The Commissar's Report

By Martyn Burke

The Commissar’s Report, originally published by Houghton Mifflin, was lauded as “a wonder of intense, cinematic storytelling...honest, inventive, and memorable.” (Wall Street Journal). In this comic novel of the Cold War, Dimitri, a young hero of the Russian Revolution and Kremlin spy is secretly smitten by the sirens of capitalism. His posting to the Soviet consulate in New York is a dream come true.

The dream quickly becomes a nightmare. Dimitri’s Soviet boss despises him, his wife is obsessed with the unsocialist pursuit of a Bergdorf’s charge account, and his boyhood friend is now a CIA agent who stalks him. On Wall Street, he is plagued by his wild talent for making money in the stock market. His bosses in Red Square would find this difficult to overlook if they knew. And, as Dimitri fears, the old men of the Kremlin have a deadly habit of knowing everything sooner... or later.

Burke creates a unique and highly entertaining tale of dark humor and rich understanding.

“...original...plot is fast and wildly complex and the twists are clever.”
People Magazine

“...consistently funny, surprising and inventive.”
LA Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bev Editions
• Release date: Mar 21, 2011
• ISBN: 9780986728778

Martyn Burke

Martyn Burke, novelist and award-winning director/writer of both documentaries and dramatic films, has travelled extensively from the Arctic Circle to the Amazon jungles, finding himself in the middle of wars and revolutions in Vietnam and Afghanistan. He has made undercover documentaries on the Mafia and KGB. He is the author of six books: The Commissar's Report, Laughing War, Ivory Joe, The Truth About the Night, Tiara, and The Shelling of Beverly Hills. A native of Canada, he divides his time between Toronto and Santa Monica.

Book preview

The Commissar's Report

Martyn Burke

First published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1984

Published by Bev Editions at Smashwords

ISBN: 978-0-9867287-7-8

Copyright: 2011 Martyn Burke

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

To Marcella

How little you know of knighthood, Sancho! answered Don Quixote. Peace, and have patience, for a day will come when you will see with your own eyes how fine a thing it is to follow this profession. Now tell me: what greater contentment can the world offer? What pleasure can equal that of winning a battle and triumphing over one's enemy? Undoubtedly none.

Table of Contents

Chapters 1-8

Chapters 9-16

Chapters 17-24

Chapters 25-32

Chapters 33-39

Chapters 40-46

About the Author

Review Excerpts

Russia

1

BEFORE THE GREAT WAR, when I was a boy, we used to dream of what life was like in Enemy Number One. It was a time when dreams were precious. Terror hung like a fog in our city, and even though we were very young, we still knew about the midnight arrests and the deportations going on all around us. And what we didn't know, we could sense from the fear-etched faces of our parents, who would talk even to us in heroic and heavy phrases of socialist realism like we heard from the loudspeakers at the May Day military parades. It was as if our parents were afraid that we would turn them in.

Enemy Number One seemed like a distant paradise to us then.

We knew all about it from the pages of smuggled copies of Life magazine. Of course it was dangerous to be caught reading such a foreign magazine. (But how were we to know you could be shot for it?) All we cared about was hurrying home after school, running through the freezing streets where steaming horses wheezed under heavy loads and streetcars clanged and clattered among the grim, ragged throngs.

No one was home in our apartment for at least an hour after school, so my brother Yuri and I spent those precious moments staring into the pages of Life, with its photographs and advertisements of all those sleek people and those big Cadillacs and the skyscrapers in New York and Chicago. My imagination would stampede and before I knew it, I was walking around our high-ceilinged parlor with its overstuffed furniture and peeling plaster, pretending I was in a glittering ballroom in Philadelphia. I danced through the ancient odors of boiled cabbage as the after-school gloom fell away in the light of some distant candelabra.I hated the smell of boiled cabbage. I was sure that Enemy Number One did not smell of boiled cabbage.

The copies of Life magazine belonged to my father. Yuri and I decided that he had probably smuggled them into Russia after his last trip overseas two years ago. Or maybe he had taken them from someone he had executed. Father was a very important member of the Party. I remember him in those days being a big man with fierce, prowling eyes that burst into their own form of laughter whenever he picked us up and kissed us. His mustache was like the bristles on a scrubbing brush, and it tickled so much we screamed and threatened to wet our pants. Father and his friends in the Party and the Army were always scheming to have one another shot. It was just the way life was during the purges, when millions of people were slaughtered by Comrade Stalin.

