Sashenka

Esteemed Josef Vissarionovich, dearest Koba,

I write to you as an old comrade of over twenty-five years, during which time I have served the Party and you as its ideal personification without once deviating from the Party line. I believe I owe my successful career as a responsible worker in our noble workers’ and peasants’ Party to your trust and kindness. I will obey any order of the Central Committee as I have always done, but I wish to protest at the methods of “investigation” used on me by the workers of the Organs. I suffer from ill health (a shadow on my right lung; angina and cardiac failure as well as physical weakness from childhood lameness and severe arthritis from hard labor and prolonged exile in Siberia during the Tsarist times) and I am now aged sixty-one. As a member of the Central Committee, I wish to report to you as General Secretary and Politburo member that on arrival here in the Internal Prison at the Lubianka, I was asked to confess to serving foreign powers. When I refused, I was forced down onto a carpet and beaten on the feet and legs with rubber truncheons by three men with terrible force. I could no longer walk and my legs became covered in red and blue internal hemorrhages. Each day, I was beaten again on the same places with a leather strap and rubber truncheons.

The pain was as intense as if boiling water had been poured on me or acid had burned me. I passed out many times, I wept, I screamed, I begged for them to tell you, Comrade Stalin, what I was enduring. When I mentioned your name, they punched me in the face, breaking my nose, my cheekbone and my glasses, without which I can barely function, and they started to beat my spine too. My self-respect as a Bolshevik almost prevents me from telling you more, Illustrious Comrade Stalin, and it pains me even to say this: when, lying in a shuddering heap on the floor, I refused again to tell the Party lies, the interrogators relieved themselves (and, in doing so, polluted the name of our sacred Party of Lenin and Stalin) on my face and in my eyes. Even in the katorga hard-labor camps under the Tsar, I never endured an iota of this fear and pain. I am now in my cell shivering in every muscle, barely able to hold this pen. I feel such overpowering fear, I who as a revolutionary of thirty years have never experienced fear, and a terrifying urge to lie to you, Josef Vissarionovich, and to incriminate myself and others, including honest responsible workers, even though this itself would be a crime against the Party.

I understand that our great state needs the weapons of terror to survive and triumph. I support our heroic Organs in their search for Enemies of the People and spies. I am not important. Only the Party and our noble cause matter. But I am sure that you do not know of these practices and I urge you, esteemed old comrade, Great Leader of the Working Class, our Lenin of today, to investigate them and alleviate the sufferings of a sincere and devoted servant of the Party and you, Comrade Stalin.

Mendel Barmakid, Party member since 1904