One Night in Winter

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  ‘There it is,’ said Beria.

  ‘So he shot her and then himself? Like I said?’ said Kobylov.

  ‘Please enlighten my blockheaded comrade, professor,’ Beria said.

  ‘All right, gentlemen. Nikolasha Blagov was killed by a shot fired at about seven metres. You see the wound.’ He leaned over the slab until he was very close to the shattered mouth. ‘No powder burns. Now look at her wound.’ He switched to the other slab with surprising agility. ‘Look! Hers is blackened quite clearly awound the edges. Her wound is point-blank. It was she who killed him and then herself. She made a mess of him, but as is typical of a female suicide: one shot to the heart. A lady likes a tidy house, yes? Her face is immaculate. You see, stwaightforward, all very stwaightforward.’

  ‘Thank you, professor.’ Beria looked at Kobylov and Mogilchuk and opened his hands: ‘You got it the wrong way round, you imbeciles. Remember the dead are a marshal’s daughter and a deputy minister’s son. Remember whose children we’ve arrested. Get a move on or you’ll find yourself guarding scum in Kolyma. The Instantsiya is impatient.’ He turned away from them, rubbing his hands. ‘Now, I’ve got a girl waiting who’s good enough to eat! Fresh as summer strawberries. And then a game of netball with the guards.’

  He swept out of the morgue, followed by Colonel Nadaraia and the other bodyguards.

  ‘What energy Comrade Beria has,’ murmured Kobylov. ‘And what a brain. Every moment of every day is organized as precisely as a Swiss watch. We are pygmies beside him. Come on, Mogilchuk, let’s return to our school games.’

  17

  TAMARA HAD SCARCELY spoken to Hercules in their apartment. Was it bugged? He thought so. She couldn’t speak to him in the car because of the guards; nor at the Golden Gates.

  So, most unusually, after drop-off at the school, she said, ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘Do you have time to walk with me to Alexandrovsky Gardens?’ Satinov asked her.

  Tamara did not have a class until ten so they walked towards the Kremlin in silence. That day Hercules was not in uniform but a summer suit, with a white fedora low over his eyes, and Tamara thought what a handsome man he was.

  Two guards walked ahead, Losha behind, and their car purred twenty metres behind them. The summer blizzard of gossamer seeds swirled around them. Young soldiers, a girl in naval uniform, pensioners in cloth caps walked the streets, eyes half closed, cushioned by the soft, easy air. Tamara noticed how sometimes these sleepwalking members of the public were jolted awake with the spark of recognition. ‘Wasn’t that . . .?’ they asked their companions as they passed Satinov.

  If only they knew that our life isn’t as easy as it appears, Tamara thought.

  Having checked everyone was out of earshot, she put her hand through Satinov’s arm. Ever since George had disappeared, she had longed to talk to him.

  She adored her Hercules. Amongst those coarse, hard-drinking leaders, with their fat, depressed wives and spoilt, disturbed children, Tamara’s friends would often say, ‘If only I had a husband like Satinov. Tamara, you’re so lucky,’ and she would reply, ‘He’s a wonderful husband but I just wish he talked to me more . . .’

  Despite their years together, she found it hard to breathe around his coldness, his detachment. Why didn’t he cuddle her? Why couldn’t she be with a man who talked to her and told her about his day? It had been the same when his eldest son Vanya was killed. She wanted to shriek and tear her clothes – but he just seemed to absorb it. She wondered if he really wasn’t that deep, if he was simply uncomplicated or, worse, flinthearted? He had cried once, but afterwards he just said to her, ‘The whole Motherland is weeping, Tamriko. We’re no different.’ And he had returned to the front, leaving her to comfort the other children. Now his son was in prison and still she could not reach him.

  ‘Hercules, is there any news of George?’ she asked now.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘But you saw . . . him last night?’ She meant Stalin, of course.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’

  Satinov shook his head. ‘He’s exhausted.’

  ‘Did Beria say anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I do hate that man. He’s repulsive, Hercules. How can you work with him?’

  ‘The Revolution needs people like him. He’s our most capable Bolshevik manager, whatever his faults.’

  ‘He’s a rapist, a criminal.’

  ‘Tamriko!’ He sighed. ‘Let’s be grateful that I am friendly with him now, of all times.’