Father kept the Life magazines in a locked, hidden compartment in the parlor wall. He thought no one knew about this compartment, but Yuri and I knew about it because we had spied on him one night when he had come down to the parlor to get one of his balloons. His balloons and Life magazine were the only things he kept in the hidden wall compartment.

The first time we opened the compartment and took out one of the balloons, we didn't know what it was for. It was white and rubbery and rolled up so it formed a perfect little circle. It came in a small package with English writing on it. Yuri unrolled the balloon and blew it up, occasionally letting air out of it in small farting bursts that made us laugh. Then he let the balloon go and it shot across the room like a demented airship, crashing into the portrait of Stalin that hung near the wood stove. When Yuri tried to blow up the balloon again, he found it was impossible. There was a tiny hole in it. We didn't know what the balloon was for, but we knew that Father would thrash us if he knew we had been playing with it. He didn't keep things in the hidden compartment for nothing. So we rolled it up very carefully and put it back. That night Father got drunk on vodka, as he often did. We heard him opening his hidden compartment, singing away to himself and then hurrying off to their bedroom. My mother always made strange yodeling noises after Father went in there with one of his balloons. Yuri and I thought he must have been tickling her. There was a lot to tickle. Mother was very heavy, with a flat, wide face and thick legs.

Later we realized that Father must have got the balloon with the hole in it. That was how my little sister Natasha was born. Father was furious. As Mother swelled up even more, he ranted about shoddy capitalist merchandise. The capitalists are still screwing us, he would say over and over again when he got drunk. And late one night, we sneaked a look at him spreading all his balloons out on the dining room table and then holding each one up to the light to see if there were any more holes in them. Stalin looked down serenely.

This mishap didn't stop us from reading Life. It became even more of an obsession with us as things got worse in our city. In the final days of a bitter winter, everything outside the heavily curtained windows of the parlor seemed to bring either coldness or fear. So we let our imaginations soar in the glorious childhood images that leapt from the pages of Life.

Enemy Number One was a magical place for us. We lost ourselves in visions of the big cars driven by sleek men in the advertisements. For myself, I had taken a Buick, while Yuri waved to me from a DeSoto as we drove down marvelous roads with white lines in the middle. And clothing! Not the baggy, shapeless suits that even someone as important as Father wore. But tailored elegance that made us dashing as we lit our Lucky Strike cigarettes with gold lighters and stared out from under our wide-brimmed fedoras. From every photograph, Enemy Number One drew us in to its secrets and mysteries and its power. We soared in its planes and raced its big cars. We could stretch out on the overstuffed furniture that stunk of boiled cabbage, and suddenly we were in Florida where the big nightclub echoed to Latin music and gangsters with blondes sat in velvet chairs watching the floor show. Or in Holly-wood, where I was that big movie star Clark Gable who was probably able to have all the women he wanted without having to inform on any of them to the commissars.

It was the women of Enemy Number One that sent us into ecstasy. The brassiere ads totally wiped us out, as they say. We sat there gaping at these nearly naked creatures with their two shiny white cones beckoning us to illicit thrills. We laughed and clutched at our crotches, and rocked back and forth knock-kneed as these sleek visions of sexual enticement moistened their full red lips and pleaded with us to touch —just touch it! — their shiny white cones. There was nothing like it in our city. Almost all the women were like our mother. Shaped like the wood stoves. With pushed-in faces and a beaten-down quality. On the clotheslines their brassieres looked like two tents sewn together. Tents that smelled of boiled cabbage.

We lusted after so much in Enemy Number One. All the shiny and beautiful things that we in our drab and fearful lives did not have. But there was nothing that attracted us so much as its women. And it was because of them that we really got ourselves in trouble.

One day Yuri and I invited a school friend named Lavrenti over to our home after school. We knew that he would enjoy the forbidden delights of the white cones as much as we did. Lavrenti was my age but was smaller than either of us. Even then he had big round eyes, made larger by his thick glasses. Although he was small and wore such thick glasses, no one at school ever picked on Lavrenti, because his father was important in the Party. Almost as important as our father. On many official occasions his father and ours would be together on the reviewing stand with other commissars and sour-looking Army generals. Our father often got drunk with Lavrenti's father, and together they would toast the revolution and how much they loved each other and how they would defend one another against the insidious enemies of the motherland.

