One Night in Winter

History FACTS AND FICTION

The chief characters in this novel – Satinov, Dashka, Serafima, Benya and Belman – are entirely invented by me. This is not a novel about power but about private life – above all, love. But it is set amidst the Stalinist Kremlin élite and that means that the familiar dilemmas of family life, the prizes and perils of children, adultery and career, have higher stakes than if the story was set in Hampstead. This novel stands alone but some of the characters and the families appear in my earlier novel, Sashenka.

Obviously some of the Soviet leaders, generals and secret policemen are based on real people and the details of their personalities, sometimes even their words, are accurate. My aim is make the atmosphere as authentic as I can but the joy of this is that it is fiction.

For anyone interested in the plausibility of the plot or its inspirations, the novel is very roughly inspired by several true stories.

In 1943, two schoolchildren, both the offspring of high-ranking Soviet officials, died in a shooting on Kammeny Most. In their notebooks, the secret police found joke plans for a government. Their friends, who included many children of the élite, including the sons of Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan, were arrested on suspicion of being members of an anti-Soviet conspiracy. The full story appears in my book Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, and also in the memoirs of Anastas Mikoyan, Tak Bylo, and of his son, Stepan Anastasovich Mikoyan: An Autobiography: Memoirs of Military Test-flying and Life with the Kremlin’s Élite. I myself interviewed some of the children in question, including Stepan and Sergo Mikoyan and Stalin’s own nephew, Stan Redens. The children were in prison for six months and were only released after signing confessions. Their punishment was six months’ exile in Central Asia. The Fatal Romantics and The Game are totally invented by me.

In 1944–5, Major Hugh Lunghi of the British Embassy met and fell in love with a Russian girl whom he wished to marry. Lunghi translated for Churchill during meetings with Stalin at the Big Three conferences. When his fiancée tried to leave Russia, she was poisoned on the train and brought back to Moscow. At a personal meeting with Stalin, the British Ambassador asked him to allow the girl to leave. He promised to look into it. However, his fiancée was never released. Instead she was arrested for treason and sentenced to the Gulags. Lunghi was not able to make contact with her again until the sixties when both were happily married to other people.

Stalin was a stickler for showing no favour to the children of leaders, and especially not to his own. He refused to swap his eldest son Yakov when he was captured by the Nazis, and was infuriated by the spoilt and decadent escapades of his second son Vasily. During the war, Vasily took his unit on a fishing expedition during which he and his men used grenades to catch fish. A man was killed and an outraged Stalin had Vasily cashiered and demoted. But such was the reverence shown to the Leader’s son (and Stalin’s own ambitions for the boy) that he was soon promoted way beyond his limited talents to air force general. On his watch, an air force flypast went catastrophically wrong and ended in a plane crash, and he was demoted again.

In 1945, Stalin was informed at Potsdam by his son Vasily Stalin that Soviet aircraft frequently crashed owing to a manufacturing flaw. Stalin then orchestrated the so-called Aviators’ Case against Air Marshal Novikov and other leading military officers as well as Aviation Minister Shakurin. The case was partly aimed at the Politburo member in charge of aircraft, Georgi Malenkov, who was temporarily demoted, but was actually part of a sustained campaign to diminish the power of the Soviet marshals, particularly the ultimate hero, Marshal Georgi Zhukov. Novikov and many other officers were viciously tortured and some were shot. Malenkov was temporarily sent to check the harvest in Central Asia.

Stalin encouraged a rivalry between two secret-police chiefs: Beria, long-serving head of the NKVD, and Victor Abakumov, chief of SMERSH, who reported directly to Stalin. Abakumov and Beria were constantly complaining about each other to Stalin. In 1945, Stalin reduced the power of Beria in secret-police matters by sacking him as Interior Minister. Yet Beria remained Stalin’s top manager and Deputy Premier, taking charge of the most important project of the era: the creation of the Soviet nuclear bomb. Beria’s protégé Merkulov remained State Security Minister until he was sacked in 1946 and replaced by Abakumov. After Stalin’s death, Beria, Merkulov and Kobylov were executed in 1953 and Abakumov in 1954.

In 1945, Stalin suffered some sort of coronary attack or minor stroke. He was extremely sensitive about the details of any illnesses which might undermine his political power and suspicious of doctors: hence the Doctors’ Plot. His own long-term doctors who diagnosed his arteriosclerosis were arrested. (See below.)

Sexual abuse of female prisoners and ordinary female citizens was the informal prerogative of secret-police bosses, who often used the threat of the arrest of loved ones to blackmail women into giving sexual favours: on his arrest in 1953, Beria’s rape and abuse of hundreds if not thousands of women were revealed. His two chief bodyguards, Colonels Sarkisov and Nadaraia, were exposed as pimps and kidnappers of girls that Beria spotted on the streets of Moscow. It was revealed that Beria had twice caught VD during the war. Abakumov too abused his position. In 1946, Abakumov ordered the arrest of film star Tatiana Okunevskaya after she turned him down; earlier, Beria had drugged and raped her. Stalin turned a blind eye to these cases of favoured potentates but encouraged his henchmen to collect evidence to use against them later.

After 1945, the rise of American superpowerdom and the American support for Zionism that led to the creation of Israel turned Stalin’s existing prejudices against Jews into obsessional and deadly anti-Semitism. Stalin created a series of anti-Semitic cases against Soviet Jews, leading first to sackings, then arrests, the killing of Yiddish actor/Jewish leader Solomon Mikhoels in a faked car crash in 1948 and finally the deadly anti-Jewish cases of 1949–50 (in which most of the defendants – Party officials and writers – were executed). In the Doctors’ Plot of 1952–3, doctors in the Kremlin Clinic, particularly the cardiologists and the Jews, were accused of murdering and planning to murder Politburo leaders, starting with Andrei Zhdanov, who died of heart disease in 1948.

The wife of Nikolai Bulganin, Politburo member, Armed Forces Minister, Marshal, taught English at one of Moscow’s élite secondary schools.

During this period Eisenstein was writing and directing the movie Ivan the Terrible Part One and Part Two; Stalin supervised the script. The Katyusha was a famous Soviet rocket launcher and there was a popular song called ‘Katyusha’ – but no movie of that name.

The fictional celebrity couple of writer Constantin Romashkin and the film star Sophia ‘Mouche’ Zeitlin are inspired partly by the experiences of the real film stars Tatiana Okunevskaya and Valentina Serova. The latter was married to Constantin Simonov, famed poet and Soviet official. As I explained above, Okunevskaya suffered bitterly at the hands of Beria and Abakumov. Serova was luckier but had an affair with Vasily Stalin. Their stories appear in many books, including Simonov’s own autobiography, but is told best in Orlango Figes’ excellent book The Whisperers.

On women in government: one inaccuracy. Stalin distrusted women – and doctors – and never promoted any female to be a full minister, though there were several leaders’ wives serving as deputy ministers in his government, including the wives of Politburo members Molotov and Andreyev. Both women were dismissed at least partly for their Jewish origins. Like Dashka Dorova, Polina Molotova was ultimately arrested and divorced by her husband. On her return from prison after Stalin’s death, she too returned to her marriage.

The details of daily life, school life and bureaucracy are also accurate but I have telescoped some of the dates for the purposes of my story. For example, the conversion of People’s Commissariats to Ministries – so that the secret police changed from the NKGB to the MGB and the NKVD became the MVD – was a little later in 1946, as was the promotion of Vasily Stalin to general; the granting of military ranks to secret policemen; the sacking of Merkulov as MGB Minister and his replacement by Abakumov; and the real Aviators’ Case. The real Children’s Case actually took place in 1943. The full story of the history behind this novel can be found in my Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar but I also recommend Anne Applebaum’s Gulag and Orlando Figes’ The Whisperers and Just Send Me Word, both of which contain many examples of the sort of stories told in this novel and Sashenka.