Red Sky at Noon

I

‘Stand up, Prisoner Golden!’

Benya stood, his knees buckling. It was two years earlier, the winter of 1940, and the three judges were filing into the plain room in the Sukhanovka Special Prison. In front of him were two fat grey men in uniform and boots, and the third he knew, not just from the newspapers, but in person. Slim and lean in his Stalinka tunic and high boots, his nose aquiline, grey-black hair en brosse, Comrade Hercules Satinov, a favourite of Stalin and member of the Politburo, took the right-hand chair. Once Benya had been excited to know such potentates, proud that Stalin knew who he was. Such sickening folly in his younger, restless self! Now he wished they had never even known of his existence.

Benya also recognized the man in charge, a shaven-haired bulldog in uniform with a patch of moustache under a puce nose the texture of pumice stone. Vasily Ulrikh, Stalin’s hanging judge.

‘I, V.S. Ulrikh,’ he droned, ‘presiding, declare this sitting of the Military Tribunal to be in session here in Special Object 110.’ He meant Sukhanovka Prison. ‘It is four thirty a.m. on the twenty-first of January 1940. Considering the case of Golden, Beniamin.’

It was the middle of the night? Benya looked at Ulrikh’s scar-puckered face first, still not quite believing that they could possibly find him guilty when his only mistakes were childish curiosity – and falling in love with the wrong woman. But in Ulrikh’s boozy, watery eyes he saw only a bored disgust and Benya recalled with a shudder that the judge was said not only to attend executions but even do the job himself.

Benya savoured the strong smell of cigarettes, vodka, coffee, pickles emanating from the judges – the fug of grown men without sleep in airless offices. It was familiar, reminding him of long happy nights when writers sat up till dawn in Muscovite kitchens to bicker about that bestselling poet, or the best movie, or the latest scandal… A life gone forever.

Glancing down at the papers in front of him, wiping his fuchsia-tinged eyelids, Ulrikh read: ‘Golden, Beniamin has signed a confession admitting to his crimes and he is hereby found guilty of terrorism, of conspiracy to murder Comrades Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich and Satinov (who is present on this tribunal), and of membership of a counter-revolutionary Trotskyite group, connected to White Guardists, controlled by Japanese and French secret services, under Article 58.8.’

‘No, no!’ Benya heard his own voice, high-pitched, from somewhere far away.

Ulrikh pivoted to the right. ‘Comrade Judge Satinov, would you read the sentence?’

Satinov did not reveal the slightest emotion but then Stalin’s grandees were masters of sangfroid. They had to be.

He coolly raised his eyes to Benya: ‘In the name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Military Tribunal of the Supreme Court has examined your case and you are hereby sentenced by the Military Tribunal to Vishnaya Mera Nakazaniya, to be shot.’

The words – the Highest Measure of Punishment – hit Benya in a hot rush, winding him. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe and he gulped frantically for air. He was close enough to see Ulrikh scrawl the fatal initials: ‘V. M. N.’ – known as the ‘Vishka’; everything in Russia, every department, every job, even killing, had its sinisterly neat acronym. But this was a mistake, a terrible mistake! The words bounced around his head. He knew how the Vishka worked because, ever the curious writer, he had once asked a top Chekist how they killed their prisoners, a question he had asked in the naive certainty that he himself would never face this moment. We take them to a cell deep under the streets, he was told. Two guards hold their arms while, quickly, before the prisoner can think, a third fires Eight Grammes from his Nagant pistol into the spot where your neck meets your head. Finally there is the ‘control shot’ to the temple.

‘I didn’t confess. Never! I didn’t…’

Ulrikh sighed, whispered to Satinov and showed him a wad of papers.

‘I have in front of me your signed confession, Prisoner Golden,’ said Ulrikh.

‘It’s false! I’m not guilty of anything!’

‘Quiet, prisoner!’ shouted Ulrikh, banging the table.

‘Did you or did you not sign this?’ asked Satinov in his Georgian accent.

‘No!’ Benya replied. ‘You see, I had no choice – I was beaten. My confession was forced out of me. I deny everything, I was tortured…’

Ulrikh wiped his flat face with his liver-spotted hand. It had been a long vodka-fuelled night of Vishkas – prisoners condemned and executions attended – and Benya could see he wanted to send his report to Comrade Stalin and get to bed.

‘A signed confession carries the full force of the law,’ said Ulrikh, sounding both furious and indifferent. ‘The sentence stands, the verdict is final and to be effected without delay…’

Benya started to hyperventilate. A drop in the belly like the trapdoor of a gallows and then a drenchingly fearsome nausea that buckled his knees; he thought he would die then and there. The guards caught him and held him up like a broken mannequin.

Then Satinov leaned sideways and whispered to Ulrikh. Satinov was the top man present, he was Stalin’s comrade-in-arms, and he was not a judge. He was there for a special reason. Stalin had nominated him to be the ‘curator’ of the trial because Satinov had been friends with the people whom he was going to have to sentence to death. That was a test set by Stalin.

Ulrikh shrugged, and Satinov cleared his throat. ‘Prisoner Golden, your death sentence is reprieved. Instead, you are sentenced to ten years…’ And the rest was lost in the roar of relief in Benya’s ears. Did he really hear it? Yes. There it was. Ten years! The joy of life – all thanks to Satinov!

‘Thank you,’ Benya whispered to the judges but they were no longer paying him any attention. They were standing up, collecting their papers. He rushed forward but the guards caught him, shook him and held him back: ‘God bless you!’ he shouted.

‘No talking!’ A rifle butt in the side. ‘Silence, prisoner!’

A man who has heard his own capital sentence has lived more profoundly than any other, and for Benya Golden, nothing would ever be quite the same again. Now he could live, passionately, expansively. He could love again. Oh, how he loved life. He barely noticed the judges filing out of the room.

Then there was the march through the corridors and the ride in the Black Maria back to his cell, where he understood it all better. He was condemned to a realm beyond mere death, and now knew his entire life up to his arrest was over. He was almost dead, a death without instant decay, trapped while he still breathed, in the hell of the eternal now. He recalled the slaves who rowed the Roman galleys: now he was to be a galley slave, toiling to death in the Camps known as the Gulags. But then he thought: ten years! It is not forever. I can survive ten years and come back to life, can’t I?

Weeks and months of 1940 passed in that cell. He became accustomed to the routine but he knew that would soon end and every prisoner hates the change of rhythm. Change is dangerous. But he knew what was coming: the transfer, known as the etap, the journey to the east, to the Gulags.

And then it came. Four a.m. reveille. The guards burst into his cell. ‘Wake up! Get your things. Davay! Davay! Let’s go!’

