Stalin's Barber by Paul M. Levitt

Author:Paul M. Levitt [Levitt, Paul M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Taylor Trade Publishing
Published: 2012-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

Only the Pitiless

Although Dimitri’s desire for another man frightened him, he couldn’t suppress his love for Yuri Suzdal. At first they had retreated to Yuri’s apartment and merely kissed, but not before Dimitri had carefully studied the flat for hidden microphones. The inherent tenderness of both men led to gentle touches and finally sex, which they found immensely gratifying, but also terrifying. They knew that if Dimitri’s superiors discovered their relationship, executions would follow. The charge would be that Dimitri’s special status made him privy to secret information that he undoubtedly passed on to Yuri. No proof of passed messages or coded cables was necessary. Homosexuality earned one the firing squad.

To make matters worse, in 1936, Genrikh Yagoda had been replaced as the head of the secret police, renamed Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD), by a man with a savage temperament and a maniacal outlook, Nikolai Ivanovich Ezhov, the bloody dwarf. Owing to his influence, Soviet party members were now, a year later, required to replace their membership cards with passports, which were far more difficult to obtain and dangerous to forge. The chistka, employed periodically to cleanse the party of malingerers, malcontents, and impostors, now became both a party-revival campaign and a hunt for enemies. The previous desultory purges, often harmless, evolved into full-scale terror directed against anyone deemed an enemy of the people. Ezhov’s “war” employed the slogan: “Under current conditions, the inalienable quality of every Bolshevik must be the ability to detect the enemy of the party, however well he may be masked.” In particular, the Ezhovshchina, “the Ezhov business,” sought to purge “Formers,” that is, social aliens: people from the wrong class who were trying to hide their former identities, like priests and kulaks and royalty and White Guards and Tsarist officials. Stalin had ordered Yagoda shot, a signal that a new ruthless order was replacing the old corrupt one. Besides, Yagoda had a Jewish background; Ezhov did not. When Natasha had asked her brother which dignitary would be moving into Yagoda’s dacha, Dimitri couldn’t be sure, though he assumed the new chief of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs would receive the prize. Would he also, Natasha wondered, inherit Yagoda’s pornographic films and handsome library?

The Ezhovshchina made Dimitri’s work all the more precarious—and morally hateful. Whereas before he merely reported people for misbehavior that earned them a slap on the wrist, his reports now could lead to a person being tortured or exiled or shot, or all three. But if he failed to find traitors, his superiors were likely to accuse him of collaboration, a charge that could lead to his immediate discharge or arrest. An NKVD agent was judged by the number of denunciations in his dossier. In desperation, Dimitri sought to transfer to guard duty in the Kremlin or surveillance at the railroad station. He applied to work in the passport office. He even offered to take a demotion and work as a chauffeur to one of the Kremlin courtiers. But in every

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