Cold War, Hot Passions: Omnibus One

By Andre Jute

COLD WAR, HOT PASSIONS
OMNIBUS ONE

the epic saga of ten intertwined Russian and American families
who live and die by their love of liberty
and the searing passions their fight for freedom arouses
in war and peace.

“Wild but exciting. A grand job with plenty of irony.”
New York Times

“Jute has clearly conducted a great deal of research into everything he describes, investing the novel with an air of prophecy. His moral concerns are important.”
Times Literary Supplement
THE GREATEST CONSPIRACY THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN
STARTED WITH THE STORMING OF THE WINTER PALACE

In the beginning they were impassioned young revolutionaries risking only their own lives for justice. The prince, the soldier, and the peasant became the patriarchs of three families whose generations are enfolded in the sweep of humans and inhumans, inquisitors and victims, that tells the story of the KGB — which is the story of Russia in the Twentieth Century — from the day Lenin created it as the Cheka in the Smolny Convent: the Extraordinary Commission from the beginning and from the inside, motivated by its own imperatives of fear and fanaticism, through the murders of whole classes, the massacres of kulaks, the betrayals of friends and family, the show trials of colleagues, the psychiatric tortures of dissidents, right up to glasnost, when the fourth generation must answer the question, Was the result worth three generations of suffering and sacrifice?

While on the other side of the world a slumbering giant awoke slowly to a threat, not of a Russian bear stirring, but of German tanks rumbling...

THE GREATEST
SECRET INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN
BEGAN AS ONE MAN’S DREAM

There was David, the Boston patriarch, comrade of “Wild Bill” Donovan and father of the intelligence mandarin Joshua. And Joshua’s friends. The roistering, confessing Richard, the last soldier-priest. Joe-Bob from the Louisiana swamps, who saw the power of politics, an artist with a knife. Hillel, the penniless Jewish refugee from Germany, equally handy with a pistol or a computer. Harvey McQueen, the permanent outsider, the greatest spy of all time, who exposed Kim Philby and dug the Berlin Tunnel into the heart of Russia’s darkest secrets.

And their women. Virginia, the senator’s daughter. Nicole the Resistance fighter. Giselda the German spy. Jen whom the pressure turned into a lush. Belinda the brain. Fiona the faithful.

And there was Hubbell, who saw the final truth. He knew it was greater than power could ever be—and gladly risked the world for it.
***
There were two cars. One took away their jumpsuits and parachutes. They climbed into the other car. David sat beside the driver, a woman. He leaned over the back of his seat. ‘The Contessa de Grubelli drove racing cars before the war but I hope her skill will not be called upon tonight. I asked General Donovan to send me his very best men.’

‘To do what?’ Hillel asked.

‘To take over a country.’

‘It had better be a small country, sir,’ Richard said. ‘There are only three of us.’

‘It is only a small country.’

‘Then between us and the sea we got them surrounded,’ the irrepressible Joe-Bob laughed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andre Jute
• Release date: Feb 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781908369246

Andre Jute

André Jute is a novelist and, through his non-fiction books, a teacher of creative writing, graphic design and engineering. There are about three hundred editions of his books in English and a dozen other languages.He was educated in Australia, South Africa and the United States. He has been an intelligence officer, racing driver, advertising executive, management consultant, performing arts critic and professional gambler. His hobbies include old Bentleys, classical music (on which for fifteen years he wrote a syndicated weekly column), cycling, hill walking, cooking and wine. He designs and builds his own tube (valve) audio amplifiers.He is married to Rosalind Pain-Hayman and they have a son. They live on a hill over a salmon river in County Cork, Eire.

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CONTENTS

Cover

Read all about it

Title Page

Copyright

Start reading

COLD WAR, HOT PASSIONS OMNIBUS ONE

Family Tree

Glossary

More Books by André Jute & Friends

COLD WAR, HOT PASSIONS

OMNIBUS ONE

the epic saga of ten intertwined Russian and American families

who live and die by their love of liberty

and the searing passions their fight for freedom arouses

in war and peace.

Wild but exciting. A grand job with plenty of irony.

New York Times

Jute has clearly conducted a great deal of research into everything he describes, investing the novel with an air of prophecy. His moral concerns are important.

