Death at the Dacha

by Paul M. Levitt

  She shared this information on Stalin’s second visit to the cottage. A former cavalry officer, Captain Ivan Narvinsky, had come calling. He had recently moved to the neighborhood and had noticed Ana’s comeliness. Immediately, Stalin hated him, not only for having served the tsar, but also for his interest in Ana. To make matters worse, Stalin came off poorly in a comparison. With highly polished boots and a starched uniform, the captain exhibited pink cheeks, a neatly barbered black twirled mustachio, and a lilac cologne. He had brought a box of chocolates.

  Stalin, having walked through a rainstorm and sat through an allnight session arguing the political cost of compromise, resembled a soaked alley cat. His long hair wanted cutting and his beard needed trimming. His semi-military tunic was rumpled and his pants baggy. Removing his soft leather Caucasian boots at the door, he felt woefully out of place, ready for bed not dinner.

  At the table, salad was followed by a beef dish, supplemented by rye bread, onions, beets, and pickles. Vodka flowed liberally. For dessert, Mrs. Skilowitz served tea and jam. During the meal, the captain regaled the party with stories about his adventures in the tsar’s guard. Stalin sat silently. When the captain described a great ball at the Alexander Palace in all its magnificence and elegance, Stalin finally spoke.

  “And who paid for all this splendor?”

  The captain, not understanding, replied, “The tsar. The party was at his expense.”

  “In other words,” Stalin riposted, “the people paid . . . with their toil and taxes.”

  “Surely,” the captain said imperiously, “you are not of the socialist persuasion?”

  Ana, a guest in the Skilowitz house, tried to shield her relatives and lighten the conversation with a joke, but only made matters worse. With the tsar’s abdication in March, just two months before, the captain seemed in no mood for humor about Nicholas Romanov. Ana, however, persisted.

  “A man reportedly said, ‘Nicholas is a moron!’ and was arrested by a policeman. ‘No, sir, I meant not our respected Emperor, but another Nicholas!’ ‘Don’t try to trick me: If you say “moron,” you are obviously referring to our tsar!’”

  The captain rose, clicked his heels, thanked Mrs. Skilowitz for the meal, and excused himself. As he exited the cottage, Ana rose and followed him outside. No one at the table spoke. Several minutes later, Ana returned with the captain in tow. A disgusted Stalin fell into a funk.

  Yalek tried to dispel the gloom by telling a story about a peasant who came to his father’s general store and bought a loaf of bread. Lacking the money to buy butter or honey to put on his bread, he stood next to the honey barrel and let the loaf slip into the barrel. When Yalek’s father cried that the man was trying to get honey for free, the man exclaimed, “What do you mean leaving the lid off the barrel? You have ruined my bread.” With the exception of Stalin, everyone politely laughed, acknowledging the shrewdness of peasants.

  Noting Stalin’s glumness, Ana said, “Josif, you are not enjoying yourself.”

  “I was just thinking,” he replied, “how many of our people go to bed hungry, lacking even a loaf of bread.”

  The captain scowled. The others looked solemn. Stalin continued. “We have some of the richest soil on earth, the chernozem belt, and yet we cannot feed our nation. And why? Because one percent of the population consumes ninety percent of the country’s wealth. Not until the peasants own the granaries will we be a free and happy people.”

  “And how do you propose to bring about that joyous day?” asked the captain sarcastically.

  “Through revolution.”

  “Should that day ever come, I will take up my saber again and fight to restore the monarchy.”

  “If you’re so damned willing to fight, why aren’t you at the front helping to combat the Germans?”

  “Sir, are you insinuating I am a coward?”

  “If the shoe fits . . .” Stalin answered recklessly.

  “My second will call on you in the morning. Your residence?”

  Fade quickly to the Dacha and Stalin’s sofa. Evening.