So we figured it was okay to share our secret with Lavrenti. When we opened the pages of Life to the treasures of Enemy Number One, his eyes almost fell through his glasses. He too was immediately swept off into our world of gangsters and big cars and movie stars. And of course the brassiere ads. When he saw those, he seized the magazine away from us and giggled uncontrollably. Yuri and I were both afraid he would tear the pages out. We had to stop Lavrenti from running into the bathroom and locking the door. The only way we could get his attention was to blow up one of Father's balloons and then let it go careening around the room.

When Lavrenti saw the balloon, he was like someone who was having a vision. He picked it up in awe, holding it like a skinny limp fish.

It's to put on your Raskolnikov, he said.

Both Yuri and I had no idea what our Raskolnikov was. But we acted as if we knew and said, Oh sure, we've whipped it onto the old Raskolnikov dozens of times.

You have? said Lavrenti, amazed and envious. I've always wanted to. Can I?

Sure, we said. Suddenly Lavrenti unbuttoned his pants and pulled them down. It was then we realized what a Raskolnikov was, as Lavrenti's was hastily fitted with Father's balloon. Lavrenti chortled and gasped as Yuri and I looked on, stunned.

Why do you call it a Raskolnikov? asked Yuri. I thought it was your pecker.

My father always calls it that, said Lavrenti, proudly hobbling over to a mirror, his pants still down at his ankles. He keeps on telling me what will happen if I stick it into one of the workers' daughters who live in the shacks down near the river. He says it will turn black and fall off. That's what these balloons are for. To stop it from turning black and falling off.

For capitalist tools, said Yuri, and we broke out in fits of giggling. But it was true. The balloons were made by the capitalists. Suddenly it all became clear to us. That was what the men wore in Enemy Number One! Under all their sleek tuxedos in Hollywood or their elegant pin-striped suits on Wall Street, all those gleaming, powerful men were walking around with balloons on their Raskolnikovs! That was why they had such style. That was why the blondes clung to them in their big cars.

Yuri and I immediately dove into the balloon supply and began unwrapping one each. Soon we were each taking turns standing in front of the mirror under Stalin's portrait, staring at ourselves wearing the balloon. Standing there trying to act debonair with our pants down around our ankles.

But there was an obvious problem: too much balloon and too little Raskolnikov. It confirmed our belief that everything in Enemy Number One was bigger and better.

It was Lavrenti who came up with the answer. He was very smart for a twelve-year-old. It's because the capitalists have all those women, he said. It's like any muscle. The more you use it, the larger it grows. We need some women.

Of course. It was simple. So we pulled up our pants and put on our heavy greatcoats. We went outside into the cold grayness of our city to find women who would be enlisted to do their patriotic duty in our struggle to maintain national pride. There was still snow on the ground. People hurried through the fading afternoon light, bundled up in their drab clothing against the cold. No one stopped to talk to anyone else. In those days, everyone was too afraid to say anything. You never knew who would be arrested next, and anyone recently seen talking to the poor wretch might be taken in too. Only members of the Army or the secret police seemed to be in groups. There were few cars on the wide roads that had been built to resemble the boulevards of Paris. But nothing could have been less like Paris. The buildings were dingy and ill lit. Lantern oil was rationed like everything else, and a lot of places had neither gas nor electricity. And because the coal rations had gotten smaller after the failure of the Five Year Plan, many of the trees on the boulevards had been cut down for the stoves. The result was a kind of unending bleakness in the silent, fearful streets.

But on this afternoon we were true soldiers of the revolution. We saw none of the bleakness. We ran along the big road that led past the statue of some dead poet and then went down to the workers' shacks by the river. The shacks had been there since before the revolution. Most of them were made of wood, but some were made of hardened mud. Toothless old women hauled sacks of coal and stared suspiciously at us as we approached. Just by the way we dressed they knew we were outsiders — Oktybryata, Children of the October Revolution. Privileged ones. Troublemakers. The old crones jabbered at the children to go inside.

We walked among the shacks imagining that we were movie stars in Enemy Number One waiting for the blondes. But I discovered that there must have been a certain skill to being a movie star, because my balloon started coming off. Yuri was having the same difficulty. Again it was Lavrenti who solved the problem.

You walk with your knees together and your hands in your pockets, he said with an air of authority.

So we walked the way he told us to. We looked like three demented chickens. The children all started laughing at us. But that was their problem, the little peasant fools. How were they to know that this was the way movie stars walked in Hollywood?