Times Literary Supplement

THE GREATEST CONSPIRACY THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN

STARTED WITH THE STORMING OF THE WINTER PALACE

In the beginning they were impassioned young revolutionaries risking only their own lives for justice. The prince, the soldier, and the peasant became the patriarchs of three families whose generations are enfolded in the sweep of humans and inhumans, inquisitors and victims, that tells the story of the KGB — which is the story of Russia in the Twentieth Century — from the day Lenin created it as the Cheka in the Smolny Convent: the Extraordinary Commission from the beginning and from the inside, motivated by its own imperatives of fear and fanaticism, through the murders of whole classes, the massacres of kulaks, the betrayals of friends and family, the show trials of colleagues, the psychiatric tortures of dissidents, right up to glasnost, when the fourth generation must answer the question, Was the result worth three generations of suffering and sacrifice?

While on the other side of the world a slumbering giant awoke slowly to a threat, not of a Russian bear stirring, but of German tanks rumbling…

THE GREATEST

SECRET INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN

BEGAN AS ONE MAN’S DREAM

There was David, the Boston patriarch, comrade of Wild Bill Donovan and father of the intelligence mandarin Joshua. And Joshua’s friends. The roistering, confessing Richard, the last soldier-priest. Joe-Bob from the Louisiana swamps, who saw the power of politics, an artist with a knife. Hillel, the penniless Jewish refugee from Germany, equally handy with a pistol or a computer. Harvey McQueen, the permanent outsider, the greatest spy of all time, who exposed Kim Philby and dug the Berlin Tunnel into the heart of Russia’s darkest secrets.

And their women. Virginia, the senator’s daughter. Nicole the Resistance fighter. Giselda the German spy. Jen whom the pressure turned into a lush. Belinda the brain. Fiona the faithful.

And there was Hubbell, who saw the final truth. He knew it was greater than power could ever be—and gladly risked the world for it.

***

There were two cars. One took away their jumpsuits and parachutes. They climbed into the other car. David sat beside the driver, a woman. He leaned over the back of his seat. ‘The Contessa de Grubelli drove racing cars before the war but I hope her skill will not be called upon tonight. I asked General Donovan to send me his very best men.’

‘To do what?’ Hillel asked.

‘To take over a country.’

‘It had better be a small country, sir,’ Richard said. ‘There are only three of us.’

‘It is only a small country.’

‘Then between us and the sea we got them surrounded,’ the irrepressible Joe-Bob laughed.

COLD WAR, HOT PASSIONS

OMNIBUS ONE

by André Jute

comprising

VANGUARD ELITE

TERRORS

BREAD & CIRCUSES

BLACK CABINETS

DERRING DO

*

CoolMain Press

For

Roz and Charles

COLD WAR, HOT PASSIONS

OMNIBUS ONE

First published by CoolMain Press 2013

www.coolmainpress.com

[e-mail]

This edition published at Smashwords 2014

The author has asserted his moral right. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

VANGUARD ELITE

Copyright © 2012, 2013 André Jute

First published by CoolMain Press 2012

TERRORS

BREAD & CIRCUSES

BLACK CABINETS

DERRING DO

Copyright © 2013 André Jute

First published by CoolMain Press 2013

Editors:

For VANGUARD ELITE: Sarah Dixon

For TERRORS Lisa Penington

For BREAD & CIRCUSES Lynne Comery

For BLACK CABINETS Diane Fisher-Monroe

For DERRING-DO: Lynne Comery

Glossary: Lisa Penington

Cover Photos: Belovodchenko Anton

Glossary

RUSSIAN / TRANSLATION

Bolshoi cheroy / ‘Big Boil’, euphemism for big shot, important personage

Bolshoi drap / Big panic (in the face of German assault in WW2

Chernozhopy / Black asses (racist epithet)

Cheka / Secret Police

Chekist / Member of the Secret Police

Dacha / Country cottage/house/second home

Ekaterinburg / Large city in Russia. Tsar and family executed here in 1918

Electromontor / Torturer (usually with electricity)

Frunze Ulitza / Street in Samara, Russia

Glasnost / Openness and transparency

Glavni protivnik / Main adversary

Gulag / Acronym for the general administration of prison camps

Kholkos / Those engaged in the construction of modern society.

Khulighanism / Hooliganism

Kolkhos / Collective farm

Komsomol / Youth organisation

Koshka-mishka / Cat and mouse, children's game

Kremlin / Official residence of Russian Government

Kulak / ‘Fist’, prosperous peasant

Matushkas / Grandmothers

MVD / Previously Cheka

Nash / One of our own

Nechevo / Nothing

Nomenclatura / The higher officials of the Soviet Union

Perestrelka / Shooting, euphemism for executions

Perestroika / The overcoming stagnation program

Petrograd / Later Leningrad/St Petersburg

Pizda / Female genitalia (perjorative)

Politburo / Political bureau of the Central Committee

Referenture / Country-specific officers-in-charge

Sluzhba / Pejorative slang term for secret police

Smert spionam / Death to Spies

Spetsnaz / Special Commandos

Stukachi / Informers

Tovarich / Comrade

Veruyushchii / Literally believers, meaning the religious

Vosdushna Desontniki Voist / Air assault forces

Cold War, Hot Passions

VANGUARD ELITE

*

Dreams

Bread! Land! Peace!

