Red Sky at Noon (The Moscow Trilogy)

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  They loped through a sunflower field, divebombed by sparrows. Prishchepa leaned over and grabbed the wide, happy heads of the flowers and shook out the seeds, pouring them into his mouth as if this was a day out with his pals. And as the flat land dipped slightly in tribute to the stream that ran before them like a trickle of mercury in the sun, they spotted the mirror flash in the village far ahead, and through the binoculars Zhurko saw horses and field-grey men and khaki metal.

  They checked and rechecked their weapons. Panka rode alongside Benya now. Chewing on his whiskers, he put a huge hand, dark as teak, on his arm. ‘This is big country,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to stretch yourself just to keep up with it.’

  Benya looked into Panka’s narrow eyes, not much more than glinting wrinkles in that weather-beaten, foxy face, but blessed with almost miraculously sharp sight. Panka never ceased scanning the steppes, listening for the sounds of birds, the bark of deer, the grumble of engines. ‘That’s a swallow,’ he might say. Or: ‘That’s the grunt of a buck on the rut.’ He might point ahead. ‘Watch out! A gopher’s burrow there.’ Then there were the planes: ‘It’s one of ours, a tank-killer.’ Or a gun: ‘That’s an eighty-eight millimetre.’ He always knew.

  The adrenalin pumped into Benya’s throat, making his palms slimy, his belly churn and, for a moment, the heat made him dizzy. His parents were somewhere out there. Sometimes he knew they were dead and he wanted to join them, but today hope surged and he was sure he would find them. For a moment, he recalled the woman he had loved in Moscow. He smelled the skin on Sashenka’s throat, her grey eyes, the sinews in her neck straining as they made love – it was all so vivid that it made him ache. Life after her was truly an afterlife, ground down to its essentials: trial and the Camps. He had been at war for months now but somehow this simple life, this lethal struggle, the company of Cossacks and their horses in the realm of sunflowers and grass, this empire of dust and horse sweat and gun oil, made him feel more alive than he could remember. If you had asked him later if he had been afraid, he would have said, ‘Afraid? More terrified than you can ever know.’ And yet beyond fear too. ‘We are singing a song,’ wrote Maxim Gorky, the great writer who had once been so kind to Benya, ‘about the madness of the brave.’ Benya was riding to kill a man, perhaps many men, and, struck with a presentiment of catastrophe, he was unlikely to survive. But he still believed in his own luck. He had to. They all had to.

  As she headed through the sunflowers, Silver Socks turned her head to the right, ears pricked, and Benya Golden felt her shorten her stride. She was telling him something. Panka and Prishchepa were already dismounting, guns cocked. Benya rested his hand on the PPSh sub-machine gun hanging over his shoulder.

  If you die now, he told himself, you died long before …

  Day One

  I

  ‘Stand up, Prisoner Golden!’

  Benya stood, his knees buckling. It was two years earlier, the winter of 1940, and the three judges were filing into the plain room in the Sukhanovka Special Prison. In front of him were two fat grey men in uniform and boots, and the third he knew, not just from the newspapers, but in person. Slim and lean in his Stalinka tunic and high boots, his nose aquiline, grey-black hair en brosse, Comrade Hercules Satinov, a favourite of Stalin and member of the Politburo, took the right-hand chair. Once Benya had been excited to know such potentates, proud that Stalin knew who he was. Such sickening folly in his younger, restless self! Now he wished they had never even known of his existence.

  Benya also recognized the man in charge, a shaven-haired bulldog in uniform with a patch of moustache under a puce nose the texture of pumice stone. Vasily Ulrikh, Stalin’s hanging judge.

  ‘I, V.S. Ulrikh,’ he droned, ‘presiding, declare this sitting of the Military Tribunal to be in session here in Special Object 110.’ He meant Sukhanovka Prison. ‘It is four thirty a.m. on the twenty-first of January 1940. Considering the case of Golden, Beniamin.’

  It was the middle of the night? Benya looked at Ulrikh’s scar-puckered face first, still not quite believing that they could possibly find him guilty when his only mistakes were childish curiosity – and falling in love with the wrong woman. But in Ulrikh’s boozy, watery eyes he saw only a bored disgust and Benya recalled with a shudder that the judge was said not only to attend executions but even do the job himself.