When we were almost at the edge of the shacks, we saw Irina. She was a real woman. At least thirteen. At school we had watched her carefully and decided that she must be growing breasts under those layers of shapeless and ragged sweaters she wore. Irina had long braids of light brown hair framing her face. In ten years she would start to turn into a wood stove like her mother. But now she was cute. I tried to imagine her in one of the brassiere ads in Life.

Lavrenti informed Irina that we were on a mission of highest patriotic importance. He told her she had been selected to help overcome a strategic advantage that the capitalists held over the sons of the revolution. Irina looked at us in a way that seemed almost intimidating. Lavrenti informed her that it was a matter of such significance that it could not be discussed in our present surroundings. Bourgeois spies were everywhere. A secure place had to be found. Like the nearby woods.

The moment we got into the woods, we jumped her. That was only one of our mistakes. She was bigger than any of us and obviously had carried a lot of coal, while we had lifted nothing heavier than Life magazine. She immediately hammered the glasses off Lavrenti's head, sending him into a groping panic in the snow. His greatest fear was to be without his glasses. Then she pitched me into a log. Yuri was our only hope. He was almost as tall as she was. But before he could make his move she landed a foot right smack in his balloon. Yuri keeled into the snow like a felled tree. Then she sat on a tree stump looking at us. Several minutes passed. The daylight was almost gone. The only sounds were our wheezing and groaning. I wondered if they did it this way on Wall Street.

Then she took off her coat and laid it on the snow. She sat back on the coat, hoisted her skirt above her waist, and peeled off the layers of long woolen stockings and underwear. She lay there half naked. Daring us. Lavrenti stared through his shattered glasses, an idiot's grin on his face. He began making unintelligible noises like a monkey. With his knees together, he staggered over to the white legs that were raised to form a canyon of flesh and teetered into its depths. Grappling with his pants and chortling to himself, Lavrenti pumped away like a jackhammer until Irina disdainfully pushed him off and motioned to me.

I tried to act as if I knew what I was doing. I imagined how Clark Gable the famous movie star would have done it. First of all he would just walk over to the women in the brassiere ads and stare them down. They would fall at his feet. Because if they didn't, Clark Gable could always denounce them to the commissars and they would be sent to labor camps.

So I walked coolly over to Irina and stared, like the movie stars would do. That was a mistake. She burst out laughing. I felt humiliated. I had no idea what to do next. My uncertainty ended abruptly when Irina reached up and grabbed my crotch. Raskolnikov instantly sprang to life.

It was perhaps the most political moment of my life. I realized why the men of Enemy Number One all looked so sleek and powerful. And why they made the balloons so big.

I was dragged onto Irina, pulled down into the canyon. Swamped by the musty layers of ragged sweaters that stank of boiled cabbage. I unleashed Raskolnikov. I had no idea what to do, so I did what Lavrenti had done. I pumped like crazy, feeling a surge of excitement unlike anything I had known before. Suddenly Irina pitched me off into the snow, muttering insults. I lay there dazed and suddenly cold as she motioned to Yuri.

Yuri redeemed our honor. He did it differently than us. He began slowly, kissing her. I had never thought of kissing her. Then he began rubbing her all over. It was quite something to see. She began breathing harder. Then he climbed on top of her, and instead of doing it like a jackhammer he was a series of waves. She began to call out. First in low moans, then in loud, breathless cries.

Lavrenti and I sat there fascinated. I was proud of my older brother.

Suddenly, her cries were mixed with other, more distant voices. Angry male voices. The flames of torches could be seen in the darkness. The forest echoed to the voices that called out Irina's name. Lavrenti and I heard them long before the other two. They were too busy making their own noises. We did not want to interrupt them. But another group of voices and flames came bobbing up from a nearby hill. They were so close that even Irina heard them this time. She looked terrified.

Help! she screamed. Rape!

She grappled with her clothes and screamed. Almost immediately we were surrounded by a group of angry, sour-faced workers (in the old days they would have been called peasants). The flames of their torches made them look like demons from the woods. They reeked of the potato vodka they drank. Irina was still trying to put on her clothes when her father, a small man with a flat face, hit her and called her a whore. She whimpered and cried and said that we had raped her. More men arrived. They were all very hostile. One of them kicked Yuri in the rear end while he was pulling up his pants. Others grabbed Lavrenti and me. There was talk of flogging. Or cutting a hole in the ice and throwing us into the river, where we would drown.

