The Betrayers

by Harold Robbins

  T-34 was the barracks monitor, the live-in headmistress over the two hundred boys in the building. I heard she had been assigned as a medical orderly during the battle for the city, but had picked up a rifle and joined the troops on the front lines.

  Because of her big boned, muscular frame, some of the boys claimed that T-34 was really a man with long hair and big breasts, but no one questioned her gender to her face—or her sexual preference, which seemed to be the barracks mistress next door, a woman who was only a slightly smaller version of T-34. No one had actually seen the two do anything, but suspicions got raised and rumor and innuendo flew each time the woman visited T-34 in her quarters and T-34’s door got locked and the curtains drawn.

  The bottom of the building contained her offices and quarters, the kitchen, mess hall and rec room. We boys were crowded in bunks on the floor above. The building was wood, poorly insulated, cold most of the year but an oven during the couple of months of the year the region experienced sweltering heat.

  “Take down your pants and bend over.”

  “Comrade Mistress Renko—”

  “Shut up. Do as I say. Pull down your pants.”

  I undid my belt and let my pants drop to my ankles.

  She removed an ugly, coarse piece of knotted rope from its place of honor on the wall. The yellowish rope material was stained with blood. Some of it was my own.

  “You are incorrigible.”

  “I was attacked.”

  “You struck the first blow.”

  “Only after Pavel hit Lev.”

  “I saw only your kick.”

  “Comrade—”

  “Bend over, grab your ankles.”

  I groaned as she came at me, slapping the coarse rope in the palm of her hand. She was a big woman, with big hands and muscular arms. A big woman who liked pain. Other people’s pain.

  “I’ve been trying to be good—”

  “You are the smartest boy in the barracks and your grades are the worst. Unless you start studying and participating in school activities and Young Communist meetings, you will not be sent to the university but to a labor camp in Siberia. Do you know what the temperature is in Siberia?”

  “I’ll change, I promise.”

  “Too late. Drop your underwear, grab your ankles. You know the rules.”

  The “rules” were that for each whelp I made, or if I let go of my ankles, she would add another swat.

  She hit me and I choked back a cry. Then again and a third time.

  “Stay put,” she told me.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw her set down the rope and pick up a jar and unscrew the cap. I had no idea of what was in the jar. Knowing T-34, it could have been salve—or battery acid.

  She poured an oily substance into her hand and stood beside me.

  “I don’t know what to do about you, Nicholaus Pedrovich.”

  She rubbed the oil on my bare buttocks. I flinched, expecting it to burn, but it was cool and soothing.

  T-34 was not noted for her tender ministries after a lashing. Nor did she use the Russian “familiar” of a boy’s first and middle name.

  I wondered what she was up to.

  As she pushed against me, caressing my rear, I felt the powerful muscles in her hip. Great Lenin’s Tomb! I hoped T-34 was not getting sexually aroused. There was common kidding among the boys about what it would be like to have sex with the barracks matron, but it was universally agreed that a mere boy might not survive the experience.

  Her hand was cool and moist against my damaged rear.

  Then it slipped between my legs. I almost cried out as her fingers caressed my testicles. My penis jerked alive as her fingers gently rubbed my balls.

  I must have looked stupid, like I was ready to launch like a rocket, holding onto my ankles with legs spread, cock erect and my mouth gaped wide open. I didn’t know what to say. She was scaring the hell out of me and making me feel really good at the same time. The only sex I’d ever had was in my bed at night stroking my own cock. I passed on doing it with other boys or letting them pull my cock like some of them did. One of the boys would even do it to others with his mouth for a ruble. But this was the first time anyone had touched my genitals.

  “Nicholaus Pedrovich.”

  Her voice was soft and gentle, almost purring, a voice from T-34 that I’d never heard before.

  “Yes, Comrade.” My voice quavered.

  “I want something from you.”

  “Something?” My legs trembled. My cock throbbed. Fuck your mother! T-34 was going to rape me!

