Elvira Baryakina - The Prince of the Soviets

Magda gave Friedrich a nickname in private: Friedrich der Große (Frederick the Great). He knew no fear and was less concerned for his own welfare than he was for that of his comrades and for the general good—as he understood it. He was the first man that Magda had ever met who cared nothing for her fortune. In fact, he thought of it as a burden that she should get rid of as soon as possible.

“I can’t,” Magda explained apologetically. “It’s not my money, you see. It’s my father’s. He just pays all my bills.”

Friedrich never spoke to Magda of love. He assumed that she wanted to help not him personally but his cause, and he was grateful to her for it.

One day, he clasped her tightly by the hand and told her that he was leaving for the Soviet Union.

“The Party will never forget your kindness, Miss Thomson!”

“I’m coming with you,” declared Magda without a second thought.

Friedrich was dumbstruck. He told Magda she had lost her senses and hinted that, as a British capitalist, she might run into some serious problems in the USSR. In reply, Magda said that she was not really scared of anything. She had been traveling around South America and met an Indian medicine man who had given her a special herb to smoke and put a charm over her that was supposed to protect her from a violent death.

Next day, Magda went to see new friends she had made in the Soviet Embassy and managed to get herself a visa.

“Have they lost their minds?” Friedrich yelled, furious, when he found out. “How did you talk them into it?”

Magda smiled enigmatically. She had offered Friedrich’s comrades in arms a large medical truck that they could use to take personal possessions out of China. The Soviet government was only providing enough money to evacuate people, the party archive, and weapons. Everything else was to be left behind.

Friedrich was furious with Magda and warned her not to come near him. The other Bolsheviks kept their distance from her too as if she might infect them with “British Imperialism.”

The journey from China was a long one, and Magda, worn out from fear and loneliness, was overjoyed when Nina Kupina was put into the truck with her, especially as this new fellow passenger spoke excellent English. It was a good thing that Nina was thin too as it meant she could squeeze into the space behind the passenger seat. There was no room in the back; the van was crammed full with bundles, baskets, and boxes.

Day after day, the medical truck trundled across the desert like a solid, stony sea. Watermelons rolled about underfoot while feathers from a number of ladies’ hats nodded overhead, pinned to the ceiling of the driver’s cabin. The Embassy women were hoping to sell them for a profit in Moscow, opting to forget about their anti-capitalist convictions for a while.

Their Chinese driver sang songs, interrupting his singing now and again to curse their guides, who kept getting confused and more than once led the column of vehicles in the wrong direction completely.

“What are we going to do if we run out of gas?” the driver muttered now and again. “Or if there’s a sandstorm?”

Magda was listening with only one ear. Up ahead of them was the Buick driven by Friedrich der Große. She would have given anything on earth to be next to him right now. If there were some disaster, she thought how good it would be to die with him at his side in a single moment! The sands would cover them, and three-hundred years later, they would be discovered by some archeologist, sitting side by side and holding hands. Even death would be powerless to separate them.

But Friedrich had taken Borisov in his car with him, together with an extra water cask—there was nothing there to delight the archeologists of the future.

Magda could not understand why Friedrich was rejecting her. It was true that she was no beauty; it was true that she was English, but these things had never bothered him in the past. And what if he had no desire to make it up to her when they got to Moscow? What if he just disappeared, leaving her to do whatever she wanted?

Magda had no idea what to expect in Soviet Russia. There had been a revolution there ten years ago, followed by civil war and a famine that had claimed the lives of five million people. One of her friends had been in Petrograd in 1921 and told her of rats running around in the hotels. Hotel guests had been issued with a bucket of water a day to wash and to prepare food.

“When did you leave Russia for China?” Magda asked Nina now.

“In October 1922,” Nina said. “There was a terrible shortage of food back then.”

It’s safe to assume, thought Magda, that things wouldn’t have changed too much in five years.

Magda felt anger rising up in her like a wave. The Bolsheviks could not get their own house in order, but here they were trying to teach the world how to create a “bright future.”

