by David Szalay
From the station, I went straight to the office. It was late – a vacuum cleaner was whining somewhere – and I had to tell Mikhalkov what had happened. I was not looking forward to this.
However, he seemed no more than vaguely interested in what I had to say, which surprised me. ‘Why didn’t he sign it?’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s almost ten,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t still be here.’ He told Sherepin to phone for his car, and then, just as I was leaving, said, ‘Do you want a lift, Aleksandr Andreyevich?’ It was the first time he had ever offered me a lift. ‘If you want one,’ he said, pulling on his overcoat, ‘meet me at the front entrance in five minutes.’ It was obvious that he wanted to speak to me in private, so I waited for him in the lobby and when he arrived we went out into the rain. I held the umbrella and opened the door of the Packard for him and then hesitated, not knowing where to sit myself. Perhaps I was expected to sit in the front with the driver. Mikhalkov immediately moved over, however. ‘There’s been a slight change of plan,’ he said. ‘I’m going to see Veklishev at his flat.’ General Veklishev was the head of the oblast MGB, and for an uneasy moment I thought he meant for me to join him. Then he said, ‘Pyotr will drop me there, then take you on. Where do you live?’
I told him.
‘Did you get that, Pyotr?’
Pyotr nodded.
‘Yes,’ Mikhalkov said, with a sigh. ‘Veklishev wants to know what’s going on. With Yudin. He’s taking a personal interest in this one. And you know what he’s like. When he gets hold of something.’ Needless to say, I did not know what he was like. I had never spoken more than a few words to him.
‘I’m sorry about this problem,’ I said. ‘With Lozovsky.’
Mikhalkov yawned. ‘It’s not your fault. Lozovsky will have to be moved. We need someone who’ll sign the form. Who’s his deputy?’
‘A man called Dyomkin.’
‘Do you know him?’
‘I’ve met him.’
‘Will he sign it?’
‘Yes, probably.’
‘Okay. It will have to be done through the oblispolkom, of course. We’ll have to speak to them about it. That’s our next move. The man to speak to is Gasselblat.’
‘Gasselblat.’
‘Yes. Explain the situation to him. Arrange to meet him – meet him personally, don’t do it over the phone. Make him understand what needs to be done.’
We pulled over in front of a tall building. It stood out in the darkness because of the way that many of its windows were lit, even at that hour, with electric light. ‘Here we are,’ Mikhalkov said. ‘Pyotr will take you on. Wait for me here when you’ve dropped him, Pyotr. I shouldn’t be long.’
Pyotr turned the Packard in the wide road. ‘How are you, Pyotr?’ I shouted over the noise of the engine and the squeaking of the windscreen wiper.
For a moment, he half-turned. ‘How d’you think?’
‘I don’t know.’
He just shook his head, as though it was obvious. ‘Haven’t had my dinner, for one thing,’ he shouted, a minute later.
‘No, me neither.’
‘And Comrade Colonel says he won’t be long. Well … we’ll see about that.’
‘Keeps you waiting, does he?’
‘What do you think?’
I laughed. ‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘Still,’ he said, ‘at least it’s not all night.’
‘No.’
‘Not all night, every night.’
‘No.’
‘I don’t know how I survived that summer,’ he said.
He meant the summer of thirty-seven, when we worked all night, every night. The summer of thirty-seven. So much has been said about it. To understand what happened, we must start two and a half years earlier with the murder of Sergey Mironovich Kirov. Everyone, so they say, knows what they were doing when they heard the news of Kirov’s murder. I had only been with the NKVD for a few months. It was 2 December 1934 – a freezing morning, the windows of the trams thick with ice and luminous in the dark – and I arrived at work as usual. I went into the office and took off my coat and hat. When the door opened a minute later, I expected it to be Ablamov. It was Pervukhin. ‘Good morning, Comrade Colonel,’ I said. ‘There’s a meeting in the mess at eight o’clock,’ he said. ‘And tell Ablamov.’ It was obvious that something serious had happened. Though the mess was full, it was very quiet. Reshetov entered with Pervukhin and some other senior officers. Immediately, there was silence. Reshetov had a short, whispered conversation with Pervukhin. ‘Comrades,’ he said suddenly in a loud voice, ‘there’s been a terrible tragedy. Politburo member Comrade Sergey Mironovich Kirov has been shot and killed, in Leningrad.’
