"When the Bolsheviks seized power, six months later, that meant very little to us down on the lower Volga until a movement started among the men to shoot all their officers. But we had been fighting the Turks most of the time and I had had the luck to save the life of one off my sergeants a chap called Budenny."
"The Budenny?" Gregory asked with interest.
"That's it. All the world knows him as Marshal Budenny to day; but then he was just Sergeant Budenny, of the Dragoons; a great strapping fellow with a moustache like a couple of horses' tails. He protected me when some of the others wanted to put me up against a brick wall.
"Someone God knows who ordered us away from the front and we went to Tsaritsyn they call it Stalingrad now. They would have shot me if I'd tried to leave them, so I went with my regiment. A few weeks later Voroshilov arrived there after his amazing retreat from the Ukraine and was elected to defend the town. It was Voroshilov who picked Budenny out of the rut and Budenny took me with him. Horses were his specialty and he hadn't got much of a brain but enough to know that my military education would be useful.
"Tsaritsyn was right at the apex of the triangle held by the Bolsheviks. They called it the Salient of Death, you know the Red Verdun. The odds against us were tremendous; but if the Reds hadn't managed to hang on there the grain barges would no longer have been able to get up the Volga. Moscow would have starved and the Revolution would have collapsed. By the time I had been fighting there for a few weeks it became a matter of professional honour to me and lots of other regular soldiers who were with the Reds that the town should not be allowed to fall. I don't think we cared much whom we were fighting, but by the time it was all over I was looked on as a dyed in the wool Bolshevik."
"Queer, the tricks fate plays with men, isn't it?" Gregory commented.
Kuporovitch refilled the glasses; his hand was steady as a rock but his voice had begun to slur just a trifle as he went on
"Yes. Fate served me well, though, to put me where it did. I'd probably have done the same if I'd been with the Army commanded by Tukachevsky been made a Red General afterwards too but I'd be dead by now. As it was, I was a Voroshilov man and no soldier ever served under a finer leader. He was just a mechanic never handled a rifle until the Revolution broke out; but he held Tsaritsyn for six months against all comers. He wasn't afraid of God or the Devil. He even told War Lord Trotsky to go to hell when Trotsky wanted to relieve him of his command because he wasn't a professional soldier." The General leaned forward and banged the table. "D'you know what Clim Voroshilov said to Trotsky?"
"No," said Gregory.
"I'll tell you," said the General a little thickly. "Trotsky threatened to arrest him for insubordination, so Clim turned round and said: `You arrest me, a Russian working man, one of the oldest members of the Bolshevik Party and an active revolutionary of twenty years s' standing? You who only sneaked back from Canada after the revolution was all ever to join the Party six months ago? Get to hell out of here you dirty, snivelling Jew journalist, or I’ll throw you out and you can tell Lenin what I said" "
"Good for him” laughed Gregory. "Of course, Tukachevsky was Trotsky's pet, wasn't he, while Voroshilov was backed by Stalin; who wasn't such a big noise in those days?"
Kuporovitch paused with the bottle in his hand and replied in a lowered voice: "It's all right to mention Stalin here these old walls have no Dictaphones but wiser not to talk about him where you're liable to be overheard. He was with us dawn at Tsaritsyn, as Clim's Political Commissar. Clim's a decent sort and never soiled his hands with murder; but the other one well, sometimes I think he's the Fiend in person."
Gregory nodded. "He must have bumped off a good few people in his time."
"You'd never believe what's been going on these last three years." The General raised his eyebrows to heaven. "It started with the Tukachevsky Putsch in 1937. They executed him and eight other leading Generals; then the Ogpu began to trace the ramifications of the whole conspiracy. Thirty Army Corps commanders disappeared and hundreds of other Generals yes, hundreds I said. Staff after staff was wiped out. They did the same thing in the Navy and the Air Force. There was hardly an officer over the rank of Captain left in the Soviet Army. That's the inside story of this colossal mess they've made in Finland. Fellows commanding the battalions there have been jumped up from platoon leaders. Not one out of ten of the staff officers has ever seen the inside of a military college for as much as a month's course. At a rough estimate judged by the divisions I know about Kobe Stalin must have executed between 30,000 and 40,000 senior officers in the last two and a half years."
Gregory had heard the same tale of wholesale murder from a very different source but he forbore to comment and asked
"How did you manage to escape?"
The General laughed, a little drunkenly. "Because I'm an old friend of Clim's. After Tsaritsyn I was with him when we formed the First Cavalry Army, which took Rostov, and I was with him all through the Polish campaign. Sacre nom, those were the days We thought we were going to Paris Luckily for me, Clim Voroshilov doesn't forget his old friends. All the same, they won't trust me with a command and I have to put up with a damned Political Commissar who pries into everything I do. Thank God his wife's ill, so he's down in the town to night, otherwise I'd never risk talking to you like this; but it's the first chance that I've had for years to talk to anyone intelligent without fear of being reported."
"I'm very flattered, General," Gregory smiled, "but don't you think it's a risk to talk to me? Say I repeated what you've said?"
The Russian's lazy blue eyes narrowed. "There's no fear of that. In the first place, you're one of my own kind, so you wouldn't let me down. In the second, if you did nobody would believe you. I haven't kept my head on my shoulders for all these years without learning a thing or two. I'm so pro Stalin that the Pope of Rome is a heathen by comparison and although old Oggie that's my Political Commissar is a nuisance, he's more frightened of me than I am of him."
"That's the spirit! Gregory laughed, filling up the glasses yet again. "But since we're being frank, don't you get damned sick of it? I shouldn't think it's much fun being a Soviet General and always having to mind your p's and q's."
"Fun " The General wave an arm. "It's a godforsaken life and this is a godforsaken country. There's nothing here nothing, D’you understand? which could appeal to any civilized human being. It's drab, dreary, poverty stricken, and it gets worse instead of better with every year that passes. What wouldn't I give to see Paris again?"
"You used to go there as a young man?"
"Mon Dieu, yes Every year. And what a place it was in those days Girls scores of them real girls in silk and feathers not animals, which are all we have left here. Beautiful women exquisitely gowned and perfumed. Did you know Paris in those days? But no; you're not old enough."