a eunuch. Kleiner belongs to a special breed. He is a “Chekist” from head to foot. Perhaps he is the best specimen of that breed. Future generations may not remember his name. His monument may never be built. And yet he is a very loyal man. He is full of a hidden inner enthusiasm. He may seem dry. His conversation is also dry, yet he inspires you when he talks. The sound of his voice seems childish, yet strangely alluring. They say that he has smiled only once in his whole life, and even then to bad effect: while informing an old lady about the execution of her son, he smiled accidentally out of nervousness. The old lady fainted. Kleiner has never smiled again. 147 One of Kleiner’s ideas is to project executions onto a large screen outside the Cheka building. “It would be a kind of cinema for everyone,” he says. “You mean like in America?” “Yes, yes, exactly. To teach the people a lesson. So that they’d be scared. The more scared they are, the fewer people we kill . . . I mean . . . execute.” . . . “But such spectacles would only corrupt the people,” I said to Kleiner. “What? What did you say? Corrupt? You are full of prejudices. Peter the Great sent Russian students to the Stockholm anatomical theater and ordered them to tear the corpses’ muscles apart with their teeth, so they’d learn how to operate. I bet that didn’t corrupt them. What is necessary does not corrupt. Try to understand. What is necessary does not corrupt.” 148 Kleiner himself is incorruptible because he is necessary. “They will probably never build a monument to Kleiner, but they really should: he spent his whole soul on the revolution.” 149 They did build many monuments to Kleiner’s commander, Feliks Dzerzhinsky. One used to stand outside the Cheka building in Moscow. Another is Eduard Bagritsky’s poem “TBC,” in which the pale knight of the revolution appears before a feverish Young Communist poet. “Sharp-angled face, sharp- angled beard,” Dzerzhinsky sits down on the edge of the bed and talks to the young man about the heavy burden of the “three-edged frankness of the bayonet,” about the need to cut through the “crusty gut of the earth’s routine,”