Fall of Giants

by Follett, Ken

  “How can he say such a thing? The nobility has been crushed.”

  “But so has the opposition press.”

  “A temporary necessity—”

  “How temporary? The Russian revolution is three years old!”

  “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

  “He says there are arbitrary arrests and executions, and the secret police are more powerful now than they were under the tsar.”

  “But they act against counterrevolutionaries, not against socialists.”

  “Socialism means freedom, even for counterrevolutionaries.”

  “No it doesn’t!”

  “It does to me.”

  Their raised voices woke Millie. Sensing the anger in the room, she started to cry.

  “There,” said Ethel resentfully. “Now look what you’ve done.”

  { V }

  When Grigori returned home from the civil war he joined Katerina, Vladimir, and Anna in their comfortable apartment within the government enclave in the old fort of the Kremlin. For his taste, it was too comfortable. The entire country was suffering shortages of food and fuel, but in the shops of the Kremlin there was plenty. The compound had three restaurants with French-trained chefs and, to Grigori’s dismay, the waiters clicked their heels to the Bolsheviks as they had to the old nobility. Katerina put the children in the nursery while she visited the hairdresser. In the evening, members of the Central Committee went to the opera in chauffeur-driven cars.

  “I hope we are not becoming the new nobility,” he said to Katerina in bed one night.

  She laughed scornfully. “If we are, where are my diamonds?”

  “But, you know, we do have banquets, and travel first-class on the railway, and so on.”

  “The aristocrats never did anything useful. You all work twelve, fifteen, eighteen hours a day. You can’t be expected to scavenge on rubbish tips for bits of wood to burn for warmth, as the poor do.”

  “But then, there’s always an excuse for the elite to have their special privileges.”

  “Come here,” she said. “I’ll give you a special privilege.”

  After they had made love, Grigori lay awake. Despite his misgivings, he could not help feeling a secret satisfaction at seeing his family so well-off. Katerina had put on weight. When he first met her she had been a voluptuous twenty-year-old girl; now she was a plump mother of twenty-six. Vladimir was five and learning to read and write in school with the other children of Russia’s new rulers; Anna, usually called Anya, was a mischievous curly-headed three-year-old. Their home had formerly belonged to one of the tsaritsa’s ladies-in-waiting. It was warm, dry, and spacious, with a second bedroom for the children and a kitchen and living room too—enough accommodation for twenty people in Grigori’s old lodgings in Petrograd. There were curtains at the windows, china cups for tea, a rug in front of the fire, and an oil painting of Lake Baikal over the fireplace.

  Grigori eventually fell asleep, to be wakened at six in the morning by a banging on the door. He opened it to a poorly dressed, skeletally thin woman who looked familiar. “I am sorry to bother you so early, Excellency,” she said, using the old style of respectful address.

  He recognized her as the wife of Konstantin. “Magda!” he said in astonishment. “You look so different—come in! What’s the matter? Are you living in Moscow now?”

  “Yes, we moved here, Excellency.”

  “Don’t call me that, for God’s sake. Where is Konstantin?”

  “In prison.”

  “What? Why?”

  “As a counterrevolutionary.”

  “Impossible!” said Grigori. “There must have been a terrible mistake.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who arrested him?”

  “The Cheka.”

  “The secret police. Well, they work for us. I’ll find out about this. I’ll make inquiries immediately after breakfast.”

  “Please, Excellency, I beg you, do something now—they are going to shoot him in one hour.”

  “Hell,” said Grigori. “Wait while I get dressed.”

  He put on his uniform. Although it had no badges of rank, it was of a much better quality than that of an ordinary soldier, and marked him clearly as a commander.

  A few minutes later he and Magda left the Kremlin compound. It was snowing. They walked the short distance to Lubyanka Square. The Cheka headquarters was a huge baroque building of yellow brick, formerly the office of an insurance company. The guard at the door saluted Grigori.