V I Lenin — Slogan

1

On December 7, 1918, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, leader of the two-month old Bolshevik Government, approved the creation of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Struggle against Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, in Russian Vse-Rossiyskaya Chrezvychainaya Komissya po Borbe s Kontr-revolutiseiy i Sabottashem, soon to be known as ‘Cheka’ from the initials Ch.K. for Extraordinary Commission. Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky was appointed Chairman of the Extraordinary Commission. He would create the Cheka in his own image: saturnine, fiery-eyed and single-minded in the protection of the Revolution and the Party. The next evening, December 8, Lenin assisted Dzerzhinsky in staffing the Cheka by sending a handwritten note to the Petrograd Party Committee:

‘Please send not less than 100 persons, absolutely reliable Party members, to room No. 75, second floor—the Committee to Combat Looting. (For performance of commissar duties)

‘The matter is arch-important. The Party is responsible. Approach the districts and factories.’

A number of men were recommended by name to Dzerzhinsky by various personages in the Bolshevik inner circle, and Dzerzhinsky had a list of his own. Among those recommended to Dzerzhinsky by Lenin, by the important railmen’s leader Sergei Alliluyev, by Foreign Minister Leon Trotsky, by Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko of the Military Revolutionary Committee (which had hitherto been in charge of the functions the Cheka was created to perform), by the Party’s chief administrator Joseph Stalin, and on Dzerzhinsky’s own roster, only four names appeared in common on every list as ideal candidates for the Cheka. Ironically, one of them, who would later be known as the Last of the Old Bolsheviks, had come into the trusted inner circle only three days before the storming of the Winter Palace.

2

It was more a bedlamite antechamber to Hell than a railway station, but it exhilarated him. It was Petrograd and he was a Bolshevik. That was all that mattered. He had come to make the Revolution.

He had never been to a big city, or any city at all, but he was not frightened. Already this was his city. He wanted to linger on the step of the train, to imprint on his mind the sight and the sound of the city, if not the smell of the gangrene that rose from the limbs of the wounded soldiers laid in almost orderly rows on their pallets. But the man behind him, a peasant hung with calico bags from which wafted the maddening smell of bread no more than a week old, cursed his parentage and shoved him heavily in the small of the back. Only his youthful agility saved him from sprawling face first on the platform. Instead he landed lightly on the balls of his feet, crouching instinctively so as not to overbalance. ‘Profiteer!’ he snapped at the back of the peasant already scurrying away.

His mouth watered at the lingering smell of the bread, then he almost gagged as the smell of suppurating wounds from the soldiers on their pallets supplanted salivation. It was never this bad at the front, just the good clean smell of fresh blood, much like slaughter-day on the farm; perhaps the smell was why the authorities tried to hide the field hospitals from the fighting men. He suppressed a stab of pity for the men whimpering in pain or crying out to a nurse scurrying by in a daze, her hollow eyes bespeaking a fatigue that would haunt the rest of her life long after her mind built scar tissue over the horror of this and every other day of the war their country had lost. Lost against the stupidity of its own despotic rulers and generals and capitalists long before they lost against the Germans. This great mass of damaged humanity was not the result of a great battle today or yesterday or even the day before, for there had been none for months. No, it was the smallest visible signature of the Devil of Chaos, besporyadok, that even Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great with all their ruthlessness were unable to eradicate from the deepest recesses of the Russian soul. His grandmother whispered to him in his seamless memory that the Devil of Chaos was greater than all the other devils, even the Devil of Lust and the Devil of Greed, that it was right to fear besporyadok, the chaos of disorder, above all other disasters.

In the multitude, only a few slept. Many stared with open eyes into the mysteries of the cast-iron rafters so far above the platform that the ceiling could almost be a shadow-green Heaven. The sleepers might recover, he thought, but the staring ones were as good as dead. The great thing was never to give up hope, never to resign yourself. While you breathed, hope was alive. He suppressed the pity: it was as Lenin was supposed to have said, that things must grow worse before they could become better. That was almost peasant wisdom. A green boil hurts but it must come to a yellow head before you can squeeze it and enjoy relief.

