VOLAND IS A DANGEROUS PLAYMATE
The year 1939 was nearing its end, and Stalin’s sixtieth birthday had arrived, the sixtieth birthday of the new tsar. It was quite logical that he should commission a new play, to be produced by the Moscow Arts Theater in honor of his anniversary, from Bulgakov, the bard of the White officer corps. Bulgakov, however, had broken the taboo: he had asked to see documents about the life of Koba. The play was banned.
This decision was more than Bulgakov could bear. He knew, of course, by then that “evil for the sake of good” had destroyed millions, the guilty and the innocent alike. But he had forced himself not to see, to believe in the “Scourge of God.” He had so longed for, so passionately hoped for a change in his fortunes. Instead he had been spat upon, slapped in the face. Evil did not need his services. Evil had allowed him to live—and that should be enough. According to her diary, Bulgakov said to his wife, “Do you remember when they banned Days of the Turbins, when they took that other play off, when they rejected my Molière manuscript … I never lost heart, I went on working, but look at me now: I lie here before you full of holes.” Shortly afterward he fell fatally ill.
In the novel, Voland helped the Master. In real life, the Devil had killed the Master. It is dangerous to play games with the Devil.
GLORY, GLORY TO OUR RUSSIAN TSAR
In February 1939 the Bolshoi Theater staged the favorite opera of the Romanov tsars—Mikhail Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar. It had been performed in celebration of Nicholas II’s coronation, and to mark the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty. Now it was performed again on the same stage, though under a different name. It was now called Ivan Susanin.
Stalin sat at the back of his box. Music that had not been heard since the Revolution filled the theater. “Glory!” But the famous words which had become the tsarist national anthem had been changed to “Glory, Glory to Thee, My Russia!” Sergei Gorodetsky, a poet of some note before the Revolution, had adapted the text at Stalin’s bidding. The Boss himself had checked and edited the new version. He was an opera librettist as well as everything else!
He celebrated his sixtieth birthday to the strains of “Glory to Thee!” He had long been tsar. A lonely Russian tsar. His comrades-in-arms, or rather his servants, lived in mortal fear of him. The writer E. Gabrilovich recounted a story told by Khrushchev, about how he was once the Boss’s guest at his dacha near Gagry, in Georgia, where he was on holiday:
Stalin was sitting in a summer house in the garden. They were drinking tea and chatting. Time passed. It got dark. And Stalin became gloomy. Khrushchev said, “Well, I’d better be going home, Joseph Vissarionovich, my wife must be wondering where I am.”
“You won’t go anywhere,” Stalin said abruptly. “You’ll stay here.”
“My wife will be expecting me, Joseph Vissarionovich.” Stalin looked up at Khrushchev. With that look of his: his yellow eyes full of rage. Khrushchev, of course, stayed. But slept badly. Next morning he dressed and went out into the garden. Stalin was sitting in exactly the same position, in the summer house, sipping tea. Khrushchev asked him about his health.
“Who are you? How did you get here?” Stalin asked peremptorily, between sips.
“I’m … Khrushchev, Joseph Vissarionovich.”
“I shall have to go and find out who exactly you are,” Stalin said. He pushed the tumbler away, and left the summer house. Trembling with fear Khrushchev walked along the garden path toward the exit. He was overtaken by one of the guards and prepared himself for the worst.
“Nikita Sergeevich. Comrade Stalin is asking for you. He’s been looking everywhere for you.” Khrushchev hurried back to the summer house. Stalin was sitting there drinking tea.
“Wherever were you, Nikita Sergeevich?” he asked affectionately. “You shouldn’t stay in bed so long, I’ve been waiting all this time for you.”
He liked playing games, the Boss. They were all specks of dust—his mighty bureaucracy. He made them suffer constant, unremitting fear. He sent the wife of Kalinin (then the nominal head of state, as president of the Supreme Soviet) to a camp. There, the president’s wife picked the lice from prisoners’ underclothes before they were laundered, while Kalinin, a pathetic old man, pleaded for her release in vain. Stalin also sent to the camp the wife of his faithful secretary, Poskrebyshev. Poskrebyshev also importuned the Boss to bring his wife back. And also to no avail. The head of the government, Molotov, was also deprived of his wife. Stalin imprisoned her. Three of the most important people in the Soviet Union had wives behind bars. Just so they wouldn’t forget that they were nothing. Blind kittens. He could send them after their wives at any moment. Besides, he had no wife of his own. He was simply evening things up. Now they could serve the Great Dream, without any of silly Khrushchev’s family distractions, and forgetting petit bourgeois happiness.
