Historians trawl with broken nets. How would they know that, from childhood, specters and visions guided Stalin’s life, determining its course?
His visions pulsed with power. He feared them as a child, and in a misguided effort to quell them, he enrolled in a seminary as a youth.
Stalin’s father, a drunken cobbler, showed up every now and then to mock him. Often he saw the people he had killed, directly, with his hands, as a bank robber. Those whose deaths he ordered didn’t bother him. Some specters threatened him, some mocked him, but he had no cause for fear. What weapons does a specter have?
The old man has no need for sleep. He sits up at his desk, his head upon his hands. He waits for his children, the ones that guide him into his greatest feat, a public execution of killer doctors and all the events that will ensue. Great pent-up power will spill into the streets.
It’s 4:32 a.m. He is awake, alert, awaiting the children, yet they stubbornly remain on the walls, bound to paper. Their turn has not yet come. A vision comes instead: a burst of sunlight, changing from yellow to red, then deeper, thicker, richer, like blood that spurts out of throats while hearts still pump.
A panorama broadens on his wall, like a big map. The sun is no longer whole. Streams flow from it. Rivers form. Red waters pulse like veins.
A specter enters next, projecting on a wall, like a film on a screen. He looks familiar: a dead Jew, a blasphemer of his plans, a voice that shouldn’t be. What is his name?
“Yefim!” he hears a roar within his skull. And what is this? A sword?
“Go away, Yefim,” thinks Stalin, for specters hear thoughts. You speak to them without uttering a word.
Yefim is Zeitlin, a minor commissar, a fighter armed with dreams that cannot cut.
“How many divisions do you have?” the old man mocks. “Dissolve, Yefim, dissolve.”
The thought of power over visions amuses him.
Yefim dissolves, as does his sword. Left alone, Stalin waits to hear purring beneath the floor. He waits for the children to step from their pictures on the walls and start their gentle play, like cheerful circus dwarves. They’ll gather flowers on the carpet, fly paper planes, and draw. They’ll dance as well, but they’ll step softly.
He sees them every night, which means they will come again. His head slips down onto the leather surface of his writing desk. That’s how it has to be, for slumber presages their arrival. Same ritual. Same children. Month after month.
* * *
The Russian historian and playwright Edvard Radzinsky comes closest to offering an accurate account of the events at Stalin’s dacha in the early morning of March 1, 1953.
According to Radzinsky, a security man with the last name Khrustalev (first name unknown) instructed the guards who stood at the doors of Stalin’s private quarters to go to bed.
Instructions of this sort were unheard of at the Nearby Dacha through its thirty-year history. It was commonplace for the tipsy czar to come within a centimeter of sleepy guards, drill them with his lupine eyes, and taunt them. “Chto, spat’ khochesh?” Sleepy, huh?
Though Radzinsky’s account is accurate, he is missing some crucial details.
* * *
“Kogo vezyote, rebyata?” asks Major Khrustalev, coming up to the curb. Whom are you bringing, boys?
“Negrov vezyom,” answers a tall man who seems too old to be a lieutenant.
Khrustalev is a muscular man with a round face, blue eyes, and a brooding soul. This does not distinguish him from other men in his position, but this is all that’s known. It’s late, and Khrustalev isn’t in any shape to click his heels and salute.
His gray State Security cap is somewhere in his office, probably on his desk. He threw it there after loading four singing drunks—Politburo members Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov, and Bulganin—into a Moscow-bound limousine. They had more than two bottles of juice each. Juice, in the lexicon of the Nearby Dacha, is a wicked young Georgian wine. You drink it by the bucket. It benefits the liver. Khrustalev knows that to be the case. That night, two bottles failed to complete the journey from the cellar to the Big Dining Room. As Khrustalev stands alongside the Black Maria, his happy liver is soaked in purloined juice.
Khrustalev has heard from a checkpoint that an MGB vehicle is heading toward the dacha with Negro prisoners and a written mandate from the old man. Of course, it would be prudent to check whether the mandate is genuine, but there is no way to do it short of asking the old man himself. This is dangerous even when the old man is sober. Perhaps it’s one of Beria’s tricks. There has to be a reason, but it is something from above, and Khrustalev is determined not to get ground up in this.
“Are they under arrest?”
“Comrade Stalin’s orders,” says Levinson, handing Khrustalev the mandate.
“Arrest Paul Robeson…,” the major reads, concluding with “blya,” a word that connotes a woman of loose morals, but is used in common speech for emphasis, melody, and balance.
“Paul Robeson?” he asks with disbelief.
“And wife,” adds Levinson.
“I’ll take a look,” says Khrustalev.
