Post-Stalinist Dirty Laundry (Part 1)

Some books are so deep and dark, they make Heart of Darkness seem like Dr Seuss. The Noose and the Stone in the Green Grass is one of them. It’s a wonderful and terrible murder mystery by the Weiner brothers — one of the most famous writing pairs of the Soviet era. More than a detective story, it’s a glorious indictment of a society that managed to create a living hell. Besides the triviality of the plot, the novel is 110% true. The book is not available in English (any philanthropists who would like to sponsored a translation, email me!). Much of what it covers isn’t widely available to the English-speaking world. Hence I thought it was my blogospheric duty to lay out the dirty laundry — as it is yours to forgive the indulgence of writing about a single book in several posts. [EDIT: This is a three part post. Part 2. Part 3]

Background

The Weiner brothers wrote this book in the 70s, in secret. At the time, it was Very Not Publishable. They worked on it alongside their bread-and-butter (less political detective novels). The Noose was written in cypher (life is stranger than fiction). They could not risk keeping a manuscript in their apartments: copies were hidden away and smuggled overseas by friends and associates. They had to bide their time and it was only published in 1991.

It’s the 70s. The Great Butcher has been dead for 2 decades. His cult of personality was long-revealed and long-denounced. His murders long-exposed (at least most of them). Millions of his victims were “posthumously rehabilitated” (a wonderful expression if you ask me!) And a new era containing a milder, softer USSR was proclaimed. The novel shatters this rosy perspective. It is true, people were no longer being killed by the millions. But the repression was still absolutely everywhere. And — most importantly — the vast majority of Stalin’s henchmen were never brought to justice. They continued to operate well into the 70s, with interesting consequences.

The book deals with Alyosha, the son of one of these henchmen. Alyosha’s father was a member of a special unit that was more top-level than the KGB (or the NKVD as it was called in Stalin’s days). He was a god-man who could have anything done, and did. And now he’s retired, with three sons. Two of which went in his direction, not into special forces but into cushy eschelons of Soviet management; the upper-middle cogs of The Machine. Alyosha on the other hand is the black sheep, wanting litle to do with that world. He’s a mediocre writer, with a Jewish girlfriend Ula whose father was murdered in the late 40s. Alyosha begins investigating the murder of Ula’s father to find— you get the drift.

Snapshots

What’s most memorable about the book is the stand-alone scenes that live on in memory but are timeless. Like Hitchock, the brutality is usually implied and off screen which makes it all the more shocking. Here are some snapshots.

• There’s an oft-told story about Alyosha’s father. Once, when he was interrogating a priest, the priest’s eye-capillary burst and his eye filled completely with blood. His father didn’t do anything to him before, but the all-pervasive fear that he could have was enough. Compared to Stalin’s era, you were much less likely to be killed, but the fear remained.
• One of Ula’s relatives from Stalin’s era was a very joyous woman. She laughed as she lived, as she met and married her husband, as she had kids. She laughed when she was arrested and didn’t wipe the smile off her face even in the interrogation room. When all her teeth were broken she continued to laugh a toothless smile. She laughed in the Gulag, as she developed friendships and helped out other inmates. She was shot dead in a tiny town in Siberia by accident. When they were marching in line, she spotted a bit of bread on the ground. She ducked out to get it and the young, inexperienced guard pulled the trigger. He was of course following an official slogan that described the prisoners: “A step to the left, a step to the right counts as an escape attempt. The convoy opens fire without warning.”
• In the US, there are country clubs with exclusive memberships and untold luxuries on the inside. In the novel, because of his family connections, Alyosha can go to a similar house in the middle of Moscow. It’s an apartment block where the Party Elite live. There’s a fabulous indoor restaurant, bar, swimming pool and banya. You can choose from any number of imported foods, whilst on the Outside people line up for hours for potatoes, sugar and soap. Alyosha notes with irony about the terrible price paid by the house’s inhabitants. During earlier times, nobody who moved in to the house lasted longer than a few years before being arrested and Purged. There’s something black-humorous about nobody sleeping, wondering if they’d be next. This in the midst of all the luxury. A law enforcement car would pull up in the middle of the night pretty much once a week and nobody would know if it was coming for their neighbours or them. This apartment block had the highest resident turnover in Moscow, it was the place to be at 4am. And yet with stunning cognitive dissonance, new high-ranking party officials continued to move in. Perhaps if you’re going to be taken anyway, you might as well enjoy some laps in the pool and some imported Swedish herring while you can…
• Another of Ula’s relatives was a rabbinnical student in a Jewish shtetl before the revolution. He was very religious but when the revolution came became convinced by fellow radicals and became a passionate revolutionary. He traded in his kippah and peyot for the uniform of a local Soviet “community organiser”*. During the purges, he was arrested along with thousands of passionate party members — possibly because he was Jewish but possibly for any other reason including bad luck. He died in an interrogation room in one of the cogs in the Machine. What I’ll never forget is him screaming to the other prisoners whilst being dragged away. [Paraphrased]: “Attention comrades! I’m being arrested as part of an imperialist fascist counter-revolutionary plot. But don’t worry, these people will be brought to justice. Stalin himself will deal with the perpetrators. Stalin will find out!“

*If this novel doesn’t highlight the utter insanity of comparing Obama to the Soviet regime, nothing will.