The Stalin Epigram (20 page)

Stalin hauled his wicker chair back behind his desk and sank into it, lost for a long moment in reflection. “So what’s your answer, Mandelstam?” he said. “I haven’t
got all night. Will you do your part to secure the secretary general’s immortality?”

“I would if I could.”

His eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What does that mean?”

“Even if I were to compose such an ode, it would be useless to you. I would be going through the motions. I don’t really know you well enough to compose something so true it cuts to
the bone, which is what a poem must do if it is to have life after the poet’s death. For me you are a larger-than-life icon, a legend, a myth, not a flesh-and-blood human being. There is no
way I can counterfeit it.”

“Stalin is made of flesh and blood like you.” He straightened in his chair. “What is your age?”

“Forty-three.”

“You look older. I happen to be thirteen years your senior, but the difference in age notwithstanding, we have a lot in common. Both our fathers were in the leather business—yours
sold leather in Warsaw, mine was a shoemaker in Georgia. It is not to be excluded that my father made shoes using leather supplied by your father. Stranger things have been known to happen. In
addition we share a common interest in poesy. I myself have written romantic verse—several of my poems were published in a Georgian newspaper under the pen name Soselo before I became a
full-time revolutionist. That’s not all. It is certainly no accident we both married women whose name, Nadezhda, signifies
hope
in Russian—we may hope for different things, but
we share an inclination toward hope. And, curiously, you and I have the same forename. During one of my stretches in exile, the locals in Solvychegodsk in the Arkhangelsk Oblast took to calling me
Osip, which is a popular Russian form of Josef up north. I even signed
Oddball Osip
on love letters I wrote to a schoolgirl there named Pelageya. Being a revolutionist, robbing banks to
finance the sacred proletarian enterprise, was not without advantages—you could get into any girl’s pants.”

“Being a poet was not without advantages, too,” I said, but I could see he was lost in his own life and hadn’t heard me.

“By God, those were the days. Exhilarating. Dangerous. Sheer fun. In Gori, in Tiflis, I was a local hero. People in the Caucasus respected me for who I was, not”—he waved the
back of his hand at the Kremlin compound—“where I lived.” Stalin remembered I was there. “Did you say something?”

“No.”

He nodded absently. “Jesus, I haven’t thought about Pelageya in years. I even know her name. Pelageya Onufrieva. I must make a note to have my people find out what became of
her.”

I thought I might stand a better chance of ingratiating myself with Stalin if I could keep him talking about himself. “Siberian exile must have been a bitter experience,” I said.

Stalin blew air through his lips. “Bitter doesn’t begin to describe it. I was banished seven times, seven times I survived to make my way back to European Russia. I’ll tell you
what kept me going in exile: aside from shacking up with girl prisoners so the both of us could keep warm at night, there were the books. Reading is what kept me going. Every time a prisoner died
we’d fight to see who’d get his books. I usually won. My seventh exile ended when I raced across the country to Petrograd, after the tsar was overthrown, to direct the Bolsheviks until
Lenin negotiated a safe passage through Germany and returned from abroad. Siberian winter is best described as hell frozen over. Try to visualize your piss freezing before it hits the ground. Try
to visualize sucking on icicles of frozen vodka to get drunk. Summers, which were as short as a blink of the eye, weren’t much better with their swarms of mosquitoes. Ha! As soon as the
permafrost started to thaw, I joined the other prisoners crawling under the women’s shower house—when we spotted water dripping through joints in the floorboards, we would squirm along
the ground until we were directly underneath and try to look up through the dripping water to see the naked woman showering above. And if you could keep your eyes open long enough, you could make
out the tear—”

“The tear?”