  Stalin could envision his movie being shown in his private cinema, with all the apparatchiks present, oohing and aahing, but for now, given his paralytic condition, he would have to settle for a mental re-creation. Having deliberately conflated his story with Turgenev’s novella, The Diary of a Superfluous Man, he realized that his movie was taking on a life of its own, distorting one fiction as it pursued another. Perhaps no one would notice. So he decided to see where his dreaming took him.

  Cut to a spruce forest near Petrograd.

  Stalin arrived early and waited. His second, Lev Kamenev, tried to persuade him to apologize. But Stalin felt confident that he could shoot a pistol as well as any man. Furthermore, by killing the captain, he would rid himself of a competitor for Ana’s attentions. In the distance, horses were heard coming down the path at a gallop. Before the horsemen reached the dueling ground, a shot echoed through the forest. A voice cried, “Assassin,” and then the captain’s second rode into the clearing, leading a horse with a body slumped in the saddle. The captain was dead; a single shot to the head had killed him. The killer had escaped, though the second had fired his own pistol in the assassin’s direction.

  The captain’s second wanted to know if Stalin and Kamenev had arrived alone? Yes. Had they spoken of the duel to anyone? No. Did the Skilowitz family know? Perhaps. Could they think of anyone who wished the captain harm? A peculiar question on the day of a duel, when Captain Narvinsky’s opposite presumably hoped to kill him.

  “The captain told me that over dinner you sounded like a Bolshevik. Captain Narvinsky despised the whole lot of them. Wouldn’t you say that his strong feelings could explain why someone would shoot him? Someone who knew about the duel.”

  There matters stood until Stalin met Ana at a service for her Uncle Yalek, who had died suddenly from a cerebral hemorrhage. She wore black, and her face was veiled. They both sat through the service and followed the coffin to the cemetery, where they left flowers and exited the grounds together. The fragrant summer air, so at odds with the moment, led Ana to softly say, “Such strange death weather.”

  “Like the day of the duel.”

  She looked at him incredulously. “Duel? What duel? Who?”

  Failing to note her confusion, he said, “The shooter, obviously a good shot, hid at some distance.”

  Stalin again wondered whether he was telling his story or Turgenev’s. The two had seemingly merged. He shuddered. The thought that he could no longer distinguish between fancy and fact scared him. Such was the state of his imaginings and mind screen. During these ruminations, Ana stood by silently. He resumed the conversation, asking when he could see her again.

  After an awkward pause, she suggested June 21, to appreciate the magical, lambent light of the white night.

  On the longest day of the year, he and Ana sat on a bank of the Neva and watched the sky mutate from bright to dark to bright, all within an hour. On the night that so many of the city’s denizens never go to bed, Stalin and Ana returned to his room and made love. He would have liked to celebrate the first time in a splendid setting, but at the moment all he had to offer was a shabby room with a smoking candle, in a cheap hotel. As they lay on the cot afterward, he worried about his manliness and spoke some of his unhappy childhood, but mostly of his dreams for the future under Lenin’s enlightened leadership.

  “I heard a rumor,” she said, “that your Pravda articles promoting reconciliation among the revolutionary parties have displeased Lenin.”

  “He despises compromise.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Wait and watch.”

  “I take that to mean you’ll trim your sails to suit his course.”

  “It all depends on how he treats me.”

  “You sound like a little boy who wants to be loved by his daddy.”

  Stalin said nothing. He merely remembered an earlier compromise. Kato’s mother had insisted on an Orthodox Church w
edding. He had resisted, but Kato begged him to grant her mother this one wish. So they were married by a former seminarian Stalin had known at school.

  When Stalin and Ana parted in the morning, he was besotted, intoxicated by her person and her perfume. Just a few years later, in a store in Moscow, he detected the scent, and found himself standing behind a dark-haired woman holding a vaporizer and trying to decide whether this essence was right for her. Stalin startled her by recommending the perfume. The woman, a perfect stranger, asked him how anyone could be sure about something as intangible as a scent. He replied, “Ideas are vaporous, and yet we know a good one from a bad.”

