SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher (16 page)

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.