“The slash in the crotch. The slit. The cunt, you idiot. You ought to be familiar with cunts, Mandelstam. I have been told you get laid a lot. The Cheka file on your wife says she is an
occasional lesbian, that you and your wife are both having an affair with a theater actress, that you sometimes watch them and she sometimes watches the two of you and you sometimes do it
à trois
in the French manner. I myself have never fucked more than one woman at a time, but it’s not for lack of trying. I made several attempts to talk my Nadezhda into
experimenting with free sex in the Bolshevik spirit, but for all her revolutionist credentials—did you know she used to type speeches for Lenin before the Revolution?—she was too
puritanical to liberate herself from the bourgeois definition of marriage. These days I fuck my housekeeper Valechka. The only thing she knows is the missionary position, which has a certain irony,
since what I preach is the gospel according to Marx.”

I watched as Stalin poured water into a glass from a pitcher, then measured out drops from a vial. “Tincture of iodine,” he said. “I don’t trust doctors. I treat my
several ailments with ten drops twice a day. Works wonders.” And pulling a face in anticipation of the awful taste, he swallowed the contents of the glass. “With luck, all these
anecdotes will break down the wall between us. Maybe you’ll begin to see me as flesh and blood after all, which will inspire you to write a serious poem to Stalin, as opposed to a treacherous
little polemic.” I could only nod in agreement. Who could rule out the possibility that, knowing these intimate details of his life, I might be able to fabricate an ode to Stalin and avoid
being crushed by the state?

He reached over to angle the desk lamp so that it illuminated a framed photograph on the wall between us. “That’s me at Lenin’s funeral procession. As you can see, as all of
Russia knows, I was one of the pallbearers carrying his coffin on our shoulders toward Red Square. There was so much ice, I was terrified I’d lose my footing and the coffin would fall to the
ground and open and Lenin’s corpse would spill onto the street. I was devoted to Lenin, it goes without saying, though the old man, as we called him, could be a prick sometimes. To begin
with, he wasn’t very courageous—while the rest of us were out in the Petrograd streets making a revolution, he hid in that girls’ school we used as an H.Q. When he did work up the
nerve to leave Smolny, he wrapped his face in bandages so nobody would recognize him. I’ll let you in on a state secret, Mandelstam. To speak plainly, Lenin wasn’t very Leninist. Oh, he
could theorize about proletarian revolution until the cock crowed but when it came to the day-to-day implementation of the theory, he dithered.
Two steps forward, one step back
was his idea
of progress. Lenin didn’t have the guts to attack the peasant problem head-on—it took a Stalin to do that. History will vindicate me. Collectivization, despite the occasional
inconvenience to a handful of peasants, will be the crowning glory of my legacy.”

Stalin had collapsed into the wicker back of his chair by now, smoking his cigarette in short agitated puffs, clearly caught up in recounting his life’s story. “Listen, I was the
only one in the immediate group around Lenin who had peasant roots, the only one who had been an active revolutionist leading Bolsheviks squads in street fighting, as opposed to a shitty
coffeehouse intellectual. Which made me the odd man out, the sore thumb in the superstructure. When it came to the pecking order, no one took me seriously. Well, they all underestimated me,
didn’t they? That was the real secret of my rise to the top of the heap. They were lulled by my Georgian accent, they laughed behind my back at the grammatical errors I made when I spoke
Russian, they took me for a country chawbacon who couldn’t survive in the big city. In the end it was child’s play to fuck over those Jews—Trotsky and Kamenev and Zinoviev, even
Karl Heinrich Marx, the Vandal who had the misfortune to come from a long line of rabbis. He’s probably turning over in his London grave at the thought that someone who doesn’t really
understand all his bullshit is the leader of the world Communist movement. I even outsmarted that asshole Bukharin who understood Marx’s bullshit, or pretended to. How did I do it? To begin
with I took the job none of them wanted—general secretary of the Party. I did what none of them wanted to dirty his hands doing—the boring routine day-to-day chores. And so they went on
theorizing and scheming and preening while I built up an apparat loyal to me and ran the country. And what did I get by way of a thank-you? After Lenin’s first stroke, he was surrounded by
vultures who did everything they could to turn him against me. I’ll let you in on another secret. Days before the old man kicked the bucket, they prevailed on him to write a testament
denouncing Stalin for—get this!—his
crude behavior
toward Krupskaya, Lenin’s hagfish of a wife who was furious with me for talking about his affairs with girls in the
typing pool in front of her. Needless to say, I suppressed the so-called last testament. I keep the original, written out in Lenin’s wobbly hand, in my desk. You don’t believe me?
Here”—he snatched a sheet of paper from the drawer and, waving his good hand the way I do when I recite, began to read aloud from it. “
Stalin is too coarse . . . I suggest to
the comrades that they think of a way of transferring Stalin from the position of general secretary . . . assigning someone more tolerant, more polite, less capricious,
and so on and so forth.
Well, you get the gist. Me, capricious! That’s a good one. After Lenin cashed in his chips, Krupskaya threatened to circulate a copy until I warned her, to her face, I’d appoint a new
widow for Lenin if she opened her trap about the testament. You can bet the bitch shut up.” Stalin brought up a laugh from the pit of his stomach. “Just because she shit in the same
toilet as Lenin didn’t give her the right to walk over me.”

