DEATH AT THE DACHA
DEATH AT THE DACHA
STALIN'S LAST MOVIE, A NOVEL
PAUL M. LEVITT
GUILFORD, CONNECTICUT
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
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Copyright © 2020 by Paul M. Levitt
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ISBN 978-1-4930-5059-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4930-5060-4 (e-book)
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For my Ukrainian father, who came to America bearing memories and stories that he shared with his son.
At what seemed like the very last moment he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room.
He suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something above and bringing down a curse on us all.
—Svetlana Alliluyeva
CONTENTS
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
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viii
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Guide
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Start of Content
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.”
—Maya Angelou
I feel grateful and privileged to have received assistance from:
Ronald Ribman, playwright, who gave me permission to quote from The Journey of the Fifth Horse, based on Ivan Turgenev’s The Diary of a Superfluous Man, which I deeply admire.
Luther Wilson, former director of the UNM Press, who has encouraged and published my work.
Jim Palmer, film critic, who kindly read the first few chapters and offered sage advice.
Cherry Weiner, literary agent, who recommended indispensable changes.
Jonathan Brent, who called to my attention the importance of Stalin’s anatomy.
Martin and Gloria Trotsky, friends, who donated generously to the university.
Philip DiStefano, Chancellor, who has often supported my efforts.
Rick Rinehart, publisher, who bravely took on this project.
Emily Chiarelli, editor, who expertly navigated the text.
Simon Sebag Montefiore, who wrote two elegant books on Stalin, both of which I found immensely useful.
The anonymous contributor to FestungArnulfinger web log, who wrote “Koba, beloved of Valenchka,” December 18, 2007.
In the belief that we remember best what we read last, I have saved my greatest thanks for Bruce Kawin, film scholar, critic, and poet, who read the manuscript, made copious notes, offered invaluable suggestions, and kept me from countless errors. The surviving misadventures are my fault, and mine alone.
CHAPTER 1
Urine. Rank and rancid. Surely he hadn’t pissed himself. But the revolting, putrid smell of ammonia and the stickiness of his pajamas argued otherwise. He had laughed when his enemies shitted themselves from fear. Now his own bladder had betrayed him, and stinking piss attended his undoing. His enemies had often enough accused him of defiling the revolution, calling him the stinking gravedigger of the party. Was befoulment, then, to be his final state, he who had made Russia great again with his iron fist?
He lay on the floor next to a copy of Pravda and his wristwatch.
The desk calendar read March 1, 1953. He could see hoar frost on the windows and snow in the birch trees. In the little dining room of his dacha, Blizhny, he maintained a virtual office: a table covered with documents and newspapers, an array of special phones, a radio, a gramophone, and on a small end table a bottle of Narzan mineral water, to which he normally added ten drops a day of tincture of iodine on the advice of a veterinarian—he distrusted doctors—who had told him it worked wonders for hypertension.
From the hallway he thought he heard Valentina Istomina, his faithful housekeeper, call “Koba.” No, he must have misheard. Valechka had left Blizhny for the day, and she would have called him Josif, even though Koba was his favorite nickname. For safety’s sake, revolutionaries used different aliases. His had come from the main character in his favorite Georgian novel, The Killer of the Father. But he also answered to “Vozhd,” “Boss,” “Soso,” “Dear father,” and, among other flattering names, “Man of Steel.”
Another odor, this one strangely sweet, arrested his attention. On the table lay his treasured cherry root pipe, smelling of “Herzegovina Flor,” his favorite tobacco. No ordinary leaf, it was found only in cigarettes, and had come to Moscow in the nineteenth century by way of Java and Herzegovina. He relished the flavor of the tobacco, but as a man of the people, he could hardly smoke a cigarette associated with the upper classes. So he would shred two Herzegovina cigarettes and fill his pipe with the pungent tobacco.
