Death at the Dacha

by Paul M. Levitt

  “Women and men speak a different emotional language, and there’s no one around to provide a simultaneous translation.”

  “I’m depressed again . . . feeling that when I try to climb out, the sides are so slippery that I keep falling back.”

  “He takes no care with fragile things.”

  “My youth is gone and the romantic hopes no longer dreamed”

  “I cannot bear to see the kindness go. It’s like attending a funeral”

  “If only I could take some comfort from what I do and not feel failed over what I haven’t done . . . ”

  “My life is marching nowhere.”

  “I have no sense of myself; I live through others. In every aspect of my life, I feel unfulfilled.”

  “Dear Josif, Iris Storm in The Green Hat says of herself what I have long felt: ‘I am not what you think. I am not of the women in your life. I am not the proud adventuress who touches men for pleasure, the silly lady who misbehaves for fun. I am the meanest of all, she who destroys her body because she must, she who hates the thing she is, she who loathes the thing she does.’”

  Stalin closed the diary. His first reaction was rage. “I’ll find the traitors who’ve been pouring poison in her ear,” he cried. “It’s the evil influence of others. They’re to blame. I’ll burn all her books.” Then, after calculating the consequence of a witch hunt, he resolved to privately hate her. “You’ve crippled me. Deliberately. This is your revenge.” He asked himself how he could continue in power. “People will say I failed to protect you. They will question my legitimacy as the father of the country. You’ve ruined me. You should never have done it. You’ve maimed me for life. Oh, Nadya, Nadya! Why are you punishing me? Once again, I am cast as a leper.”

  Feeling betrayed and misunderstood, he heard ringing in his ears the determined words of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, words that he slightly altered to suit his own emotional needs.

  It is impossible to trust anyone.

  You are all I have.

  Before Russia I swear

  A weighty oath:

  To execute my will throughout the land,

  To destroy throughout Russia savage robbers,

  To shed throughout Russia the blood of the guilty,

  To burn out treason with fire,

  To cut out treachery with the sword,

  Not self nor others sparing—

  FOR THE SAKE OF THE GREAT RUSSIAN REALM.

  CHAPTER 5

  Fearful of how an independent Poliburo might act in his absence, Stalin tried to envision his colleagues’ betrayal, which he would ruthlessly punish should he recover.

  “For a while, he insisted he would step down,” Molotov explained to the others gathered in Stalin’s Kremlin office. “He said Nadya’s death disqualified him from leading the party. Her death, he felt, was a standing reproach.”

  “Never could take criticism. Regarded even the best-intentioned corrections as malicious,” said Beria.

  “Is that why,” asked Khrushchev, “you always praised him?”

  “Let’s not get personal.”

  “Fawned over him would be a more accurate description.”

  Bulganin said that if they were going to rake through the ashes of history, he could add something that Stalin told him, namely, that Stalin’s first wife, Kato, treated him like a demigod.

  “And,” Beria added, “he expected the same from all of us.”

  “If Kato Svanidze was the light of his life,” remarked Khrushchev, “you have to wonder why he treated their son so badly and killed off most of her family.”

  Malenkov said to no one in particular, “Especially her brother. For God’s sake, he introduced them.”

  “The answer is simple,” said Beria. “Alexander, or should I say Alyosha, was a scholar. He spoke several languages and edited a journal. For Stalin the enemy was anyone whose achievements were greater than his own.”

  As he lay on the sofa imagining this scene, Stalin could not help but free-associate. The mere thought of Ekaterina Svanidze, his beloved Kato, brought him back to Tiflis and their first meeting. He knew from the start: All is dross that is not Kato. He knew that her perfect unblemished skin, her sculpted lips, her almond eyes, her silky hair, her thin fine fingers, her slender neck, her smile, yes, the smile that radiated such tenderness and love, would never fade from memory. After she died, he had rummaged through her belongings and discovered her diary, which her family wished to own but which he kept. He would incorporate her diary into his movie. She was, after all, one of the principals in his story.

  “Let me tell it, Josif. You know: the woman’s point of view.”

  In her youthful diary, Stalin heard again Kato’s liquid voice as she recounted scenes that told of their delicious days and her dismal death.

