THE Lubyanka, the still of night, the long black car with the engine running, two agents in overcoats charging down the steps – was there no escaping the past? thought Suvorin, bitterly, as they accelerated away. He was surprised there were no tourists on hand to record this traditional scene of life in Mother Russia. Why not put it in the album, darling, between St Basil’s Cathedral and a troika in the snow?
They thumped into a dip at the bottom of the hill near the Metropol Hotel, and his head connected with the cushioned roof. In the front seat, next to the driver, Netto was unfolding a large-scale map of the Moscow streets of a detail that no tourist would ever see because it was still officially secret. Suvorin snapped on the interior light and leaned forward for a better look. The apartment blocks of the Victory of the Revolution complex were scattered like postage stamps across the Tagansko–Krasno metro line, in the north-west outer suburb.
‘How long do you reckon? Twenty minutes?’
‘Fifteen,’ said the driver, showing off. He gunned the engine, shot the lights, swung right, and Suvorin was pitched the other way, against the door. He had a brief impression of the Lenin Library flashing past.
‘Relax,’ he said, ‘for pity’s sake. We don’t want to get a ticket.’
They sped on. Once they were clear of the centre, Netto unlocked the glove compartment and handed Suvorin a well-oiled Makarov and a clip of ammunition. Suvorin took it reluctantly, felt the unfamiliar weight in his hand, checked the mechanism and sighted briefly at a passing birch tree. He hadn’t joined the service because he enjoyed this kind of thing. He had joined because his father was a diplomat who had taught him early on that the best thing to do if you lived in the Soviet Union was to get a posting abroad. Guns? Suvorin hadn’t set foot on the Yasenevo range inside a year. He gave the weapon back to Netto who shrugged and stuffed it in his own pocket.
A blue dot grew noisily in the road behind them, swelled and flashed past like an angry fly – a patrol car of the Moscow militia. It dwindled into the distance.
‘Asshole,’ said their driver.
A few minutes later they turned off the main road and headed into the wilderness of concrete and wasteland that was the Victory of the Revolution. Fifteen years in Kolyma, thought Suvorin, then welcome home to this. And the joke was, it must have seemed like paradise.
Netto said, ‘According to the map, Block Nine should be just round this corner.’
‘Slow down,’ ordered Suvorin, suddenly, putting his hand on the driver’s shoulder. ‘Can you hear something?’
He wound down his window. Another siren, off to the left. It faded for a moment, muffled by a building, then became very loud, and colours burst ahead – a blue and yellow lightshow, rather pretty, moving fast. For a couple of seconds the patrol car seemed to be coming straight at them but then it swung off the road and bounced over the rough ground, and a moment later they were level with it and could see the entrance to the block themselves, lit up like a fairyland – three cars, an ambulance, people moving, shadowed tracks in the snow.
They cruised round the building a couple of times, a trio of ghouls, unnoticed, as the stretcher men brought out the body and then Kelso was driven away.
Chapter Eleven
SIMONOV TELLS THE following story.
At meetings of the Council of People’s Commissars, it was Comrade Stalin’s habit to rise from his place at the head of the long table and to pace behind the backs of the participants. Nobody dared to look round at him: they could establish where he was only by the soft squeak of his leather boots or by the passing fragrance of his Dunhill pipe. On this particular occasion, the conversation concerned the large number of recent plane crashes. The head of the air force, Rychagov, was drunk. ‘There will continue to be a high level of accidents,’ he blurted out, ‘as long as we’re compelled by you to go up in flying coffins.’ There was a long silence, at the end of which Stalin murmured, ‘You really shouldn’t have said that.’ A few days later, Rychagov was shot.
One could quote any number of such stories. His favourite technique, according to Khrushchev, was suddenly to look at a man and say: ‘Why is your face so shifty today? Why can’t you look Comrade Stalin directly in the eyes?’ That was the moment when one’s life hung in the balance.