As Khrustalev creeps up to the back of the Black Maria to sneak a discreet glance, the lieutenant clenches his teeth, the soldiers sit stone-faced, and the Negroes smile politely.
“He looks young, but she is ugly,” Khrustalev reports to Levinson. “That nose … a coquette, too. Where did you find them?”
“Got them off a plane. They say our chekisty delivered them across the American border to Canada. They say he had a concert near Buffalo, state of New York.”
“Are they arrested?”
“That’s what it says.”
“Wasn’t he a laureate of the Stalin Prize?”
“So was Mikhoels. They think they were rescued, so—quiet…”
“Why are we standing here, talking? Let’s get them in, comrades. Let Comrade Robeson cheer up Iosif Vissarionovich.”
“He would love that. He’s been singing for us all the way from the airfield.”
* * *
Khrustalev walks through the Big Dining Room, singing what appears to be an English translation of a Soviet song:
Fdom bodda undoo bodda,
From oushan un-doo-dunn-blya,
Rayz aap, rayz aap, blya, ze layborink folk,
Ze go-od R-rash-shan folk!
He believes that he sounds a lot like Robeson, and perhaps he does.
Around the corner, outside the Dining Room, Khrustalev’s rendition concludes with a non-melodic “U-u-gh…” Excruciating pain emanating from the shoulder makes him bend over, albeit not low enough to experience relief.
Levinson has a talent for choking his victims while dislocating their shoulders in a wrestling version of a checkmate. This grip can be executed in a manner that causes death.
Inside the dacha, Kogan’s disgust vanishes. He sees a tasteful Frank Lloyd Wright interior, beautiful walnut paneling, comfortable chairs, a well-proportioned table.
* * *
That night, the children fail to show up, but specters bother the old man.
Five burst into his room, in robes of harsh red.
“What are you, doctors?” asks Stalin in his skull, but they don’t seem to be the same as that preposterous Yefim. They fail to answer.
Perhaps addressing them requires speech. He glances at the clock: 4:34 a.m.
“What are you, doctors?”
“Judges,” a tall specter says.
His is armed, it seems. He is holding a curved sword. The old man saw that sword before. Was it not brandished by Yefim?
“Defendant, state your name.”
He feels a hand—a corporeal hand—grab hold of his shirt collar and lift him up. A specter with a hand that grips is something new: a threat.
“Iosif Stalin. Who are you?”
The judges suddenly line up ominously like a firing squad. “Am I awake? Can this be real?” he thinks.
“Mikhoels, Solomon,” says the tall judge, the one who propped him up, and held him by the collar.
“Kaplan, Arkashka,” another specter says.
“Zeitlin, Yefim,” says specter number three.
“Akhmatova, Anna,” says the fourth.
“Robeson, Paul,” the fifth one says.
What is this? Some alive. Some dead. All known to him but one: Kaplan, or some such. Has the world changed? And this Yefim, again. The old man needs to adjust to the changing boundaries of his new life.
“Paul Robeson?” asks Stalin out loud.
“You lied, and I believed,” the specter answers.
“You wanted to believe, and so you did.”
“We sinned together.”
When did they lose their ability to hear thoughts? When did they learn to speak? Are the children different now, too? Will they still dance and play the way they did last night?
Mikhoels, who is clearly dead, and thus a harmless specter, has to differ from that Robeson fool.
“Mikhoels, do you think I missed the insult in your Kinig Lir? You called me a fool for liquidating your old friends. I banished Trotsky. Is he Kent? Cordelia Bukharin? Let’s cast Zinoviev, Kamenev, Yagoda. Which one’s your Edgar? Which one’s Edmund? I am not Lir! I kept my kingdom! I’ll make it bigger still, uniting Earth and hell to build a heaven.”
“I know why you had me killed. I grew too big for you to handle,” the tall one says. “But why kill Zuskin?”
“I read your article about Lir. You said so yourself: Lir and his jester are a single role. You taught me that the king’s the fool, and the fool’s the king. Agreeing, I decreed that the fool must follow his king to his new kingdom. Not me—the real Sovereign—but you, Mikhoels, the pretender. You left me no choice. You wrote the play. My job was to enact it.”
Levinson’s stage directions read:
Chief Judge begins a nign.
The melody is as simple as melodies can be. No words, just winding, wailing sounds, which souls carry into the heavens and back.
Ay-yay-yay-yay-yay-yay-yay-yay-yay
om bibibom-bom bibibibibom
ay biri-biri-bim-bom, biri-bim-bom
ay digidamdam-digidamdam, om-bibibibom-bibibibom …
* * *
“Yefim, I saw you minutes ago. You raised a sword. Was that a warning or a threat?”
