SEVEN
That evening, while Nikolai Gerasimov found solace with Klaudia Spizenko, typist in the pool at Radio Moscow, Tatiana Orlova changed out of her overalls into a dress, left her son Igor with Drusha, the thirteen-year-old daughter of her neighbour, and walked up to the Tverskoi Boulevard where she caught a bus.
She got off the bus after it had crossed the Kalinin Bridge over the Moscow River where the huge Hotel Ukraine faces the White House, the parliament of the Russian Federation. Barbed wire entanglements, tanks and barricades still remained as relics of Yeltsin’s defiant resistance against the coup the year before.
Next to the Hotel Ukraine, there was a second skyscraper of the Stalinist era with a grandiose entrance and pale grey walls. As she walked towards it in the dusk, Tatiana shuddered. Since she had learned that so many millions had died in the gulags at the time this block had been built, she had always imagined that the bricks had been made with their ground-up bones.
Tatiana was admitted by the concierge who kept watch on the door. ‘Are they there, Katerina Petrovna?’ she asked.
‘So far as I know.’ The grim-faced woman did not smile, but her tone was familiar, even friendly.
Tatiana took the lift to the ninth floor and, as she came out onto the landing, took a key from her bag. With the key, she let herself into an apartment.
‘Hello,’ she shouted as she closed the door.
‘Tania?’ came the voice of an older woman.
‘Mother?’
‘We’re in the kitchen.’
Tatiana’s mother had no need to say this, for although it was a large flat with big rooms, some facing across the river to the White House, Tatiana’s childhood had been spent in that kitchen. It was there that her mother had felt at ease.
Her parents were eating – her mother standing at the stove, her father sitting at the table. The mother embraced her: the father, gruffly but with evident pleasure, patted the seat beside him on the bench that ran along the wall.
Tatiana sat down where he had suggested – her thin body slipping easily in between the bench and the table. Her mother, a small, broad woman with a round face and grey hair combed back into a bun, put a bowl of soup and a spoon in front of her daughter. Tatiana glanced at it, then smiled up at her mother, thanked her, picked up the spoon but, instead of dipping it into the soup, turned to her father and asked: ‘Where is Andrei?’
Ivan Keminski frowned. He was a man of around sixty with dark features, a grave look and the same high cheekbones and pointed nose as his daughter.
‘You know,’ he said. ‘He went West.’
‘They were asking about him.’
‘Who?’
‘Someone from the Lubyanka.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘That I didn’t know where he was or what he was doing.’
‘Which is true.’
‘Yes. But if they are suspicious, then …’
‘What?’
‘I am afraid.’
‘For Andrei?’
She blushed. ‘Not just for Andrei. Also for you.’
Her father laughed, but as he did so Tatiana glanced at her mother and saw that she, too, was anxious.
‘I know that you and he have something planned,’ she said.
‘A joint venture, that is all.’
‘What kind of joint venture?’
‘Nothing. Just a bank.’
‘A bank? The last two Marxists in Russia are starting a bank?’
‘Not starting a bank, no. Just opening a branch of a Western bank.’
‘But Father …’
‘They have suspended the Party. There is no more Central Committee. No more secretariat. I am out of a job. Andrei too.’
‘But a bank …’
He frowned again. ‘What would you want me to do? Sell apples from the dacha in the market?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. She knew – she saw, she could not avoid it – how terribly the recent events had upset her father who had given his life to the Communist cause. Since her conversion to Christianity, she had often argued with him and, being young and quick-witted, she had sometimes got the better of him; but in those days he had always had his position to sustain him as a leading ideologue at the centre of influence of one of the two great powers of the world. Now, since the coup and the suspension of the Party, it had become impossible to argue against him without appearing to gloat over the downfall of the Soviet state.
‘Why not a bank?’ asked Tatiana’s mother, still standing at the stove. ‘We have plenty of room in the apartment. All you need is a telephone and a typewriter and a fax – that’s a bank!’ She said this with childlike enthusiasm, but it was unconvincing. She still had a worried look on her face.
