Death at the Dacha

by Paul M. Levitt

  “Unless I replace everyone here, when I am gone the capitalists will drown you like blind kittens.”

  You focused first on Beria. For the sake of my script, share your feelings.

  “The man is a slimy schemer.”

  In your name, he authored A History of the Bolshevik Movement in the Caucasus, which earned you praise for deeds that you, in fact, never effected.

  “The cockroach . . .”

  The very word Mandelstam applied to you.

  “Don’t interrupt. You asked for my thoughts.”

  Sorry. Beria.

  “A rapist, murderer, opportunist, denouncer, parasite, and fawner.”

  Who turns your head six ways to Sunday with his endless flattery.

  “But not anymore.”

  Do you despise him because, as a fellow Georgian, he speaks Russian better than you?

  “No. Of all the people at the table most likely to betray me, Beria heads the list. He is a born security operative.”

  Your informants told you that Beria wanted to liberalize Soviet policy and strike a deal with the US to prevent nuclear warfare.

  “The smarmy killer has gone soft.”

  When you leaned across the table toward Beria and “fixed” your eyes on him, he knew better than to look away. For a moment you said nothing.

  “I hoped that my silent stare would disconcert the hoarse, nasalvoiced opportunist.”

  When Beria failed to blink, you returned to the subject. But at this point, for the sake of immediacy, I suggest we make the past present, and relive the scene.

  You ask a question. “Lavrenty, what should we do with the doctors?”

  Beria responds: Beat them, beat them, and beat them again.

  “You are saying what you know I want to hear.”

  Voice-over: Having chauffeured the police chief on his nocturnal forays to lure young women into his car, and then his home, and finally his bed, the colonel has often been privy to Beria’s wishes for political change, which includes the elimination of Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. In other words, an assassination. Who would think to call it murder? His health is failing. His stomach, subject to indigestion, no longer allows him to drink as before, and his memory problems are becoming noticeable. He looks old and tired. His fear of assassination gives him no peace—and makes him especially dangerous.

  Comrade Stalin, permit me to continue my rendering of the scene.

  You and the police chief continue to stare at one another. Beria knows that to look away will convince you of his guilt. But guilt for what? As yet, Beria has done nothing, though he realizes that subversive thoughts—if suspected—can earn one a bullet in the back of the head. You have already shrunk Beria’s fiefdom in Georgia and have uncoupled the two security divisions, state and internal, that Beria originally merged. But as one of your willing executioners, Beria has proved himself as bloodthirsty as any former secret police chief. Perhaps his record of cruelty and willingness to walk across the bodies of friends to gain a promotion is what you fear most. Beria no doubt wonders and worries, as you shift your gaze to Georgy Malenkov.

  Looking at the owl-eyed apparatchik, you know that whatever you say, Malenkov will approve. In my script, I have written: Malenkov, a manager by telephone, an able administrator and a slavish Stalinist. He always gets the job done. Example: He gladly lent himself not only to the mass purges of the 1930s, when thousands of party officials were murdered, but also to the anti-Jewish campaign in 1952 that led to the execution of thirteen prominent Jewish writers. No theoretician, he does understand politics and the need for reform. Well-read and well-spoken, Malenkov eclipses the others in language and logic.

  You suspiciously eye him, wondering if his silence masks ulterior motives.

  “Tell me, Georgy, how would you treat the doctors in custody? Try them or torture them or both?”

  The value in beating them is that if they don’t confess, they have at least learned a valuable lesson.

  “Which is?”

  The Great Stalin rules!

  You snicker on hearing that line, well aware that the unctuous Malenkov, who comes from a wealthy farming family and whose mother is the granddaughter of an Orthodox priest, regards himself as your social superior. He married a woman who pulled strings to help him gain a place in the Central Committee. Strong-willed and anti-Semitic, she rules the roost. In your view, Georgy and Laventry have much in common. They both traffic in flattery, and both have stores of records on the party members—left, right, and center. Two million files. No wonder Malenkov agrees with Beria that no one is innocent.

