Martin, the red-haired Englishman, whistled in admiration. He was hoping to work with Boris Iofan, the building’s designer and one of the architects responsible for the city’s modernization plan.
“Don’t get too excited,” Claude advised quietly. “It’s a brilliant move: They put all the country’s best minds in the same place, lavish them with privileges, and it’s far simpler to keep tabs on them this way. I bet there are peepholes in all the walls and OGPU microphones hidden everywhere.”
Michael, a Scotsman who’d already spent time in Russia, touched his arm amicably. “Please, Claude. We come as friends. We’re not counterrevolutionary spies; in fact, just the opposite. Don’t upset our Spanish friend with paranoid gossip about the Political Directorate.”
Claude smiled patiently. “Did you know that the leader the great Stalin admires most is Ivan the Terrible? I’m just saying: Be careful what you do and say in there.”
Elías’s apartment was bigger than any other place he’d ever lived, certainly much larger than his humble room in Madrid’s Student Residence or the dismal bedroom at his house in Mieres. The furniture was austere: a table and lamp, a single bed, a small armoire, stove, and bathroom. It had a sad air, but rather than a dungeon, it resembled a monk’s cell, a place that fostered sobriety and hard work. A curtainless window looked out over the immense cement forecourt, crisscrossed with paths leading to other buildings. The people down below looked like ants, rushing haphazardly from place to place. The sun shone cold but bright. The temperature was bearable, at least inside his apartment. Nikolai showed him the room like a solicitous bellhop and then said goodbye, shaking Elías’s hand once more.
“I’ll come for you tomorrow at six. You’ll go straight to work. For now, rest. Welcome to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”
Elías fumbled, searching his mind for the right words with which to thank him in Russian, and Nikolai gave him a pat on the shoulder, bemused.
“Let’s hope you build bridges better than you speak Russian.”
That same evening, Elías wrote a letter home, giving his father his first impressions. He described the cities they’d traveled through on their way to Moscow, the desolate beauty of the landscapes he’d seen, and the people he’d met on the train, including his three new friends. Elías was surprised by how much seemingly unsophisticated people—workers and peasants—knew about literature and music, both classical and popular. It wasn’t uncommon to overhear heated arguments about who was the better composer, Verdi or Bizet, or to hear Bach and Prokofiev being played on pianos in any old café.
Outsiders seem to believe that people here are on their knees, and I’m not yet in any position to affirm or deny this. It’s true that the police are everywhere, and that when people mention Stalin they call him “vozhd” and lower their voices if they’re not sure who might be listening. The Soviets have a proverbially wry sense of humor, it seems, and often use the word “sidit,” which means both to be sitting down and to be incarcerated. But how many of our compatriots do you know who can play a Bach fugue? Or recite Spanish poets the way, here, a fisherman recites Mayakovsky? They say Stalin is a great music lover; well, I can say that at least he shares his love with the people. Classical music is a required subject starting in elementary school. What they’re building here, Father, is incomparable to anything humanity has ever built before, there’s no doubt about it. I am very excited and can’t wait to start work.
Take care, and give Mother a hug.
The following days were intense. First thing in the morning, well before dawn, Nikolai would come to pick Elías up at the gates of the residence, and then together they’d take the tram to the outskirts of town. Elías traveled alongside port and railroad workers, breathing in the potent smell of their clothes, rolling tobacco, strong coffee, and alcohol. He scrutinized their tired faces as they nodded off against the tram’s windows, listened to the women’s conversations, and grilled his “shadow,” asking him questions about anything that drew his attention and begging Nikolai to speak to him only in Russian. Elías was curious about everything: the architecture of the buildings they passed; Moscow’s history, literature, and music; and, of course, politics. He wanted to know it all: who was who, how things had gone since the civil war. And he was drawn like a magnet to the omnipresent figure of Stalin. The man’s image was everywhere—there were portraits along the large avenues, signs with his proclamations inside the tram cars, images on the sides of public buildings and even on the walls of the most secluded alleys. Stalin was like an omniscient god, watching everything with his deep eyes and enormous mustache.