A map of the Soviet Union hung on the wall. Stalin extended an arm toward it and tried to say, “I am dying, Russia, dying,” but the creeping paralysis on his right side had reduced his speech to inarticulate sounds. His mind, though, remained clear and, like the cinema he so loved, he pictured scenes from the life he had led, particularly domestic scenes. Through a process of association, he began mentally scripting his own movie: the setting, the plot, the dialogue, the principals, and especially the ill-fated marriages that had envenomed his life before the real poisoner had spiked his water with a lethal dose of the blood thinner Warfarin.
He knew that in his movie the imaginary and the real would sometimes clash, but he reasoned that as a filmmaker, he couldn’t let the truth obstruct the narrative. Besides, he preferred fantasy to fact. The former would allow him to roam freely; the latter would constrain him, binding him to the evidence. He liked the idea of many voices, with different ranges and tones, appearing in discrete scenes. At the end, he would splice them together. But he quickly realized that in addition to personal voices, he would need a kind of voice-over to provide context, since most of his audience would lack the background to appreciate his story.
Having spent innumerable hours watching films, he knew what he liked. In fact, he had a particular film in mind from which he drew inspiration for his own life: Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part I. Now here was filmmaking he could identify with, a historical story that reflected current conditions and persons. Just as Tsar Ivan found himself besieged by the Boyars, who refused to accept the idea of a unified power and treacherously prepared for an invasion of Russia by her western neighbors, the Soviets, too, had to forge a nation from disparate loyalties, tribes, religions, and clans, to say nothing of having to fight off the invading armies of the Third Reich in the early 1940s. And just as Ivan was made “terrible” by the conditions around him, so too Stalin felt the need for desperate measures to keep the country intact. In Stalin’s Marxist interpretation of the film, he saw a justification for the purges, the prison camps, and the killings. By changing the society around him, Ivan made monarchy a progressive step toward national development. By ridding the country of “enemies,” Stalin turned the USSR into an industrialized, self-sustaining world power. He therefore regarded Ivan the Terrible as an exemplar of the steely leader who forged a united country in the crucible of violence.
Stalin flashed back to Eisenstein’s opening scene, where the young Ivan is cowering in terror. It was painfully reminiscent of his treatment at the hands of his father, who often beat him, as his mother tried to ward off the blows. Both he and Ivan had begun their reigns from a position of weakness; both had taken years to establish their supremacy. He regarded the movie as a choric commentary on his life.
Quick fade-in.
In the gloom a bright spot of light picks out an eight-year-old boy, crouching tearfully in a corner.
The camera approaches him swiftly.
Close-up: the frightened face of the boy.
Off-screen: the anguished scream of a woman.
He had thought so well of the film that he approved of Eisenstein making Part II, which would diminish the role of the tsar and employ socialist realism to tell the story of the people. But he hated the result, calling the film pretentious, and castigated its style.
He had never shied away from chastising artists. Not even the members of the Politburo were immune to his hectoring. He felt that by orchestrating meetings with his aides, he kept them from political heresy. Every Soviet cabinet member with a medal on his chest opined about the state of the world and imagined himself a philosopher. It was all too easy to forget the party line and get off track. He therefore regarded his interruptions and intrusions as instructive. In his memory movie, wherever he found it necessary to add a choric voice, he would mimic his advice to the Politburo: “Never forget the importance of authority and leadership, without which unity is impossible.”
During conversations in the Politburo, when his influence seemed lost in a haze of theory, he felt as if his years of dedication to the simple and true had been vitiated by dunderheads. Why were his ideas not second nature to these people? Had he not imbued them with correct Soviet thinking? Surely no one could fail to understand the quintessence of Stalinism: its strength, its beauty, its lasting value. But lest his movie become too didactic, he would concentrate not on the political but on the personal, so that viewers could see for themselves that the faults ascribed to him had their source in others, and that he had been victimized by events beyond his control, like illness and suicide, as well as that accursed novel, The Green Hat, highlighting that harlot, Iris Storm.
