by Robert Moss
‘But you won’t share that mission. I’m not sure I understand it.’ He recited another verse from Vissotsky’s ballad of the wolves, without translating:
‘The wolf cannot, must not, act in any other way:
See, my hour has already come
He for whom I am destined
Smiles and shoulders his rifle.’
Elaine could make sense of only a few of the words. Her frown deepened when he said, in English but scarcely less obscurely, ‘My mission is reflected in whatever you find in me to love.’
‘And to fear?’
‘Perhaps that too.’
He drove her from Bangladesh to a metro station and sped away without looking back, into a tarpaper dark.
*
‘He did the right thing of course,’ Guy Harrison remarked. ‘By his lights, that is. I’m sorry, old girl.’
‘Being sorry isn’t enough. I may have put him in danger.’
‘We took every conceivable precaution,’ Harrison reminded her. He paused before adding, ‘He seems a remarkable man. It’s the driven men who have always interested me. The ones with a hidden compass. Which way do you suppose he is pointing? You say he’s a man with a mission. Is he a man with an ideology?’
‘No,’ she said quickly, hearing him recite Vissotsky’s line: I have passed beyond the flags. ‘He’s not interested in abstractions. His beliefs are founded in what he has lived. He’s not a communist, or a liberal, or a fascist.’
Harrison glanced at his watch and said, ‘It’s time for the news.’ He twiddled with the dial on his radio, and soon the familiar strains of the theme signal for the BBC World Service filled his cluttered living room.
There was a report about a new atrocity by Iranian kamikaze bombers, and when the announcer said, in his clipped voice: ‘We have just received news of a wave of labor unrest in the Soviet Union, whose leader has not been seen in public for several weeks. An underground trade union that diplomatic observers liken to the Polish Solidarity movement is said to be involved in strike activity in the industrial city of Togliatti.’
The rest of the news was routine: a new wrangle within the European Community over subsidies for French farmers, an anti-nuclear demonstration outside an American base in West Germany, a new guerrilla offensive in Central America.
When the broadcast was over, Elaine said, ‘Guy, do you think the Togliatti business is as serious as they make out?’
‘You mean, a Russian Solidarity? Not much chance, I would think. The last time there was a major strike here, the authorities brought out the tanks and heavy machine guns.’
‘They haven’t managed to kill Solidarity in Poland,’ she pointed out.
‘That’s completely different. Poland is an occupied country. And the Poles have got the Pope on their side. He’s worth a lot of battalions.’
An occupied country. The phrase reminded her of something Sasha had said in New York, trying to explain the state of his country, and his own sense of duty toward it.
‘The people don’t make revolutions in Russia,’ Harrison went on. ‘Revolutions are made in their name. And that’s a different thing altogether.’
‘You don’t think the strike could be a catalyst for something?’
‘What kind of something?’
‘Well —’ She paused. He had mentioned tanks being used to crush a previous strike. She tried to picture Sasha in command of those tanks, and couldn’t. ‘Suppose they brought in the army.’
‘Yes?’
‘And the army didn’t want to obey.’
She expected Guy to brush the suggestion aside in his languid way, but instead he responded as a trained intelligence operative, and pounced. Did Sasha talk to you about it?’
‘No, of course not. I don’t think I ever heard of Togliatti before now.’
‘Mmm.’ He slumped back into his armchair.
She said, ‘How far is Togliatti from Moscow?’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘You don’t need to know. The place is off-bounds for now, for me, and especially for you. All we need is for you to get yourself arrested. Look, I can see you need a change of scene. Go and enjoy the sights. Take a day trip to Novgorod. Go to the Bolshoi. I’ve got a little tout who can always get hold of some good seats. I’ll send in a report and we’ll see what those geniuses in Washington think up next.’
