The House of Government

23

THE TELEPHONE CALL

On December 1, 1934, Khrushchev was in his office in the Moscow City Party Committee when the telephone rang. “It was Kaganovich. ‘I am calling from the Politburo, please come immediately.’ I arrived at the Kremlin and walked into the hall. I was met by Kaganovich. He had a terrible, frightening look on his face, seemed badly shaken, and had tears in his eyes. He said: ‘Something awful has happened. Kirov has been murdered in Leningrad.’”¹

The deputy head of the Military Chemical Trust and former representative of the Communist Party of Poland at the Comintern, Vatslav Bogutsky (Waclaw Bogucki), was in his House of Government apartment (Apt. 342) that evening. With him were his wife, a librarian at the Lenin Institute; Mikhalina (Michalina) Iosifovna; and their nine-year-old son, Vladimir, who later wrote about it:

One evening my father received a telephone call. He answered in the usual way. But suddenly, the expression on his face changed dramatically. In a voice filled with emotion he asked several quick questions. We could not hear the answers, but the tone of the conversation and the expression on his face frightened my mother and me. When he hung up the phone, he had tears in his eyes. My mother asked in alarm who it was and what had happened. He named the caller (it was someone he knew from the Comintern or the Central Committee apparatus, I don’t remember anymore) and said quietly: “Kirov has been killed.” Never again did I see such an expression of grief on my father’s face.²

According to Inna Gaister, who was also nine at the time, her parents found it strange that their next-door neighbors in Apt. 166, the director of the construction of the Agricultural Exhibition, Isaak Korostoshevsky, and his wife did not seem to grieve as much as they did. “My mother said they were less upset because they did not have any children.” The death of Kirov was a personal tragedy that different members of the Soviet family experienced to the best of their emotional ability and moral imagination, but everyone seemed to know that, as Khrushchev put it, “everything had changed.”³

Agnessa Argiropulo and Sergei Mironov were still in Dnepropetrovsk, where Mironov was head of the provincial NKVD office. On December 1, Agnessa came home and was surprised to see his hat in the hall.

I ran to his study. I found him sitting, still in his overcoat, with a strange look on his face and his thoughts far away. I knew then: something had happened.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, in alarm.

He answered simply:

“Kirov has been killed.”

“Who’s Kirov?”

“Remember, I pointed him out to you at the railway station in Leningrad.”

I did remember. I have an excellent visual memory. Though it’s true, I’d only seen Kirov very briefly in Leningrad that time.

Mirosha had a few days off once and we’d decided to splurge on a quick trip to Leningrad from Moscow: the “Red Arrow” there and back, and one day there to “live it up.” At the station Mirosha pointed to a man and whispered:

“Kirov, the Provincial Party secretary.”

Not very tall, with a pleasant face, he greeted us warmly and said:

“So, you’ve decided to come see our Leningrad?”

The head of the NKVD Directorate in Leningrad was Medved, and then Zaporozhets joined him there. We knew them both well from the sanatorium in Sochi. Filipp Medved was large and burly. Zaporozhets was tall and slender, became famous during the Civil War, was wounded in the leg, and so he walked with a limp. His wife Roza was a real beauty. They’d never been able to have kids, but there’d been a rumor that she was, finally, already in her fourth month. Every day she’d go on long walks in different directions—seven or eight kilometers one way and then seven or eight back—to get in shape and get strong for the birth.

“Killed?” I asked, astonished. “By whom?”

“The killer has been arrested. His name is Nikolaev.” And then he added, with a harsh laugh: “The Leningrad Chekists haven’t been doing their job too well, have they?”—as if to suggest that on his watch such a thing would never have happened. But he also seemed relieved that it had not happened in his district.⁴

According to Stalin’s adopted son, Artem Sergeev (who lived with his mother in Apt. 380 and turned thirteen in 1934), “nothing was ever the same again.” According to Sergeev’s close friend, Anatoly Granovsky (the son of the director of Berezniki Chemical Works, Mikhail Granovsky), “the news made a subtle change in everything. People suddenly started to act as though they had been told by their doctors that they suffered from a malignant growth which might, or might not be cancer. There was a general suspension of opinion and speculation. Men just waited. But it was soon established that the Trotskyites had done it. It was a name I was not very familiar with, except to know it indicated something despicable. I accepted what I was told and was prepared to forget the whole incident, little knowing what had been started by that single shot.”⁵

■ ■ ■

The scapegoat is a central figure in human life. A community that feels threatened identifies groups or individuals responsible for the crisis, casts them out by killing or expelling them, comes together healed and renewed, and attempts to forestall the next crisis by restaging the original event in ritual or else by wondering how it could have punished an innocent lamb (and trying to identify groups or individuals responsible for the delusion). Both the term and the practice seem to originate in sacrifice:

And Aaron shall offer his bullock of the sin offering, which is for himself, and make an atonement for himself, and for his house. And he shall take the two goats, and present them before the Lord at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation. And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for the scapegoat. And Aaron shall bring the goat upon which the Lord’s lot fell, and offer him for a sin offering. But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.⁶

Both goats are scapegoats: both suffer for our sins and both serve as ransom to jealous gods and redemption for those who stay behind (“ransom” and “redemption” have the same root). In the Greek pharmakos ritual, maidens, children, or—more commonly—low-status men were, in times of crisis, given figs to eat and then driven out or killed. Many creation myths begin with the expulsion of the devil (or his trickster associates). Many heroic quests (including those of Adam, Moses, Paris, and Oedipus) begin as tales of ritual expulsion or infant exposure. For farming to take hold, Abel has to die. For Rome to be built, Remus and Romulus have to be abandoned and Remus has to be killed.⁷

Whichever came first—the act or the myth—human sacrifice is one of history’s oldest locomotives. Much of literature is about scapegoats: comedy is the story of expulsion from the point of view of society; tragedy is the same story from the point of view of the outcast. Comedy is about social reintegration: a temporary or illusory exclusion of the protagonists (by prigs, snobs, mobs, clowns, monsters, impostors, unjust laws, unseeing peers, and obdurate fathers) and their eventual redemption, accompanied by the conversion of some wreckers and the expulsion or execution of others. For David Copperfield to mature and for Mr. Micawber (the descendant of supernatural helpers and trickster-servants) to live “in a perfectly new manner,” Uriah Heep must go. A relatively recent—and particularly popular—variation on the scapegoat theme is the detective story, which Northrop Frye describes as “a ritual drama around a corpse in which a wavering finger of social condemnation passes over a group of ‘suspects’ and finally settles on one. The sense of a victim chosen by lot is very strong, for the case against him is only plausibly manipulated.” In the less optimistic version of the story, the hero gives up on society, reverses the meaning of the sacrifice, and chooses to exile himself (literally, like Chatsky in Aleksandr Griboedov’s Woe from Wit, or metaphorically, like the good soldier Svejk). In the cases of Noah, Lot, and Aeneas, the renewal of the world requires two sacrifices: one genocide and one exile.⁸

Tragedy (from the Greek for “goat”) focuses on the act of sacrifice and the figure of the scapegoat. Some tragic heroes—Oedipus, Macbeth, Anna Karenina—may be guilty; some—Joan of Arc, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Joseph K—may be innocent, at least in the eyes of the reader; and some—Iphigenia, Jesus, Romeo and Juliet—are programmatically innocent as well as willingly self-sacrificial, but that is not the point (as Job is told by the best authority on the subject). The plot of tragedy is much less concerned with the nature of the transgression than with the inexorability of the fall: goats and lambs go to the altar together, and Jesus was crucified next to two thieves, one penitent and one impenitent. Lambs and goats are ultimately interchangeable (Sophocles would have had no difficulty pointing to Jesus’s hubris). All outcasts are, by definition, redeemers, and vice versa. The villains of comedy—“Heeps of infamy”—may come back as tragic heroes, and tragic heroes may turn out to be innocent. Oedipus begins his life as an exposed infant and ends it as an outcast king. And so, in his own way, does Moses. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is about the traditional American scapegoating ritual: the trial of a black man accused of raping a white woman. But the interesting thing is that the alternative suspect and the main accuser are also traditional scapegoat figures: the mysterious recluse and the town drunk. The black man remains an innocent victim, the alternative suspect becomes a dragon-slaying hero, and the accuser is killed as an impenitent thief. All look familiar; the most famous town drunk in America is Huck Finn’s father.⁹

Flesh-and-blood scapegoats are associated with crises—from family disputes and boarding school fights to the Final Solution and the Global War on Terror. The victims tend to be deviants, outsiders, and possessors of dangerous knowledge: twins, priests, monks, cripples, healers, strangers, traders, moneylenders, noblemen, and old women, among others. They are accused of causing the crisis in general and of committing particular acts that threaten the sacred center of social life: rape, incest, arson, bestiality, cannibalism, iconoclasm, infanticide, contagion, blood sacrifice, food poisoning, and gratuitous murder. If the crisis persists, the accusations tend to snowball, as more communities and officials join the search for culprits. In the case of judicial persecutions, they snowball further, as creative interrogations and serial confessions help uncover large conspiracies by implicating the kinsmen and associates of the original suspects. In the late 1620s and early 1630s, amid crop failures and continuing “wars of religion,” the witch trials in Bamberg, Bavaria, resulted in the burning of several hundred people, including most of the town elite.¹⁰ One of them, according to the minutes of the proceedings, was the town’s top official, Johannes Junius:

On Wednesday, June 28, 1628, was examined without torture Johannes Junius, Burgomaster at Bamberg, on the charge of witchcraft: how and in what fashion he had fallen into that vice. Is fifty-five years old, and was born at Niederwaysich in the Wetterau. Says he is wholly innocent, knows nothing of the crime has never in his life renounced God: says that he is wronged before God and the world, would like to hear of a single human being who has seen him at such gatherings [as the witch-sabbaths].

Confrontation of Dr. Georg Adam Haan. Tells him to his face he will stake his life on it [er wolle darauf leben und sterben], that he saw him, Junius, a year and a half ago at a witch-gathering in the electoral council-room where they ate and drank. Accused denies the same wholly.

Confronted with Hopffens Elsse. Tells him likewise that he was on Haupts-moor at a witch-dance; but first the holy wafer was desecrated. Junius denies. Hereupon he was told that his accomplices had confessed against him and was given time for thought.

On Friday, June 30, 1628, the aforesaid Junius was again without torture exhorted to confess, but again confessed nothing, whereupon, … since he would confess nothing, he was put to the torture.¹¹

After five days of torture and “urgent persuasions,” Junius confessed to having been seduced by the she-devil, renouncing God, joining a large conspiracy, participating in witch dances, desecrating a holy wafer, and trying to kill his son and daughter (but killing his brown horse instead). On July 24, 1628, he wrote a secret letter to his daughter:

Many hundred thousand good-nights, dearly beloved daughter Veronica. Innocent have I come into prison, innocent have I been tortured, innocent must I die. For whoever comes into the witch prison must become a witch or be tortured until he invents something out of his head and—God pity him—bethinks him of something. I will tell you how it has gone with me. When I was the first time put to the torture, Dr. Braun, Dr. Kotzendorffer, and two strange doctors were there. Then Dr. Braun asks me, “Kinsman, how come you here?” I answer, “Through falsehood, through misfortune.” “Hear, you,” he says, “you are a witch; will you confess it voluntarily? If not, we’ll bring in witnesses and the executioner for you.” I said “I am no witch, I have a pure conscience in the matter; if there are a thousand witnesses, I am not anxious, but I’ll gladly hear the witnesses.” Now the chancellor’s son was set before me … and afterward Hoppfen Elss. She had seen me dance on Haupts-moor…. I answered: “I have never renounced God, and will never do it—God graciously keep me from it. I’ll rather bear whatever I must.” And then came also—God in highest Heaven have mercy—the executioner, and put the thumb-screws on me, both hands bound together, so that the blood ran out at the nails and everywhere, so that for four weeks I could not use my hands, as you can see from the writing.… Thereafter they first stripped me, bound my hands behind me, and drew me up in the torture. Then I thought heaven and earth were at an end; eight times did they draw me up and let me fall again, so that I suffered terrible agony….

And this happened on Friday, June 30, and with God’s help I had to bear the torture…. When at last the executioner led me back into the prison, he said to me: “Sir, I beg you, for God’s sake confess something, whether it be true or not. Invent something, for you cannot endure the torture which you will be put to; and, even if you bear it all, yet you will not escape, not even if you were an earl, but one torture will follow after another until you say you are a witch. Not before that,” he said, “will they let you go, as you may see by all their trials, for one is just like another.” …

And so I begged, since I was in wretched plight, to be given one day for thought and a priest. The priest was refused me, but the time for thought was given. Now, my dear child, see in what hazard I stood and still stand. I must say that I am a witch, though I am not—must now renounce God, though I have never done it before. Day and night I was deeply troubled, but at last there came to me a new idea. I would not be anxious, but, since I had been given no priest with whom I could take counsel, I would myself think of something and say it. It were surely better that I just say it with mouth and words, even though I had not really done it; and afterwards I would confess it to the priest, and let those answer for it who compel me to do it…. And so I made my confession, as follows; but it was all a lie.…

Then I had to tell what people I had seen [at the witch-sabbath]. I said that I had not recognized them. “You old rascal, I must set the executioner at you. Say—was not the Chancellor there?” So I said yes. “Who besides?” I had not recognized anybody. So he said: “Take one street after another; begin at the market, go out on one street and back on the next.” I had to name several persons there. Then came the long street. I knew nobody. Had to name eight persons there. Then the Zinkenwert—one person more. Then over the upper bridge to the Georgthor, on both sides. Knew nobody again. Did I know nobody in the castle—whoever it might be, I should speak without fear. And thus continuously they asked me on all the streets, though I could not and would not say more. So they gave me to the executioner, told him to strip me, shave me all over, and put me to the torture. “The rascal knows one on the market-place, is with him daily, and yet won’t name him.” By that they meant Dietmeyer: so I had to name him too.