One of the several telephones on the desk rang. Stalin plucked the receiver off the hook and held it to his ear. “Agreed,” he said. “Of course they were plotting to kill
Stalin. That’s what I would be doing in their shoes. As for the trial, it will lend credibility to the proceedings if foreign journalists and foreign diplomats are permitted to witness the
confessions. On the matter of the opera
Onegin
, which I attended last night, I find it outrageous that Tatiana appears onstage in a sheer gown. Stalin is not giving instructions but merely
expressing an opinion. Whatever happened to Bolshevik modesty? Send a memorandum to the director saying Stalin was overheard remarking that Ivan the Terrible, a great and wise tsar, beat his
pregnant daughter-in-law for wearing immodest clothing. Let our cultural workers draw the appropriate conclusions.” Hanging up the phone, he glanced over at me. “I lost the thread of
our conversation.”

“You were talking about the people who tried to turn Lenin against you,” I reminded him.

“Yes, yes, it’s the price one pays for success,” Stalin plunged on, lighting yet another cigarette on the embers of the one that had burned close to his lips. “They tried
to turn Lenin against me and almost succeeded. Ten years later the same pricks were at it again, trying to turn my own wife against me.” I could see that the mere mention of his wife had
aroused strong emotions. His brow creased in pain, his eyes narrowed in irritation “Our marriage was never a bed of roses, as they say. To begin with, I was twenty-two years older and more of
a father figure than a lover in her eyes. She actually left me once, running off to Petrograd with the children, but I went after her and sweet-talked her into coming home. And then, in the early
thirties, with collectivization under way and nobody quite sure how things would turn out, Bukharin filled her head with cock-and-bull stories of starving children with swollen stomachs begging at
train stations, of a Soviet-organized famine spreading across the Ukraine, of mass deportations, of summary executions. Looking back, I can see that Bukharin poisoned our marriage. Nadezhda and I
argued bitterly. I fended off her accusations, quoting Lenin’s line—not that he acted on it himself—about the need for the peasants to do a bit of starving. The trick, he said,
was not to lose your nerve. The peasants who resisted collectivization, who destroyed their cattle and horses and grain, calculated we would lose our nerve and feed them. Zinoviev and Kamenev and
Bukharin and Nadezhda were losing theirs, but I wasn’t losing mine. I was the same Stalin who risked his skin robbing banks in the Caucasus, who forced the defeatist Bolshevik commanders at
Tsaritsyn onto a barge and sank it in the Volga, drowning all the traitors and saving the city from the Whites. Things between Nadezhda and me came to a head at the Kremlin banquet celebrating the
fifteenth anniversary of the Revolution.” Stalin shook his head in dismay. “That was eighteen months ago, but the scene is so fresh in my mind’s eye it might have happened
yesterday.”

“What happened?”

