Myasoedov, who as a consequence of these charges left the gendarme corps under a cloud, giving information during his trial that exposed the dirty methods of police work—thereby setting the police department against him forever.
Myasoedov, in retirement, befriended Sukhomlinov, who was then commander of the troops of the Kiev Military Okrug and the governor general, and became his fixer for dubious business dealings.
Myasoedov, who tried to return to the service many times and was always rejected—because Prime Minister Stolypin remembered his testimony against the police.
Myasoedov, restored after Stolypin’s death by Sukhomlinov, by then Minister of War, as “officer for special assignments” at the ministry.
Myasoedov, who in 1912 was accused without evidence of espionage by the leader of the Octobrists, an adventurer and duelist, former Duma chairman Guchkov, who needed to involve Sukhomlinov in a scandal, the better to remove him from his ministerial post.
Myasoedov, loyal to his protector and fired on the basis of Guchkov’s charge.
Myasoedov, who tried at length to be taken into the army when the war broke. He was made a translator in intelligence. He served in the headquarters of the ill-starred 10th Army, which suffered a crushing defeat by the Germans.
Myasoedov, who was accused of treason by Lieutenant Kolakovsky when he made up his stories about the German conspiracy because he remembered the name from the newspaper articles about the “spy case” inspired by Guchkov.
Myasoedov.
Doomed to be the scapegoat.
Kirill used him as a model for an algorithm: how people become victims in history, which he called the “Myasoedov archetype.”
Kirill wrote out the algorithm in a café at Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport, watching border and customs officials in the café after their shifts, watching the crowd, sorting, classifying, attaching an invisible label to each.
You have to be a public figure, people must remember you when talk of your espionage comes up: oh, there were suspicions before, he was on a slippery slope! This lends a sense of recidivism to the event, serving like proof of guilt for the public and inspiring fury: You mean they knew about him long ago? Who was covering up for him? Treason! It’s not an individual case, it’s a system!
You must indulge in certain immoral behaviors that are shared by many, who delight in seeing them in others. Bribes, debauchery, weakness of character, falsehood, illegitimate children, debts, excesses: anything that demonstrates your ruin. This is not incontrovertible evidence of guilt, but it makes it psychologically believable.
You have to have an entourage of dubious repute. It may have formed reasonably, by virtue of fate, profession, interests, but the public will see that you are not worthy of trust on the principle of Tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are.
You must have a powerful patron (Sukhomlinov) who can be compromised by compromising you. The end of this intrigue must (for the intriguers) justify the means, their scope, cost, vileness, and immorality.
You must have formidable enemies, acquired long ago, who by their action or inaction will support the attack on you (in Myasoedov’s case it was the police department, which he had discredited by revealing certain facts).
You must have a personal torturer, an eagle for Prometheus (Guchkov), who sees an opportunity for fame and media capital in your case, an opportunity to promote his views on a number of social and political issues.
You must have a pile of circumstantial evidence against you, which essentially proves nothing and can be explained but which fires up the public’s hunting instinct: catch him already, why is he still out there running and lying, catch him and kill him!
You must NOT have the opportunity to defend yourself properly: Myasoedov was court-martialed, the judges had orders to send him to the gallows.
You must have exhausted the limit of success and become the object of infernal irony. Everything must turn against you: people, things, circumstances. It’s the reverse of your villainy: the fact that previously evil served you will now expose you.
The accusation must not be the start of your misadventures. You must already be mired in serious problems: personal, financial, social; be profoundly bewildered, disillusioned, exhausted; you must give up a few “life preservers” that might have helped later.
You must not be a fighter by nature. Not a wimp, but not a fighter. And you must not be attractive. You may be talented and gifted (colleagues spoke well of Myasoedov as an intelligence office), but you must not be interesting, charming, or sympathetic.
Your case must have some concrete evidence, real or invented. Myasoedov serves in the headquarters of the 10th Army, and it has been crushed! And they found documents in his possession describing the location of troops (even though he was supposed to have them as an officer in intelligence).
Society, which has felt a decline in patriotic hurrahs and which is disillusioned by failure, terrible defeats that seem inexplicable, should have embarked on an irrational search for spies and traitors.
If you add them all up, a fatal result is inevitable.
Kirill wrote down his conclusion on the reverse of his printed e-ticket. It was the standard, the lens, through which he regarded the biography of the Schwerdts, recognizing in it fragments of the deadly Myasoedov pattern of fate, the dull links of fate entwined in the chain of ordinary events. He did not turn that lens on himself, in part because he was certain that his fate was insignificant and in that sense insured against great misfortune and in part because in the depth of his heart he was afraid to see and recognize in his life the same dull and terrible links.
***
A German conspiracy.
Espionage.
All the newspapers wrote about it, soldiers whispered about it. Almost all the future Soviet generals and marshals served in World War I as soldiers, noncommissioned officers, captains, thought Kirill. That means they “knew” that Germans colonists were injuring horses, sending signals to the enemy. Teaching German was banned in the country, the newspapers attacked Germans, everyone witnessed the deportation of German citizens to Siberia, the robbery and confiscation of their property; the shadow of their future engulfed the Schwerdts, but Gustav and Andreas thought it was the shadow of the near future only, and that further down, there would be light.