She let him ramble on without contradiction, her thoughts focused on Togliatti and its rumored strike. Before leaving New York, she had met an elderly man, a friend of her father’s, who was active in the cause of Soviet Jews, and he had given her a contact she had had no thought of using until now. Why not seek him out? Why not try to get to Togliatti? The venture would give her a chance to test herself as a reporter. It might bring her into the heart of Sasha’s country, and its turmoil.
And she sensed, rather than thought, that this might be an act of expiation: for a few days, she would share some of the risks that Sasha had to live with every day of his life.
*
When Misha Repnin read out the speech that had been delivered by his fellow auto worker at the funeral in Red Square, there was a groaning and jeering from the men who had gathered in his cramped living room. So Andropov was a true Leninist, a friend of the workers, was he? Well, his much-advertised efficiency drive and his anticorruption campaign hadn’t changed the life of the bosses, not so you’d notice, anyway. But Misha and his comrades on the assembly lines at the giant auto plant at Togliatti had felt the effects, right enough. Now there were sneaks hanging around, ready to rat on a man who showed up a few minutes late, or had a bit of a hangover, or ‘borrowed’ a few trifles from the factory store, or did any of the other things that made life bearable. Thanks to his famous efficiency drive, one of the men at the plant had actually signed his name to a letter in the Komsomol paper denouncing ‘slackness and graft’ among his co-workers. Misha had cornered him during the lunch break and told him that if he did anything like that again, he, Repnin, would fix his gearshift for him.
Coming from Repnin, this wasn’t a threat to take lightly. He was a stocky young man with plenty of muscle to make up for his beer belly. He sported a droopy walrus moustache, like his hero Lech Walesa in Poland. The snitches were told to keep an eye on him, but Misha had a pretty good instinct for who he could trust. At night, he would get a few friends together and turn on his powerful Japanese radio. He could get all the foreign broadcasts — German, British, American — and they would listen to what the world was saying about the changes in Moscow and the war in Afghanistan and the East-West struggle. But what most held their interest was the news from Poland. Whatever the authorities were saying in Moscow, it was clear that the revolt of the Polish workers hadn’t been broken yet.’If the bloody Poles can do it,’ Repnin liked to point out to his friends, ‘if Lech Walesa can set up a free trade union and force the regime to treat him with respect, then why the fuck can’t we do it too? Are we Russians or aren’t we?’
His fighting words were received with more and more sympathy in the months after the new General Secretary was installed. Nobody had any illusions about what he stood for, this old hack puffing his way through a string of cliches. He stood for more of the same, words in place of reforms, government by the same old gang of geriatrics who had been stealing the workers blind. You only had to look around. The food shortages were worse than ever, while they spent a fortune on crocodile tears for Yuri Vladimirovich. Misha hadn’t been able to buy meat or milk at his local shop for months. White bread was almost unobtainable. It was the same all over the country.
‘So why can’t they feed us?’ Repnin would lecture his friends. He was a natural as an orator, and he had been boning up on samizdat leaflets that were passing from hand to hand. ‘Number one, they’re too busy spending money — our money — on tanks and rockets. Number two, they won’t let the farmers be farmers.’
‘Why is that, Misha?’ somebody asked.
‘Because they’re shit-scared. Any fool knows that. Just
suppose they let the farmers start earning an honest living, so they could put a bit away for their families and might have some incentive to do their job right instead of lying around drunk all the time. What would happen? Why, we might have a new class, a class of independent producers. They’ll never allow that. Why do you think Stalin starved the peasants? So there’d be nobody to answer back, nobody who didn’t depend on the state for a meal ticket.’
‘What about Hungary then?’ the same speaker asked. There’d been a lot of talk on the BBC about the so-called Hungarian economic model, and incentives for farm production.
Repnin made a raspberry. ‘They don’t give a shit what the Hungarians do. They’ll go in with tanks, like in ninety-fifty-six, if they get out of hand. But with us, it’s a different matter. They think if they allow one little crack to develop, it will widen into a huge geological fault, and the whole granite system will be blown to bits.’
He was rather proud of this analogy, but it was too high-falutin’ for most of his audience.
