Winter of the World

Volodya was baffled. The leader of a nation could not just disappear. ‘What’s he doing?’

‘No one knows.’ The soldier ran down. Kamen wound it up and set it going again. ‘On Saturday night, when he heard that the Soviet Western Army Group had been encircled by the Germans, he said: “Everything’s lost. I give up. Lenin founded our state and we’ve fucked it up.” Then he went to Kuntsevo.’ Stalin had a country house near the town of Kuntsevo on the outskirts of Moscow. ‘Yesterday he didn’t show up at the Kremlin at his usual time of midday. When they phoned Kuntsevo, no one answered. Today, the same.’

Volodya leaned forward. ‘Is he suffering . . .’ his voice fell to a whisper, ‘a mental breakdown?’

Kamen made a helpless gesture. ‘It wouldn’t be surprising. He insisted, against all the evidence, that Germany would not attack us this year, and now look.’

Volodya nodded. It made sense. Stalin had allowed himself to be officially called Father, Teacher, Great Leader, Transformer of Nature, Great Helmsman, Genius of Mankind, the Greatest Genius of All Times and Peoples. But now it had been proved, even to him, that he had been wrong and everyone else right. Men committed suicide in such circumstances.

The crisis was even worse than Volodya had thought. Not only was the Soviet Union under attack and losing. It was also leaderless. This had to be its most perilous moment since the revolution.

But was it also an opportunity? Could it be a chance to get rid of Stalin?

The last time Stalin had appeared vulnerable was in 1924, when Lenin’s Testament had said that Stalin was not fit to hold power. Since Stalin had survived that crisis his power had seemed unassailable, even – Volodya could now see clearly – when his decisions had verged on madness: the purges, the blunders in Spain, the appointment of the sadist Beria as head of the secret police, the pact with Hitler. Was this emergency the occasion, at last, to break his hold?

Volodya hid his excitement from Kamen and everyone else. He hugged his thoughts to himself as he rode the bus home through the soft light of a summer evening. His journey was delayed by a slow-moving convoy of lorries towing anti-aircraft guns – presumably being deployed by his father, who was in charge of Moscow’s air raid defences.

Could Stalin be deposed?

He wondered how many Kremlin insiders were asking themselves the same question.

He entered his parents’ apartment building, the ten-storey Government House, across the Moskva River from the Kremlin. They were out, but his sister was there with the twins, Dimka and Tania. The boy, Dimka, had dark eyes and hair. He held a red pencil and was scribbling messily on an old newspaper. The girl had the same intense blue-eyed stare that Grigori had – and so did Volodya, people said. She immediately showed Volodya her doll.

Also there was Zoya Vorotsyntsev, the astonishingly beautiful physicist Volodya had last seen four years earlier when he was about to leave for Spain. She and Anya had discovered a shared interest in Russian folk music: they went to recitals together, and Zoya played the gudok, a three-stringed fiddle. Neither could afford a phonograph, but Grigori had one, and they were listening to a record of a balalaika orchestra. Grigori was not a great music lover but he thought the record sounded jolly.

Zoya was wearing a short-sleeved summer dress the pale colour of her blue eyes. When Volodya asked her the conventional question about how she was, she replied sharply: ‘I’m very angry.’

There were lots of reasons for Russians to be angry just now. Volodya asked: ‘Why’s that?’

‘My research into nuclear physics has been cancelled. All the scientists I work with have been reassigned. I myself am working on improvements to the design of bomb sights.’

That seemed very reasonable to Volodya. ‘We are at war, after all.’

‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Listen. When uranium metal undergoes a process called fission, enormous quantities of energy are released. I mean enormous. We know this, and Western scientists do too – we have read their papers in scientific journals.’

‘Still, the question of bomb sights seems more immediate.’

Zoya said angrily: ‘This process, fission, could be used to create bombs that would be a hundred times more powerful than anything anyone has now. One nuclear explosion could flatten Moscow. What if the Germans make such a bomb and we don’t have it? It will be as if they had rifles and we only had swords!’

Volodya said sceptically: ‘But is there any reason to believe that scientists in other countries are working on a fission bomb?’

‘We’re sure they are. The concept of fission leads automatically to the idea of a bomb. We thought of it – why shouldn’t they? But there’s another reason. They published all their early results in the journals – and then they stopped, suddenly, one year ago. There have been no new scientific papers on fission since this time last year.’