Then I had to tell what crimes I had committed. I said nothing.

… “Draw the rascal up!” So I said that I was to kill my children, but I had killed a horse instead. It did not help. I had also taken a sacred wafer, and had desecrated it. When I had said this, they left me in peace.

Now, dear child, here you have all my confession, for which I must die. And they are sheer lies and made-up things, so help me God….¹²

In the margins, he added: “Dear child, six have confessed against me at once: the Chancellor, his son, Neudecker, Zaner, Hoffmaisters Ursel, and Hoppfen Els—all false, through compulsion, as they have all told me, and begged my forgiveness in God’s name before they were executed…. They know nothing but good of me. They were forced to say it, just as I myself was.”¹³

■ ■ ■

In the 1980s and early 1990s in the United States, amid the “culture wars” that centered on procreation, abortion, homosexuality, and the nature of the family, thousands of people were accused of raping and torturing small children. In 1983, in Kern County, California, two couples were sentenced to 240 years for tying up, chaining, and raping their children and selling them for sex. The following summer, several more people in the same county were sentenced to 273 to 405 years for drugging their children, hanging them from boards, and raping them repeatedly in the presence of strangers. In March 1984, seven teachers from the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, Los Angeles County, were arrested for sexually abusing 360 children over the course of ten years. The accusations included drinking blood, eating feces, cutting babies into little pieces, and staging orgies in underground tunnels, graveyards, and air balloons. Over the next ten years, hundreds of child-care centers throughout the United States were accused of “ritual abuse.” Most cases began with an allegation by one parent and evolved into large campaigns involving multiple agencies. The only evidence was the children’s testimony and, in a few cases, the defendants’ confessions; no scars, films, graves, tunnels, bodies, or witnesses were ever produced. Most defendants never saw their accusers and were presumed guilty by the judges.¹⁴

As the day-care campaign unfolded, hundreds of adults began to accuse their parents of having abused them when they were children. In August 1988, the twenty-one- and eighteen-year-old daughters of the deputy sheriff and Republican Party chairman of Thurston County, Washington, Paul Ingram, suddenly remembered that their father had been regularly raping them since they were little girls. Confronted by his colleagues in the police department, Ingram denied his guilt but added that, since his daughters would not lie about such things, “there must be a dark side of me that I don’t know about.” Several hours into his first interrogation, he confessed to having sexually abused both of them for many years. By May 1989, when his trial got under way, he had confessed to belonging to a large satanic cult whose members routinely murdered babies, drank blood, and raped humans and animals. By June 1993, more than four thousand US parents had been accused by their adult children of having molested them in the more or less remote past. About 17 percent of the accusations involved satanic-ritual abuse. A report by a prison official in Idaho, circulated to police workshops around the country, estimated that satanic cults sacrificed fifty thousand to sixty thousand people each year. In a speech delivered in 1988, the psychiatrist Benett G. Braun, who believed that about two hundred thousand Americans suffered from “multiple personality disorder” and that about one-fourth of them were victims of ritual abuse, described the satanic conspiracy as “a national-international type organization that’s got a structure somewhat similar to the communist cell structure.”¹⁵

The judicial campaign was accompanied by media reports about poisoned Halloween candy, child pornography networks, battered-women shelters, brainwashed cult members, secretly encoded rock songs, and thousands of missing children (depicted on milk cartons in every grocery store). Christian fundamentalists, anxious to protect home and family from the devil, and radical feminists, anxious to protect women and children from patriarchy, joined forces against an enemy that was both demonically possessed and legally liable.¹⁶ When Frank Fuster, the owner of a babysitting center in a Miami suburb, was convicted on fourteen charges of sexual abuse and sentenced to at least 165 years in prison, the Miami Herald editorial attempted to express its readers’ sentiments:

Few criminals in South Florida history have deserved a genuinely life-long prison sentence more than Frank Fuster Escalona. The man lurked at his Country Walk Babysitting Service like a venomous spider that has built a web to bring his victims near. He practiced gross sexual acts on small children entrusted by their parents to his care. He violated them systematically and over time, as a life style, not as a momentary aberration.… If these horrors had to be visited upon these tiny innocents, then the maximum positive results have been realized. Laws have been changed, victims comforted, parents emboldened, prosecutors strengthened, public consciousness raised. And the monster Fuster is destined to spend the remainder of his unnatural life deservedly caged.¹⁷

