Alina Adams - Writer
STALIN’S OTHER NON-AGGRESSION PACT
Some people joined the CIA for action. Some for intrigue. Some for travel. Danny Spivak joined for the paperwork.
Or so he told himself.
Otherwise, his current assignment would be unbearable.
Thanks to Russia and America’s new policy of friendly cooperation, the Agency had been given access to a basement full of boxes jammed to the breaking with recently declassified KGB documents. Danny’s superiors had already gone through the good stuff - files listing double agents, the real story behind Alger Hiss, records from the Bay of Pigs debacle. As low man on the totem pole, Danny was left with lists of citizens happy to spy on their neighbors (most of whom were now dead), addresses of bank accounts where dedicated, Communist public servants hid their skimmed gains from the masses (most of which were already closed), and toilet paper receipts for the Politburo lavatories. I.e. not a career-making discovery in the lot.
Danny worked backwards, starting with boxes labeled 1991, the last year of the Soviet Socialist Republics. Three months into the day in/day out glamour of his Moscow posting, he was wading elbow-deep in superfluous papers pertaining to the Stalin-Hitler non-aggression pact of 1939. Considering that most of the world already knew the details of the notorious deal struck by Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany’s foreign ministers - Hitler gets Western Europe, Stalin gets East, we split Poland down the middle and neither bothers the other in their quest for domination - Danny hardly expected to stumble upon anything of interest.
And, initially, he didn’t. It was all mind-numbingly routine. Until he found, stuck between a copy of a copy detailing the steps for subduing potential revolution in Lithuania and a list of films Stalin wished to acquire for his private screening room, a document that didn’t seem to quite fit the series.
For one thing, it was an original. For another, the date was wrong. The World War II non-aggression agreement was rather famously reached on August 23, 1939. This one was dated September 21, 1924, almost fifteen years earlier. Also, the Stalin-Hitler pact had been negotiated and signed by their respective foreign ministers, Molotov (of cocktail fame) and von Ribbentrop. The document in Danny’s hand appeared to have been signed by Stalin himself, and another name Danny couldn’t easily make out.
And one more unusual thing.
It was signed in blood.
Danny knew C.I.A. protocol mandated the reporting of his discovery to his direct superior. This was so that said superior could take all the credit and reap the subsequent benefits of Danny’s find. It didn’t say that last part in the handbook, of course. Danny, the crack intelligence analyst, had deduced that last part all by cynical self. Which was why, when he filled out his progress report at the end of the day, he managed to slip his mind right over the puzzling document. After all, Danny’s assignment was to list the contents of the boxes in the basement. And the sheet of paper was no longer, technically, in a box. Or in the basement. It was in his pocket.
Danny spent the remainder of his evening attempting to decipher the other signature next to Stalin’s. Vladimir Palka? Vladimir Polka? Paluka? He couldn’t be certain - the letters were hard to read, what with blood not being an ideal writing tool.
Figuring he had enough preliminary info to start more in-depth digging, Danny tackled the massive tomes of records compiled in the decade since the C.I.A. had been given access to previously sealed files. A week and a half after he started searching, Danny came upon a possible match. Vladimir Poloka, from the Republic of Moldovia, was listed as having been arrested for the crime of "promoting ethnic sedition" and banished to Siberia. A not uncommon charge. A not uncommon punishment. Danny’s own maternal grandfather had been banished to Siberia, too. Leonid Popov’s crime was being one of the Soviet soldiers who met up with a unit of Americans at the Elbe River on April 25, 1945. The retreating Germans had blown up both bridges, leaving the US 69th Infantry Division and the Soviet 58th Rifle Division to literally crawl over the rubble to reach each other. Their long-prayed-for meeting signified the Allies’ total victory over that section of Nazi Germany. None other than Stalin himself hailed the Soviet soldiers as ultimate heroes of the USSR. Seven years later, the majority of the heroes were killed or exiled. None other than Stalin himself had decided that their contact with the Americans at Elbe had left them "tainted" and thus a danger to the state.
In Stalin’s day it was not uncommon for a heroic ally to be turned, with the stroke of a Kremlin pen, into an official enemy of the people overnight. Still, Vladimir Poloko’s fall seemed to have come swifter than most. He signed the non-aggression pact on September 21, 1924. He was deported to Siberia on September 22.
Danny could only wonder if it was something poor Vladimir said.
He checked the records to see if Poloka was ever released. After Stalin’s death, hundreds of prisoners were rehabilitated. Though it came too late for Danny’s grandfather. He died within a year of deportation. It was just as well. Danny’s mother always said that, as one who fought to protect Mother Russia, it would have killed him to know that his daughter, son-in-law and only grandson immigrated to the United States in the early 1990s.
Vladimir Poloka was not listed as having been rehabilitated. He wasn’t listed as having died. He wasn’t listed as anything, actually. Beyond his crime and the date of his deportation, the only other piece of information in his file was the name of the Siberian town where he’d been deported. It was the same place, interestingly enough, that Danny’s grandfather had been sent to. The town of Krov.
The next morning, Danny told his supervisor he needed a break from his duties in the basement. Since he’d already lasted longer than any other file-shuffling agent in his position, no one found his request for vacation time unusual, and it was immediately granted. That same day, Danny checked if there was a railway line running to the town of Krov, and promptly booked a seat on the Siberian Express.
Before he left, he sent a telegram to the only post office in the vicinity, telling them he was coming. He signed it Danny Spivak, son of Irina Popova.