He almost lost his footing again in the rush of soldiers for the train. They were peasants in uniform. There were also peasants out of uniform. All Russia’s peasantry, what in February he heard an officer call ‘Russia’s dark heart’, seemed to be crowding him back to that train. He could smell them even over the stale sweat left on him by carriages overheated by too many confined bodies. He struggled to stay upright, lashing out to clear space around him. When the tide receded he heard a railwayman shouting close by that the train was going nowhere, that it would be serviced before it would leave again, that nobody knew when it would go and where it would go when it left. None of those scrabbling onto the train with their elbows and fingernails paid any attention.

The tide washed around him and, gasping for breath, he noticed for the first time that more soldiers and peasants squatted on their heels among the wounded, each place marked by a heap of sunflower shells on the station floor. These were the more experienced ones, waiting for a train that would depart for somewhere further than the marshalling yards and the service sheds. Russia, he thought, was like that, an uninformed peasant squatting in an ill-fitting, scratchy uniform among the husks of spat-out ideas and promises, waiting for a train going somewhere.

Waiting. All Russia was waiting, that much he knew already; that was why he was here. But in Petrograd the suspension of life was tangible, a thing to see and reach out and touch. An opportunity. Why had no one taken it?

He looked around for soldiers or police who might want to inspect his papers. Other deserters had told him there would be none but he practiced the caution of his own peasant stock. Satisfied, he walked towards the light falling through the towering arches on his right. Outside the station he turned right, wandering without sense of direction, marveling first at the height of the buildings, then at the deliberate waste of their symmetry. He did not know the names of the classical styles but books had taught him to associate such edifices with power. Petrograd was a shining city even before dawn, despite the dirty sidewalks, unwashed windows and the roving bands of drunken soldiers for whom he stepped with outward respect off the pavement. After an hour he came onto the most important street he had so far seen, which he would later learn was called the Nevsky Prospekt. Queues of men and women with baskets waited in front of every shop, though this early in the morning the shops were not yet open. He stopped to listen to a bargain being struck between a soft-painted woman with an animal fur around her throat and a soldier. Each spoke slowly and enunciated carefully in order to be understood by the other.

‘Two rubles to wait now and you can come back when the shop opens. Ten rubles to wait through the night tonight so that you can be first.’

‘I’ll pay you when I return.’

‘If you don’t come back by the time the baker opens, I’ll sell your place to somebody else.’

‘I’ll be here. And then we can talk about tonight.’

After a few paces the woman turned back. ‘I hear soldiers are selling chocolate for eleven rubles a block.’

‘So they say.’

She would not be put off by the lack of enthusiasm. ‘Can you get me some?’

‘Yes. You will have to advance me the money. Thirteen rubles. In case the price has gone up. Plus something for me—or you could offer me a hot meal at your back door.’

‘I’d rather pay. Will you try today? For my children.’

The soldier nodded. ‘You rich people are all the same. I should just steal your money.’

‘But you won’t.’ She smiled a little bitterly and walked away.

The soldier turned. ‘What are you looking at?’

‘I look and I learn. No offence intended. I don’t want trouble.’

The soldier smiled crookedly. ‘You look like you could handle it.’

He was faint with hunger. It was not a challenge he wanted to accept. Pointless. He turned away.

The soldier caught his elbow. ‘New?’

‘Eh?’

‘Just arrived?’

‘Yes.’

‘Rusanin, Anatoly Feodorovich.’

He was so surprised at the offered hand that it was already withdrawing, the other man’s eyes clouding with quick temper, when he took it. ‘Kurusov, Sergei Ivanovich.’

‘When did you last eat?’

‘Day before yesterday.’

‘Wait with me until the shop opens.’

‘I don’t have any money.’

‘Just wait.’

‘I have nothing better to do for a few hours.’

His new-found friend laughed with good strong teeth. He was a short man, built like a barrel, with olive skin, curling unkempt hair, a two day beard growing almost to the small black quick-tempered eyes. His eyelashes were surprisingly long, almost girlish. ‘There will be nothing left in the shop by the time we get there. But I have made other arrangements. You learn to survive.’

They talked circumspectly about their families. They came from similar backgrounds, peasant stock who had not gone hungry too many generations to remember, their birthplaces on the Volga about a hundred versts each side of the dull provincial town of Simbirsk. Anatoly learned to read and write before leaving school; he was impressed that Sergei finished in the gymnasium in Simbirsk. ‘Lenin was there before me,’ said Sergei.

