RED ICE

by R. L. Crossland

  To safeguard his industrialization program’s food supply, Stalin set in motion a program with multiple objectives: to break the kulaks’ hold on food distribution, to generally drive the peasants into the cities, and to soften rural Russia for the advent of agrarian collectives.

  Setting out with their usual heavy-handedness, Stalin’s henchmen rounded up land, crops, and livestock in the name of the state. The kulaks constituted a very small percentage of all Russian peasants, but once the Soviet machine began rolling, it ground up everything in sight. Five million Russians were displaced. Some were executed outright while others were sent to factories, underpopulated regions, or corrective labor camps. The Red Army managed the program and it was pursued in a warlike manner. Unfortunately, no one was exactly sure who qualified as a kulak. In the interest of “Soviet thoroughness” all peasants became fair game, and the program was expanded to the uprooting of whole villages to clear the way for farm collectives.

  In 1931 the Vyshinsky family stood face-to-face with Soviet thoroughness. The Vyshinskys had been peasant farmers and occasional blacksmiths for generations. The grandfather was a farmer and blacksmith; the father a farmer and blacksmith; and the sons, Sacha, age ten, Pyotr, age eight, and with the exception of Yuri, age four, were expected to become peasant farmers and blacksmiths, too.

  Yuri’s birth had been difficult and his mother had died in childbirth. A sickly child, Yuri Vyshinsky was deemed ill suited for farm work because of his delicate constitution and because…of his gift. At four, Yuri could complete basic problems in farm math flawlessly. He could play a respectable game of chess on the village’s one chessboard (which did not have carved pieces but only symbols stamped on disks). This game he played endlessly on each pech or brick oven of the many izbas—family huts—in the village.

  There were some in the village who said he should be sent somewhere to learn how to read and make himself useful. Others attributed his strange aptitudes to something more sinister, in some way related to his Rumanian grandmother’s alleged Gypsy blood, and very likely to result in ill fortune. The second group announced that he would come to no account and end up in the company of fortune-tellers, actors, musicians, and mountebanks. Unknowingly, Yuri possessed a rare talent for harnessing abstractions.

  That spring, a party commissar came to the village meeting. He explained the new farm policy with commendable Soviet thoroughness. It became evident that the new order placed industrialization and the well-being of the cities well above peasant sensibilities. The commissar, clearly a city man, countered sanctimoniously every awkward question with generous use of the new term kulak. The picture presented to them did not sit well with peasants who were only just getting used to the idea of owning their own land. Now someone had come to take it away. There were angry words. The Vyshinskys’ patriarch closed the meeting with an old slavic political custom, a defenestration. The commissar was lucky the meeting had been held in a typical one-story izba.

  “We are not ‘kulaks,’” bellowed the senior Vyshinsky out the window to the retreating commissar. “This is hard, ungiving land. Do you think some air-sniffing Muscovite is going to tell us how to wring a living from it?”

  Isolated and illiterate, the villagers were surprised when the armed men of the GPU arrived. They rounded up the families of the village and herded them to a holding camp at a railroad station tens of miles away. They awaited their unnamed Siberian destiny in despair.

  “We must write Kalinin, Grandfather,” the small, awkward boy suggested one day. “Pyotr heard the train master say that he is the head of the Bolshevik government,” Yuri added shyly.

  His grandfather smiled at the naïveté of his reedy grandson, but Yuri seemed to function at a level beyond them. Anyway, the assistant train master could write and seemed sympathetic. Who knew when their train would come?

  The letter started, “We beg you, Comrade Kalinin, a mistake has been made. We are not ‘kulaks’ but honest peasants who wield our humble sickles in the fields.…”

  The Vyshinskys tried a one-in-a-million shot. In the end, no one dared to tamper with a letter addressed to one so high up. Though Stalin was the real power, Kalinin was president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

  Perhaps the party leaders were having second thoughts about their attack on the Russian breadbasket. Perhaps it was time to demonstrate that Soviet thoroughness could distinguish between peasants and kulaks. Perhaps Kalinin, who had made so much of his peasant background so often, found it expedient to underscore his ties once again. In any event, that fall when the train finally came, the Vyshinsky family alone was spared. Quiet young Yuri was torn between his pride of achievement and the knowledge that his playmates were gone forever.

