The Red Gods

by Christopher Nicole

  Undoubtedly she could tell both where he was looking and what he was thinking. “What did you think of General Denikin?”

  “In the British Army, junior officers are not encouraged to comment on their generals.”

  She smiled. “But this is the Russian Army. And this is the Princess Bolugayevska asking you a Question. I know we have fallen upon hard times, but I do assure you that General Denikin bows whenever we meet.”

  “In that case, Your Highness, I will say that I found him most forthright. And his commissariat is certainly efficient.” He brushed down the sleeves of his uniform.

  “It almost fits,” she agreed. “Leaving at four,” she appeared to muse. “Does that mean you will travel all night?”

  “I imagine so.”

  “Sitting bolt upright in an uncomfortable seat, surrounded by other men? Or will you have a sleeper?”

  “I do not think I will have a sleeper.”

  “So, tell me, of what will you dream?”

  Now she was challenging him. At least, he hoped she was. “I will dream of the most beautiful woman I have ever seen,” he said, and as she flushed, added, “Is that not what soldiers should dream of, when they ride off to battle?”

  “Absolutely,” Priscilla had recovered very quickly. “But if you have one specific lady in mind, then you should wear her favour.”

  He wished he could be sure whether or not she was teasing, she had to be teasing. “I would like that, very much.”

  “You understand,” she said, “that a woman’s favour is not for display, or even, in any circumstances, for revealing.”

  “I should wear my lady’s favour next to my heart, never to be seen except in the case of my death.”

  She rose. “Come.” She walked to the door leading to her bedroom. Joseph hesitated just a moment, then followed her. “Favours should be granted in private,” Priscilla said. “Close the door.” Joseph obeyed, and inhaled her scent, which filled the room. Priscilla was standing with her back to him, opening the top drawer of her bureau. From this she took a pale blue silk scarf. Now she turned, and held it out. “I wear this round my neck when riding. Bring it back to me, when you have won.”

  He took the scarf. This was even more heavily impregnated with her scent. He raised it to his lips, and kissed it. She watched him with slightly parted lips. What now? he wondered. God, to know more about women and their whims! I am on my way to serve with this woman’s husband. But she has not seen him for several months. Or any man? Were she Grandma Anna, now...She seemed able to read his thoughts. “I have always found myself in an intensely difficult position,” she said. “I am told by everyone who knew her then that I look exactly like Aunt Anna, when she was a girl.”

  “You are more beautiful,” he declared.

  “It is therefore assumed,” she went on as if he had not spoken, “that I must be like her in every way.” He took a step forward. “Perhaps sadly, I am not,” Priscilla said. “I suppose because I was brought up as an American lady, not a Russian princess. I had fame and fortune thrust upon me rather late.” Joseph’s shoulders sagged. “I find you attractive,” Priscilla said. “And we are only related in the most vague manner.”

  “But you love your husband.”

  She sighed. “I do not know. I do not think so, now. But I am his wife. Will you accept that?”

  “I will accept anything you require me to, Priscilla.”

  “Well, then...” she held out her hand, and he kissed it. “Go to your war, Cousin Joseph,” she said. “Our war. And do please bring that scarf back to me, when you have won.”

  Chapter 2 - The General

  A band played as the train pulled into Kiev Central Station. There were no other spectators than the soldiers and some civilians wearing red arm bands; Kiev was a conquered city. “You will remain here until I send for you,” Army Commissar Leon Trotsky said.

  It was the first week in October, and even here in the Ukraine the weather was turning chill. Sonia Bolugayevska had already put on her fur coat and hat preparatory to leaving the warmth of the train; now she took them off again and sat down.

  It was a game they played, a formality they went through at every possible occasion. He owned her, body and soul; he could command her execution, as he had commanded the executions of so many men and women, and no one would hesitate to carry it out — yet it pleased him always to defer to the superior rank she had held in Tsarist Russia, to pretend that she had the right to refuse him anything she chose. He was, after all, the only Bolshevik leader to have an ex-princess as his mistress. Perhaps he was the only Bolshevik leader who would ever have dared. Now he placed his cap on his head and stood to attention before her. “Correct?”

