One Night in Winter

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  A stark, white villa in Babelsberg, Berlin. Stalin lay on a divan identical to the one in his Nearby Dacha in a library filled with the same books and journals. His first meetings with Churchill and Truman were set for later that day and he wore his new generalissimo’s uniform: a white tunic with a single star and golden epaulettes, creased blue trousers with a red stripe, and laced bootkins, instead of the baggy trousers tucked into high boots he generally favoured.

  Outside the room, he heard the hum of the headquarters of an empire: motors revved, phones rang, boots clipped on marble floors, young officials bustled, typewriters clattered.

  He was not quite alone, however: his son Vasily stood before him in full uniform, almost to attention, as if he was not family at all but a lowly air force general.

  ‘Sit, sit,’ said Stalin.

  Vasily sat nervously.

  ‘How are you, Vaska?’ Stalin said softly. He was about to ask how Vasily’s poor wife and child were doing but it seemed a waste of time. He knew exactly how they were, and they were not happy.

  ‘Fine, Father.’

  ‘As you can see, I’m busy. No one can do a thing on their own, you know. You tell them what to do and they either ignore you or screw it up.’

  ‘Of course, Father. Only you can decide anything.’

  ‘You can see I’m weary. Not quite well.’

  ‘You look very well to me, Father. Congratulations on the new rank, generalissimo.’

  ‘Pah!’ Stalin waved this aside disdainfully. ‘We’ve got a lot to do here.’ He knew from his British agents that Truman would tell him in the next two days that America had its nuclear bomb and that they would now drop it on Japan. He would pretend that he knew nothing about it. If its awesome power was not exaggerated, he would have to accelerate the Soviet nuclear programme to get his own bomb at breakneck speed. A titanic endeavour. Only his best organizer, Beria, could pull it off . . . Stalin had won the war, he had toiled sixteen hours a day for four years, sometimes, in the early crises, sleeping on a campbed in his office for days on end. But now he had defeated Germany and conquered half of Europe. And just when he had triumphed, the Americans had got this new bomb and he would have to start all over again. His enemies were still strong and he would have to be harsher, stronger, more vigilant than ever. No one must find out how ill he was.

  ‘Father . . .’ Vasily started and Stalin, whose mind had been far away, focused on the sickly, grey face of his son. It was the face of an alcoholic. Like Stalin’s father.

  ‘Vaska,’ said Stalin, suddenly colder and businesslike. He didn’t have much time and the boy bored, shamed and irritated him in equal measure. What would his late wife Nadya have thought of this pathetic ne’er-do-well? She’d have blamed him, of course. ‘You’ve been mentioned in connection with the Children’s Case. The Chekists say you were chasing Sophia Zeitlin’s daughter. You’re a general now, and a married man. I’ve already cashiered you and demoted you once. Stop chasing skirt, stop drinking. You’re making a fool of yourself and me. They’ll ask you some questions. Answer them properly so I don’t have to hear about this again.’

  Vasily hung his head. ‘Yes, Father, I promise. But this case involves Marshal Shako’s daughter, Rosa, and I wanted to talk to you about him.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It’s about our fighter planes and how they crash far too often.’

  Stalin sat up abruptly: ‘What are you saying?’ Military technology was his own speciality, so if things went wrong, it meant either incompetence or sabotage. Both were crimes.

  ‘Our planes, specially Yak and MiG fighters, crash seven times more frequently than American Hurricanes or British Spitfires. Many pilots have been killed and there is considerable anger in the air force.’

  ‘Why haven’t you told me this before?’ Now Stalin was paying Vasily his fullest attention, and Vasily, who seconds earlier had been no more than a delinquent weakling, now basked in the blazing sunlight of his focus.

  ‘I reported this in full to Marshal Shako and Aircraft Production Minister Titorenko.’

  ‘Their reaction?’

  ‘They basically suggested that I conceal the evidence from you. To push ahead with production. To sacrifice more machines and pilots.’

  Stalin was furious – he was thinking about those patriotic young pilots crashing in those faulty planes, and the criminals who had sabotaged them. He took a breath. He had to keep calm, preserve himself for his sacred mission in world history.