That things had been allowed to reach such a point was said to be the fault of the NKVD. We were ‘lackadaisical’ and ‘unvigilant’. We had failed to follow up obvious leads, and had ignored the testimony of informers. Important suspects had been freed without proper interrogation. ‘Stronger leadership’ was said to be needed. We were perman entlyunder pressure from politicians and the press. In July thirty-six, the directors of several failing enterprises – the Urals Copper Mining Trust and a few others – were arrested. Then in September, Reshetov suddenly went. His place as head of the oblast NKVD was taken by Dmitriev. There was in fact a huge turnover of personnel at all levels, unfamiliar faces everywhere, and a number of new investigations were launched. A few months later two prominent members of the obkom, Fuks and Golovin, were arrested for fraud and false accounting. A middle manager – I’ve forgotten his name – testified against them. Golovin was second secretary of the obkom, and when he was arrested Kabakov wrote an article in the ‘Urals Worker’ in what was obviously an attempt to distance himself from the spreading scandal. It didn’t work. Throughout the spring, more arrests were made, until, in the high summer of thirty-seven, Andrei Andreyevich Andreyev arrived in Sverdlovsk. He stayed for a week and while he was here, virtually the entire obkom – including Kabakov himself – was thrown out in a series of vociferous public meetings. For as long as he had been first secretary, Kabakov had perpetrated fraud and embezzlement on a massive scale. Worse, he had unjustly expelled thousands of honest party members, and handed party membership to many of his own supporters. Many of these people were not even Communists. They were swept out en masse while Andreyev was here.
All summer the purge went on. Something very strange was happening under the cloudless sky. There was a stunned, surreal atmosphere in the emptying offices. Many positions in the state, party and security services were suddenly vacant.
One day of that summer has particularly stuck in my mind. In the morning I was at work, opening letters to the former head of the oblast NKVD, Dmitriev. Most of these letters were from members of the public with information to pass on. One of them, however, was from the wife of an officer who had been arrested himself – he had known what Kabakov was doing, and had said nothing. Quite possibly he had been in his pay. The officer’s name was Ivan Blyakhman, and his wife’s letter asked if she would be able to take his things from his office. She listed them – his party documents, insurance papers, vacation permit, and so on. Though I had not known Blyakhman personally, I was touched by his wife’s letter, and when I left work, I went to his empty office and found his papers still in a desk drawer. Even his hat was where he had left it. His address was on his party card. A street of wooden houses with the Iset at the end. There was no answer when I knocked on the door, so I spoke to one of the neighbours, who told me that Blyakhman’s wife had been evicted. He said he did not know where she was, so I left her husband’s things with him to pass on if he ever saw her again. Then I went to meet Irina. We had a picnic, and spent the afternoon lying half-asleep in the park. That evening we went to the theatre.
Ever since then I have wondered what happened to Blyakhman’s wife. It is true that thirty-seven took innocent men and women – perhaps she was one of the innocent, perhaps not. Yet it still left Rightis
ts in place throughout the state and party organisations. Why did this happen? I don’t know. I was not in a position to know. Perhaps we simply stopped short, lost our nerve, lacked the historical will to press home the purge. Epshteyn understood the importance of historical will. The New Economic Policy of the twenties he saw as a surrender to petit bourgeois elements of the peasantry, as a failure of nerve, which particularly infuriated and depressed him because, as he told us, all previous social revolutions had failed because they had paused, moderated, lost their nerve. When he spoke of the stubbornness of parts of the peasantry, I thought of my own father. He was truly, as Epshteyn said, petit bourgeois in his mentality. A true kulak – proud to be the pike who swallowed the carp, and intractable as the frozen winter soil. ‘The world is strong like water,’ he said, ‘and stupid like a pig.’ That was his philosophy. It still saddens me to think of it. Why did he not understand? He was a victim of history. And history was his victim too. If instead of stubbornly obstructing he, and millions like him, had joined willingly in what had to be done, innumerable lives would have been saved. As it was, their stubbornness led to strikes and violence in the cities, where the food shortages were severe, and forced Lenin to introduce the NEP. And this would stay in place, and Epshteyn would fulminate against it, until the end of the decade, when the problem of the kulaks would be dealt with once and for all, as he had always insisted that it should be.