‘Who?’

‘The leader of the Bolsheviks.’

‘Ah. There is talk that they are planning another revolution, to throw out the treacherous Provisional Government.’

‘Kerensky too was a student at Simbirsk.’

‘Ah, you are well-connected!’

Sergei cautioned himself to keep his mouth shut. Such talk could be dangerous. At the front he saw officers killed for carrying the wrong family name.

The shop opened. The queue started moving. They shuffled forward with the queue. The woman returned when perhaps twenty people stood between them and the door. She paid Anatoly. The moment he put the money in his pocket the doors were forced closed from the inside against the press of would-be shoppers. Behind them a woman started sobbing. Men swore. A brick flew over their heads but glanced off the heavily shuttered facade of the building without doing any more damage than the other bricks that scarred it on previous days. Sergei fancied the brick flew half-heartedly, resignedly. There was something more wrong than mere lack of bread. He could sense it but not quite put his finger on it. Hunger slowed his brain.

‘I won’t give your money back just because your place in the queue was too far back,’ Anatoly told the woman.

‘What about tonight? Will you be well enough forward in the queue to guarantee that I get into the shop?’

‘You can come inspect my position. About ten o’clock. You pay me then if you’re satisfied.’

‘What about the chocolate?’

‘I can’t guarantee that.’

‘But you will try?’

‘If you will trust me with your money.’

‘I’m Durnova.’ She counted out more money and gave it to him, then stood with her embroidered purse open. ‘What about ham? A friend bought half a ham last week.’

‘Anatoly. That was last week. Vodka perhaps.’

She laughed and again Sergei heard the bitterness in the failed merriment. ‘No, we have plenty of wine and my husband still has disinfectant. I’ll talk to you again about the vodka if he runs out.’ She gave the young man a handful of notes. ‘Any food you can find. Anything at all. But especially food suitable for children.’

A soldier at the door of the shop held an old woman while another took the bread from her basket. Sergei started towards them but Anatoly grabbed his elbow. ‘They didn’t forget to bring their rifles.’

Sergei shook his head miserably. When he deserted he had given his rifle, a well-made German piece picked up on a battlefield, to another soldier without a rifle; he was not a traitor, only a socialist. But this was not the socialist heaven, peasant soldiers robbing a threadbare old woman. He watched, wanting to cry, as the woman stood with tears running down her cheeks, pulling the cloth back over her empty basket as if that would hide her loss, while the soldiers strolled away laughing, each munching on a half of her loaf.

‘You shouldn’t show so much money on these dangerous streets,’ Sergei said to Madame Durnova.

She shook her head. ‘It’s not much good, money, when your children cry from hunger.’

Anatoly seemed to come to a momentous decision. ‘Come with me. You too, Sergei.’

He led them around the corner and into a lane. After a few paces he stopped beside a door. Sergei thought they were behind the bakery. If Madame Durnova was frightened to be in a deserted lane with two murderous-looking rogues she took care not to show it. Sergei admired her for it.

The door opened and a girl came out. She smiled at Anatoly and scowled at the strangers. In a few years she would look like a female edition of Anatoly, Sergei thought, but meanwhile she wore the freshness of youth, a vitality that was almost beauty.

‘This is Anna. This is Madame Durnova, and this is Sergei.’ Anatoly opened the basket the girl held in her hands and took out a loaf of bread. ‘Anna’s from my village. We’re betrothed.’ He put the loaf in Madame Durnova’s basket.

‘And what will you eat?’ Anna demanded.

‘Perhaps a burnt loaf fell on the floor.’

‘That would be a fine thing, you fool!’ But she said it over her shoulder as she disappeared inside.

Sergei could not tear his eyes from the basket. He could smell the bread. His grandmother’s bread smelt like that. She could read only enough to struggle through the Bible and she would submit to a regiment of Cossacks rather than wear even the restrained smear of rouge Madame Durnova used to brighten wan cheeks, but by God could she bake! Madame Durnova hesitated, her upper body turning this way and that, her bosom heaving, as she was torn between running with the food for her children and the civilized impulse of being gracious to a man who gave her the bread from his own mouth. Anatoly, facing the door, did not notice but Sergei did.

‘If she finds nothing, I will give you half back,’ Madame Durnova said.

‘She’ll find something,’ Anatoly said comfortably. ‘Anna is the loaves and the fishes.’