  He began shouting as soon as he entered the building. “Who is in charge here? Bring me the duty officer this instant! I am Comrade Grigori Peshkov, member of the Bolshevik Central Committee. I wish to see the prisoner Konstantin Vorotsyntsev immediately. What are you waiting for? Get on with it!” He had discovered that this was the quickest way to get things done, even though it reminded him horribly of the petulant behavior of a spoiled nobleman.

  The guards ran around in panic for a few minutes, then Grigori suffered a shock. The duty officer was brought to the entrance hall. Grigori knew him. It was Mikhail Pinsky.

  Grigori was horrified. Pinsky had been a bully and a brute in the tsarist police: was he now a bully and a brute for the revolution?

  Pinsky gave an oily smile. “Comrade Peshkov,” he said. “What an honor.”

  “You didn’t say that when I knocked you down for pestering a poor peasant girl,” Grigori said.

  “How things have changed, comrade—for all of us.”

  “Why have you arrested Konstantin Vorotsyntsev?”

  “Counterrevolutionary activities.”

  “That’s ridiculous. He was chair of the Bolshevik discussion group at the Putilov works in 1914. He was one of the first deputies to the Petrograd soviet. He’s more Bolshevik than I am!”

  “Is that so?” said Pinsky, and there was the hint of a threat in his voice.

  Grigori ignored it. “Bring him to me.”

  “Right away, comrade.”

  A few minutes later Konstantin appeared. He was dirty and unshaven, and he smelled like a pigsty. Magda burst into tears and threw her arms around him.

  “I need to talk to the prisoner privately,” Grigori said to Pinsky. “Take us to your office.”

  Pinsky shook his head. “My humble room—”

  “Don’t argue,” Grigori said. “Your office.” It was a way of emphasizing his power. He needed to keep Pinsky under his thumb.

  Pinsky led them to an upstairs room overlooking the inner courtyard. He hastily swept a knuckle-duster off the desk into a drawer.

  Looking out of the window, Grigori saw that it was daybreak. “Wait outside,” he said to Pinsky.

  They sat down and Grigori said to Konstantin: “What the hell is going on?”

  “We came to Moscow when the government moved,” Konstantin explained. “I thought I would become a commissar. But it was a mistake. I have no political support here.”

  “So what have you been doing?”

  “I’ve gone back to ordinary work. I’m at the Tod factory, making engine parts, cogs and pistons and ball races.”

  “But why do the police imagine you’re counterrevolutionary?”

  “The factory elects a deputy to the Moscow soviet. One of the engineers announced he would be a Menshevik candidate. He held a meeting, and I went to listen. There were only a dozen people there. I didn’t speak, I left halfway through, and I didn’t vote for him. The Bolshevik candidate won, of course. But, after the election, everyone who attended that Menshevik meeting was fired. Then, last week, we were all arrested.”

  “We can’t do this,” Grigori said in despair. “Not even in the name of the revolution. We can’t arrest workers for listening to a different point of view.”

  Konstantin looked at him strangely. “Have you been away somewhere?”

  “Of course,” said Grigori. “Fighting the counterrevolutionary armies.”

  “Then that’s why you don’t know what’s going on.
”

  “You mean this has happened before?”

  “Grishka, it happens every day.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  Magda said: “And last night I received a message—from a friend who is married to a policeman—saying Konstantin and the others were all to be shot at eight o’clock this morning.”

  Grigori looked at his army-issue wristwatch. It was almost eight. “Pinsky!” he shouted.

  The policeman came in.

  “Stop this execution.”

  “I fear it is too late, comrade.”

  “You mean these men have already been shot?”

  “Not quite.” Pinsky went to the window.

  Grigori did the same. Konstantin and Magda stood beside him.

  Down in the snow-covered courtyard, a firing squad had assembled in the clear early light. Opposite the soldiers, a dozen blindfolded men stood shivering in thin indoor clothes. A red flag flew above their heads.

  As Grigori looked, the soldiers raised their rifles.

  Grigori yelled: “Stop at once! Do not shoot!” But his voice was muffled by the window, and no one heard.