Stalin’s use of terror seems to have been partly instinctive (he was naturally physically violent: he sometimes struck his subordinates in the face) and partly calculated. ‘The people,’ he told Maria Svanidze, ‘need a tsar.’ And the tsar upon whom he modelled himself was Ivan the Terrible. We have written confirmation of that here in this archive, in Stalin’s personal library, which contains a copy of A. M. Tolstoy’s 1942 play, Ivan Grozny (F558 03 D350). Not only has Stalin corrected the speeches of Ivan to make them sound more clipped and laconic – to sound more like himself, in fact – but he has also scrawled repeatedly over the title page ‘Teacher’.
Indeed, he had only one criticism of his role model: that he was too weak. As he told the director, Sergei Eisenstein: ‘Ivan the Terrible would execute someone and then spend a long time repenting and praying. God got in his way in this matter. He ought to have been still more decisive!’ (Moskovskie novosti, no. 32, 1988).
Stalin was nothing if not decisive.
Professor I. A. Kuganov estimates that some sixty-six million people were killed in the USSR between 1917 and 1953 – shot, tortured, starved mostly, frozen or worked to death. Others say the true figure is a mere forty-five million. Who knows?
Neither estimate, by the way, includes the thirty million now known to have been killed in the Second World War.
To put this loss in context: the Russian Federation today has a population of roughly 150 million. Assuming the ravages inflicted by communism had never occurred, and assuming normal demographic trends, the actual population should be about 300 million.
And yet – and this is surely one of the most astounding phenomena of the age – Stalin continues to enjoy a wide measure of popular support in this half-empty land. His statues have been taken down, true. The street names have been changed. But there have been no Nuremberg Trials, as there were in Germany. There has been no process here equivalent to de-Nazification. There has been no Truth Commission, of the sort established in South Africa.
And the opening of the archives? ‘Confronting the past’? Come, ladies and gentlemen, let us say frankly what we all know to be the case. That the Russian government today is scared, and that it is actually harder to gain access to the archives now than it was six or seven years ago. You all know the facts as well as I do. Beria’s files: closed. The Politburo’s files: closed. Stalin’s files – the real files, I mean, not the window dressing on offer here: closed.
I can see my remarks are not being well received by one or two colleagues –
All right, I shall draw them to a conclusion, with this observation: that there can now be no doubt that it is Stalin rather than Hitler who is the most alarming figure of the twentieth century.
I say this –
I say this not merely because Stalin killed more people than Hitler – although clearly he did – and not even because Stalin was more of a psychopath than Hitler – although clearly he was. I say it because Stalin, unlike Hitler, has not yet been exorcised. And also because Stalin was not a one-off like Hitler, an eruption from nowhere. Stalin stands in a historical tradition of rule by terror which existed before him, which he refined, and which could exist again. His, not Hitler’s, is the spectre that should worry us.
Because, you know, you think about it. You hail a taxi in Munich – you don’t find the driver displaying Hitler’s portrait in his cab, do you? Hitler’s birthplace isn’t a shrine. Hitler’s grave isn’t piled with fresh flowers every day. You can’t buy tapes of Hitler’s speeches on the streets of Berlin. Hitler isn’t routinely praised as ‘a great patriot’ by leading German politicians. Hitler’s old party didn’t receive more than forty per cent of the votes in the last German election –
But all these things ar
e true of Stalin in Russia today, which is what makes the words of Yevtushenko, in ‘The Heirs of Stalin’, more relevant now than ever:
‘So I ask our government
To double
To treble
The guard
Over this tomb.’
FLUKE Kelso was escorted into the headquarters of the central division of the Moscow City Militia shortly before three a.m. And there he was left, washed up with the rest of the night’s detritus – half a dozen hookers, a Chechen pimp, two white-faced Belgian bankers, a troupe of transsexual dancers from Turkestan and the usual midnight chorus of outraged lunatics, tramps and bloodied addicts. High-corniced ceilings and half-blown chandeliers gave proceedings a Revolutionary epic look.
He sat alone on a hard wooden bench, his head leaning back on the peeling plaster, staring ahead, unseeing. So that – that was what it looked like? Oh, you could spend half a lifetime writing about it all, about the millions – about Marshal Tukhachevsky, say, beaten to a pulp by the NKVD: there was his confession in the archives, still sprinkled with his dried blood: you even held it in your hands – and you thought for a moment you had a sense of what it must have been like, but then you confronted the reality and you realised you hadn’t understood it at all, you hadn’t even begun to know what it was like.