Night, another night. It breathes like a dying horse, blood-flecked foam on its lips, blood flowing down the gutters; evil lights illuminate its fading eyes, the lights of fires reflected in broken store windows. Signs are torn down from apothecary shops and ateliers, bakeries and studios, the pharmacy bottles broken, pastries squashed, fabric thrown into the mud, and there are no police whistles, no police badges to be seen or heard—the Russian din rolls over in waves, dark and thick, drowning cries in German, cries of horror and pain. Janitors will come out in the morning to sweep away the glass, wash away the blood, but it is still night, smelling of rubbing alcohol and pharmacy lotions, carousing over Moscow, and the May lilacs are intoxicated by blood.
Two in the study on the second floor. The mansion’s walls are sturdy, the armaments room has loaded rifles, but what are rifles against an elemental pogrom? Against the government?
Night follows night; Moscow cleaned itself up, glaziers replaced windows, the dead were buried at the German Cemetery. But now others storm houses and offices, men in the uniform of military counterintelligence, with search warrants. They’re after traveling salesmen selling German agricultural equipment—for they allegedly spy on the harvest; they came to Singer to stop sales of sewing machines and the company was declared a threat to national security; June, lightning, and a telegram—Sukhomlinov’s departure, the minister unofficially charged with aiding Germany.
But Gustav’s factories are still working, still manufacturing tracks on which army trains travel; the commission is still studying their appeal and ancient admirals are still discussing the case of the Marinated Midshipman; the house is still standing, and the bolts are
still strong.
A year of war. August 1915. New agencies are established—Special Councils. The most important of these: the Special Council for the Discussion and Unification of Measures on State Defense. The word “special” receives the meaning it will retain under the Bolsheviks: a symbol of the state’s power over a citizen’s property and life.
The chairman of the Special Council can sequester an enterprise; set general and individual requisitions; fire directors, managers, boards; pass resolutions on changing the character and volume of production; determine salaries.
The Schwerdt case got hung up, the government commission is unable to determine whether the death of the Marinated Midshipman can be an exemption for his descendants; the commission does not want to take a risk and awaits subsequent acts under the law, instructions; and thus a year passes.
Gustav is no longer Iron, but Decrepit Gustav, a ruin in which the outlines of his former strength can only be guessed. Andreas is no longer energetic and he is visited more frequently by thoughts of the other Andreas who was eaten by savages, of the mystical meaning of sharing a name.
His engineer’s mind resisted false constructions, but the tendency toward mysticism of his father, Balthasar, appeared in his mature years and whispered something different. Andreas must have been confused, agitated by the Rasputin affair, the heir’s hemophilic bleeding healed by the shaggy-haired Siberian elder: a reincarnation of Uryatinsky’s estate, where Balthasar, the doctor, was incarcerated. Andreas secretly began looking for his sacrificial field, the opportunity to respond to the sacrifice of Andreas the sailor who had protected the family for several years now.
Gustav died in the night, in December. That day he had learned that the lands taken away from citizens of German origin would be bought by the Rural Land Bank, and the bank would set its own price. Gustav understood what was going to happen and what the newspapers would be writing about: the land purchases would be handled by influential people, landowners, ministers, and they would buy up the best for a song, using their connections in the bank; no one had yet touched land belong to the Schwerdts, they were still protected by the headless ghost, but Gustav got tired of waiting to be rescued and seemed to put out the flame of his own life.
Andreas became master of all the property. And he was immediately made an offer—the buyers didn’t even wait for the traditional forty-day mourning period to pass—for the most valuable factories. Not directly, of course; Kirill guessed the intermediary might have been Prince Andronikov, an agent of the secret police who later became head of the Kronstadt Cheka and extorted money from his former society friends for permission to leave Soviet Russia—but at the time he was an intriguer, publisher of a patriotic newspaper, and inside the Rasputin circle.
Andreas was faced with an ultimatum. He did not have the weight that Gustav did, and the connections he inherited after Gustav’s death saw a convenient moment to end those ties. Many sent only flowers or telegrams to the old magnate’s funeral, without appearing in person, and some did not send flowers or telegrams.
Kirill could imagine what was hinted at, what the veiled threats were. The commission of General Batyushin was created within the apparatus of military counterintelligence, and it was subordinate to the chief of staff of the Supreme Commander. “In fact, Batyushin was the dictator of Russia at that time,” Kirill read in postrevolutionary memoirs. Batyushin’s people, according to the laws of wartime, had the right to search and arrest anyone at all, and so they were raiders and blackmailers threatening to charge people with state treason, a capital crime. Working in parallel was the Special Committee Against German Dominance, which studied the bylaws of companies to discover suspicious investments.
Special Councils, Special Commissions, illegal punishment, government violence—the Bolsheviks didn’t invent anything, thought Kirill. They created the Cheka along the fresh tracks of their predecessors. A long war, defeat, and the threat of a popular revolt had made the tsarist government ready to implement extreme measures as the norm, to implement paranoid witch hunts, which the Soviet government adopted and which returned again with the Chekist regime in Kirill’s day.