Communism is not violent. It is humane. To say that Communism is humane is to state the obvious, is self-evident. However, for Communism to be humane, it is first necessary to liquidate those elements that are implacably hostile to it, and since they will fight to preserve themselves and their social order – and why would they not? – this will inevitably involve violence. Epshteyn knew this very well. He had fought, and lost his arm, in the Civil War, and the flat left sleeve of his jacket might have been the subject of mockery. Other teachers were shown no mercy. For some reason, however, there was never any question of mocking Epshteyn, or even of mentioning it, unless he mentioned it first – which he sometimes did, with wry humour. He was tough, soldierly and erudite. We imitated his simple, emphatic way of speaking, the words he used, his way of smoking, of lighting a match with one hand. This was especially true of the more intellectually-minded of us in our final years at the school – the ‘Epshteynites’ as we were jokingly known. He impressed on us that even after victory in the Civil War, the Revolution was unfinished, that in fact the struggle for a more just world had hardly begun, and that it would be for us to ensure that it was seen through.
On Monday I went to see Gasselblat, head of the health secretariat of the oblispolkom. His office was on 1905 Square. He himself was middle-aged and nervous. He had a stutter. I told him that there was a man, Mikhail Naumovich Lozovsky, the director of a small hospital and medical institute, who had been identified as a security threat and should be moved. Gasselblat nodded. He wrote down the words ‘Lozovsky’ and ‘Metelyev Log’. ‘Understood,’ he said.
I suggested Dyomkin as a suitable successor, ‘though of course that’s up to you.’
‘Of course.’
I thanked him and left. When I got back to the office, I phoned Mikhalkov and told him what had happened. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Well done.’ And that seemed to be that. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. A few days later Gasselblat phoned me. He said, ‘Listen, there’s been a p –, a p –, a problem.’
‘What problem?’
The problem, he said, was that Lozovsky’s post at Metelyev Log was on the nomenklatura. This was surprising – it seemed a very minor, unimportant post to be on the list. What it meant, of course, was that it was not possible to move Lozovsky without the say-so of the obkom.
‘Well,’ I said, impatiently, ‘have you spoken to them?’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘First they said, “Fine, fine.” Then I didn’t hear from them for a few days. And when I phoned them this morning, to find out what was happening, they said I should just leave it. I don’t know,’ he said sadly. ‘Maybe you should speak to them.’
When I told Mikhalkov, he was impatient, irritated. ‘What’s the problem?’ he said. ‘Why won’t they move him?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Well have you spoken to them?’
I told him I hadn’t.
‘Why not?’
I said that I didn’t know who I should speak to.
He sighed, unimpressed. An hour later, he phoned me back. ‘Suvorov,’ he said. ‘Speak to Suvorov.’
‘Suvorov?’
When he hung up, I sat there for a few moments staring at the phone. I had hoped he would speak to the obkom himself. It was an intimidating thing for me, for someone in my position, to have to do.
7
‘HE’S WITH ME,’ Ivan says to the old man with the nicotine-stained forelock, suited like an undertaker, on the entrance of the First Department of the Turkish baths. Aleksandr no longer has access to the First Department except when Ivan signs him in. The old man waves them through with his cigarette and they start up the wide wheaten marble stairs. ‘How’s things?’ Ivan says. ‘Over the disappointment of the football yet?’
‘I think so.’
‘It wasn’t just that we lost. It was the way we …’ He stops, in mid-sentence, to talk to someone on their way down – a man in late middle age with a heavy, sensuous face and very short grey hair. Ivan is not obsequious, not at all. However, he is highly, suavely solicitous. And he does all the smiling. The other man does not smile. Aleksandr, who stopped several steps up from them, is only able to hear snatches of their talk.