After a while two militia men wandered up and stood at the metal drinking fountain next to him, discussing the case of the Uzbeki bandit, Tsexer, apparently machine-gunned earlier that evening in the cloakroom of the Babylon.
‘Is anyone dealing with my case?’ interrupted Kelso. ‘It is a murder.’
‘Ah, a murder!’ One of the men rolled his eyes in mock surprise. The other laughed. They dropped their paper cones in the trash can and moved off.
‘Wait!’ shouted Kelso.
Across the corridor, an elderly woman with a bandaged hand started screaming.
He sank back on to the bench.
Presently, a third officer, powerfully built, with a Gorky moustache, came wearily downstairs and introduced himself as Investigator Belenky, a homicide detective. He was holding a piece of grubby paper.
‘You’re the witness in the business involving the old man, Rapazin?’
‘Rapava,’ corrected Kelso.
‘Right. That’s it.’ Belenky squinted at the top and bottom of the paper. Perhaps it was the walrus moustache or maybe it was his watery eyes but he seemed immensely sad. He sighed. ‘Okay. We’d better have a statement.’
Belenky led him up a grand staircase to the second floor, to a room with flaking green walls and an uneven, shiny woodblock floor. He gestured to Kelso to sit, and put a pad of lined forms in front of him.
‘The old man had Stalin’s papers,’ began Kelso, lighting a cigarette. He exhaled quickly. ‘You ought to know that. Almost certainly he had them hidden in his apartment. That’s why –’
But Belenky wasn’t listening. ‘Everything you can remember.’ He slapped a blue biro down on the table.
‘But you hear what I’m saying? Stalin’s papers –’
‘Right, right.’ The Russian still wasn’t listening. ‘We’ll sort out the details later. Need a statement first.’
‘All of it?’
‘Of course. Who you are. How you met the old man. What you were doing at the apartment. The whole story. Write it down. I’ll be back.’
After he had gone, Kelso stared at the blank paper for a couple of minutes. Mechanically, he wrote his full name, his date of birth and his address in neat Cyrillic script. His mind was a fog. ‘I arrived,’ he wrote, and paused. The plastic pen felt as heavy between his fingers as a crowbar. ‘I arrived in Moscow on –’ He couldn’t even remember the date. He who was normally so good at dates! (25 October 1917, the battle-cruiser Aurora shells the Winter Palace and begins the Revolution; 17 January 1927, Leon Trotsky is expelled from the Politburo; 23 August 1939: the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact is signed …) He bent his head to the desk. ‘– I arrived in Moscow on the morning of Monday October 26 from New York at the invitation of the Russian Archive Service to deliver a short lecture on Josef Stalin …’
He finished his statement in less than an hour. He did as he was told and left nothing out – the symposium, Rapava’s visit, the Stalin notebook, the Lenin Library, Yepishev and the meeting with Mamantov, the house on Vspolnyi Street, the freshly dug earth, Robotnik and Rapava’s daughter … He filled seven pages with his tiny scrawl, and took the final section even quicker, hurrying over the scene in the apartment, the discovery of the body, his desperate search for a working telephone in the next-door block, eventually rousing a young woman with a baby on her hip. It felt good to be writing again, to be imposing some kind of rational order on the chaos of the past.
Belenky put his head round the door just as Kelso added the final sentence.
‘You can forget that now.’
‘I’ve done.’
‘No?’ Belenky stared at the small pile of sheets and then at Kelso. There was a commotion in the corridor behind him. He frowned, then yelled over his shoulder, ‘Tell him to wait.’ He came into the room and closed the door.
Something had happened to Belenky, that much was obvious. His tunic was unbuttoned, his tie loose. Dark patches of sweat stained his khaki shirt. Without taking his eyes off Kelso’s face, he held out his massive hand and Kelso gave him the statement. He sat down with a grunt on the opposite side of the table and took a plastic case from his breast pocket. From the case he withdrew a surprisingly delicate pair of gold-framed, half-moon glasses, shook them open, perched them on the end of his nose, and began to read.
