1

 

The red flags and banners were cracking in the wind, Making the NKVD bodyguard edgy and tense, on the day in the early part of 1937 that Comrade Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, paid a rare and frightening visit to meet some of his subject peoples. The streets were cleared of traffic for miles around while his armoured American Packard, surrounded by a legion of NKVD bodyguard in trucks and on motorbikes, took him to a bakery co-operative near the Leningrad Station. The reason he was visiting this bakery was that it had exceeded by over one hundred per cent its loaf production targets, as set out in the second great Five Year Plan. That this great loaf leap forward had been achieved by diluting the flour with various poisonous metals was of no concern to anybody, apart from those few who were killed by their lunch. He was there to present a medal of Heroes of Soviet Labour (second grade) to each member of the workforce.

The General Secretary went along the line of men and women, uttering the odd gruff word, pinning medals on the rough tunics (made of the same crude fabric as his own) of the bakers and the administrative staff.

Stalin was a small man and most of the faces of the workers were well above his but towards the end of the line he came face to face with the quivering visage of I.M. Vosterov, comrade baker third grade, a short round man with a thick black moustache, round bright brown eyes and a rather delicate, fine, thin nose. When Stalin accidentally looked into the eyes of this sweating little man he was astonished to feel a sudden and violent lunge of fear, a fear composed of nothing but pure fear itself, free floating and anchored to nothing, a horror so deep that a man less dexterous at hiding his feelings, would have run yelping into the street. Yet nigh on nothing showed on Comrade Stalin’s face, a slight twitching of his moustache perhaps as he moved down the line, and the further he got from I.M. Vosterov the more the dread subsided. However, if he looked back down the ranks and caught the slightest sight of the little man then the fear returned to him as strong as ever. Stalin didn’t know how he kept moving; the fear he felt was intolerable. He thought to himself that he would not be able to endure the next few seconds and minutes. That he could survive through the following days or weeks with this fear seemed an absolute impossibility.

Of course he had felt fear before but it had been of an entirely different order: lesser, altogether understandable. He had feared other men — more or less all other men — for what he thought they might be able to do to him. For example he had feared all the old Bolsheviks, those who knew the secret, the ones who had read Lenin’s last letter to the Central Committee condemning him as unfit, a scoundrel and a repressor. They were all now shot or being worked to death in the camps and he feared them no longer. He had feared Trotsky, the only one who could have replaced him in the early days. Trotsky, of course, was banished, waiting on the shelf in Mexico to be dealt with one day. He had feared Bukharin because they said Bukharin had a better mind. For the crime of having a better mind Stalin had exiled him twice and allowed him to come back twice, forcing him the last time to admit his mistakes before the entire Party Congress, playing with a man as if he were a clockwork toy (his confessions wouldn’t save him, he would be executed one day, and the thing was that Bukharin, with his fine mind, knew it). Stalin got pleasure from the way Bukharin looked at him, he liked to see the knowledge in his eyes. Stalin had even allowed him to go abroad, knowing he would come back.

And he had. It was terribly hard for Russians not to return to the sacred soil of the Motherland, even if it killed them; it was part of the soulfulness the Russians saw in themselves, a poetic attachment to soil.

The kind of terror that Stalin felt when he thought of the little baker was entirely different. As far as he could tell he did not fear what Vosterov could do to him: what could a baker do to him — Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union? Cook him a bad cake? No, it seemed that there was just something about the little man which brought out terror, pure and simple. This dread was clear and burning to the skin, like the finest peasant-grain vodka, distorting and oily in its bottle. Perhaps, Stalin thought, the little baker was some kind of mirror that reflected back all the screaming fear that rose like swamp fog from the entire terror-ity of his empire … he didn’t know. He didn’t know. He, who through his web of secret agents and spies, knew all that was going on in distant frozen Archangel, in sunny Yalta, amongst the minarets and towers of Oriental Tashkent, suddenly he didn’t know what was going on inside his own head. He felt furious and very, very frightened.

Sitting back in the leather seat of the car Stalin reflected again on the nature of the anxiety he felt. There were many around him who he suspected of treachery, there were many who he thought might try to kill him, there were many that he hated (the entire Kulak class, for example), but this terror was certainly different. The fear that he generally felt was an enabling thing: a motivation to have this individual or that village or that class liquidated. But with the little baker it was the reverse — it paralysed him.

