“Sit down and tell me what’s worrying you.”
“Aren’t you tired after your journey? Maybe we should leave it until tomorrow?”
Aarons smiled. “Let’s talk now.”
Lensky sat down facing Aarons and he took off his glasses and put them on the low table, rubbing his eyes before he leaned back in the armchair.
“There are God knows how many factions and schisms inside the Kremlin but the two that really matter are the Stalinists who want to take over the whole world and those who want to give the people a better life. And right at the moment the Stalinists have got the upper hand. The army’s behind them and so are the state security services. It’s not easy, you know, to convince people that doing nothing may be better than making the whole world communist.”
“They’d say that spreading Communism was one of the fundamentals of Marxist-Leninism.”
“Sure. But by conviction, by persuasion, not by threats and the overthrow of governments. And the objectives have to be right.” He shook his head. “These people aren’t going to give their conquered countries a better life. It’s power they want.” He waved his arm impatiently. “And why not give our own people a decent life before we take over other people’s lives? God knows our people need it. They’ve just become statistics and pawns in a terrible game.”
“Jakob. Tell me something good about the Soviet Union.” The question seemed to stop Lensky in his tracks. He leaned back in the chair, his eyes closed. It seemed a long time before he opened his eyes and leaned forward again.
“Just the people, Andrei. Just those patient, loving people. Nothing but them.” He sighed. “And the music, the literature from the old days, the Bolshoi …” he smiled, “… and Moscow Dynamo.”
“So what’s bad?”
“Corruption of every kind. The abuse of authority. The abuse of the law, and power in the hands of despots who can send hundreds of thousands of people to forced labour camps. Or just one man because he gets in somebody’s way. Privilege and bribery on a scale you wouldn’t believe. Nepotism at every level.” He shrugged. “A dream turned into a nightmare.”
It shocked Aarons to hear Lensky making the same criticisms of the Party that its political enemies always made.
“So why does nobody expose it? Why don’t you use your influence and protest?”
“My dear boy if anyone heard me say what I’ve said to you tonight I would be floating in the Moskva river tomorrow. If I was lucky. If not, I would be lying on the cement floor of a cell in the Lubyanka with my fingers broken, maybe my legs and arms too, if I had any teeth left they would be hanging loose. Maybe six months later you’d read a small piece in Pravda or Izvestia saying that the Jew Lensky had been tried as an enemy of the Revolution, found guilty and executed by due process of law as laid down in the Constitution.”
“But the Constitution specifically prohibits all that.”
“Neither the Constitution nor the law matters to these people. They do what they want. They are the law.”
“Are conditions for the people as bad as the overseas propaganda says they are?”
“They don’t know the half of it. These men have turned humans into garbage, and there’s an almost visible mist of misery over every town and village. Even the fields and the forests haven’t escaped. Except for the privileged few, the apparatchiks and the nomenklatura, we have created a nation of prisoners. In what other country in the world is it an offence to want to live somewhere else or pay a visit abroad? Or an offence to listen to a foreign broadcast or read a foreign magazine or book? They are afraid that the people will discover how the rest of the world live. They’ve made even the mind a frontier.”
“And what can I do to help you?”
“I want to know from you about what is happening in the United States.”
“Why?”
“You can’t imagine the ignorance of the men in the Kremlin about Europe and the United States. Information comes from our embassies and our agents abroad, but if it gives a true picture, which it seldom does, it is ignored and the sources are looked on as suspect or worse. I want to be able to use my past record of loyalty and work for the Party to influence what they do. And to do that I need to know what the people in Washington are thinking and planning.”
“To what end, Jakob?”
“To try and avoid another war.”
“Is it that possible?”
“We are spending 35 per cent of our national product on arms. Guns, tanks, planes, warships, men. And we shall have our atom bomb too before long.”
For a few moments Aarons didn’t respond, and then he said quietly, “Do you really think that you can make a difference?”
“I don’t know, Andrei. But I must try. I think there is a chance. Some of them are not far from being psychopaths but there are others who could be diverted if they thought they were going to lose because of their aggression.”
“Lose what?”
“Their privileges, their dachas, their Western
