The Restoration Game (20 page)

“You see?” he said. “It is more than a rumour. It is so consistent it has to have been a cover story, planted by the KGB. And if that was the
cover story
, what was the truth?”

“But—if the story's so consistent, that might be evidence that it's true,” I said.

“No!” Yuri said, angrily. “You don't understand. If the story was true, nobody would have heard it, or dared to repeat it. The Soviet Union was a state that kept its secrets, and tenfold so in Stalin's time. And in Krasnod in 1952 people prattled about Beria and the Bomb? About the most feared man in the country, and the top military secret? No. If people spoke of such things, it's because the authorities wanted them to talk of such things. That story was planted, Lucy, it was disinformation.”

“You're saying the truth must have been something that had to be kept even more—”

“Yes! Exactly! Something quite shocking—shattering.”

“How
shocking?” I demanded. “An alien spaceship? A stargate?

An angel? The Ark of the Covenant?”

“The Ark of the Covenant,” said Yuri in a serious tone, “is in Ethiopia. So that is ruled out. An angel would tend to confirm religious belief, which does not seem to have been the effect. An alien spaceship is a possibility, but it wouldn't undermine materialism. Now, a stargate or some such space-time anomaly—there you may be close to the mark. It's certainly the sort of thing I find myself speculating on when I think of Beryozkin's confidence that there is a better world beyond this one. Perhaps he literally
saw
that better world. And I think the secret is something that can be seen, because…now here we are in the realm of rumour, Lucy, and in my country that is a wide and treacherous realm, where rumours enter history all the time. But for whatever it may be worth, here is the rumour. I heard it from a friend in Moscow in 1990, who had a friend who worked in the archives—the same friend, by the way, who later, at some risk to himself, obtained for me the confessions of Arbatov and of Beryozkin. This friend of a friend had heard from yet another friend a story which, needless to say, was itself a tale whispered in shadowy aisles between dusty filing shelves, year upon year.”

“The tale was this: Beria really was involved in the 1952 Mount Krasny incident—perhaps not personally on the scene, but involved—Beria was after all in charge of the State Committee on Problem Number One, the atomic bomb program, and its successor, the hydrogen bomb program. And the incident may initially have had something to do with prospecting for uranium or some other radioactive element. Beria knew the legends, of course—he was a Mingrelian, a people who have a long acquaintance with the Krassnians, an acquaintance shall we say intimate, or as the Americans put it, ‘up close and personal.’”

He chuckled darkly again, and mimed a knife thrust.

“Like that. But being a convinced dialectical materialist, and an ambitious and driven man to boot, Lavrenti Beria sniffed a hopeful possibility in these legends. He wondered if the legendary mysterious glow in the mountainside might indicate a rich deposit of radioactive material, if the fabled grotesque consequences for normal people of approaching the site of the Vrai secret might be some kind of mutation or radiation sickness, and if the power of the Vrai might be itself a mutation that perhaps protected against the radiation that had originally given rise to it. Or he may have suspected that all except the strange glow were legendary accretions—to the benefit of the local aristocracy, no doubt—around an outcrop of radioactive ore. In any case—radioactive ore! Just what he needed!”

“But how to find it? Beria knew well—from the records of such interrogations as that of Beryozkin, if not from his own recollections—that the location of the site could not be extracted from the supposed Krassnian truth-keepers by any means. Even assuming that any one of them could be found to have survived the work of the likes of NKVD Colonel Klebov. Being a man of some experience in these matters, our Lavrenti reckoned that folk from among the stalwart working class and peasantry were more susceptible than the degenerate national intelligentsia to bribery, flattery, persuasion, intimidation, and what the NKVD called ‘methods of physical pressure' and what the security agencies of your own motherland and your adopted country call ‘repeated application of legitimate force’—and what more honest criminals call ‘beating the living shit out of them.’