Benya didn’t know where he was going, just that he was heading east in cattle cars, chugging slowly across the endless spaces of the Urals, Siberia and onwards. The trains were packed with filthy, lice-infested prisoners (many Poles, Benya learned, victims of Stalin’s new conquests), the stinking bucket overflowing with urine and dysentery. Sometimes Benya and his companions talked about Stalin’s astonishing alliance with Hitler, how they’d split Poland between them. Paris had just fallen to the Nazis. How long would Britain hold out? But mostly Benya just lay in his corner, saving his energy, trying to stay alive, learning to listen and not talk. Being a ‘Political’, he was the lowest in the hierarchy of the prisoners. Even murderers and thieves were higher than him, and the highest of all were the Criminals who ran the cattle car, received the best food and took whatever else they wanted. A quick shuffling amongst the huddling prisoners and a man was killed for his new boots in the gloom of Benya’s cattle car, quickly stripped for his clothes, coat, hat, ration. There was a sudden glare as the door was slid open; and Benya glimpsed the broken-ragdoll dance of arms and legs as a naked body was tossed out, filling the roaring frame of the open door for a second before the door slid shut again, and Benya wondered whether he had seen it at all. From then on, in this life, the death of a man, once an event remarkable and unforgettable, something you might tell your family or read about in the newspaper or discuss with a friend, was often merely an occurrence in a succession of occurrences for Benya, quickly forgotten in the drone of the day. The seething of lice on his body drove him crazy but he spent his days catching them and crushing them, feeling the pop of their bodies, a rare satisfaction, a lesson that small unlikely pleasures could make life almost tolerable. Sometimes he felt he had become the master of the enjoyment of minuscule things, and that that was the art of living.

He spent weeks at each transit prison – each one a world of its own, with its own rules of survival – until his next etap was called, and the next. A succession of cities. Petropavlovsk. Novosibirsk. Irkutsk. Everywhere his fellow prisoners said, ‘Pray you’re not going to Kolyma…’ But by the time he saw the blue waters of Lake Baikal, Benya knew that was exactly where he was going.

Still dazed after the horrors of the voyage in the hell ship across the Sea of Okhotsk, they arrived at Magadan, where a new world of snow-capped mountains, bracing air and the lunar landscape of the gold mines awaited them. Benya imagined the gold-rush towns he had read about in his beloved Jack London novels, the frontier of The Last of the Mohicans with its gunslingers, its trackers and Red Indians. It was still September, the last weeks before the Sea of Okhotsk froze, and Kolyma was about to be cut off from the mainland for many months.

The guards marched them up the hill in groups along a muddy lane called the Kolyma Highway and into a compound where Benya and his fellow prisoners were stripped, washed, shaved and their clothes steamed and deloused. In the showers, Benya saw men fall on each other, some on their knees, others bending over, coupling frantically, seizing white-knuckled fistfuls of gratification. Next day he stood naked in front of the medical examination board, a doctor and a Chekist, trying to look as weak and old as possible. But the doctor, a prisoner himself, stamped his file: ‘KOLYMA-TFT. Fit for Hard Physical Labour.’

‘But I’m not strong enough,’ protested Benya.

‘Shut the fuck up, cocksucker,’ said the guard. ‘The sentence for falsifying illness is Eight Grammes in the nut. For complaining you face the Isolator. Get a move on!’

Next day, he was woken at 4 a.m. ‘Davay! Davay! Let’s go! Grab your belongings!’

Riding in a truck, fuelled not by petrol but by a furnace fired with wood, Benya travelled up the Highway into a mountain wilderness of rushing streams, reindeer herds and precipitous canyons. Then he saw first the barbed wire and watchtowers; next the wooden barracks and finally they entered the gate of their Camp: Madyak-7.

A giant sign declared:

And finally at the bottom:

Early next morning, the first roll call, hundreds of men standing to attention in the mist: pairs of favoured prisoners – known as Camp Trusties – waved whips and bully sticks to herd them into work brigades. The brigadiers reported to the Commandant. ‘There are twenty-seven in this brigade,’ called out Benya’s brigadier, a Criminal called Shurik. ‘One died at the mine yesterday; one executed for insubordination. One dead this morning in barracks; two sick in barracks; one self-injured in the Isolator. Five new prisoners. Total: twenty-seven!’ He marched them up to the mine. ‘You work, you eat,’ Shurik warned Benya and his fellow Zeks – that was the Camp nickname for prisoners. ‘You don’t work, Zeks, you die.’ Facing Benya was a capacious and gigantic scoop of mud and rock carved out of the mountainside, an ants’ nest of teeming workers and armed guards, all creeping along plank walkways or excavating deep gulches, tiny figures in a landscape that the Zeks already called the Dark Side of the Moon.

II

‘Bandits, today your training is over,’ announced Penal-Colonel Melishko, the battalion commander. How Benya had survived his time in Kolyma he never knew, and here he was eighteen months later, in July 1942, in southern Russia, not far from the city of Stalingrad.

At sundown on that broiling summer night, they stood in a half-circle around Melishko in the manège of the Marshal Budyonny Stud Farm Number 9, very close to the Don River. It was horse country, land of the Don Cossacks. They had been training for seven months.

‘You are ready to be assigned your first mission – and you will be needed faster than any of us thought. The Motherland is in peril!’ roared Melishko.

Benya caught the eye of his friend Prishchepa next to him. Prishchepa smiled flashily, but Melishko’s gruff confidence did not hide the panic of the other officers. When Benya had started his training in December 1941, the front was far away and the Germans had been defeated outside Moscow. Now the war had come to them; since yesterday, they could even hear the belch of artillery as the Germans approached the Don.

‘You bandits have a special reason to fight hard for the Motherland! I found you as scum. Now you’re as battle-ready as regulars, good soldiers, fine horsemen’ – Melishko’s eyes, under his crescent-shaped eyebrows that looked like wings, glanced at Benya with a stroke of warmth – ‘and even the most unlikely of you can at least keep your seat.’

Prishchepa wiped away the tears that ran down his young cheeks. He wept and laughed easily; he went through life as happy as a swallow; nothing disturbed his geniality, not his sentence to the Camps, nor this parade today, nor tomorrow’s battle. ‘Life is easy for a simple soul like mine,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You just have to live it.’ Benya enjoyed studying Prishchepa; he’d never lost his interest in human nature, and there was no laboratory so fascinating as the Gulags and this battalion of vicious criminals and court-martialled soldiers.

Benya and Melishko had been in the same Camp in Kolyma. After his arrest, General Melishko had been so severely tortured that he had no teeth or fingernails left; only his moustache, thick, white and stiff as a painter’s old brush, was the same. Nevertheless when the war started, he had been one of the first officers recalled to fight but instead of being assigned a division or corps, he had been made a colonel and given this rabble. He was, however, still called ‘the General’ by everyone and Benya loved the fact that Melishko was unchanging, whether waiting for soup in the dining block in Kolyma or addressing the men as an officer.

In the barn-like manège, its sandy ground designed for training horses, Melishko stood alone at the front. Behind him: Captain Ganakovich, their Politruk, the Political Officer, and Pavel Mogilchuk, head of their secret police Special Unit.

Benya did not know the details – the truth was always ‘Top Secret’ – but he did know the Russians were retreating fast and now there must have been some new debacle. Ganakovich was fritzing with nerves, Mogilchuk visibly shaking. At each crump of the guns, the fear slithered another degree up Benya’s belly.

‘Remember what I always say,’ bellowed Melishko, his false teeth breaking the vowels. ‘You can’t get me!’ It was a line borrowed from his favourite movie and the men loved it.

‘Urrah!’ they cried but then there was the sound of footsteps and Benya peered round as Captain Zhurko ran into the manège and handed Melishko a piece of paper.

