“Revolutions are the locomotives of history.” He had recalled the quote when taking part in a heavily chaperoned visit to a locomotive factory in Moscow. Oumansky had looked at him as if he had gone mad. There were times when Jones wondered whether he was the only person in the whole of the Soviet Union who had read any Marx. It was hard to define why, but the visit was depressing, the immediate source of his bleak mood. Everywhere he’d gone in the factory, more than a mile long, he’d been accompanied by a cloud of officials, flies hovering over a dead dog. Oumansky was perpetually at his side.
Jones had dutifully written down in his notebook Oumansky’s brisks translations of the various officials in charge, detailing the astonishing rises in production, the enthusiasm of the workers for subscribing to Soviet bonds to better secure the revolution, their reported joy in leaps and bounds in production. The two things he didn’t see were any newly-made locomotives – and any joy. When Oumansky left to visit the bathroom, a Russian engineer, his face as white as candle wax, had whispered to him in bad French that the workers were hungry, so hungry they couldn’t work.
“May I quote you on that?” replied Jones in French.
“Mon Dieu, non, absoluement non.”
After that, the engineer hurried off and retreated to the far edge of the official party. Every now and then, Jones glanced at him to see him downcast, gnawing on his fingers. Jones felt he couldn’t report the exchange for fear of what might happen to the engineer. Besides, a chance remark from one nervy engineer was not enough for him to do down the whole noble Soviet experiment and bring down Oumansky’s wrath on his head to boot. And yet his unease stayed with him.
Jones took a sip of vodka and started to pound away at the typewriter, explaining to his readers back home in Wales the magnificent work of the locomotive factory, how its production was so improved, how willing the workers were to pay a ten per cent tithe on their wages to buy Soviet bonds. Not a word of his doubts about what was happening in Russia was reflected in his report. None of his reports had done that. There had been no complaint from the office back in Cardiff. Far from it – only the encouragement and excitement of readers willing to give the benefit of the doubt to a different kind of system when capitalism was failing them so badly.
After he had finished typing, Jones removed the original, the carbon paper and the under-copy and placed the original in an envelope. In the morning he would walk to the Foreign Ministry and deliver it to Oumansky or one of his minions for his approval. Only after they had stamped it, then initialled the stamp, could he go to the main post office in Moscow and get the message telegraphed to his office in Cardiff. He drained his vodka, put on a jumper, scarf, coat and his trilby and prepared to celebrate his first Soviet Christmas.
Someone was waiting for him in the hotel lobby. The face wasn’t familiar but he had met him, once. It took Jones some moments to realise that it was Attercliffe. With him was a Russian woman, worry written all over her face, and with them three young girls, the oldest, Jones reckoned, twelve years of age. The daughters were all got up in pink dresses, their blond hair plaited. Jones might have been wrong but he suspected that Attercliffe had been idling his time, waiting for him, perhaps for hours.
“Merry Christmas, Mr Jones.”
“Merry Christmas, Mr Attercliffe. Is this your wife and family?”
Attercliffe nodded, his ordinarily bleak face breaking into a smile of paternal pride when his daughters smiled hello.
“You’ve got a beautiful family, Mr Attercliffe,” said Jones.
“All down to Mrs Attercliffe, Mr Jones.”
Mrs Attercliffe beamed at the compliment and said in a heavy Russian accent, “Father Christmas, Mr Jones.”
“No, Yulia,” interrupted Attercliffe. “You mean Happy Christmas. Father Christmas is Dyed Moros.”
“I am so sorry, my English is…”
“…much better than my Russian,” Jones completed the sentence. There was a moment of silence, a silence which grew and filled the lobby.
The hotel receptionist, a man in his forties with a bulbous nose mapped by broken veins, was not watching the group. Such lack of interest was out of character. Ordinarily, from Jones’ observation, he stared at anyone new.
But today was different.
Sitting on a sofa on the other side of the lobby were two men also not watching the Attercliffes and Jones. The first was clown-faced and short, with a put-upon air. The second was far bigger, brutal or brutish, his hair dyed black – or so naturally black that it had the sheen of a chemical dye.
Mrs Attercliffe nudged her husband in the ribs.
“Going to the Metropol, Jones?” Attercliffe asked.
“I am.”
“Shall we walk together?”
“What about your family?”
“Oh, the girls wouldn’t like the Metropol. And they’re Orthodox, not like us, so it isn’t really Christmas for them.”
“And Mrs Attercliffe?”
“She’s looking after the girls.”
“Very well, then, let’s go.”
Attercliffe kissed his wife tenderly and said goodbye to his three daughters, who waved in unison like three little clockwork dolls.
Out on the hotel steps, the cold smacked Jones in the throat like a bully. The noises of the city were muffled by the snow, muffled by some unspoken dread.
Attercliffe and Jones walked in silence, their breaths pluming out before them. Down a gloomy side-street they came across three beggars, one standing rock-still, his back to a wall, one kneeling in the snow, a third squatting. Outright begging was illegal so, most ofte,n people would sell something to earn a kopek or two. The standing man had a tattered picture album in his black mittens, its red cover pattered with snow. The kneeler was selling an icon in a frame, the glass cracked from side to side; the man squatting had set out in front of him a wooden tray of forks and spoons and a smear of dirty lace. All three were dead.
“It’s the famine,” said Attercliffe. “It’s far, far worse in the countryside but now people are dying here, in the heart of Moscow. The authorities can’t keep up. They’re getting swamped by the number of the dead.”
“These poor bloody people,” said Jones.
“Amen to that,” replied Attercliffe. “I can’t bear these credulous buggers who come over and think it’s all hunky-dory. George Bernard Shaw and the like. The rights of workers here? They barely exist. You’re late for work by twenty minutes? You face prison. Free movement of labour has been abolished. You can’t leave your village, town or city unless you’ve got an internal passport. That’s why they got rid of the Tsar. Well, he’s back, only he’s got a red star in his crown these days. But if you say that out loud, you can end up in the GPU hot room.”
“What’s a hot room?”
“In the basement of the Lubyanka. The radiator is on full blast, the room’s full of people, twenty in a cell meant for two. They give you salted fish to eat and not enough water. It’s a fancy torture but it’s torture, no question.”
“But they say they’re building the future. To do that, you break some things on the way, but it’s still worth it.”
“You think that?”
“It’s what they say.”
“Listen, lad. Listen to me. They go on about the electrification of the Soviet Union until the cows come home. For Metro-Vickers, I helped build an entire electric cable factory upstream of a dam on the Volga, not far from Stalingrad. They built a huge shed out of brick in two months. It was an extraordinary achievement. Then the cable-making lathes arrived from Sheffield. Some of the equipment had been damaged in transit. Not on the ship, mind, coming up from the port. But we managed to fix it and we produced one beautiful cable. And then I went off to Moscow for a week, to try and beg for supplies so we could get cracking. That week they opened the dam and a massive reservoir was created virtually overnight. By the time I’d come back, the whole ground floor was underwater. Electrification of the Soviet Union, my arse.”