The Stalin Epigram (22 page)

Bukharin was a slight man with a ruddy goatee that in happier times lent him a raffish air. These days he had the preoccupied appearance of someone with a terminal illness. He’d been
expelled from the Politburo in the late twenties, but his absence from the inner circle had apparently not poisoned his relationship with Stalin, who anointed him editor of
Izvestiya
and let
him keep his Kremlin apartment despite the occasional friction between them. Still, rumors had been circulating in Moscow that Bukharin’s days were numbered; that if Zinoviev and Kamenev were
brought to trial, which many thought of as a probability, as opposed to a possibility, to save their skins they would implicate Nikolai Ivanovich and that would be the end of him. I felt terrible
bringing my troubles to someone who had so many of his own. But what was I to do? He still had the ear of Stalin. If only he would consent to put a word in.

“Nothing more outrageous than the poems you know,” I told Bukharin, stretching the truth for fear he wouldn’t dare lift a finger for Mandelstam if he knew what was in the
epigram. “I come to you, Nikolai Ivanovich, as my last and best hope.” And I went on to describe the life Mandelstam had been reduced to living: borrowing money to make ends meet,
reading his poems aloud in return for cigarettes; making the rounds of editors who, when he managed to get past the secretaries, invented one excuse or another for not publishing his work. I spoke
of the heart palpitation that had rendered Mandelstam’s health fragile. I even described how he had fabricated a copy of
Stone
to sell to an editor who was buying up original
manuscripts for the new Literary Fund Library. “You helped Osya’s brother in the early twenties,” I pleaded. “You must absolutely help Osya now.”

Bukharin listened so intently the cigarette in his mouth burnt down and singed his lips and he had to spit it out and grind the end under his heel on the floor. “Times have changed,”
he said. “These days I am not confident I can help myself.”

I had steeled myself to come away empty-handed, but tears welled in my eyes. He produced a handkerchief and awkwardly offered it to me. “Control yourself, I beg you, Nadezhda
Yakovlevna,” he said and, pacing back and forth in his enormous office, he bombarded me with questions. “Have you attempted to see him?” he demanded.

I explained that, thanks to Akhmatova, we had discovered he was being held in the Lubyanka, but visits to relatives in prison were out of the realm of possibility—they hadn’t been
allowed for years. I could tell from the expression on Bukharin’s face that this came as news to him.

“What article are they holding him under?”

“The usual one for political prisoners, Article 58,” I said.

Bukharin paled. “Anti-Soviet propaganda, counterrevolutionary activities—that’s a bad omen. If only it had been a lesser charge . . .” He let the thought trail off, then
came back at me with another question. “What was the rank of the senior Chekist who arrested Osip?”

“What difference does that make?”

“The higher the rank of the arresting officer, the more serious the case, the worse the fate of the prisoner.”

“He claimed to be a colonel,” I said.

Bukharin shook his head in despair. “The fact that they sent a full colonel is a not good sign. Most Article 58 prisoners are arrested by captains, majors at the most.”

The telephone on his desk rang. Striding over, he brought it to his ear. Turning his back on me, lowering his voice, he spoke urgently into the mouthpiece. I thought I heard him pronounce
Mandelstam’s name. “Don’t hold up supper—I will be home late,” he said, and he hung down the phone.

“That was my wife,” he told me. “Anna Larina is shaken by the news of Mandelstam’s arrest but she begged me not to get involved. Someone as well known as Osip Emilievich
could only have been arrested with the knowledge of Stalin. It is quite likely that he was arrested on the instructions of Stalin. There is enough contentiousness between us without adding
Mandelstam to the list of things Stalin holds against me, so my wife advised.”

I rose to me feet and handed the handkerchief back to him. “She’s right, of course,” I said. “It was thoughtless of me to put you in this situation.”

Bukharin threw an arm over my shoulder and accompanied me to the door. “We live in—” He racked his brain for the appropriate word. “We live in
grim
times.
Koba,” he went on, referring to Stalin by his Bolshevik nom de guerre, “is not the man he was when Lenin was alive. He sees himself surrounded by potential enemies, he suffers from
pathological suspiciousness, he trusts no one, he schemes to turn one against the other, to divide and liquidate. He sided with Kamenev and Zinoviev against Trotsky, then with me against Kamenev
and Zinoviev. When I was no longer useful to him, he threw me out of the Politburo and the Central Committee. I tell you, it will be a miracle if any of the old Bolsheviks survive.”