As soon as he got back to his apartment in the Kremlin and his bodyguard had gone, Stalin ran from room to room in a high-stepping dance, flapping his arms like a bird and saying over and over to himself, ‘OhmiGod! OhmiGod! OhmiGod! OhmiGod! OhmiGod!’ Then he settled in a corner and beat himself on the temple with the heel of his hand, shouting, ‘Stop it! Please stop it! Please stop it!’ Then he sat at his desk and issued an order to Yagoda, the head of the NKVD, to arrest and deport to the labour camps the entire workforce of the Bakery Collective near the Leningrad Station. Yet, as he went to put the order in the internal mail, the General Secretary thought to himself, ‘Well off you go to the camps, you comrade little shit, I.M. Vosterov’ and having that thought caused a picture of I.M. Vosterov to rise up inside his head.

If anything, the fear was worse than before: Stalin fell off his chair to the floor and lay watching the ceiling spin for several minutes. It did, at least, give him the chance to inspect the bottom of his desk for microphones. Eventually Stalin was able to climb back to his desk where he wrote on the executive order in a shaky hand: ‘Excluding from deportation Comrade I.M. Vosterov, baker third grade.’

Over the next few weeks, though, Stalin was frequently struck with thoughts of I.M. Vosterov, each thought carrying its own spear of terrible anxiety. He consoled himself with the notion that at least he would never have to see the man again; after all, there was no chance that a humble bakery worker would ever come into contact with the great Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Gradually he became more involved in preparations for the 16th Party Congress and his terror began to fade.

So it was that Stalin strode out onto the podium in the great hall to give the opening speech for the 16th Congress, and in the second row — amongst the Uzbeks and the Tajiks and the Kazaks in their colourful native costumes — standing to applaud the General Secretary’s entrance with as much fervour as the thousand other delegates from all over the vast lands of the Soviet Empire, his clapping hands like the blur of a hummingbird’s wings, smiling and grinning and sweating, was I.M. Vosterov.

Stalin saw him right away, as those who are afraid of snakes will see a serpent or a coiled hose that might be a serpent, or a coiled hose behind which serpents might be hiding, or a barrel in which serpents might be slithering and twining over each other, where others would only see a hose and a barrel with no serpent-related qualities at all.

Stalin’s eyes zoomed in on the features of I.M. Vosterov. Fear had given him the gift of seeing I.M. Vosterovs across phenomenal distances: he would have seen the little baker if there had been ten thousand or ten million delegates, he would have picked that face out if it had been at the back of the hail a mile away, even if it had been wearing a cossack hat, a scarf and a pair of welder’s goggles. Stalin staggered sideways as the terror gripped him, and was only able to stay upright by grabbing on to the hammer-and-sickle-draped lectern at the centre of the stage. What was the little bastard doing there?

What had happened was this. When I.M. Vosterov turned up for work the day after the General Secretary’s momentous visit, he was a little surprised to be the only person in the entire huge echoing building. Of course he did not mention it to anyone and he did not go looking for everybody. It was as basic as breathing in the Soviet Union that you did not remark on the disappearance of your fellow citizens. You certainly did not report the disappearances to the authorities since it was the authorities who were certainly the ones who had caused the disappearances. You assumed that if they had gone there was a good reason for it: the authorities, under the guidance of the great helmsman, Comrade Joseph Stalin, absolutely knew what they were doing; though, admittedly, it was sometimes hard to divine exactly what their motives were, what lessons you were supposed to take from their actions. So I.M. Vosterov unsuccessfully set about baking a thousand loaves all by himself and somehow the sullen ox of the Russian populace got by with a little less bread. The only one Ivan Vosterov could confide in was his wife. When he got home from the bakery, after filling out his own time slip and docking himself fifty kopeks for late arrival, he told his wife of the disappearance of the entire workforce.

Once he was in the relative safety of his apartment he allowed his emotions some relief. ‘Oh how we suffer, us Russians,’ wailed I.M. Vosterov. ‘Poor Slays, sons of the soil of Mother Russia, we endure so much,’ then he rocketed to the other extreme: ‘… ah but then give us a few friends, a bottle of vodka, some pickled cucumber and how we laugh! Ha, ha, ha!’

‘Actually I don’t remember much laughing,’ said his wife.

