And for the next hour, the two men set aside the game of tennis and spoke instead of their lives. The Count spoke of Sofia, who was making wonderful strides at the Conservatory, and who remained so thoughtful and quiet. Richard spoke of his boys, who were making wonderful strides in the nursery, and who remained neither thoughtful nor quiet. They spoke of Paris and Tolstoy and Carnegie Hall. Then at nine o’clock, these two kindred spirits rose from their seats.
“It’s probably best if you see yourself out,” said Richard. “Oh, and should it ever come up, you and Professor Sirovich had a lengthy debate on the future of the sonnet. You were in favor, he was against.”
After they’d shaken hands, the Count watched Richard disappear into the bedroom, then he turned toward the door to let himself out. But as he passed the grandfather clock, he hesitated. How loyally it had stood in his grandmother’s drawing room and sounded the time for tea, for supper, for bed. On Christmas Eve, it had signaled the moment when the Count and his sister could slide apart the seamless doors.
Opening the narrow glass door in the clock’s cabinet, the Count reached inside and found the little key still on its hook. Inserting it into the keyhole, the Count wound the clock to its limit, set the time, and gave the pendulum a nudge, thinking: Let the old man keep time for a few hours more.
Almost nine months later, on the third of March 1953, the man known variously as Dear Father, Vozhd, Koba, Soso, or simply Stalin would die in his Kuntsevo residence in the aftermath of a stroke.
The following day, workmen and trucks laden down with flowers arrived at the Palace of Unions on Theatre Square, and within a matter of hours the building’s facade was adorned with a portrait of Stalin three stories high.
On the sixth, Harrison Salisbury, the new Moscow bureau chief of The New York Times, stood in the Count’s old rooms (now occupied by the Mexican chargé d’affaires), to watch as members of the Presidium arrived in a cavalcade of ZIM limousines and as Soso’s coffin, taken from a bright blue ambulance, was borne ceremoniously inside. And on the seventh, when the Palace of Unions was opened to the public, Salisbury watched in some amazement as the line of citizens waiting to pay their respects stretched five miles across the city.
Why, many Western observers wondered, would over a million citizens stand in line to see the corpse of a tyrant? The flippant said it must have been to ensure that he was actually dead; but such a remark did not do justice to the men and women who waited and wept. In point of fact, legions mourned the loss of the man who had led them to victory in the Great Patriotic War against the forces of Hitler; legions more mourned the loss of the man who had so single-mindedly driven Russia to become a world power; while others simply wept in recognition that a new era of uncertainty had begun.
For, of course, Richard’s prediction proved perfectly right. When Soso breathed his last, there was no plan of succession, no obvious designee. Within the Presidium there were eight different men who could reasonably claim the right to lead: Minister of Security Beria, Minister of the Armed Forces Bulganin, Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers Malenkov, Minister of Foreign Trade Mikoyan, Foreign Minister Molotov, Secretariat members Kaganovich and Voroshilov, and even former mayor of Moscow Nikita Khrushchev—that blunt, brutish, and bald apparatchik who not long before had perfected the five-story concrete apartment building.
Much to the relief of the West, it seemed in the aftermath of the funeral that the man most likely to prevail was the progressive internationalist and outspoken critic of nuclear arms, Malenkov—because, like Stalin, he was appointed as both Premier of the Party and General Secretary of the Central Committee. But a consensus quickly formed within the Party’s upper ranks that no one man should ever be allowed to simultaneously hold both of these positions again. So ten days later, Party Premier Malenkov was forced to pass his chairmanship of the Secretariat to the conservative Khrushchev, setting the stage for a duumvirate of antagonists—a delicate balance of authority between two men of contrary views and ambiguous alliances, which would keep the world guessing for a few years to come.