The Stalin Epigram

  Stalin himself had changed a great deal since I’d last seen him in the Kremlin. He had put on ten kilos at least—a paunch swelled under his tunic. He was older and looked it, his hair thinner, the smallpox scars on his face redder. The hand of his crippled arm was tucked into the pocket of his tunic. He rocked back on the chair so that his weight was on its rear legs and inspected me. He noticed the stiffness of my shoulder and arm and asked me what had happened. I explained about having fallen from the second floor of a hospital and broken my shoulder. Accidents happen, he observed, hiking his own bad shoulder.

  Stalin rocked his chair onto its four legs and, climbing to his feet, walked over to an enormous map of the world filling an entire wall of the dining room. Why is it towns around Leningrad still bear their original German names from the time of Catherine? he demanded. He turned toward one of the general officers. This is an intolerable situation. Change these to good Russian names. The officer pulled a small notepad from a pocket and jotted something in it. Stalin came across the room until he was standing behind me. Was I imaging that I could feel his breath on the back of his neck? I heard him say, You disappoint me, Mandelstam. I have read your so-called Ode. It is far worse than that first piece of shit you wrote about me. What do you think I am, an illiterate peasant? You still despise Stalin—you can’t bring yourself to celebrate him. You drag him through the mud a second time. He circled around the head of the table and sank tiredly into his chair. You don’t eat? he said. I have lost my appetite, I replied. He snickered through his nostrils. And well you might. He turned to the others and shouted, And well he might! Several of those around the table nodded in vigorous agreement. There is a lesson here somewhere, Stalin rambled on. I wanted a poem from him when he wouldn’t write one. Now he has, but it’s of no use to me because he is no longer the poet he was when he refused to write a poem for me. He continued speaking to the others but his angry yellow eyes were fixed on me. On the surface, this new Ode pretends to venerate Stalin, but in subtle ways it is exactly the opposite. I think I mumbled, I don’t understand because he grew more exasperated. Of course you understand. You’re the author of this piece of garbage. How could you not understand? He turned toward his guests. Out, out, everyone out. What I have to say is for the poet’s ears only. The kittens, as Stalin was known to refer to his Kremlin associates, headed for the door. Khrushchev left taking his dinner plate with him. Stalin snatched a piece of paper from his breast pocket and, his voice oozing sarcasm, began to rattle off lines from my Ode. What does it mean: Stalin’s eyes are parting mountains. This can only be understood as an echo of that treacherous reference in your first poem to Kremlin mountaineer. What does it mean: I want to say—not Stalin—I want to name him Dzhugashvili. Why are you incapable of letting the name Stalin pass your lips, Mandelstam? Why Dzhugashvili except to draw attention to Stalin’s non-Russian origins? Who gives a shit if I have Georgian roots? Napoleon was Corsican, not French. Hitler is Austrian, not German. Even that prick Winston Churchill, who will slip a kopeck out of your pocket if you don’t keep an eye on him, is half American. Believe me, Nadenka, when I say I attempted to defend myself. You are misreading what I wrote, I began, but he rushed on before I could get a word in. What does it mean: Artist, cherish the warrior, he is always with you. Are you intimating we live in a police state, with Stalin or his Chekists looking over your shoulder twenty-four hours a day? He slapped the paper with the back of his hand. And this, for God’s sake. Squirm out of this if you can: He smiles—a smiling reaper. Do you imagine for a split second that someone hearing this wouldn’t understand the reference to grim reaper? Ha! And here! I didn’t even notice this the first time I read your piece of shit: Bending from the podium, as if upon a mountain—there you go again with your fucking mountain—he reaches over mounds of heads. What does it mean, Mandelstam, this image you project of Stalin reaching over mounds of heads? It comes back again in the last stanza: In the distance where the mounds of human heads diminish. I see now I should have had you shot the first time you pulled off something like this. Out of the kindness of my heart I gave you three years—the notation next to your name, in my own hand, read isolate and preserve—and how do you repay me? With trash! With treason! With references to mounds of human heads in the distance! You might as well have erected a signboard pointing east saying, “This Way to Stalin’s Gulag”! My God, what insolence! His face went slack, his lips barely moved as he said, You have played with fire, Mandelstam. You must be burned. Reaching into the big pocket of his tunic, he produced a spent bullet and a folded scrap of paper. He tossed the bullet across the table to me. I picked it up. The bullet was crushed, as if it had been fired into something. In minuscule inked letters it bore a name: Bukharin. Yes, yes, I can see it’s dawning on you, Stalin ranted on. This is the bullet that was used to execute the traitor Nikolai Bukharin. I had a surgeon dig it from his skull and clean away the brain matter. Your mentor, Bukharin, wrote