In a more concrete way, what the Party meant by its actions was the problem that confronted I.M. Vosterov’s branch of the Communist Party: that his entire collective had been liquidated while this seemingly innocuous little man had been spared had to be a powerful message of some kind — but what was it? Supine submission was not an option for Party officials; their lives depended on deciphering the signs and signals that were handed down from the Party, no matter how cryptic. That was how a cow had become director of the Chelyabinsk Tractor Works.

So, after much debate, the secretary and the chairman of the branch decided that the higher reaches of the Party were sending a hint that they, the secretary and the chairman, had been undervaluing I.M. Vosterov. By solely excluding him from the slaughter of his entire collective the Party were saying that he was a man who should be valued more highly. They could, of course, just have sent a letter to this effect, but that was not the way of the Party. So in this manner I.M. Vosterov was elected as the delegate from Central Moscow Branch to the 16th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Once he had stumbled through his speech Comrade Stalin spent the rest of the morning sitting with his hands over his eyes, causing those speakers who followed him to contemplate suicide or a swift run round to the French Embassy and a pole-vault over the gates. The General Secretary also did not attend the buffet lunch — ‘a hundred tastes of Kazakhstan’ —with the delegates, as he had been scheduled to do.

Stalin had risen to his position of god through the manipulation of the committees and sub-committees of heaven and so he spent the lunchtime arranging for I.M. Vosterov to be transferred to a plenary sub-committee on the struggle against the Kirovite faction, sitting in a side room while the Congress went on in the great hall. As long as he timed his entrances and exits he ran no risk of colliding with the little man.

After the 16th Congress Stalin considered having the secretary and chairman of I.M. Vosterov’s Party branch shot for bringing the fearful apparition to his favourite event of the year, but waves of uncertainty seemed to spread out from the delegate for Central Moscow so instead the General Secretary contented himself with half-heartedly deporting some Ukrainians to Siberia. He knew he should at least do the same for I.M. Vosterov, but something in him now wanted to keep the baker close by in Moscow: he told himself that when he had got rid of his fear he wanted to be able to know where the little man was so that he could look on him without feeling the panic, the panic that rose in him that very moment as he contemplated the little baker in his mind. This time he got to check the skirting board for spyholes.

As Stalin spent more and more time thinking about I.M. Vosterov he had less time to stoke his usual resentment and furies, and therefore less people were condemned to death or deportation. This should have been a golden time but many could not enjoy it, expecting the terror to begin again, worse than ever. ‘Oh how our poetic Russian souls do suffer,’ they thought to themselves and wept suddenly in self-service canteens. Others in the ranks of the Party saw the decline in the deaths of innocents as a sign that Stalin was losing his hold, and began to plot against him.

Meanwhile the General Secretary attempted many things to try and free himself from the fear. He tried, for example, to make the little baker ridiculous in his mind. He imagined I.M. Vosterov sitting on the toilet, his trousers round his ankles; but that only succeeded in making Stalin afraid every time he went to the toilet, since his thoughts would now go ‘I’m going to the toilet, I thought of I.M. Vosterov on the toilet. Oh God … this floor is cold.’

One day, in desperation, Stalin called in Kuibyshev, the Minister for Health. ‘Tell me, Kostya,’ he said. ‘I was arguing with that shit-talking fool Molotov the other day about who is the best psychiatrist in the Soviet Union. Now you’re a clever bastard: who would you say it was?’

Kuibyshev didn’t know what to say to this — it could be a fatal trap in so many different ways. A seemingly innocent chat about puppies or mandolins with Stalin could somersault into yelled accusations of high treason within six or seven words; the General Secretary was like a serpent hiding within a coiled hose. So, having no other option available, he decided to tell the truth.

‘Nobody, General Secretary,’ said Kuibyshev. ‘As I’m sure you remember, Comrade General Secretary, it was decided at the Congress of the Academy of Science in ‘32, which you so ably chaired, that as mental problems were created by the workers’ alienation from society, and as the Soviet Union is a perfect society run according to the principles of Marxist Leninism with the workers owning the means of production, there can be no alienation and therefore no mental problems in the Soviet Union. Mental problems cannot possibly exist because that would mean our society is not perfect; which of course it is. The workers live in perfect harmony in the glorious Soviet Union which you, Comrade Stalin, have brought into being following the glorious teachings of Comrade Lenin, and thus there are no mental problems of any kind, whatsoever, at all, anywhere.