  In your own movie, Comrade Stalin, I would advise you to make clear that Malenkov’s wardrobe mirrors yours, and that he will never express an opinion on any issue without first gaining your approval.

  You stare, and Malenkov stares back with that placid look that makes others think of him as an agreeable neighbor. But you know better.

  “I had already decided that if illness forced me to step down, Malenkov would be my replacement.”

  Of course, Georgy knows your way of thinking: Trust no one, not even yourself. Beria and Khrushchev know the catechism also, but Georgy, lacking any initiative, will hew to your line.

  “Drink up, comrades!” you insist. “The night is young.”

  You walk to the phonograph and put on a different record. As the music plays, you softly clap your hands and move your head to the rhythm. Ah yes, at one time you could dance, even if awkwardly, while others paused to watch. The cynosure of the ladies and apparats, you, like Charlie Chaplin, played with the globe, which was nothing more than a balloon filled with hot air.

  You opine that the classical composers are fine, especially the Russian ones, but nothing can compare with folk songs, the music of the people. You can just see them working in the fields, playing with their children, dancing, smiling, and thanking the Soviets for the good life.

  You tell your dinner guests: “Comrades, we have come a long way, but the fight is not over. We are still besieged by enemies.”

  Those words can mean only demotions, dismissals, and, in some cases, death. Your dinner guests undoubtedly feel uneasy, since those closest to you always perish first. They will therefore not object if something happens to you. Without knowing it, you are digging your own grave.

  “How many traitors in our midst have we had to eliminate?”

  Walking over to Khrushchev, you pat the top of his bulbous head and ask Nikita to expound on the aims of British foreign policy, knowing full well that he cannot.

  “Well?”

  Khrushchev answers with a proverb. Another person’s soul is darkness.

  You reply with another proverb: “A fool can do more damage than an enemy.”

  Agreed, says Nikita, but who is the fool and who the enemy?

  “Nikita, try again to dance the hopak.”

  You step aside. As before, Nikita leaves his chair and circles the table. You find it hilarious to watch the rotund Niki attempt to perform the required leaps, squats, stretches, turns. Fortunately the music stops, and before you can change the record, Nikita pleads overindulgence.

  Too much lamb, he says, patting his stomach and feigning a burp.

  “Then finish the vodka,” you tell him, reaching across the table for the bottle and handing it to Khrushchev. “There’s only a third left.” Khrushchev finishes the bottle in three gulps and almost immediately becomes unsteady on his feet.

  “Sit down,” you say, and lead Nikita to one of the sofas. Standing beside him and contemptuously looking down at his hairless head, you take up your previous subject, to the poor man’s discomfort.

  “Now what I’d like to get from you, Nikita, given your vast experience”—and here you turn to the table and wink at the others—“is a recommendation for how to handle the doctors.”

  Wiping the perspiration from his forehead with his hand, Nikita dries his clammy paw on his pants and advises that you follow the example he set in Ukraine.

&nbs
p; “Namely?”

  I took matters into my own hands. I resorted to extreme measures.

  “Always you say 'I.’ Did you not confer with the local Soviets? Why so conceited?”

  I . . . I mean . . .

  “Without saying 'I,’ please explain.”

  We starved peasants into submission and liquidated Poles, nationalists, and other enemies of the people.

  “Then are you recommending starvation or liquidation?”

  A confused Khrushchev replies: The first is slow and the second immediate. If the first doesn’t work, use the second.

  You shake your head and remark: “We want confessions, not corpses. Ideas, Nikita, have never been your strong suit.”

  Then you return to the dinner table, followed by a chastened and wobbly Khrushchev, who slumps in his chair, profusely sweating. The poor man looks as if he will cry, and then plaintively says: Koba, you know the peasants trusted me.

  “To do what? I gave the orders.”

  The peasants paid local scribes to write and they asked me to send you their pleas, told with their heart’s blood.

  You object: “Rubbish!” But Khrushchev speaks the truth. Your dossier contains hundreds of such letters. I can re-create some of them here.

