SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher (18 page)

But how
was it to be achieved? Especially without his patient knowing that this was
what was being attempted.

In
their first formal session Novgerod Mandelstim got Stalin to again go over the
details of the fear that he felt for the little baker, I.M. Vosterov. After
that they started talking about Stalin’s childhood in Gori Georgia. The normal
psychiatric practice would be to try and point out the childhood roots of this
fear, and through this understanding to alleviate it. Novgerod Mandelstim did
not do this but instead constantly professed himself baffled by the General
Secretary’s illness. He asserted that there could be no possible way that a
violent alcoholic father and a cold over-protective mother could possibly have
anything to do with their son suffering mental problems.

Often
Stalin was forced to move the times of their meetings, and on several occasions
desperate phone calls summoned Mandelstim to his bedroom in the middle of the
night, when he’d had a particularly frightening dream. Mandelstim allowed him
to do this since it was generally considered very bad psychiatric practice to
allow the patient rather than the therapist to set the time and place of
meetings as this placed too much power in the hands of the patient. These bad
dreams that Stalin had were of great use to Novgerod Mandelstim in his project
to make the General Secretary more mentally unstable than he already was. The
dreams usually featured Stalin either being paralysed or unable to speak and
him being menaced by a giant figure — always this person was somebody he had
eliminated, such as Bukharin or Zinoviev. Generally the giant figure would be
clutching a loaf or a small bread roll. Mandelstim’s response to these
terrifying reveries was the suggestion that as they were so frightening Stalin
should attempt to avoid them by getting a lot less sleep. To this end the
psychiatrist prescribed Benzedrine tablets from the Kremlin pharmacy and within
two weeks the General Secretary was a pop-eyed wreck.

Though
in the short term this brought benefits to the people in the Soviet Union in
that executions were almost down to zero, in the longer run it was a turning
point of the wrong kind. Stalin, being no fool, even in his confused state,
though he continued to more or less trust Mandelstim, was still suspicious of
the fact that he was feeling so much worse after weeks of continuous treatment.

Mandelstim
replied with the same responses his colleagues had been using since the birth
of analysis: always darkest before the dawn, got to get worse before it gets
better, without pain can there be gain? Blah blah blah. Unfortunately Stalin
chose to self-medicate and reduced his intake of the amphetamine pills to a
level where he was merely distraught. Perhaps taking control of his situation
in this small way helped the General Secretary because from this point, despite
all the psychiatrist’s efforts, inexplicably Stalin began to get better.

One day
Novgerod Mandelstim was attempting to probe in the most roundabout way whether
what the General Secretary might be feeling for Vosterov was love. After all,
he thought to himself, what could be more terrifying for a mass murderer than
feelings of affection and desire? It appeared to Mandelstim that all that
Stalin did he was able to do because he felt no empathy for other people; his
narcissism placed him at the centre of the world and nobody else mattered,
nobody else suffered as he did. So for him to be in love, for somebody else to
matter, would be profoundly disabling for the dictator. In addition there were
the social implications. The love of one man for another was a secret
profoundly buried under the black earth of over-protective, smothering Mother
Russia. It did not appear, not in literature, not in the ever-present
sentimental folk songs, not in the conscious minds of the people; it was
profoundly invisible. To raise the possibility of it with an ordinary Soviet
worker was to risk a knife in the ribs, so how would Stalin react? However,
when he mentioned the name of the little baker Mandelstim noticed that Stalin
did not give quite such a large shudder as usual. Mandelstim felt something
close to panic at this. Quickly he switched to a line of questioning that in
the past had provoked a welcome increase in Stalin’s anxiety.