“A mortal threat.”
“The day I fear the likes of you will be the day I die. I do not fear, so I live.”
“You lost your grip tonight,” the tall judge says.
“You lost your grip, not I. Here’s all one needs to know about Jews. You kill each other for a cause, and I control the cause and give you weapons. Then I sit down and watch. One couldn’t wish for a better sport. You mocked your God, you mocked each other’s deaths and threw the corpses to the wolves. This wasn’t symbolism. The wolves are fat. It’s real.
“Where is my fault, Yefim? Your people wanted me, and I was there.”
The nign continues, and its sound makes Kima touch Yefim, her father, like on those happy nights, when she slept in her crib, and he secured the foundation of their bright future. The contact of their souls produces hot tears that come from sadness and from joy.
Ay-ay biri-biri-biri-bim-bom
ay-ay biri-biri-biri-bom
biri-biri-biri-biri-bom …
* * *
Tears don’t cripple her. Her strength increases tenfold. Her hand is steady and her weapon poised.
The sun has yet to rise, and purring has begun.
The children slide off the illustrations and stand along the walls.
“I lived for you,” says Stalin to them. This time, he uses his voice.
They look indifferent, detached.
“Our kinig is addressing specters on the walls,” notes Kogan. “He is as mad as he is lucid.”
Levinson’s stage directions: The Chief Judge prepares physical evidence.
“Let’s kill and flee,” says Kima.
Orphans have no patience for ritual of any sort.
OL’GA FYODOROVNA: How can we kill a man who may not understand why he is being killed?
LEVINSON: Why does it matter?
KOGAN: From the standpoint of ethics, Ol’ga Fyodorovna isn’t wrong. I am starting to wonder about this myself.
LEVINSON (reaching inside his rucksack to produce a janitor’s bucket): Ethics? What do you think we are?
LEWIS: Assassins.
OL’GA FYODOROVNA: Not I.
LEVINSON: Not you? Pray tell, what brings you here?
OL’GA FYODOROVNA: Pursuit of dignity.
LEVINSON: You’ve taken a wrong turn.
KOGAN: Indeed, my dear, assassinations are not especially dignified events. This is my first, of course, so I am only guessing.
LEVINSON: Enough! Please, Kogan, read your lines! I do not care what he understands. I care even less about her dignity and her pursuits!
OL’GA FYODOROVNA: How petty …
LEVINSON: Not those pursuits. He’s dead, besides. Please … sha! Somebody, read your lines!
KOGAN (reading): For you, Reb Iosif, we stage the first Blood Seder history has ever known. We will pretend that God did not stop Abraham’s hand, and human sacrifice flourished.
LEVINSON: We stage this play to make your madness real.
Had Solomon Mikhoels beheld him now, he would have seen his equal. Solomon Levinson is an actor who can direct, a director who can write. No wood. No splinters. Not a railroad spike in sight.
Watch Levinson seize the stage with energy, inspiration, movement. He hasn’t felt so young since 1921. On March 1, 1953, Levinson is wiser.
Directions read: The prisoner is inverted.
To hoist a man, you need two acrobats. Have them kneel down, then put one hand on each calf, another on the shoulder, and, yanking fast, stand up. The movement is machine-like.
Imagine this: the room is painted black. Chagall designed your set. There is no set, in fact. No seats, no stage. No right, no left, no up, no down. Let Marc design the costumes, too, and stick a cubist beak upon your schnoz. Make all the pieces click, biomechanically, machine-like, a modern unit fused in action.
The czar lurches forward, then to the side, but that is all—for even in his prime, his strength was meager.
Lewis and Kima grab a calf each. Each grabs a shoulder, too. Two acrobats invert the tyrant, as justice triumphs. Vault! The great biomechanical Machine of Truth is blasting off the dust and cobwebs.
Moscow time is 4:42 a.m.
The wheels of just revenge begin to grind.
* * *
When you are a little man with a crooked arm, you learn to protect your space. The arm is no problem. It petrifies, turns into granite, hard as a statue, which would be fitting, except the fingers curl. If you can part them with your right hand, a cigarette can be inserted. Or part them further and fold in a pipe. The left arm is decoration. The right arm is what you need when you make speeches.
The elbow moves forward, then back again, but not the arm. It hangs at an obtuse angle. And pain is close, lurking in the left shoulder.
As Stalin’s world inverts, he grabs the left arm with the right, to keep it in its rightful place, beside him. He needs no medical advice to know that his shoulder should stay unmoved.
