She and Yakov had two children, a son, Yevgeni, and a daughter, Galina. Although he never outwardly showed his emotions, Stalin adored the children. Humiliated by Yakov’s capture, he refused to engage in a prisoner exchange to free his son. Instead, he blamed Yulia and ordered her imprisonment. Never willing to admit error, Stalin told her at their one and only post-prison meeting that he had seen evidence proving her falseness, including a document that indicated she’d been born in Poland and not Russia.
She asked him to produce the document. When he refused, she called him a liar and left the Kremlin. Stalin immediately revoked her permit to reside in Moscow, forcing her to lodge apart from children, friends, and family. Now here she sat, one of his accusers.
In his own self-rationalizing way, he knew that he had put aside his innate anti-Semitism and had actually become quite fond of his daughter-in-law. But Yakov’s capture was a bridge too far. No son of Stalin would ever allow himself to surrender to the Germans; even if he had not surrendered, how could he have allowed himself to have been captured? Someone had to pay the price for the Vozhd’s humiliation. So he ordered Yulia’s arrest, even though it meant a separation from her children. Two years. Others had been imprisoned longer and come out of the gulag sane. Stalin reasoned that if she could not endure the prison regimen, it was because she, like all Jews, lacked Russian hardiness. After Stalin sanctioned her release, he had her brought to the Kremlin for a brief meeting, at which time he knew at once she would never recover from the trauma of her imprisonment. To assuage the little guilt he felt, he had the guard who scarred her face shot. That decision, he felt, evened the score.
Inexplicably, while describing her torment, Yulia became increasingly lucid. No longer did she pant and pause. Striking a mocking tone, she continued. “His humiliation. Ha! What does he know about ice chambers, and endless questioning, and sleeplessness? When cells weren’t sweltering to incite paralyzing thirst, they were kept at freezing temperatures. Result? Chills and hypothermia, which could lead to amnesia and often death.” She raised her voice and shouted at Stalin, “You are a monster! A sadist.” Then she laughed grotesquely. “I can smell your piss. A fitting end. You’ve not only befouled yourself but the whole country. Had I the power, I would dump your fat carcass in the snow. But first Id drench you in a barrel of water. And you know why? Because of what I’ve seen: prisoners dumped in barrels of icy water—in winter. I saw a man soaked and left outside in winter, bound from head to foot. He very quickly turned into a statue of ice. The most savage animals behave more humanely than you.”
Svetlana went to her and whispered, to which Yulia replied, “Agitated? That’s a word far too mild to describe what I feel. Try: consuming hatred.” She wiped away the tears streaming down her cheeks. “I haven’t even told you yet . . .” She paused momentarily. “Told you about the endless interrogations . . . when a prisoner was often made to sit bare-assed on one leg of an upturned stool. The slightest accidental movement . . . could drive the pointed leg into the rectum.”
Iris suggested that perhaps a recess would be in order, but Yulia brushed aside the suggestion.
“Then there was the forced standing and being kept awake, for five to ten days. I hallucinated with every round of punishment.” She halted, remembering. “As a child I had owned a nested doll of the tsar’s family. Each level discovered another member of the family. First came Tsar Nicholas, followed by the Tsarina Alexandra and the Romanov children: Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei. In my delirium, I imagined wandering through a toy store. A matryoshka doll caught my eye. At the top was the head of Stalin. When I started to separate the set of wooden figures, placed one inside the other, each successive doll, though smaller, was the same person, Stalin. Even more perplexing, the long and shapeless single piece of wood that formed the doll was bottomless. So there was no end of Stalins.”
Iris asked, “Are you sure you wish to continue?” Without replying, Yulia nodded her head yes.
“Others, so many others had it worse. Some were kept from sleep for twenty days and frequently went mad. Then there were the fetid overflowing chamber pots.” She inhaled deeply. “They made it hard to breathe. And always, there were random shootings, to create an air of constant fear. Did I say shootings? A euphemism for execution. For killing. For murder.”
The other women began to shift in their seats. Iris feared that Yulia might be pushing the bounds of sanity for everyone.