“So—a small army of NKVD men descends on the goat-herding collectives of Krassnia, and starts knocking on doors, banging on tables, and knocking out teeth. By one means or another they eventually get an old herdsman to agree to guide them to a place from where they can proceed to the spot—nothing they can do, he tells them, can make him go all the way himself. Naturally, the NKVD men don't go charging off up the mountain. They report back. Beria gets a team together, a dozen or so men, including a physicist with a Geiger counter, a geologist, and even a man with a handheld cine camera to record this triumph—or not, if it's a wild goose chase. In great secrecy, they arrive in Krasnod, rendezvous with the old man, and follow him up the mountain, into forests, through screes and gullies, across treacherous snowfields…. Eventually the old man stops within sight of the entrance to some cave or gorge—the tales vary, naturally—and tells them he's not going a step further. Our intrepid explorers press on, leaving only one NKVD man behind with the old man.”

“An hour passes. The old man is increasingly nervous. Suddenly, an eerie light shines from where the party have gone. Out of it, moments later, stumbles the cameraman—blinded, by some accounts; burned, by others. He does not survive, or is speechless, or mad. But his cine camera is still with him, and he gives it to the NKVD guard, perhaps with the last of his strength or his sanity. The guard makes to rush to the aid of his comrades, but is hauled back by the old man and the cameraman. Together, or apart, the three survivors stagger back to Krasnod. Nothing is said of what happened to them. But it is said that the reel of film was sent under heavy guard to Moscow, where it was watched in Stalin's private cinema in the Kremlin—Beria himself taking the place of the projectionist, Stalin alone the audience.”

“No one else saw it. Someone—again, from hearsay—saw Stalin and Beria emerge from the cinema looking severely shaken—‘as if they'd seen a ghost,’ as it is of course said, in that kind of story.”

“That would be in late 1952. In March 1953, Stalin is dead, the dread Beria is the new boss. Strangely enough, he begins to initiate liberal reforms—half emptying the Gulag, banning torture, discrediting the ‘Doctors' Plot,’ urging change on the East German hardliners, and so on. In June he is arrested, in July denounced, in December executed. And the reel of film?”

Yuri had timed this pause to arrive while we stood at a pedestrian crossing.

“Yes?” I said.

“Recycled for the silver in the emulsion,” said Yuri, and stepped out on the crossing.

3.

“That isn't a rumour,” I said, indignantly catching up on the other side of the street. “It's a fucking shaggy dog story!”

“Such things happened in Soviet times,” said Yuri.

He said it like it was the final explanation.

“I'm not buying that,” I said. “Come on! This film
just happened
to be destroyed?”

“Yes,” said Yuri. “The same was blindly and stupidly and unforgivably done to priceless footage of the early Soviet space programme—its triumphs and disasters alike. As I said, such things happened. Normally the loss of the only physical evidence would for me suggest that there was nothing behind the story. In this case, it inclines me to think the story is more than a rumour.”

He glanced around.

“We are nearing Haymarket,” he said. “Let us talk no more of these things.”

I couldn't think of anything else to talk about. Yuri regaled me with stories as we walked, up Shandwick Place and around Charlotte Square and along George Street. They weren't tales of his life in the Soviet Union—they were scurrilous, eye-opening, unrepeatable snippets about what went on behind the sandstone and granite walls of Scotland's imposing institutions: Bute House and the law firms and learned societies and brokerages and the small nation's mighty, world-straddling banks.

We reached the side door of Harvey Nichols a few minutes before six.

“A moment,” Yuri said. He lit up, and stood watching the rush-hour homeward flow of people through the mall. He said nothing, but I noticed on his face a pensive and almost sad expression, which after a few moments I recognised as compassion. The look made me feel vaguely uneasy. Yuri stubbed his cigarette on the wall, looked around for somewhere to put it, then dropped it. We stepped through the glass doors and took the lift to the top of the store, stepping out into a broad space of polished wood, white tablecloths, dim lighting, and bright windows. Ross Stewart was sitting on a stool at the small bar on the way to the restaurant area. He saw us, smiled, knocked back a shot, and swung his feet to the floor.

“Good to see you, Lucy. Hi, Yuri. Let's get dinner.”

We had a table near the window overlooking St. Andrew's Square. The sun was still high enough not to be a nuisance. I had a G&T, Ross had another whisky, Yuri chose vodka.

Time to order.

“And how would you like your venison?” the waiter asked Ross.

