The Commissar's Report
by
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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. Yun 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.
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About the Book
In 1954 he was the most promising spy Russia had ever smuggled into the United States. By 1984 he was one of the richest capitalists in the world. The Commissar's Report begins deep in the doldrums of the 1950s. Stalin's in the Kremlin shooting intellectuals, Ike's on the golf course shooting above par, the KGB and the CIA are shooting each other, the Cold War is getting hot, and Dimitri is in love with Enemy Number One. He's simply bonkers about all the things that make America great: the Brooklyn Dodgers, Cadillac convetibles, Bloomingdale's, Life, Time, Fortune, and pink flamingos. His first problem is that, as a Russian spy, he's supposed to be hatching plots to conquer the good old U.S.A. Worse still, he's becoming, through no fault of his own, one of the wealthiest capitalists in the world. Dimitri's dilemma is rooted in the dark, deadly days of post-war Stalinist Russia when his father, a member of the secret police, smuggled home contraband copies of Life magazine. While Dad was at the office liquidating his rivals, Dimitri and his brother were furtivel6y reading Life at home in the Worker's paradise. "From every photograph, Enemy Number One drew us into its secrets and mysteries and its power. We soared in its planes and raced in its Buicks Suddenly wew were in Florida, where the nightclub echoed to Latin musica and gangsters with blondes sat in velvet chairs 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 white shiny cones beckoning us to illicit thrills. There was nothing like them in our city. All the women were like our mother. Shaped like wood stoves." Thus is our young hero of the Russian Revelution secretly smitten by the sirens of capitalism. In due course Dimitri is marked by the Kremlin as a young man with an exceedingly devious mind. Accordingly they assign him to the New York Consulate of the U.S.S.R. For Dimitri, at last united with his love, it is a dream assignment. But, as dreams go, America quickly takes on the colors of a nightmare from which there is no awakening. In short order, Dimitri finds himself intrigued against his own chief of station, whose highest ambition is to ship the young spy back to Moscow preferably in a steamer trunk. At home in the consulate, he finds his future threatened by Katya, his voluptuous wife, whose highest ambition is to have an unlimited and most unsocialistic charge account at Bergdorf's. On the streets, he is stalked by Lavrenti, a boyhood friend turned CIA-agent and nemesis, whose thirst for revenge compels him to kill Dimitri in a thousand little ways and one big final payment. And down on Wall Street, Dimitri is plagued by his own wild talent for making money in the stock market, a lot of money, enough money to make him one of the hundred richest men in America something that his employers in Red Square would find difficult to overlook if they knew. And, as Dimitri knows too well, the old men of the Kremlin have a deadly habit of knowing everything sooner or later. A unique and highly entertaining table of dark humor and rich understanding, The Commissar's Report is that rare novel that is simultaneously thrilling, moving, and hilarious. What Joseph Heller did to World War II with Catch-22, Martyn Burke does to the Cold War with The Commissar's Report.
About the Author
Martyn Burke is a novelist, screenwriter and filmmaker. His books are often drawn from places and situations in which he has been involved. They include Laughing War, The Commissar's Report, Ivory Joe, and his latest novel, the sequel to Ivory Joe, The Shelling of Beverly Hills. His credits as a documentary filmmaker include Connections, powerful expose of the North American and Italian mafia; and Witnesses the award winning behind-the-lines film on the last day of the soviet war in Afghanistan. Other documentaries have ranged in subject matter from street gangs in Los Angeles to the feuds among the Mohawk Indians. He has written screenplays for such comedies as Paramount's Top Secret and The Second Civil War for HBO. He wrote and directed the hit TNT movie Pirates of Silicon Valley which was nominated for five Emmies including Best Screenplay, the Producers Guild award for best film, and the Directors Guild award for best directing. Martyn Burke divides his time between Toronto, Canada and Santa Monica, California.