“I knew Nadezhda was in one of her dark moods the moment I put a polka on the American gramophone. Anastas Mikoyan, my Armenian Politburo pal, sashayed across the room and held out his
arms to Nadezhda to dance, but she insolently turned her back on him. Anastas, who, with his little Hitler mustache fancied himself something of a dandy, shrugged off the insult and wound up
dancing with Voroshilov’s wife, Ekaterina. Nadezhda snubbed my old Georgian friend Beria, the Chekist responsible for cleansing Transcaucasia of wreckers, when he tried to chat her
up—she once pretended that he was known to have a weakness for raping young female athletes, but I had no reason to believe this was anything more than grist for the Kremlin gossip mill. I
worked the room, making small talk with Bukharchik, as I called Bukharin—I like to give everyone in my entourage a nickname—teasing him about the age difference between him and the
piece of ass Anna Larina, whom he’d been openly courting. I remember telling him,
You outspit me this time,
an allusion to his fucking someone even younger than my Nadezhda was when I
took up with her. As stunning as Anna Larina was, she didn’t hold a candle to my wife, who looked particularly beautiful the night of the banquet. She was wearing the black dress, embroidered
with rose petals, that her brother Pavel had brought back from Berlin. She’d done up her hair for once, pinning a tea rose in it. When we’d worn ourselves out dancing and singing
Georgian songs, we drifted over to the long table piled with soup terrines and platters of salted fish and lamb, along with bottles of vodka with frost on them. I sat down in the middle of the
table next to the film actress Galina Yegorova, the wife of a Red Army commander who had been conveniently dispatched to run a military district in Central Asia. The night of the banquet, Galina
was wearing one of those low-cut dresses you see in French magazines. Have you ever caught her on the screen? She’s not much of an actress, but I am in a position to testify that she’s
damn good in bed. Nadezhda sat across from me, favoring me with jealous looks every time I let my eyes wander to Galina’s tits. For some reason Molotov and Yagoda began boasting about the
dizzy success of our collectivization program. Lazar Kaganovich, my railway commissar, had just come back from the North Caucasus where he’d organized cattle cars to ship peasants who refused
to join collectives off to Siberia. Kosherovich, as I’d nicknamed Lazar so nobody would forget his Israelite roots, pulled a slip of paper from his pocket and began reeling off numbers.
Ukraine—145,000; North Caucasus—71,000; Lower Volga—50,000; Belorussia—42,000; West Siberia—50,000; East Siberia—30,000
. I tried to shut him up but he was
too drunk to spot the dark looks I dispatched in his direction. Nadezhda called across the table,
What are those numbers, Lazar?
His eyes were glazed over from alcohol and he didn’t
see the storm coming.
Why, deportations, what else?
he replied. I attempted to distract Nadezhda with a toast.
To the destruction of the enemies of Socialism,
I called out, raising my
glass. Everyone around the table raised their glasses and repeated the toast. Everyone except my own Tatochka. She sat there in simmering silence, staring at me across the table with what can only
be described as hate in her eyes. If, as the peasants say, looks could kill, I would have been struck dead on the spot.
Why don’t you drink?
I demanded.
Are you for or against the
enemies of Socialism?
When she looked away without answering, my Georgian temper got the best of me and I threw a handful of orange peel at her.
Hey you, drink!
I shouted. And Nadezhda,
humiliating me in front of everyone, shouted back,
Don’t
hey you
me
. And then she turned insult into injury by storming out of the banquet hall. What could I do? She had
offended me in front of the entire Politburo. You could have heard a pin drop as I settled back into my chair. I tried to pass the incident off as a domestic squabble.
I am married to a
fool,
I said, flinging cigarette ends at the empty chair across from me.
All women are torn
—I gestured toward the genitals of the actress next to me—
and for some reason
unknown even to Marx, we have become prisoners of this tear, we serve life sentences
. Yagoda had the good sense to laugh and the others followed his lead and soon everyone was roaring with
laughter. Everyone except me. I’m not boring you, am I, Mandelstam? Do you want to hear the rest or would you prefer to return to your cell?”