pleading with me to give him morphine so he could kill himself rather than die with a bullet in the head, but I didn’t dignify his letter with a reply. This note will also interest you. It was written by Bukharin moments before the sentence of the court was carried out. Fitting on a pair of spectacles, Stalin unfolded the paper and read from it. “Koba, why do you need me to die?” I whispered, Why did you kill him? Again Stalin mixed vodka with wine and drank off half a glass. You forget where you are, Mandelstam. I didn’t kill Bukharin. The Cheka discovered he was guilty of treason. The judges heard the evidence and sentenced him to the highest measure of punishment. The executioner killed him. Stalin had nothing to do with all that. The khozyain belched into his sleeve. Bucharchik was a intellectual hunchback, he said. My late father used to say only the grave straightens a hunchback. I think I half rose from my seat. But he was innocent, I exclaimed. Stalin sneered. Innocent! Nobody is innocent. Let me tell you a story. I turned eleven the day two bandits were hanged on a riverbank in Gori. They were handsome young men with wide trousers and bristling mustaches. Dragging their leg irons in the dirt, they went to the gallows bantering with the constables who escorted them. One of the condemned men winked at me as they tightened the noose around his neck. When the bodies fell through the traps and danced at the end of the cords, two fat deputies hung from their feet to speed up strangulation. In a state of exaltation, I ran all the way back to the shack with straw and mud caulking the walls to tell my saint of a mother I’d found out how to cheat death—you winked at it, you bantered with it, you didn’t let on you were scared shitless to quit the only life there was, which contrary to what the Orthodox priests preached, was the one before death. By chance my father, Vissarion, who hired out to a shoe factory in Tiflis, had turned up that morning for his monthly visit, his breath reeking of cheap alcohol, an earthenware jug clutched to his chest. Crazy Beso, as his drinking pals called him, was a thickset man with a scruffy beard. He was coming off an all-night binge, which is what he usually did when he had money in his pocket. (Are you still there, Nadenka? Pay attention to every word I am about to tell you, repeat it to no one, let it go to the grave with you.) Vissarion, Stalin ranted on, adding still more vodka to his wine and drinking until the lids of his eyes turned crimson, set the jug on a shelf and pulled his wide leather belt out of the loops of his canvas trousers. I knew what was coming and cringed in a corner. What has Soso done now? my mother begged. She grabbed her drunken husband by the arm. Grunting, he spun around and punched her in the face. I could see blood spurting from her nose. My father loomed over me. Confess, he blurted out. Confess to what? I cried out. I am not guilty of misconduct. Vissarion cursed me and God the Father and Jesus the Son. Where is it written you have to be caught in the act to confess to misconduct? he told me. My mother pleaded with him. Why do you beat him if he is innocent? And my prick of a father said, I beat him to instruct him there is no such thing as innocence—he knows what he is guilty of even if I don’t. And he began lashing me across the arm that I’d thrown up to protect my head. This arm! Stalin rai
sed his withered left arm. The more I protested my innocence, the harder he whipped me. He beat me until my shirt was in shreds and my arm covered with welts and torn skin and sticky blood. Breathing hard, Stalin fell silent. I asked him if his father was still alive. He is burning in hell, he said. Biographies of me claim he died a hero’s death. My saint of a mother once told me he drank himself into a potter’s field. She didn’t offer details. I never asked. Fuck him. After a while I worked up the nerve to ask Stalin why he was telling me about his father. You won’t like his response, Nadenka. He said, I tell you this because I’m talking to a dead man. Bukharin isn’t around to save you a second time. Listen, there is going to be a war with Hitler. If I play my cards right, I may be able to delay it until 1942 or ’43. I’ve drawn the appropriate conclusions from the Spanish Civil War, specifically from the battle for Madrid, when the infamous fifth column of Franco sympathizers rose up inside the city to support the four columns of Nationalist troops attacking from outside. Before war with Germany breaks out, I must purify the Party, I must weed out the weaklings and the doubters. The purging of a million members from the ranks of the Bolshevik Party, the several public trials and the thousands of less public tribunals, the punishments that fit crimes which, given half a chance, the wreckers would commit, should be seen as a preemptive strike on the fifth column. I must eliminate the collaborators before they can rise up to support Hitler. My campaign against potential enemies must be guided by the principle that there is no such thing as innocence. It doesn’t exist in this world. Every last one of the hundred and fifty million people in Russia, with the exception of my sainted mother, is guilty of something. Lenin tops the list. My own Nadezhda is high on it. All the old Bolsheviks—Kamenev, Zinoviev, Trotsky and the others—are on it. So is the darling of the Party, Bukharin. So, too, the darling of poetry, Mandelstam.