  She grabbed my balls and squeezed so hard I yelped.

  “Vodka! Bring me vodka!”

  14

  Vodka. The milk and honey of all the Russians and their Soviet brothers. The name itself literally meant “water” and referred to the “waters of life.”

  The British and Americans had their whiskeys and beers, the Europeans their wines and beers, the Japanese their sake and beers, but no libation so nourished the soul or dominated a culture as vodka did in Russia.

  The Russian solution to the fact that vodka had made drunks out of millions of people was simple: “Vodka is our enemy, so we will utterly consume it!”

  But there is also another old expression about the national drink—vodka spoils everything but the glass!

  Whatever it was—and if it’s any good, it’s tasteless, colorless and odorless—and whatever it does—create ruin in the lives of tens of millions or make daily survival more palatable—it was always in high demand.

  They say that garlic was Russian penicillin. But vodka was nourishment for the Russian soul. When there was a shortage, tempers rose, the murder rate went up, production fell. Yet, occasionally the apparatchiks cut back on the supply of the stuff on the grounds that too many citizens were drunk too much of the time, though the real reason was that they just hated people having something to fall back onto that gave them comfort in this bleak society we lived in.

  The Bolsheviks, certain that vodka was the scourge of the common man, outlawed it soon after the revolution, but eventually had to back down, no doubt because the men and women of the those days also needed to have their souls nourished with something besides ideology.

  Now, with the war literally won, the rationing of vodka was back, the government ordering the distilleries to cut back on the production of this nectar of Russian gods.

  That was the reason T-34 told me she wanted vodka—there was a shortage of it. Unless you were in the upper echelon, you had to spend many hours in line to buy a bottle and what was a mere bottle to any self-respecting man or woman?

  How did I fit into this great national scheme in which an orphanage barracks matron finds herself unable to quench her thirst because the government was trying to dry out Russia and the rest of the Soviet republics? How did a mere school boy fit into the historical epoch of rationing vodka, thus making it liquid gold to the deprived?

  It was those criminal tendencies that T-34 complained I had, though I never really thought of myself as a criminal. Of course, what a crime was depended on what side you were on. The Huns killed millions and called it war, not crime. I wasn’t quite in that category, but even at fourteen I preferred not to think of myself as a criminal. Opportunist, yes.

  All boys fourteen or over at the orphanage were apprenticed to factories or offices to learn a trade that would become their livelihood once they finished school. I was officially apprenticed to a tire factory. Under the Soviet system, my future was laid out in a clear and precise manner—I would spend the rest of my days standing at an assembly line, helping turn hot rubber into tires. I would be a productive citizen, a good Communist.

  However, T-34 was right about me. There was a flaw in my character. Rather than being a good Communist, or at least a good Communist Youth, I found myself attracted to free enterprise. That attraction created an inherent problem of logistics and perception because there was no legitimate free enterprise in the Great Socialist State.


  Actually, though, while there was not supposed to be any free enterprise in the Soviet Union, there was one form of capitalism that existed everywhere in the country, with a big city like Leningrad being particularly susceptible to it: crime.

  The government’s clamp-down on vodka production opened a door for black marketeers, some of whom were no doubt the same people who traded in stolen food—and human flesh—during the 900-Day Seige.

  The interesting thing about black marketeering was that although few crimes of violence, even most homicides, were punishable by death, the Boss, Josef Stalin, hated private enterprise enough to make buying and selling for profit a death sentence. But human nature being what it is, it wasn’t a deterrent. The system was puritanical and corrupt at the same time, money had a loud voice even in a Communist society, only an occasional black marketeer was actually sentenced to death—usually when an execution quota needed to be met—and no one planned on getting caught, anyway.

  Through another boy in the barracks, I had made contact last year with an underground entrepreneur, a one-armed former war hero named Sergi, who bought and sold whatever he could get his hands on. At that time, Kremlin-quality cigarettes, made from tobaccos grown in the Georgia and Abkhazia regions, were in high demand on the black market. My job was to deliver packs to Sergi’s timid customers, the ones who were too afraid of a prison sentence to come to the Haymarket and make an overt purchase.