Nikolai would answer some questions frankly, obviously proud of his people’s culture. He was from a city in the Urals whose name Elías found unpronounceable, and swore that without the Great Leader’s literacy project, he would never have had the opportunity to read Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, much less move to Moscow. And yet Nikolai gave vague replies to any slightly indiscreet questions, when he didn’t evade them completely. After spending a few days with him, Elías realized that even in the USSR, openhearted sincerity was a rare virtue. Nikolai weighed his words carefully, and it was clear that survival instincts took precedence over his principles. Elías could never tell what Nikolai truly thought about certain subjects. And his own instincts soon told him that he himself needed to be discreet with comments and opinions. After all, he was just a Spanish student who couldn’t understand the context surrounding what was happening in his host country. Nonetheless, his enthusiasm and sincerity made keeping his mouth shut quite a struggle.
The job site he’d been assigned to was, at the time, the greatest feat of engineering ever undertaken by man: an enormous canal that would connect the Moskva and Volga rivers to supply the city’s water and connect Moscow with the great White Sea Canal. Using sluiceways and lateral canals, thousands of miles of river would be rechanneled, altering the natural course of waterways that had until now defiantly refused to be tamed. Hundreds of thousands of men and women, children and old people toiled night and day with picks and shovels on this massive undertaking.
“Moscow will be the Port of Five Seas,” Nikolai proclaimed with obvious pride. Its Great Canal would connect to the Volga-Don and flow into the White Sea, the Baltic, the Caspian, the Sea of Azov, and the Black Sea. “The most celebrated leaders, from Alexander the Great to Peter the Great, dreamed of something like this. But we, the Bolsheviks, are the ones creating canals in the steppe to make it possible.”
It was impressive indeed, Elías admitted, examining the plans for this titanic endeavor. But he was also confronted by the harsh reality of the inhuman means by which it was carried out. The canal’s construction was overwhelmingly supplied by forced labor, prisoners sometimes convicted on ridiculous charges. Stealing a loaf of bread could carry a five-year sentence. Prisoners condemned to death for felonies had their sentences commuted in exchange for working like slaves, constantly watched over by armed units from the OGPU and the GULAG administration—the police that ran the forced labor camps headed by Matvei Berman and Genrikh Yagoda. Just the mention of their names was enough to harden Nikolai’s expression.
“You don’t understand,” he charged one morning, when Elías kept going on about it. Nikolai praised the educative labor being carried out by prisoners, but as he spoke, Elías saw a prisoner being savagely beaten with clubs by a couple of guards, and no one batted an eye or dared to intervene. Where was the education in that? Where, in the deaths caused by scurvy, malaria, overexposure, and beatings, Elías wanted to know. He was horrified.
“There is education in silence and in death. A lesson for the living that they will not forget,” Nikolai responded, his caustic Soviet irony on full display.
“What about the people?”
“The masses are simple, they are brute force, fickle and easily manipulated. Any faith in their love is misguided. The only guarantee of their loyalty is through f
ear.”
“But these are the same people who need a better quality of life. Otherwise, what’s the point of all this?”
Nikolai shrugged. “The peasants want to live in palaces. There can’t be palaces for everyone.”
Reality, and the constant shock of its contrasts, smacked Elías in the face again and again; it was all so disconcerting. No sooner would he get his bearings in one setting than he’d be whisked off to another where things couldn’t be any more different, with no time to process. From the swamps on the canal—thigh-deep in mud, surrounded by unspeakable hardship and suffering—he’d be taken straight to visit Lenin’s astonishing mausoleum, or to a performance by the Bolshoi Ballet or a reception with local authorities who for hours subjected him to hot air he could only partially understand. He hardly had time to rest or write about his day in letters to his father, which he gave to Nikolai to take to the post office. His letters were contradictory, as were his emotions and the reactions he had to all that was unfolding before his eyes. The enthusiasm he’d felt at the beginning had not abated in the three weeks Elías had been in Moscow, but there were now shades of gray that made him question the means by which Stalin had decided, at any cost, to bring the Soviet Union into modernity. He wondered, in his letters, what would happen if Spain’s new Republic were to adopt the same methods: army purges, forced labor, intense fervor. His conclusion was clear: We Spaniards couldn’t endure this. We lack the Soviets’ stoicism and self-sacrifice.
