The Prince of the Soviets

16. THE RAID

Vadik, the Pioneer leader, promised Tata that if she took an active part in public service, she would be able to join the Pioneers that summer and go on a camping expedition.

Tata had never been anywhere in her life except Moscow and only to places within walking distance of her home. Her mother never gave her any money for the tram.

But a Pioneer camping expedition was a real adventure! The children would pile into an open truck, drive through the streets singing songs, and then set off with their backpacks far away into the unknown—perhaps even as far as the Moscow suburbs.

Tata was already in agonies of joy and suspense.

She registered on a three-person team or troika on a state-wide project to stamp out illiteracy, taking the place of a boy who had recently come down with tuberculosis. The members of the troika were to go around the neighborhood recruiting adults who could not read and write for literacy classes.

The thought of knocking on strangers’ doors terrified Tata, but she told Julia and Inessa, the other members of the troika, that she was shivering from cold rather than fear and embarrassment. It was twenty degrees below outside.

Tata had a warm hat knitted with yarn from an unraveled old sweater, but her coat was a pitiful sight. It had been made from a plush mat decorated with squirrels. These squirrels were the cause of merciless taunting from her classmates.

The troika expedition was a disaster from the start. In the first building they went to, they were met with crude insults. In the next, they were stopped by a fierce dog in the yard. In the third, a maid told them to wait while she went to the store for kerosene, and they sat for two hours on the stairs for nothing. When the maid came back, she was visited by a fireman, and the shameless couple began kissing in front of the children.

Julia dug Tata in the ribs. “Say something!”

“Do you know that in 1920, six hundred and forty-five Russians out of every thousand couldn’t read?” began Tata, stammering. “And now the figure is only four hundred and fifty-six.”

“And do you know when you’re not wanted?” barked the fireman and stamped his foot at the girls.

The troika fled outside.

“It’s all your fault!” Julia said and gave Tata a cuff around the head.

It was getting dark over the boulevard, and the sound of a brass band could be heard from behind the trees. Despite the cold weather, the rink on Chistye Prudy was crowded with skaters.

“What do you think? Shall we keep going?” asked Tata, her teeth chattering.

“She said she wasn’t afraid to go ‘round houses on her own,” said Julia to her friend. “Didn’t she?”

“Yes, she did!” Inessa nodded.

Tata was taken aback. “What do you mean ‘on my own’? Vadik said that the three of us should work as a team.”

“She’s a ‘fraidy cat,’” snorted Inessa scornfully. “When we go camping, she’ll probably start crying for her mommy.”

“I’m not afraid!” Tata protested. “I can go ‘round houses on my own!”

“Well, let’s see you do it then,” taunted Julia. “Do you see that house with the turret? Go and find out if there’s anyone living there who can’t read or write.”

There was nothing for it. Hunching miserably, Tata shuffled toward her doom.

At the gate, Tata was met by a man with a ginger toothbrush mustache.

“I know just the person you need,” he said,\ when Tata told him she was looking for anybody who could not read and write. “Come with me.”

He took her across the yard and shown her the entrance door. “Go up one flight of stairs,” he said. “There’s only one apartment. It’s impossible to miss.”

Tata felt like a terrible fool. Luckily, she had a piece of paper with a speech on it, dictated by Julia. Without it, she would have been unable to say a word.

She reached the apartment, rang the doorbell, and when the door opened, she began to read aloud, unable to look the tenant in the eyes.

“Good afternoon, Comrade Tenant!” she said, struggling to decipher her own scribbles. “We are re-pre-sen-ta-tives from the troika of… oh, well, never mind that now…. What’s your profession?”

She looked up and froze.

“My profession? Journalist,” said Uncle Klim, smiling down at her.

“Can you read and write?” Tata heard herself saying in a small voice.

“Of course not!” came a voice from the staircase. It was the man with the ginger mustache. “Mr. Rogov, I sent this young lady up to you on purpose, so she could teach you to read and do your sums.”

Tata wished the ground would swallow her up.