He will be rescued by the guards or, better yet, the children. Inverted but intact, and held together with his own arms.
The children do not move.
“Tear them to pieces!” Stalin cries.
The children weigh allegiances. Specters often do.
LEVINSON: Kogan, your lines …
KOGAN (reading): It’s said that every generation, and every man, must find his freedom from his Egypt. Our times are cruel. We part one sea after another.
LEVINSON (holding up a flattened bullet): With this I killed a man.
KOGAN: Our freedom is won in battle …
LEVINSON: Against the czars.
KOGAN: Against the Fascists.
LEWIS: Against our brothers.
KIMA: Against the tyrants.
KOGAN: Against our God.
He must remember to hold his arm, to ward off pain. Blood rushes to his head. He needs to stand upright, ward off the pain that’s setting in the living nerves above that cursed dead arm.
Why do the children keep their frozen postures?
* * *
The specter lets the bullet drop into the bucket and, reaching into the rucksack, raises two gutted leather boxes.
KOGAN: Tefillin ripped. Twice desecrated. First by us. The second time by thugs. We gutted God for freedom. They are gutting us for gold, for sport, or for no reason at all.
LEWIS: To kill a man is homicide. To kill a czar is regicide. To kill a demigod is demideicide.
OL’GA FYODOROVNA: What do you call the killing of a madman?
LEVINSON: You have no script!
OL’GA FYODOROVNA: And yet I dare to ask.
LEVINSON: Meshugecide, let’s say!
KOGAN (reading): To kill this man is a sin times three.
OL’GA FYODOROVNA: A sin times four, you mean. Meshugecide brings it to four.
LEVINSON: Enough!
KOGAN (reading): A sin times three will equal one redemption.
OL’GA FYODOROVNA: Redemption without God? Incongruent.
LEVINSON: I wrote Without god. Lowercase.
OL’GA FYODOROVNA: Such nonsense.
LEVINSON (raises a jar of syrupy brown liquid): This blood is Kogan’s. Spilled by thugs, and mixed with snow and lard.
KOGAN: Let’s call it by its real name. A brown sauce mit shkvarkes.
LEVINSON: Consult your lines, old goat … please.
OL’GA FYODOROVNA: If your unleavened bread is called the bread of affliction, this sauce is something else.
KOGAN: Blood of affliction?
LEVINSON: Your lines! Your lines! Keep up the nign, Lewis.
KIMA: Let us rejoice at the wonder of our deliverance …
KOGAN: From bondage to freedom.
LEWIS: From agony to joy.
KIMA, LEVINSON, KOGAN, and LEWIS (reading together):
From mourning to festivity,
From darkness to light,
From servitude to redemption.
LEVINSON: Without god.
OL’GA FYODOROVNA: No, comrades, with Him. Tovarisch Stalin, I come here with an ode of sorts. I come to tell you how rich my life has been because of you. With a firmer hand than any czar, you made the Russian verse a game of life and death. Each time you raised the stakes, I felt a twinge on lips I kissed, on heads that later rolled. The more displeased you were with their songs, the more these men and women pleased me.
LEVINSON: I didn’t write this.
KOGAN: Next Year in Jerusalem? Is that the conclusion here?
LEVINSON: This is my play, you fool! I am at home! No! Forever here!
Who are these spirits? What power do they have to get me—Stalin—under their control?
His right arm slowly lets go, the left one drops, its angle widens, and pain pours in from shoulder nerves.
The world’s polarity has changed, and that which was above is now beneath.
* * *
“Judges, read the verdict,” commands Levinson.
The judges read:
“The accused, Stalin, I., is sentenced to the highest measure of punishment: the extraction of all blood, drop by drop.”
The czar feels a light pinch in his left leg and, released, warm fluid comes down upon his belly, his chest, his chin.
He hears a voice: “Why isn’t there blood?” It is a judge … Mikhoels?
Another judge replies: “This is a catheter, not a drainpipe!” Zuskin?
“So get a drainpipe!”
“Where?”
“I don’t know! In your farkakte bag!”
“Am I a plumber?”
“Plumber? Worse! You are a goat, an old goat at that, an alte tsig!”
“This catheter is for shpritsing!”
“But our verdict is to drain!”
“I didn’t write it. It is your play, your verdict!”
“What do you want to do?”
“In principle, you could inject him.”
“Mit vos?”
“Mit digitalis. Potassium, maybe. Even a burst of air in the veins will stop the heart.”
“Then get the digitalis!”
“Let me see…”
“A little faster … It’s almost dawn! The acrobats look tired!”
“I have no syringe.”
“A doctor without a syringe?”
