My grandpa used to say he loved us more than he loved Stalin, which we never believed because we knew just how much he loved the old leader. He kept a thick, well-groomed mustache and always tucked in his work shirt. When we were kids he’d tell us that everyone should have somebody they look up to, and we would smile up at him and nod, always transfixed by the force of his gregarious charm. As we grew older we got weirder and distant, responding to his still-frequent orations with murmurs of famines and Gulags. This was normal in the family—my

father’s teenage rebellion consisted of impassioned Trotsky worship, referring to him constantly as El Viejo and putting up posters venerating the permanent revolution in his bedroom. In those years my grandfather was a Stalinist in both heart and will. He’d tear down the posters and spend hours berating my dad about how lazy and useless he was becoming. Once my father came home drunk, and my grandfather beat him with his belt until he bled, shouting Mexican obscenities and calling him a counterrevolutionary. “It seems absurd looking back,” my dad told me once. If my grandmother hadn’t been addicted to Valium I doubt she could have survived those years. But still, we all felt deeply for him. He and his parents had been deported to Mexico during the Great Depression even though they were all born in Texas. When they returned in 1944, my grandfather was eighteen and joined the army because he couldn’t get a job. He said that most men in his platoon were Black or Hispanic, and all of them were communists. My grandfather spoke little English and knew even less about politics, but he understood that the United States was responsible for what happened to him and his family. His comrades told him that even though they were all fighting fascists, the US hated Stalin and the Soviets because they were building a new society where men didn’t have to lose their jobs and die in the streets because of powers outside their control. By the time my grandfather returned to America, he had read the important books by Lenin and learned to speak in a kind of stilted, acerbic English. We always joked that he spoke Russian in translation. He and my father would always reconcile after their conflicts, and over the years my father has told me he sometimes can’t help but feel a pang of deep love for the old Soviet leader. Most people don’t understand it when I tell them my grandpa was a communist, but that’s what he was, just like some people’s grandparents were Dixiecrats or alcoholics. In many ways, he became my own personal Stalin. It’s all so complicated but sometimes, I can’t help but forgive him for everything—he beat the goddamn Nazis, for Christ’s sake.