Rise of an Oligarch: The Way It Is: Book One

by Carlito Sofer

  Regrettably, if the KGB had singled you out, the court trial would be just a farce, as a KGB’s indictment was tantamount to a conviction. All those party bosses who my father had helped over the years, denied that they had even known him once they heard that the KGB was involved. Everyone was scared of the KGB and did anything to avoid its attention.

  I didn’t really know whether my father was anti-communist or even a true Zionist. I was too young to understand these things. But even if he was, he hardly deserved what was coming.

  It was true that my father was active in the Jewish community. He used to cherish Jewish traditions, tried to speak some Yiddish at home and often hosted Jewish bohemia in our apartment. Friends used to gather in our living room, drink vodka, talk and sing. One of my father’s friends usually brought an acoustic guitar and played as everyone sang enthusiastically. My parents sent me to bed, but I used to stay awake and listen to them from my bedroom until the small hours of the morning.

  “Blooming pears and apples all around her

  With the morning mists beneath her feet

  Walked Katyusha slowly by the river

  On the rocky riverbank so steep.

  She was walking, she was softly singing

  Of her silver eagle of the steppe

  Of the one for whom her heart was beating

  Of the one whose letters she was keeping.”

  But my father didn’t do much more than that. It was very hard to leave the country and almost impossible to emigrate. So he was just talking and singing about Zion and Israel, rather than doing anything about it. He wasn’t going to fight the communist regime and risk losing his comfortable job. He wasn’t going to risk imprisonment in Siberia like many refuseniks. However, it didn’t matter what he did or didn’t do - he was doomed once he was chosen as a sacrifice for the communist party’s needs.

  One evening when I was almost nine years old, we heard a loud knock on our front door as we were all sitting at the kitchen table eating dinner.

  “Police. Open up!”

  My parents exchanged a silent, worried look. My father sharply exhaled, stood up and went to open the door. Three uniformed men barged into our house, almost knocking my father down as they swung the door open. After stepping backwards and gaining his balance, my father tried to ask them what they wanted, but one of them just forcefully tossed him to the floor.

  “You know very well what we want, Zionist spy.”

  A policeman picked him up, pushed his face into the wall and handcuffed his hands behind his back. They searched our apartment, apparently knowing in advance what they wanted to take. They took our radio, some of the letters addressed to my father, especially those from abroad, and a few manuscripts of young Jewish writers that they drafted by themselves and gave to my father to read. They threw our possessions on the floor and broke everything that was in their way. Our apartment looked like it was hit by a tornado.

  While being handcuffed, my father looked at Sasha and gasped, “Sasha, take care of your mama and Misha until I return home. Don’t worry about me.”

  And to my weeping mother he said, trying to steady his trembling voice as much as he could, “Don’t cry, Goldushka. It will be alright. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  I saw one of the policemen, certain that nobody was watching, place some green papers inside one of the books that they’d singled out to take. His colleague invited two of our neighbours to sign search protocols as witnesses. As they showed our neighbours their findings, the policeman dropped the book, as if accidentally, and all the green papers fell out onto the floor.

  I shouted, “I saw you stashing the green papers inside the book.”

  “Shut up,” they barked at me.

  “I saw it, I saw it, I saw it,” I yelled. But nobody seemed to pay attention. My father was blamed for something he didn’t do.

  “Look, this traitor has more than three hundred dollars here!”

  The policeman took a long coercive look at the neighbours, while holding the green dollars in his hand and nodding his head meaningfully. The neighbours probably believed me, but they knew that not signing the protocols would be bad for them. With trembling hands, they took the official papers and signed. Possession of foreign currency implied a breach of currency regulations. This was a serious criminal offense that could easily be interpreted as remuneration for espionage services by a foreign intelligence agency.

  “Filthy Jewish traitor!” the policeman spat at my father.

  My father tried to protest, but it was pointless.

  “Shut up,” the two men yelled as they pushed him out of the apartment.

  Before disappearing, my father whispered to me, “Poka, Misha! Be a good boy.”

  At the time, I didn’t know that these short words were my last memory of my proud father, as I saw him being dragged like a dog on a leash, pale and shaking. My mother was crying. Sasha was crying. This was the single time in my life I saw him crying. I wasn’t crying - I was too furious to shed any tears.

  Something was terribly wrong. I was certain that it was some kind of a misunderstanding. Surely my father would return home in a couple of days. It didn’t make any sense that the country that loved us like a mother would take my father away.

  He was accused of plotting against the communist regime and sent to a correction facility in Siberia. We used to get letters from him for a couple of years, and my mother kept them like Katyusha in the song. One day these suddenly stopped. An official state letter arrived instead, with the red hammer and sickle on its letterhead, informing us that my father had perished with pneumonia.

  Our little happy family was shattered the day my father was taken away. The country, the authorities, the KGB, the police and all the other pretend law enforcement agencies became my number one enemies. Those who were supposed to protect us, betrayed us and took my father away. The fuckheads.

  After my father was prosecuted, our apartment in Kiev’s centre was confiscated and we were relocated to a small flat on the outskirts of the city. Our big apartment belonged to the construction trust, not to us. In communist Ukraine nobody owned their house. We were simply informed that by such and such date we needed to take ourselves and our belongings and move elsewhere.