‘What are we going to do then, Misha?’ somebody asked almost plaintively.
‘Every time we get a new boss in Moscow,’ Repnin said, ‘he promises to make things better. This time, we ought to show that we’re watching to see if any of the promises are kept. This is the workers’ state, isn’t it? Let’s show them that the workers still have some balls.’
After that, anonymous wall posters started sprouting from the walls around the Lada factory, making fun of the bosses both in Togliatti and in Moscow. Askyerov, who as the man in charge of the transportation sector was at least partly to blame for the food shortages, was ideal for caricature. Crude sketches depicted him as a monstrous cockroach feeding off a lavishly spread table while skinny Russian children in rags looked on. Young people started to appear at the factory gates at the end of each shift, handing out leaflets to workers who would accept them. It was a sign of the times that most of the men from the Lada plant weren’t afraid to take the samizdat. One of the leaflets announced the formation of an independent trade union, the Association of Russian Workers.
When the local Party boss, Muzykin, got wind of this, he flew into a rage. Something had to be done immediately, he informed Moscow. Anti-Soviet agitators were taking advantage of the change in leadership to test the determination of the regime. It would be suicidal, he counseled, to tolerate any ‘controlled experiment’ on the Polish model.
The militia didn’t waste any time. Everybody knew — or at any rate suspected — that Misha Repnin was a moving spirit in the Association of Russian Workers. It wasn’t necessary to wait for proof. Like any good Russian, Misha was fond of his tipple. He was coming home late one night, a little bit merry, and a squad of militiamen, headed by a major, no less, grabbed him right off the street. Nobody could tell for sure afterward whether he had died on his way to the station or after he got there. The militia didn’t want to hand the body over to his widow, Aglaya, but there were ugly threats to close down the assembly lines, and after a mob gathered outside the MVD building, the people in charge decided they might as well let his family bury him after all. Misha’s neck had been twisted around at a crazy angle. The only explanation forthcoming from the militia was that he had broken his neck in a fall. This version was somewhat undermined by the fact that most of Repnin’s teeth were missing, and there was a pattern of blue-black marks, like ink blots, all down his chest and thighs.
Party Secretary Muzykin and the local militia had just provided the Association of Russian Workers with its first certifiable martyr. Even many of the workers who had shunned Misha Repnin’s call to organize turned out for his mass funeral. Muzykin panicked and called the Central Committee.
‘I need authorization to use regular troops,’ he told his superiors.
They turned him down flat. What would the world make of the new leadership if it ordered soldiers to put down a peaceful workers’ manifestation — a funeral, not a strike — so soon after the death rites of the last General Secretary? Besides, Muzykin’s imagination was obviously inflamed. The man must be unstable. There’d been workers’ protests in the Ukraine, in the Baltic states, as well as in the satellites. But a workers’ revolt in Russia? No, it was unthinkable.
So Secretary Muzykin had to make do with the militia. He had them massed, in their blue-gray uniforms, in front of the Party building, with heavily armed reinforcements of MVD Internal Troops posted in side streets, ready to be brought in if things turned out as he feared.
There was a terrible silence as the crowd advanced through the streets, bearing Repnin’s coffin on its shoulders. The widow Aglaya was in the front row, with her three children. But nobody seemed to be leading the marchers. When the crowd swung off the prescribed route, and headed toward Party headquarters, it seemed to be the result of some collective instinct. Their silence, their solidity, seemed to be too much for the first line of militiamen, who fell back and let them through.
When Muzykin, from his window, saw the bier, draped in black and red and strewn with wreaths, sailing up the street, he called down to the militia commander, ‘Bring up the Internal Troops! And be quick about it!’ The men in these units, recruited in other parts of the Union and mostly non-Russians, could be counted on to do what they were told. They didn’t care whose heads got broken.
