The Intrigues of Jennie Lee

by Alex Rosenberg

  From the open government car to their hotel, they watched the streets go by, empty of vehicles save for the streetcars. These came at a steady pace, crammed with riders, some leaning from the entry steps, others having clambered on to the roof, dangerously close to the overhead tram wires.

  “Valery, why so many stores boarded up?” Nye asked the Soviet official, the question the rest were thinking.

  Kutuzov answered, evenly. “It’s the Five-Year Plan. Things were different up till about a year ago. Then Stalin put an end to Lenin’s ‘state capitalism.’ No more profiteering. Everything according to the plan. The little shops started disappearing in just a few months.”

  “That’s a good thing in a poor country, isn’t it?” Jennie asked. “All that shop-keeping was undermining socialism.”

  Kutuzov was about to answer, but Frank quickly spoke up. “Maybe it’ll be a good thing in the long run.”

  It was not like him to interrupt rudely. The others in the car noticed. Nye Bevan was about to speak, but Frank shook his head firmly.

  * * *

  An hour later Jennie, Frank, and Nye were strolling down a broad but empty street towards the Moscow River. They had left the hotel in search of a tobacconist. The hotel’s shop had run out of cigarettes, even domestic brands.

  Moscow wasn’t anything like London, not this part of it at any rate. On each side of the boulevard, more boarded-up shop windows interspersed with forlorn storefronts and almost bare shelves. It was disquieting.

  No one spoke till Jennie put a question to Frank. “So, what was that head-shaking about, Frank, back in the touring car before we got to the hotel?”

  “I didn’t want to get Valery into any trouble, that’s all.”

  “Trouble?” Nye’s tone was arch. “How could he have gotten into trouble, Frank?”

  “Well, the driver’ll be expected to report anything we say and everything Valery says to us.”

  Jennie and Nye spoke simultaneously. “Why?” “To who?”

  “To the OGPU, because Valery is a state official and therefore not to be trusted.”

  Frank smiled to convey his little joke. They all knew the OGPU—the organs of state security.

  “It’s the way they can be sure everyone is singing from the same hymnal. Valery will have to report everything we say, and the driver’s report will have to jibe with what he reports.” He paused. “So, the less said, the smaller the chance of a ‘misunderstanding,’ right?”

  The others nodded.

  “That’s why Valery didn’t come out with us just now. It’d be too risky for him to walk round Moscow with a set of foreigners and no one to corroborate what we spoke about.”

  “Not even left wing Labour party types?” Jennie was earnest. She didn’t want to be taken an enemy of the Soviet state.

  “We might all be wolves in sheep’s clothing, Jennie.” Nye laughed. “I suppose that Valery knows what he’s doing.”

  Frank nodded. “Valery has to be extra careful. Kutuzov is a famous name, and not in a good way. Valery’s related to the Marshal Kutuzov, the one who beat Napoleon in 1812. Keeps having to prove he’s not a class enemy.”

  Jennie changed the subject. “Frank, all these shops bare or boarded up. You said things were different last year. What happened? Did Stalin order them to close?”

  “No. But once Gosplan—the state planning bureau—took control of the economy, the middlemen disappeared and the shopkeepers had nothing to buy and put on their shelves, nothing people wanted to buy.”

  Nye spoke. “Not even smokes? Look, we’re out right now with money ready to pay. Why isn’t there anybody to sell us a packet of cigarettes?”

  Frank pointed down the street. “There’s another tobacconist. Let’s try again.”

  A moment later he came out shaking his head, a rueful smile on his face. He looked at his two friends and reported.

  “Man said no fags anywhere in the city this week. Factory runs out of glue for the cigarette papers end of every month. You have to stock up.”

  Jennie was quizzical. “Run out of glue? Why don’t they just order more?”

  Frank frowned. “It’s the plan, Jennie. Factories don’t order. Planners order the factory and plans are written in stone, once a year.”

  “But that can’t be the problem, Frank.” Jennie spoke earnestly. “Planning is organising the whole economy to get everyone what they need, instead of capitalist profiteering.”