Most experts, investigators, and interrogators were therapists acting as policemen and policemen trained as therapists. The result was an inquisitorial regime dedicated to a search for both lost memories and hidden enemies. The number of memories and enemies grew in direct proportion to the investment of effort. One of the pioneers of abuse archaeology, the psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder, claimed that sexual abusers were organized into a powerful coven of “normal-looking” monsters, who had deliberately infiltrated all strata of society and posed as “doctors, ministers, professionals of every kind.” According to a 1991 poll, about one-half of California social workers “accepted the idea that SRA [satanic ritual abuse] involved a national conspiracy of multigenerational abusers and baby-killers and that many of these people were prominent in their communities and appeared to live completely exemplary lives. A majority of those polled believed that victims of such extreme abuse were likely to have repressed the memories of it.”¹⁸

The form of “repression” theory that enabled the therapeutic terror of the 1980s posited (as had Freud in his pre-Oedipal period) that what was repressed was not forbidden wishes but actual abuse by elders. The memories of such events were banished as soon as the acts of abuse had occurred; therapy consisted in “recovering” those memories for the purpose of healing the victim and punishing the perpetrators. Confessions were obtained and interpreted by counselors not bound by any confirmation or verification requirements. Deputy Sheriff Paul Ingram was both a Pentecostal Christian used to speaking in tongues and a police officer trained in recovered-memory cases. After several hours of questioning, he told his interrogators: “I really believe that the allegations did occur and that I did violate them and probably for a long period of time. I’ve repressed it.” Three days later, he asked Pastor John Bratun, of the Church of Living Water, to exorcise the demon that had taken possession of him. The combined efforts of the police interrogator and the exorcist, both practicing counselors, produced immediate results: “Ingram began seeing people in robes kneeling around the fire. He thought he saw a corpse. There was a person on his left in a red robe who was wearing a helmet of cloth. ‘Maybe the Devil,’ he suggested. People were wailing. Ingram remembered standing on a platform and looking down into the fire. He had been given a large knife and was expected to sacrifice a live black cat. He cut out the beating heart and held it aloft on the tip of the knife.”¹⁹

Another method of extracting confessions was plea bargaining (the suspension of a show trial in exchange for an admission of guilt). The twenty-five-year-old Gina Miller, seen as the least culpable defendant in one of the Kern County cases, was offered immunity, a new identity, financial assistance, and custody of her four children if she confessed to engaging in ritualistic sex abuse and testified against her codefendants. She refused, insisting on her innocence, and was sentenced to 405 years in prison—several decades more than the alleged cult leaders. In a Freudianized (inquisitorial) criminal justice system, denying one’s guilt was further evidence (symptom) of guilt; not an act of self-defense but a “defense mechanism.” On July 7, 1995, nine years after his conviction for sexual abuse at a day-care center in Pennsylvania where he was a substitute janitor, Thomas McMeachin wrote a letter to the journalist Mark Pendergrast: “I’m one of them people that was falsely accused.… I’ve went up for parole 3 times since 1992 and each time I was turned down because I didn’t finish the sex offender program. Well now that I completed the program the psychologist told me that he could not recommend me for parole because I’m in denial of my crime because I won’t admit to it.”²⁰

When the Paul Ingram case began to collapse under the weight of the Boschian detail the defendant kept providing, the investigators invited an expert on “cults” (Richard Ofshe, of the University of California, Berkeley, Sociology Department), who concluded that the memories had been manufactured and urged Ingram to withdraw his guilty plea. After two months of reflection (he kept a log of his memories, classified by degree of certainty), Ingram wrote “Died to Self” in his Bible and petitioned to change his plea. His request was denied. At the sentencing hearing, he said: “I stand before you, I stand before God. I have never sexually abused my daughters. I am not guilty of these crimes.” He was sentenced to twenty years in prison, with the possibility of parole in twelve years. He served fifteen.²¹

