Elvira Baryakina - The Prince of the Soviets

Tata buried her face in the mattress. How could she go to school now? What would she tell them about the poster?

And what a beast Uncle Klim had turned out to be! An informer and a villain! How could he forbid children to play with one another? Didn’t he feel sorry for his own daughter?

Tata felt that Kitty had become the most darling person in her life. She remembered how the two of them had been sitting on the windowsill in the evenings, playing that everything around them was different.

They had made believe that the dilapidated houses were beautiful glass and concrete buildings, the woodsheds were smart kiosks, and the linen hanging in the yard was the flags of different socialist republics. A milkman carrying a frost-covered churn on his sled was a famous Arctic explorer and researcher. Mitrofanych, one of the tenants of their apartment, had walked up to the milkman, and Kitty had wanted him to be a polar explorer too, but Tata disliked him. So, she had made him one of the sleigh dogs.

Then the girls had gone off on their own expedition beyond the fence to look for the Tunguska meteorite.

Had all this really come to an end?

Oscar’s journey had been a success. He had satisfied himself that his wife really was a rich heiress and instructed lawyers in Berlin and Stockholm to sort out her papers.

Now he had to think of how to get his precious wife over the border. There were Bremers in Germany, and they had got wind of the fact that Oscar had his eye on the family fortune and were demanding he produce Nina with proof that she really was Baroness Bremer.

Oscar sorted out documents for Nina at the American Embassy without too much difficulty. Now all he had to do was to get an exit visa from the OGPU.

As soon as his train got in to Moscow, he drove to the Lubyanka to see Comrade Drachenblut who was the head of the OGPU’s Foreign Section.

A swarthy secretary showed Oscar into a spacious office with portraits of communist leaders on the walls. Although it was still afternoon, the windows were covered with heavy drapes with tiny holes in the material that let in thin rays of light. A lamp with a green shade lit up a desk littered with papers and intercoms.

Oscar beamed amicably at a pale, scrawny man with a high forehead and thinning brown hair, who was sitting at the desk, smoking a cigarette.

“How are you?” Oscar asked and held out a hand.

Drachenblut, however, ignored this greeting and indicated a chair against the wall. “Sit down.”

He rummaged for a while through some yellow cards, plucking at his mustache and pushing up his spectacles with his middle finger when they slipped down his nose.

With each moment of tense silence, Oscar felt more and more uncomfortable. At last, Drachenblut put his yellow cards to one side and fixed his cold gray-blue eyes on Oscar.

“I’m very glad you came in to see me,” he said frostily. “I’ve had some complaints about you.”

“Who’s been complaining?” asked Oscar, surprised.

“That doesn’t matter. You were invited to the Soviet Union and provided with everything you needed to work to attract foreign capital into the country. And what’s the result? Do you know what proportion of our industry is currently provided by foreign concessions? A grand total of 0.6 per cent.”

“I can’t help it if your government is always quarreling with the rest of the world,” replied Oscar, trying to keep his voice steady. “You’ve backed the Chinese communists, and now, people in Washington don’t even want to talk about recognizing the USSR.”

“So, why haven’t you persuaded those people that they need to improve relations with us? There’s a democracy in the States, the American workers support us… you need to put pressure on the politicians.”

Good god, thought Oscar, what workers is he talking about? In the Kremlin and in the Lubyanka, they judged what was happening in the USA from reports by intelligence agents who wrote whatever their bosses wanted to read and whatever was favorable to them.

If some agent reported that the workers in this or that US factory were on the verge of rebellion, he would be given money to help the revolutionary struggle. Then he would report back, saying he had invested all the money in the cause. How was anyone to know that he was lying through his teeth and had spent the lot on whoring and gambling?

The Soviet Union had nothing to offer American farmers or workers whose dreams were not of world revolution but of having their own house and car and of their favorite baseball team winning the next game. The only people in the States who raved about socialism were left-wing intellectuals. They lapped up the communist propaganda and had no idea what life was like in the USSR.

But Oscar found it impossible to convince Drachenblut of this.

