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 creche. 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
The future of Germany, and therefore of Europe, was to be decided at the Conference of Foreign Ministers held in Moscow in March 1947.
Volodya, now a colonel, was in charge of the intelligence team assigned to the conference. Meetings were held in an ornate room at Aviation Industry House, conveniently close to the Hotel Moskva. As always, the delegates and their interpreters sat around a table, with their aides on several rows of chairs behind them. The Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, Old Stone Arse, demanded that Germany pay ten billion dollars to the USSR in war reparations. The Americans and British protested that this would be a death blow to Germany’s sickly economy. That was probably what Stalin wanted.
Volodya renewed his acquaintance with Woody Dewar, who was now a news photographer assigned to cover the conference. He was married, too, and showed Volodya a photo of a striking dark-haired woman holding a baby. Sitting in the back of a ZIS-110B limousine, returning from a formal photo session at the Kremlin, Woody said to Volodya: ‘You realize that Germany doesn’t have the money to pay your reparations, don’t you?’
Volodya’s English had improved, and they could manage without an interpreter. He said: ‘Then how are they feeding their people and rebuilding their cities?’
‘With handouts from us, of course,’ said Woody. ‘We’re spending a fortune in aid. Any reparations the Germans paid you would be, in reality, our money.’
‘Is that so wrong? The United States prospered in the war. My country was devastated. Maybe you should pay.’
‘American voters don’t think so.’
‘American voters may be wrong.’
Woody shrugged. ‘True – but it’s their money.’
There it was again, Volodya thought: the deference to public opinion. He had remarked on it before in Woody’s conversation. Americans talked about voters the way Russians talked about Stalin: they had to be obeyed, right or wrong.
Woody wound down the window. ‘You don’t mind if I take a cityscape, do you? The light is wonderful.’ His camera clicked.
He knew he was supposed to take only approved shots. However, there was nothing sensitive on the street, just some women shovelling snow. All the same, Volodya said: ‘Please don’t.’ He leaned past Woody and wound up the window. ‘Official photos only.’
He was about to ask for the film out of Woody’s camera when Woody said: ‘Do you remember me mentioning my friend Greg Peshkov, with the same surname as you?’