Frank Fuster, a thirty-five-year-old immigrant from Cuba, and his seventeen-year-old Honduran wife, Ileana Flores, were arrested in August 1984 for ritually abusing twenty children in a “gated” Miami suburb. The Dade County state attorney and head prosecutor, Janet Reno (who had an election coming up), promised to do “everything humanly possible to see that justice is done.” Ileana spent six months in solitary confinement with the light permanently on. As she said later in an interview, “I was there alone in a very small cell with a bed and a toilet. But the thing is that they would switch me from cell to cell. There was this other cell—I’ll never forget. It was called 3A1. I’ll never forget that, because most of the people that were there, it was like a big room with little cells next to each other. And most of the people—well, all the people that were there were suicide or suicide watch or they were crazy. Everybody was naked.” Ileana’s defense attorney told her that her only hope was to plead guilty and testify against her husband. Two psychologists, who ran a business called Behavior Changers Inc., visited her on at least thirty-five occasions. “It’s kind of a manipulation,” one of them, Dr. Michael Rappaport, explained. “You could make them feel very happy, then segue into the hard things.” Several times, she was visited by Janet Reno. According to Ileana, “She was like, ‘Hi, how are you? I’m Janet Reno, the State Attorney.’ And I would tell her, ‘I am innocent.’ And she said, ‘I’m sorry, but you are not. You’re going to have to help us.’ … I’d been in jail already a year or so; I’m not sure. I wanted her to help me. But I was afraid of her after she told me—she was very clear—if I didn’t help, she was going to make sure I was never going to get out of there.”²²

On August 22, 1985, Ileana agreed to plead guilty. “Judge,” she said in court, “I would like you to know that I’m pleading guilty not because I feel guilty, but because I think—I think it’s the best interest … for my own interest and for the children and for the court and all the people that are working on the case. But I am not pleading guilty because I feel guilty…. I am innocent of all those charges.”²³

Sitting between Rappaport, who hugged her from time to time, and Janet Reno, who held her hand, she told the court that Frank had raped her, put a crucifix up her rectum, put a gun and a snake in her vagina, poured acid on her in the shower, and forced her to have oral sex with the children she was babysitting. When she could not recall a certain incident, Rappaport would request a break; after a few minutes in private, they would return to the courtroom, and she would continue her testimony. Frank was sentenced to six life terms and 165 years in prison. Ileana was sentenced to ten years in prison and ten years’ probation, served three and a half years in a youthful offender program, and was deported to Honduras. In March 1993, Janet Reno was appointed US attorney general (after two previous appointees had withdrawn because they had employed illegal immigrants as nannies). One month later, she ordered an assault on the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, Texas. The Branch Davidians (offshoot of Seventh-Day Adventists) were an apocalyptic millenarian sect led by the last days prophet David Koresh (Vernon Howell, who renamed himself after King David and the liberator of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, Cyrus the Great). The assault resulted in a fire, in which seventy-six sect members, including David Koresh, died. Reno’s official reason for ordering the assault was the allegation that the children within the compound were being abused.²⁴

In the summer of 2001, Ileana contacted the PBS documentary program, Frontline, and requested an interview. The reporter asked her if the events she had described in her testimony actually occurred.

A. No, they didn’t.

Q. Frank Fuster—aside from how you feel about him as a husband or as a man—was he guilty of the things that he was accused of and convicted and is serving prison time for?

A. No, he’s not guilty, sir.

Q. Did he do these things? Did you witness any of these acts of which he was accused, those children you all brought into your home?

A. I never witnessed it.

Q. Did any of this nightmarish scenario that came to be known as the Country Walk child abuse case—did any of this happen?

A. No, sir. None of that happened…. I never hurt any children specifically or anybody. Country Walk just didn’t happen.²⁵

In July 1998, the same reporter interviewed Frank Fuster, who was serving the first of his six life sentences:

Q. Frank, did the state ever offer you a deal?

A. Oh yes. They insisted. They offered me 15 years, regular 15 years. And if I had taken those, I would have been home 10 years ago.

Q. Why didn’t you take it?

A. Because I am innocent. I went to trial not only for me. I went to trial also for the children. I went to trial for Ileana. I went to trial for everyone involved. Someone had to say the truth. I decided to do it, and I did it.²⁶

As of this writing, Frank Fuster has been in prison for thirty years.²⁷

■ ■ ■

Scapegoats are sacrificed everywhere, all the time: symbolically (in myths, films, tales, and temples) and in the flesh (at the same time that the devil worshippers were being hunted down in the United States, hundreds of “traitors,” many of them accused of witchcraft, were being burned alive in South Africa, and hundreds of thousands of people were being “ethnically cleansed” in the former Yugoslavia). Some societies succeed in limiting sacrificial offerings to special occasions; others have to improvise acts of atonement in response to unexpected catastrophes. Sects, or “faith-based groups radically opposed to a corrupt world,” are besieged fortresses by definition. Millenarian sects, or sects living on the eve of the apocalypse, are in the grip of a permanent moral panic. The more intense the expectation, the more implacable the enemies; the more implacable the enemies, the greater the need for internal cohesion; the greater the need for internal cohesion, the more urgent the search for scapegoats.²⁸