  “You’d think so. But a plan can’t meet millions of people’s wants for thousands of different things each made from dozens of parts.” He stopped for a moment. “Without prices, what you called ‘profiteering,’ Jennie, there’s no way to tell how much...cigarette paper glue is really needed. And Stalin has abolished prices.”

  Now Nye spoke with irritation. “Frank, we don’t need a lecture on why socialism is impossible.”

  Jennie pulled her two companions along, an arm through each of theirs.

  She had to defend her partner against her friend’s complaint. “But Frank is a socialist, Nye.”

  “That I am.” He had not been angered by Nye’s provocation. “My kind of socialism is workers owning the factories they work in, Nye. The sort of cooperatives I deal with all over Russia.”

  Nye scoffed. “Co-ops don’t make socialism! Heavy industry needs planning, not endless shop-floor discussion.”

  “Yes, that’s what you’d think. Just ask every manager what they need and what their factory can produce, make the allocations, and let them get on with it.” Frank looked up and down the street meaningfully.

  “Well, what went wrong?” Jennie persisted.

  “Once managers start having to tell Gosplan what their factories need and how much of anything they can make, every boss starts to be economical with the truth.”

  “Lying, to get more than his factory needs and produce less than it can?” Nye had caught on. “Just like a pit crew at the coal face.” He laughed.

  “Sounds like a job for the secret police!” Jennie smiled.

  But Wise took the thought seriously. “They’re trying it. But the coppers won’t know what to look for, and they’ll be bribed by the factory bosses anyway.”

  Jennie’s tone became slightly belligerent. “What will work, Frank, capitalism?”

  “Prices. What they had before this damn Five-Year Plan.”

  Jennie frowned. “Bring back prices, you’ll end with capitalism, Frank.”

  Frank fell silent.

  Then he replied. “Yes, I’m afraid you’re right. That’s the conundrum.”

  They were now at a bridge crossing the Moscow River.

  Nye brightened. “I know where we can get some fags.” He pointed. “See the Union Jack across the river? That’s the British embassy. They’ll have a canteen.”

  “Right you are, Nye.” Frank smiled.

  Chapter Ten

  A week later, Jennie and Frank were trying to find a comfortable way to sit, lie or lean on the wooden-slatted benches of a “hard class” railway coach. They were a thousand miles south of Moscow. The rest of the Labour party delegation had gone back to Britain. After two days of watching the endless forest tracts, Frank and Jennie’s train was now rumbling along vast fields, golden with wheat ready for harvest. In the early evening light, the thick line of tassels almost sparkled.

  “Isn’t it harvest time, Frank?”

  “Actually well past it, I would have thought. I used to see farm families camped everywhere hereabouts, working past dusk to get every bushel in.”

  Jennie brightened. “Maybe now they’ve collectivised, they have combine harvesters and can start later.”

  “I don’t think there are enough tractors to go round. But the trouble is once farms are collectivised, farmers don’t own the crops they grow. So why should they work day and night to harvest them?”

  * * *

  The open seat coach was not crowded, but the rest of the occupants were divided between those suspicious of the two foreigners and t
hose grateful to them for sharing what food they still had—hard sausage, black bread, and large sweet red onions.

  By the time they were three days out from Moscow, Jennie and Frank had become accustomed to suspicion. It had accompanied them everywhere in Moscow, along with Valery Kutuzov, the liaison between Centrosoyus and the Foreign Affairs Commissariat who’d greeted them on their arrival. He’d guided them through what the party wanted them to see in Moscow. Kutuzov had been friendly, informative, even occasionally, though quietly, candid. But just as Frank had said, he was never completely alone with these guests of the Soviet state.

  Then, the night Frank and Jennie left Moscow for the Caucasus two thousand kilometres to the south, Kutuzov met them for the last time, by himself, on the quay. He seemed to Jennie a little furtive, looking behind him once or twice. Evidently, he still didn’t want to be seen alone with them. He kept a brimmed hat on as they approached. Jennie sought to put him at ease, or at least express her gratitude for his hospitality.