“Thank you for seeing me, Nikolai Ivanovich.”

“You were right to come,” he said quickly. “One must do what one can to starve the beast. I will raise the subject of Mandelstam’s arrest with Koba.”

I had all to do not to burst into tears again. “Words fail me,” I murmured.

He managed a pained smile. “Let us both hope they don’t fail
me
.”

TWELVE

Nikolai Vlasik

Wednesday, the 22nd of May 1934

T
HERE WAS NO LOVE
lost between me and the so-called
darling of the Party
, Nikolai Bukharin. On my all-time shit list, he was right up there with
that Pigalle doorman Maksim Gorky. Bukharin’s squeamish take on the usefulness of Red terror, his foot-dragging on collectivization, his patronizing attitude toward the
khozyain
, his
intellectual arrogance all rubbed me the wrong way. Even Lenin, in his famous testament, felt obliged to concede that Bukharin was weak on dialectics. I don’t have the foggiest idea why my
boss put up with this smug son of a bitch. Maybe it was, as Yagoda once suggested, an attraction of opposites—Stalin was everything Bukharin wasn’t, which is to say someone who had the
balls to follow his instincts where they led, as opposed to the spineless coffeehouse Marxist who didn’t want to soil his manicured fingernails constructing Socialism. In the end I suppose
the unlikely friendship, if friendship it was, could be chalked up to the
khozyain
’s lingering admiration for book learning, an acquired taste that dates back to his brief stint at a
seminary when he was young. To this day, Josef Vissarionovich keeps a stack of books on his desk and another on his night table, and I’m here to tell you they aren’t there for
decoration. Many’s the time the boss, plagued by insomnia, would curl up in a reading chair, his nose glued to a book on the Napoleonic wars or ancient Greece or the Persian shahs or
The
Last of the Mohicans
. Which is how I’d find him when I came by with newspapers in the morning. I mention all this to explain why, when Bukharin showed up in the anteroom outside Comrade
Stalin’s hideaway office—without phoning ahead to ask for an appointment, mind you—I was predisposed to give him a hard time.

“Raise your arms,” I instructed him.

“Raise my arms?”

“Which words don’t you understand? Raise? Your? Arms?”

“Why would I want to raise my arms?”

“Nobody gets in to see Comrade Stalin unless I pat them down for weapons.”

“You’re not serious, Vlasik. Since when am I suspected of wanting to assassinate Stalin?”

“I was born serious and become more so as I grow older. Either raise your arms or get out.”

Mortified, Bukharin slowly lifted his arms over his head. And I just as slowly frisked him, starting at the armpits and working my way down his trousers to the ankles, then back up the inside of
his legs to the crotch. I spared him nothing. When I’d finished, he barged through the door into the
khozyain’s
office. I followed him inside and took up a watchful position with
my back against the door, my arms folded across my chest.

“Koba, I most strongly protest against this indignity,” Bukharin burst out.

Comrade Stalin, sitting behind his desk, pushed aside the pile of state papers wrapped in newspaper. “What indignity are you talking about?”

“Your bodyguard insisted on searching me like a common criminal before he would let me into your office,” he sputtered.

I’d been around the
khozyain
long enough to see he had all to do to keep from smiling. “Compose yourself, Bukharchik,” he said, the tips of his mustache dancing on his
cheeks, his eyes glinting with mirth. “It has nothing to do with you personally. Yagoda has decided that nobody can be permitted into my presence without first being searched for firearms. I
was against the measure, but Yagoda insists it is a necessary precaution, given the current situation.”

“What situation?” Bukharin demanded.

“Comrades thought to be close to me are known to be openly echoing Trotsky’s critique of collectivization, which must be seen as an attack on Stalin’s leadership.”