  ‘Oh God!’ So George was in Beria’s hands. Her eyes filled with tears. ‘I can’t sleep, Hercules, I’m so anxious. Usually I love my classes but the school is like a hornets’ nest. I look at George’s seat . . . and Andrei, Vlad, Minka – all absent! And sweet Rosa. I want to cry. The children can’t concentrate either; some are terrified, some are queuing up to denounce their friends. The common room feels . . . like it did in the thirties. Dr Rimm is up to something . . .’ She hesitated to share the petty intrigues of the common room with her husband, but she couldn’t stop herself, and out it all came.

  ‘How very familiar,’ he said afterwards with a thin smile. ‘It’s like the Politburo in miniature.’

  ‘I miss George bitterly, and he’s not even my son. How are you finding it?’

  ‘I don’t sleep a lot. For once, Stalin’s schedule suits me.’

  ‘You were so strong about Vanya . . .’

  ‘Listen, Tamriko,’ said Satinov tersely. ‘You must hold the line. Especially at school.’

  ‘But Mariko is asking for George, and Marlen too.’

  ‘You must tell them not to. George and his friends will be well treated and home soon. They are simply witnesses. Two children are dead. They have to investigate. Find out what happened. That’s all.’

  ‘Then why is it so secret?’

  ‘It’s the way we Bolsheviks do things.’

  ‘But you’re one of the most powerful men in the country, so why can’t you speak to someone? Find out when George is coming home?’

  ‘Stalin is dead set against any favouritism.’

  And that’s supposed to make me feel better? Tamara thought. ‘Of course,’ she replied.

  ‘Look, we built Lenin’s state, we won the war. When you chop wood, chips fly.’

  Not that damn slogan again! But she nodded submissively.

  Satinov stopped. ‘I’ve got to go.’ He kissed her forehead and she watched him enter the Kremlin through the Spassky Gate.

  Sometimes, she thought, it’s a lovely thing to be married to an iron hero; sometimes, it’s just too painful for words.

  Beria collapsed wheezily by the side of his new girl, his green-grey man-breasts hanging pendulously like a camel’s buttocks. What a session! Then the vertushka, the special Kremlin line, rang. Doesn’t a man get a moment’s peace? he thought, picking it up.

  ‘Comrade Beria?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘Comrade Stalin expects you,’ said the expressionless voice of Poskrebyshev. The line went dead.

  It was five past midnight but in Stalin’s world, it was the middle of the day. Beria dressed quickly in his usual garish Georgian shirt and loose jacket but then turned to look one last time at the fourteen-year-old girl lying naked on his bed, the skin of her flat belly a little flushed and creased by his weight.

  ‘Colonel Nadaraia will drive you home,’ he said softly, sitting beside her for a moment. Thank God he had managed to get his pox cleared up before he found this treasure. But he had to lose weight! Leaping around with a girl this age tired a man out. Memo to Comrade Beria: eat more salad! His hand actually trembled as he stroked her long hair, the satin of her lower back. ‘But first Colonel Nadaraia is going to show you the apartment I’ve chosen for you and your mother.’

  ‘Oh Lavrenti, thank you! How amazing. Mama will be so happy.’

  ‘She will,’ he agreed. He knew her mother. She had been his mistress first.

 
‘You’re pleased with me, aren’t you?’ she asked, frowning sweetly.

  ‘Yes, yes I am. See you tomorrow.’

  I am really very taken with her, he thought as his Packard raced through the Spassky Gate in the Kremlin and round to the Little Corner of the triangular Yellow Palace. Yes, this perfect girl is melting the heart of one of the hardest men in our carniverous era.

  Beria took the lift to the second floor, showed his pass to two sets of guards (even he was not exempt) and hurried down the interminable corridors with the blue carpet held in place by brass rings set in the parquet. Two more checkpoints, and finally he was handing in his Nagan pistol to the guards outside Comrade Stalin’s office.

  Two man-sized globes stood by the doors. A couple of ministers and several generals were waiting stiffly in the ante-room, grown men holding their papers on their knees like frightened schoolchildren. Quite an appropriate analogy, thought Beria, as schoolchildren were one of things he had come to discuss.

  He was no longer so impressed with the Great Stalin though. He had seen Stalin’s dire mistakes in the early weeks of the war, his obstinacy, his panic, the waste of millions of lives; yes, Stalin would not have won the war without his help. Didn’t Stalin realize that he, Beria, and the Organs had held the state together? Beria saw himself not just as a Chekist, but as the most capable statesman in the entire leadership.

