Red Shadow (12 page)

‘Look at this,’ she said quietly, reading out the caption and translating as she went. ‘
Stalin’s wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva, pictured here with their daughter Svetlana. Nadezhda, known as “Nadya”, is thought to have shot herself in 1932.
’

‘But she died of appendicitis,’ said Misha. ‘Everyone knows that.’

Svetlana did not return his gaze. She stared hard at the photograph. Misha noticed for the first time her clear pale skin and light red hair. She was turning into a beautiful woman.

‘She never liked me much, you know. Look how uncomfortable I look in that photograph. But I think she had a difficult life. I think she probably did shoot herself. Papa never speaks of her. I’ve learned not to mention her.’

‘This is capitalist propaganda, made to make your papa look bad,’ Misha said. ‘You should ignore it.’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said carefully. ‘This is the
Illustrated London News
. It’s a reasonable magazine. I’ve read it a lot and they seem to tell the truth in their reports. And the British are our allies. They have other articles here about how bravely our soldiers are resisting the Nazis, and how determined Papa is to lead his country to victory. Why would they put something like this in? Just out of spite? No, I think it’s true. I think Papa drove her to it. I think she was so cold with me because she was so unhappy with him.’

Misha daren’t voice an opinion, even if he had one, which he didn’t.

Svetlana picked up on his discomfort. She placed a hand on his arm. ‘I’m sorry to weigh you down with my own troubles,’ she said. ‘I ask you to tell no one of what I have said.’

‘I promise you as a good communist never to repeat what you have said,’ Misha hurriedly replied. There was an awkward silence. Then he said, ‘Shall we get back to Antony’s speech?’

She shook her head. ‘No. You have told me enough,’ and began to gather her books and notes.

‘Here, come and walk with me to the embankment,’ she said. ‘It’s a lovely evening.’

It was an odd request but Misha didn’t mind. Maybe she felt she didn’t want to part company from him quite yet, after confiding in him.

So they walked over to the grand avenue overlooking the Moskva River and stared into the opalescent dusk. The air was thick with the last of the hot summer day and swallows circled high above them. ‘It’s beautiful out here,’ said Misha, looking down at the river and the handful of pedestrians that hurried along Kremlyovskaya. In the misty gloom you could barely see the buildings along Sofiyskaya on the opposite bank of the Moscow River.

For a moment or two they stood side by side, almost touching. Misha thought of Valya’s teasing and hoped Svetlana didn’t take a fancy to him. He was beginning to like her but having her as a girlfriend would be like going out with a scorpion. He reassured himself that he was too much of a lightweight for the daughter of the
Vozhd
.

The undulating mechanical wail of the air-raid siren cut through the dusk. ‘They’re early tonight,’ she said calmly.

Misha and Svetlana watched a crowd of officials and secretaries heading for the newly built shelters in the squares and gardens of the Kremlin. They all walked at a steady pace to their allotted shelters, no one looked too concerned. After all, sometimes the sirens went off and nothing happened. He wondered whether he ought to escort Svetlana to her own shelter or wait for her to dismiss him.

But then they heard the faint buzz of aeroplane engines, swiftly blotted out by the steady thud of anti-aircraft guns. The Germans were here already.

‘They’ve sneaked through in the fog,’ said Misha, trying to keep the fear from his voice. The shelter the Petrovs had been allocated was close to the north wall. The first bombs were beginning to fall – a regular
crump
crump
CRUMP
– as the planes discharged their loads in rapidly approaching detonations. Sometimes there was just that single chain of explosions. Often the sound of crumbling masonry followed on.

The last explosion was close enough for them all to see the flash, and from the corner of his eye Misha saw black fragments hurling through the air. Svetlana grabbed him by the arm. ‘Come to my shelter,’ she said. ‘It’s nearer.’

All at once they were running, like everyone around them. Stalin and his cohorts had their own place of safety, newly dug just outside the Little Corner, close to the
Vozhd
’s own apartment and office. The two soldiers guarding the stairway entrance let Svetlana and her guest past without a word.