  A moment later there was a crash of gunfire.

  The condemned men fell to the ground. Grigori stared, aghast.

  Around the slumped bodies, bloodstains appeared on the snow, bright red to match the flag flying above.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  November 11-12, 1923

  Maud slept in the day and got up in the middle of the afternoon, when Walter brought the children home from Sunday school. Eric was three and Heike was two, and they looked so sweet in their best clothes that Maud thought her heart would burst with love.

  She had never known an emotion like this. Even her mad passion for Walter had not been so overwhelming. The children also made her feel desperately anxious. Would she be able to feed them and keep them warm, and protect them from riot and revolution?

  She gave them hot bread-and-milk to warm them, then she began to prepare for the evening. She and Walter were throwing a small family party to celebrate the thirty-eighth birthday of Walter’s cousin Robert von Ulrich.

  Robert had not been killed in the war, contrary to Walter’s parents’ fears—or were they hopes? Either way, Walter had not become the Graf von Ulrich. Robert had been held in a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia. When the Bolsheviks had made peace with Austria, Robert and his wartime comrade, Jörg, had set out to walk, hitchhike, and ride freight trains home. It had taken them a year, but they had made it, and when they returned Walter had found them an apartment in Berlin.

  Maud put on her apron. In the tiny kitchen of her little house she made a soup out of cabbage, stale bread, and turnips. She also baked a small cake, although she had to eke out her ingredients with more turnips.

  She had learned to cook and much else besides. A kindly neighbor, an older woman, had taken pity on the bewildered aristocrat and taught her how to make a bed, iron a shirt, and clean a bathtub. It had all come as something of a shock.

  They lived in a middle-class town house. They had not been able to spend any money on it, nor could they afford the servants Maud had always been used to, and they had a lot of secondhand furniture that Maud secretly thought was dreadfully suburban.

  They had looked forward to better times, but in fact things had got worse: Walter’s career in the foreign ministry had been dead-ended by his marriage to an Englishwoman, and he would have moved on to something else, but in the economic chaos he was lucky to have any job at all. And Maud’s early dissatisfactions seemed petty now, four years of poverty later. There was patched upholstery where the children had torn it, broken windows covered with cardboard, and paintwork peeling everywhere.

  But Maud had no regrets. Any time she liked she could kiss Walter, slide her tongue into his mouth, unbutton his trousers, and lie with him on the bed or the couch or even the floor, and that made up for everything else.

  Walter’s parents came to the party bringing half a ham and two bottles of wine. Otto had lost his family estate, Zumwald, which was now in Poland. His savings had been reduced to nothing by inflation. However, the large garden of his Berlin house produced potatoes, and he still had a lot of prewar wine.

  “How did you manage to find ham?” Walter said incredulously. Such things could normally be bought only with American dollars.

  “I traded it for a bottle of vintage champagne,” said Otto.

  The grandparents put the children to bed. Otto told them a folktale. From what Maud could hear, it was about a queen who had her brother beheaded. She shuddered, but did not interfere. Afterward Susanne sang lullabies in a reedy voice and the children went to sleep, apparently none the worse for their grandfather’s bloodthirsty story.

  Robert and Jörg arrived, wearing identical red ties. Otto greeted them warmly. He seemed to have no idea of their relationship, apparently accepting that Jörg was simply Robert’s flatmate. Indeed, that was how the men behaved when they were with older folk. Maud thought that Susanne probably guessed the truth. Women were harder to fool. Fortunately they were more accepting.

  Robert and Jörg could be very different in liberal company. At parties in their own home they made no secret of their romantic love. Many of their friends were the same. Maud had been startled at first: she had never seen men kissing, admiring one another’s outfits, and flirting like schoolgirls. But such behavior was no longer taboo, at least in Berlin. And Maud had read Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe, which seemed to suggest that this kind of thing had always gone on.

