Among the celebrants was a reed-thin, six-foot-tall beauty with green sirenlike eyes and a hastily applied smear of red lipstick. She was in her late twenties, yanking along a recalcitrant eight-year-old boy. The louder everyone cheered, the harder the woman sobbed. Andrei Bremzen, her husband, my paternal grandfather, was one of the eight million men who didn’t return from the front.
If one adds civilian deaths, the Great Patriotic War (as we officially called it) took 27 million lives, although some estimates are far higher. In Russia it left tragedy and devastation unprecedented in history, unfathomable in its scale. For four uninterrupted years war had camped on Soviet soil. There were 25 million citizens homeless, 1,700 towns and more than 70,000 villages reduced to rubble, an entire generation of men wiped out.
By war’s end my mother was eleven, a bookish daydreamer with two thick black braids who’d graduated from Hans Christian Andersen to Hugo’s Les Miserables in its mellifluous Russian translation. Really, any book permeated with romantic tragedy attracted my mother. The first post-war summer found her family at a cozy dacha on the outskirts of Pushkino, a town north of Moscow where Naum was now directing a spy-training academy. “Counterintelligence, counterintelligence!” Granddad kept correcting, brows furrowed, when anyone blurted out the “spy” word. Later that year he’d be in Germany to debrief Hermann Goering amid the ruins at the Nurenberg Trials.
Swatting flies and picking at gooseberries, Mom read her sad books and contemplated what was happening to Russia. What to make of the crippled men now thronging stations, begging and playing the accordion? How to grieve for the fathers of her friends who hadn’t come back? Strangely, no one else in her family shared these thoughts. Liza plunged herself into household chores; Naum, who anyway never really talked to the kids, was busy with his steely-eyed spy colleagues and their coiffed wives, who boasted of the furniture their husbands scored in Berlin. Yulia quoted Generalissimo Stalin so often now, it made Mother nauseated. And so Larisa started a diary. Carefully she selected a small book with glossy white pages and a gold-embossed cover, a prewar Scandinavian present from Naum. She dipped her pen in the inkpot and paused for so long that ink drops ruined the page and she had to tear it out.
“Death,” she then wrote, pressing hard on the pen so it squeaked. “Death inevitably comes at the end of life. Sometimes a very short life.” She thought a bit and continued. “But if we are meant to die anyway, what should we do? How must we live that short hour between birth and death?”
To these questions Mom had no answers, but simply writing them down she felt relief. She thought some more about such matters out on the grass by the house, sucking on a sweet clover petal as dragonflies buzzed overhead.
“DEATH!! DEATH???” Liza’s screams broke Mom’s contemplation.
Liza pulled at Mom’s braid, brandishing the notebook she’d just found on the table. “We beat the Germans! Your father fought for your happiness! How dare you have such bad, silly thoughts. Death!” Liza ripped up the notebook and stormed back into the house. Mom lay on the grass looking at the shreds of paper around her. She felt too hollow even to cry. Her parents and the voices on the black public loudspeakers, she suddenly realized—they were one and the same. Her innermost thoughts were somehow all wrong and unclean, she was being told, and in her entire life she had never felt more alone.
CHAPTER FIVE
1950s: TASTY AND HEALTHY
In the prework hours of March 4, 1953, a time of year when mornings are still disagreeably dim and the icicles on roofs begin their thawing and refreezing act, classical music aficionados in Moscow woke up to a pleasant surprise. From early morning that day, instead of the usual Sovietica cheer, the radio was serving up a veritable banquet of symphonic and chamber delights in sad minor keys. Grieg, Borodin, Alexander Glazunov’s most elegiac string quartet. It was when the radio’s “physical culture” lesson was replaced with yet another somber classical piece that people began to have thoughts.
“Someone in the Politburo kicked the bucket?”
The shocking announcement came around nine a.m.
“Comrade Stalin has suffered a brain hemorrhage… loss of consciousness. Paralysis of right arm and leg… loss of speech.”
Throughout that day a familiar baritone boomed on the airways. Declaiming medical bulletins of the beloved leader’s declining condition, Yuri Levitan was back in combat mode. Pulse. Breathing rate. Urinalyses. The Voice infused such clinical details with the same melodrama with which it announced the retaking of Orel and Kursk from the Nazis, or the drops in prices immediately after the war.
“Over last night Comrade Stalin’s condition has seriously de-te-rio-ra-ted!” announced Levitan next day, March 5. “Despite medical and oxygen treatments, the Leader began Cheyne-Stokes res-pi-ra-ti-on!”
“Chain what?” citizens wondered.
Only doctors understood the fatal significance of this clinical term. And if said doctors had “Jewish” as Entry 5 (their ethnicity) on their passports? Well, they must have felt their own death sentences lifting with Stalin’s last, comatose breath. In his paranoid, sclerotic final years, the Generalissimo was outdoing himself with an utterly fantastical anti-Semitic purge known as the Doctors’ Plot. Being a Jewish medic—Jewish anything, really—in those days signified all but certain doom. But now Pravda abruptly suspended its venomous news reports of the Doctors’ Plot trial. And in the Lubyanka cellars where “murderers in white coats” were being worked over, some torturers changed their line of questioning.
“What’s Cheyne-Stokes?” they now demanded of their physician-victims.
By the time the media announced Stalin’s condition on March 4, the Supreme Leader had been unconscious for several days. It had all begun late on the morning of March 1 when he didn’t ask for his tea. Alarmed at the silence of motion detectors in his quarters, the staff at his Kuntsevo dacha proceeded to do exactly… nothing. Hours went by. Finally someone dared enter. The seventy-three-year-old Vozhd was found on the floor, his pajama pants soaked in urine. Comrade Lavrenty Beria’s black ZIS sedan rolled up long after midnight. The secret police chief exhibited touching devotion to his beloved boss. “Leave him alone, he’s sleeping,” the pince-nezed executioner and rapist instructed, and left without calling an ambulance.
Medical types were finally allowed in the following morning. Shaking from fear, they diagnosed massive stroke. Suspecting he might have been Stalin’s next victim, Comrade Beria had reasons for keeping assistance away. Ditto other Politburo intimates, including a sly, piglike secretary of the Moscow Party organization named Nikita Khrushchev. Whatever the Kremlin machinations, the pockmarked shoemaker’s son né Iosif Dzhugashvili died around 9:50 p.m. on March 5, 1953.
He was gone.
The country was fatherless. Father of Nations–less.
Also Generalissimo–, Mountain Eagle–, Transformer of Nature–, Genius of Humanity–, Coryphaeus of Science–, Great Strategist of the Revolution–, Standard-bearer of Communism–, Grand Master of Bold Revolutionary Solutions and Decisive Turns–less.