Anybody who does show any mental problems therefore must be a shirker or a saboteur and is imprisoned or shot.’ Kuibyshev paused to see how all this was going down. Stalin seemed sunk in thought, so he decided to continue, ‘Actually it occurs to me, Comrade General Secretary, that the only possibility of mental problems would be if a person were alienated from the workers’ paradise because they were not a worker but a blood-sucking Kulak or a bourgeois intellectual Kerenskyite saboteur perhaps …

Kuibyshev was pleased with this elaboration which had just come into his head. It did not do to come up with stuff if there was a witness present because you could make yourself seem cleverer than Stalin, which was a subway token to the Gulag, but on the other hand if there was no one else around then it was essential to come up with things, because then he could later claim these thoughts as his own.

The Minister for Health continued, ‘Also, of course, Psychiatry is a Jewish invention and we know that that lot are not to be trusted. So in 1933 we sent all the psychiatrists to chop down trees in the forests of Siberia where, incidentally, lumber production was reduced by thirty-five per cent on their arrival.’

‘Well who is the best of them then?’ asked Stalin.

Still living.’

Kuibyshev considered for a while. ‘None of them, Comrade Secretary General; they are all dead if they have been in the camps since ‘33.’ Then he had a thought. ‘Ooh ah, no, wait a minute — there is Novgerod Mandelstim, he came back from the United States with his entire family in ‘36 after the proclamation of the new Constitution. We didn’t arrest them all for sabotage until early this year so I suppose they might still live.’

Kuibyshev waited. Finally the General Secretary spoke.

‘If he lives, bring him to me,’ ordered Stalin.

 

 

2

 

A few mornings later, far to the east, Novgerod Mandelstim was trying, inexpertly, to cut down a tree in the Siberian forest. The deep snow he was standing in came up to his knees, soaking through the thin sacking of his trousers. He thought this might be the day when he lost his toes. Then the NKVD guards came for him and he thought he might lose more than that.

To his surprise, however, the guards were relatively polite, not beating him much at all. Down the track a car was waiting with its engine running and the heater turned up high. They threw him in the back of it; it was the first time he had been warm in six months. The car set off with a squeal of frozen brakes and bumped along forest roads for over an hour till they came to a narrow black road.

To his right Novgerod Mandelstim saw prisoners filling some of the holes in the road with rocks, their faces and hands were raw and bleeding. A few took a quick look to see which powerful figure was in the back of this car they were perplexed to see one of their own reflections staring confusedly back at them.

The car drove for another two hours down the black road till they came to some sort of compound with the emblems of the NKVD above its gates. The motor swung through the barrier, not slowing down and only just clearing it as frantic soldiers pushed the gates open. They were now into a large clearing, long and narrow, trailing into the icy acid mist. And here was the most extraordinary thing: a three-engined aeroplane stood on the frozen grass, red stars emblazoned on its shining silver corrugated sides, its propellers slowly spinning in the corrosive air in order to stop them freezing.

Novgerod Mandelstim considered now that he wasn’t going to be killed that day after all.

They put him in a seat on the empty plane, then two implacable guards came aboard and sat facing him. Novgerod noted that they were both captains in the NKVD. This got stranger by the minute: he wondered whether he had gone mad and this was some sort of long-drawn-out delusion. It felt real enough, but then he supposed delusions did, while you were having them.

The engine note of the plane changed to a roar, they bumped forward then began racing across the tundra, trees whipping along beside them, until finally they hiccupped into the air. As the aeroplane tore higher into the thin atmosphere, out of the window Mandelstim could see the many, many camps, each a white clearing in the forest, like patches of nervous alopecia in a dark green beard.

For most of the rest of that day they flew west. It was dark by the time the engine note changed again and the Illuyshin began its descent. The psychiatrist woke and looked once more out of the window. Tilted on its side was Moscow! He could see the Kremlin and Red Square clearly, the floodlights illuminating Lenin’s tomb casting long black shadows over the rest of the city.