  Poverty became our reality. No more ice cream, cinema or toys. My mother’s answer to anything I asked was, “We don’t have money for that, Mishenka,” as she tried to suppress her tears. The colour of my childhood turned grey - the grey buildings, the grey filthy snow after the first day if falls, and the grey, sullen face of my mother.

  I shared one small room with Sasha, while my mother slept in the living room. We lived on the third floor, with no lift, in a large concrete state-built house with over eighty identical grey flats. All my and Sasha’s clothes were hand-me-downs from a couple of sympathetic neighbours. Their children were older than us and their grandfather had been killed in Stalin’s time for alleged treason. They felt that our fate was somehow similar to theirs so they felt sorry for us. I hated that people felt sorry for us. It was such a desperate feeling.

  My mother had to sell most of our belongings to cover our daily needs, yet still we were always short of cash to buy basic stuff, even food. Most of our old furniture was too big to fit our modest new apartment, so my mother sold them. At night I would hear her sobbing gently, and many times I would cry too, silently so that Sasha wouldn’t hear.

  I remembered how not so long ago I sat in a different room in a different house, listening to the sounds of singing and laughter at my father’s Jewish bohemian gatherings. How had things changed so dramatically? It was too much for a nine year old to understand.

  My mother started taking extra shifts at the textile factory, as well as an additional job of delivering mail and newspapers on weekends. Sasha and I eagerly helped her, dividing the distribution area between us. She always seemed tired and miserable. It was as if she’d aged by a decade since my father had gone. I promised to myself that one day I would make enoug
h money so my mother wouldn’t need to work at all. Ever.

  ***

  It was 1986, and I was thirteen years old when Ukraine hit the world news headlines when a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power station exploded, sending a radioactive plume across Europe. Common Ukrainian citizens didn’t know about the incident for over two weeks because State Television and Radio didn’t report anything. Complete silence. But nothing of that magnitude could be covered up indefinitely, and soon rumours and conspiracy theories went wild.

  We tried to intercept the Voice of America or other foreign radio broadcasts in Russian, but as always these transmissions were constantly jammed by the KGB. Others fished for information from anyone who might be even remotely connected to the events in Chernobyl. At first, the rumour was that there was a fire at Chernobyl and a single person had perished. Nothing too extreme.

  A few days passed and a whole range of alternative versions spread, all alleged to be a hundred percent accurate. Some stated knowingly that while scientists were testing some new super weapon, it had exploded, completely erasing from the face of the earth a fifty square kilometre area. Others took a different angle, saying it was a heroic defence effort against a new American super weapon, which despite being deflected had left the same fifty square kilometre area completely barren.

  The most bizarre story was that our military had battled Martian aliens at Chernobyl, like in H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, and our brave army had won.

  The scariest story was actually pretty close to the truth, claiming that there had been a tremendous radiation leak and that we were all going to die. That is unless we drank twenty droplets of iodine a few times each day. Some terrified believers died of a self-inflicted fatal dose.

  Aliens, weapons or just a radiation leak, our mother chose the cautious approach, telling Sasha and me to stay at home and to get our homework from schoolmates.

  As she left for work she issued a final warning, “If anyone leaves the apartment while I’m gone, you’re going to regret it for the rest of your life.”

  That was a huge disappointment, since we’d planned on watching the workers demonstration parade on the first of May - International Worker’s Day, a big holiday in communist USSR. But after such a threat, we knew that our mother was serious.

  The demonstration actually took place as if nothing had happened. For allowing people out on the streets under a radioactive airborne contamination any Western government would’ve been sacked and someone would’ve been prosecuted. In the USSR, however, it was perfectly normal. The preservation and cultivation of the ideology were much more important than the life and health of the people who were serving the Soviet Union.

  Over time we would learn of the desperate efforts to contain the damaged reactor within a huge concrete sarcophagus. Many fire-fighters and armed forces personnel died of radiation sickness. Nobody cared to warn them about the dangerous consequences of the exposure to lethal levels of radiation. Using their hands and shovels, in many instances without adequate protection suits, they cleared radioactive debris and dropped lead into the reactor. Good men who served in the military were sent to die. It made you wonder why anyone would want to serve in the army. The politburo had never hesitated to use citizens and soldiers alike as human shields against Nazis, radiation or any other threat.

  Finally, weeks after the whole world knew about the Chernobyl disaster, we were given details of the accident. By that time, polluted radioactive water had already leaked into the rivers and water supply, so informing us about the severity of the problem was too little, too late. Everyone was exposed and many people would die of cancer years later. For months we looked for mutated fish with three eyes in the Dnieper River. We wondered whether we would glow in the dark and our children would have seven fingers in each hand.

  My mother decided to send Sasha and me to live with her sister in Leningrad in the north west of Russia, far away from the radioactive danger. We were more than happy to spend the entire summer with our cousin Tolik, who was older than Sasha and about to be recruited by the Soviet army. Tolik came to meet us at the train station.

