Winter Palace
Authors: T. Davis Bunn
© 1993 by T. Davis Bunn
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
www.bethanyhouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan
www.bakerpublishinggroup.com
Ebook edition created 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meansâelectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwiseâwithout the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owners. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-7089-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
All scripture quotations, unless indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version ®. NIV ®. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.© Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.
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It is important to note that, except as specifically mentioned within the Acknowledgments section, this story is entirely a creation of the author's imagination. No parallel between any persons, living or dead, is intended.
“Of all the burdens Russia has had to bear, heaviest and most relentless of all has been the weight of her past.”
Tibor Szamuely
“The Russian Tradition”
“
When the sun of publicity shall rise upon Russia, how many injustices will it expose to view! Not only ancient ones, but those which are inacted daily will shock the world
.”
Marquis de Custine
Visitor to the Russian Nobility
1839
“
Everything is collapsing
.”
Mikhail Gorbachev
In an address to parliament,
August, 1991
“
The situation before and after the February 1917 revolution is absolutely the contemporary situation in Russia today. There is still hatred for authorities, the same horror of hunger, the same disorder, and so on. It is the same situation
.”
Edvard Radzinsky
Russian Political Historian
In an interview with the
Washington Post
, July, 1992
“
The fullness of God's salvation cannot be confined to one or several historical patterns, to one or several Christological titles, to one or several doctrines; it can only be told in
a varied multitude of stories which tell us what experiences to expect when trusting in Jesus Christ
.”
Edward Schweizer
“
How good and pleasant it is
When brothers live together in unity
. . .
For there the Lord bestows his blessing,
Even life forevermore
.”
Psalm 133:1, 3
This book is dedicated to
W. Lee Bunn
Beloved brother.
Trusted friend.
And to his wonderful wife,
Pamela
Contents
Prologue
The loudest sound on the dark Saint Petersburg street was that of Peace Corps volunteer Leslie Ann Stevens' shoes scrunching along the grit-encrusted cobblestones.
There was no movement around her, none at all. Leslie Ann resisted the urge to look upward, to search the blank and darkened windows and see if anyone was spying on her. The sensation of being watched remained with her always, downfall of Communism or not.
Beside her, rusting metal latticework lined the Fontanka Canal. Once this neighborhood had been a most prestigious address, boasting winter homes for nobility from the length and breadth of Russia. Now the royal residences were split into rabbit warrens of crumbling, overcrowded apartments, and the canal itself was nothing more than a scummy pool.
As she approached the end of Fontanka, she thought she heard a murmur of voices and shifting footfalls. She stopped, her heart in her throat, and debated going back. Behind her was the safety of the relatively well-lit Nevsky Prospekt. But the other way back to her apartment meant walking almost a mile farther, and she was tired.
Ahead were the former royal stables of the czars. Once it had been a palace in itself, with quarters both for officers and members of the royal household. Now it sheltered the city's fleet of garbage trucks. Leslie Ann searched the blackness ahead of her, saw nothing, and heard no other sound. She decided to continue on her way.
When President Kennedy had established the Peace Corps in the sixties, the organization was intended to assist emerging nations and to contradict the Soviets' accusation that
Americans were only interested in profit, in exploitation. Volunteers had been ordered to go forth and proclaim the goodness of both the nation and the people.
In Leslie Ann's view, the survivors of Russia's Communist era were now accepting that message a little too wholeheartedly.
Her host family tended to take everything she said as coming from the mouth of God. As best she could, Leslie Ann tried to explain that not everything in America was perfect. Not everyone drove a brand-new car. Not everyone had a swimming pool in his backyard. Not all citizens could afford to eat prime beef three times a day.
In her halting Russian, Leslie Ann also tried to introduce the family members to the deeply held faith that had brought her to Russia in the first place. She shared her beliefs, led them through a prayer, and gave them a Cyrillic Bible. All the while, though, she had a nagging impression that they listened because of where she came from, not because of the message she was trying to share.
