Red Shadow

by Paul Dowswell

  Misha dimly remembered a story from early childhood about his papa saving Comrade Stalin during the siege of Tsaritsyn. An assassin, one of the Tsar’s former officers, had tried to shoot him as the Bolshevik high command planned their defence of the town. Yegor Petrov had knocked the weapon from the man’s hand. The battle that followed had made Stalin’s reputation and Tsaritsyn had been renamed Stalingrad.

  In early 1937 Pravda had run an article on the teachers striving to eradicate illiteracy among the thousands of peasant families who were arriving in Moscow every month. A photo of Yegor was there on the front page with two of his students. That must have been what caught Stalin’s eye. As soon as he discovered his old comrade was living in Moscow, he sent a message asking if he would come to live and work at the Kremlin.

  But Stalin was very unpredictable. People around him would disappear for reasons no one could fathom, while others remained, their lives hanging by a thread. Misha had heard they called them ‘the walking dead’. Maybe he and Papa were among them.

  Perhaps his mama’s disappearance was the start of it. A test of loyalty.

  What other reason could there be for her arrest? Anna Petrov had come from a poor village in Belarus. She had been starving until the Revolution, as she often reminded Misha when he was little and refused to eat his dinner. She had educated herself in one of the new schools the Soviets had founded, becoming one of the first of her village to be able to read and write. Papa had often been busy with work, and Misha and his brother and sister had all been inspired and nurtured by their mother. Look at his elder brother, Viktor. Despite being in school at a time when exams and homework had both been abolished, he had gone on to work on the construction of the Magnitogorsk Steel Works – the biggest in the world, as the newsreels often boasted.

  His mama had been an exemplary communist – forever volunteering, as he did now, to teach literacy in the evening, after her job as an elementary school teacher during the day. It made no sense to Misha that she should be declared an enemy of the people.

  His train of thought was broken by the sound of a key in the lock.

  ‘Hello, Papa. You’re home early,’ he said.

  Yegor smiled and looked relaxed. ‘The Vozhd went early to his dacha,’ he said. ‘There’d been a row with some of the high-ups. I could hear them through the office door. Some intelligence report from England came in, about the Nazis invading the Soviet Union in the spring. It’s preposterous. Why would they do something so stupid? The Vozhd told me afterwards he thought the British were trying to scare him into an alliance. “Churchill needs all the help he can get,” he said, “and it’s not coming from me. The imperialist powers can tear themselves to pieces all by themselves.”’

  Misha thought about telling his papa what Barikada had said and asking whether he could stop taking Grandma to church. But his father looked so happy he didn’t have the heart to spoil the moment.

  Chapter 4

  Misha woke the day after the banquet for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs feeling sluggish. It had been a very late night. Twenty courses of caviars, borsch soup, chicken, beef, lamb, sturgeon, salmon, stewed and fresh fruit, all washed down with champagne and either spiced or pepper vodka.

  Valya had been there too, slightly to Misha’s surprise, and he watched her handle the unwanted attention of the guests with her usual elan, but she looked even more exhausted than him when they had finished.

  After a hurried breakfast, he put on his Komsomol uniform. He was required to wear it when he went to give his talks to the Stalin Automobile Plant workers.

  He looked in the mirror and felt safe. Everyone recognised the red scarf and the Sam Browne belt and knew that whoever was wearing it was a young man or woman with a great deal of promise. Only the best were allowed to join the Komsomol, when they reached sixteen. That was how you got to be a member of the Communist Party – something every ambitious school boy or girl needed to be. And maybe, Misha thought, it would count in his favour if anyone else denounced him? Maybe it would make a difference if they were trying to decide whether to shoot him or send him to a prison camp.

  He left school early to go to the automobile plant and was delighted to see at least twenty workers had come along to his class. Word seemed to be spreading. Today he introduced his students to Shakespeare’s Richard II. They listened to what he had to say and seemed to appreciate the points he made about the play. When the class finished, some of the workers insisted Misha join them in a bar close to the factory. He didn’t really want to go but didn’t want them to think him aloof either. He was worried that alcohol might make him less cautious about what he was saying with other people around to judge him, maybe even betray him.

  It started to rain heavily just as they got to the bar, which was in a little courtyard off the main street of the proletarian district, with plush red seats and stools and small wood and iron tables. That early in the evening it was half empty but it soon filled up with bedraggled customers seeking shelter from the weather.

  One of the students – Misha thought his name was Vladlen – insisted on buying him a drink. Misha liked the fellow – well, he was barely more than a boy. He was quick to answer questions in class but always made sure the others had a chance to answer and that he didn’t dominate the group. He was an assistant foreman too, a bright young man with a future. Like Misha.

  In the corner of the bar there was a small coal fire which cast a lovely warm glow. As he reached the end of his beer, Misha began to relax enough to accept another when Vladlen insisted on buying him one.

  The bar was now full to bursting and the noise was deafening, especially with the gramophone in the corner playing the jazz soundtrack from The Jolly Fellows. His drinking companions started to tell jokes.

