Death at the Dacha

by Paul M. Levitt

  Nadya picked up her shawl from the floor. As she neatly folded it, she grew increasingly angry. “What I understand, you fail to. Namely: Who is Stalin, the real Stalin, not the one who fashions himself a man of steel, not the schoolboy adored by his mother, not the genius Beria makes you out to be, but the real Stalin?”

  Stalin shook his head, as if to clear the film from his eyes. “Just look in your desk drawer. You have dozens of photographs of me, in different poses and places. That’s who I am.”

  “You are a man who finds revolution more attractive than people. Just look at what the revolution has brought: famine and displacement.”

  “No: equality, freedom, and opportunity.”

  “For whom? Not the dead.”

  “For all the future generations.”

  “Abstractions, vaporous nonsense. You care nothing about others. It’s all about you. Your dachas, your fawning aides, your name emblazoned across the country and spoken with god-like reverence. You are a self-absorbed monster.”

  Stalin, feeling more hurt than hated, argued, “Can’t you see that I am trying to keep the country from becoming another Weimar, with its degenerate politicians and music and art?” As she collected her shawls and folded them, he took a pipe from his pocket and used it like a baton, orchestrating his thoughts. “Have you seen the depths to which a great country like Germany has fallen? Cabarets with naked women, drugs, paintings that only an opium addict could make sense of, no sense of reality, a world askew. Paris and London the same. The United States no different. They’re all,” he frothed, pointing to her small nightstand, “like the characters in that book you’re reading.”

  “The Green Hat. What do you know about it?”

  “Trash”

  “You haven’t even read the novel.”

  A wicked smile animated his face. “Aha, but I have!”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “A few nights ago, I stayed up and read the whole damn thing, with its bitchy heroine.” He could even picture himself reading the book and commenting out loud on the spoiled life of Iris Storm.

  She went to the bed table and opened the book. “I don’t see any greasy fingerprints on the pages.”

  Stalin deliberately wiped his hands on her bedspread, and then held up his palms. “See! Clean.”

  “You’re contemptible.”

  He burped again. “There’s your proof.”

  She stared at him without speaking. Then she took several deep breaths, as if preparing herself for a sprint. “I should think it was your kind of book. It describes the decadence of the spoiled rich.”

  “The English upper classes are worse than our own, with their snobbery and smart talk, and their stylish clothes and posh cars. If not for your relishing the book, I would have stopped reading after the first chapter. The insincerity and cynicism of these bored people made me wish that when they were burning their candles at both ends, they would burn down their houses and all their corrupt institutions. The femme fatale—”

  “Iris Storm.”

  “Beneath the glamour and glitter she’s a whore.”

  “No, a tragic heroine.”

  “How can you read such rubbish?”

  “I understand the woman.”

  “Driving around London in her yellow Hispano-Suiza, spreading romantic intrigue—she’s a perfect example of the spoiled bourgeoisie.”

  Nadya opened a desk drawer and removed a scrap of paper on which she had written the pages she wanted to revisit. Thumbing through the book, she came to the passage she wished Stalin to hear. “When I read this, I can’t help but think of myself.” She read: “You see, I am not what you think. I am not the proud adventuress who touches men for pleasure, the silly lady who misbehaves for fun. I am she who hates the thing she is, she who loathes the thing she does.”

  “The devil take you, the book, and Iris Storm,” Stalin snarled and stomped out of the room, chastising himself for having thought the book would give him some insight into Nadya’s moods.

  Nadya held the book close to her bosom as if she wished to protect it from Stalin’s violence. Then she sat at her desk and fondly re-read the pages she had written down. Less than a month later she was dead.

  ******

  Stalin’s movie cut from Nadya’s bedroom to his Kremlin office, where the indistinguishable voices of the Politburo continued to rehash the past as they tried to fathom a future.

  - Her death changed him.

  - And not for the better.

  - He kept mumbling, “I didn’t save her.”

  - At the time, he harped on not taking her to the movies. I never understood the connection.

