Stalin's Envelope
Had it not been for that faintly tense gesture, I might have taken the question as a natural extension of small talk.
Keep it simple, and if I say it should be demolished, they’ll mark me a revolutionary; if I say it should be preserved, a reactionary pining for the empire?
Either way, it was not a question one could answer lightly.
“Well… I don’t feel particularly strongly one way or the other.”
“…….”
“Whether it’s a city the Tsar built or a city the people live in, stone is stone, walls are walls, and a city is a city.”
I watched the scenery sliding past the window.
Streetlamps along the canal cast long trails of light across the blue surface of the water. On a bridge, a couple who looked like lovers linked arms and crossed at an unhurried pace. From somewhere far off, the thin sound of an accordion rode the wind toward us.
“I simply… think it’s a beautiful city.”
It was all the more bitter to know that, a few decades on, this place would be dragged into a great war and left as nothing but ash.
“Katerina… Kacha, what do you think?”
At the question thrown back at her, Katerina, who had been holding the wheel in silence, stiffened. She seemed to weigh her words carefully.
“To me, ‘SPB’ is just home. Beyond that, I have no particular interest.”
An answer that slipped cleanly past every political yardstick of preservation or demolition, revolution or reaction.
“…Ah. Do you mind if I check something for a moment?”
“Go ahead.”
I decided not to press and hurriedly changed the subject. Whatever history a person I had only just met might carry, it was not my place to dig. Besides, something else occupied my mind. I slipped a hand into the inner pocket of my coat.
My fingers found the envelope Stalin himself had handed me.
A plain white envelope marked with the instruction to open it upon arrival at the lodgings in Leningrad. We had essentially reached those lodgings already; opening it now could hardly matter.
So why did I feel so uneasy…?
Inside were two letters of recommendation in Stalin’s name, several dozen banknotes, and a single certificate of admission. Relying on the streetlight that seeped through the car window, I first read the certificate.
A bad premonition made my fingertips tremble. The moment I took in the Russian at the top, an impulse I could not choke back left my mouth.
“Oh, fuck…”
The Cyrillic characters stamped clearly across the head of the admission paper. Nowhere did the words Leningrad Polytechnic appear. What stood there instead was Leningrad Red Army Military-Political School.
That place trained political officers, pure and simple.
In an instant the scattered pieces in my head locked together. The word “military school” Nadezhda had let slip—she had not misheard. It had been a small clue Stalin himself had dropped. The meaning of that single line on the face of the white envelope—“Open upon arrival in Leningrad”—was clear now as well.
After I had arrived in Leningrad. The return train was already gone, and there was no reason left to go back.
Cold sweat beaded on my palm; rage surged up with it. Then it cooled just as quickly. The result was already fixed. The only thing left was to accept it fast and start looking for a way out.
Once that much was settled, another thought slid into the space the anger had vacated. I found myself analyzing the matter as a matter of course.
A son who had been walking the path of engineering—and of all things, a political officer.
Why on earth does Stalin want to make me a political commissar?
The first thing that rose was the fact that Stalin himself had been one. During the Civil War, as political commissar at Tsaritsyn, he had watched the officers of the old Imperial army, clashed with them, and at the same time drawn men like Voroshilov and Budyonny—later marshals of the Soviet Union—into his own circle.
That was what a political officer was from the start: a watcher in uniform the Party planted to keep the army under its eye.
After the Civil War more than seventy percent of Red Army officers still came from the old Imperial forces, and the share of Party members was pitifully low. A political safety mechanism was needed to monitor them and guarantee loyalty to the system. It was from that very post that Stalin had taken his first step toward becoming the one at the top.
Could he be trying to make his son walk the exact road he himself had taken?
And this was 1925. In December of this year, after Mikhail Frunze’s death, Stalin would seat Voroshilov as People’s Commissar for Defense and chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council—placing a comrade from Tsaritsyn at the apex of the army and drawing the Red Army into his own hand. To train his son as a political officer at a moment like this meant he intended to plant me, as a piece, right in the middle of that army.
When the thought reached that far, the corner of my mouth actually rose.
Then I would simply have to play my own moves on that board.