  “And what, in your opinion, is a good idea?”

  “One that works. And I can tell you from personal experience that this perfume works.”

  The question that remained unanswered at the time was: Would Lenin’s ideas work?

  CHAPTER 3

  Fade from Stalin and Ana leaving the hotel, kissing and whispering their goodbyes. The camera then follows the Moscow River, lit by a silvery light, to the Kremlin and Colonel Khrustalev, who is beseeching the Politburo cronies to allow a young woman, Regina Sabashnikova, to see the dying Stalin.

  “Stalin and her mother, she says, were once married. She’s been pestering me and the dacha guards for hours.”

  “Her name again?”

  “Regina Sabashnikova, daughter of Ana Rubinstein.”

  “We have no record of such a marriage.”

  “She said they tied the knot in Petrograd, October 1917.”

  “Perhaps,” mused Beria sardonically, “that’s why he missed the revolution.”

  “She plans to write Comrade Malenkov a letter.”

  “I’ll be sure to file it under classified,” said Malenkov.

  The colonel, taking that statement as an invitation to leave, thanked the men and returned to the dacha.

  Molotov and the four Politburo members sat for a minute, lost in thought.

  “In the 1920s,” Molotov explained to the members of the Politburo, “he confiscated nearly all the documents pertaining to his personal life and destroyed most of the 'incriminating’ ones. Thus, we know very little about his private life.”

  Beria leaned his elbows on the felt-topped table, pressed his hands to his temples, and said, “My files are also incomplete—but noteworthy.”

  Malenkov, not to be outdone, added, “I have files, too.”

  An impatient Khrushchev blurted, “If you’re so damn proud of your secret dossiers, then out with it!”

  Bulganin sat quietly stroking his goatee.

  Beria continued. “My files indicate that for dozens of years, someone in high places took care of Rubinstein and her daughter, Regina. She is living or lived in an elite neighborhood on Vasilievsky Island, opposite the building housing the leadership of the Leningrad Communist Party.”

  Malenkov, anxious to prove the value of his records, interrupted. “I might add that Ana and her daughter stayed in Leningrad during the siege. The question is: How did they survive when a million others starved?”

  Beria: “They likely survived on food packages from the party branch.”

  Molotov: “Do we know anything more about the woman seeking entrance at the dacha gate? Daughters don’t just materialize out of thin air. She’s probably someone’s bastard.”

  Beria: “I can have the colonel check my records and call us back.”

  “No need,” said Malenkov smugly. He picked up one of the telephones on Stalin’s desk, dialed, asked for a certain file, requested that it be read to him, made some notes, and hung up. He self-righteously reported: “Regina Kostiovsky married Vladimir Sabashnikov, an engineer. In September 1950, they moved to Moscow. Stalin made sure the Sabashnikov couple received a spacious apartment. They lived in a luxurious building near Taganka Square. One more thing, and this point speaks to those who call the Vozhd an anti-Semite. Shortly after moving to Moscow, Regina was hired as an engineer at a classified institute that developed innovative weaponry, even though the KGB had months before issued an official decree not to hire Jews to work in security-related institutions.”

  Bulganin sighed. “Why waste time on this subject?”

  “Because,” Beria responded, “Stalin’s history is also ours.”

  An exasperated Bulganin looked around the table and said, “We all know what happened.”

  “Do we?” asked Khrushchev, and went on to say that though the facts were few and rationed, they knew that when Lenin arrived at the Finland Station in Petrograd, he expressed his disapproval of Stalin’s conciliatory editorials. Stalin seemed to disappear for two months, surfacing at a public demonstration and a few meetings to show his support for Lenin. On July sixth, the authorities issued an arrest warrant for Lenin, who then hid at the Alliluyev apartment, where Stalin was staying. Lenin had to choose between arrest or flight. He chose the latter, and Stalin helped spirit him across the Finnish border to safety. “But we have no idea what role Stalin played in the decision.”

