Blowing My Own Horn, Part One: The Troika of Osip Teitelbaum

Blowing My Own Horn, Part One:

The Troika of Osip Teitelbaum

“I cannot take comfort in the lie of the Germans. I was not ‘only following orders.’ I was a machine. I machine of my own making. I am the New Soviet Man. And hell is my destination.”

You know, they say Ron Jeremy can blow his own horn.

No, that’s not what this series is about. This series is me, the author, telling you, the potential reader, why you should read my books.

I’ve been a prolific writer over the past five years, particularly since I took early retirement in 2017. For two years, I did little but write and edit. I think that, in that time, like with so many things, practice was making, if not perfect, then at least much better.

I’ve gotten pretty good at writing, I think. Most people who give my work a chance tend to like it. I get very few lukewarm, or even nasty reviews; and some of the nasty ones are suspect, if you get my drift. Some of my writing, particularly A Life on the Line, my memoir of my career in the Canada Border Services Agency, has rubbed people the wrong way. I am no stranger to the drive-by one-star review.

But, for all my self-satisfaction with the bulk of my work, aside from A Life on the Line, I’ve seen very little forward movement. Do people not know what my books are about? Does their subject matter, or size, intimidate?

That, I cannot answer definitively. All I can do is something I have always tended to be reluctant to do: SELL. Selling my work requires, I believe, not nagging and repetition, but opening people’s eyes to what’s behind the cover.

Not all of my works provoke the sort of passion that compels me to sing their praises. But I do not put out anything I do not believe in 100%. I write some crime thrillers that deliver more excitement and reliable action than any sort of deep insight. My Will Bryant Thrillers are, I think, excellent beach towel, vacation books. Easily devoured in the span of a one-week all-inclusive trip, then on to the next one.

Don’t get me wrong; Will is my first love, and I have no intention of stopping telling his stories. My stepmother would kill me. But the books I will focus on in this series are the ones where I think I’ve reached beyond simply telling a reliable and sexy action story. The ones where I’m saying something a little more profound.

The first is a book I wrote about two years ago, at the end of my period of unfettered freedom and time.

The Troika of Osip Teitelbaum: Genesis

“The Troika always consists of my victims, of course. The most memorable, in rotation, they judge me. Waiting for me in the basement is always the same smiling face. The face of Senior Lieutenant of State Security Osip Teitelbaum. Husband, father, Soviet. Killer.”

We live in a time where “Nazi” is a pejorative, but “Communist” is a viable political choice. Some would suggest it’s the best choice.

I disagree with this as vehemently as it’s possible to disagree with anything. Because I’ve read my history, and I know that, for every one person killed by men with swastika armbands and snappy Hugo Boss threads, twice as many have been killed by clear-eyed fanatics following the secular religion of Marx and Engels.

My history reading started young, and it’s influenced much of my other work. My father collected history books, particularly twentieth-century military history books, obsessively.

I grew up with this library at my disposal. While other kids read about Spiderman and Batman, I was reading about Yamamoto and Zhukov. And I wasn’t just looking at the pictures.

I absorbed certain lessons from my readings, one of the foremost being that, for all their supposed antagonism, Nazism and Communism were really twins separated at birth. I developed a sense of the political spectrum as not a ruler; but rather, a circle. Liberal regimes that respected human dignity were on one end of the circle, while totalitarian regimes which broke bodies and minds occupied the other end.

This is hardly a popular belief in the day and age of champagne radicalism. But, since this opposing viewpoint is largely held by people who form their beliefs in 140 characters or less, I hardly find it worthy of acknowledgement. It’s the truth, peeps.

Throughout university, I read Volkogonov, Solzhenitsyn, and Conquest. I even dared write an essay about Stalin and the Purges, tweaking the noses of leftist professors and TAs. I became curiously fascinated with the time of the Great Terror.

Some history now, for those who didn’t live with my father’s library.

The Great Terror: Stalin Solidifies His Power

“’Comrade Senior Lieutenant? The General Secretary will see you now.’ I stand to attention and march nervously towards my first sight of the man who controls the fates of 170 million people.”

In 1924, while the Soviet Union he’d brought into being was still in its infancy, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin died.

Josef Vissarionovich Stalin began a decade-long quest to outmaneuver and eliminate his rivals in the Politburo, and to suppress the damning “Testament” that Lenin had dictated to his widow Krupskaya on his deathbed.

In the Testament, Lenin stated baldly that, of his two most obvious successors, he plainly preferred Lev Trotsky, head of the Red Army and the chief intellectual in the Party, to Stalin, the coarse and crude Georgian who’d maneuvered his way into the General Secretary job at the Communist Party.

