One Night in Winter

General Bogdan Kobylov,* ‘the Bull’, MGB

Colonel Vladimir Komarov,* investigator, SMERSH/MGB

Colonel Mikhail Likhachev,* investigator, SMERSH/MGB

THE FOREIGNERS

Averell Harriman,* US Ambassador to Moscow

Captain Frank Belman, diplomat, deputy military attaché, interpreter

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the following friends and sources whose stories have helped inspire this novel with the elixir of passion and the detail of authenticity: Hugh Lunghi, Gela Charkviani, Nestan Charkviani, General Stepan Mikoyan and his daughter Aschen Mikoyan, Sergo Mikoyan, Stanislas Redens, Galina Babkova, Rachel and Marc Polonsky; and Sophie Shulman.

First: Hugh Lunghi. Hugh and I became friends while writing my books on Stalin because he translated for Churchill at some of the Big Three meetings with Stalin. He kindly told me the entire story of his Russian love affair which inspired Serafima’s story. Without him the book could not have been written.

Gela Charkviani, son of Kandide Charkviani, Stalin’s First Secretary of Georgia 1938–51, shared his elegant memoirs of élite life, Memoirs of a Provincial Communist Prince. Sophie Shulman kindly let me read her fascinating memoirs, Life Journey of a Secular Humanist. Gela Charkviani and Sophie Shulman answered my questions about their schooldays in Stalin’s Russia. General Stepan Mikoyan, air force pilot, and Sergo Mikoyan, sons of Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan, were both arrested (Sergo was fourteen) in the real Children’s Case and both talked to me about their experience, as did Stanislas Redens, Stalin’s nephew, who was also arrested.

Thanks to the Polonskys who had me to stay in Molotov’s apartment in the Granovsky building.

I am hugely grateful to my brilliant, tireless and meticulous editor and publisher, Selina Walker, and to the irrepressibly superb Georgina Capel, the best agent in town. Thanks to my parents for editing this.

Above all, thanks to my wife Santa for the supreme gifts of serene love and best friendship; and for shrewd advice on this book; and to my adored children Lily and Sasha, who have inspired the children in both my Russian novels.

SSM

Prologue

June 1945

Just moments after the shots, as Serafima looks at the bodies of her schoolfriends, a feathery whiteness is already frosting their blasted flesh. It is like a coating of snow, but it’s midsummer and she realizes it’s pollen. Seeds of poplar are floating, bouncing and somersaulting through the air in random manoeuvres like an invasion of tiny alien spaceships. Muscovites call this ‘summer snow’. That humid evening, Serafima struggles to breathe, struggles to see.

Later, when she gives her testimony, she wishes she had seen less, knew less. ‘These aren’t just any dead children,’ slurs one of the half-drunk policemen in charge of the scene. When these policemen inspect the IDs of the victims and their friends, their eyes blink as they try to measure the danger – and then they pass on the case as fast as they can. So it’s not the police but the Organs, the secret police, who investigate: ‘Is it murder, suicide or conspiracy?’ they will ask.

What to tell? What to hide? Get it wrong and you can lose your head. And not just you but your family and friends, anyone linked to you. Like a party of mountaineers, when one falls, all fall.

Yet Serafima has a stake even higher than life and death: she’s eighteen and in love. As she stares at her two friends who had been alive just seconds earlier, she senses this is the least of it and she is right: every event in Serafima’s life will now be defined as Before or After the Shootings.

Looking at the bodies of her friends, she sees the events of the day with magnified vividness. It’s 24 June 1945. The day that Stalin reviews the Victory Parade. Yes, it’s one of those occasions when every Russian remembers where they are, like 22 June 1941, the day the Nazis invaded. The war’s over, the streets teem with drunken, singing crowds. Everyone is certain that a better, easier Russia will emerge from the war. But this depends on one man whose name is never uttered by sensible people except in reverent praise.

Serafima cares nothing for all this. She thinks only of love, even though her lover is a secret, and for good reason. Usually when schoolgirls nurture such a secret, they confide every detail to their closest girlfriends. This isn’t Serafima’s style: she knows from her own family that gossip can prove fatal in their age of witchhunting. She also knows that she’s somehow different even if she cannot quite decide why. Perhaps it’s growing up in her mother’s shadow. Perhaps it’s just the way she’s made. She is convinced that no one in all of human existence has ever known such a passion as hers.