“Yulia, I think we’ve heard enough.” But Yulia insisted she had more to say, even though her grip on lucidity was beginning to slip.
“I met a poet, a young student, imprisoned for writing a single line . . . a line that mentioned Stalin unflatteringly. He was sentenced to ten years, ten years of hard labor. Women! They too were beaten and tortured . . . unless they were pregnant. Can you guess what that led to? Women prisoners begged the guards to impregnate them.” She choked on sobs. “I couldn’t bring myself to such debasement. From all around I heard women’s cries. Most of them were jailed because their husbands had fallen out of favor . . . for one minor reason or another. It’s insane! Now there’s a word to ponder. Stalin’s jails and gulag were schools for prisoners to learn insanity.”
Iris now insisted that the jury had heard enough, but though Yulia wanted to continue, Iris said that she and the other jurors were utterly exhausted. Their emotional reserves were spent. As if to confirm Iris’s observation, the other women hung their heads in despair.
“It is time for summing up,” said Iris. The female jury murmured their consent. Removing a book from her purse, Iris said she wished to conclude her part in the trial with a quotation from David Bergelson’s novel The End of Everything.
Stalin’s mind screen immediately pictured the Russian-Yiddish author who had lived abroad and returned to Russia to lead a movement of literature written in Yiddish. A member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Bergelson and other committee members were arrested and accused of conspiring with the West to undermine the Soviet Union. After a secret trial, they were found guilty, tortured, and executed by a firing squad. Stalin remembered that he had always wanted to read one of Bergelson’s books but never got around to it.
Iris apologized for ending her role in the proceedings not with an assertion as she had advised Svetlana to do, but with a quotation. She introduced the passage by saying: “Let me remind you, Comrade Stalin, that like so many other writers, you had Bergelson put to death. His heroine in this novel, however, goes on living. She speaks directly to every woman sitting here.”
I feel as though I’ve never known a spring, and have always toiled in the autumn of my life. The thought that someone else has lived through my springtime grows more and more obvious to me from day to day: even before I was born, someone else had lived out my springtime.
Iris closed the book.
Stalin uttered to nobody in particular, “I’m finished. Despised. I trust no one, not even myself.”
Iris invited final comments from the women, but no one indicated a wish to speak. Observing that Stalin’s correspondence to family and friends had been purged by the Vozhd himself, Iris noted that preciously little remained.
“Had Ana not preserved a single letter” which Iris now removed from its envelope, “the record would be blank.” Holding up the letter, Iris said, “I wish to put this document into the record, sent from Ana Rubinstein to Josif Stalin. Dated October 3, 1932, the contents are self-explanatory. Permit me to begin with the last page, where Comrade Stalin wrote in his cramped handwriting:
I am returning your last letter. What I need is not advice but loyalty. You should have been a lawyer. The case you make for Nadezhda describes a woman of your own imaginings. Nadya is like the bug in amber. She never escaped her surroundings. A child bride, she has remained so, with her maddening competitiveness to rise in the Party and make her mark. Hence she surrounds herself with people of lesser talent, in whose company she can shine, in other words, ne’er-do-wells.
Of c
ourse, she would never bring such people to the Kremlin or introduce them to stalwart party members. She lives a kind of subterranean life, in which her make-believe world substitutes for the real one. Her way of showing that she’s not invisible is to correct any small error on my part. If I mistakenly say the event at the dacha started at 7:30, she will interrupt to say, “No, 7:40.”
Such behavior makes her appear petty and spiteful. Her immaturity has crippled her emotionally and made her unfit to help me govern. Rather than seek a divorce, I find solace with you. I feel refreshed by your intelligence and strengthened by your understanding.
The letter begins:
Dear Josif,
I’ve concluded we can no longer continue our clandestine trysts. It’s best you face the truth of your marriage. Either make peace with Nadya or live apart.
I know how much Nadya vexes you. You say that she’s shallow, and her capriciousness reckless. On the few occasions I have found myself in her company, I feel that I am in the presence of a good simple woman, desperate to shine with the qualities she obviously lacks.
