by Robert Moss
‘What will they do to the little bugger?’ Harrison asked without looking up.
‘The Armenian? Oh, he’ll probably be shot,’ Kozlov said casually. ‘They’ll put him up in front of a military court, because the case now involves war crimes. But they’ll want him as a witness first, to deal with Askyerov and the others.’
‘What else have you got on the menu?’ Harrison had watched Kozlov’s first show, a guided tour of Askyerov’s various residences.
‘Well, for tomorrow,’ Kozlov smirked, ‘I think we’ll do the vice ring that supplied Bolshoi dancers and underage girls to a number of illustrious gentlemen of the Central Committee. The public can’t get enough of it.’
Harrison thought the same might apply to his editors. For a change, he had no trouble getting the military censor’s approval for his story.
*
Sasha had personal business to settle in Moscow. He drove to the apartment building in Peschanaya Street where he had grown up. He had wanted to go alone but Zaytsev, who was in charge of security, had insisted that the rules applied to all eight members of the junta, under all circumstances: they were to travel with a minimum escort of four men, all of them drawn from Spetsnaz. There had been an incident just that morning, the first of its kind in Moscow. Someone had fired from a window at Leybutin’s car. The sniper had once been an agent for the Third Directorate of the KGB. He seemed to be unhinged, and was almost certainly acting alone. But there were too few of them, as Zaytsev pointed out, to take risks.
So the children came running to look as he stepped out of his car, flanked by his guards.
He made them wait outside when he entered Number 14. It was strange that his mother had remained in the same place all this time. Thanks to his influence, she had got possession of the whole apartment years before. There were no longer noisy neighbors jostling for space in the kitchen. In what had once been the family room, nothing seemed to be altered. There was babushka’s antique Singer, gathering dust. There were the snapshots of his father, and a newer photograph of himself, taken the day he first put on his major-general’s uniform.
‘Have you been all right?’ he asked his mother. ‘Is there anything you need?’
Their conversation was stilted, but it had always been that. Her requests were banal, even ridiculous when addressed to the most powerful man in the country. She had been trying to get a new refrigerator. Could he help?
It was all so familiar, so predictable. But he sensed something out of place. The way she kept trying to shunt him away from a particular door — the one leading to what had once been that drunk Fufkov’s room.
‘Is there someone here?’ he asked suddenly. And she jumped.
‘No!’ She said it too loud, and too quickly.
He gripped the door handle and turned.
‘Please, Sasha.’ She put her hand on his sleeve.
‘Who is it?’
She wouldn’t say, so he threw the door open. There, on the far side of the room, crouched in the corner like an animal at bay, was Krisov. He hadn’t changed much. His hair was sparser perhaps, his features more pinched, the eyes small and red like a ferret’s. There he was: the once so self-important Party functionary who had deformed Nina’s life. And she was still siding with him.
‘He thinks you’re going to shoot him, Sasha,’ his mother pleaded. ‘Please don’t hurt him.’
Sasha laughed, then fell silent, remembering Krisov’s intervention at his grandmother’s funeral.
‘What’s going to become of him?’ the mother was asking.
‘You know our policy.’ Sasha addressed this to Krisov. ‘Did you have any profession?’
‘I worked all my life for the Party.’
‘What was your father’s profession?’
‘He was a plumber.’
‘All right. There are schools for plumbers. You’ll report to this office’ — he scribbled the address and a brief note — ‘by ten in the morning. As you told me yourself, Citizen Krisov, there is no place for parasites in our society.’
*
His next call was on Professor Levin, long since retired from the university, who had found himself a couple of rooms near the Arbat. This time, Sasha broke the rules and went without an escort. It was painful enough to revive the memories of Tanya, and his first discoveries of the truth about his father and his country, without spectators.
Levin was nervous at first, then hostile, but his sense of history prevailed, and soon he was drawing a complicated analogy between the arrest of the Central Committee and the way Lenin’s chekists had seized the entire leadership of the rival Social-Revolutionaries when they had assembled in the Moscow Opera Hall to indict the Bolsheviks.
He paused to roll himself another of his terrible homemade cigarettes, and Sasha said, ‘None of this might have happened except for you. And Tanya.’
He trembled as he said it, reliving the scene of Tanya’s arrest, and the horror of her suicide in the labor camp. Out of her suffering, his purpose — his whole being — had been tempered.
But the professor was shaking his head, and wheezing as if his lungs were about to give out.
‘If Tanya were here,’ he said at last, ‘she’d probably still be cranking out samizdat. Against you.’
‘I don’t think so. I think this is what she would want. If not, then —’ He stumbled, but picked himself up again. ‘I’ve failed everyone. Is that what you think, Arkady Borisovich?’
‘Don’t ask an old man. Maybe you’re right. It’s not for me to say. Maybe Tanya would have sided with you. I can’t pull up my roots. I’m a Marxist, Sasha. For all that I’ve seen, I don’t blame the idea, I blame its interpreters.’ He started coughing, and Sasha was alarmed by the purplish flush that spread across his cheeks.
‘Can I get you something? Water, perhaps?’
‘No, no. You’ll have to excuse me, Sasha. I’m not what I was. On days like this, I feel the chill of the Perm region in my marrow. Do you really believe you can win without the camps? Without terror?’
‘We’ll try.’
‘First the philosophers, then the terror,’ Levin mused. ‘But you’re no philosopher, are you, Sasha?’
‘You should know. You taught me history.’
‘Perhaps that’s what will save you. The study of men struggling, and falling, and climbing back. Yes, perhaps you’re right. Tanya would have been with you. She cared more about people than abstractions.’