‘But what do you know about banking, Father?’ Tatiana asked.
‘You don’t need to know much. There are banks in the West which want to invest in Russia. They need people with contacts. I have contacts. That is my capital, my contacts.’
‘And what do they bring?’
‘The money. Currency.’
‘And what has Andrei to do with it?’
‘Well, precisely, he is in Europe to arrange things. To set it up.’
Tatiana looked uncertain. It sounded plausible, and would have been plausible had the idea been put forward by two other men.
‘Is there no more to it than that?’ she asked.
‘What more should there be?’
‘Andrei served under General Khrulev and General Khrulev was involved in politics up to his neck.’
‘Maybe. Perhaps that’s why they want to question Andrei. But the coup failed. Khrulev is dead. We now have to change our ideas to survive.’
Tatiana put down her spoon. The soup was untouched. ‘I know you love Andrei,’ she said to her father, ‘and that you were sorry when we separated …’
Keminski shrugged. ‘What’s done is done.’
‘I know that perhaps you think it was my fault, that becoming a believer made it impossible for Andrei …’
‘No man wants to be married to a nun.’
Tatiana blushed. ‘I wasn’t a nun, Father. I was always, well, a wife.’
‘Don’t talk of these things,’ the mother muttered.
Tatiana looked up. ‘I am afraid, Mother. I am afraid not just for him but of what he might do. And I blame myself, because a man with a family will think twice before he does anything dangerous.’
‘But there is nothing dangerous about a bank,’ said Ivan Keminski.
She turned on her father. ‘Whatever you may say, Father, you will not persuade me that Andrei has now become a bourgeois businessman. I know him. I know him better than anyone. He is a believer, a true believer, a Soviet patriot, a Bolshevik dreamer, and I fear he will stop at nothing to make those dreams come true.’
‘An idealist,’ said Ivan Keminski, ‘not a dreamer, as any Chekist worthy of the name should be.’
The telephone rang. Ivan Keminski left the room to answer it. Tatiana was relieved. When her father became bombastic, she knew that the time had come to change the subject.
‘Ah, Nogin, at last …’ Her father’s voice boomed from the hallway. ‘I’ve been trying to get through to you for several days … Did you get the message? My nephew, yes … in Jena. I’d be most grateful … Bored, I think … Without currency, they can hardly afford to breathe. Yes. That would be kind … Here? Don’t ask. Terrible. To think we fought for this … Courage, my old friend … Courage of a different kind.’
Keminski came back into the kitchen. Tatiana rose to go. ‘Is Piotr in Germany?’
‘No, in Saratov. Why?’
‘Then who is your nephew in Germany?’
For a moment, the old man looked confused. ‘What nephew in Germany?’
‘I thought you just said, on the telephone, that you had a nephew in Jena?’
‘Ah yes. It’s Piotr. Of course it’s Piotr. I only have one nephew, after all. He’s going there, briefly, on
some business or other and I told him to look up my old friend Nogin. He’s still stationed there. You won’t remember Nogin. We were in the army together. Back in 1945 our tanks ran neck to neck in the race from Stalingrad to Berlin. Brave soldier. Good comrade. He got there first. And now, I dare say, he’ll be one of the last to leave.’
EIGHT
Colonel Yevgeni Mikhailovich Nogin, Ivan Keminski’s old comrade-in-arms, commanded the Soviet base at Waldheim, fifty miles north of Berlin. His most pressing duty during the short, dark days that winter was finding something for his men to do. There was no reason now to train for a war with NATO. They knew they were to return to Russia when, if ever, somewhere was built for them to live. What reason was there to get up in the morning, let alone turn up on parade? The most Nogin could hope to get out of his men was an hour or two each morning spent servicing the tanks before they were loaded onto trains at the Tucheim sidings on the first stage of their journey back to the scrapheaps in Russia.
