Simon Montefiore - Sashenka

A motorbike scooted up onto the pavement. Maxy pulled off his Viking helmet, holding it by the horns, and kissed her in his over-familiar way.

“You look flustered,” he said, taking her hand. “Let’s sit in the sun and you can tell me everything.”

Once seated, Katinka told him about her visit to Tbilisi, her night with Lala, her discovery that Roza Getman was Sashenka’s daughter—and her more recent encounter with the KGB.

“You’ve done so well,” Maxy told her. “I’m impressed! But let me interpret some of this for you. Mouche Zeitlin says the KGB told her Sashenka was sentenced to ‘ten years without rights of correspondence.’ Usually that was a euphemism for execution.”

Katinka caught her breath. “But what about the ex-prisoner who’d seen Sashenka in the camps in the fifties?”

“The KGB liked to trick people that way. The KGB files say Mendel died of ‘cardiac arrest.’ That was another euphemism. It means he died under interrogation: he was beaten to death.”

“So these files have their own language?” she said.

“I’m afraid so,” he said. “There was a terrible randomness in the Terror, but at the same time there were no coincidences in that world: everything was linked by invisible threads. We just need to find them. Send files of Palitsyn case to Central Committee ,” he repeated. “I know what that means. Come with me. Climb on.”

Katinka joined him on the back of his bike, pulling her denim skirt down over her thighs. The engine revved raucously and Maxy weaved in and out of the unruly Moscow traffic, down Tverskaya until he took a sharp left at the statue of Prince Dolgoruky, founder of Moscow, and went down a steep hill. The wind blew in Katinka’s hair and she closed her eyes, allowing the rich spring air to refresh her.

They stopped alongside a Brezhnevite concrete box with a shabby glass front, a dark frieze of Marx, Engels and Lenin over the revolving door.

Maxy scissored off the bike in his leathers and tugged off his helmet, pushing back his hair. She thought him more seventies heavy-metal singer than historian. He strode ahead into a marble hall and Katinka followed him, almost running. In the grey foyer, women behind tables sold Bon Jovi CDs, hats and gloves, like a flea market, but at the back, where the entrance to the elevators was guarded by two pimply teenage soldiers, stood a white Lenin bust. Maxy showed his card and they checked Katinka’s passport, kept it and gave her a chit.

Maxy led her up the steps, past a canteen with its moldy cabbage-soup fug and into an elevator, which chugged to the top of the building. Before she could take in her surroundings, he was leading her into the glass-walled reading room with its circular panorama of the roofs of Moscow.

“No time to admire the view,” he whispered as disapproving old Communists looked up crossly from their studies. Maxy’s leathers creaked loudly in the hushed room. “I’ve got a little place for us here.” They sat in a cul-de-sac formed by towering bookshelves. “Wait here,” he said. She listened to the rasp of his biking gear with a smile. Moments later, he returned with a pile of brown papki files and sat very close to her. He radiated a blend of leathers, coffee, bike oil and lemon cologne.

“This place,” he whispered, “is the Party archive. You see these papki , numbered five hundred fifty-eight? Stalin’s own archive. It’s still officially closed and I don’t think it’ll ever open.” He flipped the first files toward him. “I was looking at these earlier and I noticed Satinov’s name. When it said your files were sent to the Central Committee, that meant to Stalin himself. This is Stalin’s miscellaneous correspondence. Go ahead, Katinka, look under S for Satinov.”

She opened the file and found a cover note, stamped by Poskrebyshev at 9:00 p.m. on May 6, 1939:

To J. V. Stalin

Top Secret. It has come to my notice that Ivan “Vanya” Palitsyn ordered surveillance of his wife, Party member Alexandra “Sashenka” Zeitlin-Palitsyn, without the knowledge of Narkom NKVD or Politburo.

“You see,” explained Maxy, “Beria had discovered that Palitsyn was bugging his wife.”

“How did he find out?”

“Probably by a tiny bureaucratic mistake. Wiretaps were always copied to Beria, who decided which to send on to Stalin. Palitsyn, foolish with jealousy, had ordered that the transcripts of his wiretap be shown only to him. Remember how he wrote no copies ? Probably his secretary forgot this, as secretaries do—and sent it by mistake to Beria, who, by the rules of the time, had to report this abuse of government resources to Stalin himself. Beria had no malice toward the Palitsyns and he knew that, after the May Day party, Stalin took a paternal interest in Sashenka. That’s why his note”—Maxy tapped the cover note—“is neutral. Stalin was often tolerant or even amused by steamy private gossip—unless he felt he had somehow been misled.”

“But then he read the transcripts?”

To: Comrade Ivan Palitsyn, Commissar-General, State Security, third degree

As requested, surveillance and transcript on Alexandra “Sashenka” Zeitlin-Palitsyn, room 403, Metropole Hotel, 6 May 1939 Midday: Zeitlin-Palitsyn left office on Petrovka and walked to Metropole, took elevator to room 403. Writer Benya Golden entered the room fifteen minutes past midday, leaving separately at 3:30 p.m. Snacks and wine were delivered to the room.

Katinka turned the pages and found a place marked with a red crayon:

Golden: God, I love you. You’re so lovely to me, Sashenka.

Zeitlin-Palitsyn: I can’t believe I’m here.

Golden: What, darling? Didn’t I please you enough last time? Until you called my name?

Zeitlin-Palitsyn: How could I forget it? I think I imagined the whole thing. I think you’ve made me delusional.

Golden: Come here. Unbutton me. That’s paradise. Get on your hands and knees on the bed and let me unwrap the present. Oh my God, what a delicious sight. What a sweet [word deleted]. How [word deleted] you are. If only your tight-assed Communist wives’ committee could see you now…

Katinka was peeping into an intimate pocket of time, a vanished wrinkle of private passion, in a cruel world, long ago. Her eyes were drawn to the words underlined by three harsh thick crayon marks.

Zeitlin-Palitsyn: Oh my God, Benya, I love your [word indecipherable], I can’t believe you got me to do that, I thought I might die of pleasure…

“That red crayon there, the underlining, is Stalin himself,” said Maxy, pulling a fat oilskinned notebook out of his stack of files. “This is Poskrebyshev’s list of visitors to Stalin’s office here on Trinity Square in the Kremlin—known to the cognoscenti as the Little Corner.” He opened it. Poskrebyshev’s tiny, immaculate handwriting listed names, dates, times. “Look up May seventh, evening.”

Katinka read the page:

10:00 p.m. L. P. Beria.

Leaves 10:30 p.m.

10:30 p.m. H. A. Satinov.

Leaves 10:45 p.m.

10:40 p.m. L. P. Beria.

Leaves 10:52 p.m.

“So Satinov was there soon after Beria showed Stalin the transcripts. Why?”

“Beria comes to see the Master and gives him the transcripts. Stalin reads this hot stuff, red crayon in hand. He orders Poskrebyshev to summon Satinov, who’s at Old Square, Party headquarters, up the hill. The vertushka telephone rings on Satinov’s desk. Poskrebyshev says, ‘Comrade Satinov, Comrade Stalin awaits you now. A Buick will collect you.’ Stalin’s already appalled by what Sashenka and Benya have done.” Maxy read Stalin’s note to Beria: