Comrade koba, p.1
Comrade Koba, page 1
BY ROBERT LITTELL
The Defection of A. J. Lewinter (1973)
Sweet Reason (1974)
The October Circle (1975)
Mother Russia (1978)
The Debriefing (1979)
The Amateur (1981)
The Sisters (1986)
The Revolutionist (1988)
The Once and Future Spy (1990)
An Agent in Place (1991)
The Visiting Professor (1994)
Walking Back the Cat (1997)
The Company (2002)
Legends (2005)
Vicious Circle (2006)
The Stalin Epigram (2009)
Young Philby (2012)
A Nasty Piece of Work (2013)
The Mayakovsky Tapes (2016)
Comrade Koba (2020)
NONFICTION
For the Future of Israel (with Shimon Peres) (1998)
Copyright © 2020 Robert Littell
Cover © 2020 Abrams
Published in 2020 by The Overlook Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020932378
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4832-5
eISBN: 978-1-64700-003-5
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For Banjo
“Conscience, the uninvited guest . . .”
ALEKSANDR SERGEEVICH PUSHKIN
“I don’t get ulcers. I give ulcers.”
COMRADE IVANOVITCH, AKA KOBA
ONE
WHERE THE KID TRIES TO SPEED UP TIME
FROM LEON’S NOTEBOOK:
THE OLD MAN: Since you’re such a hotshot with numbers, kid, can you tell me how much the Soviet Union weighs?
ME: Hey, nobody can know that. It’s impossible to calculate.
THE OLD MAN: Give it a stab. With its planes and tanks and ships, with its factories and machinery, with its trains and tractors and trucks, how much?
ME: An awful lot. Like, more than an awful lot. If someone could calculate the weight, it would be astronomical.
THE OLD MAN: Could an enemy of the people plotting to murder members of the politburo and restore capitalism resist the astronomical weight of the Soviet State?
ME: No way. He’d be crushed to death.
THE OLD MAN: Aaahhh, I am relieved to hear it. I sleep better knowing nobody can resist the weight of the Soviet State.
Just thinking about it makes me grin.
“Give me three reasons why I should talk to you,” I remember the old man saying.
I was wolfing the ice cream he had ordered up for me at the time, two volcano-sized scoops of vanilla drenched in chocolate sauce. “My first is, I don’t know who you are.” I may have accidentally wiped my chin on my sleeve because he gave me one of those killer looks adults own the patent to. I didn’t flinch. “My second is, since I don’t know who you are, I’m not afraid of you.”
I remember the old man studying me, one eye closed, one eye not, over the rim of the glass as he sipped his milk. Suddenly he sat up straight and raised his glass and toasted me the way my father used to when he drank wine and I drank pomegranate juice. Thinking about my father made me sad and I looked away, which infuriated the old man. “Goddamn it, kid, look me in the eye when I toast you, otherwise you’ll have seven years of bad sex.”
“Like, I’m too young to have any kind of sex,” I said.
That made him smile. You could tell from the way the smile didn’t fit on his lips he wasn’t used to smiling. He seemed human when he smiled. Almost. Maybe that’s why he didn’t smile all that much. Then he said something I’m still trying to figure out. “I don’t often get to talk to people who aren’t afraid of me.” He said this almost as if he was having the confabulation with himself. “Even Vladimir Ilyich, in the last months of his life, was afraid of me. Krupskaya, his lawful wedded codfish of a wife who couldn’t warm a man’s bed if her life depended on it, was terrified of me. Trotsky’s great mistake was he didn’t become afraid of me until it was too late to save himself.”
“Who’s Krupskaya? Who’s Trotsky?”
He ignored my question. “I asked you for three reasons.”
“I’m working on my third. Don’t rush me.”
Here’s the thing: For a long time grown-ups who heard the story from the horse’s mouth, the horse’s mouth being yours truly, thought it was a fairy tale, thought I was inventing the confabulations with the old man, inventing the arrests, inventing Isabeau and the other kids hiding in the House on the Embankment, inventing the dead raincoat, inventing the secret passages between the apartments (to say nothing of the tunnel under the river Styx), inventing the big steel door with the rusted-open lock that led to the steel staircase that led to the great hall with humongous chandeliers and humongouser windows covered with window curtains so thick they suffocated sounds coming from the street I supposed was outside. Well, the laugh’s on them, right? Because the editor who is publishing this book, he didn’t believe me neither until I went and showed him the secret passages and the tunnel and the big steel door with the rusted-open lock.
I couldn’t show him the old man because by that time he was dead and buried.