  Sergi was the boss of the organization, what Russians call the vor v zakone. The name implied a relationship of honor and loyalty among thieves, but Sergi never struck me as someone who would sacrifice himself for his underlings. I never did quite understand what his war “heroics” were. He didn’t strike me as the type who would risk his life for anyone else. I asked once, but got snapped at for asking. I guess just surviving, even with only one arm, was tantamount to heroics.

  I couldn’t figure out what he did with the stacks of rubles he collected, either. He certainly didn’t share with anyone else—as far as I could see, everyone was paid in cigarettes or other barter items. Nor did he spend any of the rubles on shaving gear, haircuts or fancy clothes. He had a scruffy beard, unkempt hair and clothes and tattoos on both arms.

  The tattoos were a symptom of how unsophisticated the Russian justice system was. Criminals proudly wore tattoos as a badge of honor and police officers somehow didn’t notice that most of the criminal underworld had branded themselves. Or maybe they didn’t care. Once when he’d had too much of his own bootlegged brew, Sergi explained the cops-and-criminals system to me. “They don’t understand economic crimes because they don’t understand economics,” he said. Being an entrepreneur, buying low and selling high, jacking up prices when the supply went down and the demand went up, bartering, things that came “naturally” to people in the West, were alien to people raised and educated under the Soviet system. “I even have a hard time finding police to bribe,” he complained. “Not only are they scared, but most of them don’t understand the concept of having more rubles in your pocket than you need for today’s expenses.”

  I was paid in cigarettes, which I used in exchange to buy little luxuries like candy and better food than the cabbage soup and potatoes we got at least twice a day at the orphanage.

  The enterprising Sergi had moved from cigarettes to vodka when the law of supply and demand shifted. His vodka supply came from a collective farm near Lake Lagoda that grew potatoes. Vodka, like everything else, was a state monopoly, and the farm was not authorized to produce it. That worked out well for them and Sergi, because he wasn’t authorized to distribute it, either.

  With vodka, I had the same delivery job that I had with cigarettes, using my school bag to hide the bottles in and hand-delivering them to shy customers, but Sergi still paid me off in cigarettes because they were easier for me to exchange for other goods and vodka was too valuable to waste on a delivery boy.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out how T-34 discovered I was delivering the brew—there weren’t many secrets when you lived in one big room with a couple hundred other boys.

  Early the next morning, I rode on the passenger side of Sergi’s old truck as I drove with him to the collective farm to pick up a supply of the bootlegged brew. It was my first trip to the farm and I volunteered to come along and help Sergi load because I needed to talk to him about T-34’s thirst.

  “Why do they make vodka at the farm?” I asked.

  “Potatoes, that’s all they grow and the government demands their crop for the army. Worse, with the Huns cleared from the land, other farms are growing food and now there are too many potatoes. So they turn the potatoes into something they can use to barter with other collectives and factories for their goods.” Sergi grinned. “And I give them a supply of rubles so they can buy things that they can’t barter for with their home brew.”

  No one seemed to find the Soviet system of economics in which collective farms and factories survived on a system of fraud and deception as irrational. I did only because of listening at the keyhole to late-night discussions between my mother and father when they used to talk about the system. But I was taught to keep my mouth shut about criticizing the system. I couldn’t even intimate to Sergi that the system was wrong. It was a far worse offense to criticize the system than it was to violate it.

  “Won’t they get arrested if anyone finds out?” I asked.

  Sergi shrugged. “They don’t announce their vodka production in Pravda, but everyone knows half the collective farms in the country make moonshine. The farmers wash the inspectors’ hands and the inspectors wash theirs, the inspectors and their bosses get paid off in vodka and everyone is happy unless some naïve apparatchik from Moscow shows up and turns things sour. When that happens, the government shuts down the still and shoots the collective’s director. Six months later, they have a new director and the stills start boiling again.”