“Very rare. Just caught in the headlights.”

Over my seared salmon and Ross's startled deer and Yuri's roasted chicken we talked about everything except what I wanted to talk about. It was frustrating. Ross, in waistcoat and shirtsleeves (complete with stretchy silver armbands to keep his cuffs from slipping too low), jacket over the back of the chair, was in relaxed and expansive mood. Yuri (sleeves rolled up) was sombre. I could have done with picking the brains of both of them—about Amanda, about Krassnia, about the Maple Revolution and “the business,” but they instantly cut out any such allusion. Not that there was anything secretive about their manner—Ross surprised a Polish waitress with a few fluent sentences, Yuri nodded to a young Slovenian waiter as if they were old pals, and now and again some person of substance dining out said hello in passing. I recognised a byline photo here, a television face there.

By the time the coffee came round I had found a way in to what I wanted to talk about.

“What happened in 1937?” I asked.

Both men looked at me funny.

“You don't know?” said Ross. “About the Great Terror?”

“I know about it,” I said. “I just don't know why it happened.”

“Ah,” said Yuri. “The big question. Why did it happen? Everything else, we know why it happened. The Red terror in the Civil War, the dekulakisation, the famine, the deportations of suspect nationalities…. In the early thirties, the late forties, and the early fifties the camps and prisons and exile settlements were full of people who knew why they were there. They either hated the system or knew why the system hated them. In ‘37, the camps and the cells are full to bursting—or I should say, to
crushing
—with people who have
no idea
why they are there. Party members, active citizens, and ordinary nonpolitical people, ninety or more percent of whom have never raised a finger against the system. Of the seven hundred thousand executions, three hundred and fifty thousand were of supposed ‘class enemies’—priests, kulaks, former Whites, former members of the possessing classes, and so on. A further two hundred and fifty thousand were of supposed suspect nationalities, from Koreans to Germans via Persians. Let us grant some perverted rationality to these slaughters—though even in those cases there were ten times as many victims as had been fingered in the original quota. That leaves another hundred thousand who, with very few exceptions, can have had no idea why—” He made a pistol with his fingers and thumb. “That's the problem, yes?”

“Yes,” I said.

“It's simple,” said Ross. “Stalin wanted to cut down anyone who might conceivably be a threat, and started up a chainsaw that even he found hard to stop.”

“It is not so simple,” said Yuri.

Ross gave me a wry smile. “Our dissident is a quixotic upholder of Stalin's honour,” he said.

“What!” I said, shocked.

Yuri scowled.

“Again, it is not so simple. Let me explain. Look.”

He waved a hand towards the window. The sun hadn't set, but clouds had darkened the sky, and the west was red; Arthur's Seat, the Castle, the spire of the Scott Monument, black. The rectilinear reflections of the restaurant's overhead lighting hung above the city like an alien invasion fleet.

“What?”

“The people out there,” Yuri said, “what do they have? Nothing!”

I looked at him, puzzled. “Well,” I said, “I suppose it makes a difference whether it's the West End or Wester Hailes we're talking about, but I'd say apart from the homeless most people have a great deal more than nothing. They have better housing and food and entertainment and so on than—”

“Yes, yes, yes,” said Yuri. “I know what it is to be compared with, thank you very much. In terms of having their own culture, their own politics, they have nothing. In those respects the working classes of the West are little better than slaves.”

“Now wait a minute,” I said. “That's—”

“Look at yourself, Lucy. You do not have nothing. What you got from your mother was a tradition, a knowledge, a culture that came from…her mother and her grandparents. A certain confidence, a set of reflexes—I can see it in the way you move, the way you think, the way you hold your head. You may be a very uncertain young woman, you may be in a lowly occupation—though still well-off, in a way—but you have it in you to rise, and when you do, you will find that life is not strange but somehow what you were born to. You may not know this now, and you may disagree with me now, but you will see.”

“Disagree with you?” I said. “Why should I? I'm flattered.”

Yuri flashed his bushy brows at Ross. “You see?”

Ross shrugged, and sipped his double espresso.

“What's that got to do with—oh!” I said. “I see! They wanted to wipe out people like me!”