  Oh, Nadenka, my sharer of troubles, I tell you I listened to Stalin as one listens to a madman. And then I remembered Tolstoy’s tale of a man who, seen from a distance, seemed to be engaged in something which indicated he was mad. Coming closer, he realized the man was sharpening a knife. The khozyain, it can be said, appeared mad but he was sharpening a knife. I pushed my chair away from the table and [illegible]. Stalin was talking to himself as I backed toward the door. His lips moved like those of an old man chewing cud. I heard him say, The closer we come to success, the more active our enemy becomes. When he is at his most active and destructive, it should be taken as a sign that we are on the brink of victory.

  What transpired after that, dearest Nadenka, was anticlimax. I was taken to Lubyanka and signed in but never seriously interrogated. It was as if my guilt had already been established. I was an enemy of the people, a wrecker, an agent of the discredited and executed Buhkarin. The only thing remaining was to determine the appropriate punishment for my imaginary crimes. Talk about coincidence, for a time I shared a cell with Christophorovich, the Chekist who interrogated me after my first arrest. You surely remember him, Nadenka, though you wouldn’t have recognized him if you passed him in the street. He had grown cadaverous, his once fine uniform hung off his body, he’d lost most of his hair and all of his cockiness. He didn’t make excuses for himself—he said only that his fall had been inevitable in the sense that Chekists moved up the ladder by unmasking their immediate superior as a foreign agent, so it was only a matter of time before those below Christophorovich denounced him. I asked him if he had confessed to crimes. He said confessions had been useful in 1934, inasmuch as accusations against an enemy of the people had required a certain plausibility. Nowadays, so he claimed, they concoct charges out of smoke—they don’t hesitate accusing Jews of spying for Hitler—and confessions are considered superfluous, inasmuch as the Organs are not required to establish a suspect’s guilt, rather he or she must present proof of innocence. Christophorovich was sentenced to twenty years of hard labor without the right of correspondence—he, of all people, knew how to decode this—and taken off on a transport before me. I discovered he was gone when, returning one day from the toilet, I found the cell empty and a note from him saying, You were my crowning interrogation. I don’t understand why we didn’t shoot you in 1934. I was eventually taken before a tribunal and within minutes sentenced to five years at hard labor for counterrevolutionary activities. Given my physical condition, I understood the verdict to be the equivalent of a death sentence. I was transferred to Butyrki Prison, where convicts were assembled for transport to Siberia. On September 9th I and several hundred others were taken in closed trucks to a little-used freight siding outside of Moscow and herded onto cattle cars. I was told by a kindly guard we were being sent to the Second River Transit Camp near Vladivostok in the Soviet Far East to await transport to one of the gulags on the Kamchatka Peninsula. I beg you, Nadenka, to send a package to Second River Transit Camp with sweaters and gloves and soap. I kiss your eyes, I kiss the tears that spill from them should this letter by some miracle reach you. Still dancing.

  TWENTY

  Fikrit Shotman

  Sunday, the 8th of January 1939

  THE TELEGRAM AUTHORIZING YOUR servitor, Zek Sh744239, to return to Moscow from Second River Transit Camp, where I washed up after my sentence ended, specified first available transport, which happened to be one of those old first-class coaches from before the Revolution. Which is how I came to journey west in a Trans-Siberian passenger carriage filled with Red Army officers going home on furlough. The benches were fitted with cushions, something that would have tickled my camp wife, Magda, if she’d been with me, which, sorry to say, she wasn’t. She still had five years to go when she waved good-bye to me as my motor barge pulled away from the Kolma pier. (I didn’t take it badly she was sizing up the new batch of prisoners on the hillside, in her shoes I would do the same.) The train back took three hours short of three days to reach Moscow, which was a big improvement on my nineteen days in a cattle car going out. Being as my traveling companions were officers, a field kitchen had been set up in another wagon and mess sergeants distributed warm food—on china plates, no less—twice a day. Me being the only civilian in the coach, the officers took me for an important Chekist and treated me with high regard. I let them think I was as important as they thought I was.