  Benya savoured the strong smell of cigarettes, vodka, coffee, pickles emanating from the judges – the fug of grown men without sleep in airless offices. It was familiar, reminding him of long happy nights when writers sat up till dawn in Muscovite kitchens to bicker about that bestselling poet, or the best movie, or the latest scandal … A life gone forever.

  Glancing down at the papers in front of him, wiping his fuchsia-tinged eyelids, Ulrikh read: ‘Golden, Beniamin has signed a confession admitting to his crimes and he is hereby found guilty of terrorism, of conspiracy to murder Comrades Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich and Satinov (who is present on this tribunal), and of membership of a counter-revolutionary Trotskyite group, connected to White Guardists, controlled by Japanese and French secret services, under Article 58.8.’

  ‘No, no!’ Benya heard his own voice, high-pitched, from somewhere far away.

  Ulrikh pivoted to the right. ‘Comrade Judge Satinov, would you read the sentence?’

  Satinov did not reveal the slightest emotion but then Stalin’s grandees were masters of sangfroid. They had to be.

  He coolly raised his eyes to Benya: ‘In the name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Military Tribunal of the Supreme Court has examined your case and you are hereby sentenced by the Military Tribunal to Vishnaya Mera Nakazaniya, to be shot.’

  The words – the Highest Measure of Punishment – hit Benya in a hot rush, winding him. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe and he gulped frantically for air. He was close enough to see Ulrikh scrawl the fatal initials: ‘V. M. N.’ – known as the ‘Vishka’; everything in Russia, every department, every job, even killing, had its sinisterly neat acronym. But this was a mistake, a terrible mistake! The words bounced around his head. He knew how the Vishka worked because, ever the curious writer, he had once asked a top Chekist how they killed their prisoners, a question he had asked in the naive certainty that he himself would never face this moment. We take them to a cell deep under the streets, he was told. Two guards hold their arms while, quickly, before the prisoner can think, a third fires Eight Grammes from his Nagant pistol into the spot where your neck meets your head. Finally there is the ‘control shot’ to the temple.

  ‘I didn’t confess. Never! I didn’t …’

  Ulrikh sighed, whispered to Satinov and showed him a wad of papers.

  ‘I have in front of me your signed confession, Prisoner Golden,’ said Ulrikh.

  ‘It’s false! I’m not guilty of anything!’

  ‘Quiet, prisoner!’ shouted Ulrikh, banging the table.

  ‘Did you or did you not sign this?’ asked Satinov in his Georgian accent.

  ‘No!’ Benya replied. ‘You see, I had no choice – I was beaten. My confession was forced out of me. I deny everything, I was tortured …’

  Ulrikh wiped his flat face with his liver-spotted hand. It had been a long vodka-fuelled night of Vishkas – prisoners condemned and executions attended – and Benya could see he wanted to send his report to Comrade Stalin and get to bed.

  ‘A signed confession carries the full force of the law,’ said Ulrikh, sounding both furious and indifferent. ‘The sentence stands, the verdict is final and to be effected without delay …’

  Benya started to hyperventilate. A drop in the belly like the trapdoor of a gallows and then a drenchingly fearsome nausea that buckled his knees; he thought he would die then and there. The guards caught him and held him up like a broken mannequin.

  Then Satinov leaned sideways and whispered to Ulrikh. Satinov was the top man present, he was Stalin’s comrade-in-arms, and he was not a judge. He was there for a special reason. Stalin had nominated him to be t
he ‘curator’ of the trial because Satinov had been friends with the people whom he was going to have to sentence to death. That was a test set by Stalin.

  Ulrikh shrugged, and Satinov cleared his throat. ‘Prisoner Golden, your death sentence is reprieved. Instead, you are sentenced to ten years …’ And the rest was lost in the roar of relief in Benya’s ears. Did he really hear it? Yes. There it was. Ten years! The joy of life – all thanks to Satinov!

  ‘Thank you,’ Benya whispered to the judges but they were no longer paying him any attention. They were standing up, collecting their papers. He rushed forward but the guards caught him, shook him and held him back: ‘God bless you!’ he shouted.

  ‘No talking!’ A rifle butt in the side. ‘Silence, prisoner!’

  A man who has heard his own capital sentence has lived more profoundly than any other, and for Benya Golden, nothing would ever be quite the same again. Now he could live, passionately, expansively. He could love again. Oh, how he loved life. He barely noticed the judges filing out of the room.

