While waiting for Kolya to recover, Anna had come to recognize the nature of the regime to which she would be sentencing her youngest son if she returned to the Soviet Union. Lenin and his Bolsheviks had done their work too well. Central planning, antithetical to the prosperity generated by a market economy, had become the means by which the state made all economic decisions. An agrarian country inhabited mainly by peasants was to become a nation of heavy industry, necessitating countless tons of coal, iron, and other natural resources to be torn from the earth by millions of slave laborers. Agriculture was to be collectivized, with private land ownership a relic of the past. Strict censorship prevailed. Police and intelligence agencies had unbridled power. There was no rule of law. And the Gulag—or worse—awaited enemies, and even friends, of the regime.
Anna knew her son Aleksei, completely under the sway of his father, was already lost to her. If she defected, Kiril would be cared for by an Enemy of the People, her sister Marissa. But if she went back, she would be sentencing Kolya to life in Lenin’s hell. For the first time, she realized with a kind of quiet horror that she wouldn’t only have to choose between family and freedom; she would be choosing between brothers. There were moments when she felt ready to die rather than make that choice—a choice no mother should have to make. It was one Anna would remember making every waking moment of her life, and often in her dreams.
What finally pushed her in one direction rather than the other was the knowledge that whatever she could do for Kiril if she did go back was infinitely less than what she could do for Kolya if she didn’t.
The waiting had been hard. First in Berlin, when the Nazi Party had marched into Nuremberg. Then more waiting for her fears to diminish, to be replaced by a growing conviction that she was safe from the long arm of Soviet retribution.
Gradually, she felt free to accept the attentions of a young American physician—one of the surgeons who’d assisted in the operation that had saved Kolya’s life. She waited with eagerness for him to complete the last days of a two-year fellowship program under the best heart surgeon in Germany. She waited with impatience for papers to come through which “proved” that she was a native-born German. For more papers that “documented” the American surgeon was the father of her German-born son. And finally, for American passports that permitted the three of them to set sail in November of 1927 from Bremen to the United States.
En route, the captain had married Anna “Petrovsky” to Dr. Max Brenner, giving her child a father and Anna a husband. It also gave her son a new name and the opportunity to live his life to the fullest in the freest country on earth.
Chapter 2
For the first three weeks of Anna and Kolya’s departure, Yuri Glazov had been able to placate his Cheka colleagues despite their insistent questions about when his wife and son would return—a task made more difficult by Anna’s unwillingness to communicate with him. Glazov’s excuses were plausible. The child’s heart surgery was more complicated than originally diagnosed. Tests were needed. Finding the best surgeon took time. The doctor’s operating schedule was overbooked. An operating theater had to be available. A judge’s order was necessary for such a major operation. Financial arrangements had to be made. Serious cardiac complications had arisen. But as three weeks turned into two months, his excuses became more transparent, and he knew it.
He also knew that during the past two months, GPU agents in Berlin had kept their Moscow superiors abreast of the developments. So when he was informed, along with his superiors, that the operation had been performed but that recovery time for repairing Kolya’s heart valve repair was lengthy, he celebrated by drinking himself into an alcoholic stupor and prevailed upon his widowed sister, Sofia Andreyev, to care for Aleksei.
Three more months passed, after which reports from the GPU agents in Berlin ceased. Yuri Glazov’s drinking continued unabated, his mental and physical condition deteriorating so rapidly that Sofia took over the care, not only of Aleksei, but—despite the pleas of Marissa Petrovsky—of seven-year-old Kiril as well.
Glazov’s GPU superior, Oleg Reznikov, had run out of patience, and Yuri Glazov’s descent into physical and mental oblivion was the least of his problems. He issued orders to his GPU agents in Berlin to find out exactly what had happened to Yuri’s wife and son.
The agents’ inquiries, having taken a back seat to more pressing intelligence assignments, took another two months. Finally, fearing for their lives, they reported to Reznikov in December that Anna Glazov and her child, together with one of the boy’s physicians, had the month before departed from Bremen for the United States—and that they had been married by the captain of the passenger ship S.S. Stuttgart.
Reznikov was apoplectic. Two citizens of the Soviet Union had defected to the United States despite the promises of a fellow GPU operative who had sworn on his life that his wife and child would return!
On his life.
If he were to save his own skin, Reznikov knew, he had to act quickly. He arranged for poison to be slipped into Glazov’s vodka, followed by a bad fall that broke the poor fellow’s neck. Since it was a way of life with Yuri—the drinking, the falls—Reznikov was confident an autopsy would be ruled out. It was.
As for the Glazov children—Aleksei, age eight and Kiril, three years younger—Reznikov came up with the perfect solution. The children would be raised by Yuri Glazov’s widowed sister, Sofia, reliable long-term member of the Communist Party.
Nor did the red-haired Marissa Petrovsky present a problem. Tainted by her sister’s traitorous conduct, she would only need to be reminded that the State was omnipotent. That the Gulag awaited.
Oleg Reznikov was not without a sense of humor. In Anna Glazov’s haste to defect with her German surgeon, she’d had no opportunity to divorce her husband. By arranging for Yuri’s death, he thought drily, he had done Anna the great service of obliterating the stigma of bigamy.
His sister, Sofia Andreyev lived in Novogorod, an important historic city in the Soviet Union that lay between Moscow and St. Petersburg. Using a stubby finger to push his wire-rimmed glasses up his nose, Reznikov decided that henceforth the surname of both children would be Andreyev. They would be told their mother and brother had deserted them and their father, Yuri Glazov, had died in the service of his country.
Reznikov burned the Glazov file and flushed the ashes down the toilet.
Asserting her Party status, the widow Andreyev immediately enrolled eight-year-old Aleksei in a nine-year school—the highest level of general educational institutions. Five-year-old Kiril would be enrolled in three years as soon as he turned eight.
As each boy turned ten, Sofia enrolled him in the Young Pioneers—a mass youth organization designed to turn young children into staunch Communists from an early age. The main trappings were the red banner flag and a red neck-scarf. There were salutes, parades, rallies, flag-raising events, camping, bonfires, festivals, and jamborees. Membership was roughly from primary school through adolescence.