‘As you are,’ said Melishko. ‘We’re awaiting an important order from Stavka.’ ‘Stavka’ was headquarters in Moscow. Benya and Prishchepa looked at each other, and Prishchepa started to sing under his breath: ‘Don’t circle over me, black raven…’

III

Far to the north, in Moscow, a small, tired old man, wearing a military tunic and baggy grey trousers tucked into soft calfskin boots, sat at a huge desk in a long office. His face was seared with exhaustion, bleached a sallow pockmarked grey.

Outside, the Kremlin was draped in camouflage netting, and air balloons floated above the city to disorientate German bombers. Inside, the long table, the desk with the T-shaped extension and the chunky row of Bakelite telephones, the dreary drapes over the windows and the illuminated death mask of Lenin on the wall were unchanged, but now the founder of Soviet Russia was joined on the walls by oil paintings of Tsarist paladins, Suvorov and Kutuzov. This office known to regulars as the Little Corner was the headquarters of the Soviet armies, and the phone lines and telegraph wires in the communications room next door linked the man in this office to a boundless and often unpredictable and uncontrollable world of savage struggle between millions of men.

‘We were tricked,’ said Stalin quietly. ‘The whole south is collapsing. Our commanders are fools and yes-men. We lack good men. We still await the main offensive against Moscow.’

At the nearest end of the long table sat three men. Molotov, a squat blockhouse with a round head and pince-nez, nodded. The only one in civilian clothes, he wore a grey suit, grey tie and stiff white collar. He had the clammy pallor of the bureaucrat who never saw the sun, a condition known to Stalin’s familiars as ‘the Kremlin tan’.

‘You’re right, Comrade Stalin,’ said Lavrenti Beria, the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, chief of the secret police. Wearing his blue-tabbed NKVD uniform, he was broad-spanned and grey-faced but bristling with ingenuity, vigilance, ferocity.

The third of them, Hercules Satinov, dressed as an army colonel general, spoke up: ‘Comrade Stalin, I believe this is the main German offensive. They are throwing everything against the Don and the Caucasus. We made the wrong judgement. There is no Moscow offensive. I myself was mistaken and I wish to take responsibility, and if you believe it necessary, stand trial. We were tricked…’

Stalin stared witheringly at Satinov for a long moment. Until today, he might have called him a fool, a traitor, perhaps even ordered his arrest. But Satinov, his favourite and, like him, another Georgian, had always told him the truth. And now he needed the truth. Six weeks earlier, on 19 June, a German Storch plane had crashed behind Soviet lines near Kharkov. Inside was a staff officer, Major Reichel, with a briefcase that contained the plans for Hitler’s southern offensive, Case Blue. Hours later, those plans were reviewed in this very room by Stalin, accompanied by the same Greek chorus of Molotov, Beria and Satinov.

‘It’s a trick,’ Stalin had said. ‘It’s classic disinformation. The bastards expect us to fall for this? The southern offensive will be a diversion. The big offensive will be against Moscow.’ The three Politburo members had agreed – as they always did. But now it was clear they had called it wrong and Hitler’s panzers were charging across the southern plains towards Stalingrad. Russia was about to be cut in half.

Stalin looked down the table at the only other man in the huge room, General Alexander Vasilevsky, his Chief of Staff, who was leaning over a map of the southern theatre, marked with arrows and symbols. ‘Comrade Vasilevsky?’

Vasilevsky, who had the professional air of an old-fashioned Tsarist officer, stood up straight. ‘He’s right, Comrade Stalin. This is the main offensive.’

Stalin nodded, rubbing his face with his hands. Ripples of exhaustion seemed to emanate from him. Satinov could only admire Stalin’s self-control, the steely, intelligent coldness that he radiated despite his egregious mistakes. But he had aged in this past year of war; his clothes hung off him.

The padded door opened silently and a dwarfish figure, Alexander Poskrebyshev, also in boots and uniform, looked in: ‘They’re here, Comrade Stalin,’ he announced.

Stalin beckoned, and two old cavalrymen entered and stood at attention before him. Both had just flown in from the front and been driven straight to the Kremlin. The dust of battle was still on their faces, and Satinov could smell their sweat, and their despair.

‘Report, Comrade Budyonny,’ commanded Stalin in his light tenor voice.

‘German Army Group A has broken through the North Caucasus Front,’ said Marshal Budyonny, his barrel chest, his rider’s bow legs in boots and red-striped britches, even his magnificently waxed moustaches, diminished in defeat. ‘Our troops are in retreat. They’ve reached the Don, and are breaking into the Caucasus, targeting the oil fields. We are struggling to regroup. Rostov has fallen.’

‘Rostov?’ repeated Stalin.

‘A lie! You’re spreading panic,’ cried Beria. ‘Report properly!’

But Budyonny ignored him. In 1937, when they had tried to arrest him during the Terror, Budyonny had drawn his pistol and threatened to kill them and shoot himself, shouting, ‘Get Stalin on the line!’ Stalin had cancelled the arrest order.

‘Our forces fell back from Rostov,’ said Budyonny. ‘They turned and fled. Just ran! I admit there was cowardice and incompetence. I take full responsibility.’

‘And you, Marshal Timoshenko?’ Stalin turned to the other cavalryman. ‘What good news have you got for us?’

Timoshenko shook his gleaming bald head. ‘The Stalingrad Front is in disarray. German forces have reached the Don and the only thing holding them back are two armies defending the bend in the river. And we can’t hold Voronezh. I would say…’ He struggled to speak.

‘Tell Comrade Stalin the truth!’ said Beria.

‘I think Stalingrad itself in danger.’

Stalingrad! Stalin’s own city where he made his name in the Civil War. Satinov felt breathless suddenly with disbelief.

‘That’s a lie! Stalingrad will never fall,’ said Beria in his clotted Mingrelian accent. ‘Panic-mongers should be shot! The Germans are hundreds of miles from Stalingrad.’

Stalin’s hazel eyes flicked towards Vasilevsky, who was plotting the new information on the maps spread on the table. He trusted Vasilevsky. ‘Well?’

Vasilevsky appeared to consider his answer unhurriedly.

‘We will halt the German forces on the Don Bend but the defence and fortification of Stalingrad must be urgently prepared along with evacuation plans for the tank factories. I propose a radical reconstruction of the southern fronts and I’ve informed them to expect new orders from Stavka.’

Stalin thought for a moment and lit a Herzegovina Flor cigarette. In the silent room, with the two marshals standing to attention, with Vasilevsky again perusing the maps, the three henchmen waiting, the wheeze of every breath of smoke seemed laden with fearsome concentration.

‘Timoshenko, Budyonny, wait outside,’ said Stalin.

The two men saluted and left the room.

‘Of course Stalingrad is not threatened. Not yet. But I will not tolerate a single step back. Not one step back…’ He allowed this phrase to sink in.

‘Comrade Stalin,’ said Satinov after a pause. ‘The Hitlerites have very successfully used penal battalions in battle made up of court-martialled soldiers and criminal elements. We have punishment units of cowards and criminals already being trained, some recruited in the Gulags, but I propose we formalize this structure, and create penal battalions on every front and throw them into battle…’

‘Desperate men fight like devils,’ said Stalin. ‘Very well.’ He lifted one of the many Bakelite phones on his desk, ‘Get in here.’