‘Do you know who that was?’ Ivan whispers, joining him.
‘No.’
‘Kantorovich.’ Still in a whisper.
‘Who’s Kantorovich?’ Not in a whisper.
Ivan looks quickly over his shoulder. ‘Colonel-General Kantorovich,’ he says in a low voice. ‘Strategic rocket forces. Took part in the arms-limitation talks in Moscow last month. Met Nixon.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Proud of that, is he?’
‘I think so. I would be.’
‘What, of meeting Nixon?’
‘No, of taking part in the talks. Not that it wouldn’t be interesting to meet Nixon.’
They undress in the panelled warmth of the predbannik, the locker-room, and then proceed to the low light of the banya, where men, mostly middle-aged or older, sit or sprawl saggily on the wood shelves, some wearing wet flannel hats and mittens, otherwise naked, shining with sweat, flicking the sweat out of their eyes. No one speaks in the banya. The heat there is too intense for idle talk. There are only occasional short sighs. Aleksandr watches the drops of sweat slide over the sphere of his belly, the sweat-beaded backs of his hands. Yes, he thinks, we have surrendered. Surrendered on Berlin, on Germany, on our strategic rocket forces, on everything. The surrender started with Khrushchev, of course. When Khrushchev took power, he immediately put in place policies which he knew would undermine the Soviet system. Why was he not stopped? Simple. He knew that only the MGB had the power to stop him, so his first step was to neutralise the MGB. In this, he had the support of the many Rightists who were still in senior positions in the state and party – men who had not been liquidated in thirty-seven or later, and who had long been waiting for their moment to seize power. What they wanted was an abandonment of the struggle, the struggle towards Marx’s ideal of a society in which the wholeness of every human life is fulfilled. Loss of idealism. Yes. Idealism was lost, leaving nothing. Khrushchev’s peasant materialism. Brezhnev’s militarism. In the end we lost. Lost the ideal of moving towards Communism. In people’s minds. That was the essential thing. To move towards it in people’s minds. We did not work hard enough to do that. So the Rightists won, and 1937 did not destroy them. They were the people who supported Khrushchev, the people we failed to liquidate in the thirties and forties …
They stay in the banya for
ten or twelve minutes, no more, and even then Ivan is a little light-headed when they emerge. ‘Might have overdone it today,’ he says, though they were in there for no longer than usual. The showers are simply huge spigots, with old-fashioned wooden handles, from which pours water, icy or piping hot.
Grisha, one of the predbannik attendants, a teenager, has been sent out for vodka. While they wait for him, they eat pork fat, smoked fish and bread. Someone is talking about football, about Yerevan, the first-division team. ‘They play like Europeans,’ he is saying. ‘They’re individualists. They’ll shout at the ref if they don’t agree with him …’ Someone else – he must be fiftyish, with large flaccid muscles and a handlebar moustache – is telling a joke. ‘Igor says to Yegor, “You know what, I think my wife might be cheating on me.” “Oh yeah,” Yegor says. “Who with?” “A florist.” “What makes you think that?” “Because when I got home unexpectedly the other day, I found this rose on the table.” “Right.” So Yegor thinks for a minute, then he says, “You know what? I think my wife might be cheating on me too.” “Yeah?” Igor says. “Who with?” “A fella that works on the railway.” “What makes you think that?” “Well, when I got home unexpectedly the other day, I found her in bed with this fella that works on the railway.”’ Laughter. The joke-teller looks pleased with himself. He is a mass of tattoos. Prominent on one shoulder is ‘STALIN’, on the other ‘LENIN’. Nodding towards these with an ironic smile, Ivan says, ‘Like the tattoos.’ The joke-teller stares at him menacingly. Everyone laughs. ‘Yeah, well.’ He shrugs, inspecting himself. ‘They were fashionable once, but now … You know …’ More laughter. Someone says, ‘In the West they do tattoos without needlework. That’s what I heard. They just sort of stamp them on you.’