“I’m sorry,” she said, blushing. “I just wanted to know if anybody here needed help learning the alphabet.”

At that moment, Kitty came rushing out. “Here you are!” she cried delightedly, hugging Tata.

“Won’t you come in?” suggested Uncle Klim.

Mother will hit the roof when she finds out I came to see the Rogovs without permission, though Tata helplessly. Nevertheless, she entered the apartment.

“I’ll just come in for a minute to warm up,” she said.

As soon as she stepped inside, Tata realized that Uncle Klim was no revolutionary; he was a bourgeois. His home was a bastion of materialism—there was a mirror, a grand piano, and pictures of some fancy wenches on the walls. With a father like that, no wonder Kitty had some gaps in her education.

Uncle Klim brought in a samovar from the kitchen.

“Kapitolina isn’t here, so we’ll have to fend for ourselves,” he said. He put down a dish of candy on the table. “Help yourself.”

Tata gasped. Her mother always squirreled away sweets, and only once in a blue moon would she nibble on a toffee, letting Tata have half.

Tata reached out her hand to the dish, but at that moment, she remembered how all the children at school had been urged to eat only the right candies—the ones in ideologically sound wrappers which were called things like “Internationale,” “Republican,” or “Lives of the Peasants Then and Now.”

But all Uncle Klim had were candies, their wrappers decorated with a picture of a girl bobbing a curtsey.

Tata looked at Kitty who had already put a candy in her mouth.

“How many can I have?” she asked, despising herself for her lack of character.

“As many as you like,” Uncle Klim said.

Tata drank some delicious tea, ate candies and cookies, and began to feel that she was developing bourgeois tendencies.

“Let’s see what books you have,” she said, looking at Klim’s bookshelves. “Anna Karenina, poetry… some sentimental rubbish! That’s harmful literature. Self-indulgent drivel.”

Uncle Klim looked at her with unfeigned curiosity. “So, what reading do you consider good for the soul?”

“There’s no such thing as a soul,” snapped Tata. Then she added, not entirely truthfully, “I’m interested in politics, not fiction. At the moment, our class is reading Lenin’s speech to the third Young Communist Congress. I don’t suppose you’ve ever inoculated yourself with the germ of revolution.”

Uncle Klim burst out laughing and said that he would write down that phrase in his notebook; it would be useful for one of his articles. This ought to have pleased Tata; after all, it isn’t every day adults want to make a note of your words. But she had an uneasy feeling the conversation was not going well.

“Come on. I want to show you something!” said Kitty, and, grabbing Tata by the hand, she led her into the other room.

Tata was amazed to see that Kitty had a bedroom to herself, and more toys than Tata had ever seen in her life. Kitty reached under the bed, brought out a colored magazine with a picture of a bourgeois lady on the cover, and settled down on the rug.

“Let’s play. You can be her, and I’ll be her.”

One picture in the magazine showed the beach and some scantily clad girls, the other—a bride and groom at a wedding table laden with cakes.

“Let’s eat all those!” said Kitty, beaming. “Yum-yum!”

Tata decided to take charge. She announced that they would play at a communist wedding.

“I’ll be the secretary of a Young Communist organization, and you can be a worker bride who is getting married to… how about this teddy bear?”

Kitty shook her head. “No, he’s too young for me. We bought him yesterday.”

Tata spent a long time trying to pick out a potential husband: Kitty’s rag horse, a wooden duck on wheels, and a progressive worker from the Liberated Labor factory whose portrait was in the paper. Eventually, Kitty agreed to marry a giraffe painted on her bedroom wall.

Tata read out a report about the new way of life in the Soviet Union and presented the newlyweds with a blanket from the women’s union and a pillow from the factory management.

Uncle Klim knocked at the door. “Tata, I’ve been called out on business urgently. Would you mind staying here with Kitty?”

“Of course not,” she said.

He pulled on his coat. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Be good!”

“We will,” promised Tata, a brilliant plan already taking shape in her head.

About thirty journalists were crowded into the press room. They sat around a long table, typewriters at the ready.