As for who the old man was, I was pretty innocent when I first climbed the spiral steel staircase to his apartment. He told me he helped run the country. He told me he was a sort of assistant tsar. He told me he personally knew esteemed Comrade Stalin. Like, I’m no longer innocent, by the way—innocence is what the old man took from me in exchange for confabulation. But hey, that’s a whole other story.
Here goes nothing: It’s me, Leon. The Leon who got to be friends with this old man in the last weeks of his life before he met his Maker (assuming his Maker, given the old man’s awful iodine breath, was willing to meet him). The Leon who was on the listening end of confabulations with the old man, my questions fish-hooking his answers, which I scribbled on the pages of a lined notebook as soon as I got back home. The Leon who hung out with him in his apartment when nobody else could get to within shouting distance except for the comrades he called kittens, them and the household, who skimmed the marble floors of the palace in bedroom slippers so as not to wake him because it was supposed, at his age—not to mention what he might have had on his conscience being that he helped run the country—he didn’t sleep all that much, which turned out to be more or less factual.
You’re thinking to yourself: Like, how could the kid know a detail like that if he hadn’t been there like he says he was?
I suppose I need to start at the start, the only problem being I’m not sure I can identify the start. Maybe, hey, maybe it was my dad dying of radiation poisoning. You’ll probably recognize his name—David Rozental?—he was famous, here in Russia at least. He was the nuclear physicist who came up with the quantum field model of the weak nuclear force (being my father’s son, I actually understand it), he was the one who convinced the general secretary it was theoretically possible to make an atomic bomb (I think that’s when they gave him the Pobeda with the golf-club gear shift), later he was in charge of the super-secret Laboratory No. 2 in the Academy of Sciences and organized Russia’s first chain reaction. It wasn’t cooled by heavy water because Russia didn’t have heavy water—they used graphite to slow down the chain. Naturally it didn’t slow down and overheated. Everyone bolted except for my dad, who tried to save the precious uranium in the rods because Russia didn’t have all that much uranium neither. When my dad didn’t come home from work that day my mother, thinking he might have been arrested—hoping he had been arrested because the alternative was too awful—made frantic phone calls until she fell on someone at the Laboratory who told her what happened and made her swear not to say who told her. I heard my mom utter a swear word as she hung down the phone and break into hysterical sobs. Seeing her cry, naturally I cried too, though at the time I wasn’t sure what I was crying about. That was four years ago, in 1949; I was six going on six and a half. David Rozental was awarded the Order of Lenin for his work on “First Lightning,” which was the code name of our first Soviet atomic bomb. My mom took me with her to a secret ceremony in a stuffy hotel room filled with papier-mâché funeral flowers and stone-faced men who looked as if they were suffering from terminal heartburn. They gave me American chewing gum and a real NKVD badge. One of them, a little guy with thick heels on his shoes to make him taller and a monocle glued to his left eye, stepped up to my mother and planted a noisy kiss on both of her ashy cheeks, then permitted the back of his right hand to graze her left breast as he pinned this medal on her dress. (Hey, at six and a half I already knew about the birds and the bees.) It was in this hotel room I learned the word posthumously. Okay, let’s say, for argument’s sake, that was the start.
Or maybe . . . on second thought, maybe it started with my mother’s arrest. Now that I think of it, that seems like a smarter place to start if for no other reason than it’s fresher in my brain.
So I’ll start with this major event in my life: my mom’s arrest.
Thanks to my father bein
If I climbed onto a chair, from my bedroom window of our apartment I could see the Kremlin walls, behind which the general secretary himself lived, reflected in the Moscow River flowing between the Kremlin and me on my chair looking out the window. The House on the Embankment, which was this gigantic building built long before I was born, had an awful lot of empty apartments, the doors of which were sealed with duct tape with the initials NKVD on them. I don’t know why so many apartments were empty, or why even if they were empty the doors needed to be sealed with duct tape. My father, when he was still alive, would mutter something about not getting in the way of the stampede of history when I asked him to explain the duct tape. My mother would look away and scold me for asking foolish questions, the answers to which I was too young to understand. What I was too young to understand was why they didn’t answer my question. I understand now. But that’s a whole other story.