The Münster Anabaptists began by expelling Catholics and Lutherans, went on to mandate universal adult baptism (compulsory sect membership for all citizens), and ended up discovering that none of the apparently faithful were “as perfect as their heavenly father is perfect.” The Taiping warriors found it increasingly difficult to distinguish between the Manchu barbarians outside the heavenly capital and the hidden enemies within. Robespierre argued that the true “enemies of the people” were not the foreigners and aristocrats assembled at the border, but the citizens who sought “to deprave morals and to corrupt the public conscience.” Every Armageddon requires a witch hunt.²⁹

Egypt could be struck with many plagues, but when contagion began to spread to the chosen people, Moses stood at the entrance to the camp and said: “‘Whoever is for the LORD, come to me.’ And all the Levites rallied to him. Then he said to them, ‘This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: “Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.”’ The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. Then Moses said, ‘You have been set apart to the LORD today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day.’”³⁰

Apostates are not simply allied with the outside enemy; they are worse than the outside enemy because they have seen the truth. As Peter wrote in his Second Epistle, “It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and then to turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them. Of them the proverbs are true: ‘A dog returns to its vomit,’ and, ‘a sow that is washed returns to her wallowing in the mud.’”³¹

On the eve of the End, all enemies are connected to each other (and to impure thoughts). Those who are free to choose are more dangerous than those who have never heard the sacred command. Hidden enemies are more dangerous than the clearly branded ones. Within a millenarian sect (and in unitary states with serious sectarian aspirations, such as Aragon and Castile under the “Catholic Monarchs”), all enemies are both deliberate and hidden, and no enemies are as dangerous as those closest to the inner sanctum.

Satan is a fallen angel; Antichrist is pseudo-Christ; and Jesus had Judas. Korah, who challenged Moses’s monopoly on virtue by saying “the whole community is holy, … why then do you set yourselves above the LORD’s assembly?” was himself a Levite, set by God above the assembly. Aaron, who corrupted the public conscience by making the Golden Calf, was Moses’s brother and the assembly’s head priest. And Miriam, who joined Aaron in saying “has the LORD spoken only through Moses? Hasn’t he also spoken through us?” was their older sister who had saved the baby Moses from Pharaoh’s spies. The Hebrew God could afford to be a nepotist (Korah was swallowed by the earth; Miriam was affected with leprosy for seven days; and Aaron was spared at his brother’s request), but his more consistent successors could not. As Calvin told his Geneva audience in a sermon on the Levites’ massacre, “you shall show yourselves rightly zealous of God’s service in that you kill your own brethren without sparing, so as in this case the order of nature be put under foot, to show that God is above all.”³²

All millenarians practice self-monitoring and mutual surveillance with the purpose of identifying and punishing heterodoxy. What makes them both more anxious and more hopeful than other besieged fortresses is that the current set of enemies is going to be the last one. For, as Peter argued in his Second Epistle, against his own evidence,

If God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, putting them in chains of darkness to be held for judgment; if he did not spare the ancient world when he brought the flood on its ungodly people, but protected Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and seven others; if he condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by burning them to ashes, and made them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; and if he rescued Lot, a righteous man, who was distressed by the depraved conduct of the lawless (for that righteous man, living among them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds he saw and heard)—if this is so, then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to hold the unrighteous for punishment on the day of judgment.³³

The fact that it happened before is the best guarantee that it will never—after the coming day of judgment—happen again. The unrighteous are like animals, “born only to be caught and destroyed,” and “like animals they too will perish”—this time for good.³⁴

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The Bolsheviks lived in a besieged fortress. The Revolution and Civil War involved the use of “concentrated violence” against the easily classifiable enemies from the top of Bukharin’s list (“parasitic strata,” “unproductive administrative aristocracy,” “bourgeois entrepreneurs as organizers and directors,” and “skilled bureaucrats”) and their properly uniformed and color-coded defenders. The purges of the 1920s confronted the revolutionaries’ great disappointment (as Peter did in his Second Epistle, whose main subject was the apparent nonfulfillment of the prophecy). The third and final battle was the Stalin revolution against the remaining targets from Bukharin’s list, including “technical intelligentsia,” “well-off peasantry,” “middle and, in part, petty urban bourgeoisie,” and “clergy, even the unskilled kind.” The Seventeenth Party Congress of 1934 had then proclaimed victory, provisionally pardoned the doubters, and inaugurated the reign of the saints.³⁵