  When Momma and Papa advised us—three daughters and one son—to quit our mountain village of Didi-Lilo for Tiflis, where jobs were more plentiful, we balked. To leave the fruit trees and rural life for the fumes and fuss of the city took some persuading. Every night, Momma and Papa told us colorful stories about a city shaped like an amphitheater, surrounded on three sides by mountains, split in half by a river, and populated by Azerbaijanis, Ossetians, Azeris, Armenians, Greeks, Turks, Mountain Jews, Russians, Mingrelians, Chechens, Yazi-dis, Kurds, Kuban Cossacks, and others. On the narrow streets one could hear the tongues of the world.

  Our parents said that if we closed our eyes and looked into the past, we would see camel trains laden with silks from China, rosewater and aloe from the Korean Empire, musk (subtitle: used for ink) from Tibet, wool from Alexandria, diamonds from India, and jade from the British province of Burma.

  ******

  Indeed, now that we are here, it has all unfolded as they said—and as the Baedeker travel guide described. The houses, adorned with Persian balconies, perch one above the other on the mountain slope, looking like the steps of a staircase and leading to the fourth-century clifftop Narikala Fortress. From the balconies, often painted blue, clotheslines, sagging with wet sheets, reach across the courtyards. Ivy and flower pots bloom all year round.

  Near the sulfur baths stand a mosque and a synagogue. Of course everyone knows the Mohammedans have been living here forever, but the Jews have been here for almost as long, twenty-five hundred years. And the city abounds with churches. My favorites are the sixth-century Anchiskati Basilica and the Sioni Cathedral, with its pepper-pot dome. My family frequents both.

  From sunrise to sunset, except for the hot summer midday hours, the streets pulse with men and animals. Horses and donkeys, draped with water skins, pull carts burdened with heavy loads and often ridden by more than one man. The Georgian dealers sell vegetables, fruits, and fishes, and display their wares on large wooden trays they carry on their heads. Markets offer all the gifts of the earth, from lettuce to leeks. Flower shops look like shooting stars with all their bursts of color. Traders peddle everything from shaslik and ice cream to hats and shoes. Old men crowd the parks, even after dark, playing chess and chatting. At night, wrought-iron street lamps light the avenues and squares.

  When we think of fashion, women come to mind. But in Tiflis men do the strutting and flaunting of clothes. They are like preening male birds. The Persians, in their long caftans and their high black fur caps, often with red-dyed hair and fingernails, compete for attention with the Tartar seids and mullahs, in flowing robes, with green and white turbans. Mountain tribesmen and Cossacks walk the streets in picturesque tcherkeskas and wear frock coats gathered at the waist, with cartridge pouches hung from the side. But more numerous—and less ostentatious—are the smooth-shaven Tartars in their ragged clothing and baggy fur caps. Porters, with bent backs, wear aprons and bear loads fit for mules. Children in overalls scamper in delight through the threadlike alleys, and Mohammedan women, trailing numerous children, never appear in the streets unveiled.

  In the bazaars, both buyers and the curious flock to the open workshops of the goldsmiths and armorers; the carp
et weavers; the stalls of the dealers selling buttons and buckles; the pastry cooks, filling the bazaar with delectable odors; the bakers’ shops, with their flat loaves baked in huge clay ovens; the cobblers’ stalls, displaying their gaudy cloth-woven slippers made from dyed thread; the wine merchants’ shops, where the wine comes from an area of the world’s first cultivated grapevines and is kept in sheep or buffalo skins, with the hair inside.

  We Svanidze children adore the bazaars most of all, and to our relief the schools are less strict than in the countryside and more open to new ideas.

  ******

  After graduation, I joined my three sisters in the Atelier Madame Her-vieu. Our mother had taught us since childhood how to sew, a skill that we had perfected in our mountain village. My sisters recommended me to Madame Hervieu, but even so she insisted on putting me through my paces. I reported early one morning and followed her into a fitting room, where she sat me down at a table with needles, cloths, and threads, as well as lightweight knitting yarns and short needles. Then she directed me to demonstrate my skill at the many different hand stitches, including embroidery and hemming. It felt like an audition for the tsar. But I understood why she was so particular. She served the city’s most fashionable clientele.

