The Prince of the Soviets

1. ESCAPE FROM CHINA

The window of Nina Kupina’s room was decorated with an intricate pattern of thin red wooden strips. At one time, the room had been occupied by the wife of an important Chinese official, and the window lattices had been a sign of success and prosperity. For Nina, however, they were nothing more than the bars of a prison, serving only to remind her of her captivity. Ever since the Bolsheviks had brought her here, she had been forbidden to leave the house, and for two months now, her world had been reduced to an inner courtyard with a weed-covered pond and a high stone wall.

Officially, the building was occupied by a scholar specializing in Oriental studies. Unofficially, it was the headquarters of the Soviet secret service, sent to Peking to organize workers mutinies and to create a new hotbed of world revolution.

It was very early in the morning, but the entire household was already up. Employees ran back and forth; abandoned possessions and forgotten documents lay scattered among the puddles.

Nina looked anxiously at the cars, which stood at the gates with their doors wide open, while young stenographers hurriedly loaded them with bundles and suitcases.

So, it was true, Nina thought. Moscow had given the order to evacuate.

It had been hot and muggy since dawn, but she kept shivering. If the Bolsheviks left, what would become of her? She hoped fervently that they would leave her behind or simply forget about her, and then she could smash the wooden lattices on the window and escape.

Recently, life for the Soviet workers in Peking had been like sitting on a powder keg. Efforts to incite revolution in China had failed, the Soviet embassy had been ransacked, and now, local communists were being executed without trial. Their severed heads were displayed in town squares as a warning to the public. By August 1927, it became clear that the Soviets were fighting a losing battle.

Moscow had spent vast amounts on propaganda and civil war in China, and somebody had to be held accountable for the disaster. The Soviet agents working in Peking found themselves caught in the middle; to one side of them were the Chinese police officers with their curved swords, and to the other side were their stern colleagues from the Bolshevik party.

The idea of returning to the USSR was an alarming prospect to say the least.

Borisov, the party instructor, came out onto the porch, and Nina shuddered. Whenever the swine had a drink inside him, he would pound at her door, slurring, “How about some class war tonight? Just you and me.” She had had to barricade herself in her room with furniture to keep him out.

Now, Nina watched two men come running up to Borisov with a map. They spread it out on the bonnet of a car and began to argue about something, pointing at different locations.

Please, let them forget about me! she prayed silently.

Six months earlier, she had, as ill luck would have it, ended up on a steamer together with a number of Soviet agents who had been arrested too. The Chinese authorities had not bothered to find out which of the passengers were communists and which were White Russians, those who had fled the country for China after the Bolshevik’s had seized power. The prisoners had been spared from execution only because Moscow had paid an enormous bribe to the judge, who had let them out of custody.

But Nina had fallen straight from one prison into another. The ruler of Peking announced a manhunt for the conspirators, and they had been forced to go into hiding in an old mansion on the edge of the city. One after the other, Nina’s “partners in crime” had been sent back to the USSR, the house’s inhabitants kept changing, and still, Nina sat in her room waiting for her invisible superiors to decide her fate.

She had been to Borisov more times than she could count, pleading him to let her go home. She had told him that she had left behind a husband and a small child in Shanghai, but Borisov would not be moved. He knew that Nina had adopted a Chinese orphan girl and refused to believe that she might really have grown attached to Kitty. As for her husband, he simply laughed at Nina’s face at the first mention of him. “I know you White whores—you sell yourselves to the first capitalist pig you can find.”

Had Borisov known Nina was in charge of a large security organization consisting of several hundred armed White Army men, he would have been the first to put her up against the wall to be shot. It was only in the eyes of the Russian émigrés that Nina had made a brilliant career for herself.

The Bolsheviks saw things differently. In their opinion, if some young lady who had run off to China after the revolution suddenly became rich, it could mean only one thing. After all, it was a well-known fact that nobody could achieve success through their own brains and hard work in a capitalist country.

Things were made worse by the fact that Nina had managed to get American passports for herself and Klim, as an exceptional case, without having set foot in the country. Clearly, she was a spy and an enemy of the workers.

Borisov raised his head and looked in at Nina’s window. Then, with a decisive air, he set off inside the house toward her.

Nina’s heart lurched. What should she do now? Make another barricade? What if Borisov started shooting, or, worse still, set the building on fire? Just a few days ago, the Bolsheviks had been saying that the house would have to be burned after they left because it would be impossible to take all their secret documents with them.

Borisov burst into the room and seized Nina by the arm. “You’re coming with us.”

“Where to?” Nina gasped.

“To the Soviet Union. We’ll hammer all the bourgeois nonsense out of you.”

She tried to make a dash for it, but two guards came running to help Borisov. They pulled Nina from the house and pushed her into the back seat of one of the waiting cars.

Borisov thrust a large, blue-tattooed fist up close to her face. “Just one sound out of you, you bitch, and you’re dead.”

The small procession left Peking in mid-August, and for some weeks, they traveled a circuitous route along country roads, trying to throw the police off the scent.