  “Correct,” she said. Another game. She wondered what he would say if she one day replied, “No, not correct. You look absurd.” He certainly did not look like a commanding general. His cap was too large for his head and threatened to envelop his ears. His horn-rimmed glasses were out of place in a military setting. His goatee beard was neat — it was one of her tasks to trim it every day — but she could not recall any other general of her experience who wore a goatee heard. His body was slight, given some hint of bulk by the heavy khaki topcoat, some semblance of authority by the revolver holster belted round his waist.

  So what was the secret of his success? It was certainly not charisma. It was his consuming energy, his utter ruthlessness, and his all-pervading dream. These had led her into his arms, seven years ago, when they had first met. He had come to her Petrograd house — or should she now follow fashion and call it Leningrad — seeking shelter following his escape from exile in Siberia. He had come to her because she too had once escaped from Siberia, and if she had, briefly, soared out of the orbit of anarchists like him through her marriage to Prince Bolugayevski, when that marriage had come crashing down in ruin, and she had been returned to her proper station in life, not one of her old comrades-in-arms had doubted she would again be firmly on their side.

  She had not been in the least physically attracted to Trotsky, a man of whom she had only previously heard, and she had been frightened of what he represented: she had determined to turn her back on all that. Yet, having to put up with him for a week while concealing him from the Okhrana, the Tsar’s secret police, she had become fascinated by his personality. Thus she had succumbed. At that time she had been the dominant partner. They were both Jewish, so there had been no racial superiority to assert, but she had been a princess — in Tsarist Russia the rank had not indicated royalty, only social supremacy—and she was clearly the most beautiful woman he had ever possessed, with her strong, aquiline features, her curling black hair, and her splendid figure. She felt that, even at forty-two, she might still be the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, as he had never had the privilege of meeting either Anna Bolugayevska or her granddaughter. Yet their relative circumstances had changed. The revolution had overtaken her, when she had tried so desperately to escape it. The revolution had been inspired by him and his friends. He gloried in it, and he had risen to the top of it. When she had returned to him in 1918, in her desperate anxiety to save Alexei and Priscilla and the children, she had not known what to expect. She had half expected to be shot for having fled his bed a year before. But he had appeared delighted to take her back. She did not know if he had ever discovered the reason for her return had not been love for him; he had never given any evidence of it, even if he accepted that she might have returned merely because the revolutionary with whom she had once had an affair was now a general in command of all the Red armies.

  Since then she had come to accept her role, even if with misgivings. She understood that Trotsky, who had no formal training, was actually a military genius. But she also knew that he was unlikely to win this war. The White armies were supported by the Allies, and had all the best officers: he was having to make do with hastily promoted NCOs. There had been successes, hut these had mainly been because of the bickering between the Whites themselves. Thus
Yudenich’s advance from the Baltic states had fizzled out, and Kolchak had now retired into the depths of Siberia, along with his Czech legion. He had done this because he differed with Denikin on what was to happen when the Reds had been destroyed. Kolchak had been simply for the restoration of the Tsar; Denikin, more of a politician, had wished to reconsider the matter after victory, well aware that the mass of the Russian people had supported some sort of revolution to free them from Tsarist tyranny, even if they had not quite bargained for the Red terror in its place.

  Kolchak’s aim in life had then come to a grinding halt as news had leaked out of the Ural city of Ekaterinburg that the Tsar and his entire family had been shot to death. She had nothing going for either Nicholas or Alexandra. It had been Nicholas who had condemned her to exile in Siberia. With their strict adherence to formality the Tsar and his wife had been instrumental in forcing Alexei to divorce her, less for any misconduct on her part than because it was unthinkable that one of Russia’s premier princes should be married to a Jewess. That she did not actively hate them was because it was not in her nature to hate anyone, with perhaps one exception.