  For Tiflis, the work was well paid, but the demands and deadlines exhausting. Some girls I knew from school wanted to join the profession and asked me what it was like being a seamstress. I replied that it will save you from domestic service or factory work. But if you think it will give you time for yourself, you’re mistaken. Every morning you have to arrive by six. Some days we work until eleven, sometimes later. Often a dress ordered in the morning and fitted in the afternoon has to be finished the same night, when a servant collects it for the mistress. My friend Tatiana, who quit school and was working as a domestic, plaintively asked, “What’s a poor girl to do? I ain’t got a ticket. You own an education and a skill—and a family that lives in a good apartment and looks after you. My family’s all paupers.” When I tried to console her, she repeated: “It’s easy enough for you; you got a ticket to ease.”

  Our roomy apartment, located in the heart of the city, behind the South Caucasus military district headquarters, proved a haven for the political refugees and revolutionaries that my brother, Alyosha, regularly hid. That’s how I met Josif. He and Alyosha attended the seminary together. They were both Bolsheviks. In 1904, Josif was a wanted man, an outlaw revolutionary who had committed capital crimes against the state. After a particularly dangerous assignment, Josif feared the authorities were closing in on him. Alyosha asked my sisters and me if Josif could take refuge in our family’s apartment, and we agreed.

  Although nobody said it, Josif was socially beneath me and my family, who had come from the minor nobility. My siblings and I took pride in our schooling, whereas Josif was mostly self-taught. A voracious reader, he would pore over books late into the night, sleep until midday, and then resort to the couch for more reading. He particularly liked history, but fiction and poetry also held his attention. He liked to recite poetry to my sisters and me, and to share his political opinions. We have a saying in Georgia: “Don’t expect heaven from the parish priest.”

  I remember a story Josif told that makes this point. Two brothers, who worked on a large estate with a pestiferous swamp, were told by the landowner to drain it. The practical brother, Stanislas, suggested that they enlist the help of the local villagers, who suffered from the malarial mosquitoes and vile vapors. The idealistic brother, Trofimov, dismissed that idea, preferring to recruit outside laborers with skills the locals lacked. Stanislas reasoned that those who suffered the most would work the hardest and would gladly learn what they needed to know. Trofimov replied that seasoned workers were better than green ones, and suggested that they use German workers, far and away the most disciplined. But the closest German community was several days journey, and the lord of the estate wanted the work done as soon as possible. So the brothers agreed to try both ideas. While Trofimov journeyed to the Volga, Stanislas showed the peasants how to drain a swamp. The result: The Russians eliminated the miasma and sowed the marshland; and the Germans, seeing no benefit in leaving home for dirty work elsewhere, refused to become hirelings.

  Josif drew the moral that rather than lean on others, Russians were better off depending on their own enterprise.

  With regard to his personal life, he never breathed a word to others, not even Alyosha, who introduced Josif and me. And yet, from the day he arrived in our apartment, I knew he fancied me. My sisters said that whenever he thought himself unobserved, he would stare at me longingly. Eventually he asked me to take walks with him and enjoy the countryside. Before long, he started showing up at the atelier, wishing to accompany me the short distance to our apartment. I knew he had no money or very little, because he spoke wistfully of taking me to a good Tiflis restaurant. But I also knew that his persistent penury was owing to his revolutionary work, exploiting the discontent of workers and organizing strikes.

  The tsarist government, fearing nationalist fervor in the Caucasus, was impressing upon the people the importance of autocracy and orthodoxy, and directing their Cossack minions to attack Finns, Poles, Armenians, and particularly Jews. The only ones strong enough to resist the purges and pogroms were the socialist parties, who made common cause in the fight against government repression. Every night I could hear gunfire, and the next day the dead were carted to the cemetery. But Josif insisted that the socialists were not merely protecting minority groups, they were also fighting for fairness in the workplace. He said that if I ever wanted to see the hell he’d survived, I should visit the factories, like the one that employed his father and him cobbling shoes. Even worse, he said, were the oil fields and the tobacco sheds and the barrel factories and the railway workshops and the iron foundries and the workers’ barracks. He compared the indescribable conditions to Dante’s Inferno.

