Sashenka

He placed a yellowing piece of paper before her, headed in black type—OFFICE OF J. V. STALIN. Its entire surface was covered in squiggles and shading in thick green and red crayon, doodles of wolves and apparently random words. But Stalin’s secretary had annotated the exact date and time: 7 May 1939. Sent to archives 11:42 p.m. That was the evening when Beria had shown Stalin the transcript of Sashenka and Benya in bed together at the Metropole.

Katinka looked into the bottle-thick, greasy lenses of Shcheglov’s spectacles, which reflected her own anxious eyes, then down at the papers before her. Slowly, she started to piece together the drama of the night that had doomed Sashenka and her whole family. She knew how Stalin had read the bugging transcript and hated it, calling Sashenka morally corrupt…like a streetwalker. She got her notebook out of her bag and glanced back at the order of Stalin’s visitors that night:

10:00 p.m. L. P. Beria.

Leaves 10:30 p.m.

10:30 p.m. H. A. Satinov.

Leaves 10:45 p.m.

10:40 p.m. L. P. Beria.

Leaves 10:52 p.m.

By the time Beria left Stalin’s office at 10:30 p.m., Satinov was waiting in the anteroom. Stalin called in Satinov and asked him about Sashenka’s affair.

Katinka perused the new page of Stalin’s squiggles and, with a rising horror, she started to understand.

Questions for Comrade Satinov: Sashenka in St. Petersburg was in the middle of the page, surrounded by circles, squares and a finely drawn fox’s face, shaded in red and entitled Comrade Snowfox. Satinov must have answered these questions coolly because Stalin scrawled down his answer: Old friends, devoted Bolsheviks.

Then Stalin called in Beria again and they intensified their cross-examination of Satinov. The next words were scarcely legible.

“I can’t quite read this,” she said.

The archivist followed the words with his finger and read out:

Snowfox in St. Petersburg reliable/unreliable?

L. P. Beria: Molotov and Mendel in St. Petersburg?

Katinka realized that these were all questions to Satinov. She started to imagine his struggle for survival during those five minutes. What could he say? He must have been pale, sweating, his mind spinning. He had a sweet wife and a new baby, but he was a devoted Communist and an ambitious man. His answers during those five minutes would either save his life and make his career, or destroy his own life and that of his wife and baby.

When Stalin asked about Sashenka’s “reliability” in Petersburg, a name must have come to Satinov’s mind: Captain Sagan, whom he knew of only from his dealings with Mendel in late 1916.

Did Stalin already know about Sashenka’s mission to turn Sagan, and that it had been ordered by the Petersburg Committee? If he talked about it now, and no one knew of it, it could taint Sashenka, although this was unlikely since Sagan had been dead for twenty-two years.

But what if Molotov or Mendel, the only others apart from Sashenka who knew about the Sagan operation, had already discussed it with Stalin? Satinov would then be accused of hiding it from the Party, from Stalin himself. That was unthinkable. That would mean death.

Katinka stared down at the crayoned hieroglyphics that revealed this feverish game of Russian roulette that would still decree the destinies of people fifty years later.

So what did Satinov do? Did he panic and say more than he meant? Or did he calculate and act in cold blood?

“We’ll probably never know.” She found she was talking aloud.

“But we do know he said this…,” replied Shcheglov, his finger showing her the next words written by Stalin on this crowded piece of paper: Hercules S: Cpt Sagan. Petersburg. SAGAN

Katinka went cold. So Satinov had told Stalin and Beria about Sashenka and Captain Sagan of the Okhrana. She felt pity for Satinov, and then anger, and then pity again. He might have answered differently if he had known that Captain Sagan was alive—and in one of Beria’s camps, his name meticulously filed in the NKVD roster of prisoners. Within hours, Sagan was on his way to Moscow and Kobylov was beating him into testifying against Sashenka.

“If Satinov had brazened it out,” she whispered, “they might all have survived.”

“Or he might have faced the Vishka too,” Shcheglov pointed out. “Have you seen enough?” He started to gather up the papers and put them away in his orderly files where they would rest, perhaps forever.

“So Satinov doomed his best friends,” Katinka mused, “but then risked everything to save their children. Does that redeem him?”