  Vladlen told one about a Frenchman, an American and a Russian, all stranded on a desert island. ‘“One of them catches a fish, but it’s a magic talking fish and it offers them three wishes if they will throw it back.”

  ‘“I’ll have a million dollars and I want to go back home,” says the American. “I’ll have three beautiful women and I want to go back home,” says the Frenchman. The Russian is left all alone. He says, “I’ll have a crate of vodka. And as we were all getting on so well, I want the other two to come back.”’

  They all laughed at that, although Misha had heard it before.

  Vladlen seemed pleased at the success of his joke. Misha noticed he was drinking faster than the rest of them, and litre glasses too. Vladen leaned forward and waved his hands for them to huddle together and listen.

  ‘Can you keep a secret?’ he said. The others all nodded their heads. ‘Three men in a prison camp,’ he said, as quietly as the noise in the bar would allow. ‘The first one says, “I am here because I supported Yezhov.”’

  Misha blanched. He couldn’t believe Vladlen was telling a joke about Beria’s predecessor as head of the NKVD, who had now disappeared. He looked at the others. They had fallen silent. Their stony faces giving nothing away. Vladlen didn’t notice and blundered on.

  ‘The second one says, “I am here because I opposed Yezhov.” Then the third one says, “I am Yezhov!”’

  Vladlen burst out laughing but only then did he notice no one else was joining in. He deflated like a balloon. ‘What’s wrong with you all?’ he muttered.

  Shortly after, he stormed off into the night.

  Everyone seemed quite subdued after that. It had spoiled the evening and the cosy bar now seemed stifling. Misha was glad to step out into the cool night air, fresh after the rain. As he walked through the damp streets to the nearest metro stop, he remembered that his mama and papa never drank carelessly. They prided themselves on being cultured people. Even when they had all shared the single-room kommunalka, they had made sure Misha and his brother and sister all had their own towel and toothbrush. They all wore underwear and ate with knives and forks.

  Thinking about the kommunalka, Misha made an impulsive decision. His old home was here in the
proletarian district, a few minutes’ walk away.

  Within five minutes he had reached the outside of the building and was gazing up at the light coming from their old apartment. Misha’s family had lived in part of the dining room. Once, finely dressed ladies and gentlemen had eaten there. By the time the Petrovs arrived, four separate families were crammed into the same space. The first thing they were shown when they moved in was a strict timetable, showing exactly when each family was entitled to use the bathroom and kitchen. The walls that separated their allotted dwelling places were thin enough to hear the slightest cough from the family next door, not to mention the arguments.

  He looked around and memories of playing Reds and Whites out in the street came flooding back. None of the children wanted to be the Whites – the class traitors and reactionary elements in the Civil War. Inspired by the kommunalka rota, his brother Viktor had suggested a ‘class traitor rota’ to the children so they could take it in turns.

  As Misha stood in the street, the door opened and someone came out. Misha let the woman leave, then tried the door. It never did close properly and he pushed it open now and stood in the hallway. The smell of the place was still exactly the same. That overpowering mixture of antiseptic, cold cabbage and stale frying, that clung to your clothes all day. All of a sudden he was ten years old again.

  As he stood in the hall, he remembered other things, things long suppressed. They had known a family upstairs. The father was not a friendly man. Occasionally they would hear terrible rows between him and his wife. Once, they heard her shouting, ‘If only you had kept your mouth shut, we would still be living in Kharkov.’

  They knew something serious had happened when the usual morning stomping about and shouting were entirely absent. No one came home for lunch either. Someone always came home for lunch.

  That evening Misha crept upstairs with Elena, and on the door was an official-looking document, stamped with the seal of the NKVD, instructing no one to enter the apartment nor remove the paper from the door. Even back then, Misha had heard of the NKVD. They were like the bogeyman in a fairy tale. But this was the first time he had seen something that told him they really existed.

  Worse was to come. Two weeks later, Misha was alone in the apartment one evening and there was more shouting on the stairs. He went to look. Two men, dressed in drab green uniforms with breeches and black leather boots, were dragging a terrified man down the corridor. Another uniformed man came down the stairs carrying a small child under each arm. The man pushed past, nearly knocking Misha over, and one of the children looked at him desperately. Misha could still picture her now, tears streaking her face. The men hissed at him to get out of their sight. He fled with the smell of polished leather and stale sweat in his nostrils.

  Afterwards, in the apartment, he felt totally alone. Usually the building was full of noise, but that evening the only sound he heard was footsteps on the floorboards. Nobody in the kommunalka was in the mood for talking.

  Now, on that spring evening there in the hallway, Misha felt a tightening in his chest as he realised the NKVD had infected every part of his life.

  The rain started again. He wrapped his coat tightly around himself and hurried to the metro.

  Chapter 5

  When Misha got back to the apartment, he remembered Papa had asked him to tidy up before he went to bed. As he searched for somewhere to put a pile of magazines that was taking over the living-room table, he opened a cupboard in the hallway they rarely used.