“Since when has it become a crime to criticize one policy or another?” Bukharin, uninvited, sank into the upholstered chair under the arched reading lamp. A photograph of Comrade
Stalin in the very same chair, a book open on his lap, a pipe in one of his fists, had been published several months earlier in a popular weekly magazine; I know this detail because one of my
concubines had cut it out and taped it to her vanity mirror. “In the days after the Revolution,” Bukharin was saying, “everyone was free to criticize Lenin in private. The only
taboo involved raising the matter in public—of challenging the collective infallibility of the Party—once a policy had been decided.”

“I have absolutely nothing against criticism made in private,” Comrade Stalin said, “as long as it is made to my face and not behind my back.” He lit a Kazbek Papirosi on
the end of the one between his lips. “Why is it every time I see you we get into an argument?”

“I wasn’t aware that this was the case.”

The
khozyain
shrugged. “You surely didn’t drop by to compare Lenin’s style of leadership with mine. What brings you to my wing of the Kremlin on this rain-soaked day,
Bukharchik?”

Bukharin pulled a silk handkerchief from a jacket pocket and mopped his brow. “I want to talk to you about the arrest of the poet Mandelstam.”

“In the matter of Mandelstam, I, of course, had nothing to do with his arrest. Yagoda, who signed the warrant, informed me about it after the fact. He has apparently been charged with
anti-Soviet propaganda and counterrevolutionary activities under Article 58 of the Penal Code.”

Bukharin leaned forward in the chair. “Mandelstam is a first-class poet, Koba, a credit to Soviet culture, but for some time now he has not been quite . . . normal.”

“I understand he has confessed to the charges against him,” the
khozyain
told his uninvited guest.

“Pasternak got in touch with me about Mandelstam. He is extremely distressed about this. He and Mandelstam are personal friends.”

Dropping Pasternak’s name into the conversation caught Stalin off guard. He scraped the chair back from the desk and, removing the cigarette from his mouth, brought it up to his eyes and
studied the thin plume of smoke drifting toward the ceiling. I was aware my boss had a certain esteem for Pasternak—it dated back to his wife’s suicide and the perfunctory letters of
condolence that flooded the press at the time. I happened to have brought around the newspapers the morning the news of Nadezhda’s death (attributed, if memory serves, to peritonitis) was
published. I found the
khozyain
in a foul mood, the rheumatic throbbing in his deformed arm having kept him up most of the night. Flipping open the newspapers, he read aloud the trite
letters of condolence, his voice dripping with scorn.
Accept our grief at the death of N. S. Alliluyeva . . . a bright candle tragically extinguished . . . a comrade who will be sorely
missed
. That sort of thing. And then he stumbled across a short letter signed by Pasternak, who had apparently refused to add his name to the banal communication from the Union of Writers,
preferring to publish a note of his own. The
khozyain
snipped Pasternak’s letter out of the newspaper and kept it on his blotter for months. As far as I know it may still be there. I
can confirm that Pasternak’s letter, which read like a telegram and reeked of sincerity, was the single expression of condolence that brought any comfort to the shattered Stalin. As he took
to reading it aloud in my presence every morning for weeks, I pretty much remember what Pasternak said:
The day before her death was announced, I thought deeply and intensively about Stalin; as
a poet—for the first time. Next morning I read the news. I was shaken, as though I had been there, living by his side, and had seen it. Boris Pasternak
.

The
khozyain
resumed smoking, sucking on the cigarette in short nervous puffs. “What does Pasternak say exactly?” he asked Bukharin.

“He was stunned to learn of Mandelstam’s arrest. He asked me to tell you that in a quarrel between a poet and a political leader, the poet, whether he emerges alive or dead, always
comes out on top. History, in Pasternak’s scheme of things, is on the side of the poet.”

“Fuck the cloud dweller,” the
khozyain
sneered, using the nickname he had bestowed on Pasternak. “You can count on these rhymesters to stick together, it doesn’t
matter where the fault lies.” All the same I could tell from his tone that the boss was shaken.

Bukharin realized that Pasternak’s intervention had impressed Stalin. He drove the nail home. “He says that Mandelstam isn’t in his right mind. Years of humiliation, of not
being published, of begging or borrowing money to make ends meet, have pushed him into madness. He is not rational, not responsible for his actions—”

The
khozyain
interrupted Bukharin. “Would you be interested in reading the particular poem, written out in his own hand, that caused him to be charged with anti-Soviet
propaganda?”