Poskrebyshev appeared at the door, notebook and pencil already in hand. ‘Take this down,’ Stalin ordered. ‘Order 227 from the People’s Commissar of Defence.’ He stood and started to pace up and down, his hands shaking as he inhaled his cigarette. ‘Telegraph this to all fronts. To be read to all units urgently on this very night… The enemy throws new forces against us… The German invaders penetrate towards Stalingrad… they’ve already captured Novocherkask, Rostov-on-Don, half Voronezh… Our soldiers, encouraged by panic-mongers, shamefully abandoned Rostov… I order: Not One Step Back…’

IV

‘Not One Step Back! That is our slogan!’

In the sultry heat of the manège’s arena, Melishko was reading out Stalin’s orders which had just arrived, smoking off the telegraph from Moscow. Benya felt the hair rising on his neck. His life was entering a new and daunting stage.

‘Stavka orders: “Every army must form well-armed blocking squads (two hundred men) and place them behind any unstable divisions. In the case of any retreat, they are to shoot panic-mongers and cowards on the spot… Not One Step Back… We are already training punishment units of prisoners.’ Benya and his comrades concentrated; Stalin himself was addressing them and their destiny. ‘Now I order the formation of penal battalions – shtrafnoi batalioni – of eight hundred persons on every front made up of men guilty of crimes, breaches of discipline due to cowardice or confusion. They are to be placed in the most difficult sectors of the battle to give them the chance to redeem their sins against the Motherland by the shedding of their own blood… These are the orders of our Motherland. This is to be read to all companies, cavalry squadrons, batteries and headquarters. People’s Commissar of Defence. J Stalin.”’

Melishko folded the paper and peered grimly at his ‘bandits’. ‘Comrade Stalin has spoken and—’

‘Permission to speak!’ a voice called out. Melishko nodded.

‘What does “redeeming sins by shedding blood” mean?’ said Prishchepa. Only he would have dared ask such a thing.

Melishko wiped the sweat from his forehead into the wisps of his meagre rust-coloured hair. The men waited; Benya could feel them craning forward.

‘Comrade Stalin means that there are only two ways to earn your freedom. Death or by being wounded in battle.’

The men held their breath for a moment as they, like Benya, absorbed the primitive simplicity of their fates.

‘See, my bandits?’ said Melishko. ‘You have the chance to free yourselves in battle. Your deployment is imminent. Get some rest tonight… Yes, comrade?’

Ganakovich whispered in Melishko’s ear.

‘Right,’ said Melishko. ‘Comrade Ganakovich will tell you more.’

Captain Ganakovich swaggered to the front. ‘Lads, comrades, muckers, Shtrafniki,’ he started in a deep voice of rasp and raunch that he adopted for momentous occasions. ‘You bear the taint of alien elements, bourgeois illiterates, counter-revolutionary delinquents, murderous degenerates, but you’ve been re-educated and retrained and now you have the honour to fight for the Socialist Motherland and the Great Genius Stalin – and I’ll be right there with you, shoulder to shoulder!’ Ganakovich was in Stalinist commissar mode as he drew his pistol and held it above his head. ‘As convicts and cowards, you have no rights as soldiers. You will not even be informed of the name of your front, and there’ll be no maps for you. You will gratefully receive your mission and you will fulfil it. If I or the Special Unit notice the slightest hesitation, deviation, insubordination, a word, a look, yes, even a thought, you’ll get the Eight Grammes: instant execution!’ He gulped – he had a tendency when excited to forget to swallow his saliva, which then built up in his mouth until it had to be consumed in one phlegmy wad.

Melishko looked embarrassed but the ex-prisoners were unmoved. The things they had seen in the Gulags, or in the great retreats of 1941, had accustomed them to the malignant buffoonery of Soviet bureaucrats.

‘Thank you, very useful, Comrade Ganakovich,’ Melishko said, stepping forward again. The men could feel his disdain for the Party hack – and they shared his disgust. ‘Good luck, bandits! I will be there with you! Long live Stalin!’

‘Excuse me, penal-colonel,’ the secret policeman Mogilchuk interjected. ‘There’s one more thing. Captain Ganakovich will enlighten the men.’

‘They need to rest and tend the horses. Haven’t my bandits listened to us enough?’ objected Melishko.

‘Not quite,’ said Mogilchuk. ‘Proceed! Bring out the prisoner!’

A hush fell over the Shtrafbat as the NKVD men, machine guns sloping ready, pushed a figure in front of them. Benya saw at once it was young Polyak and he was sobbing. God, prayed Benya, give the boy strength! But there was no God there to help him now, no God at all in their lives.

When Polyak reached the cluster of officers in the middle of the manège, Mogilchuk made a gesture and they brusquely stopped him. Polyak swayed but the guards held him up.

‘Lads, pals, if the generosity of the Great Stalin is abused with trickery, there can only be one result,’ declared Ganakovich portentously. A creature of the Communist Party, Ganakovich liked to present himself as a leader with the popular touch. Benya knew that if they were dancing the kalinka, Ganakovich would jump into the centre of the circle and make his fancy leaps. If the men were taking a drink, Ganakovich, slapping backs and massaging arms, would buy shots and tell stories of his dubious exploits – his heroics in the grain campaign of ’32, the time he met Molotov, the day he defeated a Trotskyite cell in his factory, and of course the girls whom he had conquered. Only his upturned snout and piggy eyes hinted at his self-glorification. He swallowed loudly. ‘I hand you over to our Chekist knights of the Revolution.’

Flanked by his NKVD soldiers, Mogilchuk stepped forward. ‘Anyone who deliberately wounds themselves to avoid battle or win redemption will receive the Eight Grammes. Penal-Sergeant Polyak was sentenced to serve in this penal battalion for retreating without orders during the battle of Kiev. Last night, hearing our deployment was imminent, this coward went to elaborate lengths to fake sickness, by cutting himself.’

‘It was a real cut!’ Polyak wailed.

‘Silence, prisoner!’ snapped Mogilchuk. ‘He was denounced by one of the medical team. After an investigation, following this order from Stavka, he is hereby condemned to the Vishka, the sentence to be carried out immediately and in front of the battalion.’

An intake of breath.

‘Shtrafniki, my lads, my muckers!’ cried Ganakovich, making no effort to conceal his excitement. ‘Volunteers from the ranks to execute the prisoner?’

Melishko stared at his boots. It was so hot that Benya found it hard to breathe. He remembered how he had once heard his own death sentence. He stared at the boy: Mitka Polyak, we talked often; if you were so afraid, why didn’t you come to me?

The men swayed slowly, shifting foot to foot, flies buzzing.

‘I repeat,’ cried out Ganakovich. ‘Volunteers to execute the prisoner!’

Silence.

Ganakovich raised his pistol again. ‘Or must I do it myself?’

Benya and Prishchepa glanced at each other. They lived in a Russia dominated by Ganakoviches but it was ironic that in a regiment of cutthroats, no one wanted to fire a shot.

‘I will shoot the boy!’ said a voice. Spider Garanzha had raised his hand.

‘Step forward, Penal-Private Garanzha,’ said Ganakovich.