By mid-afternoon, most of Colonel Nogin’s men were tipsy. By sunset, they were dead drunk. If they had no vodka, wine or cognac, they stole pure alcohol from the dispensary or even antifreeze from the workshops. Since Colonel Nogin himself was not immune from this national weakness, he was usually flushed when the time came to eat dinner with his fellow officers in the mess. Not only was his face red in patches; one or two buttons on his tunic were often left undone. Most of his subordinates were in the same condition.
Only Captain Sinyanski was always sober. At one time, Colonel Nogin had been afraid of Sinyanski who was known to report back to the Third Directorate of the KGB. At the time of the coup, Sinyanski had become agitated – plotting, so Nogin suspected, to arrest and incarcerate those officers whom he considered ideologically unsound. After the collapse of the coup, and the subsequent restructuring of the KGB as the security service of the Russian Federation, Sinyanski had become dejected. He was now a toothless tiger. Nogin no longer feared him. He even came to like him. Sinyanski was more intelligent and so better company than most of the other officers, and Nogin shared many of Sinyanski’s feelings, particularly his anger at the way Gorbachev and Shevardnadze had surrendered Germany without a fight.
Although it was now stranded in the middle of hostile territory by the receding tide of Soviet power, the garrison at Waldheim was little affected by the collapse of the Communist government in the DDR. There were no more May Day parades in the nearby town of Tucheim where girls with blonde pigtails from the Freie Deutsche Jugend would present their ‘fraternal liberators from fascism’ with bunches of flowers. But nor were his men stoned by the local inhabitants when they went to Tucheim on leave as Nogin had once feared.
It was not until December that Nogin heard from Piotr Perfilyev, Keminski’s nephew in Jena. He immediately invited him to stay at the base for the weekend. They were glad to see some fresh faces and were hardly short of space. In due course, Perfilyev turned up at Tucheim on the train. Nogin sent a junior officer, Lieutenant Vorotnikov, to meet him.
Perfilyev was brought straight to Nogin’s house. He wore civilian clothes and told Nogin that he was working in Jena as an engineer. Perfilyev was a tall bearded man well into his thirties, perhaps even forty, who bore no resemblance either to his uncle, Ivan Keminski, or his mother, Keminski’s sister, whom Nogin had met in Moscow after the war.
Perfilyev produced as a gift for the garrison six bottles of Stolichnaya vodka. The five that found their way to the officers’ mess ensured a warm welcome for the visitor, who was placed next to Nogin at dinner. Perfilyev’s health was the first of many toasts that were proposed in the course of the evening.
As they became drunk, the officers lost their inhibitions and an argument started up between Sinyanski and the young lieutenant, Vorotnikov, about the slander in a new guide to the former concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, situated between Waldheim and Berlin.
‘If it’s true, it’s true,’ said Vorotnikov. ‘Hitler built Sachsenhausen. Stalin made use of it after the war. Think of what he did to the kulaks in Ukraine. The one was as bad as the other …’
‘Untrue,’ shouted Sinyanski. ‘Certainly, Stalin did what had to be done because he faced desperate odds. People died, I grant you that. Perhaps innocent people were killed. But the end justified the means. Without collectivization there would have been no industrialization, and without industrialization, there would have been no tanks to fight the fascists at Stalingrad and Kursk. Where would those swines in the West be now if our fathers and grandfathers hadn’t laid down their lives in the Great Patriotic War? The concentration camps would still be in business and there wouldn’t be a Jew left alive!’
‘That’s as may be, Alexander Sergeyevich,’ another junior officer broke in, ‘but you can’t build the future on the courage and heroism of past generations. It won’t build our economy. It won’t buy food.’
‘Lenin and Stalin imposed Communism,’ shouted another, ‘and Communism doesn’t work.’
‘Who says it doesn’t work?’ countered Sinyanski. ‘No country on earth has achieved so much in so short a space of time. In 1918 we were a bankrupt nation of muzhiks. In 1945 we were a major world power.’
‘And now we’re a bankrupt nation of muzhiks once again,’ said Lieutenant Vorotnikov.
‘Only because so-called reformers have bartered the achievements of three generations for a loan from the World Bank.’