Contrary to clichéd belief, Siberia was not a perennially snowy wasteland. It being the summer, Danny got to see some lovely, green countryside. In fact, he saw several days’ worth of it. Despite taking an airplane as far east as Aeroflot flew, Danny still needed to spend eighty-plus hours cramped into a sleeper-car made for midgets, before reaching his destination.
He was the only one to disembark in Krov. The conductor even asked if he was certain this was his stop. Danny assured him that it was. He pointed to a figure standing in the shadows of the platform, indicating that the gentleman was there to greet him.
The conductor shrugged. He warned that the next service wouldn’t be coming through for another week, then watched his lone passenger get off the train.
Danny approached the shadowy figure. It was a man about Danny’s age, wearing a faded, gray shirt, a wide-brimmed hat, and work gloves that covered his hands to the elbows. The two studied each other for a long moment, both wondering who would be the first to admit what they new.
Danny decided to break the suspense. In Russian, he said, "Hello, Grandfather."
"You are the first person to riddle us out." Vladimir Poloka took a seat across a meticulously sanded, handmade wooden table and looked from Danny to his grandfather with beaming approval.
"It wasn’t hard," Danny had to admit. " Not once I saw the non-aggression pact. Signing a document in blood more or less screams an undead agenda."
"My grandson, the genius!" Leonid Popov smacked Danny heartily on the back. His bones rattled inside the loose skin like crushed Cheerios. "Stalin tried to hide the evidence, but my Daniel was too smart for him!"
"How did you do it?" Danny asked Poloka. "How did you get Stalin to agree to something like this?"
"What choice did the crazy Georgian have? He knew he couldn’t stop us. Long before him, the Russians attempted to subdue Bessarabia, and they never succeeded. Their military was no match for an Army of the Night. The Soviets had no better luck. But Stalin knew he needed to subdue all of Moldavia to make his eventual push east to Rumania, to Yugoslavia, Albania. The non-aggression pact was his idea. My people agree to move out of his way and, in exchange, he guarantees a never-ending supply of fresh blood to our new home in Krov."
"Krov," Danny noted. "The Russian word for blood. Clever."
"Thank you. It seemed the appropriate touch."
"So all of Stalin’s deportations, we thought he was trying to purge the country of political enemies. But he was just sacrificing citizens to keep your forces at bay."
"This is absolutely wrong." Poloka appeared genuinely hurt by the suggestion. "It was always a purge of perceived enemies. The paranoid bastard saw enemies lurking under every brick of the Kremlin. Even after his mind went, at the end, and he was foaming at the mouth, accusing everyone... tell me, Daniel the genius, do you recall Stalin’s final, delusional accusation?"
"The doctor’s plot. He accused Jewish doctors of sabotaging..." Danny smiled, feeling like he’d solved an extra-credit puzzle on an AP math exam. "The Russian blood supply. He called them Doctors-of-Harm and claimed they were trying to poison Party members through injections into the blood."
"He had blood on the brain!" Grandpa Popov laughed and slapped his knee. This time, it sounded like a pebble dropping to the bottom of a like. "Even the syphilis couldn’t wipe that particular memory. Just scrambled it a bit."
"I think Lenin was the one who died of syphilis," Danny corrected primly. A good CIA research drone, even while sitting at a table in Siberia between two vampires.
"Rotten, bastard pig!" His grandfather mimed spitting. As the last bit saliva had dried in his mouth in 1952, it was more of a ceremonial expectorant. "Every venereal disease in the world - tied to a stick and shoved up his ass - wouldn’t be enough punishment."
"That’s rather judgmental of you, isn’t it?" Obviously, Danny’s compulsion to get facts just right resided in that area of the brain which others reserved for self-preservation. "After all, you were practically partners with Stalin in his genocide. He may have deported his enemies. But you’re the ones who killed them."
"Stalin," Poloka said calmly, nodding to agree with himself after every word, "Had his own countrymen arrested, tried, and sentenced to death without any possibility of defense, appeal, or reprieve. I, on the other hand, gave them a choice: Death, or join us for eternity? The ones who chose death were killed quickly. Humanely. Do you think we allowed them to slowly go mad with hunger and pain and cold, like in the other camps? If they wished to die, they died. And if they wished not to die, they were accepted into our community. Man, woman, Slav, Gypsy, Cossack, Jew... you wish to see true communism? It wasn’t that poison preached by Moscow. True communism is here. Do you know we have some of Russia’s greatest minds with us? Men who masterminded the revolution, men who created the Politburo, and worked on the atom bomb and put Castro into power and broke codes so secret your American government doesn’t even know they exist. We are not monsters. We are civilized citizens."
Danny asked, "How civilized did you remain when the fresh shipments stopped coming? Don’t tell me there was no dissention in the happy ranks, then?"
"Whoever said the shipments stopped coming? Stalin may have died, but there were still enemies to banish. Khrushchev sent us reinforcements without knowing, or caring, where he was sending them. Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, they all kept us well stocked. The state may change. The paranoia does not. We have plenty to eat, even now. In fact, I must say, having suspected the truth about our little expatriate community, you were very brave to come here."
Danny shrugged. "In my business, the only way to get ahead is to take risks. Agents like me, foreign-born agents, rarely get too far in the C.I.A. But I intend to get ahead. I’ve got some ideas."
"How? By pulling back the proverbial cover of night and telling the world all about us?"
"Well," Danny leaned forward, linking his fingers thoughtfully in front of him. He glanced at his thirty-year-old grandfather, and at the even younger looking older man sitting by his side. Danny asked, "Actually, I was wondering, how would your civilized, greatest minds of Russia like to share a little bit of their expertise with the CIA?"
Last Updated 12/10/04
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