Moving with his customary slowness, relishing the strength of his cyclopean limbs and the terrifying effect of his face, Garanzha stepped up to the front of the battalion and crossed his hairy arms. A giant swollen spider, a birdeater perhaps; Benya could see how he got his nickname.

‘Who else? We need one more. Come on, men. Who’s it to be?’

‘Count me in!’ It was Smiley, a Chechen gangster whom Benya had met on the atrocious sea voyage to Kolyma.

‘Come forward Penal-Private Ulibnush,’ blared Ganakovich, using Smiley’s real name.

‘Proceed to your positions,’ said Mogilchuk, who believed that saying ‘proceed’ frequently granted him a patina of authority. ‘Or you’ll face the tribunal yourself.’

Smiley moved sideways with the loose, dancing gait of one who has lived beyond the law all his life, who has never slept without remaining half awake, never crossed a road without watching his back, who was always running from one heinous thing towards another.

Polyak cast a glance at these two cutthroats and started to shake.

‘Please get this over,’ whispered Benya.

Prishchepa was praying, touching his icon necklace. When Benya looked around, he saw that many of the Cossacks in the battalion were also moving their lips silently.

Ganakovich handed out the Nagants. Both executioners took the pistols as if born with guns in their hands.

‘On your knees, prisoner!’ cried Ganakovich with a gulp.

The guards turned Polyak away from the men and then let him drop to his knees. Benya saw his lowered freckly neck flush bright red. There’s sometimes as much character in a man’s neck as in his face, Benya thought. Polyak started to breathe greedily, tossing his head back, gulping air. He was no longer a human, just an animal seconds from death, like a cow in the abattoir, straining at the hands of his captors.

Garanzha and Smiley cocked their pistols. First Garanzha and then Smiley fired into Polyak’s neck, the shots merging into one. When Benya opened his eyes Polyak lay on his side. Mogilchuk drew his own pistol and, wincing with the strain – no gunman he – fired the control shot into Polyak’s temple. Benya noticed that Melishko had never looked up.

‘Good work! Medics,’ called Ganakovich.

Two nurses rushed forward with a stretcher and rolled the body on to it. Then the battalion medic, whom Benya knew well from the Camps as Dr Kapto, knelt beside Polyak, touched his neck, and nodded at Ganakovich.

‘Prisoner deceased,’ he said.

‘Thank you, doctor,’ Ganakovich replied, glaring at the men. ‘Lesson learned, lesson learned, eh lads?’

V

Benya walked alone out to the training arena and leaned on the white railing. The night was rosy and soft, a true soomerki, one of those perfect summer nights when it was so hot that no one could sleep and the air had the texture of creamy velvet; it was a night, thought Benya, for a boulevardier to walk a girl he hopes to kiss. The horizon flashed; the guns boomed, seemingly ever closer; sometimes he heard the roar of engines as tanks detrained at the station and moved towards the front. Somewhere, across the Don, thousands of Russians were fighting for survival; and somewhere very close, Polyak’s body was being dumped into an unmarked grave, dug in this rich black earth. Had they shot the boy pour encourager les autres, to instil discipline in this unreliable crew, Benya wondered, or had the imminent transfer to the front simply terrified Polyak into wounding himself?

The solitude was a tonic to Benya. One of the torments of the Camps and of the army was the loss of personal space. He craved the luxury of loneliness. That is why he adored the space of the steppes. He often walked out here at night, to smoke, to dream, and often he remembered his daughter who lived with her mother, Benya’s estranged wife. Were they safe in Brussels or Paris or had they made it to Madrid or London? His daughter must be a young woman now – he had not seen her for years… Then there were his parents. Odessa had fallen to Hitler’s allies, the Romanians, who were said to have unleashed such havoc that most of the Jews of the city had been slaughtered in the streets. Could such a thing have happened to them? Or had they escaped eastwards?

And then he looked up at the stars and Sashenka came to him. Was she even alive? He was overcome with a wave of love; he craved her lips, the stretch of the tendons behind her knees when her legs were around him. If she was reachable out there somewhere, he sent her kisses: ‘I love you!’ he whispered. But though he strained to hear something back, there was no sound, not even an echo. Of all the people in the world whom he loved, he did not know if a single one of them was alive…

The fear of tomorrow loomed over him. In the meadows beyond, the horses whinnied. There were thousands of them in the paddocks here, Budyonny horses bred by Russia’s first cavalryman, Marshal Budyonny. Silver Socks was there. He peered out towards where she might be and thought he saw the white blaze on her forehead and her white shanks. He walked out further into the darkness and stood at the fence, clopping his tongue, the way the Cossacks did, and the horses came to him. First amongst them was Silver Socks and he felt he was not so alone any more. She put her soft muzzle in his hand and, as he leaned towards her long face, his eyes so close to hers, he found he was weeping: for others, for Polyak, for himself perhaps more. Silver Socks slowly rocked her head and her breath smelled of sweet grass.

Then he heard a click and he turned, leaving one hand on Silver Socks’s neck. It was Prishchepa lighting a cigarette.

When it was lit, he offered it to Benya. ‘One for you; now I’ll roll my own.’

The makhorka was so strong it made Benya cough but he was grateful. He could see the doctor and one of his nurses standing behind Prishchepa; his friends from the Camps at Kolyma. Dr Kapto looked at Benya. ‘Are you OK, dear friend?’ he said, placing his hand on Benya’s arm. ‘We’re all a little unsteady. Easy, now, easy! You’ll be fine.’

‘Thank God you’ll be with us,’ said Benya.

‘And you, Prishchepa, how are you feeling?’ Kapto asked the Cossack.

‘I never think about tomorrow,’ replied Prishchepa sunnily. He had forgotten about Polyak already.

‘Tonya, will you be with us?’ Benya asked the nurse, who had worked for Kapto in the clinic in Kolyma.

‘Of course, I ride with you,’ she said.

Tonya always said little. She was, thought Benya, like a light without a bulb, and was overshadowed by the brown skin and long legs of Nyushka, Kapto’s other nurse. ‘We saw them bury him,’ was all Tonya said, and Benya knew she meant Polyak.

Together they had undergone their training here, far behind the front lines in Russia’s vastness. Gun training, how to fire the basic weaponry, the Moisin–Nagant rifles and the light Degtiarev machine guns… Captain Zhurko had held competitions to assemble and disassemble them in record time. The greatest skill was learning to load a PPSh machine gun at night, taking the lid off the drum, tightening the spring and pushing in the cartridges. Then there were the pistols, Nagants and German Parabellums to master and Degtiarev–Shpagins heavy machine guns. They had nicknames for everything: the PPShs were Papashas, the Degtiarev–Shpagins were Dashkas, the mounted machine guns Tchankas, and the new missiles fired from trucks Katyushas.

They had been quartered at this army base designed for cavalry and there were so many Cossacks in the penal unit that Melishko, an old cavalryman himself, decided they should be trained as cavalry.

‘Even in the age of the tank,’ Melishko told them on their first day, ‘our Red Army theory, developed by Marshal Budyonny under the guidance of the Great Stalin, states cavalry is a powerful strike force, of peerless speed and flexibility, suitable for frontal assaults, screening manoeuvres, reconnaissance, and deep raids behind enemy lines. In ideal conditions such as the Don steppe, cavalry can achieve averages of seven or even ten miles an hour…’

After that pep talk, their instructor, Sergeant Pantaleimon Churelko, stepped forward. This Don Cossack whom everyone called Panka had a head of thick grey hair worn in a topknot, and a handlebar moustache and whiskers so extravagant and broad that they seemed almost to be a piece of equipment in their own right. Leading them into the paddock, he swished his quirt and looked into the faces of the gathered hundred or so Shtrafniki. Benya stood out. He was one of the oldest – and probably the most delicate.