  I broached the subject of getting vodka for T-34, emphasizing the urgency without mentioning that she was going to rip off my balls if I didn’t get it. Instead, I concocted a story that my very life was in peril.

  “Fuck your mother! The bitch pays for it like everyone else.”

  No one would accuse Sergi of being a sentimentalist. He rather reminded me of a scruffy river rat and he frequently acted the way a rat would when other rats want a piece of the cheese. That’s how I came to think of him—Sergi the Rat.

  “Tell the bitch she can pay or drink sewer water,” he said.

  “I’ll pay for it.”

  “It would take you a month of deliveries to pay for a bottle of vodka.”

  I shut up because he was right. But where there is a will, there is a way. I would just have to steal an occasional bottle from him. That way I could satisfy T-34 and keep the cigarettes I got for making deliveries. I didn’t consider it underhanded because I knew when it came down to it, Sergi was not a true Russian gang boss. Since he was only going to look after his own needs, I would have to look after my own.

  “I heard some of the moonshine is made so badly it kills people,” I said.

  I changed the subject so he wouldn’t read my guilty mind. Being a thief, I was certain he knew exactly what other thieves were thinking. That information came from T-34, who warned me she’d rip off my balls and stuff them in my mouth if I brought her vodka that made her sick.

  Sergi gave me another who-gives-a-shit shrug. “Hundreds of people, maybe thousands, die every year from alcohol poisoning, but who cares? They have to die of something, better to die from bad Russian vodka than a Hun’s bullet or strangled by an apparatchik’s red tape.”

  As he spoke, I thought of the five-liter petrol cans in the back of the truck. We would fill the cans with vodka at the plant and bring them back to the garage where they would be used to fill bottles. Back at the garage, Sergi had poured the last petrol from one of the cans into the truck and then tossed the empty can into the back to be filled with vodka.

  When I asked about the residue of petrol left in the can, h
e did one of his who-gives-a-shit shrugs and said, “No problem, it’ll just give the vodka a little flavor. People who buy bootlegged brew aren’t particular about anything except how many swigs it takes for them to forget what their life is like.”

  The farm was huge, thousands of acres that were once in the hands of some boyar or hundreds of peasants. Now the land, literally at gunpoint, like most of the farmland in the country, had been turned into a state or collective farm where hundreds of people worked. My mother told me many people had died, perhaps millions, resisting the forced move from their own plots of land into state and collective farms. Everyone knew people were dying or being shipped off to hard labor camps for resisting, but no one said anything about the atrocities. And certainly the slaughter was not discussed in Pravda—the national news organ whose name meant “truth” in Russian.

  At the farm, one of the men took the passenger seat and I climbed into the truck bed with the petrol cans. The farmer directed Sergi down dirt roads to a place where the still was hidden behind tall walls of baled hay.

  In the clearing between the walls of hay were a series of metal tanks I took to be boilers. As Sergi talked business with the foreman of the bootlegging operation, I got another employee to explain the process for making vodka.

  “It starts with digging the potatoes and cleaning them. They get chopped and crushed and wetted and we heat them into a slush in those big vats. We call the process a ‘wash.’”

  The vats were metal pots with wood fires underneath.

  “We let the potatoes ferment for a few days and add some yeast. That produces a small percentage of alcohol in the concoction. What comes out is drunken potatoes!”

  He laughed and I laughed with him.

  “Then comes the difficult part,” he said, “getting rid of the potato residue so the liquid is clear and distilling the liquid so that it rises from seven or eight percent alcohol to fifty percent or more. We put the liquid in a pot still”—he pointed at taller vats, also with fires beneath—“and heat it again. When it heats up, the liquid turns into steam, vapor, and rises into these pipes coming out of the top of the still. These are condensation pipes. We pour cold water on them to keep them cool. Inside the pipes, the vapors cool and turn back into liquid, basically water with an alcohol content.”