  - To his mind, such an oversight made him a bad husband.

  - Years later, he said, “She did a terrible thing . . . she maimed me for the rest of my life.”

  - No wonder he never quit trying to discover why she had shot herself.

  - Of all the reasons he proposed, not one of them included his own behavior.

  As much as he wished to omit the next scene, Stalin knew that the last supper was obligatory. Like a well-made play, all the other scenes pointed to the denouement, in this instance, the night of November 9, 1932. Stalin and friends were celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution with a party in Kliment and Ekaterina Voroshilov’s Kremlin apartment. Among the guests were Vyacheslav Molotov and his wife Polina, whom Stalin counted as one of the possible reasons for Nadya’s suicide. Stalin and Nadya sat facing each other across the dinner table. The food, cooked downstairs in the Kremlin kitchen, arrived minutes later: cold cuts, dressed herring, mixed salads, pickled vegetables, raw cold bacon, meat aspic, pirozhki, hard cheeses, caviar, canapés, open sandwiches, breads, and blistered peppers. Two fish loaves, salmon and sturgeon, and grilled lamb constituted the main dishes. They arrived smothered with layers of grated, boiled vegetables (potatoes, carrots, and beetroots), chopped onions, and mayonnaise. Side dishes contained rice, hard-boiled eggs, mushrooms, and dill. The drinks of choice, vodka and Georgian wine, flowed copiously.

  Stalin surmised from Nadya’s dour expression that she was thinking of her fellow students who had filled her with stories of futility and famine. Reason enough to have exiled them to Ukraine. No, he had not executed them. Although tempted to do so, he thought it more fitting to send them to collective farms where they need not traffic in rumors but could see firsthand the face of starvation. He took silent pleasure in knowing that the profusion of food facing his guests would heighten her guilt and inhibit her appetite. His assumption proved correct when she observed that parts of the country were starving while they banqueted. “Better satiation than emaciation,” he snapped. As the party progressed, so too did the drunkenness and bawdiness. Stalin always reveled in his scatological humor, and tonight was no exception. He felt in good spirits and made no attempt to hide his amorous overtures to a Red Army commander’s wife, an actress known for her numerous affairs and risqué dresses.

  As she and Stalin bantered, Nadya sat in her new black dress appliquéd with a rose pattern. Her brother Pavel had brought the dress from Berlin as a gift. He had also presented her with a small pistol, a German Mauser. A rose in her dark hair provided a dashing touch. She hoped to arrest her husband’s attention with the new dress, but Stalin seemed not to notice. She smiled at him, to no effect. Suddenly she felt sad and alone. Others were dancing and singing. She sat ignored. In an act of defiance, she asked her Georgian godfather, Abel Yenukidze, the Kremlin overseer, to dance with her, even though he did not enjoy a good reputation, having scandalized the Bolsheviks with his sexual appetite for teenage ballerinas. Nadya danced frenetically, reminding Stalin of Nora’s tarantella in A Doll’s House. His wife’s light, quick steps and teasing flirtatious behavior infuriated him. All she lacked was a tambourine.

  Stalin became all the more attentive to the actress, clownishly putting pieces of fruit in her tea and throwing bread balls at her. By the time Nadya had resumed her seat at the table, and
watched as Stalin and the actress teased one another, she hoped that the Red Army commander would extricate his wife and exit. Not so, people were afraid of offending the Vozhd. The longer she watched her husband’s boorish attempts to be amorous, the more infuriated she became. Stalin chose this moment to make a toast. He couldn’t remember whether he proposed it to increase her annoyance or for some other reason. In any event, he filled his glass with vodka and stood. The table fell silent.

  “I drink to all those who have contributed to the destruction of the enemies of the state!”

  Nadya failed to raise her glass.

  “Why,” Stalin asked, “are you not toasting our brave heroes?”

  “Murderers,” she said softly, but loud enough for those around her to catch.

  “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that. Now drink to the annihilation of enemies of the people.”