Pantaleimon pointed at him. ‘You! Step forward! Has this Zhid ever seen a horse?’

Benya took a breath; Cossacks were known for their attitude to Jews. ‘Yes, I’ve ridden,’ he replied. ‘But a long time ago…’

‘We’ll see about that,’ said Panka. ‘First, walk into the meadow and choose a horse. Remember, this is the most important choice of your life. More important than choosing a wife!’

The moment Benya stepped into the paddock, a horse with a white flash and white feet walked right up to him.

‘That’s Silver Socks! She chose you. She’s a smart one. That speaks well for you. Now you’ll learn to ride properly and then to fight,’ Panka said. Benya’s acquaintances, Smiley and Little Mametka, sniggered but Panka spat out his tobacco wad and simply observed: ‘You laugh at the Jew learning to ride? Apart from we Cossacks, no one knows anything. Your tongues have tails but rein them in. Lesson one: your horse is your son and daughter, wife and mistress, priest and commissar. Listen to your horse! Tend her like a wife! Respect her like a mother! Feed her like a daughter! Ever made love to a beautiful woman, Jew? I doubt it.’

‘He’s too slight to handle a woman!’ teased ‘Fats’ Strizkaz, a pink barrel of a man with a small patch of moustache and bell-shaped head, who never lost weight, even in Kolyma.

‘Or too old,’ chortled another man, Ivanov, who Benya recalled was nicknamed ‘Cut and Run’.

‘Enough,’ said Panka. ‘Next one who says such a thing, I’ll thrash him myself.’

‘Really?’ sneered Ivanov. ‘You wouldn’t dare!’

‘Who spoke?’

Panka stepped towards Smiley’s gang of Criminals and Benya noticed them slink back an imperceptible inch.

‘Don’t cross us,’ piped up Little Mametka in his usual soprano. Benya recognized the tone of the Gulag where the Criminals ruled. ‘Get off our backs, old man.’

‘I am not going anywhere,’ Panka replied affably and calmly. ‘Now listen to me or the Germans will get you before you’re even in the saddle. You there, Ivanov, mount your horse. Now!’

Ivanov hesitated.

‘Go on! Let’s see you do it,’ cried Mametka. ‘Anyone can ride a horse!’

Ivanov put his boot in the stirrup, swung his other leg around and climbed up on to the horse with a triumphant leer.

‘Very good,’ said Panka, hands on his hips. The horse reared up and bucked Ivanov off and he landed on his back with a thump. His gang snickered as Panka offered a hand and pulled him up. ‘Mount your horse.’

‘Not again!’ said Ivanov.

‘That’s an order.’

‘He’s frightened,’ piped Mametka.

‘All right.’ Ivanov heaved himself up again and sat white-faced on the horse.

‘Try to hold on this time,’ said Panka, who made a soft kissing noise – and the horse bucked off Ivanov once more.

The Criminals whooped as Ivanov thwacked on to the sand where he lay groaning.

‘Not so easy, is it?’ said Panka. ‘No wonder they call you Cut and Run!’

Afterwards Benya realized that Panka could get any horse to throw its rider. He spoke horse language – amongst many others. ‘Who’s next? You’ – and he pointed to Fats Strizkaz.

‘Fats Strizkaz was once a Chekist torturer,’ gabbed a voice next to Benya. It was Koshka – ‘the Cat’ – bilious, scurfy and rail-thin, an Uzbek thief who liked telling tales about prisoners. ‘Just saying.’

‘Keep your stories to yourself,’ said Benya, who knew that stories were dangerous, that gossip could kill you. Best to say nothing and hear nothing.

‘Ivanov once killed a whole family in their beds,’ said Koshka. ‘Just saying.’

The training was exhausting: reveille at 4 a.m., first duty to groom the horses, then exercises, day after day, loping, cantering, trotting, galloping, learning to charge, ride in squadron. How to saddle and feed the horses, check their fetlocks and hooves. Each man was issued with a Red Army sabre and they were taught how to sharpen it, how to slash and pierce sacks on posts – to simulate human bodies – how to stab on the charge. Benya was a ‘townie’ but he had learned to ride when he’d covered the civil war in Spain and he’d spent many hours on horseback. But this was real riding. He learned quickly, or, as Panka put it, ‘Benya Golden can ride. Perhaps he is a Zhid with a Cossack mother!’

The horses made their long hours of training a joy, and Benya’s companions, most of whom were Cossacks, who had lived on horseback since childhood, took every chance to show off their skills. As they rode they sang songs of the Don under their breath. Panka arranged contests and soon the Cossacks were vaulting on to their mounts, slipping on to the side of their horses to shoot over their backs, picking up a glove at the gallop, ordering their horses to lie on their sides so that they could rest their rifles on their flanks. ‘Speedy’ Prishchepa could run up, mount his horse, gallop and shoot a bullseye. They lived on horseback. Benya came to love the smell of leather, the jingle of spurs and snaffles, and the sweat of the horses, which enveloped their clothes. Before long, it seemed to him that he had almost become an extension of Silver Socks. At night they played accordions and sang the songs of the Don and Kuban and talked about horses with a mixture of love and cruelty, like men talking about their wives.

‘Spend a quarter of your day grooming and loving your mount,’ Panka told Benya as he groomed Silver Socks one evening. ‘Look after your Socks and she’ll look after you. Make her your heroine and she’ll be your saviour. Do you know how to caress a woman?’

‘I think I do,’ said Benya.

‘Do you know how to beat a woman?’

‘No.’

‘Ha, you townies treat your women far too soft. Well, with a horse you need to do both. That’s why we Cossacks are so good with horses and women. But when you want to reassure Socks, don’t pat her on the neck like most fools. She won’t understand that. These horses’ mothers nuzzle their necks right here at the withers when they are foals, so when you’re in the saddle, you roll back the blanket under the saddle and caress her there. That does the trick. And never take Socks for granted or she’ll bring you down to size!’

‘Sergeant, you’ve fought in many wars?’

‘A few. The Great War against the Kaiser, the Civil War, now this; yes, a few.’

‘Are you afraid of war?’

‘No! What’s there to be afraid of? When your ride is done, ’tis done. And that’s up to God and your horse.’ Panka chewed on his moustaches, his eyes so small they were almost invisible. ‘Until then it’s always sunny on the Don,’ he said as he walked off, bandy-legged, moulded in the saddle.

Benya took a growing pride in the beauty of Silver Socks. If her hooves seemed worn or ill-shod or sore, he called in ‘Tufty’ Grishchuk, the farrier with a patchy, crusty face. If she was not herself, he consulted Lampadnik, the battalion vet. He spent hours grooming her chestnut coat till it gleamed, and polishing her accoutrements – the pommel of her saddle and the handle of his sabre. There is, he thought, no tonic for being a ruined man, like the love of a horse. Sometimes he just sat in her stable and let her nuzzle him.

