One Night in Winter

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  ‘I’ve heard that Khrushchev is the best dancer we have!’ cried Beria.

  ‘The very best!’ added Malenkov.

  Zhdanov hiccuped. He was deathly white. He never joined in such horseplay. He was a serious man.

  ‘Show us,’ ordered Stalin.

  ‘I can’t . . . I mustn’t . . . Not after such a banquet!’ said Khrushchev anxiously.

  ‘I think you’ll survive,’ laughed Stalin. ‘Comrades, let’s vote on it. Who wishes to see if Comrade Khrushchev can dance the gopak?’

  Satinov raised his hand. Beria, Poskrebyshev, Zhdanov, Molotov copied him.

  ‘Unanimous!’ declared Stalin.

  ‘Dance!’ shouted Beria, who’d already begun to clap.

  ‘It’s a Politburo order!’ teased Stalin.

  The others – everyone except Stalin – also clapped in time, chanting: ‘Khrushchev dance! Khrushchev dance!’

  Khrushchev looked at Stalin, who shrugged apologetically and opened his hands. Khrushchev got to his feet and, raising his hands and bending his knees, started to dance the gopak.

  ‘You’re like a cow on ice!’ Stalin tapped out the tune. ‘No sense of rhythm at all, Nikita. Sit down now!’

  Khrushchev slumped panting into his seat.

  Beria, who was serving as the tamada, the toastmaster at a Georgian feast, raised a series of toasts to dancers male and female – especially female.

  Stalin was focusing on Zhdanov. ‘You’re sitting there very virtuously like Christ himself but you didn’t drink much.’

  ‘He should drink a forfeit shot,’ said Beria. Satinov knew Beria hated Zhdanov, Stalin’s companion in intellectual matters. Stalin’s choice as successor.

  Streams of sweat ran down Zhdanov’s face, and Satinov could see he was ill. ‘The Kremlevka says I have to refrain. It’s my heart,’ he explained.

  ‘The Kremlevka? The lady doctor there?’ asked Stalin.

  ‘Dr Dashka Dorova.’

  ‘Taking orders from women eh? Well, you obey your lady doctor,’ said Stalin with a grin. ‘Women with ideas are like herrings!’ He hated independent women.

  ‘Comrade Poskrebyshev also didn’t drink that last toast properly,’ sneaked Beria.

  ‘Is that true, Sasha?’ asked Stalin.

  ‘I did. Didn’t you see?’

  ‘The rules are that Comrade Poskrebyshev must drink a forfeit: three shots in one!’ said Beria.

  Stalin raised his eyebrows, smiling. Beria filled a tumbler with vodka and Malenkov, his sidekick, delivered it to Poskrebyshev, who stood up. Taking a breath, he downed it: gulp gulp gulp. Flushed, he tottered. A hiccup convulsed his body, and he ran for the French windows, threw them open and vomited into the fish pond outside. Beria started to chortle.

  ‘Sasha’s got the hardest head I ever knew,’ said Stalin, trying not to laugh. But then his expression suddenly changed. ‘I think you’re overdoing it, Beria. Stop bullying people at my table. I don’t like it. You’re lowering the tone here!’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Beria. ‘I apologize.’

  ‘Go and check he’s all right.’

  Beria pulled himself up and followed Poskrebyshev outside into the grey light.

  ‘I think it’s bedtime.’ Stalin stood up, slightly unsteady on his feet. Leaning on the doorframe, he went out on to the porch at the front. Guards in white suits stood like statues in the illuminated gardens. The sun was rising over Moscow.

  The leaders staggered on to the porch, stiff-legged, bleary-eyed and as pale as a plate of kasha. Satinov thought he had never seen an unhealthier gaggle of middle-aged men outside a hospital ward.

  He looked back and saw Beria trying to heave Poskrebyshev down the corridor from the dining room. ‘Bring the bodies out!’ Stalin shouted.

  Together they dragged Poskrebyshev outside, past Stalin, down the steps and pushed him into the back of his car.

  As they did so, Beria took Satinov’s hand, squeezed it tightly and whispered so close to his ear that he wet it with his saliva: ‘George is fine. The children are coming home.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ called out Stalin.

  ‘I’m telling him that Poskrebyshev’s going to vomit again,’ said Beria.