“What can it be at this time of night?” muttered Seibert irritably, yawning.

“I expect they’ve signed yet another report on the unbreakable alliance between the USSR and Afghanistan,” replied Klim. He was sure they had all been brought here for nothing, for some story that presented no interest whatsoever to the world’s news agencies.

Still, the journalists allowed themselves to dream of larger-than-life heroes and dangerous villains.

“We really are a bunch of vultures,” said Seibert, looking around at his colleagues. “We feed off battles, plagues, and disasters. The more dead bodies, the happier we are.”

At last, Weinstein came into the room. “Are you ready? This is the front page of tomorrow’s Pravda.” He began handing out mimeographed sheets to the journalists. “Familiarize yourselves with the facts and wire the story to your agencies as quickly as you can. All the censors are in situ, so you can start right away.”

Klim scanned the text quickly. It was a report from the prosecutor of the Supreme Court about the discovery of a large clandestine counter-revolutionary organization in the Shakhty region in the south-east of Russia. The counter-revolutionaries, most of them engineers and technical specialists, had deliberately caused fires and explosions in mines. They had embezzled money allocated for construction, driven up costs, and spoiled production. Their objective was to reduce the USSR’s defense capabilities in the event of a military attack. The coordinators of the plot were White émigrés from Russia who had close ties with German industrialists and Polish intelligence.

The journalists were dumbstruck. They had joked for years over the Bolsheviks’ fears of some foreign power invading the Soviet Union. A poverty-stricken rural economy with almost no transport to speak of and no easily navigable waterways—what a prize! But if there really had been a plot, did that mean that the journalists had missed a trick?

Klim looked at the figures again. Of course, it was possible to fabricate some sensational crime and make a worldwide scandal out of it—it was just the sort of thing that could be expected from the Soviet secret police. But how could you fake the collapse of coal mining in an entire region?

The journalists all began to ask questions at once.

“How many people have been arrested?”

“A few hundred,” said Weinstein. “The case is seen as one of national importance, and the most dangerous of the saboteurs will go on trial in Moscow.”

Seibert was more agitated than anyone else. “Which German firms are suspected of financing the plot?”

“That’s a state secret for now,” Weinstein said. “There will be an open session of the panel of the Supreme Court, and we’ll find out the facts then.”

Seibert, stunned, turned to Klim. “It looks as if there’ll be no shortage of dead meat.”

The room filled up with the clatter of typewriters and the ringing of carriage bells.

Weinstein walked up to Klim and bent down to speak into his ear.

“This is your chance to improve your record,” he said. “Just make sure you get everything down honestly and objectively.”

Klim nodded without looking at him. The world seemed to have been turned upside down. A few minutes ago, everything had seemed clear: the Bolsheviks were ham-fisted cynics who blamed all their own ills on nonexistent foreign enemies. They used propaganda, lies, and the abuse of power as weapons and fed on ignorance and superstition of the majority of their countrymen. But now, everything seemed more complicated and more terrible. There was no rational explanation for what had happened in the Shakhty region. Why had the conspirators acted as they had? What was their objective?

Klim was the first to finish writing his dispatch. He rushed off to the censors’ office.

Kogan, a censor notorious for his tireless harassment of journalists, beckoned Klim over and asked for the dispatch.

“Now let’s see. What have we got here?” Kogan asked. “‘Unconfirmed information about foreign links’…. Let me tell you that all our information is confirmed—backed up by evidence.”

Rather than erasing the offending words, Kogan cut them out neatly with nail scissors, which took some time.

Seibert came rushing up to the next table, but he too did not get permission straight away.

“This has to be rewritten,” ordered his censor. “The tone is completely unacceptable.”

Kogan handed Klim his stamped dispatch, which now resembled a paper doily, and Klim rushed outside.

As luck would have it, there were no cabs to be seen, but a truck bearing the slogan “Live Poultry” was just coming around the corner.

Klim flagged down the truck. “Take me to the central telegraph office on Tverskaya Street, and I’ll give you three rubles.”