  Apparently the shop owners made no effort to guarantee the safety of the workers or provide latrines. How, he asked, can you run a factory without toilets and canteens? Lacking proper ventilation and light, the workers were dying of tuberculosis and developing eye disorders. Crippling accidents occurred routinely. Medical attention, he asked rhetorically? Paid overtime? Unions? The right to protest? No such things. Just the reverse. Compulsory overtime without compensation was more the rule than the exception. Children and adults worked side by side—for fourteen hours a day. Pay: fifty cents. A little more than three cents an hour.

  While my sisters and I lived in a spacious apartment, the poorer classes shared unheated factory shanties, where the crowding and lack of sanitation fostered disease. Cholera, with its attendant hemorrhagic diarrhea, was particularly fearsome. That’s why we made it a point never to visit a friend who lived in factory housing. Josif, though, worked among these people, trying to instill them with what he called class consciousness. He read socialist pamphlets to them and talked about the unfairness of a system in which they did not share in the wealth produced by their labor. He urged them to strike and to join his revolutionary party. Dues were out of the question, but he raised money for the cause through bank robberies and extortion.

  He thought I knew nothing of his outlaw activities and the life he lived after dark as a polemicist for socialist periodicals. How he and his friends found a printing press, paper, and ink—to say nothing of the means of distribution—I dared not ask. Although his articles and calls to action struck me as rather flat, an opinion that I kept to myself but which he suspected, he said that most people couldn’t read; and to reach those who could or who barely could, he had to put his ideas into simple prose.

  One evening he failed to show up at the atelier to walk me home. As I started out by myself, I found him waiting at the end of the street. He suggested we stop at a nearby teahouse and wait until Madame Hervieu closed for the evening. It all sounded very mysterious. He had a briefcase full of papers that he wanted to hide somewhere in the atelier. When we finally retur
ned to the shop, he went right to a large mannequin and scrambled underneath it. When he surfaced again, the briefcase was gone. He had managed to lodge it among the wires of the mannequin. I could only smile at his ingenuity. We stood facing each other, but said nothing. Slowly he advanced, took my head in his hands and kissed me on the lips. I can still remember his words. “Please, let’s! I need you.” So we undressed. Scared at first, I saw that his toy was no giant, as I had feared. From then on we regularly met in the atelier. Given the number of people sharing my apartment, I could not imagine ever having the freedom to make love there. But the atelier seemed perfect—until one night a policeman knocked on the door. Josif eased open a back window and fled immediately. The policeman looked around, and finding nothing apologized for the intrusion. He said he saw a light on in the atelier and was merely checking. Some months later, with the police looking for Josif, a full search of the premises landed me briefly in jail, but the papers in the mannequin were never discovered.

  In due time, nature took its course and I became pregnant. Josif seemed delighted when I told him, and he agreed to a wedding. I wanted a church service; he did not. My sisters and parents agreed with me—even his mother. It was then he put aside his atheism. The next difficulty was how to find a priest to officiate. Josif had false papers and could not properly wed. At last we found a priest who knew Josif from the seminary, and he agreed to conduct the ceremony, which took place at two in the morning, July 16, 1906, in a small church in Tiflis. The candlelight service showed off my dress to good effect, but Josif was scruffily clothed, eliciting laughter.

  A wedding supper followed, attended by most of Josif’s comrades in crime. Had the secret police known about the gathering, they could have rounded up some of the most wanted men in Georgia. Josif sang songs and toasted me. I was amazed that my bridegroom, so severe in his work and demanding of his men, could be so affectionate and attentive. The truth is I adored him, but I also knew how dedicated he was to his cause and how often his rough temper overcame his better nature. He told me I was sweet and had melted his heart, yet my pleas that he give up his outlaw life had no effect. For almost a year, we remained in Tiflis, and I continued my work at the salon. Josif was leading the life of a brigand, always one step ahead of the police. He kept none of the money he stole. Almost all of it went to Lenin in Finland and to the Bolsheviks. We lived on my salary, to the chagrin of my sisters.