“I thought I had it, but I don’t.”
“What good is your catheter without a syringe?”
“You have a point. Has anyone seen it?”
“We’ll cut his throat mit’n sword!”
“In the Temple, when it stood, the sacrifices were done with goats being held upside down.”
Inverted people spend their fury fast. The children stir. They dance like flames, in rapid, closing, spinning circles that keep the beat of drums that blast on the inside of Stalin’s skull. The world is red. It changes to purple, then red again. As their circles spin, the children, one by one, break out to look inside his upside-down eyes. Their faces show no grief, no joy. They don’t show anything at all.
“Fine! Fine! We hold him upside down, so—whack! How hard is that?”
How hard is that?
“Whack zhe, old goat, whack!”
“No.”
“No?!”
Many a man would bargain for that sword. For one swift strike, a lesser man would trade the conviction that murder-punishment is no cleaner than murder-crime. Beliefs, allegiances would fly like worn-out gloves, tossed in the rubbish.
“Nu-u…”
Forget commandments, oaths.
Kill, Dr. Kogan, kill! You’ve come this far! Think of your friends, your colleagues. Arkashka Kaplan, for example.
You know the truth. Accept your fate, old goat!
“Your symbolism is backward, komandir. If he is to be treated as a sacrificial goat, and if you cut his throat, you might make him kosher. That’s a wrong symbol. You’ll confuse God. The thing to do is stick him like a pig.”
“So, do!”
“Turn out the light.”
“Turn out the light!”
The lightbulb dims, yet darkness doesn’t fall. The tyrant doesn’t pray. His hands grow warm. His body swells and tingles. His breath grows faster, shorter. And he needs air, more, more, more …
His thoughts: “The world without Stalin … nonsense! This cannot happen, because it cannot happen—ever!”
He watches his spirit break out of the assassins’ grip, become upright, and join the khorovod of blank-faced children. “I’ll dance … I’ll twirl … I cannot leave.”
LEVINSON: Turn on the light!
(The light is turned on.)
LEVINSON: You didn’t stick him!
KOGAN: No.
OL’GA FYODOROVNA (crossing herself): Thank God. It would have been appalling.
LEVINSON: Fine … I have had it, Ol’ga Fyodorovna, dear countess, or whatever you are. Your pursuit of dignity is getting in the way of our pursuit of justice!
OL’GA FYODOROVNA: So kill me, too.
KOGAN: I didn’t kill him, komandir, but he is a dead man still.
LEVINSON: How can you tell?
KOGAN: I am a doctor.
LEVINSON: But you’re the kind that cuts!
KOGAN: Do you see this? Nit umkern zikh keynmol … keynmol … keynmol. He is redder than a crawfish, even his feet. Look on his lips … di lipn … zet … nu … kukt zikh ayn. He is swelling. And if you call this breathing, my name is Mrs. Robeson. O, tut a kuk … Look there, look there—we are done. Just put him on the sofa. Or the floor … Azoy … Gey, gey!
* * *
As it has been established, shortly before 5 a.m. on March 1, Major Khrustalev tells the guards that the old man gave his blessing for everyone at the dacha to go to bed, and the guards enthusiastically carry out the order.
This is, most likely, correct.
The playwright-historian Radzinsky, who obtained this information by interviewing the last surviving guard, can’t possibly account for Major Khrustalev’s whereabouts between 4 a.m., when the czar’s dinner guests piled into a Moscow-bound limousine, and 5 a.m., when the major dismissed the guards.
Radzinsky is in no position to know that at 4:57 a.m., the plotters, as they make their exit, untie Khrustalev, take a strip of red cloth out of his mouth, and apologize for any pain and discomfort they might have caused.
“Have you heard? The czar is dead,” says the tall, elderly lieutenant.
“Almost dead,” the homely Negress adds. Her voice is deep, her Russian perfect.
“It happened on your watch,” a soldier says. “You should be proud.” He has a woman’s voice.
“You led us to him,” the Negress adds. “A sheynem dank. Are you, perchance, a Yid?”
“If I were you, I’d send the guards to sleep,” Paul Robeson says. “Have some more wine, relax, gey shlofn.”
Khrustalev takes Robeson’s advice.
The following evening, Stalin is found unconscious, in a puddle of urine on the sofa in his study.
It’s no surprise that the story of three chekisty delivering Paul Robeson and his wife for an interrogation evaded Radzinsky.
Robeson’s visit was an unusual event at the Nearby Dacha, but security guards are not talkative people. Radzinsky had no basis for asking specifically about the Robesons, and no information came his way.
Soon after these events, Major Khrustalev falls ill and dies.