This Testament would become the most lethal document in history. To read it, or even hear of its existence, was to invite death.

“’That vengeful little pox-scarred monster! I never raised a hand against him, but I should have! Lenin was right! I read his Testament you know! I read it!’”

Stalin set out to eliminate Trotsky’s power base, forcing the urbane Jew into exile by 1929. His first overt move against the Politburo was the Ryutin Affair in 1932, followed by the assassination of Sergei Kirov, Leningrad Party boss, in 1934.

By 1934, all serious rivals to Stalin’s rule had been politically outmaneuvered, and either exiled or demoted to worthless jobs. But the murder of Kirov, a handsome young leader viewed as Stalin’s friend and natural successor, provided the pretext for total, final measures.

Kirov was, of course, killed by an unbalanced cipher named Nikolayev on Stalin’s order, while his NKVD bodyguard were suddenly otherwise occupied. The reason? In the last Party Congress, more delegates had voted for Kirov as General Secretary than Stalin.

Kirov, when he found out, was mortified, and renounced the results, which were duly ignored.

But Stalin remembered. Stalin always remembered.

Into this cauldron of suspicion, lies, and political murder enters the protagonist and titular character, Osip Teitelbaum, in December 1935. The Kirov murder investigation, which cannot be allowed to find the real killers, has stalled under the leadership of NKVD Chief Genrikh Yagoda, a former ally of Bukharin, and a dead man walking.

But a new man waits in the wings. He was a tiny man, under 4’11, with a ridiculous pompadour and a sinister look. His name was Nikolai Yezhov, and the bloodbath that followed, though it was all Stalin’s baby, would be called the Yezhovschina.

“When he enters a room, an ill-wind follows. He is sinister, in an agency full of sinister men, a man I would put no act of depravity past.”

Osip Teitelbaum: Antihero

“I released him. He spit blood at me. I calmly wiped it off my tunic. ‘Well? Had a good cry? Ready to do your final duty for the Motherland?’”

I have written many books, full of complicated people. Villains with likeable sides and complicated routes to evil. Heroes with feet of clay and heads full of regret. Neutral characters who could care less or go either way depending on what’s in it for them.

From the beginning, I liked to try and paint everybody in my books as people with motivations, extra dimensions, surprises. Like real people. The extent to which I have succeeded or failed is up to the reader.

But only once, in The Troika of Osip Teitelbaum, can my protagonist truly be described as an “antihero.” He beats, tortures, blackmails, and kills in the service of one of history’s greatest monsters. He seems sometimes to take a kind of enjoyment in his work; at other times he finds it repellant. He has no compunction about trading sides in the Civil War or killing those who would betray him.

“’What the fuck is this, Pavel? This cocksucker hasn’t confessed to stealing a kopek! And how come there’s no blood on the floor or the walls? What did you do, tickle him with a fucking feather?”

Yet he also loves his daughter deeply and carries a hopeless torch for his boss’ wife. He can feel, and he does, deeply. He is a man of wit and intelligence, who knows that he is serving a destructive tyrant. He knows evil, true, dedicated evil, when he sees it.

“As I sat beside Ulspensky in the cab of the truck, I concluded that this Party office had been good Communists and had exterminated their own people. But they were still going to be shot anyway. Why? The math. The math didn’t add up.”

As strange as it may seem, this book does have moments of humour, mostly of the dark variety. Like all policemen, Teitelbaum deals with what he sees and does through the blackest humour.

“’Don’t worry ma’am.’ I doffed my cap to the plump baba. ‘You needn’t worry. Citizen Goldman, please.’ ‘Oh I knew it! Dirty Yids, can’t trust a one of them.’ ‘No, of course not.’ I held out my hand. ‘I am Major Teitelbaum. Shalom.’”

“Smirnov, appropriately enough, was reading a Tale of Two Cities. ‘Is it good?’ I asked him. He smiled, sadly, ‘You won’t like it. The police don’t come off looking too good.’ I nodded. ‘We never do. It’s time, citizen.’ He shook his head. ‘I’d already figured out the ending anyway.’”

“A man with salt-and-pepper hair, I think it was Akulov, dived out the window into the street. The thud when he hit made everyone shudder. ‘Okay, only seven box lunches, anyone else?’”

Teitelbaum’s life is complicated, to put it mildly. He must juggle an alcoholic, embittered wife, dangerously enmeshed with Trotskyites and threatening to reveal his greatest secret. He must contend with Ulspensky, a cynical sadist who may know that secret firsthand. And, he must navigate the corridors of power, ensuring his outgoing chief, Yagoda, does not slip his name onto one of Stalin’s death lists, as well as his incoming chief, Yezhov, a reckless drunk and closet homosexual who may simply use him and throw him away. Despite having explosive evidence against Yezhov, he cannot reveal his fatal secret for fear his wife Yevgenia will die with him; a prospect his love for her makes impossible to bear. But always foremost in his mind is the need to protect his daughter Tatiana from the wolves that circle them both.