  The old sot doesn’t appreciate my talents, he thought, although he now thinks himself a genius and never stops boasting!

  ‘The Master will see you now,’ said Poskrebyshev, the livid red skin on his face wizened as if he had been burnt. The two men did not like each other: Poskrebyshev was a lowly cringing ink-shitter who hated Beria, and blamed him for the execution in 1939 of his beloved young wife after which he continued to serve Stalin loyally. Beria couldn’t tell him, of course, that although he had brought Stalin the evidence that his wife had Trotskyite connections, it was Stalin who had ordered her killing.

  As Poskrebyshev, in tunic and britches, escorted him through the short corridor that led to the double doors, Beria asked quietly, ‘Is it a good evening?’ He meant: Is Stalin in a good mood?

  ‘It’s a beautiful summer’s night,’ replied Poskrebyshev, meaning: Yes he is. ‘He’s going to look at his new uniforms. Here they are!’

  Three strapping young men, athletes all, entered the ante-chamber wearing flamboyant cream, braided, golden uniforms that wouldn’t have been out of place in an Offenbach opera. One even had a golden cloak. In their wake shuffled Lerner, the tailor, his nimble white-tipped fingers a-twitch with tape measure and chalk.

  ‘Very smart,’ chuckled Beria.

  ‘Stand over there,’ said Poskrebyshev to the youths. He then lifted one of his many phones and said: ‘Comrade Stalin, Lerner’s here. The uniforms.’

  Sometimes life was just too absurd, Beria reflected as the double doors opened and Stalin emerged, drawn in the face, his grey hair standing on end as if razor cut. He was wearing a plain tunic with just his marshal’s shoulderboards and a single Order of Lenin.

  ‘Who are they?’ he asked gruffly, looking at the youths. ‘What are these peacocks doing here?’ The three models saluted. Lerner bowed.

  ‘The generalissimo’s uniforms for your approval, Comrade Stalin,’ said Poskrebyshev. ‘Lerner’s here to show you the finer details.’

  Lerner, who’d started work sewing the Tsar’s uniforms, bowed again.

  ‘Comrade Stalin is grateful to you, Lerner,’ Stalin said, always polite to ‘service workers’. But to Beria and Poskrebyshev, he snarled: ‘Whose idea was this? Yours, Lavrenti? Well, they’re not right for me. I need something more modest. Lerner, do you want me to look like a doorman or a bandmaster?’ He turned and went back into his office.

  ‘You’re designing for Comrade Stalin not Hermann Göring!’ hissed Beria to Lerner. ‘It’s back to the drawing-board!’

  Lerner wrung his hands and backed away into the ante-chamber.

  As Poskrebyshev closed the doors behind him, Beria entered Stalin’s spacious room with its ruffled white blinds covering most of the windows. On the far wall were portraits of Marx and Lenin and the latter’s death mask. A long table with twenty seats, each with notebooks and ink blotters, filled the centre. At the far end was a desk with an extension holding about eight Bakelite telephones and a small table at right angles that formed a T-shape. The desk was very neat with scarcely anything on it except a blotter, an ashtray with a pipe that contained a lit cigarette smoking in its bowl, and a glass of steaming tea. Behind was a grey safe as large as a man and a small door whence Stalin now appeared, bearing a bottle of Armenian cognac. He sat down at the desk, poured two teaspoons of the spirit into the tea which he stirred and then looked up.

  ‘Gamajoba.’ He often spoke Georgian to Beria when they were alone. ‘What have got for me?’

  ‘Much to report, Josef Vissarionovich.’

  ‘What’s the plan for the German trip?’

  Beria opened the leather portfolio and brought out some papers. Even after all these years, all their shared schemes, triumphs of war and construction, and their little secrets of ‘black work’, murder and torture, Stalin still treated Beria like a trusted servant who specialized in dirty jobs. Yes, there had been family holidays on the Black Sea – Stalin liked Beria’s wife Nina and trusted his son Sergo – but still Beria felt under-appreciated. Just in January, at one of the dinners in Yalta, Stalin had introduced him to President Roosevelt as ‘my Himmler’. It was at that moment that he started to hate Stalin. The drunken braggart! Where would Stalin be without him?