Think back to the first days of your marriage. You once told me that although she yearns for an elegant mind, she has the strength of an oak. Ask her opinion. Seek her advice. I suspect her words will be honest and fearless, which you can’t say for all the party members.
One final word. Whatever she says that may vex you, keep in mind that she has cause to resent you: abortions, ridicule, neglect, yes, even cruelty. Your temper turns you from a tolerant comrade to a tyrant. I know what you say: that over the years you have grown wiser while she has remained the young girl that you married. Perhaps she has chosen to be not the person you want but the person she wants; in which case, should that person offend you—you often say she screams that she hates you—end your misery and look somewhere else.
Truthfully,
Ana
Iris asked Stalin if he had anything he wished to say in his own defense. He said that he did. Although unable to stand, he imagined himself posed and poised before the tribunal. Never a loud or bombastic speaker, always self-conscious about his Georgian accent, he nonetheless said as forcefully as he could:
“Now that you have made me out to be a monster, let me say in my rebuttal that no matter how many crimes you charge me with, no matter how many deaths you say I caused, no matter how many mistakes you attribute to me, I did succeed in making Russia great again. And as to my reputed failure with women, every scrap of evidence you have produced, every bit of testimony your examiners have given cannot undermine the fact that Valechka loved me, and that her devotion was genuine, freely given, and deep. However else I may have failed with others, and women in particular, whatever else I may have been, I was beloved of Valechka.”
******
Iris recessed the trial, and the women retired into a small adjoining room to deliberate. It seemed but seconds later that they returned. The women took their seats at the table, and Iris stood, holding a piece of paper in her hands. She read:
“Our decision rests not only on what was said here today, which I will summarize shortly, but also on the following facts. Many of the rights that women gained during the October Revolution—for example, suffrage, the right to abortion, and birth control—were lost when you, like most sclerotic conservatives, emphasized women’s role in the home. Through restrictive divorce laws, you set back women’s emancipation and bound them once more to their husbands. You encouraged women to become Soviet ‘heroes’ by having numerous children to replenish the dwindling Russian population. But when you found that your hopes to industrialize the country required a huge labor force, you decided that women could both maintain a home and work in factories. In short, you made women’s lives worse, not better, by exploiting their weakened position in society.
“In addition we have today’s testimonies on which to base our judgment.” She cleared her throat. “Given the record that you’ve amassed, the verdict of the jury, by a vote of five to one, is guilty on all counts: misogyny, cruelty, murder, madness, and mayhem.
We condemn you to dwell not in hell with fellow demons, but in darkness, alone, viewing an endless movie reel that depicts the faces of all the comrades, and especially the women, you betrayed. Loneliness shall be your portion. Never again will you know the pleasure of human kindness, the euphoria of fondness, or the elation of love. Try as you will to embrace the people in the reel, they will not embrace you or you, them. Such is your sentence.”
Stalin pleaded for his mother to appear, Ekaterina “Keke” Geladze! Then he cried, “And what of Valechka?”
Valentina answered, “I tried, but the others wouldn’t budge. Little matter what they think, you’ll always remain in my heart as the dearest man in the world. You always feared rejection. Well, I will always and ever keep your memory fresh.”
With those words, the scene faded and this painful, unwanted moment, which had organically grown out of the film, disappeared. He lay staring into space, wondering how such images could have invaded his imagination. His musings, however, were short-lived. He heard men’s voices and then the sound of people entering the room. The Politburo members had come to assess his condition and to wish him a speedy recovery. They formed a semicircle around the couch, and for several moments simply stared, stupefied by the sight in front of them. Their Vozhd, their father, their master lay mute, rendered nearly comatose by a cerebral hemorrhage. The men whispered among themselves. How did it happen? When? Why weren’t doctors immediately summoned? With no answers forthcoming, Malenkov acted first. He knelt at Stalin’s side, took his left hand, and kissed it. He was visibly moved. Bulganin stood apart and cried. Khrushchev swore he’d call specialists who could cure the Vozhd, and rushed directly to the phone. Beria merely smirked.