  That cupboard was full of junk from his childhood. He smiled when he noticed a board game called Workers and Capitalists – a Soviet version of Snakes and Ladders with Revolutionary Guards and top-hatted bosses. There was a chess set too, with the figures modelled as Bolsheviks and counter-revolutionaries. His father had been very proud of that. It had been a gift from the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet. Misha wondered who got to play as the counter-revolutionaries, and whether or not it mattered if they won a particular game. Were you meant to play to lose if you were the counter-revolutionaries? Misha had half forgotten about that chess set, because it had disappeared shortly after Mama was taken away.

  His eye caught something else glinting in the darkness of the cupboard. It was a box of Fry’s chocolate biscuits, empty except for the wrappers, which they couldn’t bring themselves to throw away. Mama had brought it home one day – one of many exotic delicacies she had discovered at the Insnab foreign provisions shop for Western workers in Moscow, which the families of the Party high-ups were also allowed to visit.

  Soviet packaging was so plain and grey and Misha and his brother and sister had never seen anything quite so lovely. Each biscuit in the box was beautifully wrapped in gold or silver foil, or crinkly red or green cellophane. It was a whole day before anyone could bear to open and eat one. After that they didn’t stop – gorging themselves on this delicious, smooth chocolate and buttery, crumbly biscuits in a single evening.

  Seeing these chocolate wrappers reminded him of how Mama and Papa had both taken to life in the Kremlin with surprising ease.

  He remembered how, when they started to be invited to Kremlin banquets, Mama had sometimes worn her hair down – she had beautiful, thick, curly locks, cut just above her shoulder, like Valya’s – and occasionally she would even wear an elegant green evening gown. Comrade Stalin himself had taken quite an interest in her, she had hinted in her breakfast conversations. Misha remembered that with some unease. Even at that age he could see how she had enjoyed the attention and how uncomfortable Papa looked when she talked about it.

  Then there were the friends they made. All at once the apartment seemed to be full of glamorous people, like the Usatovs. He was a naval attaché at the Kremlin, a very charming man from Leningrad, who had travelled all over the world and regaled them with tales of the splendours of New York and Tokyo and Paris. He had a beautiful younger wife. Mama had loved her company. She often came round for coffee and they would laugh all the time as they talked. Under the couple’s influence Mama and Papa began to enjoy the best French wines and would look down their noses at the ‘sweet stuff’ from Rostov or Stavropol.

  But then people they knew inside the Kremlin began to disappear in the middle of the night. It wasn’t just the workers and the peasants from the kommunalkas who disappeared in the Great Purges. Being at the heart of power didn’t protect you at all.

  Out of the blue, Mama and Papa stopped buying expensive food and Mama went back to wearing her peasant dresses and headscarf. All of a sudden they no longer seemed so carefree. The dinner parties his parents hosted became more serious affairs, without the riotous laughter that had kept Misha awake until the early hours. Then Mama was taken away.

  There were a few things he remembered which he hadn’t been able to make any sense of. Just before Mama disappeared, his parents had had a terrible row. He had heard them both shouting. They had made up by the morning, but he still wondered what they had fallen out about. And just after Mama disappeared he had found an envelope in a cupboard stuffed with thousands of roubles. He knew it must have had something to do with his mama’s disappearance, but he could never imagine what, and he hadn’t dared mention it to Papa.

  Chapter 6

  The following Day Four, when he returned to the Stalin Automobile Plant for his early evening class, Misha’s study group was missing a member. Although he felt that familiar knot of fear in his stomach, he could not say he was surprised. In the Soviet Union retribution was often swift and Misha had expected there might be trouble in store for Vladlen. He would never have said anything to the authorities. But there were always others who would. Maybe Vladlen had an apartment worth nabbing? Maybe someone coveted his position as supervisor at the plant? Now he was gone. Misha looked over the group of workers and wondered if it was worth asking where he was – just in case he had the flu or something like that. But his courage deserted him. He tried not to think of what might be happening to Vladlen and moved on to the text they were studying. ‘Her
e we are: Richard II. Act three, scene two.’

  The class seemed rather flat that evening and Misha was glad when it ended. As he was gathering his notes to leave, the Political Organiser of the factory came into the room. Misha had seen him before. A dumpy figure in an ill-fitting suit with a pasty white face, he reminded Misha of the Komsorg back at school. Leonid Gribkov would probably look like that in twenty years’ time.

  The man did not introduce himself; perhaps he felt the Communist Party badge on his lapel was all he needed to establish his authority. ‘Citizen, I have heard good reports from the comrades in your class.’ He paused. ‘But I also hear you are a known associate of the anti-Soviet saboteur Vladlen Melnikov.’

  Misha could feel his legs weakening. All of a sudden he felt sick.

  ‘Comrade, I spoke only once with Citizen Melnikov, in the company of other comrades after a class.’ Misha felt a mixture of indignation and a queasy sense of betrayal. ‘He was a student, and a very able one too,’ he said, recovering his courage.

  The Political Organiser grabbed his arm and drew him closer. Misha tried not to recoil from the halo of stale sweat and ashtray breath. ‘You show poor judgement, Citizen Petrov, and I understand your mother is an enemy of the people. But I am also concerned about your choice of subject matter for this class. Richard II could be considered counter-revolutionary, could it not? It was politically naive of you not to notice this.’