“What they think doesn’t matter. What about you? Do you want to do it?”
“Yes, if it will help.”
“Help what?”
“The revolution. The workers’ new freedom.”
Zagorsky half-smiled. “What do they think of Comrade Lenin down there?”
“Some say he is the only leader who will do what he says. Others say that he is as bad as the Tsar. Some say he is worse.”
“And you? What do you think?”
“I don’t know, Comrade Zagorsky. I only hear what others say about him.”
“Comrade, eh? A Bolshevik already?”
The boy smiled, embarrassed. “At least they are doing things, not just talking about it.”
“Before you are appointed as secretary you will have some training on how to run meetings and control events. It will be in Moscow and it will take about four months. Come and see me tomorrow at ten o’clock, ready to leave.”
“Yes, comrade.”
Josef had had his seventeenth birthday while he was on the training course. Despite being a foreigner he was very popular with the other students. Their ages ranged from eighteen to the mid-fifties and they came from all parts of the Soviet Union. On his birthday they threw a party to celebrate. It was at the party that he met Anna, an eighteen-year-old from Warsaw. Polish and proud of it, her father had been a party worker for many years. She too was going to be secretary to a committee in Moscow.
They were housed in an old warehouse just across the Moscow River in Kuncevo. The building was divided up into classrooms, sleeping accommodation and a canteen that provided only very basic meals of vegetable soup and bread. Twice a week there were special rations of potatoes.
Josef found some of the people on the course strange to the point of being mentally unbalanced. Men who were fanatics, constantly leaping to their feet and quoting from Marx and Lenin. Arguing with the instructors at every opportunity. Smug and self-satisfied, pleased with the divisiveness of their disruption. But most of the students were working-class men and women whose only concern was to learn how to be competent leaders in some small committee and help their fellow workers improve their standards of living.
Josef and Anna were both model students, but on fine evenings they walked along the river bank and stared across at the island and Terechovo. They were cautious at first about what they said but as time went by they talked, guardedly but honestly.
“Why is an Englishman interested in a revolution in Russia?”
“Because I’m working-class and I think workers get a poor deal all over the world. I wish there could be a revolution in England.”
“You could go back and start one yourself.”
“Things aren’t as bad there for workers as they are here. They’re not ready for a revolution.”
“Levkin the instructor said that you had the right kind of mind to be an organiser. He said you were to be trusted and you learned quickly.”
“Did you ask him about me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m staying on for another month of training. I suggested that you should stay on too.”
“I’ve got work to do when I get back to Petrograd.”
“This is special training. Only for trusted people. Comrade Zagorsky had recommended you for further training.”
“Why do you want me to stay on here?”
“Because I shall miss you. I like being with you.”
He smiled and reached for her hand. “I like being with you but I didn’t have the courage to tell you.”
“You didn’t need to tell me. I knew.”
“How could you tell?”
“When you talk to me your voice is different. It’s gentle and deep. You don’t paw me like other men try to do.”
“Which men?”
“Don’t be angry, Josef. And don’t be jealous. I can look after myself.” She paused. “So will you stay if they want you to?”
“If Zag wants me to and if you want me to then I’ll stay.”
“You shouldn’t call him Zag. He’s a very important man now. He’s a commissar at the new Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
He laughed. “He won’t mind what I call him.”
“How did you get to know him so well?”
“I was cabin-boy on a British boat that was tied up in Petrograd when the revolution started. People came to arrest the crew in case they were spies. I was left with Zag to guard the ship against looters.”
“Did he talk you into staying?”
“No. He was very critical of … ” He shrugged, “… no, I wanted to stay.”
Josef never went back to his old committee in Petrograd. After the extension course he was sent as secretary to a committee in one of the Moscow suburbs. Anna went as an administrator to the security organisation, the Ve-Cheka, which controlled all local Chekas throughout the Soviet Union. Its chief was Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinski, an austere and ruthless man who came from an aristocratic Polish family.
Josef and Anna saw one another regularly during the following six months. They recognised the dangers of talking about their work even to one another. Zagorsky was now even more important and he seemed to go out of his way to encourage their relationship. When they decided they wanted to live together it was Zagorsky who used his influence to get them a room in a new block of workers’ flats.
It was in August 1918 that Josef was called to the building that had once been the offices of the All-Russia Insurance Company and had now been taken over by the Party. Three men interviewed him. One of them was Zagorsky. They asked him question after question about his background in England and his work in Petrograd and Moscow. When he left he had no idea what the purpose of the meeting had been. It was two months later that he heard he was being transferred as an administrator to the Cheka division which Zagorsky controlled. The Secret Political Department.
By that time the Cheka was quite plainly an instrument of brutal power which was outside any legal control, and was used openly to suppress even the mildest resistance to the regime. Imprisonment without trial, on speculation alone, and liquidation