  The family’s fortunes reversed abruptly. Yuri’s grandfather was a man who corresponded with the president of the Soviet Union. Consequently, Yuri’s father was offered the position of assistant to the colonel who supervised the new collective. Yuri’s father could not admit he found the job distasteful. The family had come perilously close to oblivion and too recently for him to decline. Yet he would never really adjust to constantly thrusting himself between the system and his people. The new inhabitants of the collective were surprised that Yuri’s grandfather, once so vigorous, died not long thereafter. Yuri’s father understood and suffered on.

  Yuri, his father, and his brothers weathered the foreseeable harvest of the kulak liquidation—three years of famine, the death of millions by starvation, and destruction from which Soviet agriculture never recovered.

  The three sons were placed in the party youth organization, the Komsomol, and in a special school for peasants. The special school made good propaganda. Moreover, with the elimination of the feudal landowners, and then the kulaks, someone on the collectives had to know how to read the pyatiletka, the first five-year plan. Later, Sacha was inducted into the army and attended the Frunze Higher Military School. Pyotr followed by attending the Leninskiy Higher Naval School. Less robust, Yuri was chosen to study physics at a lesser-known university west of Moscow.

  Yuri had little say in the matter, so it was fortunate it was a discipline he enjoyed. Unlike some of the other disciplines—genetics, for instance, under Lysenko—dealing in force, mass, velocity, and acceleration carried no politically charged baggage. Reticent, soft-spoken, but already hardened to the realities, he began to find subtle ways to challenge the new Soviet thought at his university. Though painfully shy, he became adept at counseling indirectly and at serving as a sounding board for his fellow students. Vyshinsky’s paternal influence was to change Kurganov’s life. They grew inseparable. Vyshinsky’s introverted, theoretical disposition complemented Kurganov’s vigorous, extroverted style. Among his many classmates—in peasant tradition—Vyshinsky had begun sowing seeds. In keeping with the trend of the new Soviet agriculture, there was little promise of a significant harvest.

  Then came the Great Patriotic War. Yuri’s father and oldest brother, Sacha, died in defense of Rodina, the Motherland, in the first weeks of fighting after the German invasion. Still in school, Yuri Vyshinsky learned of the purges that had wiped away the cream of the Russian officer corps, just a few years before the attack, and which had helped to pave the way for German advances. The German planners had noted the purge carefully. As with the kulaks, the liquidation of the Russian officer corps resulted in the loss of millions of Russian lives.

  Not long afterward, he was called up for service with a military intelligence unit that specialized in code-breaking. He demonstrated a remarkable aptitude for the work. Surprisingly, the secret lay not in his well-developed mathematical skills, but rather in his sensitive understanding of human nature and his ability to visualize and handle people—at a distance. It had to be at a distance. Something in him did not trust his ability to act directly. Like the Wizard of Oz, Yuri Vyshinsky was at his best hidden behind a curtain.

  Eventually declining party membership, he advanced no further and was released at the war’s
end.

  Not long afterward he completed his degree and took a teaching position. Outside of the classroom, he was sought as a counselor by his students. Once again the shy physicist resumed his pattern of sowing seeds, as he called them, “of doubt and truth.”

  By the ’Fifties, his brother Pyotr had risen to an important position in the Soviet submarine service. Pyotr’s influence brought Yuri an assignment to Lomonosov State University in Moscow, and secondarily won him tenancy in a communal apartment, a coveted privilege.

  At Lomonosov, Yuri Vyshinsky’s students nicknamed him—with some warmth—krolik, the puppet, for his airy, disjointed mannerisms. They hypothesized that a stiff wind would tangle his strings and would send their professor flapping all the way to Gorky Park. The sobriquet held some truth, but would have been more accurate had it been the puppet maker, because his “sowing” was taking on more active aspects. Like a puppet maker, he created and inspired; but his was a gentle puppetry that guided, rather than controlled, the steps of his adopted charges. His method of pressing his dissension from behind a curtain was well suited for survival in the Soviet system.