Nikolai never eased up. As though instructed to give Elías no downtime, no space to reflect, he’d turn up at his apartment at night, dragging him out to the bars on Frunze Avenue, where everyone sang and drank to excess. The Russians’ spirit was as beautiful and melancholic as their culture. When drinking, they recited poetry with such tragedy that Elías, though he didn’t fully understand, ended up with a knot in his throat. Works by condemned poets and writers repudiated by the State were recited only when people were very drunk. That was when they told astonishing stories: that of Mayakovsky’s suicide, or the time Osip Mandelstam slapped Alexei Tolstoy, the “Red Count,” in the face. And the wee hours, in the haze of alcohol, was when the yurodivy, or holy fools, appeared. Prophets of God, they conferred with czars and yet were still greatly respected. Only they could tell the truth, could openly criticize members of the Politburo or even Stalin himself, with a biting wit that was always met with laughter. Listening to them, Elías thought they were like the court jesters so brilliantly portrayed in Velázquez’s paintings. Only the jesters had dared to tell the kings that they were nothing but idols with feet of clay. On nights like these, Elías once again felt he was living in the Russia of Gogol, Gorky, and Dostoyevsky; he wondered which of the men and women present might have inspired fictional characters like Anna Karenina and the brothers Karamazov.
One night, the four friends all met up at Nikolai’s suggestion. This was the first time they’d seen each other since their arrival in Moscow, three weeks earlier. They embraced merrily, interrupting one another with stories about the experiences they’d had, laughing. They had dinner together and drank themselves silly under the supervision of their guide, who observed from the sidelines, wearing an expression both empathetic and disdainful. He was like a father giving his children free rein for the first time and then watching them let loose in amused curiosity. Yet something in the four young men’s souls had evolved. Each, to different degrees, realized and expressed the fact that they were undoubtedly living a historic moment, both beautiful and terrible. Comparisons between what was happening in their respective countries and the Soviet Union were inevitable, and in one way or another they all came to the same conclusion, drunk on youth and vodka: Europe, old and frail, was dying, and a daunting and brutal new force was fighting to take its place. And they were privileged eyewitnesses.
Claude was perhaps the most taciturn of the four. Unlike the others, he’d managed to shake his guide on more than one occasion and roam the streets, chatting with people more freely. That night he took long pulls from glass after glass of vodka and kept quiet.
“Come on, Claude, don’t look so unhappy,” Martin blurted out. He was exceedingly drunk, keeping his balance by holding fast to a chair back, but his body still swayed side to side, like a ship about to founder. Michael and Elías, on his left and right, helped keep him on his feet when the rocking became too perilous.
Claude shot a sidelong glance at Nikolai, sitting one table over. He looked relaxed, talking to his comrades and drinking, though no doubt he hadn’t taken his eyes off them.
“I don’t understand your enthusiasm,” he replied quietly, his voice almost inaudible amid the noise of the packed bar. “I remember the first time I saw Lenin. It was in Vienna, before he’d had his first stroke. This was at the height of the war with the White Army, and European powers like England and France were on the verge of intervening to tip the balance in favor of the czar. Lenin was a force of nature, touring Europe to convince the world that the Bolsheviks didn’t pose a threat. But they did, and the old European dynasties trembled in the face of this little man who’d decided to turn Marx’s dream into his reality. Behind him, silent, brooding, was Stalin. We called him ‘the Bear’ because he was so big and had those bushy eyebrows and penetrating eyes. He wasn’t Party secretary then; at the time he was just one more leader, not even the most brilliant one. But I remember, watching him, that I couldn’t help thinking that this man would do anything to further his aspirations. And that what mattered was figuring out what it was he aspired to.”