Again it was Lavrenti who came up with a solution. Comrades, he said sharply, you are fortunate that your stupidity has not got you shot already.

His boldness surprised them. Suddenly they looked unsure. I remembered what my father had said about the peasants either being at your throat or at your feet.

Do you know who you are dealing with? Lavrenti continued even more forcefully, peering up at the coarse, angry men through his shattered glasses. You are dealing with sons of Heroes of the Revolution! Patriots. Our fathers are men of influence who are al-ways vigilant in defending the motherland against agents of imperialist aggression.

He needed to say no more. His message got through immediately. You could see the fear settle across the men, some of whom took off their caps as they would have done in the presence of their masters in the old czarist days. They coughed and mumbled and shuffled away in frightened clusters. Irina was still sniveling about rape, but her father cuffed her across the head and told her to shut up. They had reason to be afraid. Those were the worst days of what was called collectivization. We had heard the word used often by our fathers, who were very important in the program. What it meant was that the government was taking the land away from the kulaks — the peasants who had owned it and had farmed there all their lives. The kulaks were being herded onto state farms, where they suddenly decided they had been tricked into being slaves on their own land. They rebelled against collectivization. And so they were slaughtered.

People like Father were sent out to solve the problem. The secret police, the Committee for State Security, as it is now called, also sent out many men. The Army moved in reinforcements. The butchering was unlike anything our century had known until the Nazis got ahold of those millions of Jews a few years later.

I remember one Saturday when there was no school Yuri and I were being driven with Mother in an official car. We were to meet Father at a place we thought was a farm outside the city. It was really a prison camp. It was a very cold day, and while we were inside one of the offices some kind of trouble broke out. A riot perhaps. Gunfire sounded from not far away. We were hurried away to a safer part of the camp. I could see guards with machine guns on tripods firing into the screaming crowds. Men, women, children. The snow ran red. A few were being dragged away from the others by men with clubs.

We had to stay there for several hours until the trouble stopped. When Father finally met us, he looked very shaken. He whispered something to Mother and then told us sternly to say nothing to anyone about what we saw that day. Nothing! he said over and over. We were hurried out to the car, past the place where the shooting had been. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of dead kulaks frozen in mute and bloody hordes. In the biting wind, arms and legs rose stiffly from the pile, protruding up to the slate-gray skies. Mouths were opened in silent screams on frozen faces that stared sightlessly at the gathering blizzard. I remember those faces even now.

But it was not just the kulaks. It was a time when everyone was afraid, even people like Father. The terrible purges were at their worst. There were whispered stories of Army generals returning from the war against the fascists and being decorated with medals in the morning. Then in the afternoon they were taken out and executed. It happened. No one was safe. High-ranking party officials were suddenly dragged away by the secret police and shot. Within a day their friends would deny even having known them. Informers were everywhere. The catch phrases of the purge — enemy of the revolution, anti-socialist elements, rang out like death sentences. Guilt or innocence was of no importance. The main aim was to create fear so intense that it paralyzed everyone. It worked.

Fear was the shadow cast by Stalin's light. It was part of our lives. Or more accurately, our parents' lives. We were just children then.

So the workers who were departing with the wailing Irina were no doubt thankful for the darkness. Hoping we could not recognize them in the daylight and report them to our fathers. But our immediate problems were of a different magnitude: the balloons.Yuri had lost his balloon. It had disappeared in the snow. And mine was all warm and damp, so I washed it in a nearby stream that was not completely frozen over. Lavrenti tried to do the same but lost his balloon immediately in the cold water. And when we hung mine on a branch to dry, it froze solid. We struggled to get the frozen balloon down from the tree. It came away in two pieces. That night Yuri and I went to bed with a different kind of terror. We listened to our father getting drunk in the parlor. We could always tell when he was really drinking heavily, because he called out sweet names to our mother, who was usually asleep and snoring by then. Yuri and I lay in our beds listening to these early stages of the mating process. Usually we snickered, but on that night we were holding our breath.

Ludmilla, my flower, he called out drunkenly, the little commissar is stirring with desire. I realized for the first time that this was his own particular name for Raskolnikov. If Yuri and I hadn't been so scared, we would have laughed. We heard him open the hidden wall compartment. Then there was a terrible silence. Finally there was a breathless mumbling coming from the parlor. He was counting his balloons. Several times he lost his place and had to start over, but when he finally finished he let out a roar that sent us both diving under the covers. First he lurched into their bedroom, bellowing at my mother about thieves, demanding to know who had been in the apartment who could have stolen his balloons. (It was the first time we had heard him refer to them. (He called them the commissar's raincoats.)