  Dear Comrade Khrushchev,

  Surely our Great Father Stalin knows nothing of the plight of the peasants. If he did, I know he would, like the tsar, send us food and organize food kitchens. The people cannot eat air. Stalin promised that we would not be forced into collective farms. When the government set grain quotas, execution by famine followed. The quotas were so great that they could not have been met in ten years. Who signed this act for mass murder?

  Then soldiers arrived to find any grain the farmers might have hidden. They stabbed the earth with bayonets and ramrods. They dug up floors and cellars. They turned over vegetable gardens. Day and night trucks hauled away confiscated grain, but they had no place to store it. So they left it to rot on the ground. Then came the famine. Rains stopped and the dust, like smoke, hovered in the air. People cried that the heavens had caught fire and the end of the world had arrived.

  People starved. First the old and the sick, then the children. Fathers ran away unable to bear the hungry cries of their children. The mothers died last.

  Please, dear Comrade Khrushchev, bring our condition to the attention of our Beloved Leader. He will know what to do.

  A faithful servant of the state,

  Leysa Vovka

  Dear Nikita Sergeyevich,

  With my last few kopeks I am paying a scribe to write.

  Excuse my familiarity, but you have always said that you were a friend of the peasants. In our village, we have no grain, no bread. Our entire seed fund has been taken, so we have nothing for spring wheat or other grains. Everyone lives in terror. Mothers scream in fear when they look at their starving children. You must help us. As people begin to swell from hunger, they take to eating roots, nettles, snakes, rats, mice, birds, ants, worms. I have seen people eat leather, even old furs. How could our dear Vozhd not know? Tell him before it is too late.

  People are becoming cannibals, and our village a cemetery. When a person dies, his family cut up the corpse and cook it. I saw a man so mad with hunger that he was gnawing on the leg of a stool. In the huts, people lie hardly breathing or dead. The children look like rotting birds with sharp beaks. Soon we will all starve, and the stench will reach all the way to heaven. Then what will you and Comrade Stalin say standing before the throne of God? You must feed us.

  Serhiy Usenko

  Further notes. Nikita S. Khrushchev. Background: peasant, childhood poverty, poor student, a metal fitter’s apprentice, factory worker, mechanic in a mine, political organizer. First wife dies of typhus. To show his Bolshevik sympathies, Khrushchev refuses to allow her coffin to pass through the church to reach the cemetery behind. Instead, he and friends lift the coffin over the back fence and place it in the burial ground, to the shock and chagrin of the village. Second wife he divorces. The third is educated and comes from a well-to-do Ukrainian family. To improve his secondary education, he enrolls in the Stalin Industrial Academy, but never completes his studies. He becomes the protégé of Lazar M. Kaganovich, Secretary General of the Ukrainian Party’s Central Committee, and supports Stalin’s purges, which affect many of his own friends and colleagues.

  You save Nikolai Bulganin for last. We know from wiretaps Beria installed in the Kremlin what you think of the man: pretentious, clever, ambitious, and ruthless. With his blond hair and goatee, he assumes the airs of an aristocratic officer, although he can’t read a map or decipher a chart. A frequent guest on the western embassy cocktail circuit, Bulganin enjoys a reputation for wit and intelligence. Behind his back, you and the others call him the plumber, because he had once been in charge of maintaining the drains for the Moscow Municipality.

  “Nikolai,” you say, “in light of your comrades’ advice, where do you stand on the issue?”

  I’d hang the doctors in public squares before large crowds, as a lesson to others.

  “Before or after they confessed?”

  What’s to confess? If Koba sees a plot here, there’s no dispute.

  “We want them to name names.”

  Comrade Beria has mastered that art.

  Beria squirms in his chair, clearly persuaded that Bulganin is scheming. If you meant to pay me a compliment, remarks Beria, I’ll gladly accept it.

  Bulganin says nothing.

  You study the group for a minute, then declare that underlying the doctors’ plot is a larger problem: Jewish perfidy in general.

  “They do not assimilate,” you say. “They insist on maintaining their own culture and language. They scorn Trofim Lysenko, our great biologist. They seem to think they own the sciences. And, as we have been told, they want a separate Jewish republic set aside for them in the Crimea. The money? It will come from American Jewish capitalists.”