Sergei noticed that Madame Durnova first blanched at the blasphemy and then suppressed a small smile as its aptness struck her. He forgave her for taking their food; a moment ago he was prepared to condemn her unmet children to purgatory. Ah, but what made him think Anatoly would share with him...

Anna reappeared, without her basket but in her hands she held six rolls. They were not burnt. They were small but looked crusty. She gave two to Anatoly, two to Sergei and put two in the capacious pocket of her shift. She pulled the door to behind her; the lock clicked. ‘I’m not coming back here,’ she announced. ‘The baker will have to rub up against his wife.’

Anatoly’s face colored and his pupils shrunk alarmingly. His fist slammed into the door. Anna took his arm. ‘What good will it do to beat him? He was born a fool and you cannot improve on God’s work. Come on.’

Madame Durnova said, ‘Come with me and I will give you wine to wash down your bread.’ She led the way, Anna dragging the muttering Anatoly behind her and Sergei bringing up the rear, chewing a mouthful of one of his rolls slowly to make it last longer, his hand clasped protectively around the other in his pocket. No one, even with a rifle, would take his bread from him. No one tried.

The Durnov house was a square three-storey building—no, five, the railing hiding a basement and the parapet the attic dormers—set back only slightly from the Nevsky Prospekt. Sergei, seeing three churches without turning his head, thought his grandmother could have borne the vanity of such a big house for the convenience of so many priests so close to hand. Steps rose to the front door. At one time a small patch of green must have spread to both sides of the steps but now the cast-iron railings had been opened at one corner of the house to make a passageway to a door on a lower level leading down to the basement. The railings and the wall of the house formed a natural funnel for the people waiting their turn to enter the door. Without being told Sergei knew that he was outside a doctor’s house, one who tended the poor free of charge. The poor would wait to be healed in the basement; the rich would come in their carriages and sweep through the front door to be attended immediately. He found that offensive but it was preferable to the class of doctor who tended only those who could pay. A doctor who depended on his skill to attract wealthy clients would surely be a vast improvement on the butchers who served the army for pay. The poor received the best in return for no more than time standing in line.

Madame Durnova deliberately did not look at the line of damaged humanity waiting patiently for her husband’s attention. She almost ran up the stairs and fumbled with the key to the door until Anna took it from her trembling fingers and unlocked the door. She brushed past Anna. ‘Come in. Close the door.’ They followed her and Sergei, last in, closed the door behind them. Madame Durnova stood before a hall stand, hanging up her neck warmer. In the mirror Sergei could see tears coursing down her face. He wished he possessed a handkerchief to offer her. ‘Unless they have food they will not recover,’ she said. ‘In better days we would give them a meal at the kitchen door when my husband finished with them. Medicine, food, rest. Now... Oh, this wretched war!’

A troop of elephants stormed up the stairs from the basement, each step echoing from the laid mosaic walls stretching three storeys high until the sound was swallowed by the echo of the next step. It was Dr Durnov. Sergei thought that if he kept running up stairs he would soon be in need of medical attention himself. He was a plump man of about fifty with an open red face. He already held his handkerchief in his hand even before he could see his wife’s face. He embraced her, then wiped her tears, at the same time speaking to the strangers. ‘You three don’t look like Lily’s usual lame ducks.’ Yes, he was not a man to waste time; there was too much to do. Sergei had known sergeants like him, experienced men the smarter soldiers would fight to serve under, men who could be counted on to keep you alive.

‘They gave us their own bread. I promised them a bottle of wine.’

‘And what will you eat?’

‘We have more, sir,’ Anna said.

Sergei held up the butt end of his roll before popping it in his mouth, immediately regretting eating before a man who might be hungry.

But Dr Durnov seemed not to notice. ‘Is there coffee to go round? I want to talk to these people.’

‘Not coffee. But we have tea. No cake though,’ his wife said. She disengaged herself gently from his arm and walked away through a door in the shadow of the wide white curving stairs. Sergei stored the image of the stairs in his mind; he would tell his grandmother he saw the stairs to Heaven in the home of a doctor in St Petersburg (why confuse his grandmother with the new name?). She would not believe he entered the home of a doctor through the front door but she would enjoy the story all the same.

Dr Durnov, apparently uncaring that of his three guests only Anna was clean, ushered them through a pair of open double doors into a drawing room that looked through tall windows onto a long garden cunningly laid out to enhance the illusion of a perspective several times its own length. ‘Sit, sit.’ He held a fragile chair, all spindly gilt legs and embroidered seat, for Anna, who studied the craftsmanship of the needlewoman for a long moment before sitting down. Sergei chose a leather chesterfield well separated from the soft floral-covered furniture and therefore, perhaps, not often used. Anatoly hesitated, looked down at his filthy uniform, ran his hand over his unshaven chin, then sat next to Sergei. The chesterfield had been set aside because it was monstrously uncomfortable.

