the life and soul of the Party – indeed, this understates the case. Hypocrisy didn’t know what had hit it in October 1917. Until then, hypocrisy had had its moments, in politics, in religion, in commerce; it had played its part in innumerable social interactions; and it had starred in many Victorian novels, and so on; but it had never been asked to saturate one sixth of the planet. Looking back, hypocrisy might have smiled at its earlier reticence, for it soon grew accustomed to the commanding heights.
This vice flourishes when words and deeds abandon all contiguity. Before examining the word ‘revolution’ (square one), let us consider square two: ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’. Barely more than a footnote in Marx, the phrase was fetishized by the Bolsheviks as ‘vanguardism’: the elite revolutionaries establish a dictatorship in the name of the proletariat; the proletariat, over time, outgrows mere ‘trade-union consciousness’, and catches up with the vanguard; the vanguard, the state, then famously ‘withers away’, and full Communism is ‘realized’. The Bolsheviks, as we are aware, got stuck in the first phase of the process and never moved beyond it (though in a sense they did manage to wither away, a ‘short’ century later, leaving nothing behind them). Lenin was being hypocritical, therefore, when he outlawed the trade unions on the grounds that the proletariat already enjoyed dictatorial power.
Russia never experienced the dictatorship of the proletariat.
What Russia experienced was the dictatorship of the proletarian.
Russia experienced Stalin, and negative perfection.
(1) During the famine of 1933 Moscow continued its Russification policy in the Ukraine, purging all institutions (including the Chamber of Weights and Measures and the Geodesic Board). One official who had come under attack, Skrypnyk, responded spiritedly: he counterattacked, and then shot himself. The official obituary described his suicide as ‘an act of faintheartedness particularly unworthy of a member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party’.
(2) From The Great Terror: ‘The absolutely certain way for a defendant to get himself shot was to refuse to plead guilty. He would then not go before an open court at all, but either perish under the rigours of the preliminary investigation, or be shot, like Rudzutak, after a twenty-minute closed trial. The logic of Stalin’s courts was different from what is customary elsewhere. The only chance of avoiding death was to admit to everything, and to put the worst possible construction on all one’s activities. It is true that even this seldom saved a man’s life.’
(3) During Collectivization, when the peasants were slaughtering their cattle, the chief of grain procurement in the Ukraine, who could expect to feast his way through the coming struggle (i.e., terror-famine), is quoted as saying: ‘for the first time in their sordid history the Russian peasants have eaten their fill of meat.’
(4) This is Robert Tucker on the execution of Kamenev and Zinoviev, whose lives Stalin had originally promised to spare: ‘He not only humiliated, exploited, and destroyed them, but he caused them to die knowing they had publicly abased and besmirched themselves and very many others, taken on the guilt for his murder of Kirov, his supreme duplicity, and his terrorist conspiracy against the party-state. They had confessed to representing a variety of fascism when he was introducing just that in Russia by, among other things, this very pseudo-trial; and they wound up grovelling at their murderer’s feet and glorifying him – all for nothing but to serve his purposes.’61 In his forty-third unanswered letter to Stalin, Bukharin wrote: ‘I feel towards you, towards the Party, towards the cause nothing but great and boundless love. I embrace you in my thoughts …’ Few murderers have asked this of their victims – to go to their deaths with endearments on their lips. But this was the size of the defeat, the size of the deficit, that Stalin insisted on.
(5) Occasionally requests for clemency were passed around the table by the leadership. One such, from an innocent military commander on the eve of his execution, was footnoted: ‘A pack of lies. Shoot him – I. Stalin’; ‘Agreed. Blackguard! A dog’s death for a dog – Beria’; ‘Maniac – Voroshilov’; ‘Swine! – Kaganovich.’
(6) In 1948 Stalin made the following addition to his official biography, the Short Course: ‘At the various stages of the War Stalin’s genius found the correct solution that took account of all the circumstances … His military mastership was displayed both in defence and offence. His genius enabled him to divine the enemy’s plans and defeat them.’ Stalin then made this addition to that addition: ‘Although he performed his task of leader of the Party with consummate skill and enjoyed the unreserved support of the entire Soviet people, Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit or self-adulation.’
(7) Increasingly, as the Terror-Famine gripped, peasants stole grain to stay alive. A new law politicized this crime, declaring that all such pilferers were to be treated as enemies of the people, and would receive the tenner or the super. ‘By the beginning of 1933,’ writes Volkogonov, ‘more than 50,000 people, many of them starving, had been sentenced.’ Using the word ‘famine’ carried the same penalty. The ‘worthy reapers’, in Stalin’s facetious formulation, didn’t know that they were starving as a matter of government policy. But they did know that they were starving. And it was a capital crime to remark on it. In essence, people were being killed, quickly, for the capital crime of saying that they were being killed slowly.
You see why Solzhenitsyn needs his
expletives, his italics, his exclamation marks, his thrashing sarcasm. On the chain gang they had you sing:
We Canal Army Men are a tough people.
But not in that lies our chief trait;
We were caught up by a great epoch
To be put on the path that leads straight.
Or, at the amateur theatricals, bursting from the breast:
And even the most beautiful song
Cannot tell, no, cannot do justice
To this country than which there is nothing more wondrous,
The country in which you and I live.
… Oh, they will drive you to the point where you will weep just to be back with company commander Kurilko [‘I’ll make you suck the snot from corpses!’], walking along the short and simple execution road, through open-and-above-board Solovki slavery.
My Lord! What canal is there deep enough for us to drown that past in?62
60 N. V. Krylenko (who was prosecutor at the SR trial, and sometime Commissar of Justice) held that laws were hypocritical. ‘It is one of the most widespread sophistries of bourgeois science to maintain that the court … is an institution whose task it is to realize some sort of special “justice” that stands above classes … “Let justice prevail in courts” – one can hardly conceive more bitter mockery of reality than this.’ In July 1938 Stalin was given a list of 138 names; the words ‘Shoot all 138’ accompany his signature. Krylenko’s name was on that list. His trial lasted twenty minutes (the paperwork minimum), and the protocol ran to nineteen lines. Was that unhypocritical enough for him?
61 This crescendo of indignation could have continued. Kamenev’s wife was arrested in 1935 and shot in 1941; his older son was arrested in 1937 and shot in 1939 (his younger son survived a Cheka orphanage and the gulag). Zinoviev’s three brothers were shot, as was one of his sisters; three other sisters, together with three nephews (one of whom was shot), a niece, a brother-in-law and a cousin were sent to camp; his son Stefan was shot.