  “Hello cousins. It’s good to have reinforcements coming,” he greeted us jokingly. “Welcome to Russia. Welcome to the city that never sleeps. We’re going to have the best summer ever.”

  It turned out that he wasn’t exaggerating.

  The trip to Leningrad would turn the boy into a man. I fell in love with Northern Palmyra, as poets called it, while spending the summer there. Although Kiev always remained my favourite city, Leningrad firmly took second place.

  June in Leningrad is a magical time as the sun never really sets. The Beliye Nochi - or White Nights bath the city in their luminous brilliance as winter finally eases its grip and Leningrad stirs from its hibernation. The view of the sun kissing the horizon above the Gulf of Finland is astonishing.

  One such night Sasha, Tolik and I were hanging around Nevski Prospekt - Leningrad’s main avenue, and started chatting to three Latvian girls. Being inexperienced with the opposite sex, I stood behind my brother and cousin and let them work their charms on the two older, sixteen year old girls, while the obviously younger girl sidled up next to me, bringing an instant blush to my cheeks. The group slowly ambled away with me and the girl tagging along at the rear.

  “What is your name, boy?”

  “Err…Misha…My name is Misha.”

  “Misha...that’s a nice name. And where are you from, Misha?”

  “I’m from Ukraine. Kiev,” I answered proudly. “And...err...what’s your name?” I added shyly.

  “I’m Jelena. We come from Riga,” she said, gesturing to her two companions who were laughing and joking with Sasha and Tolik.

  “I don’t really know where that is,” I replied truthfully. “But if the girls are all like you there, I wouldn’t mind visiting it someday.”

  “Ha ha, you’re a little charmer, Misha,” Jelena laughed. “Look, there are steps down to the river. Let’s take a look,” she said and took my hand in hers.

  I let Jelena drag me towards the steps, casting a glance back at Sasha and Tolik, who were oblivious to me and my new friend.

  We found an isolated spot under a bridge and sat side by side with our feet dangling just above the river. Feeling light-headed from the magical atmosphere and the excitement that she not only wanted to be there with me, but also was two years older than me, I kissed Jelena quickly on her lips. I moved my head back to observe her reaction, expecting her to push me in to the water and run away. Instead, she kissed me back.

  Her lips were wet and her skin was so soft. She smelled so fresh. We kissed and hugged as my heart raced. My hand slipped underneath her shirt, feeling her firm young breast. Instead of slapping me and moving my hand away, she allowed me to feel her warm body, although an attempt to reach her lower parts was brushed away. I got so excited and aroused I thought I was about to explode.

  “Not here, Misha,” she said, noticing the bulge in my trousers.

  I blushed, embarrassed by my obvious excitement.

  “Don’t worry, Misha, it’s nice you feel this way,” Jelena whispered huskily whilst rubbing my erection.

  “Maybe I can help...” she said softly, and began unbuttoning my trousers.

  I thought I would explode before she even freed me, but I managed to last three or four strokes before I came. It was the best feeling I’d had so far in my young life. Jelena giggled and kissed me gently.

  “Come; we should find our friends,” Jelena ordered, and took my hand again. We walked in silence, holding hands, back to where we’d first met. Thankfully Sasha, Tolik and the girls were waiting for us.

  “Ah, the young lovers return!” Tolik teased, instantly bringing a new flush of embarrassment to my cheeks.

  “We were just talking,” I protested, but the raised eyebrows hinted that Tolik and Sasha didn’t believe me.

  “Don’t worry, Misha,” Sasha said as he looked at the giggling girls. “There’s nothi
ng to be embarrassed by spending time with such beauties.”

  Our group said our goodbyes, with promises to meet up again. Jelena kissed me one more time and then the girls left, never to be seen again.

  Instead of celebrating my bar mitzvah as every thirteen year old Jewish boy turning into a man, I lost my virginity. Well, technically I didn’t - a hand-job doesn’t really count, but still I felt like a man and it was better than any celebration.

  The White Nights last only a few weeks, marking the annual tourist high season. We didn’t want to miss any of them, so most evenings were spent pursuing girls and spending Tolik’s modest savings buying alcohol. For a boy who’d rarely seen anything of life outside of Kiev, it would be a summer vacation I would remember as one of the best of my whole life.

  When the summer was over, it was straight back to the gloomy reality of life in Kiev.

  ***

  When Sasha reached the eighth grade he finished with full-time education. He moved to a professional technical school to combine paid work with various training courses. In socialist Ukraine no child labour was allowed, so this was the only way for him to bring money home.

  Sasha tried his hardest to replace our father, and his efforts to contribute to the family finances were greatly appreciated. I’d always looked up to my older brother and desperately wished to follow suit and help out the family. But Sasha and my mother didn’t share my enthusiasm.

  “Don’t be stupid, Misha. I promised papa I’d take care of mama and you. You’re the smart one in the family, little brother. Go to school and become a famous engineer or a doctor, so you can take care of mama when we’re older.”

  “But I want to earn money and help you and mama. I’m old enough to work. I’m not a child anymore,” I protested.

  “No, little brother. Studying is your job. Stop arguing and do as you’re told.”