These
enquiries involved forcing the General Secretary to talk about the three
different people that he had been. In the beginning there had been Iosif
Dzhugashvili, the shy pockmarked seminarist in Tblisi; then came Koba the folk
hero, the idealist who wished for a better world; and finally came Stalin, the
man of steel. One tentative theory Novgerod Mandelstim had was that perhaps it
was Dzhugashvili, the child, who was leaking through somehow, who was trying in
some way to deflect Stalin from the murderous path that the third man had
embarked on. Mandelstim had also in the past wondered if this was why he
himself had always been inclined to address the General Secretary as ‘Koba’,
the idealist he had been in the days before the revolution in Baku. Mandelstim
imagined himself trying to talk to the man in the middle, the referee in the
wrestling match between the child and the monster.

In
their earlier sessions Stalin, when questioned about the lives of Dzhugashvili
and Koba, had admitted that there were huge gaps in his memory of the early
years. Though he retained in his brain the structure of every committee and
sub-committee and steering group in the jellyfish tentacles of the Communist
Party, he couldn’t recall where he went to school, what his boyhood dog’s name
was or who it was that Koba had first killed: was he a little man with a black
moustache? So again Mandelstim began asking Stalin to try and bring back
memories of his childhood in Gori. At first there was the usual gratifying
unease but suddenly he said, ‘Anton! His name was Anton!’

‘Whose
name was Anton?’ queried Mandelstim.

‘My dog
in Gori, his name was Anton,’ said Stalin and smiled a terrible smile.

The
only consolation that Mandelstim could take from the hour they spent together
was that Stalin did not yet know he was getting better, but if he did not
succeed in making his patient regress then that realisation would not be long
in dawning.

Through
the month of May the daily meetings continued and though Novgerod Mandelstim
tried every trick he knew, Stalin continued to improve, to become calmer, and
in becoming calmer he again began to sign the deportation orders. The trains
began to run again, the spies began to get their orders, the execution squads
cleaned their rifles and strode out again into the dawn.

One day
Mandelstim was summoned as usual but when he got to Stalin’s office it was
empty.

Mandelstim
knew what this meant; he sat there for the hour then returned to his room.
Later the psychiatrist asked his NKVD guard for some sort of small bag which
was delivered to him an hour later. Mandelstim packed into this bag the few
possessions he had acquired in the past months, some books on psychiatric
treatment, a small souvenir samovar from the 16th Congress, a couple of
surprisingly high-quality pencils with ‘Property of the Kremlin’ printed on
them, then lay in his underwear on the bed for the rest of the day and into the
long night.

The
next day Novgerod Mandelstim was again taken by his guard to Stalin’s office.
This time the General Secretary was in place, sitting behind his desk, though
he remained there rather than taking his spot in the armchair from which their
therapeutic encounters had generally been conducted. Nevertheless, in a
hopeless gesture, Mandelstim took his usual place in the other armchair and
waited for Stalin to speak. Finally he said, ‘Yesterday, instead of our usual
session I went down to the bakery behind the Leningrad Station. When the
workers came out for their lunch I saw a certain person. I did not faint, I
regarded him as I would regard any Soviet worker.’

‘So I
have cured you?’

‘It
would appear so.

‘Are
you grateful?’

Stalin
smiled. Strangely Mandelstim found himself smiling too, because you had to
admit Stalin did have a nice smile. Mandelstim wondered whether people constantly
underestimated this terrible creature because of the simple fact that he looked
like a nice man. In Stalin’s case nature’s warning system had failed to work:
it was as if the rattle of the snake had started playing sweet music, as if the
bright, danger-signal red of the poisonous berries had faded to the fuzzy
yellow of a delicious peach.

Stalin
said, ‘Each worker performs his allotted task within the great Soviet society
because he is part of the inevitable process of proletarian advancement. There
is no call for gratitude, gratitude is a bourgeois sentiment that has no place
in the glorious workers’ state.’

During
one of their sessions two months before, when the dictator’s anxiety had been
at its highest, Novgerod Mandelstim had asked of Stalin, ‘Koba, why have you
killed everyone?’

Stalin
thought for a while, considering it a reasonable question. Then he said, ‘They
threatened my position.’

The
psychiatrist asked, ‘And why is that bad?’

‘I am the
only one who can ensure that the revolution continues.’