There were no open enemies left. One of the most important and least discussed consequences of the proclamation of victory in 1934 was the assumption that most Soviets were now “non-Party Communists.” There was no act of collective baptism accompanied by the expulsion of nominal unbelievers, as in the case of the Münster Anabaptists or fully “reconquered” Spain, but the outcome was the same: all subjects were by definition believers, and all remaining corruption was a matter of heresy and apostasy, not enemy resistance. The Party’s main instrument of maintaining internal cohesion was no longer concentrated violence but the “transverse section of the soul” (as the administrative director of the State New Theater put it, apropos of The Other Side of the Heart). Bukharin called it “coercive discipline”: “The less voluntary inner discipline there is, … the greater the coercion. Even the proletarian avant-garde, consolidated in the party of the insurrection, must establish such coercive self-discipline in its own ranks; it is not strongly felt by many elements of this avant-garde because it coincides with internal motives, but it exists nonetheless.” Since 1920, when he wrote this, Bukharin had experienced several occasions on which to feel it; now, in the wake of the victory celebration that he had joined as part of the “supply train,” every Soviet citizen was, theoretically, in his position.³⁶

How effective were coercive discipline and self-discipline? On the one hand, family apartments were filling up with nephews and tablecloths; Don Quixotes were being replaced by Sancho Panzas; and Izrail Veitser was marrying Natalia Sats and buying himself a suit. On the other—and much more consequentially, according to Arosev’s diary—a combination of schooling, newspaper reading, and “work on the self” was producing such “non-Party Bolsheviks” as Volodia Ivanov and Lyova Fedotov. Socialism was a matter of time, and time was apparently elusive but ultimately predictable. As Peter wrote in that same epistle, “do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”³⁷

The same was true of history, which took its time while economic and social preconditions sorted themselves out and Volodia Ivanov and Lyova Fedotov “worked on themselves.” The enemy was still at the gate, and hen-and-rooster problems continued to get in the way, but, in the annus mirabilis of 1934, most signs seemed to indicate that the Bolsheviks were going to heed Peter’s warning and be steadfast and patient lest they be led away with the error of the wicked. And then, on December 1, the telephone rang.

■ ■ ■

There are two reasons why the assassination of a prominent but undistinguished Party official resulted in a vast moral panic that “changed everything.”

The first was domestic. The House of Government was as much a besieged fortress inside the Soviet Union as the Soviet Union was in the wider world. The assumption that most Soviets were now converts to Communism implied that some open enemies were now hidden; that coercive discipline might require additional scrutiny; and that Fedor Kaverin’s production of The Other Side of the Heart (which had suggested that friend and foe might be twin brothers) may have been correct, after all. At the same time, Party officials were as much under siege in their House of Government apartments as the House of Government was inside the Soviet Union. While Volodia Ivanov and Lyova Fedotov were working on themselves, hens and roosters were doing what hens and roosters do—at a pace that the builders of eternal houses could only dream of. The saints were reigning over a swamp.

The second reason was international. The Soviet Union had always been a besieged fortress, but just as victory was being proclaimed at the Seventeenth Party Congress, an effective metaphor was becoming geopolitical reality. In the east, Japan had occupied Manchuria and approached the Soviet border. In the west, the birthplace of Marxism and Russia’s traditional model and antipode had been taken over by a hostile apocalyptic sect. Fascism, long seen by the Bolsheviks as the ultimate expression of capitalist aggression, was a modern version of nativist ressentiment of the Old Testament variety. The scorned chosen tribes of a degraded Europe were to rise up against Babylon and restore their wholeness, one at a time. Some were trying, with varying degrees of conviction, but only in Germany would the movement reach millenarian proportions, take over the state, proclaim the third and final Reich, and set out to fulfill its own prophecy by preparing for one final battle. What Edom and the “tall Sabeans” had been to the biblical Hebrews and what the white people were to Enoch Mgijima’s and Ras Tafari’s Israelites, the international Jewry was to the German Führer. As Hitler would say to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, “Should the international Jewry of finance succeed, both within and beyond Europe, in plunging mankind into yet another world war, then the result will not be a bolshevization of the earth and the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”³⁸

Like the Bolsheviks (but unlike most millenarians), Hitler was in a position to bring about what he had prophesied. Like the Bolsheviks (and many other millenarians), he led his people against an enemy whose power was largely esoteric. It was the same enemy—but whereas the Bolsheviks thought of it as a class, the Nazis thought of it as a tribe. Each considered the other a blind instrument in the service of Babylon. Both followed Marx, but Hitler did not know it (and the Bolsheviks did not know it about Hitler and did not usually read Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and “On the Jewish Question”). The final battle (Endkampf, or the poslednii i reshitel’nyi boi of the “Internationale”) would reveal who was the beast and who treaded the winepress of divine wrath. The key to victory was the draining of the swamp.