They came into land at Sheremetyevo Airport and another car was waiting on the tarmac, its engine ticking like a bomb and white smoke curling from its tailpipe. By this time Novgerod Mandelstim had gained an idea as to where he was bound, or at least who he was bound to see: there was only one person who could magic these things. In this country it was beyond the power of the average Soviet citizen to get their hands on a potato! Never mind an aeroplane! So NKVD captains, cars, planes, and most of all the sense of purpose, the engines running, the guards waiting and ready to roll, in a land where everything was done at a lethargic half-speed if it was done at all. It had to be him.

The thing was that Novgerod Mandelstim had known him, had been in some ways his friend. Back in the days before the revolution, the sullen pockmarked little Georgian, then called Iosif Dzhugashvili, had seemed vulnerable and shy and conscious of his lower class amongst the flashing, garrulous, intellectuals who controlled the Communist Party branch in Baku. Novgerod Mandelstim had tried (Had he been patronising? He didn’t know.) to make him feel less self-conscious, had tried to include him in the debates, had given him preference in appointing him to committees (after all he was a genuine worker, one of those in whose name all this was being done), had invited him to dinner, since he always seemed half-starved; others had done the same. He had killed them all.

After 1917 Novgerod Mandelstim had watched in astonishment and at first with a little pride as Dzhugashvili, now called Stalin, had risen in the Party. In 1928 Leon Trotsky, the last of Stalin’s opponents, was sent into exile in Alma Ata and the first real terror had begun. Real in that this was the first terror which had reached into the ranks of the Party. Before this, purges, random murder and imprisonment had been a privilege of the ordinary citizen. In that same year the OGPU, forerunners of the NKVD, had come looking for Novgerod Mandelstim. Fortunately he had been warned by a ex-patient high up in the Party, who he had cured of a morbid fear of frogs, that this was about to happen and thus managed to smuggle himself and his son to the United States in the last days, before the gates slammed shut.

Thanks to the many other Jewish émigrés, Novgerod Mandelstim was able to move to the west coast of America and there he set up a psychiatric practice with another of those who had once been in the Party: G.V. Lubetkin.

Yet he was not happy. The corporeal decadence of the United States disgusted him, the seventeen different kinds of motor car that they had, in restaurants the little crackers they gave you that nobody ate, the gaudy suits the negroes wore at the dance halls of Compton; all of it repelled his puritan soul. Most of all he was repulsed by his patients: whining, spoilt, greedy, grownup man/woman/child without any real problems, who constantly clamoured for his attention and thought he was their friend.

This displacement caused him to fill his son’s head with stories of the Motherland. He pointed out at every opportunity the bovine materialism of the Americans, he contrasted this with the nobility of the Russian citizen; he compared the cheap jangling music with the poetry that lived within the soul of every Russian: Pushkin, Chekov, Dostoyevsky — Tolstoy versus Roy Rogers. There was no contest. Maybe this was why the lad had not prospered; despite his obvious intelligence somehow little Misha had not done well at college and had left early. In the years of the Depression he could only get work as a clerk in the accounts department of the Goodyear Rubber Company, and he had married a little girl from Yekaterinburg rather than one of the ten-foot-tall Californian women who ranged the sunburnt streets. So when in 1936 Novgerod Mandelstim heard about the new Constitution, he resolved to return to the Soviet Union. The provisions in this Constitution when it was adopted by the Party Congress included universal suffrage, direct election by secret ballot and the guarantees of civil rights for all citizens, including freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, the right of return for refugees without persecution, freedom of street demonstrations and the right to personal property protected by law. Later on Mandelstim reflected that it might as well have promised a new type of gravity and perpetual freedom from farting for all the difference it made, but by then it was too late; they were all in the net.

The ‘36 Constitution had caused a very favourable impression abroad; liberal people said, ‘Now the terror is over, maybe it was necessary, who knows? Now it is over, though, the Soviet Union will rejoin the world.’ They said this because they wanted it to be so, they couldn’t believe that free little crackers was the best that mankind could be.

So Novgerod Mandelstim told his son he was returning to the Motherland but that he didn’t expect him to come too. However, as he had secretly hoped, Misha said that he longed too to touch again the dark earth of Mother Russia. Therefore Novgerod Mandelstim, his son, his daughter-in-law and his three grandchildren all returned to the Soviet Union. They were sure that if things went wrong their US citizenship would protect them.

‘Hello, Koba,’ he said to Stalin, deliberately using the name of the Georgian folk hero that the General Secretary had adopted before he became Stalin, the man of steel.

