Free The Stalin Epigram by Robert Littell Page A

power, I can trigger the explosion if I can bring myself to abandon sanity, if I become mad enough, in both
senses of the word, to let the scream of outrage stuck in the back of my throat emerge.” Osip looked hard at me. “Screaming has a lot in common with crying, Anna—once you start
you risk not being able to stop.”
    I couldn’t believe my ears. “You propose to destroy Stalin with a poem!” I said incredulously.
    “A poem bursting with truth telling that will reverberate across the land like ripples from a pebble thrown into stagnant water. Something as straightforward as The king has no
clothes . The peasants will greet his fall with prayers of thanksgiving. The Party will declare a national holiday. The Komsomol will sing it as they march off to fulfill their quotas. At
congresses in the Bolshoi, from every balcony and box, workers will shout it out. Young people who have grown old before their time with fear will dance in the streets for joy. It will be the end
of Stalin.”
    “He will kill you,” Borisik said flatly.
    “Executions fill me with fear,” Osip admitted, “especially my own.”
    Borisik came up with another phrase from Hamlet , something along the lines of Safety lies in fear . Osip shook his head in irritation. “In an unweeded garden, there is no
safety,” he said. “No matter—the object is to save Russia, not me.”
    I was beginning to feel alarmed. Turning on Borisik, I grabbed a lapel of his jacket. “Don’t stand there like an idiot, for heaven’s sake. Talk sense to him.”
    I have the image engraved in my brain of these two dear men staring into each other’s eyes for an eternity, though it was surely only a fleeting moment. Then Borisik, the consummate
ladies’ man who wasn’t particularly physical with his male friends, did something I’d never seen him do before: moving with exquisite awkwardness, he wrapped his gangling arms
around Osip and pulled him into what can only be described as a lover’s embrace.
    “Believe me, I would talk you out of it if I could,” Borisik said in tones usually reserved for funeral orations.
    Osip seemed to be in a state of exaltation. His face was flushed, his fingers trembled. “The two of you, along with Nadenka, shall be my first readers,” he promised.
    Borisik slipped his arms through Osip’s and mine and the three of us set off walking again. I became aware of a spring to Osip’s step, almost as if the going had given way to the
getting there. Nobody said a word for some time. I remember it was Borisik who broke the silence. “If it were possible, I would set the clock back.”
    “Where would you go back to?” I asked.
    “I would return to when Osip feigned sanity to justify his failure to act.”
    “I would set the clock back still further,” Osip declared passionately. “I would go back to Russian literature before the Bolsheviks twisted its arm and tore it from its
socket.”
    I had the sinking feeling he was going to spill more milk. I begged Osip—dear God, when I think of it now my blood runs cold—I begged him to carefully weigh the consequences of his
actions. “The last thing Russia needs,” I told him, “is the death of another poet.”

FIVE
    Fikrit Shotman
    Tuesday, the 1st of May 1934
    T HROUGH THE PLANKS NAILED over the slit of a window high in the wall of my cell, I could hear horns and whistles and kettledrums and trombones in the
streets around the Lubyanka. I could picture the mass of workers, some waving banners representing their factory or collective, others carrying small children on their shoulders, flowing in great
rivers toward Red Square to file past Lenin’s Tomb in celebration of the seventeenth May Day since the glorious Bolshevik Revolution put Russia on the road to Communism. Monitors along the
route would keep an eye peeled for those who had drunk too much vodka and could barely walk, and cart them off to dry out in open trucks filled with straw parked in side streets.