Weekdays I went to School No. 175, which is where all the kids living in the House went, which is how come I got to ride in a shiny American Packard driven by an actual chauffeur. There were always three or four Packards parked outside in the morning with their motors running, and the Soviet admiral moonlighting as a doorman waved me and the other kids to the one that would leave next. The House had a cinema in the minus-one basement. My best friend Isabeau said they showed American films captured by our glorious Red Army during the Great Patriotic War. I don’t know how she could know that, being as us kids weren’t allowed into the basement cinema. On the floor below the cinema there’s a gym, a heated swimming pool, a basketball court, a laundry, and best of all a grocery store where you can buy things like Italian pasta and Cuban cigars and Scottish whisky, which was something my father especially liked. For some reason the doors to the gym and the swimming pool and the basketball court were always padlocked. There’s also a cafeteria that us kids were allowed into even without parents. When my parents worked late, then after my dad died when my mom had the night shift at the Kremlin hospital, I would pick up a tin tray and point to what I wanted in the glass case, and the cook, an Uzbek with a ski-slope nose and slanty eyes, would add vegetables even if I didn’t point to them and I would count out the fifteen rubles fifty to the cash register lady with the glass eye that stared off in one direction while her good eye looked disapprovingly at me. If Isabeau was there—both of her parents had been arrested, her dad executed for being a British spy even though he didn’t speak British, her mother taken off to some jail or other, their apartment sealed with NKVD duct tape, but Isabeau, like me after my mother’s arrest, was hiding out in our secret rooms and using the secret passageways between apartments that had been built so the House’s original tenants could circulate without being seen—we would always sit at the same table, Isabeau next to me, close. She was seven and a half months older than me but she didn’t have breasts yet, otherwise I would have asked if I could touch one. The people who ran the basement cafeteria never seemed to have gotten word who was and who wasn’t arrested—so as long as we could pay for the food they let us eat there.
My parents didn’t subscribe to Pravda. Like, my guess is that they were so important they didn’t need to, but there was always a copy of today’s paper spread-eagled in the glass case next to the admiral’s pew inside the House’s main door, and us kids would read the headlines while we waited for the next Packard. Which is how I found out about this doctor’s plot in the Kremlin hospital.
“Did you know any of these thirty-seven terrorist doctors?” I asked my mom when I got home from school that day.
She frowned, the crinkles between her eyes making her look older than thirty-something, which is how old I think she was. “How did you hear about this?”
I told her about the Pravda in the glass case and the article on murderers in white coats administering harmful treatments to important members of the superstructure. “And why does the headline say the arrested doctors are Israelites?” I wanted to know.
Turned out my mother knew most of them, one actually worked in her cardiac ward at the hospital, another worked in the x-ray service on the same floor. And they were, possibly by coincidence, probably by coincidence, positively by coincidence—how could it be otherwise in esteemed Comrade Stalin’s glorious Union of Soviet Socialist Republics?—almost all Israelites. Though I didn’t understand why Pravda needed to call attention to the fact. The one or two who weren’t Israelite weren’t identified as Christians or Mohammedans or whatever. Likewise my dad’s obituary in Pravda used his name in the headline—“the Soviet hero Rozental”—but didn’t say he was an Israelite.
I guess that makes me one too. Israelite, not hero.
About my mom, here’s what you need to know:
1. She had one of those little Chagan pistols, I think it’d been her father’s during the Polish campaign after the Revolution, stashed behind some books in our secret room.
2. She owned a collection of American jazz records that she kept, along with the German gramophone and the books in English and German that my dad brought back from trips abroad, in the secret room behind the living room bookcase. You needed to reach behind The Collected Works of I. Stalin to trip the latch and open the door. There was a three-step stepladder in the room. If you climbed onto the top step you could see through a slit into the living room. On the living room side it looked like a crack in the plaster. It was through the slit that I watched my mother’s arrest. She was sitting on the couch with the seedy cushions calmly reading a book—I knew she was making believe because she didn’t have her glasses on—while the five agents, all of them wearing ankle-long raincoats even though it wasn’t raining out, searched the apartment. They didn’t even take their hats off inside, which is how I figured they weren’t brought up all that well. They loaded every scrap of paper they found in my father’s desk, also the books in foreign languages they discovered in a pile on the floor of the toilet, also the family photo album with the photographs of arrested people missing—my mother had replaced the missing photos with others so nobody would notice the album had been scrubbed—into my father’s old Army duffel bag. As my mom was being taken away I heard one of the NKVD raincoats ask her where her son was. “He is in Sochi with his grandmother,” I heard her say. “Lucky for him he isn’t here,” I heard the raincoat say. “Not at all,” I heard my mom say. She aimed one of those half-peeved half smiles of hers in the general direction of the crack in the living room plaster. “If he were here and witnessing this he would know I am not afraid of you. As I am a loyal Soviet citizen I have nothing to fear. He would know that with the death of his father and now my arrest, he is the man of the family and must carry on until I am released and return home.” I can report that carry on after my mom’s arrest is what I did. Being the man in the family, as opposed to the kid in the family, I didn’t need to be reminded to brush my teeth twice a day, always using bicarbonate of soda naturally. I washed behind my ears before going to bed, I went to bed, lights out, no reading by flashlight, at nine sharp most of the time—well, make that some of the time. Hey, what’s the point of being the man in the family if you can’t fix your own bedtime?