As he struggled to recall the events he wished to portray, he glanced around the room, settling on a portrait of Lenin, who had ostensibly died of a stroke but had actually perished from poison administered to his tea at Stalin’s order. He justified his villainy by calling it a mercy killing: Lenin, at the time, was paralyzed and close to death. A more telling motive was Lenin’s last testament, in which the “old man,” as the Bolshevik stalwarts called him, had advised fellow party members to remove Stalin from his position as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and to replace him with Trotsky.
Trotsky! Speak of ingratitude. Hadn’t Stalin found a hiding place for Lenin and led him safely to Finland in the summer of 1917, following the failure of the July insurrection? And what was his reward? Rejection!
And worst of all was Lenin’s denunciation, calling him rude and capricious, and accusing him of lacking tolerance, loyalty, politeness, and collegiality. He had even disparaged Koba as a “Great Russian nationalist,” who cared little for other nationalities, not even for his own place of birth, Georgia. Damn fool! To profess that all 180 Russian nationalities had the right of self-determination was an act of madness. For all his sins, the tsar was right when he spoke of “Russia One and Indivisible.” Lenin’s promise to give the Caucasians freedom of government, language, culture, and religion invited chaos. He, on the other hand, proceeded from the view that collective interests trumped individual ones, and that the word “union” in “Soviet Union” meant what it said: one country, united, under one government. And indeed had he not won the argument by having all the Soviet republics report to him? His policies were draconian, but they achieved what he wanted. By the end of 1941, the Baltics had lost their independence, and the Volga Germans and Leningrad Finns had been deported. A couple of years later, no one dared complain when he resettled thousands of people in the taiga: the Crimean Ta
tars, the Kalmyks, the Balkars, the Russified Bulgarians and Greeks, the Chechens, the Ingush, and the Karachays. Yes, he solved the problem of integrating the nationalities. He put them all under Soviet rule.
No sentimentalist, he. Foes and friends . . . he exiled and killed them all alike. He closed his eyes on Lenin’s portrait and recollected the arrests and shootings that had started in the 1930s, when he felt the need to consolidate his power. Even family members were not exempt. They knew too much. Their gossip included revelations about his children and former wives, Kato and Nadya, both of whom died tragically. He acted on the belief that family secrets never remain secret. People remember. They talk, some even keep diaries. Only with the dead are secrets safe. Both Kato’s family and Nadya’s families were privy to Koba’s shortcomings and the location of the bodies. Occasionally, they tried to trade on their familiarity for favors. In removing them, he demonstrated his professed dislike of favoritism—and his fear of exposure.
To this minute, he remained convinced that without the liquidation of certain groups, Russia would never have escaped the yoke of feudalism. Most of the old Bolsheviks lacked the stomach for radical change. The military establishment had designs on running the country, and resisted repressions, particularly among their own. The secret police had files on everyone, including him. Only regular purges could keep the governing organs in line. Even the Central Committee of the Communist Party needed a thorough cleansing. In fact, he had decided, no better time than the present.
He had already demoted Vyacheslav Molotov, his former Minister of Affairs, and Anastas Mikoyan, former People’s Commissar for External and Internal Trade. Lazar Kaganovich, his dependable fixer and hit man, was living on borrowed time. And the four men, his closest aides, who had dined with him the night before, what of their fates? Not a one of them had the backbone or the balls to keep the country unified. They too would have to go.
Stalin shivered from the cold, interrupting his train of thought; he tried to reach the blanket on the divan. His eyes again migrated to the picture of Lenin, in his familiar workman’s cap and military jacket buttoned at the neck. Those imperious and slightly Asiatic eyes, the plump cheeks, mustache, goatee, and faint smile—all suggested self-assurance and intellectual pride. What the picture failed to show was Lenin’s bald pate and growing paunch and laced-up boots with their elevated heels, as if adding an inch to his height would enhance his stature. But it was he, Stalin, who had raised Lenin to the status of a demigod and sanctified his written and spoken words, which came to twenty-eight volumes. It was he who had Lenin’s body embalmed, his corpse displayed in a mausoleum designed to look like an Egyptian pyramid in layers of red, gray, and black granite, with added platforms around the sides from which government officials could inspect parades.
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