‘So,’ said Dr Durnov while sinking into what was obviously his regular chair, ‘it is in the air. Now that the Bolsheviks are the unshakeable masters of the Soviet under Trotsky’s chairmanship, when will we see the slaughter, the cannonade, the uprising, the pogrom in Petrograd?’

They sat in stunned silence. Dr Durnov took their lack of response for respectful disagreement. ‘Come, come,’ he said, jumping up, striding to a side table where several newspapers lay neatly folded, grabbing several and flourishing them swishingly in one hand, ‘everyone knows it is not whether the Bolsheviks will make a coup but when. Novaya Zhizn predicted it for last week. Rech publishes warnings every day. Even my poor patients know it will happen.’ He threw the papers on the table and strode back to his chair, dropping into it without looking back. ‘So, when will happen?’ He glared at Anatoly.

Anatoly shrugged. ‘I am only a foot soldier. I came to the city to be near my betrothed. We want land. We want bread. Until there is peace, you can’t have bread because there is nobody to bring in the harvest. Any stupid peasant, like me, can tell you that. It makes us very bitter, if you don’t mind me saying so, sir, that our democratic government cannot see it.’

‘Yes, Kerensky was a mistake. A plausible mistake but a mistake none the less,’ Dr Durnov agreed.

Sergei wondered what the devil he meant. Kerensky was thought by the soldiers to be a traitor; his sergeant said as much to an officer who claimed that the premier ‘represents the best tradition of Russian liberalism’.

‘But my friend here is a Bolshevik,’ Anatoly said.

‘Yes?’ Dr Durnov studied Sergei. ‘Why?’

‘Because there is no alternative,’ Sergei said.

The doctor nodded thoughtfully, then looked quizzically at Sergei.

Sergei laughed nervously. ‘I arrived only this morning, sir.’

‘And you think that because I have lived here all my life I must know more than you do? Ah, if only I did! If only someone did! Russia drifts rudderless and no one is in charge. Even mistakes would be better than doing nothing, which is what our present leaders do very well.’ He touched his lush moustache, a thoughtful gesture rather than one of vanity. ‘Listen, my young friend. I was in the Revolution of 1905, tending the wounded. I thought that was the revolution we waited for, for so long. I welcomed this February’s Revolution. But what we have now is not democracy; it is anarchy, more incompetent than the Romanov autocracy ever was. It is as if freedom paralyzes us. We talk and do nothing. And, not to scorn your faith, but to tell you what I fear, you Bolsheviks have no plan except destruction and then to see what grows in the ruins.’

His wife entered, followed by a maid wheeling a trolley with a silver teapot. The maid sniffed audibly at the three visitors but said nothing and at a gesture from Madame Durnova, left the room. When Sergei received his scholarship from the Prince, a man who fancied himself not only enlightened but, ludicrously, loved by his people, he learned that such a teapot on such a trolley is accompanied by fine china. He was glad Madame Durnova thoughtfully brought only five thick glasses which Sergei was certain never before left the servant quarters; she did not want to embarrass them. Fair enough. Her husband did not notice the utilitarian aspect of the glass in which his tea came to his hand.

‘Such talk is dangerous,’ his wife admonished him. ‘And rude to our guests.’

‘They can speak for themselves. They have spoken for themselves. Spiritedly.’

‘We have a policy,’ Sergei said. ‘A plan. Bread, peace, land.’

‘A policy, yes. A plan, no.’ He noticed Sergei’s blank look and added, ‘There is a difference. Your policy is to make peace, give the land to the peasants—both objectives I agree with—and then to distribute the bread that will, somehow, result. But you people have no mechanism to avoid famine in the transition period. Your leaders are ideologues without the slightest experience of administration. Though God knows that fool Kerensky enjoyed ample experience in high office—and see what he has done. Or, more precisely, not done.’

Sergei comprehended the doctor’s drift only vaguely, like an ox seen through the sheet-liquid of a waterfall. Food...famine. The doctor seemed to link the familiar and unfamiliar words. ‘If famine means people dying because they lack food, then they are starving already. You can see it on the street out there.’ As he gestured, he noticed that Anatoly looked at him in admiration and Anna in alarm. Perhaps it was dangerous to argue with your host in Petrograd, or perhaps simply bad manners. Sergei did not care. ‘Our policy is equal shares for all.’ He spread his hands, palms down, so that the doctor could see that the earth, after a year at war, still stained his fingernails. ‘Our land is rich. Nobody needs go hungry. All it takes is hard work and good will to all.’