  But she had known and liked the girls. She and the Grand Duchess Olga had almost been friends, even if the Grand Duchess had regarded her as a servant. Those four very lovely young women had been shot to death in a cellar, perhaps with atrocities then perpetrated on their bodies, maybe before they had even died. What made it worse was that no one had as yet been able to pinpoint the killers. Trotsky swore he had had nothing to do with the crime, that it had been carried out on the authority of the local soviet simply because Kolchak had got too close. But would any local soviet have dared do such a thing unless there had been at least tacit agreement from Leningrad that should any White force ever get close enough possibly to rescue the Romanovs they should immediately be executed? She knew that Trotsky was capable of ordering the death of anyone, if he chose: she had seen him do it.

  That was now past, and now the tide of history seemed inexorably to be rolling against the Reds, as Denikin’s White Armies from the Crimea steadily advanced. Sonia found it both amusing and horrible to consider that should the Whites finally win, and she be taken prisoner beside Trotsky, she would undoubtedly be shot alongside him as well. It would be the fourth time in her life under the death sentence; the first time by the Tsarist Government for anarchism — she had survived because Patricia Bolugayevska had been at her side, and the Tsar could not bring himself to hang a member of so important a family; the second by the Reds when they had overrun the palace at Tsarskoye Selo and found her nursing the four grand duchesses, who had been suffering from measles — she had been saved then by the intervention of Alexander Kerensky; the third when Bolugayen House had fallen to the Red assault — and was saved by a man’s lust. Well, since then she had existed by another man’s lust.

  Sonia sat while the noise echoed around the railway carriage; she did not bother to look out of the window. But eventually the noise faded as the troops marched off. A little while later an aide-de-camp came and saluted. “I am to take you to your hotel, Comrade Bolugayevska.”

  Sonia rose. Men were already unloading Trotsky’s and her gear. She stepped on to the platform with only a few men there, but these all hastily stood to attention; Trotsky might not like to be seen in public with her at his side, but everyone knew who she was. Sonia inclined her head to them. Then she was seated in the back of an automobile and driven away to gaze at a scene of utter desolation. She had only once before been to Kiev, in 1911. Then she had found it historically fascinating, if sinister; in 1911, there had been more unrest in the Ukraine than in any other part of Russia, unrest which had culminated in the assassination of the then Prime Minister, Peter Stolypin, at the Kiev Opera House. Since then it had been occupied by revolutionaries, then by Germans, then by revolutionaries again, then by the Whites, and now finally by the Reds. The streets were in a dreadfully delapidated state; the driver had to negotiate a series of potholes, some of them several feet wide and at least a foot deep.

  The car drew up outside the hotel and she was ushered into the foyer. “Princess Bolugayevska!” The manager gulped, and glanced at her escort. “Comrade! Welcome!”

  “It is good to be back, Comrade Tomykin,” Sonia said. “I am surprised you remember me. It has been eight years.”

  “How could I ever forget you, Your High...Comrade!”

  She was shown up to her room. “The bridal suite,” Tomykin explained, rubbing his hands. “I am sorry about the wood in those windows, but it is very difficult to obtain glass at the moment.”

  “As long as it keeps the wind out,” Sonia said.

  Trotsky was accompanied by three aides, as he usually was, but these remained in the corridor. Tomykin bowed. Eight years ago, Sonia thought, he would have ordered this upstart Jewish agitator to be thrown out of the hotel. “I hope everything is to your satisfaction, Comrade Commissar?”

  “You will have to ask Comrade Bolugayevska that.”

  Tomykin looked at Sonia. “Everything is most satisfactory,” she nodded.

  Tomykin bowed again, and fussed as a waiter brought in an ice-bucket containing a bottle of champagne, and two glasses. Trotsky liked to live well. The bottle was uncorked, and the crowd closed the door behind themselves. Trotsky gave her a glass, touched it with his own. “To victory. Have you been to Kiev before?”