  Molotov looked dumbfounded. “How can you even ask such a question? And how do you expect to find the information to prove it? Lenin is dead, Stalin dying, and the Alliluyevs nearly all gone.”

  “We have family letters and memoirs.”

  “All of them censored or heavily redacted. And how do we know they are true?”

  Fade to the Dacha and the dying generalissimo.

  Stalin snorted, knowing all too well what had taken place in the Alliluyev’s Petrograd apartment, located in the working-class Vyborg district north of the main channel of the Neva River. He could see his bedroom and the mirror used to shave Lenin’s beard, the reading chair and small round-topped table, the parquet floors and wardrobe closet. He smiled as he remembered lying on his narrow bed with its metal frame and looking through an adjoining door into Nadya’s room. He could picture the floor-to-ceiling Swedish tile stove and smell the cooking odors that issued from the kitchen.

  Voice-over: Stalin narrates.

  I first met the family in 1904. Sergei Alliluyev, the father, worked in the Tiflis railway shop as a skilled mechanic. His wife, Olga, devoted herself to keeping the home and raising the children: Pavel, Fyodor, and Na-dezhda, familiarly called Nadya. A kind and loving woman, Olga always made me feel more than welcome. Unlike my own mother, she moved me to laughter and brought out my antic and storytelling side, which I put to good use entertaining her children when they were young. Over the years, we remained in contact, and I lodged with them at different times in Petrograd. It was to them I turned for help in hiding Lenin, the very day the government ordered his arrest.

  With the Alliluyevs’ permission, I hid Lenin and another man in their apartment from July 7 to July 11. During those few days Lenin and I grew as close as brothers. We shared hopes and thoughts, feelings and fears. When he said he was inclined to turn himself in to the authorities so he could stand trial and present his case for revolution, I dissuaded him. There were weighty arguments on both sides. A trial would provide a world stage from which he could attack the government. Yes, I said, if journalists are allowed in court. But what if they’re not? He said that flight was tantamount to a confession of guilt, which could harm the Bolsheviks’ cause with workers and soldiers. You are assuming, I said, that you will receive a fair trial. What makes you so sure? And if some madman takes it upon himself to kill you in court, what then? As Ilyich pondered that threat, I applied the coup de grace, reminding him that once on trial, he might be asked about his German connections. He shook his head and conceded that having crossed Germany in a sealed train suggested that he and the Bosch had arrived at some agreement. It was a danger he hadn’t entertained. The next day I shaved off his beard and found him a wig. He hugged me and said his appreciation knew no bounds. At that moment I felt like his best-loved comrade.

  On July 11, I and a few others accompanied Lenin, in disguise and under an assumed name, to the Maritime Station for the journey to Razliv, a small village not far from Petrograd. The
tickets had been purchased in advance. We were all dressed in working clothes and said little. If the authorities had boarded the train, they would have found nothing out of the ordinary. In Razliv we walked a short distance to a rented cottage, where Lenin lived for a month before crossing the border into Finland and a safer refuge.

  On my return to Petrograd, I resumed living in the Alliluyev apartment and continued my work for the party, defending Lenin against the government charge of treason. What I could not defend were my intimacies with Olga and my affair with Ana; all the while Nadezhda, two months shy of sixteen, kept hinting that she wanted me to notice her. One night it came to a head when Nadezhda marched into my room and said angrily: “I know it all!”

  At first I thought she was referring to Lenin and our having moved him out of the city. But then she grew specific.

  “Mother and that Rubinstein woman.”

  Focusing his mental camera on Nadya, he hoped the film would capture her manic moods and her impatience. Captious is how he described her then, but less than two years later, on March 24, 1919, he married her. He was forty and she, seventeen.

  “Nadya, your mother is happily married to Sergei, a loving husband and a fond father.”

  “She believes in free love. I know it; she told me.”

  “Told you what?”

  “That Bolshevik women may take lovers.”

  “And where is this assignation supposed to have taken place? I live under your nose”