With every passing day, Leslie Ann also felt a chasm growing between her and the other volunteers assigned to the Saint Petersburg area. Some days, in fact, it seemed the only things she had in common with her companions were her age and her training as an English teacher.
As far as she could tell, none of the others who had signed up for two years' duty in Russia shared her faith. She guessed that believers joined Christian evangelical organizations instead of the Peace Corps. But Leslie Ann did not see herself as an evangelist, at least, not in the normal sense. She was an English teacher who loved God and who intended to carry her faith with her all her life, in everything she did. Yet while the Peace Corps allowed her to practice her chosen profession in an exciting foreign land, it also left her totally isolated in beliefs and motives from most of her companions.
The Peace Corps central bulletin board pretty much summed it all up. About a third of the space was given over
to helpful hints on how to survive in the crumbling Soviet empire: which street vendor sold fairly fresh meat, who had a new stock of bottled water, where a trustworthy and affordable Russian language teacher might be found, who was stocking toilet paper. The remainder contained offers of parties, overnight love affairs, companions for cross-country wanderings.
Still, its irreverent humor and homegrown cynicism was one of her few connections to Stateside. Like all the other volunteers, Leslie Ann checked it daily. And just a few weeks earlier, the bulletin board had produced solid gold.
That morning she had come into the office to find a new notice pinned in the bottom left-hand corner, announcing church services in English. Although the card had been up less than twenty-four hours, already its borders had been covered with irreverent scrawls.
The pastor turned out to be an American Baptist missionary, the church a series of interconnected rooms in a filthy back-street building. For Leslie Ann Stevens, entering the newly whitewashed makeshift chapel had been like coming home. And in the space of three weeks, the church had become Leslie Ann's island refuge in a sea of bewildering confusion.
Tonight she had broken one of her own safety rules and stayed at the church until after dark. But it was hard to leave the laughter and the warmth and return to the smelly apartment house where her host familyâhusband and wife, three children, the wife's mother, and the husband's unmarried sisterâlived crowded together into three small rooms. The fourth room had been vacated for Leslie Ann in return for the incredible sum of twenty American dollars per month, more than a professional engineer earned in three.
Saturday evenings, a trip to the floor's only communal bathroom meant struggling down a fetid hallway past clusters of teenagers playing mournful guitars and smoking foul-smelling Russian cigarettes, ignoring the slurred curses of men passing around bottles of vodka, flinching at the screams
and shouts that punched through thin apartment walls. For Leslie Ann Stevens, Saturday evenings were the most difficult times for her to recall why she had volunteered for a Saint Petersburg assignment in the first place.
Her feeble flashlight beam played across the rubble-strewn street, and she walked as fast as the darkness and the irregular pavement allowed. She arrived at the end of the Fontanka, turned beside the silent royal stables, and faltered.
Up ahead loomed one of the city's numerous winter palaces, built by royal families who controlled hundreds of square miles of land and thousands of serfs. Now its hulking presence was battered by seventy years of Communism. At the front gate, several men hustled to unload a truck. Over the broad central gates, a single flickering bulb in a metal cage swung from a rusty iron rod. The dim light transformed the men into a series of swiftly moving, softly cursing shadows.
To her utter terror, all movement ceased as she came into view. Leslie Ann turned and started to flee back to the church. Then two of the shadows detached themselves and hustled toward her.
She did not even have time to scream.
Chapter 1
Jeffrey Sinclair sat on the hard journey-bench, bracing himself against the furious jouncing and squealing turns by gripping the leather overhead strap with one hand and the cold metal edge of Alexander's stretcher with the other. Their siren's howl accompanied the racing engine as they sped through a London summer evening. The medic bent over Alexander's motionless form while flashing lights painted his tense features with ghostly hues of the beyond.
An entirely alien universe flashed by outside the ambulance. Windows tainted by the multitude of tragedies transported within showed glimpses of a hard, cold cityscape. Jeffrey craned and searched for some sign that the hospital was drawing near and found nothing familiar, comfortable, hopeful. Beyond panic, he wondered at this strange world where it took hours and hours and hours in a screaming, jouncing ambulance to arrive at the emergency room.