Stalin's Double

 

Stalin’s Double

In 1935, so the story goes, Joe Stalin decided he needed a double. They found (how?) a man named Evsej Lubitsky living in the town of Vinnitsa, Ukraine, where he worked as a book keeper. Evsej was separated, forcibly, from his family—they all were later murdered—and taken to a dacha outside Moscow, where cosmetologists, hairdressers worked him over, tailors and gypsy voodooers. He made his first appearance at a big meet-and-greet with visiting Scottish milliners, exemplary workers. No one, apparently, noticed that he was not Stalin.

 Evsej, it seems, kept his mouth shut most of the time, so that nobody could detect the absence of a Georgian accent in his speech. He made appearances in the Stalin loge at the Bolshoj Theatre, and on some festive occasions he even waved from the top of the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square. Among Soviet leaders only Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov were said to be in on the joke.

 Sometimes Stalin had his double meet with the big brass in the Kremlin—Khrushchev, Beria, Yezhov—seated in Stalin’s own armchair, saying absolutely nothing but staring hard, staring hard, while the bigwigs sweated profusely (What kind of trick is he pulling now?). Watching them sweat from an adjoining room, through a special peephole, the real Stalin chuckled into his mustache. Once the two Stalins walked into a drawing room replete with top generals and communist officials—they made their appearance from opposite directions, and the befuddled guests were left to figure out which Stalin to kiss up to. Just to be on the safe side, they kissed up to both.

 In 1952 Evsej was arrested and probably would have been shot, had not Stalin himself died a year later. He was freed under the condition that he go live in Central Asia and tell no one of his role as double. He spent the rest of his life in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, dying there in 1981.

 Evsej Lubitsky was one of at least four men who, ostensibly, worked, at one time or another, as Stalin’s doubles. One of them, Felix Dadaev, recently died at age 88. He had requested permission, of Putin, to publish his autobiography, and it appeared in 2008.

 (excerpted from the book by U.R. Bowie, Here We Be. Where Be We?)