To ease the enmity that had come between us, I asked Anna how she had come to work for Dmitri. Again with candidness she volunteered that she had never joined the tiolki – the ‘cattle’ – at the Gaudi Club or the Lookin Rooms, flirting with wealthy strangers, hoping to be spotted by a ‘sponsor’. She wouldn’t trade on her body, she assured me, not even in exchange for the best love-nest apartment on Rublevka – Moscow’s billionaires row.
‘For me this is just a job,’ she said, adding that she planned to study psychology at night school. ‘Dmitri Denisovich has promised to pay the fees.’
At the Kalashnikov stand, thrill-seekers queued to test the new AK-74M assault gun. A demonstration of the firing performance of the company’s RSHG-2 rocket grenade launcher was delayed until after tea. Beyond them, at the far end of the exhibition hall, a father berated a child. I hadn’t noticed the misdemeanour but it couldn’t have been serious: a thoughtless joke or dropped piece of cake. Yet the man seemed to want to make a point. He towered over the silent boy, who lowered his head in shame. He yelled at his son, swelling in his boots as he diminished him. I remembered a story of the daughters of an Irish farmer. Their father had owned a pig and, one day, without provocation, in a game, the young girls had hit it with a stick. Its squeals amused them so they struck it again, and again. They beat the pig until it was dead.
At the end of the day I didn’t have the stomach to visit the nearby Kubinka Tank Museum, said to be the world’s largest collection of armoured war machines. Instead I decided to head back to Moscow, alone. Anna’s absence of doubt disturbed me, and a sudden wave of anger washed over me. I asked myself if she might argue that a strong leader had a duty to wield power, even to commit crimes, for the good of the nation. I wondered if she’d accept that the murder of 293 people, including her own father, had been the price to pay for Russia’s resurrection.
We parted at the centre of the park beneath a statue of Georgy Zhukov, the Red Army commander who had captured Berlin in 1945. A simple inscription appeared on the plinth, but not Zhukov’s name. The deliberate omission of his name transformed the statue’s meaning. It was a code that every Russian understood. ‘To the Marshal of the Victory’ did not refer to Zhukov, but rather to Stalin… and by extension to the once little-known bureaucrat who’d unveiled the statue a few years earlier.
6
Tell Me Another One
We all like a good story. We all need a narrative for our lives. The most potent stories give us an idea or individual to believe in, as well as someone to blame when things go wrong: Stalin loved little children, Jews caused Germany’s ills, Middle East migrants bring cholera into Europe, Brussels strips the UK of its independence. Today many Russians have come to fancy that there was a golden age that can be reclaimed, that the whole Soviet people marched in step on Red Square on May Day, calling out in a single voice ‘Glory! Glory to the victorious people!’
The Second World War wasted Europe. Over six hellish years the Soviet Union lost 1,700 towns, 70,000 villages and 26 million men, women and children. Leningrad was besieged for 872 days. More than half of Russian POWs died of starvation or neglect in German camps. Eleven million more lives were snuffed out in the Holocaust. Warsaw was dynamited street by street, neighbourhood by neighbourhood. One in five Poles died, as did one in six Lithuanians. In the war’s final fortnight, 40,000 tons of Soviet shells fell on Berlin. In Hitler’s pulverised capital, the vengeful conquerors raped at least 100,000 women (about two million in Germany as a whole). Then the Red Army marched over three million German prisoners to Siberian gulags, some of whom would not return for a decade.
With the defeat of Nazism, the devastated continent was split like a rotten melon. Its western half was flooded with American dollars and defended by Allied armies. Its Soviet east was sustained by fear. At Yalta, Stalin had agreed to free elections for all Europeans but, as most communist parties were too unpopular to gain power through the ballot box, he used coercion to tighten their grip. First the Red Army refused to withdraw, then communists allied themselves with interim governments. Every day, from within, they demanded more and more power, cutting away elected authority like salami, thin slice after thin slice. Next they secured control of the police, aided by the threat of Russian bayonets. Opponents were arrested and their leaderless parties absorbed. Finally the elections, fettered by fraud and police terror, were rigged. Within two or three years, communists took over every government east of the Brandenburg Gate. It was an effective system.
Stalin’s objective was to create a buffer zone, as had Catherine the Great when she’d seized Crimea and parts of Poland, as had Tsar Alexander I after Napoleon’s defeat. To protect Moscow, Uncle Joe annexed Bessarabia and northern Bukovina from Romania. He peeled away a slice of Hungary. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania lost their independence so he could have access to the Baltic. He severed uranium-rich Ruthenia, the eastern tail of Slovakia. He lopped off yet more Polish territory and incorporated it into Soviet Ukraine.
He also tried to draw Berlin – and then the whole of Germany – into the communist orbit. In 1948 he blockaded the city in an effort to drive the Americans out of Europe. But the Allies retaliated by launching an airlift to sustain the city’s freedom. Stalin was forced to back down, and the Cold War turned hot.
Over the next forty years the end of the world was nigh. MAD, or mutual assured destruction, was a pyrrhic military strategy that ensured any attack doomed both the aggressor and the defender. At the touch of a button life on Earth could be extinguished. The suicidal nuclear deterrent sustained an edgy status quo through the Hungarian Revolution and Cuban missile crisis, Prague Spring and Vietnam War, until 1989 and the fall of the Wall.
In that optimistic year, Eastern Europeans embraced the democracy that Stalin had denied them. As the Red Army withdrew, they chose ‘a historically new kind of order through the process of unification’ (Václav Havel again), aligning themselves with the borderless, cooperative European Union. Two years later the USSR itself – the world’s largest nation – imploded, liberating further millions from Soviet tyranny, ending generations of repression, bringing unfamiliar freedoms and responsibilities.
Mikhail Gorbachev had come to power in 1985 to revitalise the USSR. He’d championed restructuring and openness. He’d relaxed censorship and encouraged truth-telling. His reforms – and unwillingness to use force – freed Eastern Europe. But at home his changes floundered and slipped out of controclass="underline" first because administrators had neither the experience nor the enterprise to carry them forward – decades of terror had wiped free thinking out of the civil service; and second because of shame.
With the collapse of communism, and the release of secret files, Russians could no longer deny that they were complicit in Soviet crimes: loading innocents into cattle trucks, lifting rifles in a firing squad, spying on neighbours, turning a blind eye. The truth was too much to bear and, in response, unrepentant hard-liners imprisoned Gorbachev and tried to seize control of parliament. Their coup was thwarted by mass protests and hijacked by the shrewd and impulsive Boris Yeltsin.
‘Behind our backs there was treachery. Behind my back,’ recalled Gorbachev, who later told the BBC that he’d recognised the real danger of civil war. ‘A split in society and a struggle in a country like ours, overflowing with weapons, including nuclear ones, could have left so many people dead and caused such destruction. I could not let that happen just to cling to power.’