‘Hello, Mandelstim,’ replied the emperor of two hundred million souls. ‘It’s damned good to see you, old friend.’

‘It’s good to see you too, Koba, especially since I thought I was going to lose my toes this morning.’

‘Well now you are here and your toes are safe.’

‘For the moment, yes, yes they are,’ said the psychiatrist. ‘What do you want of me, Koba?’

‘Straight to the point as always. So be it. Well, Comrade Psychiatrist Novgerod Mandelstim, I have a small problem.’ And the most powerful man in the biggest country on earth told Novgerod Mandelstim about his small problem with the little baker from behind the Leningrad Station.

 

 

3

 

When he had finally admitted to himself that he needed help in sorting out his problem Stalin had felt better immediately. While they were locating Novgerod Mandelstim the psychiatrist, Stalin day-dreamed on what it would be like to confide in another person. All his life Stalin had hidden his thinking behind a thick curtain, his power rested in the fact that his enemies (which meant every living individual in the land and some dead ones) never knew what was going on in his brain, what he was going to do next. To tell all that was in his head to Novgerod Mandelstim, what would that be like? He had no idea. But maybe it was what he needed. To relieve the pressure like a valve, the terrible pressure of trying to make a better world for everybody. ‘Oh,’ he thought, ‘how we suffer, us Russians. I suppose it is in our nature. But what have I done that life should be so hard?’ Cautiously he tried thinking about I.M. Vosterov. There came immediately a terrible spasm of fear that forced him to clutch on to his desk in order to remain standing. ‘But perhaps,’ he thought afterwards, examining the fear, ‘it might have been a little reduced already.’

Then another thought came to him, that maybe he didn’t need Novgerod Mandelstim at all. He wondered if in some way the little baker was a kind of personal demon of his who could be placated by gifts, just as the ancients made sacrifices to their gods. Even as it came to him this notion seemed absurd to the General Secretary, but he also realised that by now he would try any stupid thing to ease the fear. Armand Hammer, the American who was the only supplier of reliable pencils in the Soviet Union and who bought all their oil, had recently given Stalin as a gift a half-sized metal negro that, via a patented Edison wax cylinder arrangement in its stomach, sang slave songs and negro spirituals at the switch of a lever. Stalin promptly ordered the NKVD to have this object delivered to the apartment of I.M. Vosterov.

The neighbours watched from behind their curtains and felt a little cheered. It made a change to see the NKVD carrying somebody into a house, even if it was a metal negro. Nonetheless, in a society so conditioned to abrupt and brutal change, no happy sense endures and within the hour a rumour started to go around the neighbourhood that all workers were going to be sent to the camps and liquidated: henceforth their jobs would be performed by metal negro robots. (‘What was wrong with Russian robots,’ many complained, ‘instead of these black metal monkeys?’)

Stalin waited for the half-sized metal negro to be delivered then thought about I.M. Vosterov. Instantly he fell to the floor and Novgerod Mandelstim’s journey from the camps began.

‘I see,’ said Novgerod Mandelstim after he had heard the story. ‘And you wish me to treat this fear that you feel?’

‘Indeed, that’s what I’ve dragged you all the way from bloody Siberia for.’

‘There will be a price.’

‘There always is. You know I always think ahead, Mandelstim two or three moves, just like you Jews, always thinking, thinking. This is what I propose. Your son, his wife and two of the three children still survive…  for now. If you treat me successfully they will be released from prison and allowed to leave the country, along with yourself.’

Novgerod Mandelstim laughed a genuine, hearty deep laugh, the first in a long time. He said, ‘You forget, I know you, Koba. I allowed myself to be deluded once but I know you and I know a little of your mind. If I treat this fear of yours successfully you will kill me and my family the instant you feel well, despite any promises that you have made. Patients when they are in the grip of their illness always think they will be grateful, but when you have brought them back into the light they kvetch about the bill. You, especially, will be no different.’

‘You’re a damned idiot!’ shouted Stalin. ‘Don’t you understand that I could easily have the children brought here and tortured in front of you?’

‘Then my heart would be full of hate for you, Koba, and I would not be able to treat you, even if I wanted to.

Stalin thought for a long time. ‘Damn! What are your terms then, bastard?’

‘My son, his wife and his children are to be flown immediately to the United States. When I have spoken on the telephone to them and to one of the émigrés, Raskalnikov or Lubetkin, then I will begin treating you, not before.’