  She turned away.

  Stalin, not one to be ignored, added to his movie the final verbal exchanges of their marriage.

  “Have a drink!” When she continued to ignore him, he threw an orange peel at her and then a cigarette butt. “Hey you, have a drink!”

  “My name isn’t hey,” she snarled, as she left her chair and headed for the door.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Stalin truculently asked.

  “Shut up! Just shut up!”

  Her leaving sucked the air out of the room. Silence filled the vacuum, then whispers. “Did you hear that?” “I can hardly believe it.” “If my wife ever spoke to me that way. . . .” A drunken Stalin slurred, “What a fool.”

  CHORUS: (from Ivan the Terrible)

  The Grand Prince is sole master of his word.

  At his will it is given, at his will it is altered.

  The Grand Prince’s will is law!

  Seconds later, Polina Molotova quit her seat at the table, put on her coat, and followed Nadya, concerned about her state of mind. Polina caught up with her at the foot of the stairs, and they walked around the Kremlin grounds. Stalin knew the substance of their conversation because Polina later told him. What subsequently took place in the apartment, when Nadya was alone, he could easily imagine, but no matter how often he returned to the question of motive, he remained at a loss.

  Countless times he had tried to find a reason for her death, desperately seeking some agent, some outside source. For the sake of clarity, he needed to find, not only for himself but also for the sake of this cinematic story, his last movie, a simple discernible motive. Hating complexity, he once again began to sort through the possible interpretations, beginning with the medical, hoping to discover the Rosetta stone.

  She had come from a family rife with insecurities and mental problems. Her mother suffered from a hypersexual disorder, her father from a lack of self-esteem. Her sister, Anna, treated her as the black sheep in the family. And her brother Pavel, whom she idolized, was her model for all men. Nadya had gone to Germany to seek treatment for the ossification of cranial tissue that connects the skull bones. As the disease progressed, so too did her headaches and depression. She often behaved manically and acted irrationally. Her bipolar moods led her one minute to exhibit spousal affection and the next to threaten suicide. Her medicine chest held all manner of medicines, none of which Stalin approved of. His advice to “Pull yourself together” maddened her all the more. Frequently enervated, she would take to her room, where her dressing table mirror confirmed her paleness and fleeting youth. Uninterested in the people around her, she lived vicariously through novels about women. Her favorite: The Green Hat.

  Molotov had consoled Stalin by telling him that Nadya suffered from women’s whims and from her gypsy blood, which fueled her jealousy of him. But Stalin knew that Nadya had political reasons for resenting him. Her wish to excel as a Bolshevik had never materialized; all the while her husband was rising to the top. Matters of state, which she was powerless to affect, haunted her. She anguished over people starving, over peasants losing their land, over wandering farmers looking for work or trying to find their way out of the country. Her student friends had spoken of purges and pogroms, unimaginable conduct in a Soviet paradise.

  Her own failures were magnified in the success of Polina Molotova, her confidante, who managed a perfume factory and enjoyed the respect of male and female colleagues alike. Even Stalin admired her, at least at first. Nadya told Polina, more than once, that the man she had married was not now the man that he seemed to her in her youth, and that she was painfully disappointed. In the days before her death, she said that she was fed up with everything.

  At Stalin’s request, Polina recounted for Stalin what had taken place as she and Nadya walked the Kremlin grounds. His mental camera had frequently reviewed the reel.

  “This bitter weather,” said Polina, “is not conducive to a stroll in the garden.”

  “I’m not ready to return to my apartment,” replied Nadya, wearing a lined cloth coat and a rabbit-fur muffler.

  “Leaving the dinner party was wrong. On such a day as this, the fifteenth anniversary of the revolution, you should make allowances. Of course the men were drunk and making eyes at other women. They were merely expressing their manliness and celebrating their great achievement. A revolution, then a civil war, countless deaths . . . you have to take such things into account. These men have overthrown the old world and created a new one.”