  “Thank you for all your help, Valery.” She smiled as she offered him her hand. He made to remove his hat, then thought better of it, nodded and took her hand.

  Then Kutuzov turned to Frank, holding out a large manila envelope.

  “Here are the travel documents, for both of you.” He passed them to Wise, who slipped them into a briefcase. “You will find things more...‘difficult’ this summer, Frank.” The hesitation communicated the euphemism. “It is most important you guard the passes from the Party and the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs.” Frank nodded. “We had some trouble with the OGPU.”

  “I understand.” Frank nodded. He understood infighting between the organs of the Soviet state. “Thanks for your help, Valery.”

  The Russian had looked round briefly, shook Frank’s hand once, and then turned on his heels and trotted off.

  “He seemed worried.”

  Jennie looked at the man over Frank’s shoulder as he lengthened his distance from them. Frank reached into his bag and handed Jennie her documents. Somehow, he knew she would want to hang on to her own.

  “Everybody’s got different worries. Foreign ministry’s worried that we’ll report what we see. If you can’t get a packet of fags in Moscow, it must be much worse in the countryside. They’ll get in trouble with the party if we splash it in the English papers. Party probably fought the secret police—the OGPU—to get us the passes south. Government needs the foreign exchange my co-ops earn. That’s why they let me come at all.”

  Jennie shook her head slowly. “This isn’t the education in socialism I was expecting.”

  Frank spoke sharply. “Don’t confuse this with socialism.”

  * * *

  Kutuzov had been right about the ‘difficulties.’ It was expressed to begin with in the demand for their papers at every stop on the mainline route to Georgia in the Caucasus Mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian. Were these spies escaping to the British in Iran or agents of the Turkish dictator, Ataturk? Who had provided them with enough food to last the week to Tbilisi? And why were they using it to win over the other occupants of the coach, people who hadn’t seen a kielbasa or a kupati for a year or more? Still, their papers came from the Central Union of Cooperatives, and were stamped very clearly with a pass to all areas by the Party Central Committee in Moscow.

  After the third inspection of her bag, its thin leather strap now worn to breaking, Jennie’s patience had given out.

  “I thought this mania would weaken the further we got from Moscow.”

  Frank shook his head. “Wasn’t this bad two years ago. Something’s worrying these functionaries.”

  She replied, “What’s worrying everyone else seems to be getting something to eat.” She glanced out the window. “Frank, we’ve spent two full days riding through vast fields of ripe wheat. Why the hunger?”

  “Maybe it’s because the new collective farms can’t sell what they grow.”

  “Can’t sell? What do you mean, Frank? Why are they growing the stuff if they can’t sell it?”

  “The state just takes it. All this wheat”—he pointed out the window—“is how Russia is building a modern industrial state. It’s the only thing Russia has plenty of. Stalin is going to sell Europe every bushel he can get his hands on and invest it in steel mills. That’s the Five-Year Plan.”

  Frank glanced towards the pair of uniformed OGPU security guards, who glared back at him. “That’s why this lot has to let me travel where I want, poke my nose into any hay rick I like, smell the tobacco curing in the warehouses, rub my hands on the shoe leather cow hide...I’m here because Russia really needs to sell.”

  Jennie thought back to Frank’s exchanges with Nye in Moscow.

  “Because no one back in Moscow can trust the managers to just tell the truth about what they’ve got and how much.”

  “Precisely.” He smiled. “So we get a busman’s holiday in Central Asia!”

  Fending off begging peasants at station stops, averting their eyes from the accusing looks of hungry travellers holding emaciated children, their busman’s holiday had become a grim journey into a bad dream.

  * * *

  Midday, the train slowed and the landscape of excavation berms and pump-derricks began to look familiar to Jennie. They were entering a coal country town, a little different from ones dotting the heaths of Scotland or the Welsh vales. She made out the Cyrillic and mouthed the word Shakhty, then reached for her Baedeker. Nothing in the travel guide.

  “Know anything about this place, Frank?” She watched as a grim industrial town spread on either side of the track they were riding. It was the busiest place they’d passed through since Voronezh halfway back to Moscow.