  ‘Pah!’ said Stalin hoarsely.

  Satinov felt weak with relief. The Organs had investigated the shooting, and that was that. He would not reprimand George again, he decided. The boy had been punished enough.

  The road was a deep mauve, the sky, lilac with shards of pink: a perfect Russian summer dawn. The sweet scent of flowers and resin emanated from the woods. A peacock in Stalin’s garden trilled a high-pitched leee-at! Leee-at! A nightingale cooed its last notes.

  Stalin picked a rose, smelled it with his eyes closed and handed it to Satinov. ‘For Tamriko,’ he said.

  Satinov understood. It was for George.

  20

  AT SEVEN TWENTY that morning, Dr Rimm, the Deputy Director of School 801, nicknamed the Hummer by the children, was waiting in the janitor’s storeroom. He felt in his waters that he was about to receive a revelation. There had been no love letters from the enigmatic ‘Tatiana’ for a while, not since the shooting. But he wasn’t thinking of this. He was thinking of the note that he’d been sent two days earlier.

  He had been in his classroom preparing for Communist ethics when he’d noticed the envelope peeping out of his copy of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course. When he saw it, his heart had leaped: was it another love letter? Those letters had kept him alive for the last term. Rimm was long divorced from a Communist Party instructor whom he’d met on a Pioneers camping trip to the Crimea – and he had not had a girlfriend since. But surely he deserved happiness like anyone else? (Why did women so adore Benya Golden? What did that effete, skirt-chasing smooth-talker have that Rimm didn’t? Didn’t they know he was tainted?) The feeling that someone – he was sure he knew who it was – loved him had restored his battered pride. He knew their passion was impossible, at least for now, but this aura of love gave him confidence in his ambitions.

  The envelope had been addressed in a childish hand. ‘Tatiana’s’ love letters were always typed in capitals. But the disappointment had passed swiftly. The school was on the rack: two children dead, more arrested, all of them the scions of Bolshevik grandees. Out of the tragedy, he was convinced, the rottenness of Director Medvedeva’s headship would be exposed. She had made mistakes, allowing bacterial heresies to spread through the school. He had warned her about the peril of employing Golden as a teacher and allowing the Fatal Romantics’ faction to indulge in bourgeois romanticism. And he had been proven right in the most terrible way possible. Only he could cleanse the school of her un-Bolshevik, unpatriotic mistakes. He opened the note. I need to speak to a person in authority. May we meet by the janitor’s storeroom 7.30 a.m.? A young comrade.

  ‘Tra-la-la Stalin . . .’ he burst out singing his favourite song. He had known instantly with a surge of sap in his gut that this note heralded his moment.

  So now he was waiting there. He had woken at 4 a.m., heart palpitating, walked around Moscow since dawn, taken a coffee at the Moskva Hotel, just to celebrate. He had not served in the war (too old, and the problems with his hips) but he longed to be a spy or a leader. He knew people in the Organs and they appreciated him. And now, he was the only honest and vigilant Communist at the school, ready to do his duty. What time was it now? Seven forty and no one had come. Inside the storeroom, he began to hum.

  The door opened and he jumped. It was the janitor, that hoary Tajik in brown overalls.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ the janitor asked.

  Rimm hadn’t thought how it would look: an important teacher like him skulking in a cupboard full of bleach and lavatory paper.

  ‘How dare you!’ he barked. ‘Get on with your work! And not a word to anyone! Or you’ll be on the next train home to Turkestan!’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ said the janitor, backing away quickly.
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br />   Five minutes later, Rimm opened the storeroom door to get some air – and there he was, a small dark boy approaching with the tentative steps and lithe vigilance of a night creature. When he saw Rimm, he froze.

  The covert craft of a spy comes naturally to me, Rimm thought, as he led the way into his classroom. Closing the door, he sat at his desk and pointed to the front row of desks. The boy sat.

  ‘Demian Dorov, why did you write me that note?’ he asked.

  Demian seemed terrified as he stared at Rimm.

  ‘If anyone asks, we can say I was tutoring you on Stakhanovite poetry,’ Rimm said more gently. ‘Now, you’ve been very brave coming to see me.’

  Demian nodded and relaxed a little, but still he didn’t speak.