  ‘The meetings with the American President and British Prime Minister are set to begin on the seventeenth of July,’ said Beria.

  ‘I’ll arrive last. Let the others arrive first,’ Stalin said.

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘I miss Roosevelt. This Truman’s not a patch on Roosevelt. As for Churchill, he’ll reach into your pocket to steal a kopeck; yes, even a kopeck.’

  ‘Everything is ready for you in Berlin,’ Beria told him. ‘The route to Potsdam is 1,923 kilometres. To provide proper security, 1,515 MVD/MGB operatives and 17,409 MVD troops are placed as follows: in USSR, 6 men per kilometre; in Poland, 10 men per kilometre; in Germany, 15 per kilometre. On the route, 8 armoured trains will patrol. Seven MVD regiments and 900 bodyguards will protect you. Inner security by the 6th Department will function in three concentric circles of 2,041 men and—’

  ‘All right,’ said Stalin, waving his hand. He relit the pipe, puffing clouds of smoke and watching them waft up, his eyes moist slits, almost closed.

  ‘It’s all in the memo here.’ Beria handed over some typed sheets.

  ‘I don’t want honour guards and brass bands when I arrive. I mean it. I’m tired.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘Anything more about the new American weapon?’

  ‘The nuclear device. Our agents in the British Foreign Office report that it is almost complete. It is possible America will use it against the Japanese. It has astonishing destructive power.’

  ‘Keep me closely informed. Now, what about the schoolchildren?’

  ‘We have made some progress . . .’

  ‘Some of them are with you?’

  Beria knew that ‘with you’ meant in his prisons. ‘Yes, four of them,’ and he gave their names.

  ‘One of Satinov’s boys, eh? What were they playing at?’

  ‘We’ve investigated, and discovered that it was the girl – Marshal Shako’s daughter – who shot the Blagov boy, Nikolasha.’

  ‘Ah – Romeo and Juliet, is that it?’

  ‘She was in love with him. But he was infatuated with another girl, Serafima Romashkina – you know, the actress’s daughter?’

  ‘As I thought. A love triangle.’

  ‘You were right. When Rosa Shako found out Ambassador Blagov was being posted abroad and the boy with him, something snapped and she shot him.’

  ‘And then herself?’ Suic
ide was a sensitive subject with Stalin: his wife Nadya had shot herself. A long silence. ‘Nadya would be forty-three now.’ Stalin sighed and then collected himself. Silence. Just the mellow puckering of an old man puffing on a pipe.

  Beria waited. He knew Stalin was thinking about the Children’s Case. Beria had no wish to interrogate teenagers. It was messy, too close somehow to his own beloved son who had also attended School 801. ‘They’re just harmless children. Let’s release them,’ he was tempted to say. But he and Stalin knew better than anyone that there was no tool on earth as powerful in the management of men as a threat to their children. He raised his cloudy colourless eyes to meet Stalin’s remorseless gaze.

  ‘You said they were in fancy dress?’ A tigerish grin.

  ‘Correct,’ said Beria. Stalin tapped his pipe. Now he was waiting. Beria shuffled his papers and read from Kobylov’s report. ‘“Both dead children were members of a secret group named the Fatal Romantics’ Club. Covert chosen membership. Clandestine meetings in graveyards. Obsession with romance and death.”’

  ‘Were they reading Dracula?’ Stalin asked, puzzled.

  ‘Pushkin.’

  ‘At least they were studying good literature.’

  ‘As you saw at once, it’s a teenage love story. An old chestnut. Should we release the children now?’ Immediately Beria regretted his words.

  ‘Do you know what they were doing?’

  ‘Kobylov says they were playing something called the Game.’

  ‘And Kobylov didn’t think to find out what this Game was? And where did Rosa Shako get the gun?’ Beria knew that Stalin had never forgiven his brother-in-law for giving his wife the pistol that she used to shoot herself. ‘There’s more to do in the Children’s Case.’

  Stalin leaned back in his chair and pressed a button that rang a bell outside.

  Poskrebyshev opened the door and stood to attention, notebook raised, pencil at the ready. ‘Yes, Josef Vissarionovich?’

  ‘Sasha, let’s invite some comrades to watch a movie and have a snack. Call Comrade Satinov and the rest of the Seven.’