Old Men at Midnight (12 page)

I looked at him.

“Listen, Comrade Major, ask them if someone can assure me that my wife and children will be safe. I will say anything and sign anything if I am given that assurance.”

“I’ll pass that on.”

“Tell them, if you will, that I embrace Comrade Iosif Vissarionovich and I embrace the Party, no matter what happens to me. Nothing can stand in the way of the Party.”

“I’ll tell them.”

There was a pause. I buzzed for the guards and they led him away.

I called Colonel Razumkov on the interoffice phone.

“I can’t speak with any authority about his wife and children, and I don’t want to know about his love for them. There are certain things he must do and say for us, regardless of what is to happen to his wife and children, and he will do and say them even if we have to stick twenty needles up his ass. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Comrade Colonel.”

He hung up.

It took some while for my left arm to stop throbbing.

Those who were assigned to deal with the brigade commander reported that his interrogations were lengthy and thorough. But he would say nothing until word came down from on high that his family would be spared. Then he gave them names, accused others, and signed the 128 pages of confession they put before him.

He went on trial, was found guilty, and two days later was executed with a single shot to the back of the neck. He was an enemy of the people and got what he deserved.

Soon afterward we received orders to arrest his wife. She was given ten years and sent off to one of our labor camps in the Far East. I don’t know what happened to their children; probably relatives took them in.

About two or three years later, we began to arrest Red
Army and Navy officers. Some generals came through my office, a cool professional lot, who thought they knew how to take interrogation. On a number of them we used what we called the “conveyor”: teams of interrogators that went at it for days without stopping. Most of the time, one or two weeks of that was enough; they confessed to the crimes we put before them and then incriminated themselves in court.

About the time the Germans invaded us in 1941, the arrests had almost come to an end. By then I was a colonel.

Earlier that warm June night, the night of the 21st, I was with a woman. By the beginning of the forties there were fine restaurants in Moscow and even some nightspots. I got back to my apartment after midnight, sated and in a good mood. But I slept restlessly, woke and slept again, troubled by dreams.

For weeks some of our departments had been receiving secret dispatches from our overseas agents, from certain other reliable sources, from our embassies, from our commanders in the field, about a German troop buildup along our western frontier. We knew that Luftwaffe reconnaissance planes were constantly overflying our border and photographing our airfields. British intelligence kept insisting that Hitler was planning a June invasion. But we were at peace with the Germans: tourists arrived regularly from Berlin by commercial aircraft to take in the sights of Moscow, and ships and trains laden with food and raw
materials moved from our ports and our heartland to Germany. I couldn’t figure out why Stalin had made a nonaggression treaty with Hitler, the most hated enemy of Communism—unless he thought the Germans and the English would exhaust themselves in war and we would then emerge as the dominant power in Europe. All those heated warnings about German activity along the frontier were repeatedly dampened by explicit orders from the top that we say and do absolutely nothing that might be interpreted as even the slightest provocation against Germany.

Our country was in an awkward situation. Many of our marshals and generals had been shot by order of Stalin. Most of our officer corps—dead or in labor camps. Our forward border units—pulled back. On Dzerzhinsky Square we were reasonably sure we understood what was going on: the Germans were getting ready to move against us. But we had been told: “Don’t panic. The Boss knows all about it.”

I dreamed that night that I had stepped through a massive wooden door into a world of pure silence. Not Russian silence, which is the silence of terror, or of reverence for those taken by age or illness or murderous events. Rather, the silence that was the absence of all light and sound, the silence of an emptied globe, a planet without people, without life, without air, a world of naked rock and dormant sand distantly seen by indifferent stars.

I woke with a sense of dread.

Someone was banging on the door to my apartment. They were coming to arrest me.

I opened the door and saw my driver.

A redheaded twenty-year-old lad from a village south of Leningrad. He lowered his arm, his face went scarlet. “My apologies, Comrade Colonel. They tried to phone you but could not get through. I have orders to wake you.”

He informed me that the German army was crossing the border and we were at war. All department heads were ordered to report immediately to their offices on Dzerzhinsky Square.

My instinctive reaction as I absorbed that news—a flood of relief that I was safe. Then—cold dread. We were at war with that monster from the west—and nearly naked before its murderous teeth and claws.