  ‘What have you got?’ Rimm asked again.

  Demian shook his head. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I . . . I was just joking.’

  Think like a Chekist, like a Bolshevik, Rimm told himself. Analyse your informant and his family. The key will lie there.

  The Dorovs. The father Genrikh was the Chairman of the Party’s Control Commission, an admirable enforcer of discipline and morals; the mother, that comely doctor and Health Minister. They had four children. After a son in the army, the daughter Minka had her mother’s looks but was un-Party-minded, frivolous and impertinent. The Organs had been right to pull her in. The little boy Senka was clever but sickeningly spoilt by his mother. So Demian Dorov, who resembled his father and tried to emulate him by leading the school’s Young Pioneers, was stuck between the two favourites. Rimm suddenly warmed to him: Demian too was unappreciated. The other children nicknamed him the Weasel but perhaps he too had seen the poison of bourgeois romanticism seeping into the rotten school . . .

  Rimm came down from his seat on the platform and sat at the neighbouring desk to Demian.

  ‘You’ve been noticed by the Party and I’ve always known that you will go far.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Demian. Rimm could see he was blushing a little.

  ‘I don’t think your parents have really respected you enough. They’re too busy with their important work – or in your mother’s case with your younger brother, her favourite. Am I right?’

  Demian nodded slightly.

  ‘If you did something for the Party, I think we could change that,’ continued Rimm. ‘Let me help you.’ But Demian had begun to fidget nervously again. ‘You have a choice,’ Rimm said slowly. ‘You can either be a hero, just like the schoolboy Pavlik Morozov who denounced his wicked parents, and tell me everything – or you can hold back a secret. But if you do, and we find out, you could destroy your family.’ He paused, giving his words time to sink in. ‘Tell me what you know. The highest authorities in the Party are interested. Now!’

  Demian’s eyes blinked quickly. Rimm put his hand on the boy’s narrow shoulders. ‘I know what righteous Bolshevik deeds you are capable of.’ Finally, reluctantly, Demian reached into his satchel and pulled it out. An exercise book with velvet covers.

  ‘I recognize this book. It was Nikolasha’s. Where did you get it?’ asked Rimm.

  ‘Senka found it on the night of the deaths and he took it home.’

  ‘He hid it?’

  ‘Under the mattress in his room.’

  ‘He must have taken it right under the eyes of the Organs. Have you read it?’

  ‘No.’

  Rimm didn’t believe him. He opened the book up and for a moment, he was disappointed. ‘The Velvet Book of Love.’ A schoolboy’s scribblings. But as he glanced at its contents – lists of names, chronicles of meetings, strange rituals – he sensed there was treasure here.

  ‘Demian, you’ve done a wonderful thing for the Party. Rest assured this will be our secret. You were right to bring this to me. Now go on with your day. And tell no one of this.’

  Demian scuttled away, leaving Rimm with the book. Thoughtfully, he walked over to the new Lenin Library and sat at a desk in one of the remotest stacks. Should he show the notebook to Director Medvedeva? Possibly, but she might refuse to take it further. Or she could inform on him for being a meddler in an official investigation. She had every reason to suppress this for her own ends. Besides he, Dr Rimm, was the secretary of the school’s Communist Party committee while she was a mere member.

  Furthermore, if he kept the exercise book within the school, it would remain a school matter while this case surely concerned higher authorities. Should he take it to Demian’s father, Genrikh Dorov, Chairman of the Central Control Commission? In normal circumstances, yes, but his daughter Minka was under investigation and Demian’s role in procuring the book might compromise Comrade Dorov’s ability to pass judgement.

  Perhaps he should take the information to Comrade Satinov himself. Comrade Satinov would say, ‘Comrade Rimm, someone wants to see you, to hear it from your own lips,’ and a door in a Kremlin office would open, and there would be the Great Stalin himself, smoking his pipe. ‘Comrade Rimm, we meet at last. I’ve heard so much about you,’ Stalin would say. But no, no, Satinov’s wife was a teacher and his son George had also been arrested.

  So it was clear. Rimm would have to handle this himself. In short, this was a case for the Knights of the Revolution.