Stalin could hear Nikita saying, “What do you mean he can’t be reached?” Pause. “Then release him. Vinogradov was his personal doctor for years.” Pause. “Then send the best person you have. At once! And prepare a hospital bed, with a twenty-four-hour nurse on duty, in a private, well-guarded room.”
Hospitals, Stalin thought, were the repository of failing carcasses. Doctors wearing masks brought to mind Caucasian bandits. Both preyed upon our bodies, but the former had license to kill and walked the earth as demigods. Every dying person sees in his physician a bringer of life and a foe of pain. But at what price? His own doctor, Vladimir Vinogradov, would have had the Vozhd curtail his work and take periodic rests just to add a few years to his life. The revolution be damned, the people made to wait. He had no time to waste on personal health. Having lived his threescore years and ten, he was now living according to death’s clock. He had settled Vinogradov’s wagon. The Professor of Medicine now reposed in a jail cell.
Hospitals harbored the sick and dying. They were unnatural places, where doctors dedicated themselves to treating the ailing, where decay permeated the wards, and every disgusting food smell invaded the linen, the bedclothes, and the walls. He was drawn to the healthy, to ideals that would improve mankind’s lot, not see him to the grave. For some people, doctors served a useful purpose, but for others, like him, they were merely murderers in white gowns. And the Jews were the worst. They thought themselves more clever than most, better read, richer in culture, the masons of monotheism, and, arrogantly, God’s favorite children. Someone had to put them in their place. Now at the end of his life, he had taken this task upon himself. The Jews liked to think of themselves as doctors to the world, treating its every ill. But in fact they were just pawns of their American, British, and German masters, who sought to keep down other races and cultures, like the Slavs. Yes, he knew their game. Appropriate the oil in the Caucasus, take the precious metals in the ground, harvest the trees in the taiga, enslave the Russian people, and reduce them, yet again, to mindless consumers of capitalist goods. Before that happened, he would die first.
The very idea that his own people wanted to put him, the Vozhd, in a hospital! Absurd. He would not be treated like an invalid
or a political prisoner, whom they keep sedated day and night. Hospitals, he hated them, especially the smells: the escharotics, the bedpans, the miasma of disease, the decaying flesh, the suppurating sores, the aging bodies, the bad breath, the decaying teeth, the sweat, the flatulence, the bloody ligatures, and, worst of all, the stillborn dreams—all of which were emblematic of what had failed in the Soviet Union. The system grew sclerotic and aged just as it neared maturity. Embedded in the springs and coils and levers and nuts and bolts of communism was unintended obsolescence.
The system, like a failing machine, wheezed. You could hear its death throes in a hospital, the sounds that give the patient no respite: generators and pumps and heaters and sterilizers and furnaces and fans. Swarming insects came to mind, and then the artificial sounds the secret police manufactured in the basement of the Lubyanka Prison to mute the cries of beatings and executions. Hospital sounds, he had concluded during his visits to medical clinics, were a reminder that the distant thunder is a harbinger of death.
Philosophers of every stripe seemed to think that aging and subsequent failure were nature’s plan for regeneration, and that as we failed, our final consolation, barring dementia, was a fullness of memory that enriched our lives and prepared us for our final journey. Rubbish! There was no joy in death, just ask his victims.
After Khrushchev hung up the phone, Beria approached the Vozhd, kneeled, and said to him, “Speak to me, Comrade Stalin. Say anything. Indicate you’re still with us.” Stalin said nothing. He only stared. Then Beria whispered into Stalin’s ear, “You are an asshole and a whore dog, a miserable piece of shit, a fucking moron.” Unexpectedly, Stalin’s eyes blinked, leading Beria to think that the Vozhd would return to consciousness. In an instant, Beria took Stalin’s left hand and started kissing it, over and over. “You are our great leader,” Beria burbled, “the country’s heart and soul, our beloved Koba.” Stalin’s eyes shut. Had he fallen into a final coma? Emboldened, Beria said, loud enough to be heard, “You are a little prick, literally and figuratively. A boring jackass. An insane narcissist. A second-rate mind.”
Death at the Dacha Page 16