Winter of the World

The boom swung sideways. It was taller than the house, Lloyd saw. He almost thought the bucket would smash the upstairs windows, but the operator was skilled, and stopped it just in time. The drag rope slackened, the bucket tilted, and six tons of garden fell to the ground a few feet from the entrance.

The bucket was returned to its original position, and the process was repeated.

Lloyd looked at Fitz and saw that he was crying.

23

1947

At the beginning of 1947 it seemed possible that all Europe might go Communist.

Volodya Peshkov was not sure whether to hope for that or its opposite.

The Red Army dominated Eastern Europe, and Communists were winning elections in the West. Communists had gained respect for their role in resisting the Nazis. Five million people had voted Communist in the first French postwar election, making the Communists the most popular party. In Italy a Communist-Socialist alliance won 40 per cent of the vote. In Czechoslovakia the Communists on their own won 38 per cent and led the democratically elected government.

It was different in Austria and Germany, where voters had been robbed and raped by the Red Army. In the Berlin city elections, the Social Democrats won 63 of 130 seats, the Communists only 26. However, Germany was ruined and starving, and the Kremlin still hoped that the people might turn to Communism in desperation, just as they had turned to Nazism in the Depression.

Britain was the great disappointment. Only one Communist had been sent to Parliament in the postwar election there. And the Labour government was delivering everything Communism promised: welfare, free health care, education for all, even a five-day week for coal miners.

But in the rest of Europe, capitalism was failing to lift people out of the postwar slump.

And the weather was on Stalin’s side, Volodya thought as the layers of snow grew thick on the onion domes. The winter of 1946–7 was the coldest in Europe for more than a century. Snow fell in St Tropez. British roads and railways became impassable, and industry ground to a halt – something that had never happened in the war. In France, food rations fell below wartime levels. The United Nations Organization calculated that 100 million Europeans were living on 1,500 calories a day – the level at which health begins to suffer from the effects of malnutrition. As the engines of production ran slower and slower, people began to feel they had nothing to lose, and revolution came to seem the only way out.

Once the USSR had nuclear weapons, no other country would be able to stand in its way. Volodya’s wife, Zoya, and her colleagues had built a nuclear pile, at Laboratory No. 2 of the Academy of Sciences, a deliberately vague name for the powerhouse of Soviet nuclear research. The pile had gone critical on Christmas Day, six months after the birth of Konstantin, who was at the time sleeping in the laboratory’s crèche. If the experiment went wrong, Zoya had whispered to Volodya, it would do little Kotya no good to be a mile or two away: all of central Moscow would be flattened.

Volodya’s conflicting feelings about the future took on a new intensity with the birth of his son. He wanted Kotya to grow up a citizen of a proud and powerful country. The Soviet Union deserved to dominate Europe, he felt. It was the Red Army that had defeated the Nazis, in four cruel years of total warfare: the other Allies had stood on the sidelines, fighting minor wars, joining in only for the last eleven months. All their casualties put together were only a fraction of those suffered by the Soviet people.

But then he would think of what Communism meant: arbitrary purges, torture in the basements of the secret police, conquering soldiers urged on to excesses of bestiality, the whole vast country forced to obey the wayward decisions of a tyrant more powerful than a tsar. Did Volodya really want to extend that brutal system to the rest of the continent?

He remembered walking into Penn Station in New York and buying a ticket to Albuquerque, without asking anyone’s permission or showing any papers; and the exhilarating sense of total freedom that had given him. He had long ago burned the Sears-Roebuck Catalogue, but it lived in his memory, with its hundreds of pages of good things available for everyone to have. Russian people believed that stories of Western freedom and prosperity were just propaganda, but Volodya knew better. A part of him longed for Communism to be defeated.

The future of Germany, and therefore of Europe, was to be decided at the Conference of Foreign Ministers held in Moscow in March 1947.