‘My dear, it is rude to stare at the young man so. You provoked him—and now he has answered you.’

The doctor shook his head. ‘A genuine idealist! Of course I stare. Forgive me. One does not meet a true idealist all that often.’

Sergei would not be diverted by flattery. ‘But you do not agree, sir.’

The doctor looked at his own hands, blotched with frequent washings, stained by chemicals and nicotine, then up at Sergei. There was no longer any trace of mockery in his voice or eyes. ‘No. Your method is expropriation. The ideal is driven by hatred for others, not even as individuals but as a class. That is an evil impulse. It can lead nowhere but to mindless atrocities.’

Sergei thought on that as he finished his tea. Through the window, at the far end of the elegant garden, he could see a tethered goat which would give milk for the tea of children. He became aware that all the others were waiting for him. He shrugged. ‘It is not so difficult to know the oppressors, sir. They take—and only a few, like you, give.’ He looked at Anatoly, who rose. He stood. ‘Thank you for the tea, Madame.’

Dr Durnov rose hurriedly. ‘Have I offended you?’

‘No sir. I have learned something new and I am grateful. But I came to the city for a purpose.’

‘To join the Bolsheviks?’

Sergei hesitated, but he had already said too much. His sergeant often said Sergei was too outspoken to make a conspirator. But the time for conspiracy was past; the time for deeds was here, as the doctor himself said only a minute ago. ‘Yes sir.’

‘All right. To each his own. Where will you sleep tonight?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Good. We will give you a bed in the attic. So far my service to the city’s poor has protected my house but when the ignorant rabble is loosed, I want an honest Bolshevik of my own choice billeted on me.’

Sergei shook his head. ‘Sir, I don’t know anybod—’

‘All three of you, of course. We have plenty of space.’

‘Did you live in the baker’s house?’ his wife asked Anna, who nodded. ‘Then you too have nowhere to stay. You will be most welcome, and your fiancé, I mean your betrothed.’

‘Come tonight. Cook will have a key to the back hall for each of you. We shall talk again, when you have seen for yourself.’ With that Dr Durnov left the room in his characteristic half-run. Across the hall they could hear him descend the stairs.

His wife spread her hands in apology. ‘You must forgive my husband. He still thinks of politics as he did in his youth, as a subject for intelligent discussion.’ She put her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh dear. I am making his ill manners worse.’ She bent and brought a bottle from the lowest shelf of the trolley. ‘The wine I promised you. It’s a ’96 Madeira.’ She gave it to Anatoly, who passed it to Anna.

She saw them to the door. She pressed more money into Anatoly’s hand. ‘Buy all the chocolate you can find. Anything else edible too.’

‘I’ll bring anything I can buy back here before going to the queue,’ Anatoly said, ‘but don’t build up your hopes.’

People waiting in the queue for the doctor muttered curses at them for being let in first; Sergei wondered if these people also cursed the wealthy for receiving instant attention, or if they begrudged it only to their own kind. Anatoly spat and turned his hot black eyes on the protesters and they shut up instantly.

Anna took Anatoly’s arm and pulled him away. His anger evaporated as quickly as it arose. She held up the bottle. ‘Shall we drink this wine or trade it for food?’

‘We have plenty of money for food. Let’s drink it.’ He took the bottle and was about to knock the neck off against the corner of a building when Sergei stopped him with a hand on his wrist. Sergei took a large clasp-knife from his pocket and opened the bayonet-point. He used the point to scrape away the wax that sealed the cork, then stabbed it through the cork. Pushing sideways to maintain the bayonet in the cork by friction, he pulled the cork. It made a loud sound and Anatoly started, then grinned nervously. ‘I thought the war started again.’

With a flourish, Sergei offered the bottle to Anna, who gave it to Anatoly without drinking. She was more interested in the knife. She pulled the cork from the bayonet and dropped it in her pocket, then took the knife from Sergei’s hand and opened the two big blades, closed them and the bayonet, pulled at the big ring at the back to see how strong it was.

‘I took it from a dead German,’ Sergei said.

‘Sheffield,’ she read on the blade. ‘I wonder where in Germany that is.’ It would be three more years before she would discover that Sheffield is in England, and would wonder at the byways through which a British-made soldier’s