  Tonight, however, Robert and Jörg were on their best behavior. Over dinner everyone talked about what was happening in Bavaria. On Thursday an association of paramilitary groups called the Kampf bund had declared a national revolution in a beer hall in Munich.

  Maud could hardly bear to read the news these days. Workers went on strike, so right-wing bullyboys beat up the strikers. Housewives marched to protest against the shortage of provisions, and their protests turned into food riots. Everyone in Germany was angry about the Versailles Treaty, yet the Social Democratic government had accepted it in full. People believed reparations were crippling the economy, even though Germany had paid only a fraction of the amount and obviously had no intention of trying to clear the total.

  The Munich beer hall putsch had everyone worked up. The war hero Erich Ludendorff was its most prominent supporter. So-called storm troopers in their brown shirts and students from the Officers Infantry School had seized control of key buildings. City councilors had been taken hostage and prominent Jews arrested.

  On Friday the legitimate government had counterattacked. Four policemen and sixteen paramilitaries had been killed. Maud was not able to judge, from the news that had reached Berlin so far, whether the insurrection was over or not. If the extremists took control of Bavaria, would the whole country fall to them?

  It made Walter angry. “We have a democratically elected government,” he said. “Why can’t people let them get on with the job?”

  “Our government has betrayed us,” said his father.

  “In your opinion. So what? In America, when the Republicans won the last election, the Democrats didn’t riot!”

  “The United States is not being subverted by Bolsheviks and Jews.”

  “If you’re worried about the Bolsheviks, tell people not to vote for them. And what is this obsession with Jews?”

  “They are a pernicious influence.”

  “There are Jews in Britain. Father, don’t you remember how Lord Rothschild in London tried his best to prevent the war? There are Jews in France, in Russia, in America. They’re not conspiring to betray their governments. What makes you think ours are peculiarly evil? Most of them only want to earn enough to feed their families and send their children to school—just the same as everyone else.”

  Robert surprised Maud by speaking up. “I agree with Uncle Otto,” he said. “Democracy is enfeebling. Germany needs strong leadership. Jörg and I have joined the National Socia
lists.”

  “Oh, Robert, for God’s sake!” said Walter disgustedly. “How could you?”

  Maud stood up. “Would anyone like a piece of birthday cake?” she said brightly.

  { II }

  Maud left the party at nine to go to work. “Where’s your uniform?” said her mother-in-law as she said good-bye. Susanne thought Maud was a night nurse for a wealthy old gentleman.

  “I keep it there and change when I arrive,” Maud said. In fact she played the piano in a nightclub called Nachtleben. However, it was true that she kept her uniform at work.

  She had to earn money, and she had never been taught to do much except dress up and go to parties. She had had a small inheritance from her father, but she had converted it to marks when she moved to Germany, and now it was worthless. Fitz refused to give her money because he was still angry with her for marrying without his permission. Walter’s salary at the Foreign Office was raised every month, but it never kept pace with inflation. In partial compensation, the rent they paid for their house was now negligible, and the landlord no longer bothered to collect it. But they had to buy food.

  Maud got to the club at nine thirty. The place was newly furnished and decorated, and looked good even with the lights up. Waiters were polishing glasses, the barman was chipping ice, and a blind man was tuning the piano. Maud changed into a low-cut evening dress and fake jewelry, and made up her face heavily with powder, eyeliner, and lipstick. She was at the piano when the place opened at ten.

  It rapidly filled up with men and women in evening clothes, dancing and smoking. They bought champagne cocktails and discreetly sniffed cocaine. Despite poverty and inflation, Berlin’s nightlife was hot. Money was no problem to these people. Either they had income from abroad, or they had something better than money: stocks of coal, a slaughterhouse, a tobacco warehouse, or, best of all, gold.

  Maud was part of an all-female band playing the new music called jazz. Fitz would have been horrified to see it, but she liked the job. She had always rebelled against the restrictions of her upbringing. Doing the same tunes every night could be tedious, but despite that it released something repressed within her. She wiggled on her piano stool and batted her eyelashes at the customers.