Misha noticed immediately that this was a different class of shelter. There was a crowd of excited, anxious people, but there were nowhere near as many as packed into the other Kremlin shelters. In place of the usual whitewashed concrete walls, and the faint smell of damp earth and human waste, there was a polished woody smell from dark panels and varnished parquet flooring. Immediately to the right of a large steel door he could see an operations room, just like the one in the Little Corner which he had helped Papa clear up after meetings, with the same map on the wall, and portraits of Lenin and Stalin.

The steel door clanged shut, and Misha wondered about the two guards, there on the other side. A loud explosion broke overhead and the lights momentarily flickered. People held their breath and Misha could see the tension on their faces. He felt perfectly safe – far safer than usual. He was sure Stalin’s own shelter was deeper and altogether better than everyone else’s.

Close to the operations room was a dining room with a long table set with a lace cloth and crystal glasses. There were other rooms too, either side of the long corridor, with closed doors. Misha and Svetlana hurried down to the large room at the end of the shelter. The room filled up rapidly and Misha looked around, recognising many of the Soviet leaders. Molotov was there, and Rokossovsky and Beria. Then all at once, he saw Stalin staring straight at him. The eyes bored into him, holding his gaze, even as the
Vozhd
drew on a cigarette, his face unsmiling. Misha wondered if this was what a mouse felt like just before it was swallowed by a snake. He seemed to be saying, ‘What are
you
doing here?’

Stalin broke off his staring and leaned towards a large burly man and whispered in his ear.

‘Svetlana, do you think we should tell your papa that you asked me to come down here with you?’

‘Don’t be silly, Comrade Mikhail,’ she hissed. ‘Why should I bother Papa with insignificant tattle like that?’

The assistant was walking towards Misha with a purposeful, frankly hostile look on his face.

There was a deep and ominous rumble. The ground shook. Everyone stopped talking. Then the lights went and everything was pitch black. ‘Comrades, please stand where you are and stay silent. The lights will return in a moment,’ said a commanding voice Misha didn’t recognise.

In the dark Misha felt a hand clutch his. He was sure it was Svetlana.

More explosions followed, including one close enough to dislodge earth and plaster and cause a few people to start coughing. Misha felt horribly vulnerable there in the dark and squeezed the hand that held his.

After an eternity, the lights flickered back on and people began to move out into the corridor. As Misha’s eyes adjusted to the brightness, he realised Svetlana was no longer by his side. The sirens began to wail again – the steady all-clear signal this time.

He was anxious to leave, before the angry-looking man found him, and he shuffled out with the others streaming to the staircase exit, careful to keep his eyes to the floor. Outside, the first thing Misha noticed was the smell of burning, then that gas and sewage smell that always accompanied an air raid. Over by the north side of the Kremlin he could see flames rising above the rooftops, and the taste of water vapour from firemen’s hoses mingled with the Moscow summer evening. Misha ran towards the fire.

‘Go back,’ said a guard as he neared the flames. ‘One of the shelters has had a direct hit.’ He was relieved to see it wasn’t the one Valya and his papa used.

Misha dodged an ambulance as it swerved up the central square and walked in a daze to the great road in front of the cathedrals to look south over Moscow. Although there was a total blackout in force, the city was peppered with fires. He thought about what Valya had said about who would still be alive when the war was over and a cold shiver passed through him. Sirens and alarm bells from ambulances and fire engines brought him back to the present and Misha remembered immediately that he should go off to his own
Komsomol
air-raid detachment to see what he could do to help.

Chapter 15

Early September 1941

August passed in a haze of air-raid sirens, Nazi bombs falling on the city and a procession of further dreadful news from the front. Now, whenever his friends met, he would hear of casualties. Nikolay had lost a cousin. Yelena had an uncle who had been killed near Orsha. He and Papa waited for news from Viktor and Elena, but there was only an ominous silence.