“…Comrade Dzhugashvili?”
Katerina’s emerald eyes flicked across my face.
“Your expression doesn’t look good. Is something wrong?”
I laid Stalin’s letter of recommendation on my knee.
“…Kacha, did you know which school I was headed for?”
She answered at once, without a moment’s hesitation.
“I was told the Red Army Military-Political School.”
“I see…. My father told me it was the Polytechnic.”
Katerina fell silent. She seemed to sink into thought, chewing her lip, hesitating over her words. Only for a moment, though.
“My mission is to deliver the comrade to his destination.”
Her voice was stiff.
“Anything beyond that, I don’t know.”
It was the tone of a teacher drawing a firm line while somehow still sketching the edges of the exam. I had not been trying to ask whether she knew or not; the answer simply meant further prying would get me nowhere. I let out a short sigh.
“Then what sort of place is the Red Army Military-Political School?”
“A school that trains political commissars.”
Her answer was brief.
“It raises the personnel who will handle ideological education inside the army and the Party’s control. Those who excel go on to the higher institution—the Tolmachev Military-Political Academy—and are trained as political commissars.”
“…You know a good deal more than I expected.”
“I graduated from the Military-Political School myself. I’m currently at the Tolmachev Academy.”
So Kacha was walking the same road. That I had not anticipated.
“Then you’re a political officer as well, Kacha?”
“The proper title is political commissar, but…. Yes.”
I looked at her again. A political officer was the muzzle of ideology the Party drove into the army—a post that doubted the loyalty of former White officers to the Soviets, dug for weaknesses, and buried a man with a single report.
Yet something about Kacha was hard to place. From the woman in front of me I saw neither the fever of ideology nor the hunger for advancement. Rather, she seemed to police her own expression at every turn, like someone determined not to let anything slip.
…Is it only my imagination?
The title of political commissar simply did not seem to fit her.
Sokolova… a surname from a military house of the Imperial era…
There were no deep clues to chase, but one thing was plain. This woman was hiding something.
“If you graduated from the Military-Political School, you must know it well.”
“I may not look it, but I finished at the top of the class. If there’s anything you don’t know, ask anytime, Comrade Dzhugashvili.”
“Then would you tell me everything you know? Who the instructors are, what sort of people they are, how classes run, how evaluations work, how far the dormitory sits from the school… all of it.”
After braking amid a press of people, Katerina turned and fixed me with a look.
“…If you fire questions like that, it interferes with driving.”
“Ah. I forgot my life is in Kacha’s hands.”
At the banter she gave a short snort of laughter.
“Once we reach the lodgings, I’ll explain properly.”
Outside the window the lights of Leningrad kept streaming past.
The next morning, as promised, Katerina had the car waiting in front of the lodgings.
“How was the accommodation, Comrade Dzhugashvili?”
“Not as bad as I expected. Sleep came easily enough.”
Her face had returned to that expression of flawless control.
“First, today we go straight to the Military-Political School. There you’ll face admission questions from three instructors: Instructor Savelyev, Instructor Lapin, and Political Commissar Voronin.”
Katerina lifted my trunk without fuss.
“Instructor Savelyev tests military knowledge. Instructor Lapin looks at character. He likes to put an interviewee at ease and then catch the slip—so be careful.”
She continued the briefing in the same even tone.
“And Political Commissar Voronin….”
Her voice dropped a full register.
“Be especially careful of that man. He sits on the Leningrad Party Committee.”
The Leningrad Party Committee?
At those words my mind spun fast.
Right now Leningrad belongs to the Zinoviev faction. And before long he will raise the banner against Stalin…
From the standpoint of Stalin’s son, it meant a distinctly awkward man would be sitting across the table as an examiner.
“…We’ve arrived.”
The car had stopped before I realized it. Outside the window a gray stone building rose. A hammer and sickle snapped on a red flag above it.
So this is the Leningrad Red Army Military-Political School…
“Ah—and the General Secretary left a message.”
Katerina stepped down, came close, and whispered.
“That Yakov Dzhugashvili is the son of Iosif Stalin will be difficult for anyone to notice.”