  ‘You’re not blackening the name of a Soviet hero like Shako just because he complained to me about your behaviour? That would be unforgivable in my son, Vaska.’

  ‘No, this is sabotage,’ replied Vasily. ‘Something must be done.’

  Stalin immediately saw how this revelation dovetailed neatly into one of his most urgent concerns. Perhaps the boy wasn’t such a fool after all.

  He padded to the desk and lifted the special phone to Poskrebyshev who sat outside the door: ‘Get Abakumov back in here.’ He turned to Vasily. ‘Wait outside, boy.’

  When Abakumov entered, he bowed to Stalin and slightly less obsequiously to Vasily, who passed him on the way out.

  ‘Have you visited Hitler’s Chancellery?’ asked Stalin.

  ‘Yes, Comrade Stalin.’

  ‘I was planning to take a look but then I changed my mind. Leave that to Churchill and Truman. Comrade Stalin doesn’t make tours.’

  He told him about Vasily’s allegations. ‘Check out Shako and Titorenko. Do whatever you need.’ Abakumov knew that when Stalin said, ‘Check out,’ he meant, ‘Arrest.’

  ‘Their children are mixed up in the Children’s Case,’ said Abakumov.

  ‘Oh, those poor children.’ Stalin lit a cigarette and the fingers of blue smoke curled themselves around him. ‘But they have to be punished. Their families could well be rotten to the core.’

  ‘Comrade Stalin, Comrade Satinov is in charge of the aircraft industry. Should I check him out?’

  ‘No. Find out what you can. A bit of pressure won’t do any harm. Do we have Comrade Satinov’s attention? If he’s guilty he’ll answer to the Central Committee, but he’s a hard-working comrade.’ Stalin paused, deep in thought. ‘You know some of our generals behave as if they won the war on their own.’

  ‘You won the war, Comrade Stalin,’ said Abakumov.

  Stalin scowled at him. ‘Don’t talk nonsense, Abakumov. The people won the war, the people.’

  ‘Yes of course, Comrade Stalin, but many of our generals are corrupt. Their heads have been turned by titles and applause. Their apartments are filled with paintings, rugs and furniture brought in trains from all over Europe.’

  Stalin grunted his agreement. ‘We Bolsheviks don’t tolerate corruption. Get back to Moscow and take off the silk gloves. Check out the generals and mount your prisoners at once. Vasily says pilots barely dare fly their planes at present. A crime.’

  Stalin half closed his eyes. Abakumov was a blockhead, but this time, he seemed to have understood his coded semaphores. Didn’t all the heroes of history – Genghis Khan, Ivan the Terrible, Nadir Shah, Napoleon – talk in riddles?

  Abakumov saluted. ‘I’ll report, Comrade Stalin.’ He headed for the door.

  ‘Oh, and Comrade Abakumov?’ The Chekist turned back. ‘When I was a boy at the seminary, I was always curious about my friends, so I studied their parents. I could learn everything about the parents by talking to the children. Remember this, won’t you, when you’re back in Moscow?’

  It was late in the evening when Hercules Satinov got home, but as soon as he opened his door, Tamara threw herself into his arms as if she had been waiting for him. She was so distraught that she could scarcely speak, and her skin was mottled with weeping. In the background he could hear Leka the housemaid sobbing too.

  ‘You’ve got to do something. You’ve got to talk to Stalin!’ Tamara cried.

  The Name made Satinov’s cheeks tighten and his eyes keen. He took his wife’s hands and led her
into his study. George had been in the Lubianka for weeks now, and long days had passed since they had thought he was going to be released. And still no word.

  ‘Call Stalin!’ she was shouting. ‘Now! I’ll call him myself!’

  It had to be the children – or was it . . . no: had something happened to George? He had lost one son already. Could he bear the loss of another?

  ‘Tamriko, calm down. Tell me what’s happened.’

  ‘They’ve taken Mariko! She’s six, Hercules. Get her released! How will she survive in there?’

  Oh my God: little Mariko, his only daughter, the jewel in his crown. A pulse started high on his cheek, and the fury rushed through him. The humiliation stung him. Analyse what this means, he told himself. Put together the pieces of the jigsaw in a game where there are no coincidences.