Then, as if answering his own question, he burst into our room, grabbing Yuri, who was closest, and thrashed him until he cried. Then he grabbed me and spanked me so hard I saw stars. He yelled at us, calling us dirty names we'd never heard before. Then he stopped and dropped me to the floor.

Why three? he said, looking suddenly stricken. We dared not answer. Why did you steal three? he bellowed at me. I just whimpered. Have either of you idiots grown an extra pecker? he yelled, and beat us both again until we told him. It was Yuri who mentioned Lavrenti. At this news, my father's knees almost buckled. My mother gasped fearfully and went very pale. Then she began to weep. My father grabbed me and desperately demanded to know if Lavrenti had seen Life magazine. Suddenly he had forgotten all about the balloons. All he cared about was Life. Tearfully I said that yes, Lavrenti had seen Life. My mother was almost hysterical at the news. She howled at my father, saying that we would all go to the firing squad for possessing counterrevolutionary magazines. My father yelled at her to shut up and pounded his fist into my clothes cabinet. Clutching his bleeding fist, he lurched into the parlor.

Do you know what Lavrenti's father will do to us? he said. "That swine. That illiterate informer. He'll have your father shot. And your mother too. If you're lucky they might only send you into the gulag."

Yuri and I had always thought of Lavrenti's father and our father as being friends. Whenever they met they always shook hands and embraced and laughed at each other's jokes.

All night my parents stayed up. My mother cried and my father drank. At dawn when I awoke, my father was fearfully pacing the floors. In silence we got ready for school. Before we left, my father gave me a very large, plain brown envelope and told me to listen as I had never listened to him before. He told me to take the envelope to school and keep it hidden in my knapsack until after school that afternoon. Then I was to give the envelope to Lavrenti and tell him to take it home to his father.

It was a present, my father said. A present that would help smooth things over with Lavrenti's father. I was not to open it or write anything on the plain, unmarked surface of the envelope. And after I gave it to Lavrenti, we were both to come straight home. I did just as he told me — almost. After I gave Lavrenti the envelope, I started to return home with Yuri, but something made me decide to go over to Lavrenti's home. I wanted to see if his father would be pleased by the present. Yuri refused to accompany me, so I went on my own. Their house was on a wide street next to the park. I took the short cut through the park, and when I got close I realized something strange was happening. I saw several black cars parked outside. They were the kind the secret police drove. I knew because I had seen those cars in places like the prison camp. There were several men in long coats standing outside Lavrenti's house. I crept through the trees in the park and watched as another car drove up. My father got out. He looked very nervous. From the house, one of the men in the long coats emerged and walked quickly toward Father. The man was holding the envelope I had given Lavrenti. From the envelope, he took out the two copies of Life magazine and gravely showed them to Father, who shook his head.

Just then, Lavrenti's father came storming out of the house cursing at Father. He was stopped by two secret policemen who were very rough with him. Father merely seemed to sigh and shake his head again. Lavrenti's mother came out wailing. It was just like my mother had wailed the night before. His mother called out to my father, begging for mercy. Father just looked very regretful and gave a few orders. Lavrenti's father was put into one car and his mother into another, which sped away. Then Lavrenti and his two sisters were dragged out of the house. I remember thinking how much Lavrenti looked like his father and being impressed with how fiercely he struggled until one of the secret policemen slapped the thick glasses off his face. Then he panicked and yelled terribly as he was heaved into another car.

I ran home. I sat trembling and staring at the big portrait of Stalin until there was no more light left. I couldn't figure out what I had just seen. I was sure Stalin was smiling.

Father came home very late. It was almost dawn. Both Yuri and I were catapulted from a hair-trigger sleep by his arrival. We crept down the hall as far as we dared and listened to our parents talk in the bedroom.

Lavrenti's father and mother had been tried and executed. In a midnight trial they had been found guilty of possessing counterrevolutionary propaganda. The only evidence used against them

Reviews for The Commissar's Report

[kapplebaum_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A wonderful novel about a cold-war era Russian spy who loves the Brooklyn Dodgers (because you just CAN'T root for the Yankees!). This would get five stars, but the ending is such a downer.