‘But
what is the point of it all? The people live in terror, Joseph, millions still
starve in the Ukraine, the camps are full to overflowing and the guards indulge
in the worst behaviour that humans are capable of.’

‘But
one day everything will be better.’

‘When
will that be?’

‘When
everything is better.’

Now in
their final meeting Novgerod Mandelstim stated, ‘You said you would let me go
back to America if I treated you successfully.’

Again
that infectious, charming smile. ‘You have looked deep into my mind, Novgerod
Mandelstim. Do you really think that is likely?’

‘No it
is not likely. So what is it for me now? Back to the camps?’

‘No,
not the camps.

‘No I
thought not.’

5

In a blood-splattered yard
in the Lubyanka they tied him to the wall. As the firing squad of eight NKVD
soldiers, with long Mosin Nagant rifles on their shoulders, marched in,
commanded by an ineffectual little NKVD sergeant, Novgerod Mandelstim began to
speak. The execution party all tried to close their minds to what he said; the
deranged speeches of those tied to the wall made them uncomfortable, they said
all kinds of crazy things.

Novgerod
Mandelstim said to them, ‘I am a psychiatrist, the only one in this deranged
country. Over many months I have been examining Comrade Joseph Stalin, General
Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union —’

The
sergeant shouted to block Mandelstim out, ‘Come on, you men, line up here at
the double…’

‘— and
I have come to the conclusion that he is insane.’

‘Zorophets,
are you listening to me? I’ll have you on a charge if you don’t jump to it
smartly!’

The
psychiatrist had to raise his voice to speak over the sergeant. ‘I have a
question for you.’

‘Now
men, rifles to the ready position. Kruschev, do you know what the ready
position is? Good.’

Novgerod
Mandelstim shouted, ‘The name of his insanity is paranoid psychopathy. That is
the name of what he is: a paranoid psychopath, a mad man.’

‘Aim.’

‘But
what, I wonder, is the name for a person who unthinkingly carries Out the
orders of a paranoid psychopath?’

‘Fire!’

6

And what became of I.M.
Vosterov? Remarkably, the fate of the little baker from behind the Leningrad
Station was the only element of Mandelstim’s plan that could be judged an
absolute and total success, though of course he would never know it. Throughout
Stalin’s reverse treatment Mandelstim had striven to keep the object of Stalin’s
terror, the little baker, alive. After all it was not inconceivable that Stalin
might suppress his dread for the few seconds that it took to have somebody
ordered dead in the Soviet Union. To this end the psychiatrist took every
opportunity to plant the idea in the dictator’s brain that terrible things
would happen to him if any harm came to I.M. Vosterov. For some reason this, of
all things, stuck.

As long
as he lived — and he lived a long time — the little baker was watched over, day
and night, by a special KGB squad of elite officers whose sole duty was to keep
him from any kind of danger. A Chechen who tried to rob I.M. Vosterov late one
night in the Arbat district was amazed to find himself clubbed to the ground by
three silent men who rose from the dirty snow, crippled him with professional
dispatch and vanished back into the night. To the quaking, confused I.M.
Vosterov what happened on that night to him and the robber seemed like one of
the old legends that were told about Koba, the Georgian Robin Hood.

The
Vosterov squad became a much sought-after posting within the KGB until the
collapse of the Soviet Union. Just as a soldier had been posted for fifty years
to watch over an empty patch of ground in a forest where once Catherine the
Great had wished to protect a pretty flower, so the children and grandchildren,
the nieces and nephews of I.M. Vosterov were all guarded over by legions of
ruthless silent men whose sole mission in life was to protect Vosterovs.
Constantly swapping fleets of long black cars followed them wherever they went,
beautiful women (all of them fourth Dan or above in long form Karate) offered
themselves up to the male Vosterovs as wives and mistresses; the females were
also exceedingly lucky in the snaring of handsome husbands with ill-defined day
jobs that left them a lot of time on their hands to organise picnics, trips to
the circus and excursions to first-aid demonstrations.