  Frank looked up from his papers. “Nothing...probably slept through it the last time I came this way.”

  The brakes screeched and the train came to a halt.

  “Let’s see if we can buy anything to eat. We’ve not got much left.”

  Wise asked a conductor how long they’d stop. One hour.

  Along the platform, an elderly woman was selling tea from a dented samovar. Two cups were attached to her trolley by a meter-long chain. Jennie approached and the woman spoke. She turned to Frank.

  “Any idea what she said?”

  “I think she was reassuring you that the tea is so hot it kills any germs left on the cup by the last drinker.”

  He turned and walked across the track into the station building.

  The structure did not look promising, stained with coal dust, broken and boarded windows, doorways without doors opened to darkened spaces. Frank returned in a moment.

  “Nothing to buy. Just a few beggars. But there’s a cafeteria across the street. If it’s for party workers, we might get a bite.”

  Jennie brightened. “I’ll eat anything.”

  It was a large hall noisy with men in various uniforms, huddled over soup bowls at long trestle tables. The militia man at the door scrutinised their passes, looked towards the OGPU police sitting near by. These were the ones who’d been in their train carriage. One of them nodded slightly and the guard gestured the pair in with ill-disguised annoyance. Frank and Jennie queued without being immediately able to see anything of the steam tables behind which healthy-looking women were handing over plates. When their turn came, it was a soup-bowl of thick borscht—beetroot soup—with a dollop of sour cream. Nothing Jennie ever cared for, but it didn’t matter. She would eat. They found an empty table as far from the OGPU police as possible.

  Before they could even begin, Jennie and Frank were joined by three young men, all dressed in different versions of a drab brown, quasi-military tunic: buttons up each side under a cardboard Sam Browne belt too thin to carry the weight of a weapon. They smiled and politely asked permission to sit.

  Hearing Frank’s accent in his invitation to do so, one of the young men turned to the others, “Anglichane.”

  Frank and Jennie both knew this word and nodded. To their surprise, one of them began to speak
English.

  “Ah. You must be important Englishmen.”

  “Why?” Jennie asked.

  “First, they let you leave Moscow. Then they let you into a Party canteen. They even let you have your own table...until now.” He laughed.

  Frank smiled. “You have the better of us. We are indeed important English people. But you must be important too, as you have joined us.”

  “No. We are merely cheeky Komsomols.” This was the well-known acronym for the young adult’s branch of the Communist Party.

  “Ah, in that case, may I offer you cigarettes, since you are not allowed to smoke them?” Frank drew out his packet of Senior Service. Each took one gratefully. Komsomols took an oath to abstain from tobacco and alcohol.

  “You are well informed about our rules, sir.”

  Jennie volunteered, “We know that each of you has all taken a vow to become a New Soviet Man.”

  The English speaker translated and one of the others replied to him.

  “My friend says ‘Yes, but not yet.’” They all laughed.

  Jennie frowned slightly. “But without the New Soviet Man, this great experiment will fail.”

  “Comrade Stalin will not allow that,” the English speaker replied, and then translated their exchange.

  Jennie replied. “He can’t be everywhere.” Then she waited as the translation provoked a brief discussion among the three young men.

  The English speaker turned from his friends, looked at the OGPU police and spoke quietly. “But he can frighten enough shirkers to make socialism work. Last year there was a trial here, of ‘wreckers.’ You know what it is, a wrecker?”

  They’d heard the word once or twice in Moscow but Jennie and Frank wanted to hear more. “Tell us.”

  “You didn’t hear about the Shakhty trial in England?” Both shook their heads. “No? It was the only news everywhere in the Soviet Union in the spring of ’28, the first few months of the Five-Year Plan. There was a slowdown in coal production. The plan wasn’t being fulfilled. Fifty managers and engineers in the mines and the railway were tried for sabotaging the works. Five were executed, the rest went to Siberia. Now, New Soviet Man has to be on guard against wreckers everywhere.” He smiled at his mild subversion.