  “They have merely exchanged one tyranny for another. I can see it in their pride and sense of entitlement.” She kicked at the crusty snow, which had begun to freeze.

  Polina put an arm around Nadya’s shoulders. They walked in silence for several minutes before Polina observed, “Once the Politburo can decide on a general line, a way forward that everyone approves, the bickering and backstabbing will end. You’ll see.”

  “Josif has changed. In a favorite book of mine, The Green Hat, the disappointed heroine dashes out of the house, climbs into an automobile, speeds down the road, misses a curve, and hits a tree, killing herself." She sniffled. “Imagine! That very tree had been a meeting place for Iris and her sweetheart.”

  “Why,” Polina interrupted, “are you telling me this story?”

  “Because . . .” she paused, looking like a bewildered child, “at one time he cared for me. We would go to the movies and hold hands, like lovers. Now he takes vacations alone and broods. If I try to be affectionate, he rebuffs me. I know that he finds feminine company elsewhere.”

  Polina stopped and faced Nadya. “He needs you!” Pause. “And you need him! This is a difficult period for both of you, but the last thing either of you needs is a divorce.”

  “Before we married, I heard a rumor that the delay—we waited several months—was because his divorce from another woman hadn’t come through yet. Ever since his days as a young revolutionary, he’s maintained a secret life in addition to his public one.”

  “The same is true of all the revolutionaries. It’s a matter of safety. That’s why nearly all of them have noms de guerre. My own husband is a good example. His real name, as you know, is Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Skryabin. He took the name Molotov to protect his family from reprisals.”

  Nadya turned and walked toward her apartment. Polina accompanied her. “I don’t think he ever loved me, not really. Not the way he loved Kato.”

  “Nadezhda, that was thirty-three years ago. He’s fifty-four now.”

  Wistfully, she replied, “And I am thirty-one, much too young to slip away.”

  “What in the world does that mean?”

  “Just a figure of speech.”

  “You have a future at the Academy and a full life of exciting work in front of you. Bolsheviks don’t despair.”

  When they reached the Poteshny Palace, they parted. Nadya went to her apartment and Polina crossed the lane to hers.

  Stalin could easily envision the rest.

  The maid asked if she wanted any help. Nadya thanked her but replied that she wished to be alone, blaming a headache for her having left the party. S
he told the maid she was free to retire for the night. Sitting at her desk, she wrote a letter to Stalin, one that he never shared with the world, and that he regarded as brutal in its accusations. She put the letter in an envelope addressed to her husband and left it on the desk. Then she opened a drawer and removed a photographic album.

  And here Stalin’s mind screen created a montage effect.

  As she flipped the pages of the album, Stalin saw pictures of himself and Nadya.

  In the garden at Sochi.

  On the beach in the Crimea.

  At Zubalova on a wooded path.

  By an outdoor table and Nadya wearing a shawl.

  Nadya alone, in a white dress with her hair pulled back in a bun, showing her tanned face to handsome effect.

  The photographs consumed numerous albums and ran into the hundreds. He and Nadya: talking, laughing, entertaining, picnicking. The old photos changed from black and white to color, a rainbow of their life in photographs.

  After putting away the albums, she reached for her diary and made several entries. Then she stepped out of her dress and removed the rose from her hair. Her shoes, stylish and new, she let fall carelessly from her feet. Next to her bed stood a nightstand. In the drawer, at the back, rested the Mauser pistol her brother had brought her. She removed it from the holster and turned it over in her hands, probably thinking how strange that so small a thing could blot out a life. She loaded the gun, lay on her bed, put it to her head, and pulled the trigger.

  The next morning, the maid found her dead on the floor, her body cold and bloodied. When Stalin, a late riser, finally appeared—no one had the nerve to wake him earlier—he pocketed the letter and picked up the gun, remarking that this was probably the first and only time it had been fired. As if in a haze, he said to no one in particular, “I was a bad husband, I had no time to take her to the movies.” When he left Nadya’s bedroom he took her diary.

  Days later, alone in his study, he read the following: