Stalin’s mind screen pictured all three women and Iris Storm arrayed at the long dining room table with the green cloth, the scene of innumerable dinners with countless dignitaries.
Stalin requested an addition. “I want another person seated as well, someone who hardly ever left my side in the last twenty years.”
“Namely?”
“Valechka.”
“Never heard of her. Please explain.”
Like all poor public speakers, he failed to shape his argument, and indulged in chronology, convinced that the facts spoke for themselves.
Valentina Istomina, he related, came to his family in the early 1930s as a maid and waitress. She worked at the Zubalova dacha, where he first met her. At the time, she was in her teens; she was now thirty-eight. Of good peasant stock, she had no pretensions and went about her work with dispatch. After Nadya’s death in 1932, Valechka, her familiar name, became the caretaker for Zubalova dacha. But once Stalin had taken up residence at his Kuntsevo dacha, built in 1934, he had her transferred to his new residence, where she served as head housekeeper and, although only nineteen at the time, as a second mother to his daughter, Svetlana. A number of his aides whispered that she also functioned as his third wife.
Iris Storm pursued that thread. “Let’s get to essentials. Did you sleep with her? Did Valechka, like these other three women seated here, share your bed?”
“That’s nobody’s business. And if she did, let me remind you that Engels lived with his housekeeper.”
“I’ll take that answer as a yes.”
She looked around at the other women, who nodded their heads in agreement.
“Valentina Istomina!” she called. “You are summoned to serve on the People’s Court.”
Footsteps could be heard in the passageway connecting the dining room to the kitchen. Slowly Valechka came into view, emerging from the shadows into the light, the only one in the frame. Plump, but not obese, buxom but not sensuous, and dressed in a mass-produced, functional, white peasant blouse and skirt, with red embroidery peeking out from behind a starched apron of coarse material, she mirrored the simple and submissive women from the Russian countryside. Her round face and pug nose, her dark hair, tied in a bun behind her head, her uneasy command of Russian grammar, and her talkativeness suited Stalin’s taste.
Iris Storm invited her to sit with the other women. “Comrade Stalin desires your presence.”
“Koba!”
“No pet names. Let us keep the proceedings formal.”
“Why is he lying on his couch? Shouldn’t he be sitting at the head of the table?”
“The comrade is unwell.” Iris cleared her throat. “So that we may better know you, please state which services you rendered the accused.”
“Him . . . accused of what? He is the country’s batyuska, our little father.”
“Answer the question.”
Valentina genially replied, “I take care of practical things: his clothes, meals, and private dinners.”
“Anything else?”
“Like what?”
“Other needs.”
“I not only wash his underwear, I also starch and iron it.”
“Let me state the question differently. Are you and Comrade Stalin intimate?”
“Depends on what you mean by intimate.”
“Anything physical?”
“Such as?”
“Sex”
“Well, there’s a lotta ways to answer that question.”
“The court can wait.”
“Over the years we snuggled, but never anything you’d call a stew, as the villagers say. He’s small.” She began to sweat. “I could hardly feel it. At first, that is. Then later, with age and illness, he couldn’t, if you see what I mean. But I always liked tucking him in and resting at his side. Those were the times I always felt closest to him. Kind of a wife.”
“A wife who remained behind the scenes.”
“Like wallpaper.”
“Then you must have heard a great many things discussed here.”
“In this very room actually.”
“One can imagine the conversations you overheard.”
“But never repeated. Not to a living soul.”
“Did you know the villainies Stalin was engaged in, or the extent and degree of his crimes?”
“Comrade Stalin was no villain and no criminal.”
“You know for sure?”
“I never poked my nose into any of his business. As Josif always said, ‘Silence never betrays.’ Not from me will you ever get an earful. Me, silent as the grave. But I can tell you this: a kinder, gentler man never lived.”
“Unfailing loyalty, is that it?”
“My duty to him always came first.”
“Even before the good of the country?”
Valechka fell silent. Had Stalin not feared diminishing his own self-importance, he would have related how he had asked her for advice. It was October 1941, the terrible moment when the Nazi army, only twenty miles from Moscow, led Stalin to order all his ministries to prepare for evacuation. At a Kremlin dinner meeting, he asked them if their ministries were ready. Thinking that Stalin was asking not about their commissariats, but about them, the men replied that they were packed and prepared to leave Moscow at a moment’s notice. Valechka, in her neatly ironed white apron, was standing next to the table. Stalin asked her whether she would be leaving the city, and a smiling Valechka replied: “Comrade Stalin, Moscow is our mother, our home. It should be defended.”
Stalin then scolded the Politburo. “That’s how Muscovites talk!” The shamed commissars then eagerly vied with one another to declare that they, like the housekeeper, wished to stay and defend the beleaguered capital.
Nadya asked to speak. Iris nodded her assent. Slipping out of her fur coat, with its high collar, Nadya placed it on the back of her chair, revealing her long-sleeved, ankle-length worsted brown dress.
“You were probably a better wife to him than I. For my part, I couldn’t remain silent and sympathetic in light of all his cruelty. Playing dumb may have suited you; it didn’t me.”
“No need,” Valechka replied cheerfully, “to get snappish.”
Nadya stared fixedly at her. “I gather, then, that you feel no guilt, no responsibility, even though he drowned his countrymen in blood?”
“Josif wasn’t to blame. It was the men around him. I’m sure he never knew about all the crimes. Just go out in the street. You’ll hear people say the same thing: He never knew. The one they blame is Beria. I never liked him. Two-faced. A schemer.”
Nadya turned her gaze to the prostrate Stalin. Their eyes met and he knew what she was thinking. How many times had she warned him that Beria would say anything to remain in his good graces? The man was a butcher; he killed without mercy. He seduced young girls; he even murdered them. When he’d come to visit, he never failed to invite Svetlana to sit on his lap. Mother and daughter intensely disliked those moments to a point of nausea. He always seemed to know something personal about the family, and Nadya knew why. Beria had his agents spying everywhere, not just in other countries, but also in Russia. Phones were tapped, mail intercepted. People who betrayed others received awards. Denunciation replaced oxygen as a life-giving force.
Stalin shook his head to dismiss this biased testimony. But Nadya’s voice persisted to ring in his ears. He could never make her understand political intrigue, its machinations and hidden lines of communication. To plant a field, you must first uproot the old vines; then comes the additional labor of sowing and harvesting. Just look at all the different groups lurking in the shadows waiting for the moment to pounce, groups like the old Bolsheviks, who thought they had a greater claim than he to govern. Even the secret police couldn’t be trusted. He knew damn well they had bugged his different phones and regularly engaged in perlustratsia, opening and reading his mail. To forge one country out of many took a hammer, sickle, and a strong arm. Call it ruthless, call it cold-blooded . . . words didn�
��t matter, only results. If the end didn’t justify the means, what did? To make an omelet you have to crack eggs. To make a nation you need to spill blood. And Beria willingly served as his hatchet man, just as his predecessors had. A fellow Georgian, they talked the same language, were nurtured by the same konspiratsia. The man was invaluable—until he was not.
“You treated me,” continued Nadya, “as mentally inferior to your cronies. You called me neurotic and unstable, traits that you attributed to my family. You treated me like a child, an irresponsible doll not to be trusted outside your ‘doll house.’”
Iris Storm sat as rigidly as a stone idol. Stalin’s eyes shifted to her, his mental camera framing her face. She spoke angrily. “You ignored Nadya’s complaints about Beria, and also Valechka’s. Women’s rights!” she mocked. “Equality, the New Woman, the New Order . . . you proclaimed them but never honored them. If you want paradise on earth, which socialism promises, then enable women to enjoy the same liberties as men. Now, women are invisible because men like you won’t see—or hear.”
Her criticism brought back every bad memory he had of life in the seminary. No matter how well one behaved or how well he knew his lessons, the priests lashed the boys with words and rods. The energy of this woman, Iris Storm, surprised him. She spoke as if branded into her flesh were the words justice and fairness. Her accusations left him dazed. He wanted to denounce her, have her imprisoned in the Lubyanka, tried and eliminated, just like the others who found him wanting.
Criticism from a man was one thing, but from a woman? Forget jail and judging, he would have her shot immediately. His face red with wrath, he tried to speak, but made only gurgling sounds, like a wounded beast. What did she know of his brutal childhood and his Siberian exiles or his work in Baku organizing factory workers? If she could have seen him standing on a milk crate trying to rouse men in rags, without shoes, their skin blackened by crude oil, their bodies scarred from industrial accidents, she would fall on her knees and thank him. If she had seen the machines—actually, iron augers—that violated the virgin earth in search of oil, and that often caused accidents and death, setting their steel blades in the living flesh of those who man them; if she had seen the maimed and crippled stumps of men go limping away into the night that engulfs the poor, seen the rose fire of the furnace shining on the blanched faces of the men who tend it, she would know, like every good communist, that well-fed men would never freely choose to sell their souls to the capitalists.
He inwardly sneered at her sitting there in her stylish clothes and haughty manner, daring to judge him. Christ, what did she know of sweaty bodies all mangled and crushed? If she could have viewed the scenes that played and replayed in his head, she would have seen in the oil fields great heaps of black, stained earth, and at the bottom of the trenches, used for dumping, so far down that nothing else was visible, she would have seen bright haunted eyes, like those of a wild animal hunted into its hole. Workers of the world knew that free men never chose to labor there. The mental pictures he lived with daily haunted him: factories where men in dark underground cellars shoveled coal that burned and seared like paper in a grate; lead works where men were poisoned; sugar refineries where men were driven insane; factories where men and women lost their decency. And he knew that workers were driven to such extremities because of hunger, which made them exchange their heart’s blood for a trifling wage.
“Did you hear what I just said?” asked Iris. “Comrade Stalin, are you listening?”
He barely managed to shake his head. He felt her words were as crippling as his paralysis. To be schooled by a socialite . . . intolerable. A shooting pain wracked his head. A stroke, he’d concluded, had rendered him defenseless. Where was Professor Vladimir Vinogradov, his personal doctor? Then he remembered having ordered him imprisoned. A quack, a Jew. What did he know of the Vozhd’s strength? After all, Stalin regularly took ten drops of iodine in mineral water. Georgians were robust. They lived into their nineties and older. He was convinced that had he chosen to have children with Valechka, he could have sired a dozen sons, and daughters too. How many children did this woman who called herself Iris Storm have? None! She was all fashion and feathers, unfit for a world of grinding work.
“I asked you,” said Iris, “why you were in such a hurry to take Nadya to your bed when she was but a teenager and you a forty-year-old widower?”
The picture that flashed before his eyes was one of a young girl much taken with his dashing revolutionary exploits. His stories of dangerous undertakings thrilled her. She too wanted to live such a life. At the time, he had thought that to have a wife who wished as passionately as he to change the world . . . now that would be a find. Kato craved domesticity, Nadya political action. Kato wanted to change her son’s diaper; Nadya wanted to change the social order. As to the age difference, what did that matter? Her ideas showed courage and daring.
Iris stood and again straightened the pleats in her skirt. She walked to a window, looked at the snow, remarked how a silent world lived under the falling snow, and then returned to her seat. Resuming her defense of Nadya, she said, “When she wanted to continue her schooling, you tried to dissuade her. You wanted her to stay at home, even though she admitted that she cared more for revolution than for motherhood.”
Women, thought Stalin, make fierce fighters in the field, but as revolutionary thinkers, they take a backseat to men. He tried to think of a female socialist theorist, but could only recall the names of some women who agitated for equal rights. Women poets? Ah, that was a different borscht. They knew how to give voice to their thoughts. He repeated to himself some lines from Anna Akhmatova.
The moon sees a woman lying at home
Her son is in jail, her husband is dead
Say a prayer for her instead.
Would Nadya, he wondered, share those sentiments? Poor Anna Akhmatova, always fretting like a mother hen.
I have a lot of work to do today;
I need to slaughter memory,
Turn my living soul to stone
Then teach myself to live again.
Poetry could not save him now. The poets had all turned against him. They would probably side with this terrible woman, Iris Storm. Had Akhmatova known her, she undoubtedly would have celebrated her. No, it was easier to face Nadya than to think of the poets. She, at least, had no genius for a turn of phrase; she could only prosaically rail at him for his sins.
Nadya was speaking. “I could forgive you all the sexual peccadilloes, the drunkenness and boorishness, the tasteless jokes and stories, but what I could never allow was for you to take away my life. I took my own because it was the only freedom I could exercise.”
Although his movie had digressed and was now moving in another direction, he made no attempt to cut the scene. Nadya’s startling comment caused him to shudder and seek refuge in rationalizations. “You had the run of the Kremlin, the keys to all our dachas; you had money and clothes, though you chose to dress simply. You had nannies and nurses, cleaners and cooks. You lived better than most any woman in Russia. What are you talking about?”
“I hear what you’re saying,” said Natasha. “That I lived an easy and privileged life, even more so than most of the nomenklatura and their wives. But I also lived with your sulfuric temper and your molten moods. Like your many comrades, I never knew when you’d turn on me. And with each passing year, you grew more irascible.”
Stalin’s mind screen introduced pictures of all the people plotting to depose him, of the purges, and the war. What did she know? She never lived through the world war and Hitler’s crimes. He suddenly wanted to drag her into the bathroom and drown her, finally putting an end to her slights. Had she lived, she’d know, as he did, sleepless nights, forgetfulness, stomach problems, constipation, minor strokes, and the loss of breath from an irregular heartbeat. She died young and was spared the inevitable decline of growing old. Thirty-one forever! Like a Grecian marble, she would never age. At the time, he thought of retiring to Georg
ia and tending his garden. But how could he leave his country unprotected, vulnerable to all the rapacious capitalists who were salivating over Russia’s mineral wealth? He, and he alone, had the vision and the strength to save the country and lead it into a glorious future. Nadya could have accompanied him on his great journey, had she not been so bourgeois—and so determined to make her mark.
“The children needed you,” she said, “especially the boys. But you’d work late into the night and sleep until noon, virtually abandoning your sons and daughter. Yes, I know, you let Svetlana watch movies whenever she wished. You spoiled her, to the neglect of the boys. I never understood why.”
Easy, thought Stalin. Svetlana’s grace and comeliness gave him constant pleasure. Her gift for languages, her love of literature, her wonderful writing . . . he lived vicariously through them all.
Before Stalin could verbalize an answer, Valechka interrupted. “A papa’s girl, she was. Yes, indeed. So much so,” Valechka fondly remembered, directing her next comment to Stalin, “you couldn’t bear to see her affectionate with any other man. I suppose that’s why you drove off all her admirers.”
Jews, he silently fumed. They always try to steal the prize. He had sent her first sweetheart, a Jewish filmmaker, to Siberia for ten years. A year later, she told her father she wanted to marry a Jewish man, Grigory Morozov, a fellow student. Stalin slapped her and refused to meet him. But Svetlana had her way and married Grigory. Jewish perfidy knew no bounds. He even had to suffer the public humiliation of seeing Golda Meir swamped by admirers. Hadn’t he supported the creation of Israel? To him should go the credit, the applause. Instead she came to Moscow and spoke to ecstatic crowds in that bastard language, Yiddish.
Valechka, normally so retiring, again expressed an opinion. But instead of defending Stalin, as he expected, she continued in the same vein as before. “I was a good nanny to her. When her mother couldn’t look after her, I did, which was most of the time. She would come to me and rest her head in my lap, asking for a story. After her momma died, I took her place. We was tight as glue, until she read in a nasty American magazine that Nadya didn’t die of appendicitis, like she was told, but from suicide. ‘Why didn’t you tell me,’ she wailed. But what did I know? I believed what Josif said. You can’t trust the Americans, I warned her, but she somehow found other people who said the same thing. I was as surprised as her.”
Death at the Dacha Page 13