She turned to Nina, who was sitting on the floor of the truck and holding on to the armrest of Magda’s seat as the truck kept lurching and bouncing as it went over stones and ruts.

“Do you have a place to stay in Moscow?” Magda asked.

Nina shook her head. “No.”

“Would you like to be my interpreter? I don’t know a word of Russian.”

Nina was silent for a moment. “How long are you planning to stay in Moscow?” she asked. “Until Friedrich changes the anger to mercy?”

Magda had not realized that it was so easy to guess her state of mind.

“I don’t know yet,” she replied, embarrassed.

She had been studying Nina for some time and had noticed that anything and everything merely enhanced this woman’s beauty—she looked lovely even in a shabby skirt and blouse, even with that ever-present look of sadness in her eyes.

Nina attracted attention without any effort on her part. It was just the way she was with her large gray-green eyes, wavy dark hair, and the graceful lines of her neck and shoulders. She was like a fascinating porcelain figurine found at an antique market; to see her was to want her.

Magda, on the other hand, had always had to strive her utmost to prove to others that she was deserving of love and attention.

“I wonder what it would be like to be like you?” she asked, staring quizzically at Nina. “Men are attracted to you immediately. Don’t tell me it isn’t true.”

Nina frowned. “I can’t choose who is attracted to me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Magda smiled. She had the same problem exactly.

A month later, the fugitives crossed the border with the USSR and reached a nameless outpost where an international sleeping car sent from Moscow awaited them.

The Bolshevik agents began to breathe more easily. If they were being welcomed in this manner, surely they were not about to be reprimanded? Perhaps this was a sign that the party leadership knew they had done everything they could in China to further the world revolution and had failed only through force of circumstance.

They were gripped by a childlike excitement. Here they were, back home at last, among their own people. They had survived the journey across the desert and had met neither soldiers nor the Honghuz bandits who preyed on trade caravans. Now, they felt sure, everything would be all right.

Covered head to foot in dust, their faces burned dark by the desert sun, the fugitives began to stow their baggage onto the overhead racks of the sleeping car.

“The train will leave in five minutes!” shouted the attendant, a handsome old man with impressive gray whiskers.

Nina and Magda got into the compartment allotted to them.

There were bundles of stiffly starched bed linens on the seats. A vase holding a single flower and a menu for the restaurant car were on the window table.

On the other side of the compartment came the sound of laughter and water splashing. One of their fellow passengers was clearly marveling at the fact that there was running water on the train.

Nina walked up to the mirror on the back of the door and lifted a strand of curly hair above her head where it stayed stiffly standing on end.

“When we finally take a proper bath, we’ll wash away a ton of dirt,” said Magda. “I hope they still have bathtubs in Moscow.”

Somebody knocked at the window, and Magda opened it. It was Borisov.

“Get Nina for me,” he ordered.

Nina walked reluctantly to the window. “What do you want?”

Borisov took a newspaper from his pocket and tossed it to her. “Look at this. I just bought it in the station.”

On the first column was a large headline: “Trotsky expelled from the list of candidates for the Comintern Executive Committee.” The same article told of the arrest of several traitors who had “undermined the very basis of the party’s social construction project” and “introduced division among the Bolshevik cadres.”

“It would be suicide to go to Moscow,” Borisov whispered. “If they’ve got rid of Trotsky, they’ll eat us alive. And you into the bargain.” Borisov looked about him to make sure nobody was listening.

“Come with me to Khabarovsk,” he said under his breath. “I have money—we’ll be all right. Don’t tell me you want to go with that great English heifer to the slaughter.”

Nina closed the window with a rattle.

“What did he say?” asked Magda as the train began to move.

Nina sat down on the seat and hugged herself as if she were cold.

“Miss Thomson,” she said, “it’s dangerous to go to Moscow. Why don’t we get out at the very first station and go to Vladivostok? We could get a steamer to Shanghai from there.”