There is a Russian saying: every day learns from the one that went before, but no day teaches the one that follows.

How we stumbled and staggered about during the weeks that followed! Three million men were marching against us—Germans, Rumanians, Hungarians, Italians, Finns. With thousands upon thousands of aircraft, artillery pieces, tanks. They had split their force into three huge army groups: the northern was to take Leningrad; the center, Moscow; the southern, Rostov and the Crimea and the oil deposits of the Caucasus. How we bled! Millions of lives, vast stretches of the Motherland—quickly lost to the teeth and claws of the enemy.

The Dark Tyrant was not in Moscow when the Germans
struck but in his dacha at Kuntsevo. And Comrade Zhdanov, the chief of Leningrad, toward which an enemy army was now advancing as if the roads were greased—Comrade Zhdanov was vacationing in the Crimea on the shores of the Black Sea.

In our building on Dzerzhinsky Square a rumor began to creep through corridors after four days of silence from the leadership: Stalin had returned to Moscow, gone for a briefing at the Commissariat of Defense on Frunze Street, been stunned by the realization that our entire central front had disintegrated, exploded with anger and insults, left the briefing room with his head down and stooped over, like a peasant shrinking from an arm raised to strike him, climbed into his car, and gone home. Now, in a mood of black despair, he was hiding in his dacha, with no idea what to do. Drunk on vodka and awaiting imminent arrest for his disregard of all the warnings, his misreading of Hitler’s intentions, his immense political miscalculation. The Politburo was trying to keep the country from falling to pieces. Then came the rumor that the foreign minister, along with two or three others from the Politburo, had gone to the dacha and urged Stalin to establish an emergency defense committee, with him as chairman. He had immediately regained his self-confidence, was now back in the Kremlin. And some days later we heard his calm voice over the radio:

“Comrades! Citizens! Fighting men of our army and navy! Brothers and sisters! I turn to you, my friends.”

Comrade Stalin calling us
his friends!
An astonishment!

He told us what we had lost to the Germans: Lithuania, Latvia, western White Russia, much of the Ukraine. He said, “Our country is in serious danger.” Everything that could be moved was to be sent eastward; all that could not be moved was to be burned, destroyed, wherever retreat proved inevitable. The struggle against the German enemy was to be relentless.

The town near my village—in German hands! German troops and tanks treading upon the unmarked mass grave of my parents, my sisters, the Rebbe, the others in the village. Heavy German boots marched over their bones.

No rest for me either.

Moscow was warm, windless. Long days, short nights. The atmosphere tense, silent. During the day we went about our work; at night the city lay dark, blacked out. People seemed to be straining, listening, waiting for the first sounds of approaching tanks and artillery. I rode through the city, thinking, Moscow is now a pleasant place. Different from when I had arrived twenty years before. Almost no food or fuel then. Cold gray skies, freezing mists, filthy ice in the winter, mucky puddles in the spring. Buckets, pitchers, rags during my brief stay in that basement room; I sawed wood for the stove, washed old potatoes in icy water, boiled them in a battered pot. I remembered: One year in the early thirties there had been no socks in the entire city; that was a year or two before Kirov, the Leningrad chief, was assassinated, and we
thought they would start on all of us in Moscow after they finished with nearly the whole leadership in Leningrad—for carelessness, inadequate vigilance, negligence in connection with our duties. But they stopped with the Leningrad bunch and only started on us in Moscow a few years later when our minister got scooped up and put away. Somehow I survived. Moscow had become a fine city in which to live—and now a lot of us would be dying in it.

In early September we began to evacuate children under the age of twelve. A few days later word came down to our departments that the German northern army had completed the land encirclement of Leningrad. Then Kiev fell; we lost five armies there, more than half a million men. I lay in bed nights listening to the city: silence, darkness, millions of Muscovites holding their breath, waiting.

Three weeks later the order came to disassemble factories for evacuation eastward. Then the government fled the city—to Kuibyshev, about five hundred miles to the east. But Stalin remained behind and set up headquarters in the marble cavern of the Mayakovsky Metro station. I say that to his credit. He could have left with the others, but he chose not to.