  The colonel resumes.

  You know that all the people at the table have Jewish connections, including yourself. Rumors abound that you have ordered the construction of new camps and barracks in Siberia to house Russian Jews. If you plan to exile them all, such an order will invite pogroms and popular outbursts. The very trains carrying the exiles to the east will be subject to attacks and massacres. Beria privately hazards that you want to provoke America, and thus begin the Great War, a holy war, in which the USSR will extirpate the universal evil of capitalism and destroy international Jewry, its agent. Are these rumors true? I doubt it. But Beria insists that Armageddon is close at hand, and that on March fifth the arrest and exile of Jews will begin. Undoubtedly Beria’s fear explains why he chose this night, February 28–March 1, to act. The timing was apropos. He guessed how you intended to proceed. You would crush the four Politburo members at the table by using the Jewish question as your cudgel. And as events transpired, and as my film shows, he was right. But we haven’t yet arrived at that point, which requires a flashback.

  “Your film, Colonel, seems to be proceeding ass backwards.”

  Patience. Let us return to where we left off. After the nonsense about the doctors’ plot, you turned personal.

  “Laventry, now that we’ve guaranteed Mingrelian loyalty—or have we?”

  Beria shifts uncomfortably in his chair. He knows when you are baiting your line for a fishing expedition. For some reason, his ethnicity has always given you cause to needle him. But on this occasion, unlike others, he holds his ground.

  As you learned from our criminal investigations, replies Beria, the Mingrelian community does not wish to secede and will not collaborate with the western powers. They are loyal Russians.

  “Your mother came from the community of Uria Sopeli, in Mingrelia, where you were born.”

  It’s all there in my official biography.

  “Uria Sopeli was inhabited mostly by Jews. And your mother worked as a housekeeper for one.”

  My mother was an honest woman.


  You, Comrade Stalin, lean back languidly in your chair as you recall the exchange. “Who knows, she might have had an affair, and you . . . the result.”

  I have no Jewish blood. Pavel Khukhaevich Beria was my father.

  “And your sister, Anna. Did she not marry a Jew?”

  Your point, Comrade Stalin?

  “The Jews have insinuated themselves into every level of society. They have infiltrated our medical profession.”

  Then let us root them out.

  “We can begin with your brother-in-law. Have your sister divorce him. In 1947, I ordered Svetlana—my own daughter—to divorce her Jewish husband, Grigory Morozov. When she cried that she loved him, I told her that he, like her first Jewish liaison, Alexsei Kapler, would be exiled to Siberia. The next day the marriage ended.”

  What you fail to say, and what the secret services know, is that your elder son, Yakov Dzhugashvili, married a prominent Jewish dancer from Odessa, Yulia Meltzer, whom you sentenced to prison for two years on the pretext that she had persuaded Yakov to surrender to the Germans. We also know that she was never the same afterward, owing to the traumatic experience.

  As the colonel’s movie of the last supper unrolled, Stalin seemed amazed at how much Beria and his secret services knew about him, Malenkov, Khrushchev, and Bulganin, and about the many skeletons in their closets. Presumably they could also guess that in his own deliberate and calculated way, he wanted to purge them. The implications of this knowledge meant that with all of them on the chopping block, no one would break ranks and object to the Vozhd’s death.

  The colonel moved ahead.

  Before you can pick your next victim, the pear-shaped, big-bottomed Malenkov forthrightly admits that when you demanded Svetlana divorce her husband because he was a Jew, Malenkov told his daughter, Volya Georgiyevna Malenkova, to follow Svetlana’s example. Volya resisted, so he ordered her husband, Vladimir Shamberg, an economist, to divorce her. He did, on the advice of his father, who told him that Malenkov had designs on moving up in the Soviet hierarchy.

  When it comes to Khrushchev, you are understandably worried about how to treat him. After all, his son, Leonid, died a hero in the Great War, and was married to a Jewess, Liuba Sizykh Khrushcheva, who served a term in a labor camp on charges of spying. So you save Nikita for last, and turn instead to Bulganin.