Osip sometimes refers to himself as the “New Soviet Man,” and this phrase, like the “Troika” of the title, has a dual meaning. He is a product of two decades of upheaval and suffering. Forced for survival reasons to change sides in the Civil War, he encounters the unsavoury Ulspensky and follows him into State Security.

Unlike Germans under the Nazi regime, Soviet citizens could not refuse their roles without fatal consequences. Osip uses the analogy of the isolated lake filled with Arctic Char for the often-life-and-death politics of Stalin’s USSR.

“Finally, I broke away to pour more wine. ‘There is a lake, I am told, somewhere in Siberia, where the only living species is Arctic Char. There is no other food, so the fish feast on each other.’”

Fate has assigned Osip a role he dearly wishes to escape. Yet, in a time of turmoil, he is very useful to a man without remorse or gratitude. He knows that, one day, Stalin will turn on him. Deciding when to jump is his greatest challenge.

His only allies are his sister-in-law and sometime lover, Tanya; Yevgenia Feigenberg, the love of his life; Lieutenant Popov, a secret policeman whose life he saved years before; and Abram Slutsky, an irreverent, cosmopolitan spymaster. And, of course, his devoted and perceptive daughter Tatiana.

A reader may wonder why Osip Teitelbaum’s life is worth saving. Osip concludes it isn’t; he schemes only to save his daughter and considers himself long ago consigned to hell for his deeds. But, like many anti-heroes, Osip can win the reader over, and I consider him one of my favourite characters, despite his awful deeds. His love for his daughter and his loyalty to his friends make him a rare creature in the atavistic world of Stalin’s USSR.

Mixing Fact and Fiction: The Characters and Events of the Novel

“’Pity you can’t stay longer. The Great Synagogue is a thing of beauty, I must admit.’ ‘So I’ve heard.’ ‘Enjoy it. While it’s still around.’ Heydrich winked.”

Readers of other works of mine will no doubt notice a pattern: I prefer to mount my works solidly in the real world. Even my science fiction features real historical figures and a background of real events.

The writers I admire the most, like James Ellroy, display a firm command of history and a talent for mixing the real figures of our past with their fictional inventions. I make no bones about it; I want to be James Ellroy when I grow up (perhaps a little less strange).

Obviously, Stalin, Beria, Yezhov, Yagoda, and other Politburo members are real. Their habits, mannerisms, and fates are real too. I’ve studied them exhaustively over the course of twenty years to paint their pictures. Lesser figures, like Yevgenia, Slutsky, Skolbin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Tuchachevsky, the Nazis Schellenberg and Heydrich, are presented as they were with only the dialogue invented. The details of their lives and deaths are based on historical accounts.

I feel that fiction writers are just as free to write complete fancies as they are to do what I do. But, in an age when history education is in tatters, isn’t it better to entertain and educate at the same time? I hope that my love for history, combined with dramatic invention, will make people interested in the real accounts of those times. Trust me, they are every bit as engrossing as what I’ve written. Pick up Robert Conquest or Anne Appelbaum, you’ll see what I mean.

The Purge: A Society Consumes Itself

“Bukharin shrugged. His eyes were watery and tired. ‘The machine makes accomplices of us all.’”

The truest evil of totalitarianism is that it forces people to choose evil. For the sake of preserving a loved one, one’s self, or something of beauty, one must aid a monster like Stalin. That is the choice faced by Osip Teitelbaum, over and over.

The Troika of the title is two things; one, a sleigh pulled by three ponies, the traditional Russian winter transport. It also refers to the impromptu, powerless, NKVD tribunals of three officers, responsible for rubber stamping the system’s pre-ordained decisions. Hell on earth in Siberia? Or oblivion in a straw-lined execution cell?

Osip is no robot; he dreams of escape. To find out if he makes it, you’ll have to read the book. But one day, our technology and the global nature of society may make such a mistake impossible. Let’s think about that before we are too quick to censor ourselves or join the outraged mobs.

Between 1937 and 1938, an estimated one million Soviet citizens and foreign nationals were murdered by the NKVD on Stalin’s orders. Most were guilty of absolutely nothing, except perhaps thinking for themselves.

Since we’re keen to knock down our own statues, and burn our own flags, let’s think about that the next time somebody waves the Hammer and Sickle, shall we?