  Stalin specialized in surprises, and Satinov spent his time predicting them if he could. Earlier that day, Marshal Shako and five other generals had been arrested. He knew this concerned the planes. It was aimed at him as the boss of the aircraft industry. But Mariko! This was unworthy of a Bolshevik, unworthy of Stalin.

  The phone rang. Both of them jumped. Satinov answered it. ‘Satinov. I’m listening . . . Comrade Abakumov, thank you for calling.’ He looked at Tamara and gestured reassuringly as he listened. As he held the phone, Tamara stood up and pressed herself against him, laying her head on his shoulder; he wrapped his other arm around her. ‘Yes, naturally we’re worried . . . Yes Tamara is upset. Mariko is only six, comrade general, she’ll be terrified and—’

  ‘Tell him Mariko doesn’t eat eggs,’ said Tamara. ‘She’s allergic and if she doesn’t have a biscuit at eleven, she feels faint. She doesn’t have her toy dogs, and she can’t sleep without them. Tell him, Hercules!’ But Satinov held up a finger for quiet.

  ‘Comrade general, I know Mariko was on the bridge that night and I appreciate that it is the Organs’ Communist duty to investigate. If Mariko is essential, then yes she must be questioned.’ He listened. ‘I appreciate that . . . Tamara will be there twice at eight a.m. and eight p.m. Thank you, Comrade Abakumov . . . Bolshevik greetings to you too.’

  When he put the phone down, he gripped Tamriko firmly and told her that she would be allowed to visit Mariko in the Lubianka first thing in the morning and twice a day as long as she was being questioned, and she could take a food hamper.

  ‘How can they do this?’ said Tamara. ‘What kind of men are they? Tell Stalin! Call him!’

  She did not know that Stalin was at the Potsdam Conference, his movements a state secret. Satinov held Tamara very tightly, her hair and the nape of her neck against his face, with their sweet smell that reminded him of home and children.

  ‘The Organs act only with the highest authority,’ he said, and this she understood. Abakumov would never have dared to arrest a Politburo member’s little girl without Stalin’s permission.

  ‘Hercules,’ she said softly, ‘how am I going to get through this? I just don’t know if I can. I feel I’m dying inside. I love her so much . . .’ She was weeping in his arms and she seemed so fragile, so exquisitely tiny, that he felt as if he could count every bone in her body. ‘How are we to survive?’

  ‘We will,’ he whispered back, ‘because we have to.’

  ‘Don’t fuck us around any more, Andrei. We think you’re being very stubborn for the son of an Enemy of the People,’ Colonel Komarov told Andrei later that evening. ‘My boss is getting bored with studying Pushkin so either we beat this shit out of you, or you just answer the question.’

  ‘On Pushkin?’

  ‘Yes. They say you’re the scholar on Onegin.’

  What are the Organs up to now? he wondered. Are the Organs setting up a course on poetry? After all, they had departments for everything from tailoring to medicine and gold-mining, so why not Pushkin too? More likely, it was a trick of some sort.

  ‘I don’t know it half as well as some people,’ he said.

  ‘“NV”. What’s it stand for?’

  ‘You said it meant New Leader.’

  ‘Now we think it’s something to do with Onegin.’

  Andrei nodded slowly. ‘I think you may be right. My feeling is that NV may have been some codename for Rosa Shako.’

  ‘That’s convenient,’ chuckled Komarov. ‘She being on the slab with nine grams in her breast.’

  ‘It’s just what I think.’

  ‘Let me help you with your thinking,’ and suddenly Komarov moved very quickly, twisting Andrei’s arm and dragging him by it so that the chair went flying. The door opened and two warders rushed in. They grabbed him as Komarov kicked away his knees, leaving him gasping in agony. ‘Let’s go.’

  Across the corridor and into the room with the two-way mirror they went, the warders holding him so that his arms hurt. In the next room, a woman was reading aloud from a newspaper. When Andrei looked through the glass, he groaned. It was his mother, right here in Lubianka.

  ‘Oh my God, Mama! What are you doing here?’ he called to her.

  ‘She can’t hear you or see you. We’re sick of you brats and our boss has told us to solve it tonight, whatever the cost. If you help us, we’ll let you see your mother. But if you hold back, she’ll get ten years in Kolyma.’ Komarov shrugged. ‘But you know she won’t survive. She’s skin and bone.’ He pulled down a beige blind, stained with dark brown specks. ‘So, Andrei?’

