Skin. Sergio del Molino

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Название Skin
Автор произведения Sergio del Molino
Жанр Социология
Серия
Издательство Социология
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781509547876



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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.

      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.

      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.

      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?