In the evenings, Melishko allowed them into the village and once the local girls heard they were Shtrafniki, they were even more impressed: ‘You’re bad boys,’ said the girls. Prishchepa, with his face like a cherub and shaven hair growing back like a harvest of gold, was their darling. But when they saw Benya, they giggled. ‘Who’s your dedushka, your granpa?’ they’d ask Prishchepa.

‘But I’m only forty-two!’ Benya protested.

Prishchepa chuckled. ‘He’s a bookworm, he knows nothing about girls!’

‘But he can at least perform,’ said Fats Strizkaz, ‘unlike Little Mametka, who’s a girl in disguise. In the Camps, we called him Bette Davis. Like the film star. Big eyes, nasty face – and a bitch!’

Now, as Benya, Prishchepa, Dr Kapto and Tonya stood at the railings of the paddock, they were joined by a few others, come to stroke their horses before sleep.

Prishchepa started to sing:

‘Dr Kapto?’ It was the colonel’s adjutant. ‘Colonel Melishko wishes to talk to you. Says it’s about his bunions and piles!’

Kapto smiled. ‘I’m coming.’

They looked back towards the buildings. The lights were shining brightly, and the staff would be working into the early hours. A Willys jeep, a Lend-Lease gift from the American allies, drove up and Benya saw senior officers getting out.

As Kapto walked back to the office, Benya wondered if their mission was settled, because somewhere, he knew, someone was deciding their fate.

VI

It was midnight in Moscow but Stalin was still presiding over the meeting in the Little Corner of the Kremlin.

‘We must counter-attack on all the southern fronts – relieve the pressure!’ said Stalin, standing at the table with the Chief of Staff General Vasilevsky, looking at the small flags on the map that marked the positions of his armies from the Finnish front in the north to the foothills of the Caucasus in the south – two thousand miles and ten million men. ‘We launch Operation Mercury in forty-eight hours with Operation Pluto launched in twenty-four hours.’ He looked back at the little T-shaped table attached to his desk where Beria, Satinov and Molotov were still sitting, like expectant – if ageing – school boys.

‘Operation Mercury is being prepared but there are few divisions available,’ replied Vasilevsky. ‘We’ve formed the available units into the 62^nd and 64^th Armies, thereby reconstituting the intact forces of the sector into a new Stalingrad Front.’

‘That’s all? Bring more forces across the Don to support the 62^nd and 64^th holding out there. We must exert pressure there right now. Attack in force. When can we launch these counter-attacks?’

‘We’re rushing in reinforcements to stop the retreat,’ said Vasilevsky patiently. ‘But we are short of tanks, artillery, men.’ Stalin’s constant demands for counter-attacks before adequate preparation had already brought many disasters, but that was the nature of the man. He was relentlessly aggressive.

‘There must be more forces in the sector,’ said Stalin. ‘Find them! Who’s available now? Tonight?’

An aide brought Vasilevsky more papers which he swiftly perused and then reported in his level tone: ‘A moment please.’

Only he and General Zhukov could say this to Stalin, who had shot so many of his generals in ’37 that the survivors were now understandably cautious and jumpy.

When Vasilevsky was ready, he cleared his throat: ‘Cashiered troops and criminal volunteers have been training for the last six months on the Don and are ready for combat. Now you have formally created the Shtrafbats, the staff are working at this very minute to deploy them at the front according to your precise orders.’

‘They’re already on the Don?’ Stalin sounded surprised.

‘They’ve been training at the Budyonny Stud Nine at Vennovsk close to the bridgeheads at the Don Bend.’

‘How many men?’

‘Five thousand.’

‘Better than nothing,’ interjected Satinov. ‘And convicts will fight to the death.’

Stalin nodded. ‘Can they launch a counter-attack? How quickly can they be deployed and with what units? They have artillery and machine-gun battalions? What strength do we have in tanks?’

Vasilevsky looked troubled. ‘We will deploy artillery and machine-gun battalions but we are grossly short of tanks, Comrade Stalin. We have only a hundred T-34s in reserve for the entire sector and—’

‘No tanks? That is treason.’ Stalin’s voice rose an octave, but when he started again, he was his controlled, soft-spoken self. ‘Then throw these criminals into the fray without tanks. Let them give their lives for the Motherland.’

‘We have a few old Betushka tanks for them. We are driving new T-34s straight to the front off the assembly line at Stalingrad,’ said Vasilevsky, ‘but…’

‘I wouldn’t waste new T-34s on these jailbirds,’ advised Beria.

Stalin padded to his chair, sat down, closed his eyes. ‘What to do?’ he said.

‘May I speak?’ It was Satinov, still sitting further down the table. ‘I believe there is another possibility. I recently spent some time down on the Don with Marshal Budyonny. May we call the marshals back in?’

A nod. Satinov sprang up and opened the door, returning with the two marshals. He could tell they both expected punishment. Instead Stalin looked at Satinov: ‘Well, what’s the idea?’

‘Marshal Budyonny, you’re aware that penal forces are training at Stud Nine? How many horses do you have there?’

‘Twenty thousand of my new Budyonny breed,’ replied Budyonny. ‘But these horses are our future. Beauties, trained and bred for the finest cavalry.’

‘The prisoners there have been training as cavalry,’ said Satinov.

‘Correct,’ said Vasilevsky. ‘Since many were Cossack prisoners from the Gulags and the horses were on site, I approved cavalry training. And, since we are now so short of tanks, Comrade Stalin has ordered the formation of new cavalry regiments on all fronts.’

‘I knew the tanks would be a passing craze,’ boomed Budyonny, and Satinov could almost see the vodka oozing out of him. ‘This new-fangled technology never works. They just run out of diesel – unlike my horses.’

Satinov looked at Stalin, who cocked his head as if to say: Tell me more. So Budyonny did. ‘Cavalry is the future, the heart of any army. But my horses are bred and trained to perform as the world’s best. Please, Koba,’ he appealed to Stalin, using his old nickname, ‘they shouldn’t be thrown away on ill-trained prisoners.’

‘How dare you speak such shit to Comrade Stalin!’ hissed Beria.

Everyone waited for Stalin’s reaction.

‘Pah!’ Stalin waved his hand. ‘What a typical Cossack. Comrade Budyonny prefers horses to men. Perhaps one of your horses would have commanded your front better than you? Well, fuck that, now we need your beloved horses!’

‘Yes, Comrade Stalin,’ said Budyonny, bowing his head.

Stalin stood up and paced the long room in his soft calf-leather boots. ‘I propose the following: Stavka has lost confidence in Timoshenko’s ability to manage his front. Timoshenko is dismissed.’

Timoshenko saluted and left the office. Stalin kept talking. ‘Gordov will take command of the Stalingrad Front and you, Comrade Satinov, will fly down to Stalingrad and take control. Budyonny, you will fly back to the North Caucasus Front accompanied by Comrade Beria who will shoot anyone who takes one step back. You all leave tonight!’

Budyonny saluted.

‘General Vasilevsky, form your criminals into cavalry battalions for immediate deployment. Who’s in command of these prisoners?’

‘A certain Melishko.’

‘General Melishko?’ Stalin glanced at Beria. ‘He’s still alive? Wasn’t he with you, Lavrenti?’

