Skin. Sergio del Molino

proletariat. For evidence to be found by any means necessary, for the suspects to be tortured until they could no longer even confess, for want of teeth and tongues with which to recount their crimes.

      Of course, there were those who believed it to be Stalin’s doing, a way of ridding himself of a rival, but not as many as would go on to believe it afterwards. In 1934, the scales had fallen from the eyes of very few people, and most of those were taken for lunatics or, what was worse, bourgeois reactionaries. In later years, Stalin’s part in Kirov’s death was rather beside the point, given that, compared with the industrial slaughter he went on to unleash, it almost showed him in a good light; but at that time it was beyond most people to imagine. Which was why, when Stalin accused the Trotskyites and the enemies of the people of having driven a dagger into his very heart, almost nobody found any reason to doubt the sincerity of his lament and of his understandable clamour for revenge.

Sergey’s death was only the first part of his plan. The second was to lay bare the plot. The party, he said, was riddled with agents provocateurs, from top to bottom. Trotskyites in the employ of the West, enemies of the people boring through the victory of the proletariat like termites. A deep cleanse was required, and Kirov’s funeral, attended by half the country, with Stalin presenting himself as visibly undone by the grief, was the opportune moment to announce it. The Trotskyite traitors had struck a blow to the very heart of the USSR, in the inviolable Smolny Institute no less, killing a hero of the people. Kirov’s body, still warm, called for revenge: either we properly disinfect the country, or the rats and the parasites will eat us all.

      In the years that followed, millions are believed to have been sent to the gulags or to one of the Cheka death chambers (designed expressly with the cement floors on a slight incline to allow the blood to flow away, and with a system of hose pipes so that everything could be sluiced down in minutes and made ready for the next in line). Though Stalin never missed a summer in Sochi, the documents on his round table had steadily less to do with steel production and motorway building. Almost all were lists of names. In his wicker armchair before supper, with the Black Sea breeze not caressing his skin, still covered up with long shirts and trousers as he was, he gave the go-ahead for the following day’s executions. His daughter Svetlana came over to say goodnight, and he would tickle her or make up a joke in Georgian, and away Svetlana would go to bed, while he, scratching his psoriasis with one hand, used the other to calculate the numbers detained and killed that day. He would be angry if the lists were short, and would laugh and make jokes, pipe in mouth, if they were long, since that meant the state was doing what it ought to be doing.

On the evening of 25 August 1936, more than a year and a half after Kirov’s death, Stalin was in Sochi. He is said to have been out in the late-summer sun, looking tanned and relaxed. At 20:48, eating an al fresco supper, he received a telegram from Moscow: ‘The Politburo has decided to reject the appeals and carry out the sentence this very evening.’ The vozhd’s only reply was to acknowledge receipt, and he went on with his supper as the sun began to drop into the Black Sea. What a marvellous country it was. Nowhere could there be a sunset to rival the ones on that blessed coast. Breaking with custom, he retired early that night. He surely would have read in his room, he never went to sleep until the wee hours, but he put aside affairs of state and let his aides have a rest. Comrade Stalin appeared at peace. He transmitted a very placid sort of happiness, far more unsettling than his usual, orgiastic sort of happiness. How strange for the wine not to flow, for popular ballads not to be playing on the gramophone, and for there to be none of his friends present cracking jokes. Those who knew most about what was going on in Moscow were the most disturbed. The telegram had said that, in a few hours’ time, Kamenev and Zinoviev would be lined up and shot.

      Kamenev and Zinoviev were dyed-in-the-wool Bolsheviks, comrades of Lenin who had played leading roles in the October Revolution. Never until then had such important figures been victim to the measures. By not replying to the telegram, the vozhd gave the green light to the execution that announced to the entire Soviet world that nobody was exempt: anyone could now be declared an enemy of the state.