When Misha crossed the great bridge, he noticed work had started again on the Great Palace of the Soviets on the embankment. They had been building it for years on and off, and he had heard rumours that the foundations were not strong enough to support its huge size. But now it was going down rather than up. You could hear them on the site around the clock. The papers reported the steel girders used to build it were being turned into tank traps.

By the time Misha returned to school in early September, the German army seemed unstoppable. In the far north, the great city of Leningrad was surrounded. Down in the south, they had reached the Black Sea and it could only be a matter of days before the Crimea was occupied. Krasnograd and Novgorod had fallen. A mere two hundred kilometres lay between the Nazis and Moscow. As Nikolay had pointed out, rather alarmingly, it was a distance a fast car could cover in a couple of hours. Misha had realised how dangerous the situation was when he’d heard Kapitan Zhiglov had sent his daughter Galina to Kuybyshev, far off to the east. Lydia the maid had gone too. There was some natural justice in that. She had to put up with a difficult child, but at least she would be safe too.

Misha had also heard an extraordinary rumour about Stalin’s eldest son, Yakov. He had been captured in the fighting around Smolensk and the
Vozhd
had had his wife and children arrested. Misha’s mama had been friends with Yakov’s wife, Yulia, and he remembered her a little. When he mentioned it to his papa, Yegor Petrov looked merely uneasy, rather than shocked. ‘It’s a standard procedure when a soldier surrenders. The
Vozhd
has to be seen to be fair.’

Misha shook his head in disbelief.

On the first day back in school, Misha’s year were all assembled for a special extraordinary meeting. Misha sat with Nikolay and Sergey and was pleased when Yelena chose a seat as far away from him as possible on the other side of the hall. As he looked around, he noticed how many of his fellow pupils were looking unwell. Even twelve weeks into the war many had clothes that were starting to look too big for their bodies and the wan, malnourished look of street beggars. Clearly, rations for the general population were not as generous as they were in the Kremlin. He wondered if anyone would notice he wasn’t looking any thinner.

‘What’s this meeting about, d’you think?’ asked Nikolay.

‘Probably some information on air-raid drills and other wartime procedures,’ said Misha. He was starting to feel restless when Leonid Gribkov walked in and called the hall to order.

‘Why’s the Komsorg doing this and not Barikada?’ whispered Nikolay. Barikada usually led the school meetings and they had both seen him in class, but he had seemed unusually quiet. ‘I thought he’d be loving this,’ said Nikolay. ‘His chance to shine.’

Gribkov did indeed go through the air-raid precautions, and who was to muster where in the event of an attack. A series of names were read out, including Misha’s, who was to act as air-raid warden and who was to take a register after an attack. He also reminded them all that the war office was still recruiting volunteers to defend Moscow and to go into the occupied areas as partisans. It was not compulsory to do so, unless you were eighteen years old, but his clear inference was that younger volunteers would not be turned away.

Then he called for volunteers among the older students to replace teachers who had gone to fight. Misha caught Yelena’s eye when Gribkov asked for a show of hands, and she had raised hers too. She smiled and gave him a thumbs-up.

Then Gribkov turned more serious than usual. He began to talk in the kind of political clichés that made most of the students gaze into thin air, about the pre-Revolutionary bourgeoisie – the factory owners and the landowners – and how they had tried to ‘throttle the Revolution with the bony hand of hunger’ and how even after their final defeat they had carried on sabotaging Soviet industry. He announced it was time once again to ‘tear off the mask of the enemies of the people’. Misha wondered where on earth this was going and worried that he was about to be denounced. But then Gribkov turned and pointed directly at Yelena, and called her ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’.

Misha remembered what Valya had said about not being able to walk by when someone needed help. Amid the catcalls and boos directed at her he stood up and cried out, ‘Yelena Rozhkov is an exemplary communist and works directly for the good of all Moscow people. I have known her for many years and have heard her speak nothing but good of Comrade Stalin and the Soviet Union.’