The Stalin Epigram Read Online Free PDF Page B

if it wasn’t.
    “What kind of humor is the great Gorky in today?”
    “I get the impression he thinks he is doing you a favor.”
    A guttural laugh worked its way up from the back of the khozyain ’s throat. “Asshole.” He shrugged the greatcoat off his shoulders. One of Yagoda’s people snatched
it before it hit the floor and folded it over the back of a bench. Under the coat Comrade Stalin was dressed in one of the rough peasant tunics he favored when he appeared in public, and baggy
woolen trousers tucked muzhik- style into soft leather boots with thick heels designed to make him taller. (When he reviewed parades from the top of Lenin’s Tomb, he stood on a wooden
milk box so his head would be as high as, or higher than, those of the marshals and Politburo members around him. I happen to know this because I supplied the milk box.) I followed my boss through
the laundry room and the kitchen and reached past him to push open the swinging doors leading to the reception hall. Word of his arrival spread like wildfire through the room. Conversations died
away. The writers and editors who were already sitting at the table jumped to their feet. The others, milling around clutching small glasses of pertsovka , a fiery vodka aged with pepper,
stood to attention, looking for all the world like gymnasium students in the presence of their schoolmaster. My boss waved his good hand in a vague greeting that took in everyone. A fawning Gorky
materialized out of the crowd and made a great show of welcoming him to the villa the khozyain had given him. Comrade Stalin pulled a Dunhill pipe from the pocket of his tunic and carefully
packed the bowl from a pouch (which I’d filled with tobacco shredded from one of his favorite brands of cigarettes, Kazbek Papirosi). Gorky produced a silver pocket lighter and cupped the
flame over the bowl of the pipe as Comrade Stalin sucked it into life. For a moment the two of them were obscured by a cloud of smoke. I ambled between knots of guests to be closer to the khozyain . As I drew nearer, a beam of sun streaming through the skylight caught his face like a spotlight and I was struck, once again, by how worn-out the boss appeared. He was in his
middle fifties and looked his age, but acted older. His mustache, which his eight-year-old daughter, Svetlana, complained of being prickly, drooped like a weedy plant in need of watering. He had
what we laughingly called a Kremlin complexion that came from working fifteen-hour days—his skin, pitted with childhood smallpox scars, had turned a sickly sallow. His rotting teeth,
clearly visible as he gnawed on the stem of his pipe, seemed to mirror the general decay of his body.
    For those of us who were on intimate terms with Comrade Stalin, it was no secret that he was waging a rearguard action against a persuasive despair. Oh, he could put on a show in public, but
most mornings found him, after yet another sleepless night, in a black mood ranting about his chronic tonsillitis or the rheumatic throbbing in his deformed arm or an ache in a tooth that the
dentist Shapiro (another Israelite for me to worry about!) had failed to alleviate during a visit to the Kremlin clinic the previous afternoon. The women in his entourage—Molotov’s
wife, the Jewess Polina; Bukharin’s new bride, the beautiful twenty-year-old Anna Larina—thought he had never gotten over the sudden death, a year and a half before, of his young wife,
Nadezhda. Of course no one spoke of this in front of him lest his legendary Georgian-Ossetian temper, which could burst like a summer squall, put an abrupt end to the conversation, not to mention
the Kremlin pass that gave you access to the court. (Everyone agreed that the absence of a serious female companion contributed to the khozyain ’s depression; I myself had casually
offered to introduce him to one or several of my concubines, but he had declined so brusquely it discouraged me from raising the subject a second