  By the mid-sixties, Yuri Vyshinsky had in his invisible way contributed to establishing the samizdat, the secret self-publishing network. Years later his brother Pyotr, now a captain, first rank, in the Baltic Fleet, came to him.

  “There is no appropriate way I can think of, my brother, to convey the feeling of dying by millimeters. I am dying. Radiation sickness is now the official professional ailment of the Soviet submarine service. Through diligent application and loyal service in boats designed without people in mind, I have become an official casualty.”

  He sighed with resignation. “When the choice is between the people and the state’s objectives, the people always pay for those objectives with their lives. The final joke is, the state’s objectives are never met anyway.”

  Yuri, reticent as ever, spoke slowly. “You must leave the Soviet Union. You must get medical help. After Chernobyl it would appear the only reliable radiation-sickness treatment is to be found in the West.”

  At once Pyotr understood the staggering impact of Yuri’s words. A naval officer, especially a submariner, would not be allowed to leave the Soviet Union—not with radiation sickness. In essence, Yuri was telling Pyotr to take his family and defect. It was an eventuality Pyotr had only contemplated in a mental whisper. Yuri was inviting disaster because he would not be able to go. He did not have the mobility that accompanied his brother’s naval officer’s internal passport. The relatives that a defector left behind were punished for their unhappy status. Knowing he would be left behind, Yuri was implicitly agreeing to make an extraordinary sacrifice. Yuri was surprised at his own directness.

  Using some of Yuri’s samizdat contacts, Pyotr and his family slipped into Finland. Unfortunately, Pyotr’s exposure had been too extensive and he was dead within a month.

  Yuri Vyshinsky, professor of theoretical physics at Lomonosov State University, received the usual amenities. A year’s “medical attention” in a psychiatric ward left him in broken health and with a certain slowness of speech. His job and apartment were taken away.

  But the brain was still intact…and the spirit. “Krolik” took a job as a sweeper on the underground economy. He slept on a cot in the boiler room of the university’s physics building. His new quarters reminded Yuri of those wintry days as a child in the village when he slept on apech. Occasionally he ghost-wrote technical papers for his former students.

  The KGB attempted to visit him periodically but he was difficult to find and completely behind the puppet maker’s curtain now. Guiding the steps of samizdat writers and related dissidents, he was a consultant who specialized in dissidence in the shadows.

  There were now no distractions from his struggle with the system. Under a naked light bulb, the boiler room walls echoed, “If they take Shevschenko, get letters to the American Academy of Science…” “That Ukrainian nationalist manuscript must be printed in Austria and smuggled back here.…” “The Irkutsk Writers Union is completely infiltrated, I wouldn’t even bother…” “The short Baptist tract can be smuggled in a container like this.…” “Have you heard Rimsky got ten years in Magadan for housing the blacklisted Armenians?”

  The KGB never caught on to him. But two years after Pyotr’s death, he was thrown into Lefortovo Prison for initial interrogation. The KGB had at last discovered someone dear to Kurganov. Kurganov was a great irritation to them. One whom they could not touch directly. But Kurganov could be made to regret his actions indirectly, through the punishment of others. That was one established way of dealing with men who shouldered a strong sense of obligation and responsibility. Their file labeled “Kurganov” now had a second subheading after “retribution”: it read “Special Prisoner Vyshinsky.”

  There was, I knew, a point when after having fought hard and well that a man deserved to be pulled out of the contest. Someone else could pick up the banner. Vyshinsky had earned a rest.

  I looked at the picture again and tried to visualize him with a full beard and without glasses. I couldn’t.

  The body, the posture, but most of all, the eyes, would have to do it. The peasant puppet maker’s sad and compassionate eyes. Those pallbearer’s eyes.

  “Were we able to get information of the size of the garrison or the layout of the camp?”

  “No,” Sato said quietly.

  “Keep Myshka on it. I don’t want to play a long shot like this by the seat of my pants.”

