Winter of the World

Volodya walked through the open room, nodding and smiling at one or two acquaintances, but again he got feeling that he was not the hero he had expected to be. He tapped on Lemitov’s door, hoping the boss might shed some light.

‘Come in.’

Volodya entered, saluted, and closed the door behind him.

‘Welcome back, Captain.’ Lemitov came around his desk. ‘Between you and me, you did a great job in Berlin. Thank you.’

‘I’m honoured, sir,’ said Volodya. ‘But why is this between you and me?’

‘Because you contradicted Stalin.’ He held up a hand to forestall protest. ‘Stalin doesn’t know it was you, of course. But all the same, people around here are nervous, after the purge, of associating with anyone who takes the wrong line.’

‘What should I have done?’ Volodya said incredulously. ‘Faked wrong intelligence?’

Lemitov shook his head emphatically. ‘You did exactly the right thing, don’t get me wrong. And I’ve protected you. But just don’t expect people around here to treat you like a champion.’

‘Okay,’ said Volodya. Things were worse than he had imagined.

‘You have your own office, now, at least – three doors down. You’ll need to spend a day or so catching up.’

Volodya took that for dismissal. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said. He saluted and left.

His office was not luxurious – a small room with no carpet – but he had it to himself. He was out of touch with the progress of the German invasion, having been busy trying to get home as fast as possible. Now he put his disappointment aside and began to read the reports of the battlefield commanders for the first week of the war.

As he did so, he became more and more desolate.

The invasion had taken the Red Army by surprise.

It seemed impossible, but the evidence covered his desk.

On 22 June, when the Germans attacked, many forward units of the Red Army had had no live ammunition.

That was not all. Planes had been lined up neatly on airstrips with no camouflage, and the Luftwaffe had destroyed 1,200 Soviet aircraft in the first few hours of the war. Army units had been thrown at the advancing Germans without adequate weapons, with no air cover, and lacking intelligence about enemy positions; and in consequence had been annihilated.

Worst of all, Stalin’s standing order to the Red Army was that retreat was forbidden. Every unit had to fight to the last man, and officers were expected to shoot themselves to avoid capture. Troops were never allowed to regroup at a new, stronger defensive position. This meant that every defeat turned into a massacre.

Consequently, the Red Army was haemorrhaging men and equipment.

The warning from the Tokyo spy, and Werner Franck’s confirmation, had been ignored by Stalin. Even when the attack began, Stalin had at first insisted it was a limited act of provocation, done by German army officers without the knowledge of Hitler, who would put a stop to it as soon as he found out.

By the time it became undeniable that it was not a provocation but the largest invasion in the history of warfare, the Germans had overwhelmed the Soviets’ forward positions. After a week they had pushed three hundred miles inside Soviet territory.

It was a catastrophe – but what made Volodya want to scream out loud was that it could have been avoided.

There was no doubt whose fault it was. The Soviet Union was an autocracy. Only one person made the decisions: Josef Stalin. He had been stubbornly, stupidly, disastrously wrong. And now his country was in mortal danger.

Until now Volodya had believed that Soviet Communism was the true ideology, marred only by the excesses of the secret police, the NKVD. Now he saw that the failure was at the very top. Beria and the NKVD existed only because Stalin permitted them. It was Stalin who was preventing the march to true Communism.

Late that afternoon, as Volodya was staring out of the window over the sunlit airstrip, brooding over what he had learned, he was visited by Kamen. They had been lieutenants together four years ago, fresh out of the Military Intelligence Academy, and had shared a room with two others. In those days Kamen had been the clown, making fun of everyone, daringly mocking pious Soviet orthodoxy. Now he was heavier and seemed more serious. He had grown a small black moustache like that of the Foreign Minister, Molotov, perhaps to make himself look more mature.

Kamen closed the door behind him and sat down. He took from his pocket a toy, a tin soldier with a key in its back. He wound up the key and placed the toy on Volodya’s desk. The soldier swung his arms as if marching, and the clockwork mechanism made a loud ratcheting sound as it wound down.

In a lowered voice Kamen said: ‘Stalin has not been seen for two days.’

Volodya realized that the clockwork soldier was there to swamp any listening device that might be hidden in his office.

He said: ‘What do you mean, he hasn’t been seen?’

‘He has not come to the Kremlin, and he is not answering the phone.’