‘I thought you were with Ike,’ Manson said as Russell sat down.
‘I was. I needed a change.’
‘Well, if you needed a rest, you’ve come to the right place. Nothing’s happened here for months, and nothing will until the victory parade. Lenin’s birthday or May Day, depending on how quickly Zhukov and Co. can wrap things up. If you like watching tanks roll by for hours on end you’ll be in seventh heaven.’
‘Sounds riveting. I’m John Russell,’ he told the other two. ‘San Francisco Chronicle.’
‘Martin Innes, Daily Sketch,’ the thinner of the two Englishmen said. He had slicked-back brown hair and rather obvious ears book-ending a pleasant, well-meaning face.
‘Quentin Bradley, News Chronicle,’ the other chipped in. He had wavy blonde hair, a chubby face, and the sort of public school accent which made Russell’s teeth stand on edge.
‘Is this the usual breakfast?’ he asked.
‘Never changes,’ Manson confirmed. ‘One day I took the meat away with me, just to make sure they weren’t bringing the same pieces back each morning.’
Russell reached for the bread and jam. The former was dark and stale, the latter surprisingly good. Cherries from the Caucasus, most likely.
‘How did you get here?’ Innes asked.
Russell went through his itinerary, raising a few eyebrows in the process.
‘You must have been really keen,’ Manson commented when he’d finished. ‘Any particular reason?’
Russell told them he was hoping for a ringside seat when the Red Army entered Berlin.
Not a chance, was the unanimous response.
‘Why not?’ Russell asked. ‘Don’t they want witnesses to their triumph? Are they treating German civilians that badly?’ He hadn’t wanted to believe the reports coming out of East Prussia – of German women raped and nailed to barn doors.
‘They probably are,’ Manson said, ‘but that’s not the whole story. I think the main reason they won’t allow any foreign reporters near the Red Army is what it might tell them about the Soviet Union. They don’t want the world knowing how utterly reckless they are with their own soldiers’ lives, or how backward most of their army is. The front-line units are good, no doubt about it, but the rest – no uniforms, not enough weapons, just a huge rabble following on behind, stealing wristwatches by the dozen and wondering what flush toilets are for. It’s hardly an advert for thirty years of communism.’
Russell shrugged. ‘I have to try.’
‘Good luck,’ Manson said with a sympathetic smile.
He was probably right, Russell thought, as he made his way across Sverdlov Square and down Okhotnyy Ryad in the direction of the American Embassy, trying to ignore the man in the suit walking some twenty metres behind him. It was his first glimpse of the city by day, and Moscow seemed a much sorrier place than it had in 1939. There was a lot of visible bomb damage, given that years had elapsed since the last real German attacks. The shop windows were empty, and people were queuing in considerable numbers for whatever was hidden inside.
He supposed things were slowly getting back to normal. Trams trundled along the wide boulevards, and hordes of plainly dressed pedestrians hurried along the pavements. In what had once been shady parks, a few surviving trees were budding into spring. It was certainly hard to believe that only three years had passed since the Wehrmacht came hammering at the city’s door.
As Russell approached the embassy building he noticed two of the new Gaz-11s parked on the other side of the road. There were at least two men in each, and they were presumably waiting for someone to follow. The regime’s paranoia was scaling new heights.
Once inside, Russell was asked to sign the usual book, and told to wait.
‘I have another appointment in twenty minutes,’ he objected.
‘This won’t take long,’ the duty officer told him
Half a minute later, a dark-haired, bespectacled man in his early thirties came down the stairs. Russell hadn’t seen Joseph Kenyon since late 1941, when the diplomat was stationed in Berlin. He’d first met him in Prague two years earlier, during his own brief stint working for American intelligence.
After they’d shaken hands, Kenyon ushered him through the building and out into a large and barely tended courtyard garden. ‘The rooms are all bugged,’ the diplomat told him, as he reached for an American cigarette. ‘Or at least some of them are. We find them and destroy them, but they’re surprisingly efficient at installing new ones.’
‘It’s good to see you,’ Russell said, ‘but I only came to register my presence. I’ve got a meeting at Press Liaison in fifteen minutes.’
‘Just tell me who you’re here for,’ Kenyon said. ‘We’ve received no word.’
The penny dropped. ‘I’m here for the Chronicle, no one else. I gave up working for governments in 1941.’
‘Oh,’ Kenyon said, clearly surprised. ‘Right. So why Moscow? Nothing’s happening here.’
Russell gave him a quick précis.
‘Not a chance,’ Kenyon told him, echoing the journalists at the Metropol.
After scheduling a drink for that evening, Russell hurried back up Okhotnyy Ryad, his NKVD shadow keeping pace. The sky, like his mood, was darkening, and large drops of rain were beginning to fall as he reached the Press Liaison office on Tverskaya Street. A minute late, he was kept waiting for a further twenty, quite possibly as a punishment. There was a picture album of Soviet achievements on the anteroom table, all dams, steelworks and happy kolkhoz workers driving their brand new tractors into the sunset. He laughed out loud at one photograph of Stalin surrounded by nervously smiling women in overalls, and received a withering glare from the young receptionist.
Someone arrived to collect him, a thin, balding man in his thirties with a worried look who introduced himself as Sergey Platonov. Upstairs, Russell discovered the reason for Platonov’s anxious expression – another man of roughly the same age with bushier hair, harder eyes and an NKVD major’s uniform. His name was Leselidze.
Russell was reminded of another interview he had endured, in Berlin several years earlier. Then too, the monkey had asked the questions while the organ grinder just sat there, making everyone nervous.
The room was like a small lecture hall, with several short rows of seats facing a slightly raised dais. They all sat down, Platonov and Leselidze behind the lecturer’s desk, Russell in the audience front row. It felt like more like a tribunal than an interview.
Platonov asked, in almost faultless English, whether Russell was aware of the wartime restrictions on movement applicable to all non-Soviet citizens.
‘Yes,’ Russell replied in the same language. A moving crane caught his eye in the window, proof that some rebuilding was underway.
‘And the general rules governing conversations between foreigners and Soviet citizens?’
‘Yes.’
Did he understand the specific rules governing foreign reporters in the Soviet Union, particularly those regarding the transmission of any information deemed detrimental to the Soviet state?
‘I do,’ Russell affirmed. He had no knowledge of the current details, but the gist was unlikely to have changed – foreign journalists would be allowed to prop up the main hotel bars, sit quietly at official press confer-ences, and have spontaneous conversations with specially selected model workers at tractor assembly plants. Anything else would be forbidden.
‘Do you have anything you would like to see?’ Platonov asked. ‘A collective farm, perhaps.’ He sounded every inch the caring host, but his companion’s face told a different story.