  He turned to face Komarov. Before him stood an uneducated popinjay, insignificant in every respect except that he had the power of life and death over him and his mother.

  ‘NV can only be one person,’ he said. ‘It’s Nina Voronskaya.’

  ‘Nina Voronskaya. Is she at the school? We’ll arrest her right away.’

  ‘No, respected investigator, she’s a fictional character in Onegin, a beautiful society hostess in Petersburg.’

  Komarov frowned. ‘But she can’t be,’ he reasoned. ‘Why would Nikolasha Blagov put her in the notebook if she wasn’t real?’

  Andrei saw how the progress of this case resembled a play in the theatre. None of it was true, and he had no idea how the plotline would conclude. Yet this deadly fantasy could be tilted one way or the other by a word too many here, a piece of bad luck there.

  ‘Hurry up, boy, or the same thing will happen to you that happened to your father. Twenty-five years, remember?’

  ‘Without right of correspondence.’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ Komarov sneered. ‘Without right of correspondence.’

  His laughing sarcasm opened Andrei’s eyes with crystal-clear clarity. His father was no longer amongst the living. He had died right here in Lubianka.

  Andrei had never known why his father had been arrested, but he knew that in 1937–8, thousands of comrades like his father had been executed. He had always presumed that his father had committed some political crime – but it occurred to him, after his own experiences with ‘Soviet justice’, that his father could have been completely innocent. He had probably done nothing and been shot for some fabricated crime – treason or spying or Trotskyism – based on a false denunciation. These revelations, accompanied by the sight of his mother, almost broke him for the first time.

  But tears can lie too. Because for Andrei, survival was all. He had one more option – to play his last card, the one that he hated himself for playing.

  28

  MIDNIGHT IN THE Lubianka. In the middle of darkened Moscow, the lights burned in every window as if it was the hull of a gigantic ship. Victor Abakumov hurried into the Inner Prison, moving with the stiff gait of the profoundly weary. The electric lights burn brightly here, he thought, and no one sleeps soundly in my night kingdom.

  A blue-tabbed officer waited and saluted: ‘She’s here, comrade general!’

  ‘Let me take a look.’ The officer opened a door in the long sterile corridor. Abakumov looked through the window into the interrogation room at the young schoolgirl, still in her school uniform, who sat at the Formica table. Likhachev, smoking a c
igarette, was pacing up and down shouting at her: ‘Come on, you whore, who are you fucking? You little bitch, I ask you again—’ Abakumov flicked off the volume.

  The single desklight lit up the gold threads of her hair. Serafima Romashkina was waiting, playing with her curls, and she looked tired, and too thin. Her lip was cut and swollen – one of my boys went too far, reflected Abakumov. He shook his head to see this glorious creature sitting so forlorn and dejected. He had meant just to take a look before he went in but now, leaning on the wall, lighting up a cigarette and relaxing for the first time in his gruelling day, he was free to stare at her intensely – as both a connoisseur of female beauty and a manipulator, sometimes even a butcher, of men, families, villages, nations.

  She wasn’t as brazen as her famously alluring mother, but even so, he admired the perfect crescent of her white forehead, the heart shape of her face and her arrestingly green eyes with their lush dark eyelashes. This simply adorable girl was in his power, waiting for him and no one else. No wonder those stupid, spoilt schoolfriends had done foolish things to win her favour. But she possessed the last key to their case, a key he needed to unlock without delay.

  Abakumov walked straight into Serafima’s interrogation room. Likhachev sprung to attention.

  ‘I’ll take over here, comrade colonel. Shut the door as you leave.’ Likhachev saluted and vanished; the door closed. Abakumov sat, smoking his cigarette, boots on the desk, eyes fixed on Serafima. She said nothing but something about the way her nostrils flared made his power seem futile. Yes, he could beat her to pulp, he could rape her, but he still wouldn’t possess her.

  ‘I was in Berlin a few hours ago and I had a chance on the flight home to think about you and the case.’ Abakumov sighed huskily.

  ‘You did?’ said Serafima, looking bored.