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Perm alone they shot thirty-six captives to avenge Lenin and Uritsky. Thus the terrorists were requited to their faces. Less than twenty-four hours later, the Red Terror was born. The birth announcement went hissing across telegraph lines like the letter Shin, whose three vertical arms culminate in poppy-heads of flame. Meanwhile the press kept calling for more blood, more blood. In the ever timely words of Comrade N. V. Krylenko (whose own destiny would be death by shooting): We must execute not only the guilty. Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.
    But unlike the assassin herself, whose sweat had reeked of anger and fear, Krupskaya could not believe that a fellow revolutionary ought to be put to death.
    The Central Committee will have to decide, her husband said. He knew that Fanya Kaplan’s corpse had already been burned, and the ashes buried in an unmarked grave.
    Volodya, don’t think I’m a conciliationist. During all these thirty years my attitude has not changed.
    I shall consider it.
    I’m so sorry to disturb you about this. I’ve only taken her case to heart because—
    Slowly raising his bald crown from the outspread Pravda (upside down to her) which it was his habit to grip in both of his hands, he gazed at her across the neutral zone of his desk, guarded from her by his two inkwells, whose brass caps shone like the domes of Orthodox churches, by his lamp and telephone, by his long narrow scissors whose point faced her, and his eyes were very sorrowful as he said: Where’s Makarov’s dictionary? I think I’ll study it. The alphabetical arrangement of words creates such a refreshing sort of chaos. Ah—look here. In a row we find sleepy, never-drying, truancy, obscurity, bliss, then inharmoniousness. What unlike ideas! And all because they begin with the letters HE. In English or in Hebrew, for instance, I fancy they’d be arranged quite differently. And what if there’s some perfect ordering that’s never been thought of before? But my opinions on linguistics are not important . . .
    Promise me you won’t let them do this, pleaded Krupskaya, who thanks to her thyroid condition had already developed the protuberant eyes which would give her the nickname “The Fish.” (Strangely enough, in her youth, one of her revolutionary aliases had been “The Lamprey.”)
    Lenin blinked and said: Nadya, you know very well that right now our Revolution faces so many dangers.
    I never asked you for anything. I married you; I mended your clothes; I let you have your mistress and even collaborated with her. Save this woman, Volodya, I beg you!
    Lenin said to her: Nadya, you need to control your emotions.
    Trembling, breathing heavily, she sat down. She was overweight, unhealthy; not long afterward she’d suffer her first heart attack.
    Lenin was not undevoted. He’d carried milk to his wife with his own hands when she’d lain in a sanatorium. (On one such mission, bandits had robbed him of his coat. On another, they expropriated one of his cars.) He’d granted her political power in accordance with her abilities. He’d given her a small, ornate desk in the Kremlin, a window view, a sofa flanked by bookcases, a personal library of twenty thousand volumes; these were her luxuries. This was the first and last time she’d ever ask him for anything. And so Lenin called to him Comrade J. V. Stalin, who was so useful in matters of this kind. Stalin smiled angrily and said that it would be done.
    Just because she fucks Lenin doesn’t mean I have to get up on my hind legs for her, he said to his understudy, Molotov, who quickly agreed: She understands nothing about politics. Nothing.
    A week later, Lenin told his wife: It’s all right. I’ve made inquiries. You can talk with her tomorrow. But it’s all got to stay top secret. Right now the whole world is against us.
    Krupskaya knelt and kissed his hand.
    7
    Typically enough, she set out for the prison alone, in her stained and dirty peasant