His heavy chin jutted forwards. Occasionally, his eyes would flicker up from the page to Kelso, study him for a moment, then return to the text. He winced. His moustache sagged lower over his tightening lips. He chewed the knuckle of his right thumb.
When he laid the final page aside he gave a sigh.
‘And this is true?’
‘All of it.’
‘Well, fuck your mother.’ Belenky took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with the side of his hand. ‘Now what am I supposed to do?’
‘Mamantov,’ said Kelso. ‘He must have been involved. I was careful not to give him any details but –’
The door opened and a small, thin man, a Laurel to Belenky’s Hardy, said, in a frightened voice, ‘Sima! Quick! They’re here!’
Belenky gave Kelso a significant look, gathered the statement together and pushed back his chair. ‘You’ll have to go down to the cells for a bit. Don’t be alarmed.’
At the mention of cells Kelso felt a spasm of panic. ‘I’d like to speak to someone from the embassy.’
Belenky stood and slid his tie back up into a tight knot, fastened the buttons of his tunic, tugged the jacket down in a hopeless attempt to straighten it.
‘Can I speak to someone from the embassy?’ repeated Kelso. ‘I’d like to know my rights.’
Belenky squared his shoulders and moved towards the door. ‘Too late,’ he said.
IN the cells beneath the headquarters of the Central Division of the Moscow City Militia, Kelso was roughly frisked and parted from his passport, wallet, watch, fountain pen, belt, tie and shoelaces. He watched them shovelled into a cardboard envelope, signed a form, was handed a receipt. Then, with his boots in one hand, his chit in the other and his coat over his arm, he followed the guard down a whitewashed passage lined on either side with steel doors. The guard was suffering from a plague of boils – his neck above his greasy brown collar looked like a plate of red dumplings – and at the sound of his footsteps, the inmates of some of the cells began a frantic shouting and banging. He took no notice.
The eighth cubicle on the left. Three yards by four. No window. A metal cot. No blanket. An enamel pail in the corner with a square of stained wood for a lid.
Kelso went slowly into the cell on his stockinged feet, threw his coat and boots down on the cot. Behind him, the door swung shut with a submarine clang.
Acceptance. That,
he had learned in Russia many years ago, was the secret of survival. At the frontier, when your papers were being checked for the fifteenth time. At the road block, when you were pulled over for no reason and kept waiting for an hour and a half. At the ministry, when you went to get your visa stamped and no one had bothered to show up. Accept it. Wait. Let the system exhaust itself. Protest will only raise your blood pressure.
The spyhole in the centre of the door clicked open, stayed open for a moment, clicked shut. He listened to the guard’s footsteps retreat.
He sat on the bed and closed his eyes and saw, at once, unbidden, like the after-image of a bright light imprinted on his retina, the white and naked body revolving in the down draught of the elevator shaft – shoulders, heels and trussed hands rebounding gently off the walls.
He sprang at the door and hammered on it with his empty boots and yelled for a while, until he’d got something out of himself. Then he turned and rested his back against the metal, confronting the narrow limits of his cell. Slowly he allowed himself to slide down until he was resting on his haunches, his arms clasped around his knees.
TIME. Now here is a peculiar commodity, boy. The measurement of time. Best accomplished, obviously, with a watch. But, lacking a watch, a man may use instead the ebb and flow of light and dark. Lacking, however, a window through which to see such movement, the reliance must be devolved upon some inner mechanism of the mind. But if the mind has received a shock, the mechanism is disturbed, and time becomes as the ground is to a drunkard, variable.
Thus Kelso, at some point indeterminate, transferred his body from the doorway to the cot and drew his coat across himself. His teeth were chattering.
His thoughts were random, disconnected. He thought of Mamantov, going back over their meeting again and again, trying to remember if he had said anything that could have led him to Rapava. And he thought about Rapava’s daughter and the way he had broken his word in his statement. She had abandoned him. Now he had revealed her as a whore. So the world turns. Somewhere, presumably, the militia would have her address on file. Her name as well. The news about her father would be broken to her, and she would be – what? Dry-eyed, he was fairly sure. Yet vengeful.