Throwing a rough army greatcoat over his shoulders, he stood in the porch of the club watching the flow of New Year’s Eve revellers going along Tverskaya, lit up by the flashes of the lights from advertisements and traffic lights. Gena’s head was spinning from the mix of brandy and champagne he had been drinking and from the unfamiliarly strong papirosi, and he wandered out onto the pavement under the large snowflakes. The pedestrians were not at all surprised by the sight of a man in jodhpurs, and hurried on their New Year way. A couple of times, taxis stopped, the drivers threw questioning glances at him and then drove off. Unexpectedly, a retro-automobile, a GAZ M-1, pulled over from the flow of traffic, a famous pre-war ‘M-car’, with grilles on the sides of the long bonnet. With a cursory gesture, the driver called him over and Gena, driven by curiosity, wandered over to the curb and sat in the back seat.
‘Where to?’ asked the driver.
‘To see Father Christmas’, Gena joked, ‘in the High North.’
‘As you wish,’ replied the driver, and with a crunch put the car in gear.
Inside the car there was the sickly smell of cheap petrol, like in the country buses of Gena’s childhood, and the young man became carsick. The driver remained silent as the car slowly made its way through the New Year’s Eve traffic on Tverskaya, heading down towards Manezh Square, past the Moscow City Council building and the Central Telegraph. Gena closed his eyes and forgot where he was, but opened them when he heard the clanking of gates. The ‘M-car’ drove through the gates of the huge dark NKVD building on Lubyanka Square. ‘What’s going on?’ he muttered in his half-awake state, but strong hands had already pulled open the door from outside, dragged him out of the car and pushed him into the entrance of the internal courtyard. In front of him, as if in a dream, there flashed past doors, bars, corridors, and featureless grey faces with fish-like eyes. A lieutenant of state security sitting in an office under portraits of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky indifferently wrote down his garbled explanation. On the tear-off calendar, Gena noticed the date: 29 December 1936. They started to search him. When they found his wallet and his documents, the lieutenant let out a whistle and called the captain. For a long time, the two of them examined his Russian passport with the two-headed eagle and the credit cards, the five-thousand-rouble banknote (‘Tsarist money’, said the captain knowingly), and, coming across the three one-hundred-dollar bills, muttered satisfyingly: ‘A spy!’ Next followed the degrading process of a strip search, the examination of the foreign labels on his shirt and underwear, and the first – not yet hard – punch in the face, which made Gena feel as if a salty wave had washed over him.
After thirty-five hours of endless interrogation, beaten, with a broken ring finger from having it shut in the door, sobbing, he signed a confession that he was an agent of a White emigrants’ organization who had been sent into the USSR for the purpose of espionage and to carry out counterrevolutionary terrorist activity. He was sentenced under Article 58, Section 6, to ten years in a labour camp. And in the middle of January 1937, under a hard frost, he travelled in a cold, barred ‘Stolypin’ railway car[11] past Veliky Ustyug, the homeland of Father Christmas, through the Kotlass transit camp, and was handed over to the Ukhta-Pechora corrective labour camps in the Northern Urals.
When he arrived, he was put into a logging brigade. Unaccustomed as he was to physical labour, he was unable to fulfil his daily norm, for which he was regularly beaten by the brigade leader and other prisoners. His fashionable boots were taken from him by the criminals and in return he received ‘seasonal footwear’: foot-cloths and a scrap of a car tyre with a piece of wire to keep it attached to his foot. In the spring he went down with dystrophy and pellagra. He lay for a while in the hospital, and having survived through the summer with the help of vitamins from pine needles and wild onions, Gena returned to the barrack block. He turned into a classic camp ‘wick’ (as they were known, like in a candle), with an unshaven face, a mad look, with the padding falling out of his jacket – his appearance said, ‘just light me now’. The criminals reckoned he had gone mad, so they left him alone. He found it difficult himself to think who he was and who he had been in the past and he simply lived the life of the camp from day to day: from his morning ration of bread with hot water, until his evening skilly, watery soup with soya; his daily bread ration was cut back from eight hundred grams to six hundred, because he didn’t fulfil his norm.
Almost a year passed. It was December 1938. In the camp they prepared for the New Year by putting up a banner that read: ‘In the USSR labour is a matter of honour, a matter of glory, a matter of valour and heroism.’ In honour of the holiday, they turned the dining room into a club, decorating the doors with fir twigs and putting up a poster for a lecture, ‘To the Victory of Communism! The USSR in Eighty Years’ Time’, which was to be delivered by a political officer from Ukhta. On the eve of the holiday, Gena was returning with a group of convicts to the camp through a pathway in the snow that they had cleared by logging; they were dragging through the forest brushwood and kindling for the stove in the barrack block. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, but it was already getting dark and the crimson sunset was burning low; as evening approached, the frost was biting sharper. Even after a year, Gena couldn’t get used to the cold, but now to the usual shivering was added weakness and indifference. He looked around and sat down on a large spruce on the edge of the path. The convoy guard was still some way off and before he could run up and strike him with his rifle butt Gena could take a short break.
Gena looked up. Above the tops of the fir trees in the darkening sky shone the colourless, indifferent disc of the moon. He closed his eyes and suddenly he could imagine life under Communism eighty years hence. He saw a huge, well-lit city, spread out like an electric blot, towards which he was slowly descending, as if he were on a parachute. The city came closer and soon filled his whole field of vision. In its arteries there flowed an endless stream of cars, huge coloured billboards twinkled, there were clusters of tall towers with lit windows and, looking closely, he could see crowds of people on the streets and boulevards and strings of lights on the trees. The convoy guard must be close; any second now he would be hit in the stomach, and Gena curled up ever tighter.
‘Get up!’ He felt a careful hand on his shoulder. Gena remained still.
‘Get up, you’ll freeze to death!’ repeated a woman’s voice. Gena opened his eyes and saw two girls bending over him. He was sitting on a frozen bench on Tverskoi Boulevard, under an old lime tree. All around there were trees hung with lights. Gena looked around in amazement. The girls burst out laughing and ran off. All around there was a fairytale light, there were figures of angels and butterflies standing in the snow, Father Christmas and his reindeer, made of strings of lights and being lit up by the flashlights of cameras, as dozens of people were having their photos taken among these models. Gena scooped up a handful of fresh snow and swallowed a few fistfuls. His head was aching, the lights were swimming in front of his eyes, his broken ring finger was throbbing. He got up from the bench and slowly made his way along the boulevard in the direction of the square where the holiday music was playing, the huge numbers 2017 glowed, and it seemed as if Communism had finally arrived.
11
Reforms introduced by Petr Stolypin (prime minister, 1906–11) led to a massive deportation of peasants and prisoners to Siberia. A special type of carriage was introduced for these settlers, consisting of two parts: a standard passenger compartment for a peasant and his family and a large zone for their livestock and agricultural tools. After the Revolution, the