  Then there was the march through the corridors and the ride in the Black Maria back to his cell, where he understood it all better. He was condemned to a realm beyond mere death, and now knew his entire life up to his arrest was over. He was almost dead, a death without instant decay, trapped while he still breathed, in the hell of the eternal now. He recalled the slaves who rowed the Roman galleys: now he was to be a galley slave, toiling to death in the Camps known as the Gulags. But then he thought: ten years! It is not forever. I can survive ten years and come back to life, can’t I?

  Weeks and months of 1940 passed in that cell. He became accustomed to the routine but he knew that would soon end and every prisoner hates the change of rhythm. Change is dangerous. But he knew what was coming: the transfer, known as the etap, the journey to the east, to the Gulags.

  And then it came. Four a.m. reveille. The guards burst into his cell. ‘Wake up! Get your things. Davay! Davay! Let’s go!’

  Benya didn’t know where he was going, just that he was heading east in cattle cars, chugging slowly across the endless spaces of the Urals, Siberia and onwards. The trains were packed with filthy, lice-infested prisoners (many Poles, Benya learned, victims of Stalin’s new conquests), the stinking bucket overflowing with urine and dysentery. Sometimes Benya and his companions talked about Stalin’s astonishing alliance with Hitler, how they’d split Poland between them. Paris had just fallen to the Nazis. How long would Britain hold out? But mostly Benya just lay in his corner, saving his energy, trying to stay alive, learning to listen and not talk. Being a ‘Political’, he was the lowest in the hierarchy of the prisoners. Even murderers and thieves were higher than him, and the highest of all were the Criminals who ran the cattle car, received the best food and took whatever else they wanted. A quick shuffling amongst the huddling prisoners and a man was killed for his new boots in the gloom of Benya’s cattle car, quickly stripped for his clothes, coat, hat, ration. There was a sudden glare as the door was slid open; and Benya glimpsed the broken-ragdoll dance of arms and legs as a naked body was tossed out, filling the roaring frame of the open door for a second before the door slid shut again, and Benya wondered whether he had seen it at all. From then on, in this life, the death of a man, once an event remarkable and unforgettable, something you might tell your family or read about in the newspaper or discuss with a friend, was often merely an occurrence in a succession of occurrences for Benya, quickly forgotten in the drone of the day. The seething of lice on his body drove him crazy but he spent his days catching them and crushing them, feeling the pop of their bodies, a rare satisfaction, a lesson that small unlikely pleasures could make life almost tolerable. Sometimes he felt he had become the master of the enjoyment of minuscule things, and that that was the art of living.

  He spent weeks at each transit prison – each one a world of its own, with its own rules of survival – until his next etap was called, and the next. A succession of cities. Petropavlovsk. Novosibirsk. Irkutsk. Everywhere his fellow prisoners said, ‘Pray you’re not going to Kolyma …’ But by the time he saw the blue waters of Lake Baikal, Benya knew that was exactly where he was going.

  Still dazed after the horrors of the voyage in the hell ship across the Sea of Okhotsk, they arrived at Magadan, where a new world of snow-capped mountains, bracing air and the lunar landscape of the gold mines awaited them. Benya imagined the gold-rush towns he had read about in his beloved Jack London novels, the frontier of The Last of the Mohicans with its gunslingers, its trackers and Red Indians. It was still September, the last weeks before the Sea of Okhotsk froze, and Kolyma was about to be cut off from the mainland for many months.

  The guards marched them up the hill in groups along a muddy lane called the Kolyma Highway and into a compound where Benya and his fellow prisoners were stripped, washed, shaved and their clothes steamed and deloused. In the showers, Benya saw men fall on each other, some on their knees, others bending over, coupling frantically, seizing white-knuckled fistfuls of gratification. Next day he stood naked in front of the medical examination board, a doctor and a Chekist, trying to look as weak and old as possible. But the doctor, a prisoner himself, stamped his file: ‘KOLYMA-TFT. Fit for Hard Physical Labour.’

  ‘But I’m not strong enough,’ protested Benya.

  ‘Shut the fuck up, cocksucker,’ said the guard. ‘The sentence for falsifying illness is Eight Grammes in the nut. For complaining you face the Isolator. Get a move on!’