  Stalin lay on the sofa in the wood-panelled little study of the Nearby Dacha, feeling weary, hung-over and liverish. It was early evening. He listlessly opened a Zola novel, then read the script for the movie Ivan the Terrible Part Two. He did not like it. It must be rewritten. Who should do it?

  A knock and that soft lullaby voice: ‘Coffee for a weary man who never gets any peace!’

  It was his dear housekeeper, Valechka Istomina. She poured him a cup, just as he liked it, with two sugars. He looked around his study. Every surface was covered with piles of books and literary journals that he loved to read. But now, wearing his favourite old tunic (darned by Valechka in three places), soft kid-leather boots, baggy canvas trousers like an artist, and smoking a Herzegovina Flor cigarette, he tried to rustle up the strength to go into the Kremlin. Soon he must leave for the conference at Potsdam. Do I have the strength? he asked himself.

  The vertushka rang. It was Poskrebyshev. ‘Comrade Abakumov wants to see you. He says something new has come up.’

  Something new. Stalin relished a fresh gambit in the game of shadows that was counter-intelligence. It was his natural habitat. Even before the Revolution, even in the underground, he had mastered the game of agents and double agents, of cash in envelopes, shots in the night, daggers in the back. The Organs were the only part of government, except foreign and military policy, that he would never relinquish.

  A car drew up. One of the bodyguards knocked. Abakumov had arrived.

  Stalin stood up, his knees unsteady. He felt dizzy; his vision blurred and there was a frightening tightness in the back of his neck. He had to steady himself by grabbing his desk.

  ‘Send him in,’ he said.

  Victor Abakumov stood in the lobby in a general’s uniform, looking the other way. Stalin could tell he was expecting him to come from the big office across the hall. It was always good to keep the security people on their toes.

  ‘Come on in, Comrade Abakumov!’

  ‘Oh.’ Abakumov turned, startled. ‘Good day, Comrade Stalin.’

  Stalin led him into the bigger study where there was more space. He nodded at one of the divans and took his own seat behind the desk. ‘What have you got for me?’ he asked. ‘How’s the cleansing and filtration of traitors in the Baltics?’

  ‘We’ve arrested and deported thirty thousand Estonians this week,’ said Abakumov. ‘But I came about the Children’s Case.’

  ‘So you’re sticking your snout into Comrade Beria’s trough again?’

  ‘That is not my aim.’ Abakumov knew that Stalin was delighted that he was interfering in Beria’s ministries. The MGB reported to Beria but Abakumov, Chief of Military Counter-intelligence, SMERSH (Death to Spies), reported directly to Stalin. And Stalin had added his name to the distribution list for
documents on the Children’s Case. ‘Thank you for your trust, Comrade Stalin.’

  ‘But I don’t think this one’s for you. The young hooligans are about to be released. I think we should forgive them.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve come about. My operatives have discovered an aspect of the case that has been hidden from the Central Committee.’

  ‘What aspect?’ If there was anything Stalin hated, it was to have important matters concealed from himself.

  ‘The political aspect.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Comrade Kobylov reports that the children’s romantic club was harmless. But I believe it was more serious than that. Much more serious.’

  Stalin was now very awake, and feeling much better. His vision was clearer, and the pain in his neck had vanished.

  ‘You base this on what exactly, Comrade Abakumov?’

  ‘This.’ Abakumov opened his briefcase and took out what appeared to be a school notebook with red velvet glued on to the front and back.

  ‘I haven’t seen one of those since I last signed Svetlana’s homework,’ Stalin said.

  ‘It belonged to Nikolasha Blagov, the boy shot on the bridge.’

  ‘And how have you got it?’

  ‘It seems that Comrade Kobylov’ – Stalin knew that when Abakumov named Kobylov, he really meant Beria – ‘may have deliberately ignored this piece of evidence. It came to us because apparently Comrade Kobylov’ – Beria again – ‘was uninterested.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The two Chekists appointed by Comrade Beria to investigate the Children’s Case were slack and reduced their vigilance. They allowed this vital piece of evidence to be pilfered from the murder scene, obviously in order to conceal it from the forces of Soviet justice. The extraordinary intelligence-gathering of SMERSH operatives uncovered this a few hours ago via an informant – a teacher named Rimm within School 801 – and I have brought it straight to you.’

  ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Comrade Stalin, permission to approach to show you a page that I think is relevant?’