“The US Department of Commerce,” Oscar said, “released a report recently, saying that the Soviet state was on the point of collapse. All big businessmen in the States read those reports and trust them implicitly—”

“You were given several years to prove yourself useful to us!” Drachenblut interrupted, banging his desk. “You have not done so, and now, we shall have to liquidate you.”

“What do you mean?” Oscar asked, jumping to his feet.

Drachenblut gave a chuckle. “I mean we’re going to close down your company. The Soviet Union is moving to a planned economy. We’re collecting data on capacity and demand within the country and allocating all work according to a centralized system. There’s no place for you in the future Soviet state.”

“You can’t close my factory!” cried Oscar. “I have a contract with the Chief Concessions Commission!”

Drachenblut took a folder from his desk and, digging inside it, brought out a carbon copy of a typescript.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked. “It’s a memorandum from the vice chairman of the OGPU, Yagoda, informing the Central Committee that the foreign employees in your factory are all spies.”

Oscar gulped. Now he understood everything. In times of economic hardship, the secret police bosses had less money than usual. Recently, they had even had their monthly wages withheld at the Lubyanka. There were only two ways the secret police could improve its position: either by intimidating enterprise executives to extort money from them or to hint to the Kremlin that there were enemies on all sides and that the state should allocate more funds to fight them.

“I’ll take you to court,” said Oscar in a trembling voice.

Drachenblut smiled sarcastically. “Be my guest! You can declare war on me if you like.”

He came out from behind his desk and, walking up to Oscar, put a hand on his shoulders. “Listen. I’m not your enemy, you know. I can save you from Yagoda if you do something for us. We need hard currency—badly!—and we’re going to sell a large consignment of timber abroad. The Germans are building a new railroad. They need sleepers for it, but directors on their board are all fanatical anti-Soviets and won’t have anything to do with us. We’re looking for a go-between, someone to fix things for us. If you do the job properly, I’ll arrange for your firm to be bought off, not confiscated, and we can part on good terms.”

Never had Oscar Reich been spoken to in such an offhand manner!

“Have you thought about where that will get you?” he spat the words out furiously. “After a crude stunt like that, you won’t be able to attract a single businessman into the USSR.”

Drachenblut shrugged his shoulders. “As you please.”

He sat at his desk again and took out another document from his folder.

“We have a story here on file; the story of a brilliant young man who was studying to be a pharmacist in New York. One day, he decided to give a sleeping draught to a rather attractive young lady friend—I suppose it was the only way he could think of to get her into bed with him. The young man raped her, and unfortunately, the girl never woke up. The unqualified young pharmacist had given her a fatal dose.”

The room swam before Oscar’s eyes. How had the ORGU found out about that story?

“You tell everyone you came to Russia to help people,” said Drachenblut. “But in fact, you needed to hide out from the New York State Police for a while. That was why you jumped at Trotsky’s suggestion. Your father arranged it so that another man went to jail in your place. But if you try to put a spanner in our works, I’m afraid I’ll be forced to remember this story, and the papers will kick up no end of a fuss. How do you like the headline ‘Famous Red Millionaire Revealed as Rapist and Murderer’?”

Oscar looked at the worn carpet at his feet. A single thought pounded in his brain over and over: “I’m done for…”

“So, what do you say?” asked Drachenblut. “Will you consider our timber project?”

Oscar nodded slowly.

There was no point now in asking for an exit visa for Nina. The OGPU would almost certainly keep her in the USSR as a hostage until he had made sure they would get their timber sale.

Oscar had taken Nina to the Bolshoi Theater—the bastion of the Soviet elite, but Elkin introduced her to another side of Moscow theatrical life.

“What do they have on at the Bolshoi?” he asked with a disdainful grimace. “The Red Poppy. And they call that art?”

Nina had gone to see this ballet, and it had amused her to see how under the Bolsheviks, even ballerinas had to fight against world imperialism. The Red Poppy was the story of Soviet “pale-faced brothers” saving Chinese natives from the yoke of English rule. The producers did not even realize how insulting this premise was to the Chinese, who considered their Celestial Empire a citadel of wisdom and culture, the center of the world. And the name of the ballet was comically incongruous too. In China, the red poppy was a symbol not of revolution but of narcotics because of the connection with opium while in Britain, it was a symbol of remembrance for the war dead.