‘I’ve come to you with a proposal, Arkady Borisovich.’
‘Can’t you see I’m done for? What proposal?’
‘For three quarters of a century we’ve lived with lies, to the point that they came to seem more real than truth. Even today, there are lies that I still don’t recognize, they’re so deeply ingrained. It’s the same for you. How much more so for ordinary Russians! We have a lot of digging to do before we get to the bedrock. I intend to appoint a commission to write the definitive history of our country since 1917. All the archives will be thrown open. Think of it — the minutes of the Politburo, the dossiers of the KGB! I want you to chair the commission.’
Levin mumbled something about his age, about his ideological objections to the Military Revolutionary Committee. But he accepted in the end, as Sasha knew he would. No one who had dedicated his life to history could turn down the chance of a first look at the papers that had been meant to remain sealed forever.
*
The Marshal prowled his splendid apartment in the Visotny Dom, and drank a great deal more Akhtamar brandy than any doctor would have countenanced. General Luzhin, still his friend and admirer, though firmly committed to Sasha’s Committee, would come round some evenings to play chess. ‘It’s their turn,’ he would try to explain to Zotov. ‘Our generation had its chance. Now it’s up to the boys. Don’t forget, most of the Bolsheviks were under forty.’ At first, the Marshal would get violently angry. Once he actually chased Luzhin out of the apartment and into the hall, where two of the tough soldiers who stood g
uard day and night came to his rescue. But as time passed, and the number of decrees from the junta increased, and the TV news every night added to the discomfiture of the former elite, Zotov began to concede, grudgingly, that his son-in-law appeared to know what he was doing.
Twice a week he traveled, in the company of his deferential jailers, to the state guesthouse where Lydia and his grandson were living. Once he found Petya playing the Russian version of King of the Hill. He had just pushed an older boy off the top of a mound in the garden and was chanting, ‘I’m Tsar of the Hill!’
He scrambled down when he saw his grandfather. The Marshal bent down to receive his embrace.
‘Is it true what the others say?’ he said to the Marshal.
‘What do they say?’
‘They say my father is the new Tsar.’
‘Don’t ever let me hear you talk that way!’ Lydia shouted at him, and hurried toward the child as if she meant to spank him.
Marshal Zotov saw the boy squinting up at him, puzzled, trying to understand.
‘Let him be,’ he ordered his daughter.
He tousled the boy’s hair and said, ‘There’ll be no more Tsars, Petrushka. But you should be proud of your father. Because of him, Russia will never be the way it was before.’
*
It was too early to tell, with any degree of certainty, whether Sasha and his comrades would remain masters of Russia for long. As the old order fell into ruin, spontaneous uprisings and demonstrations erupted all over the country, despite the new government’s appeals for calm. Some of the people who took to the streets were supporters of the junta. Some were workers demanding immediate pay increases and the recognition of independent trade unions. There were ethnic clashes that pitted European Russians against Central Asians. Slavophile extremists were beating up Jews. There was a lot of random looting and brigandage, and in Kiev and Sverdlovsk the military authorities shot some of those who were caught red-handed.
Some of the surviving Party functionaries in Azerbaijan and Central Asia were plotting secession. Spokesmen for the Moslem Brotherhood, whose existence inside the borders of the former Soviet Union had never been suspected, surfaced overnight with a similar, but conflicting proposal: that the Moslem peoples of the southern republics should break away and rejoin the greater community of Islam.
There was trouble within the army itself. Since it had been revealed that the coup was not the work of the Chief of Staff but of a circle of younger officers, some regional commanders had cut communications with Gogol Boulevard. In the Far East, the District Commander tore up the order from Moscow that relieved him of his duties and set up private radio links with other disaffected generals. But when he issued orders for the forces under his command to prepare for a military assault on Moscow ‘to restore the legitimate socialist regime,’ he was shot by his own adjutant.
The Military Revolutionary Committee was supreme in Moscow, and seemed to have overwhelming support throughout European Russia. But there were fears that the stage had been set for the emergence of regional warlords, as in the civil war that had wracked the country after the Bolshevik coup, and for a long purgatory of starvation and fratricidal killing.
There was only one certainty. A man who had been a lifelong enigma to most of those around him had succeeded at what few before him dreamed possible: he had brought down the Soviet system, without war.
*
It was more than two weeks after the coup. Snow was falling from a sky like a coal scuttle, and the news from the southern republics had not improved.
The black Zil sailed along, in the middle of a little convoy, until the driver braked in front of the wrought iron gates of the old cemetery of Vagagankovskoye, where Vissotsky had been laid to rest a few years before. Only one man had been buried there since. The escort cars hovered at a respectful distance while two men in army greatcoats got out of the limousine. One was tall and athletic. The other was less than middling height, but might have been hewn from the trunk of an oak. They both looked as if they had been up all night.
They walked together to the new grave, next to Vissotsky’s, just inside the gate. They stepped within the metal grille that had been put up around it in the old-fashioned way. There was a simple bench, where they sat down, side by side. There were petals on the snow, blown roses, that must have been brought from a place warmer than this.
The shorter man pulled a bottle of Armenian brandy out of his pocket, and a couple of metal tumblers. He extracted the cork with his teeth and filled the glasses. Both men tossed off the drink.
The tall man took the bottle and refilled the glasses.
‘Pomyanem,’ he intoned as he poured brandy into the grave. ‘Let’s remember him.’
For a moment, they sat in a silence that was absolute except for the feathery sound of snow falling through the branches of the firs.
Then the tall man stood up and said to his companion, as the friend they had buried might have done: ‘Fedya, why are you fucking a cow? Nalivay!’