But this is only one element in another long story of which we can now scarcely glimpse even the chapter headings.
Postscript I
It was not long after midnight in the Lefortovo prison in Moscow, in late August 1985. Two prisoners, tried, convicted and condemned to death, facing execution at dawn, had been brought together for their last night on earth in a cell which had, of course, for occasions such as this, been fitted with appropriate equipment for the recording of their conversation. One was Constantin Andrievich Malinsky, upon whom the mantle of Supreme Party Ideologist had fallen, as a successor to Suslov.
The other one was Alexei Alexandrovich Nastin, lately Marshal of the Soviet Union and Defence Minister of the USSR.
The record of their conversation proved to be of no great value to those who listened to it later. They had never been friends (who, at a high level in the CPSU, ever had any friends?) and had little to say to each other. Their differences in the past had been quite well known and each regarded it as something of an affront when, after perfunctory visits from their families (and offers, accepted by Nastin and refused with contempt by Malinsky, of last rites from the Church), they had been put into this cell to spend their last few hours together.
“I recall,” said the ex-Minister of Defence, after a long silence, “that in that meeting where we discussed the use of nuclear weapons, near the end of last year, you were very much against it. Your argument was, I seem to recall, that there was no point in extending socialist rule over a world half destroyed, and that it was better to keep the world going more or less as it was, and move in by degrees. So when war came we did not use our nuclear armoury either from the start, as I advised, or even with its full weight when we were checked in central Europe. And this is where
“I also recall,” said Malinsky, the some-time Supreme Ideologist, “I also recall, Comrade…”
“Do we use that form of address any longer?” said the other.
“It's a habit,” was the reply, with a shrug. “It does not matter a great deal how we address each other now, anyway. What I recall is that our difference of view was on a question of all or nothing. I thought we should use none. You thought we should use the lot. I do not think either of us was in favour of anything in between. We both recognized, I imagine, that once nuclear weapons were introduced there would be no possibility — as some misguided folk in the West seemed to suppose — of controlling their use at some arbitrary level.”
“Using all we had was in the Russian traditional mode of making war. Using none was not. Never mind that now. What happened in the event was that the really incredible decision was in fact taken to do neither one thing nor the other. We would not use the lot nor would we refrain from using any. We would instead attack an important city (though not the capital: we should want that) of a major satellite in one high-yield strike and then ask for negotiations with the United States. It was almost unbelievable. I always thought the old man had gone over the top…”
“Did you ever say so?” asked the former Supreme Ideologist.
“No, of course not. Neither did you, and for the same reasons. Even in his dotage he held all the strings.”
“Never embark on a journey, they used to say where I grew up, unless you mean to arrive. To go half way, or even less, and allow yourself to stop there, is asking for trouble.”
“That is precisely what got us here,” said Marshal Nastin, the former Minister of Defence.
Through the little window high up in the wall, behind its heavy iron grille, a paler shade of night heralded the approach of dawn.
“Can't be long now,” said Malinsky.
Even as he spoke boots sounded in the corridor outside and a key rattled in the lock.
There had been good times, in the past, difficult times, but good times. That was all over now.
The cell door opened.
“Come,” said a voice. “It is time.”[29]
Postscript II
Dimitri Vassilievitch Makarov had to find Nekrassov's father as soon as he could but he had first to make some enquiries. Soviet prisoners of war, after their surrender, were only lightly guarded, the policy of the Western allies being early controlled dispersal. For many of their guests in the concentration areas there was no great incentive to leave. Food was freely available here but very scarce outside. Considerable freedom of movement was allowed during the inevitably long delays before the very large numbers of ex-members of Warsaw Pact forces involved could be got to wherever in this huge area they wished to go, making the utmost use of what had lately been their own military transport.
Officers and men had been collected and concentrated at the places where they laid down their arms, so that the personnel of divisions remained more or less together, at least for the time being. Nevertheless, it was more by luck than good management that Makarov found the man he was after. This was Boris Ivanienko, the driver of Andrei Nekrassov's BMP who, Makarov had learned, was still alive. Dimitri Vassilievitch heard from him of many others in the battalion who were not. Andrei's old Sergeant Major from No. 3 Company, for example, Astap Beda, with whom Andrei had maintained touch till near the end, was dead. Little Yuri had disappeared. Boris Ivanienko, however, before he found transport back to his Ukrainian home in Poltava, had much to tell Makarov in his own quiet way. He had got very close to his officer. Little could be said on either side but this was a relationship in which, on his side at any rate, there had been understanding and sympathy. He felt that there had been the same on the other, too. He spoke of how a compassionate and sensitive young man, good professional though he was, seemed increasingly to suffer under the strain of the madness that had engulfed them all, so that the bmp driver sometimes feared for his reason. What Makarov heard moved him greatly.
Boris still had with him the soldier's kitbag with the drawstring at the mouth, carried by officers as well as men to hold the few little articles of spare clothing and personal possessions each carried, the whole material sum of a private life on the battlefield, which he had taken from Nekrassov's body when the cannon-shell from the American gun-ship helicopter had struck him down. He handed it over, with its meagre but highly personal contents, to Makarov.
The journey down to Rostov was not easy, nor was it easy to find the elder Nekrassov's dwelling when he got there. The habit of not answering questions from strangers, still deeply engrained everywhere, would take a long time to die away. He found where his friend's father lived in the end — not in a dacha in its own grounds, which would have been appropriate to an officer retiring as a general, but in a small apartment on the eleventh floor of one of the square, grey tower blocks, grim and cheerless, of which all Soviet cities were now mostly composed. Cats were foraging in piles of rubbish round the ground floor. Children with dirty faces were quarrelling in the stairways. From a window on the eleventh floor it was at least possible to get a distant glimpse of the River Don.
The older man stood waiting for him at the entrance, as he had done every day since word had reached him that Makarov was coming.
He knew at once who it was. It could be no other.
He went forward to embrace the younger man and turned, with an arm about his shoulder.
“Come in, my other son,” he said, “and tell me.”
'We will bury you!' was the irritated retort of Khrushchev to an ill-considered interpolation. He was misunderstood by many, who thought he was threatening the early destruction of the capitalist West in war.
What he was doing was no more than to echo, in his own way, the prophetic words of Lenin.
'As long as capitalism and socialism exist we cannot live in peace: in the end one or the other will triumph —