HOME
He was tsar and God. He knew that the divinity of power resides in its mystery. The mysterious darkness with which he surrounded his life, the dread concealed by his subjects’ joie de vivre, the mysterious Night Life—the black cars, with their sweeping headlights, the nocturnal police raids of the searchlights over darkened trains carrying people to the camps, the secret shootings of yesterday’s lords of creation, the secret graves in cemeteries … all part of the mystery. The whole country believed that he lived in the Kremlin. A light was kept burning all night in one particular window of the Kremlin, looking out over the wall. In fact, a number of large Zil automobiles would leave the Borovitsky Gate in the dead of night. They would accelerate to an enormous speed and rush along the government route. The darkened, unbreakable windows of these bulletproof cars made it impossible to see who was inside. They all looked alike, and nobody knew in which of them he was sitting. Only when they were about to enter the grounds of the nearer dacha would his car move to the head of the cortege, with the others following.
The nearer dacha, half an hour’s drive from the Kremlin, was his home—and another carefully kept secret. He had moved into this brick villa, built in the thirties, after his wife’s death. The grounds were surrounded by a fence fifteen feet high. In 1938 he had a second fence built, with observation slits. Inside the villa there was a foyer and a big dining room, in which he and his Politburo comrades “dined”—his term for the midnight meal which was more like supper and breakfast in one. His nocturnal lifestyle was also secret. The villa was staffed by NKVD officers and maidservants.
One of the maidservants was the youngish Valechka Istomina. She had joined his staff in 1935. She ironed his trousers and his semimilitary tunic. He had no valet. He had never changed his habits, and did most things for himself. Valechka would work there for seventeen years. She made his bed for him, and grew old beside him. “Whether or not she was Stalin’s wife is nobody else’s business,” Molotov told Chuyev.
The maidservant in fact became his secret wife, while the new head of his bodyguard, Nikolai Vlasik, took charge of his children. The compact little villa was his palace, and the setting in which he would spend the rest of his life. This too was where death would overtake him.
ALONE
Before the war, in 1940, he received a present: Beria succeeded in organizing the murder of Trotsky. He had been ruthlessly persecuting Trotsky’s relatives all along. He began with the arrest of Trotsky’s younger son Sergei, a scientist living quietly in Moscow.
Trotsky’s wife, Natalya Sedova, vainly appealed for help to Romain Rolland and Bernard Shaw, among others. The names of many other progressive writers appeared in her open letter. But they all remained silent. Why? In 1933, answering a request from Max Eastman to speak out against the arrest of Trotsky’s supporters, Theodore Dreiser wrote as follows: “I have reflected seriously, as if at prayer, on this Trotsky business. I have great sympathy with his supporters, but a problem of choice arises. Whatever the nature of the present dictatorship in Russia, Russia’s victory is more important than anything else.” The victory of the workers’ and peasants’ state was mo
re important than mere human lives. The familiar appeal to the higher expediency.
The Boss, then, could be sure of their silence. To madden his enemy, he physically destroyed all his relatives, even the most distant. And even his grandson’s nanny!
The Boss’s agents stalked Trotsky throughout the thirties. This was yet another form of torture: torture by the constant threat of death. At last, in 1940, one of the Boss’s emissaries, R. Mercader, a former lieutenant in the Spanish Republican army, split Trotsky’s skull, exposing the brain of which he had been so proud.
Of all the old Bolshevik leaders, beginning with Lenin, he was the sole survivor. The legacy of the Revolution was now his by right. His was the loneliness of a celestial being.
22
TWO LEADERS
Genghis Khan’s gigantic empire had been reerected in Eastern Europe. It was now ready to pounce.
Until 1938, foreign policy remained subservient to domestic policy. But now that he had created a new country he could afford to begin realizing his external aims. Or rather his main aim. The secret one. The Great Dream!