In the meantime there were things our departments had to do. Much of our army was demoralized, units in disarray not only because of casualties but also on account of a general breakdown in discipline and sudden doubts about directions, plans, loyalties. We reinforced our security troops. And once again we began to attach political commissars to the army; we had stopped doing that in
1940. Then we started to shoot people for any act of sabotage or defeatism. You tell soldiers that being taken prisoner by the enemy is an act of treason, it stiffens their resolve, makes them think four or five times before they throw down their weapons.

I myself volunteered to go to the front as a political commissar, and my commanding officer sent it through channels to the minister. But the minister gave me one of his thin smiles and said he needed me close by, there would soon be a lot of work to do.

I began to understand what he meant when we started to arrest the high-echelon officers of the western front where the Germans had broken through. They were charged with having taken part in a military conspiracy against Stalin.

“Please have the decency not to insult my intelligence with such nonsense,” a general officer said to me when I asked him for his signature to a prepared confession of high treason and conspiracy against the head of state. He was a tall, thin, graceful man in his fifties, from a noted family of officers that went back to the armies of the tsars. He had pale-blue eyes, a deep, musical voice, and long, delicate fingers. “You were not there,” he added. “You cannot have the slightest understanding of what went on.”

“Must one always be present at a crime to know that a crime has occurred?” I asked. He looked very tired. He had seen many thousands of his men die. I didn’t think it would take long to bring him around.

“This is complete nonsense,” he said. “It is garbage for goats and pigs. I was the one who, two days before the German
attack, asked to alert my forces, asked to move units forward, and was repeatedly ordered not to.”

“None of that is of any significance here. Surely you understand that.”

“Comrade Colonel, have you no sense of honor, no shame?”

“What has any of that to do with this? It’s your future and that of your wife and children we are talking about here.”

“I should be on the front lines fighting Germans rather than in Moscow fighting you and your people. Tell them to send me to the worst part of the front. To Leningrad. To the Crimea.”

“You know where you’re going.”

“Comrade Stalin is the culprit here, not I and not my officers.”

“I will pretend you didn’t say that.”

“Pretend whatever you wish. Do me the simple favor of putting an end to this nonsense. I will not sign my name to rubbish.”

I regretted having to subject him to the “conveyor”; he was a man of considerable dignity and had fought the Germans with courage. But I had my orders: it was necessary to fix blame for the debacle in the west; and clearly it could not be placed on Comrade Stalin, who had unified the country and was guiding it through this war.

It took three weeks to wear him down. A stubborn man. Two days after his trial they shot him in one of our execution cellars.

I felt a twinge of regret when I heard that, but it was
quickly forgotten because we were very busy then watching the American and British delegations that were in Moscow meeting with our officials about our defense needs. We discovered two of our Foreign Commissariat people trying to use the meetings to establish connections they thought might help get them out of the country. Contemptible traitors.

Those were terrible months in Moscow. Half a million women, teenage children, and old men labored day and night to build the defense lines around the city: antitank ditches, troop trenches, miles of barbed wire. Mobs roamed through the streets, panic-stricken people, often drunk, crazed with terror over the advancing Germans, over spies, over what they were certain was the approaching death of their city. I saw a mob one night from the window of the car in which I was riding with the minister and two of his aides: a raging crowd of teenagers surrounding a woman on crutches. Probably accusing her of being an enemy spy who had broken a leg while parachuting out of a German aircraft. Inside the car, I was briefing the minister on some matter and could see his pince-nez glinting. There were no electric lights anywhere, only the light of a full moon, and his spectacles somehow glinted in the darkness of the car’s interior. An odious man, dwarfish, probably syphilitic, with a penchant for deflowering virgins. Later I walked with him through a long underground corridor and waited out of earshot while he approached the man who sat behind a large writing table on which stood more than half a dozen telephones. They spoke quietly. At
one point I heard the man behind the desk say, “Calm yourself, calm yourself,” and a moment later he turned and I saw a small round bald patch on the back of his head, and then the two of them looked at me and I saw the moustache, the pockmarked face, and the prominent nose. I felt his dark eyes,
felt
them upon my face, and could see even from a distance the gleam of yellow in them and thought he would motion me over to him. It was, I knew, dangerous to be in his company: you could not be certain when you left where you might end up that night, at home or in a prison cell. But, to my great relief, they both looked away and went on with their quiet conversation.