The driver opened the door of his cabin. “Jump in!”

They set off at top speed to the deafening sound of clattering cages and clucking chickens. A few minutes later, Klim, now covered in white feathers, had arrived at his destination.

Luckily, there was nobody at the window for Overseas Telegrams. But the next moment, a long line of journalists all panting for breath had formed there, Seibert right behind Klim.

“I should be the first in the queue!” Seibert grumbled. “But my car wouldn’t start.”

“Put your dispatches here, comrade foreigners,” ordered the telegraph operator. “We’ll send them right away.”

She gathered together the stamped forms and picked up the one at the top of the pile.

“That’s not fair!” the line exploded in indignant protests. “It’s a form of the last one who came!”

To Klim’s relief, the telegraph operator turned over the pile and took up his own form, which was now on top.

“Why do you have three addresses written here?” she asked in a stern voice.

Klim moved closer to the window. “The text has to be sent to London, New York, and Tokyo.”

“That’s not allowed.” She handed him back his form. “You’ll have to write it out three times.”

“Didn’t you know the rules had changed?” asked Seibert with feigned sympathy. “I was wondering how you managed to get here before me?”

The telegraph operator picked up Seibert’s form.

“Listen,” Klim pleaded with her, “yesterday, my courier brought you a form signed by the censor, and I called you and dictated seven addresses it had to be sent to. And there was no problem!”

“For the telephone, the rules are still the same,” the telegraph operator cut him off. “Go back to the censor’s office and write out your forms out again.”

The journalists patted Klim’s shoulder compassionately. “That’s a shame, really.”

Klim headed toward a nearby payphone on the wall, put a coin into the slot, and asked to speak to the operator at the window for Overseas Telegrams. He watched the woman picking up the phone.

“Hello,” she said. “It’s you, is it? Very well. Dictate the addresses to me.”

“They’re written on the form in front of you.”

“Dictate them anyway. That’s the rule.”

The journalists laughed at Seibert who had turned green with envy. “Sometimes you have to lose, man!”

“Just you wait,” he said, enraged. “I’ll show the lot of you!”

Klim got home after seven. As he opened the door to the stair, he stopped short in amazement. Tata and Kitty were coming backward down the stairs, dragging a heap of objects wrapped in a tablecloth.

“Now, look here, young ladies—” Klim stopped them. “What on earth is going on?”

Kitty pushed up her cap, which had fallen over her eyes. “Tata and I are trying to put a stop to your bourgeois lifestyle!”

A crystal glass slipped out of the bundle, hit the stairs, and smashed to pieces.

“Private property degrades and corrupts!” lectured Tata. “You need to throw out all this useless junk, or soon, you’ll be completely degenerate.”

Without a word, Klim grabbed the bundle and took it back up the stairs.

“Acquisition of material objects is like a swamp!” Tata cried. “It swallows you up! You live among all your vases and serviettes and don’t even notice how your own mind is in the grip of a hostile psychology!”

“Go home now, please,” Klim said to her over his shoulder. “And don’t dare show your face here again.”

“Daddy!” yelled Kitty, rushing after him.

Klim let her into the apartment and slammed the door.

The apartment had been completely ransacked. Cinema posters were torn off the walls, curtains pulled away from the windows, and books lay all over the floor. It looked as if it there had been a raid by the police.

Klim felt himself shaking with fury at Tata. The girl needed to see a nerve doctor—there was clearly something wrong with her!

All the same, it occurred to him that a twelve-year-old girl should not be walking around Moscow on her own so late at night.

He went out to the stairs and called out to her, “Tata!”

But she was no longer on the stairs, and there was no sign of her in the yard either.

Klim went back to the apartment. Taking the sniveling Kitty in his arms, he sat down with her on the divan.

“I know you wanted the best for me,” he said. “But look around you: are things better now or worse than they were?”

Kitty put her arms around his neck and burst into loud sobs. “Do you want me to go and stand in the corner?”

“No, I want you to come and wash your face and then go to bed. You didn’t raid your own room, did you?

