The Dream that Ousted Stalin from the Mausoleum

Further Notes on The Secret History of Dreaming

Dora Abramovna Lazurkina (1884-1974) Old Bolshevik and friend of Lenin, was arrested by Stalin’s secret police in 1937, jailed and tortured and sent to the Gulag. She was not released until 1955 and had nightmares about what she had endured until the end of her life.

At the 22^nd Communist Party Congress in 1961 she rose to say that she had dreamed that Lenin told her that he was not happy about lying next to Stalin in the Mausoleum on Red Square. After Stalin’s death, his mummified body had been interred next to Lenin’s, Stalin in his gorgeous generalissimo’s uniform, Lenin’s in a civilian black suit.

Lazurkina told the Party Congress:

I always carry Ilyich in my heart and always, comrades, in the most difficult moments, I survived only because I had Ilyich in my heart and I consulted with him what to do. Yesterday I consulted with Ilyich, as if he stood before me as if alive and said: it is unpleasant for me to be next to Stalin, who brought so much trouble to the party.

Though Molotov, a diehard Stalinist, declared that this was the dream of a witch, she got a standing ovation and “stormy applause, according to the transcript.  Khruschev was already planning to remove Stalin from the Mausoleum but wanted cover, fearing riots by Stalin’s perfervid followers, especially in Georgia. On the night of Halloween, October 31, 1961, a secret police unit carried Stalin’s corpse to a burial plot by the Kremlin wall on Halloween, where it was stripped of its decorations before being interred under a heavy stone slab.

A year later, the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, for whom I read translations when he spoke in Canberra in 1966, published a poem in Pravda titled “The Heirs of Stalin” in which he appealed to the regime not to let Stalin rise again: “And I, appealing to our government, petition them to double, and even triple, the number of sentries guarding this slab, and stop Stalin from ever rising again and, with Stalin, the past."

 

Dream detectives and Russian thrilllers

In my dream adventures, I often seem to be a kind of detective, investigating complex intrigues in many times and places. Last weekend, Robert the dream detective was again in Russia, a recurring locale. He was following the threads of a secret operation code-named "Griboyedov". 
    The name was very clear, and I recognized it on waking. It is the name of a colorful nineteenth-century Russian poet and writer who was sent as a diplomat to the court of the Shah of Iran. When Armenian girls escaped from the Shah's harem and took refuge in the Russian embassy, an angry mob stormed the building; Griboyedov died fighting them, sword in hand. He was decapitated by a kebab seller and his head was put on a stick at his killer's market stall. Not sure why his name would be used as a code today, but my mind goes to all those angry mobs attacking U.S. embassies across the Middle East.
     The plot of my Russian thriller thickened and changed in my second cycle of sleep dreams. Now the character my dream self was tracking was a sleeper agent planted in the West in Soviet times. He has gone rogue, unknown to his Russian handlers, and gives them a very nasty surprise. A key name in the second part of this double feature was "Verezhensky".
     This name was quite unknown to me, so I tried it out on a highly literate Russian friend. She gave me this intriguing instant feedback: "Ha! If this were my dream, I would think that Verezhensky is a perfect name for a villain in the story. It is a rare name, so there are fewer chances to get sued by its bearers, it sounds sophisticated - and it is derived from the archaic form of 'to harm'."
     She informs me that Вередить means to do harm, to bother, create mischief or even to cast a bad spell. The modern form is "вредить". There is also an expression "бередить раны", to open old wounds. The name is also related to two villages Verezheny in northern Moldova, near the border with Ukraine. 
     Full disclosure: I wrote spy thrillers, including some with Russian themes and characters, back in the 1980s. It seems that while I follow my present path, there is an alternate Robert who loves reading and writing superior cloak-and-dagger stuff, out there gathering fresh material.