Between 1 December 1934, when Kirov was shot in the back, and 25 August 1936, two people had incorporated themselves into Stalin’s circle: Nikolai Yezhov and Andrei Vishinski. The former, a short, irritable man, led the investigation into Kirov’s death (of which Trotsky himself was eventually accused, as intellectual author), and was made head of the political police for his pains. Vishinski, a public prosecutor, prepared the case, under the premise that every prisoner is guilty until proven innocent. Cynical and cruel, his delicate nerves meant he had no stomach for violence. Hence he restricted his participation to the tribunals, in which he was able to unleash a more intellectual terror with his sharp looks and sarcastic rejoinders. He believed in the usefulness, he would say, of keeping the people in suspense.

      Yezhov and Vishinski had something in common with Stalin, aside from their commitment to exterminating enemies of the USSR: poor health. Vishinski wore impeccable suits, partly because he was a dandy, but partly to hide the blemishes on his skin, which he would secretly scratch. Sometimes he would break out on visible parts of his body, like his hands or face. Yezhov’s issues were less well concealed. It was there for all to see – he was known as the dwarf – that his body was a wreck, not helped by nightly drinking bouts and general lasciviousness, and a proneness to work stress that precipitated nervous breakdowns. Both, according to all historical accounts, suffered from psoriasis just like the vozhd.

      However widespread skin conditions may be, what is the likelihood of a dictator with psoriasis recruiting two henchmen with the same illness as him to carry out his most ambitious extermination plan? A plan which, furthermore, was articulated as revenge for the death of the single friend to have seen the tyrant naked?

Yezhov, the dwarf, was married to a glamour puss with whom he shared an insatiable sexual frenzy. Yevgenia Feigenburg was one of a set of cultured Jewish women who hung around the Bolsheviks. What attracted such brilliant women to this depraved gang is a mystery I have never been able to explain. Bolshevism was puritanical, like all movements with high ideals. The revolutionaries were married to the revolution, but this clique’s nights were populated with women more reminiscent of characters out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel than one by Gorky. No self-abnegating Mother Courages here, no nuns in service to the great ideal: they were women of letters, artists, and many of them Jews, brought up in anti-conventional families that believed in free love and the like. Brazenly they sidled up to Stalin, the golden widower; it was a general truth that the vozhd, with his fully buttoned shirts and his Georgian singer’s voice, was irresistible to the ‘Stalinettes.’ In the never-ending post-dinner conversations, both in Sochi and at the Kremlin, he flirted and clowned with them, and allowed them to flirt a little with him, but always at a distance. Not even those free young ladies could manage to break through his reserve. If at some point, in the midst of a bread-fight or rolling around on the floor laughing after the thousandth bottle of wine, they all relaxed and one of them went and sat on his knee and got close enough to smell his breath, the vozhd would get up and take a few steps away in a fluster. Nor did he like slow dances, preferring instead the chaste country dances, clear air between the dancers’ bodies. Unlike many of his Bolshevik comrades, Stalin remained an old-fashioned Georgian gentleman all his days. This was true even of his conventional taste in women: he liked busty blonde farm girls, innocent, free of wiles, who could be mothers and nurses as well as lovers.

Yevgenia Feigenburg was anything but a farm girl carrying buckets of milk still warm from the cows’ udders. Worldly, witty, stylish, and very refined, her mere presence was enough to make a person forget that numerous comrades were disappearing nightly in Moscow, never to be heard of again, when men in suits went out looking for them in their black Packards. With Yevgenia there to whip the party up, absent friends weren’t missed. She and Yezhov, though married, had an open relationship, and it’s possible that the specifics of her husband’s activities as head of the political police weren’t something she knew much about either. All of us decide on how far we wish our knowledge to go, and Yevgenia would have known as much as she wanted to. He worked a lot, poor Nikolai, too much for his creaking bones and sickly constitution. He kept a nocturnal work schedule, liked to sleep in, and at the end of his working day, when it was getting close to sunrise, he let off steam