We see that with the accession of Stalin nothing had changed. It was just that the Great Leninist Dream, world revolution, which the activists of Lenin’s Party, all those defunct big mouths, had openly shown their eagerness to export, had become a secret. The Boss had relegated it to the underground. So in 1936, in an interview with the American journalist Roy Howard, reproduced in Pravda, when asked, “Has the Soviet Union abandoned its plans to carry out world revolution?” Stalin calmly replied, “We never had any such intention.”
He was playing his favorite game: quieting the enemy’s suspicions. But propaganda at home was preparing his people for something quite different. His tame writers extolled the Great War for the realization of the Great Dream. The poet Pavel Kogan prophesied that his countrymen would “advance to the Ganges” and “die in battles to come” so that the “radiance” of the Soviet Union would shine from England to Japan. Another “poet,” Mikhail Kulchitsky, looked forward to a time when “only one Soviet nation, and only the people of a Soviet nation,” would exist.
I found traces of these preparations for a major war in the President’s Archive. The Red army was rapidly rearming in the thirties—even before the advent of Hitler. As a result Tukhachevsky wrote Stalin an anxious letter: “Dear Comrade Stalin! I fully understand that one has not just to win a war but to preserve one’s economic might while doing so.… By working along those lines you can most profitably solve the problems posed by a Great War. Communist greetings. Tukhachevsky. Leningrad 19.6.30.” There followed a detailed plan for the rearmament of the Red army for a “war of engines”—a Great War. This was where Tukhachevsky clashed with Voroshilov. We need not go into the substance of their disagreement. What is important is that both Voroshilov and Tukhachevsky were preparing for a Great War.
The Great War of the Future also influenced a gigantic construction project put in motion at the beginning of the thirties. While the plans for the Moscow Metro were being drawn up, planes dropped high-explosive bombs on the site. These bombardments helped to determine the depth at which the tunnels for the future underground railway must be bored, to make it invulnerable in an air raid. With the future war in mind, the Boss gave orders that no section of the track should run aboveground. (This information on the building of the Metro was given by the engineer and historian M. Yegorov in the newspaper Arguments and Facts.)
In March 1938, Hitler annexed Austria. Clouds gathered over Czechoslovakia. It was as the Boss had expected. Hitler really was drawing Europe into war, and Germany would bring down in ruins the whole capitalist system. It was no longer a mirage, no longer a dream—world revolution was advancing on empire. All that was needed was to egg Hitler on.
These were the favorable circumstances in which the Grand Master began his first major game beyond the frontiers of his own country.
In 1938, while he was engaged in talks on collective security with France and England, the Boss began trying to make contact with his worst enemy, Adolf Hitler. The Soviet ambassador in Berlin, Yakov Surits, a Jew, was recalled, and replaced by Merekalov.
At the same time, negotiations with France and England were pursued with greater urgency. This was a typical Stalin ploy. He knew in advance that the Western democracies would never trust the new Genghis Khan. He inspired in them only fear and revulsion. The talks were meant to gain leverage on Hitler. This gambit worked. Fearing an alliance between Stalin and the Western democracies, Hitler was soon responding to Soviet advances. The customary fulminations against the USSR disappeared from official German statements, and the campaign of mutual insult petered out. A new phase had begun: the irreconcilable foes seemed to have stopped noticing each other.
Meanwhile, Czechoslovakia was about to become Hitler’s next victim. The Boss immediately offered to help the Czechs, but only on condition that England and France did the same. This was courageous of him—and quite safe: he knew that Poland and Romania would never agree to let Soviet armies cross their territory. They knew that letting Stalin in was easy, but getting him out again would be difficult. And Poland’s leaders had shortsightedly swallowed Hitler’s bait and grabbed a chunk of dismembered Czechoslovakia. Stalin had behaved nobly in the eyes of the Western European public, with no risk at all. The Politburo demonstratively discussed possible forms of aid while Czechoslovakia’s Western allies were washing their hands of the country. Once the Munich Agreement was signed, Chamberlain and Daladier were sure that they had appeased Hitler. The powerful line of Czech fortifications passed into German hands without a shot fired, and the battle-trained Czech divisions ceased to exist. As, very soon, did Czechoslovakia itself, in spite of the British and French guarantees.
Moscow learned about the Munich Agreement on September 29. At an all-night emergency meeting of the Politburo, Litvinov, the Peoples Commissar for Foreign Affairs, abroad at the time, was assailed as—supposedly—a supporter of alliance with the Western democracies. “Supposedly” is the word. Only one person was behind the Soviet Union’s diplomatic moves—the Boss. But he blamed Litvinov for policies which had resulted in the Munich Agreement and exposed the USSR to German aggression: this treachery had made it necessary to seek new ways of preventing a German attack. These statements contained the excuse he had wanted all along for an about-face. The Boss was feeling his way toward an alliance with Hitler—a latter-day version of Lenin’s Brest-Litovsk Treaty.
He had no doubt that his scheme would succeed. He sensed that Hitler was like him—insatiable. Czechoslovakia was just the beginning. But to go any farther Hitler needed an alliance with the USSR. He would give Hitler his alliance—to make sure that farther would mean farther away from the Soviet Union.
After Litvinov’s dismissal, at a Politburo session on May 3, 1939, Molotov, while remaining head of government, also took over the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, to emphasize the overriding importance of foreign policy.
Litvinov was given no new post. He took this to mean that he was doomed. While he waited for the end he wrote suppliant letters to the Boss. They went unanswered. Everyone expected that he would shortly be arrested, and everyone was amazed to see that he was not touched. This was one sign that in seeking alliance with Hitler the Boss was thinking several moves ahead. In the game he was playing, Litvinov symbolized alignment with the Western democracies. He might yet be needed. And so it was. When war with Hitler came, Litvinov, prudently preserved, would be appointed Vice-Commissar for Foreign Affairs.
With Hitler poised on the Polish frontier, Chamberlain felt compelled to assure the Poles that Britain would help them in the event of a German attack. Alliance with Stalin now became a matter of urgency for Hitler. The Boss found ways of egging him on. A military delegation led by Voroshilov held talks with England and France. Their only result was to speed up German Ambassador Schulenberg’s secret negotiations with Molotov. In Germany, Ribbentrop, long the bugbear of the Soviet press, was ready t
o leave for Moscow. The fascists were inviting the Bolshevik state to join them in partitioning Europe.
Hitler was now in a hurry to clarify the situation before he attacked Poland, and Ribbentrop showered Schulenberg with ciphered telegrams. Soviet intelligence kept the Boss informed about the Führer’s impatience. It was now the middle of August, and Hitler could delay no longer: once the rains set in, the Polish roads would be too muddy. Hitler accepted the Boss’s terms without qualification, and telegraphed on August 19 to say that Ribbentrop was on his way.
A NEW ERA
For Stalin, this change of orientation had no ideological implications. Hitler and the Western democracies alike were enemies. Alliance with either side was merely a turn on the tortuous road to the Great Dream. But in shelving his hatred for Hitler, he had sacrificed his claim to be a champion of democracy. He would obviously have to sacrifice Comintern. He knew that he could someday recover all that he had given up, and in the meantime he would gain territory.
Ribbentrop, on arrival in the Kremlin, was greeted with the words “It’s been a lovely shoving match, hasn’t it?” He and Stalin then spent three hours in perfect harmony, carving up Eastern Europe. The Boss’s supplementary proposals were accepted with startling ease. The Non-Aggression Pact and its secret protocol were signed—for the Soviet side not, of course, by the Boss, but by Molotov. The proceedings ended with a state reception—one of those lavish feasts, with lavish toasts, that Stalin enjoyed so much. Molotov, hardened veteran of the Boss’s junketings, amazed the German guests with his ability to drink without getting drunk.
Stalin raised his glass to Hitler, and the Reichsminister raised his to Stalin. After this, the German delegation had to drink deep—to the pact and to the new era in Soviet-German relations. The Boss had not, however, lost his sense of humor. He proposed a toast to Kaganovich, who was present, and Ribbentrop found himself drinking to a Jew. Still, Kaganovich himself had to drink Hitler’s health. The negotiations were over. The secret protocol specified the price which Hitler was paying him for the pact: freedom to “make territorial and political modifications in the Baltic States” and the right to “assert the Soviet Union’s interest in Bessarabia.” Stalin also received a piece of Poland. After the signing he gave Hitler a present: the German and Austrian Communists, remnants of the old Comintern, held in Soviet camps were deported to Germany, to the Gestapo.
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