Someone, perhaps a police provocateur, ran out of the crowd yelling, ‘Murderers! Bandits!’ and lobbed a bottle over the heads of the militiamen at the Party building. It smashed against the big oak doors. A second man’s aim was better. The rock crashed through the Party Secretary’s window. Muzykin was shaking. He was starting to remember the stories he had heard about the food riots in Gdansk, in Poland, when the local Party offices had been set on fire. As if to confirm his fears, someone in the middle of the crowd had unfurled a banner that nobody had seen before. It was white and red, with the word ‘Solidarity’ in Russian.
The Internal Troops marched into the square from two sides, squeezing the crowd like pincers.
‘Give them the gas!’ an officer yelled.
The tear-gas canisters were fired, filling the square with an acrid cloud. Women and children were screaming. The men were coughing and gasping for breath. As the riot troops pushed in from both sides, the mourners were jammed up against each other, blinded by the gas. When the stampede began, some of the mourners stumbled and fell under the trampling feet. The pallbearers tried to stand their ground, but the human tide carried them away, and Aglaya was left weeping beside her husband’s coffin, until a militiamen came at her with the butt of his rifle. When the smoke had cleared, there were six corpses left in the square: two children and two adults who had been trampled to death, a seventy-year-old state pensioner who had suffered a heart attack, and Misha Repnin, the cause of it all.
Party Secretary Muzykin’s version of the iron heel was less than successful. The news traveled all over the country. Soon it was being carried over the BBC and the Voice of America. Wall posters started to appear in Kiev and Gorky, in Moscow and Leningrad. Misha’s fellow workers at the Lada plant decared an all-out strike. The mysterious Association of Russian Workers appealed, in leaflets and phone messages, for a nationwide show of solidarity. There were walkouts in several cities, even at the Likachev auto works in Moscow, whose spokesman had delivered the eulogy to Andropov, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the members of the Politburo.
*
Elaine paid a visit to a modest apartment not far from the Lenin Stadium. This was the address she had been given in New York. She traveled by subway and trolleybus, circling around until she was fairly sure she wasn’t being followed. She flattered herself that she was beginning to learn ‘Moscow rules,’ as Guy Harrison called them. It was a city where habits of conspiracy were easily acquired.
A sad-faced woman came to the door.
‘Aaron Semyonich?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know him.’ The woman was preparing to shut the door in her face, but Elaine quickly added, ‘Please tell Aaron that
Irwin sent me.’
‘You wait,’ the woman said. This time, she did close the door.
When it opened again, a man grabbed her arm and pulled her inside so fast that she hardly got a look at him. When she did, she was pleasantly surprised. Aaron was tall and sturdily built, with a high forehead topped by a bright frizz of red hair that made him look as if he had just hit upon some new invention. Indeed, Aaron Semyonich had been a scientist of distinction before he committed the crime of applying for an exit visa.
He asked her a couple of questions to verify that she really had been sent by Irwin in New York, said, ‘Call me Ari,’ and got right to the point. ‘What do you need?’
‘The strike in Togliatti,’ she faltered.
‘What about it?’
‘I’d like to go. I’d like to write the truth about it.’
He peered at her skeptically. ‘Togliatti is a closed city. No western correspondents have been allowed in.’
‘I’m not here as a correspondent. I’ve got a tourist visa.’
‘Even worse. At best, they’d deport you for violating the terms of your visa. At worst, they’ll arrest you as a spy.’
‘Only if they catch me. Think what it could mean. An eyewitness account by a western writer.’
‘Do you speak Russian?’
‘Only a little.’
‘Show me.’
She told him in Russian about her course at the New School and her family history.
‘The accent isn’t bad.’ He nodded. ‘You might get by if you don’t have to say more than a word or two. And you could pass for a Soviet if you dress down a bit. They don’t make shoes like that in Russia.’
‘So you’ll help me?’
‘I’ll think about it. I might know someone.’ He paused. ‘But listen, if I get you in there, I can’t guarantee to get you out. Like they say in America, we don’t sell round trips.’