“What are you trying to get at?” Michael asked impatiently, intuiting that the conversation was drifting into dangerous territory. “I don’t know what Stalin wanted then, but I’ve seen what he’s doing now and it’s unbelievable. He’s turning the Soviet Union inside out like a sock! It’s astonishing.”
Claude nodded and then gave a little chuckle that irked the others; it was as though he knew something they did not. He pointed at Elías with his glass.
“You’ve worked with the convict brigades on the Great Canal. You’ve seen the conditions these poor wretches live in.”
Elías shot a quick look over at Nikolai, who seemed not to be paying attention, and was disturbed to realize something that he became conscious of only at that moment: fear of expressing oneself openly was contagious; he too now felt reluctant to speak.
“The majority of those people are criminals. They have a debt to society and they’re paying it off with their labor.” Immediately, he felt an instinctive horror at what he’d just said. He imagined the profound disappointment his father would feel on hearing those words. “It’s true that conditions are deplorable,” he added, trying to make amends, “but what can we do about it?”
Claude banged his hand down on the table. Luckily, the noise level was so high that no one paid any attention.
“Are you bloody kidding me? We’ve got eyes to see, ears to hear, and brains to think. You say most of those working on the canal are convicts, ergo they deserve whatever happens to them because they’ve done something wrong. I beg to differ, but even if it were true, what about those who haven’t done anything wrong, what about those who actually do not—as you say—‘have a debt to society’?”
Martin stared at his friend’s drooping eyelids, his heavy tongue poking out between his teeth. His head lolled back and then jerked forward, which seemed to clear a bit of the booze-induced haze from his mind.
“I’ve heard things,” Claude went on. “They say Yagoda and Berman have proposed to Stalin a deportation plan. They want to cleanse Moscow of what they call the lower classes—beggars, drunks, and pickpockets—but also of peasants fleeing the collectivizations. Apparently the bastards have proposed a massive emigration, to repopulate the northernmost part of the country. Nobody wants to be sent off to freeze to death in Siberia. So the police make up any damn excuse to send them there, no trial, nothing. All it takes is not having an intern
al passport.”
“That’s bullshit!” Michael exclaimed. “Defeatist propaganda from the damned Mensheviks still hiding out with kolkhoz farmers.”
The three friends became embroiled in an argument that Elías observed, dumbstruck and inebriated, but not so drunk that he didn’t pick up on the fact that their vehemence had aroused the attention of Nikolai and his friends. Nikolai held his gaze with a mocking smile, as though inviting Elías to join in the discussion. Cat got your tongue? his eyes seemed to ask. Elías felt his guts churn.
“I’m going to be sick,” he murmured, bringing a hand to his mouth.
Curiously, this gesture stopped their conversation short.
“Don’t even think about throwing up in here. What are our Soviet comrades going to think of us? A man who can’t hold his drink is not to be trusted,” Claude warned, laughing.
Elías struggled to his feet. He’d had too much to drink. Maybe not compared to his friends, but way too much for his tolerance. The bar was in a cellar and Elías dragged himself up the stairs, hands pressed to the wall so as not to lose his point of reference. The others let him go, laughing and teasing. Except for Nikolai. He wasn’t laughing.
It was freezing outside, far colder than anything Elías had ever felt in his life, and despite wearing a heavy jacket he trembled like he had malaria. The dark sky was heavy with clouds, an icy slush raining down, but the moon above looked beautiful, bathed in a luminous aura that made Elías feel very far from home. The concern he felt over his friends’ conversation and Nikolai’s penetrating eyes eased a bit. There was nothing to fear. Yes, they were young, impetuous idealists, but they were honest and prepared to work hard. When it came down to it, what difference did a few critical words spoken in the heat of vodka make? He unzipped his trousers and, as he urinated, softly sang an old nursery rhyme in Asturian dialect, amusing himself by drawing circles in the snow.
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