“No-o! I didn’t want to give away my horses.”

“Well, you see! You mustn’t take other people’s things without asking them.”

Kitty nodded. “I understand. We mustn’t take any of your things, but we can take Elkin’s things. He’s a Nepman and a criminal element.”

“Who told you that? Is this Tata again?”

“Ye-es…”

“Don’t listen to her.”

Klim did not know what to do. Kitty was surrounded on all sides by barbarism and stupidity. Whether she liked it or not, it was starting to affect her.

He had to put a stop to the friendship with Tata. The raiding of the apartment was the thin end of the wedge. The next thing he knew, there would be denunciations to the authorities or worse.

When Tata got home, her mother was already asleep, and she was able to climb unnoticed into her wardrobe. The next morning, she did not breathe a word about what had happened but ran off to school.

She was furious with Uncle Klim; he had no right to inflict such damage on Kitty’s young mind!

If Tata were an adult, she would have insisted on removing Kitty from her father’s care and having her brought up by the Young Pioneer organization. Then Kitty could grow up to be a true Bolshevik.

But what could Tata do now as a little girl who had not even been accepted into the Pioneers?

After classes, there was a meeting of the school editorial committee, and Tata was given the task of putting together a Stengazeta, a newspaper in the form of a poster, to mark thirty-five years of literary work by Maxim Gorky.

She was entrusted with a large piece of white paper and some watercolor paints—hugely precious items.

“Look after those,” Vadik warned her. “That’s the last we have. If you do the job well, I’ll give a good report on you to the Young Pioneers.”

Tata promised to be as careful as she could.

As soon as she got home, she set to work. She wrote out the title “To Gorky from the Young Pioneers,” and neatly pasted some articles by school reporters below it. It looked very good indeed.

There was a little room left in the bottom left-hand corner, and Tata decided to use it to make an important suggestion:

The door opened, and Tata’s mother came in. She grabbed Tata by the collar, dragged her out from behind the table, and smacked her hard upside the head.

“What did you do that for?” wailed Tata.

“I’ll give you ‘what for,’ you little brat!” her mother yelled. “Tell me why you ransacked the Rogov’s apartment?”

Tata took a step back. “Uncle Klim is a class traitor…” she began in a trembling voice. “He’s supposed to be educated, but he has portraits of filthy bourgeois all over his walls—”

“I’ll give you ‘filthy bourgeois’!”

Her mother looked around her, eyes wild. Her gaze fell on the poster.

“No, Mother, please!” squealed Tata, but it was too late. Her mother tore the poster to pieces, threw them to the floor, and stamped on them.
“That’ll teach you to touch things that don’t belong to you! Out of my sight!”

Tata darted into the wardrobe. She heard her mother collapse onto the bench and weep bitterly.

“You fool!” her mother said in between sobs. “I hope you’re satisfied! He said to me he won’t let Kitty come to our house anymore because you’re a bad influence.”

“What?” Tata, in her astonishment, peeked out of the wardrobe.

“Shut that door this minute!” shouted her mother. “Or I swear, I’ll thrash the living daylights out of you!”

Tata buried her face in the mattress. How could she go to school now? What would she tell them about the poster?

And what a beast Uncle Klim had turned out to be! An informer and a villain! How could he forbid children to play with one another? Didn’t he feel sorry for his own daughter?

Tata felt that Kitty had become the most darling person in her life. She remembered how the two of them had been sitting on the windowsill in the evenings, playing that everything around them was different.

They had made believe that the dilapidated houses were beautiful glass and concrete buildings, the woodsheds were smart kiosks, and the linen hanging in the yard was the flags of different socialist republics. A milkman carrying a frost-covered churn on his sled was a famous Arctic explorer and researcher. Mitrofanych, one of the tenants of their apartment, had walked up to the milkman, and Kitty had wanted him to be a polar explorer too, but Tata disliked him. So, she had made him one of the sleigh dogs.

Then the girls had gone off on their own expedition beyond the fence to look for the Tunguska meteorite.

Had all this really come to an end?