  Next day, he was woken at 4 a.m. ‘Davay! Davay! Let’s go! Grab your belongings!’

  Riding in a truck, fuelled not by petrol but by a furnace fired with wood, Benya travelled up the Highway into a mountain wilderness of rushing streams, reindeer herds and precipitous canyons. Then he saw first the barbed wire and watchtowers; next the wooden barracks and finally they entered the gate of their Camp: Madyak-7.

  A giant sign declared:

  GLORY TO STALIN THE GENIUS

  GLORY TO STALIN OUR BELOVED LEADER

  GLORY TO STALIN, FRIEND OF THE WORKING

  CLASS, FATHER OF SOVIET CHILDREN

  And finally at the bottom:

  MORE GOLD FOR OUR SOCIALIST PARADISE!

  Early next morning, the first roll call, hundreds of men standing to attention in the mist: pairs of favoured prisoners – known as Camp Trusties – waved whips and bully sticks to herd them into work brigades. The brigadiers reported to the Commandant. ‘There are twenty-seven in this brigade,’ called out Benya’s brigadier, a Criminal called Shurik. ‘One died at the mine yesterday; one executed for insubordination. One dead this morning in barracks; two sick in barracks; one self-injured in the Isolator. Five new prisoners. Total: twenty-seven!’ He marched them up to the mine. ‘You work, you eat,’ Shurik warned Benya and his fellow Zeks – that was the Camp nickname for prisoners. ‘You don’t work, Zeks, you die.’ Facing Benya was a capacious and gigantic scoop of mud and rock carved out of the mountainside, an ants’ nest of teeming workers and armed guards, all creeping along plank walkways or excavating deep gulches, tiny figures in a landscape that the Zeks already called the Dark Side of the Moon.

  II

  ‘Bandits, today your training is over,’ announced Penal-Colonel Melishko, the battalion commander. How Benya had survived his time in Kolyma he never knew, and here he was eighteen months later, in July 1942, in southern Russia, not far from the city of Stalingrad.

  At sundown on that broiling summer night, they stood in a half-circle around Melishko in the manège of the Marshal Budyonny Stud Farm Number 9, very close to the Don River. It was horse country, land of the Don Cossacks. They had been training for seven months.

  ‘You are ready to be assigned your first mission – and you will be needed faster than any of us thought. The Motherland is in peril!’ roared Melishko.

  Benya caught the eye of his friend Prishchepa next to him. Prishchepa smiled flashily, but Melishko’s gruff confidence did not hide the panic of the other officers. When Benya had
started his training in December 1941, the front was far away and the Germans had been defeated outside Moscow. Now the war had come to them; since yesterday, they could even hear the belch of artillery as the Germans approached the Don.

  ‘You bandits have a special reason to fight hard for the Motherland! I found you as scum. Now you’re as battle-ready as regulars, good soldiers, fine horsemen’ – Melishko’s eyes, under his crescent-shaped eyebrows that looked like wings, glanced at Benya with a stroke of warmth – ‘and even the most unlikely of you can at least keep your seat.’

  Prishchepa wiped away the tears that ran down his young cheeks. He wept and laughed easily; he went through life as happy as a swallow; nothing disturbed his geniality, not his sentence to the Camps, nor this parade today, nor tomorrow’s battle. ‘Life is easy for a simple soul like mine,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You just have to live it.’ Benya enjoyed studying Prishchepa; he’d never lost his interest in human nature, and there was no laboratory so fascinating as the Gulags and this battalion of vicious criminals and court-martialled soldiers.

  Benya and Melishko had been in the same Camp in Kolyma. After his arrest, General Melishko had been so severely tortured that he had no teeth or fingernails left; only his moustache, thick, white and stiff as a painter’s old brush, was the same. Nevertheless when the war started, he had been one of the first officers recalled to fight but instead of being assigned a division or corps, he had been made a colonel and given this rabble. He was, however, still called ‘the General’ by everyone and Benya loved the fact that Melishko was unchanging, whether waiting for soup in the dining block in Kolyma or addressing the men as an officer.

  In the barn-like manège, its sandy ground designed for training horses, Melishko stood alone at the front. Behind him: Captain Ganakovich, their Politruk, the Political Officer, and Pavel Mogilchuk, head of their secret police Special Unit.