  “I was staying in this very hotel on the night Stolypin was shot. I was at the opera.”

  “You never told me that. You mean you saw Stolypin die?”

  “You never asked me. No, I saw him shot. He died some days later. It was a fateful night for me, too. It was the night I met Paul Korsakov. If I had not done so I would not have been divorced by the Prince.”

  “You regard that as a personal catastrophe. But if you had not been divorced by the Prince, you would never have met me.”

  “As you say, Leon, that night was a personal catastrophe.”

  They gazed at each other, then he laughed. “I adore you when you tease. But I adore you anyway. Come to bed.”

  “In the middle of the morning? What of your duties?”

  “I have carried them out. I have recaptured Kiev. Now I am entitled to relax, if only for an hour. They are giving me a civic lunch, supposing they can get together enough food. I cannot sit down with so many boring men without having you first.” He did certainly adore her. She found it at once amazing, reassuring and exciting. He made love as he did everything else, with consuming energy, and if he did not regard her feelings as sufficiently important to be considered, she could not help but be aroused by his very febrility. She was panting as hard as he was when he finally lay still. Then he rolled on to his back. “Now,” he said. “News. Lenin is coming down.”

  “Here?” Sonia sat up in alarm.

  He put both arms round her to nuzzle her breasts. “He feels it would be appropriate. The truth is that he does not like me getting all the credit for our triumph.” He rolled over with his head on her lap. “Why are you so concerned? Are you not old friends?”

  “I have not laid eyes on Lenin for twenty-two years. Since we escaped from Irkutsk together.”

  “Did he ever fuck you?”

  Sonia looked down at him. “Never.”

  “I imagine Krupskaya would not let him.”

  “I would not let him.” Sonia moved his head and went into the bathroom to fill the tub.

  “Ha!” Trotsky commented. “Suppose, when he comes here he wishes to take you to bed? Would you let him?”

  “Would you?”

  Trotsky also got out of bed, but unlike her he immediately began to dress. “I am merely Commissar for the Army. Lenin is Head of State.”

  Sonia stood in the doorway. “Are you afraid of him?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Yet you serve him faithfully.”

  “I believe in what he is doing. At the moment.”

  Sonia turned off the taps and sank into the water. “When last
we met, I was a twenty-year-old girl. Now...”

  “You are a beautiful, mature woman. We shall have to see.” He stood above her. “I have arranged for you to be served lunch here. But this afternoon I will come for you and we will go somewhere together.”

  “Where?” She could not help but be suspicious, as he normally did not take her anywhere, except to bed.

  He grinned. “There is someone I wish you to meet. An old friend.”

  She hardly ate, although the food was both plentiful and well-cooked. She was very aware of his macabre sense of humour. She knew no one in Kiev, therefore this person had to be a prisoner. She did not really want to meet any White prisoners; they might be too close to home. But she had no choice when he returned for her, having apparently had a very good lunch. The streets were lined with saluting soldiers as they drove to the city gaol behind the fluttering red flag; there were few civilians to be seen. “When a place has changed hands this often, it is very difficult to be sure of the loyalty of the people,” Trotsky explained. “Thus I have imposed a twenty-three hour curfew; they are allowed out for an hour every morning to buy the necessaries of life.” He grinned. “Not that there are many necessaries of life available.”

  “You mean many of them are going to starve.”

  “Well, they are used to that around here,” he commented. “Have you no heart at all?”

  “Not where Whites, deviationists or Tsarists are concerned. And neither must you. Come.” The car had stopped, and soldiers were saluting. Her own experiences had made Sonia reluctant ever to enter a prison unless she had to...but now she had to. She had only ever been arrested by the Okhrana, the Tsar’s secret police, and the Okhrana prisons, although invariably full, had never given the impression of overcrowding. This prison was packed to the doors. They walked beside a wire fence behind which there were masses of men who surged forward as they recognised a commissar, some begging, some shouting curses. “Ignore them,” Trotsky recommended.