‘They had no choice …’
A number of voices now clamoured to be heard, but since no one could rise above the other, and since most were now too drunk to sustain a cogent argument of any kind, they all eventually petered out; whereupon Nogin, from curiosity as well as politeness, turned to Perfilyev, who until that point had remained silent. ‘Have you a view of the current situation, comrade? You know better than we do what’s in store for us when we get home.’
‘I sympathize with our friend here,’ said the visitor, nodding towards Sinyanski, ‘but I am afraid that we have to acknowledge that we have been outmanoeuvred by the enemy.’
‘Outmanoeuvred?’ asked Nogin, hoping that the conversation was moving on to military matters that he could better understand.
‘Outwitted is perhaps a better word,’ said Perfilyev.
‘How do you mean?’
‘It was a mistake to spend all our resources on defence, and on prestige projects like the space programme or foreign aid. We should have invested in the quality of life …’
‘I agree,’ said Nogin. ‘To think of all those roubles going to Cuba and Nicaragua and Ethiopia, when our own people were going short.’
‘What Marx and Lenin promised, after all,’ Perfilyev went on, ‘was not wealth but justice, a society in which each gave according to his ability and each received according to his needs.’
‘But after seventy-five years of socialism,’ said Vorotnikov, ‘there are still millions who do not receive according to their needs.’
‘Yes,’ went up a cry. ‘What about our housing?’
‘We are impoverished,’ said Perfilyev, ‘precisely because we concentrated our resources on preparing for a war that would never be fought. If they had been used instead on public welfare, then we could have shown the world the superiority of our socialist way of life.’
‘But the Americans and Germans would still be richer,’ said a Major Ivashenko, Nogin’s second-in-command, ‘and they would enjoy liberties that were not permitted under our Soviet system.’
‘Liberties?’ asked Perfilyev who, though he had drunk little, was now flushed. ‘I have lived in America, comrade, and I can tell you that their so-called liberty is just the cant of their corrupt intelligentsia. In reality, it is the most intolerant and unequal society the world has ever seen. You can become rich, true, but once you are rich you are imprisoned in your suburban villas behind chain fences while drug-crazed hoodlums prowl the streets, hunting and pillaging and murdering their own kind. That is what liberty means in America, comrades – to exploit if you can, an
d rob if you cannot.’
‘I get the impression,’ said Nogin, ‘that you did not warm to the Americans?’
‘Warm to them? No. I loathed them. They are a nation of mongrels, the descendants of all the miscreants, malcontents and traitors who abandoned their native lands in the old world – sectarians like the Puritans and Quakers, greedy English colonists, slave-owners who preached liberty as an excuse to turn against their king; the runts in the litter of every slum in every minor nation from Latvia to Sicily, from Ireland to Greece. What is the driving spirit of every colonial culture? Greed! To hell with the people. Every man for himself. From the conquistadores in Mexico to the cattle barons in the Wild West – exploit the soil, enslave the people! And if they will not work as slaves? Herd them into reservations and let them die!’
As he was speaking, Perfilyev’s eyes had widened, and their expression had grown intense. His deep voice, rising in pitch as he proceeded, held the attention of his intoxicated audience. Sinyanski looked at him with evident satisfaction. Nogin, too, could not suppress a sense of exhilaration to hear the old enemy attacked in this way. Even the young lieutenant, Vorotknikov, appeared impressed by the fervour of Perfilyev, if not by the substance of what he said.
Only the adjutant, Major Ivashenko, retained his scepticism. ‘You may be right,’ he said, ‘but if our people now reject socialism, what can we do but follow their example?’
‘It will be fatal to try,’ said Perfilyev. ‘Socialism suits the temperament of our people: they were always averse to capitalism of any kind. They resisted Stolypin’s reforms after 1905. They will resist Yeltsin’s now. Unless, of course, the so-called reforms are forced upon us by the Americans and the World Bank. Then, comrades, you have only to look south over the border to see what the future holds. Look at Turkey, a once great empire reduced to the condition of a third-rate power, its people transported to Germany to provide cheap labour for Krupp and Thyssen on the Ruhr.’