  The coordinates placed the camp in a valley just west of the Dzhugdzhur Range, over eighty miles from the coast. Navigation would be tough. Magnetic compasses would spin aimlessly in that portion of the world. Solar compasses, which gave readings using the angle of the sun’s rays at a specific time of day, were no more help, since we hoped to move at night.

  The stars and terrain features offered our primary means of night navigation. Confronted with a heavy overcast or a good snowstorm, we might have to drop crumbs to find our way out—a procedure which the pursuing Soviet army might find amusing.

  CHAPTER 12

  In the predawn darkness, I put the twenty-five men through an hour of heavy calisthenics, then took them on a 10,000-meter run. Four or five of the Marseilles group wheezed in a full half hour behind the rest.

  “It’s too cold for running.… What was all this jock stuff for?… The only muscle that needed conditioning was the one connected to the right index finger.… We’ve already been through basic training once, we don’t need it again.” One, a chain smoker, quit on the spot. He flew home that night.

  After breakfast we mustered in one suite, which became a makeshift classroom. Dravit and Heyer drummed Russian phrases and some written words into heads of varied receptiveness. During breaks, rumors swirled about like blizzard snowflakes. We were learning Russian to impersonate Russians…we were learning Russian to abduct Russians outside of Russia…we were learning Russian to survive in Russia. Dravit, who knew the nature of our mission, smiled enigmatically. I simply pretended not to hear.

  In the afternoon Heyer began the cross-country instruction in his quiet competent way. The pale blond Norwegian paired the experienced skiers with the inexperienced and put them through the basics. We carried no packs at first, nor any weapons. Japan put severe restrictions on firearms and in any event, we did not want to attract attention.

  As far as anyone knew, we were some burly tourist group. The Japanese are used to tourist groups moving around with martial precision behind a host of flags in matching apparel. We reversed the norm by peppering our wide range of cast-off military clothing with enough civilian items to pass for American casual chic.

  The next few days went by without incident. I increased the pace and stress of the physical training and the group sorted itself between the fit and thriving, and the unfit and downward spiraling. Three were keeping up with the cadre of four, a middle-aged ex-French Foreign Legion officer, the Gurkha rifleman, and an ex-German K
ampfschwimmer. The legionnaire, d’Epinuriaux, was from Chamonix, where he had at one time tried downhill racing. He was called Chamonix or ’Nix. The stocky Gurkha, Gurung, despite coming from the snowiest region of Nepal had never skied but nevertheless led the novices by sheer force of will. Lutjens, a wedge-shaped German frogman, had been a world-class gymnast.

  The ex-Foreign Legion officer, Gaston d’Epinuriaux, had a hawklike face and a long, lean configuration, which combined to remind you of a French halberd. Laconic, precise, he was not the fellow you’d go to first with a new joke. Then again, I was hardly the one to be critical on that point. His cold, unblinking blue eyes were accented by a long-discolored scar that streaked down one side of his face like a bolt of tropic lightning. The steely gray stubble over his ears looked as if it could strike sparks on a hard surface. Everything about him was either hard, cold, or contained.

  In the hotel’s hot-spring pool, he’d created a stir among the Japanese guests when they’d seen his bare torso—dimpled with more zippers than a motorcycle jacket. Bayonet work, I’d say. At its dirtiest.

  He was a gloomy old soldier, the kind they fear in the Legion because of the cafard. Le cafard was the black beetle that, according to legend, gnawed into men’s brains at those lonely, desolate outposts of which the Legion was fond. It accounted for all manner of murder, madness, and suicide. The quiet ones were always the most dangerous, the morose ones who did their work mechanically. The merest trifle might set them off.

  That was the easy answer to his manner, I suspected there was more to it.

  The second excelling new skier, Amarsing Gurung, was a Gurkha. It seems useless to say more. “Gurkha” says it all. He was one of those stocky, bandy-legged mountain men from Nepal whose weathered brown faces opened into a dazzling white smile when there was mischief afoot or at the prospect of action with heavy doses of cordite and cold steel. He shaved his head in the old way, leaving only a jet black topknot by which the gods could pluck his fallen body from the field of battle.