‘Why the hell should I do this?’

‘Because you want to be well again. Who knows? It might be part of your treatment.’

‘Will it be?’

‘I don’t know, Joseph; you will have to do it and find out. For once you do not hold all the cards and you are not holding the dealer’s family prisoner. You cannot control events this time, no matter how hard and from how many angles you think about them.’

The General Secretary grunted, he pressed a button under the desk and one of his personal guard came in. Mandelstim was taken to a room within Stalin’s suite of apartments and locked in it. A cold meal and a bottle of vodka waited for him on a table. There was a clean suit, shirt and tie in his size hanging in the closet.

Three restless days later he was taken by another guard to an office which contained only a desk and a chair. On the desk was an olive-green telephone. After a minute or two the phone pingled in a muted fashion. With his hands trembling, Mandelstim picked up the handpiece. He felt as if it weighed a thousand pounds.

‘Misha?’ he said.

‘Father?’

‘Oh my son, I am so sorry for what I’ve put you through. I was such a fool. This place is … is hell.’

‘One of my daughters is dead.’

‘I know. Where are you now?’

‘We are in Lubetkin’s house in Beverly Hills.’

‘Are you safe?’

‘There are Pinkerton men with shotguns all around, guarding the house.’

‘Then you are safe for now.

‘Will you be coming too, Father?’

‘I don’t know, son. Let me speak to Lubetkin.’

The older man came on the phone. ‘Hello, Mandelstim,’ he said. ‘Is he there listening?’

‘In another room I expect he is, yes.

‘He will hunt them down if they are not hidden well.’

‘I know it.’

‘Don’t worry. They will be hidden well; we have learnt how to do these things over the years.

‘Say goodbye to Misha, Natalia and the children for me.

‘I will.’

‘Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’

The treatment began the next day.

For an hour each day he would talk to Stalin in the General Secretary’s office. Each of them sitting at an angle to the other in a comfortable armchair. Stalin had told his staff that Novgerod Mandelstim was writing a new biography of the great pilot of the Soviet State.

 

4

 

Yet, early on in the treatment, Novgerod Mandelstim was presented with an ethical dilemma which he thought no psychiatrist could possibly have encountered before in the short but colourful history of the profession.

The dilemma was this. It soon became clear to Mandelstim, from what his sole patient told him, that for the moment Stalin’s fear was considerably curtailing his murderous instincts. He could not fail to learn that deportations were down, that executions were almost as low as they had been under the Tsar, that terror and dread did not stalk the streets with the swagger that they once had. In apartment blocks in the workers’ quarters, where citizens had disappeared more frequently than a magician’s assistant, the population was stable for the first time in years.

Mandelstim sensed a little, though not all, of the things that were going on beyond the three-foot-thick walls of the Kremlin. Without the perpetual and butcherous attention of the General Secretary, the clamp of the Party on the life of the Republic began to slacken. The secret police and the army did not know what to do and the mesh of spies did not know who to send their lies to any more.

As months went by with no crackdown, so people dared a little to sing the old songs. To worship the old God. In the west, the border guards became lazy on their patrols and each night more and more dark shapes slipped through the wire and into Poland. Via Georgia and Azerbaijan the camel trains again ran trade into Turkey. To the east, in the sea off Sakhalin Island, a thousand tiny boats made for Japan in a single night as the Red Coastguard stayed in port drinking vodka and consorting with whores. In the Ukraine peasants dragged political commissars from their offices and burnt them alive in the market squares and, as was usual in times of upheaval, Jews were murdered simply because it was again possible to do so.

It thus came to Novgerod Mandelstim that if he was somehow to cure Stalin then the murder would immediately begin again. Normally he knew that the patient’s wellbeing was supposed to be the only concern of the psychiatric practitioner, but he felt he was beyond hiding behind such spineless evasions. Nothing was normal in the Soviet Union. No, he concluded: every second that Stalin remained ill, others remained well; therefore it was his duty as a human being, though perhaps not as a psychiatrist, to actually strive to make his patient worse! God knows enough of his colleagues had managed to do this without trying.

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.

Nothing bad ever happened to a Vosterov and they all grew up to believe that the world was a benign and happy place where good things happened to good people and bad people had swift and certain justice meted out to them by kindly strangers.