‘He was,’ replied Beria, who had tortured Melishko personally. He had smashed all his teeth out and still no confession. Very stubborn man, old school. Admirable really.

‘Maybe God preserved him to serve,’ said Stalin thoughtfully. ‘He must have been a good man all along. That’s decided then. Melishko’s First and Second Cavalry Penal Battalions to launch Operation Pluto on the Stalingrad Front.’

‘Orders are already being telegraphed to Penal-Colonel Melishko – that’s his present rank,’ Vasilevsky said.

Stalin stopped pacing and sat behind his desk. ‘Beria, stay behind; the rest of you have your orders; go straight from here to the airport.’

‘Right, Comrade Stalin!’ Satinov and all the others left.

‘Lavrenti,’ said Stalin to Beria, now speaking their native Georgian. ‘Isn’t this the ideal moment for our game of daggers and mirrors?’

‘Yes. Our special operative is ready. His key task is in order, and it’s essential he’s delivered behind enemy lines – even if the Shtrafniki achieve nothing else and not one of them is left alive,’ said Beria.

‘Make sure that happens.’

Stalin stood up and walked out of his office through the antechamber where his bodyguards jumped to their feet, brandishing PPSh sub-machine guns. Four moved in front of him, four followed. It would be so easy for one of them to shoot me in the back of the head, thought Stalin, so easy!

Lighting a cigarette, head down, thinking, he walked through the long deserted corridors of the Kremlin palaces, along a pathway of red carpets over shining parquet, until he reached his apartment. Leaving the guards outside, he closed the door and entered the kitchen where a small but curvaceous teenage girl in a plain blue skirt and white blouse sat alone. She was holding a pencil over an open book.

Svetlana Stalina, red-haired and freckly, jumped to her feet. ‘Papa, you look exhausted!’ She threw herself into his arms and he kissed her forehead.

‘Why aren’t you in bed, girl? It’s after midnight.’

‘I am sixteen, Papa, and I have to do my homework.’

‘It’s good you are working,’ he said. ‘Everyone must work for the Motherland…’

‘Can I feed you, Papa?’

‘My little sparrow can cook! But I’ve eaten.’

‘I heard the Germans are nearing Stalingrad. Can this be true?’

‘Pah! What’s with the questions, Sveta? Who are these panic-mongers you talk to? Papa’s girl doesn’t listen to foolish chatter! Kiss your old peasant papa goodnight and finish your homework.’

After he had gone to his study at the back of the apartment, Svetlana sat down again, and for a moment, she dreamed of the things that all teenage girls dream of. She had never had a boyfriend; no one would touch her. She was Stalin’s child and none of them wanted her. ‘Your friends will want to worm their way into the family because you’re Stalin’s daughter,’ her father had warned. But, on the contrary, all the boys she knew were afraid of her. She was the princess in the Kremlin fortress; the girl in the tower. At the Josef Stalin Communal School 801, she saw her friends meeting boys after lessons, walking around the Patriarchy Pool, even kissing in the Alexandrovsky Gardens right outside the Kremlin. Not her, never her… If only she could fall in love and someone could love her back.

She threw aside her book and started to read an article in Krasnaya Zvezda – or Red Star – the Red Army newspaper. It was by a correspondent called Lev Shapiro who reported from the Stalingrad Front. A few writers stood out: the novelist Ehrenburg with his murderous bombast, a younger writer called Grossman – and this Shapiro whose tales of the carnage in the south hid none of the tragedy of war. Yet he saw the world through such romantic eyes. Who was he? His words reached her, even here in her tower.

In his study along the corridor, Stalin shut the door and, taking off just his boots and tunic, lay down on the long divan, pulled a counterpane over himself, and closed his eyes. Svetlana, my little dove, he thought. You look just like my mother. There was a picture of his late wife, Nadya, Svetlana’s mother, on the table next to his couch. He looked at her round, pouchy face, her dark eyes. Pah, he thought. She let me down. But it’s hard to be Stalin’s wife, Stalin’s daughter. And it’s hardest of all to be Stalin.

And then he thought of the crisis in the south, the direst of the war, and the punishment battalion on the Don. The only way they can redeem themselves is by shedding their own blood, he mused, pleased with his idea, which seemed to belong in Ancient Rome. My reading of history helps me, soothes me, he told himself. But he was too tired to read now. He tried to sleep but he was still shaking. Russia was close to the edge – but this was his destiny in history. To command Russia, and ultimately to triumph, whatever the cost. That was the meaning of the word ‘Stalin’. It was the name he had invented just for this.

He slept spikily in fragments, then awoke again, thinking of that wild, boneheaded, horse-worshipping fool Budyonny and his stallions, and the mission of the Shtrafniki. He half remembered three years earlier ordering Beria: ‘Beat Melishko – he might be a bastard; don’t treat him with silk gloves; he’s mixed up with enemies in Spain; he knows something.’ But he had been a good man all along. And now he was right where he, Stalin, needed him.

He got out of bed in his vest and britches and lifted one of the phones. ‘Get me Melishko,’ he said. ‘Now.’

VII

At the Budyonny Stud Farm Nine, Melishko had finished talking to the General Staff in Moscow and had organized his bandits into the new units ordered by Stavka. Wearing only his underwear, he was now asleep on his mattress on the floor, snoring deeply, when the phone started to ring in his command centre in the farm manager’s house.

His adjutant, fast asleep in a chair in the room, picked up the phone. ‘I’m listening,’ he said.

‘Is this the command of Colonel Melishko at the Budyonny Stud Nine?’

‘It is,’ replied the adjutant.

‘Comrade Stalin on the line for Melishko,’ said the voice impassively.

The sergeant’s first thought was this was a joke. ‘Who?’ He paused and the words stuck in his throat. ‘I’ll get him,’ he said, and ran in his underwear to Melishko’s room in the outhouse.

‘They say Stalin’s on the line,’ he stuttered.

‘Fuckers! Taking the piss, are they?’ But Melishko got up and staggered in his bare feet across the yard to the house, his exposed paunch shaking. He tripped up on a bucket, swore, got up again and ran into the headquarters where he picked up the phone.

‘Melishko on the line,’ he panted. He’d forgotten to put in his false teeth. Hell, I’ll sound like a simpleton, he thought.

He heard the operator connect the call and then the echo of breathing. He stiffened to attention.

‘Melishko.’ The Georgian accent reverberated down the line. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘I am well, Comrade Stalin.’

‘They gave you a hard time in prison. There are too many yes-men in this country who harm innocent people. That’s over now, isn’t it?’

‘It is, Comrade Stalin.’

‘The Motherland needs you. You have your orders? After this attack, you will have your rank back.’

‘Thank you, Comrade Stalin.’

‘And, Melishko?’

‘I hear you, Comrade Stalin.’

‘Your criminals are now Soviet cavalry and you must attack the Germans at full charge. Give no quarter. If you run out of bullets, use your sabres, and if you run out of sabres, kill them with your bare hands… Even if none are left, your men will redeem themselves by shedding their own blood.’

The phone line went dead. Melishko still held the phone. ‘Even if none are left…’ Then he shook his head and called for his adjutant. ‘Get the men on parade,’ he roared. ‘We move out at dawn.’