Batyushin later joined the Whites, emigrated, died in Belgium, and in 2004 was reburied in Moscow with the participation of the FSB. What a posthumous career, what a legacy, thought Kirill. His closest colleague, Lieutenant General Bonch-Bruevich, was the first tsarist general to work for the Reds, for Stalin and Dzerzhinsky, heading the military bureau of the Party; Bonch-Bruevich was the link between the generals of the General Staff and the future creators of the October Revolution.
The VChK, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, commonly known as Cheka, founded right after the Bolsheviks seized power, was the direct descendant of the commission of Batyushin and Bonch. It was reborn many times, changing its name, growing new fangs to replace the ones grown dull: OGPU, NKVD, MGB, KGB, FSB ... but the seeds of evil were sown in tsarist times. Andreas—Kirill caught his breath—Andreas was one of many who helped the evil grow, thinking they were doing good or at least choosing the lesser evil.
Andreas’s factories and plants were not taken away in the first half of 1916. There were no documents, no hints of how this happened, but Kirill figured that Andreas paid off the right person, Rasputin or someone from his crowd, or maybe he came to terms with Batyushkin, bought him off. But sensing that these people would keep demanding more and more from him and that their promises were not to be believed, Andreas starting giving money for the revolution.
At first Aristarkh, Arseny’s old acquaintance who was healed at the estate after the first revolution, made his presence known indirectly to Andreas. Kirill thought that the experienced underground fighter had learned long ago whose son Arseny was and what a rich family he therefore had in the palm of his hand, for if the case were revealed, Arseny would be in danger of punishment for hiding Aristarkh.
Aristrakh bided his time while Gustav was still alive. But now he turned up, probably learning from the papers that the old man who would have kicked him down the stairs had died.
Andreas was informed that the workers at the factory, who were working on a military commission that could not be delayed, were planning a strike, and representatives of the strike committee wanted to meet with the owner. Andreas realized that someone was staging the strike, but at first suspected competitors who wanted to ruin him and force the sale of his company—but it was the group headed by Aristarkh, extorting money for the Party coffers.
At first Andreas gave money reluctantly, to avoid the strike and cover up his son’s old sin (he didn’t write to Arseny about it), even though he was putting himself in their hands and they would come again, threatening to compromise him.
But then—and the “then” came very soon—he seemed to recognize his sacrificial field, his (not literal) repetition of the fate of the Marinated Midshipman Andreas.
He decided to sacrifice his wealth, good name, way of thinking, education, his entire life to make sure that their persecutors were punished, so that the Schwerdt family could stop being afraid of their name. There may have been a secret desire to take belated vengeance on Gustav for taking away his talent and using his gift for the profane business of enriching themselves.
Andreas saw salvation in the doctrine of the International, in the Marxist idea of classes. He started giving the fighters more and more money, turned a blind eye to the agitation at his factories. He must have expected on some level that his collaboration with the revolutionaries would be discovered, that he would be arrested, sentenced, perhaps executed, but that afterward, the revolution would punish his enemies.
Kirill suspected that things did not end with money. The revolutionaries could have used the warehouses of his companies, the accounts, they could have been put on the payroll so that they would have a legal right to travel around the country; Andreas must have had connections in neutral states, entry to the black market where things that were not allowed to be exported from warring states could b
e bought, old and secure contacts with customs, expediting offices, foreign banks, newspapermen, diplomats. The underground group could have used his import-export lines for smuggling and his accounts for bringing in money from abroad.
It’s unlikely that Andreas expected his dream of revenge to come true so soon.
In the fall of 1916, the instructions came at last on how to interpret the law, and a commission started working on the case of Andreas the sailor. The instructions required evidence of “valiant behavior” on the part of one who died in combat; the gray naval officials considered whether the death of Midshipman Schwerdt was a manifestation of valor, studied documents, the ship’s log, and reports on whether he had time to take out his weapon, and whether the concepts of valor and death by cannibalism were compatible.
A bit later the Council of Ministers decided to liquidate industrial enterprises on expropriated land, including the smallest ones with fewer than ten workers; the enterprises were either bought by the Land Bank or shut down, and it was looking as though the Marinated Midshipman would not save the Schwerdts and their holdings would go under the hammer.
In the winter of 1917 the railroads stopped. The blizzards that had once brought Andreas and his future wife together blocked the tracks. The rails, cars, and engines worn out over the three years of war were breaking down; the same thing was happening to Andreas’s body. Never ill before, he began complaining of terrible headaches, he could not sleep, pacing in Gustav’s study, where he had the sun of swords removed—he couldn’t bear having blades over his head.
The February Revolution—the desired vengeance—found Andreas near death. The universal rejoicing touched him glancingly. He seemed to be ashamed of hurrying to join the underground instead of waiting for the events that now seemed inevitable, precipitated by the course of history. And also, Kirill thought, Andreas had peeked behind the scenes of the revolution and could see much sooner than others what he had financed, what future he had brought closer.
The Goose Fritz Page 19