All this time, the Bolsheviks continued to keep a close eye on Nina. They were tired, their nerves frayed, and they took out their anger on whoever happened to be on hand. For them, letting Nina go would have meant giving the “White bitch” a chance. This was something, in their eyes, she did not deserve.

When they had got as far as Inner Mongolia, they were joined by more cars carrying Chinese communists and their Russian advisers. These newcomers frightened the fleeing Soviet agents by telling them of the in-fighting that had begun among top party officials in Moscow.

Joseph Stalin had unexpectedly begun to build up authority. In casting around for someone to blame for the foreign policy debacle, he had singled out none other than Leon Trotsky—one of the main organizers of the Bolshevik Revolution and the founder of the Red Army. Those who supported Trotsky were now openly referred to as counter-revolutionaries and were being hounded by the press. This was a bad sign. The agents who had worked in Peking had, almost to a man, been supporters of Trotsky.

Nina shuddered to hear the news. If loyal Bolsheviks were seriously concerned about their own fate, what might lie in store for her? Though, truth be told, she was not at all sure she would even reach Soviet Russia. Borisov made no secret of the fact that he was planning to teach her a lesson. He had recently bought himself a chain metal whip at a village market, and he had promised Nina that he would soon be trying out his new acquisition on her.

Once the convoy had crossed the low mountains, they saw the great Gobi Desert stretching to the horizon, but they were not able to travel far across the stony, trackless waste. One of the cars broke down, and as they tried to mend it, night fell.

For the first time since they had left Peking, the fugitives allowed themselves to relax a little. Borisov had some rice vodka in his luggage, and he passed his flask around the circle.

Nina realized that this was her last chance to make a run for it. They had still not gone too far from the last Chinese village.

As the revolutionaries, warmed by the drink, sat around the fire reminiscing about their life in China, Nina hurriedly gathered her possessions. She took only a compass, a blanket, some bread rusks, and a water flask. There was no point in taking more—if she got lost, she would never survive in any case.

Nina tried not to think about what would happen if she managed to make it to a Chinese settlement. She did not know any Chinese, she had no documents, and it would be impossible to send a message to Shanghai—the nearest telegraph office was more than a hundred miles away. But it would be better to rot in remote Chinese backwater than to fall into Borisov’s clutches.

A little the worse for the drink, the Bolsheviks went off to their tents one by one, and when the first light appeared in the sky above the mountains, Nina quietly stole away from the camp.

Hardly a thing could be seen in the gray half-light. Nina made her way across the flat, stony plain by looking at the stars. All around, it was deathly quiet. Twisting an ankle, stepping on a scorpion, or simply grazing a heel—any of these would be enough to spell death.

“Just wait for me—that’s all I ask,” whispered Nina.

For several months now, she had been keeping up a constant conversation with her husband as if Klim could hear every word she said. When the Chinese had arrested her, Klim had rushed to Peking to make all possible efforts to get her released, and this despite all their quarrels and offenses of the past. No matter what happened between them, he never deserted her when she was in trouble.

The Bolsheviks had almost certainly not told Klim where they had taken Nina after the trial, and she could only guess what he had done after that. Had he gone back to Shanghai? Or had he perhaps stayed in Peking?

“Just you wait. I’ll come back to you,” Nina kept saying. “I’ll make everything right again. Just give me a chance.”

When a huge, red sun rose over the desert, Nina was so tired that she felt a constant ringing in her ears and a sharp pain in her side. But she could not stop trudging uphill—she had to walk as far as she could before the heat of the day set in.

Suddenly, the deafening sound of a gunshot broke the silence, and a fountain of small stones erupted right beside Nina. Flinching, she looked around, and her blood ran cold—down below at the foot of the hill stood a familiar, dust-covered Buick.

The German flight instructor, Friedrich, lowering the barrel of his gun, beckoned to Nina. “Come here!”

There was nowhere to hide. Nina sank to the ground and hid her face in her hands. Let them carry her back to the car if they had to.

Borisov came running up, grabbed her by the shoulder, and forced her to her feet.

“Idiot!” he shouted, dealing her a great slap in the face. “Do you know how much petrol we’ve wasted because of you?”

Nina tried to get away, but Borisov twisted her arm and pulled her toward the car.

“You’re for it now!” he hissed. “You backstabber! What if they’d caught you? You’d have handed us all over to the Chinese, wouldn’t you?”

He was about to hit Nina again, but Friedrich stopped him. “We should go,” Friedrich said. “We still have to catch up with the others.”

Nina, sobbing, was bundled into the Buick between boxes of tinned food and a shining gramophone speaker.

“Oh, don’t worry,” said Borisov. “I’ll set you free in a week—without food and water. But first, I’ll thrash the living daylights out of you.”

Friedrich glanced at Nina in the rearview mirror. “Get into the truck with Magda,” he said suddenly in English. “And don’t leave her for a minute, or this scoundrel will beat you to death.”

Nina was bewildered. She had had no idea that any of the Bolsheviks sympathized with her.

Borisov frowned. “What did you just say to her?” He knew no English, despite having spent three years in the Peking Legation Quarter.

“I was just telling her to get into the baggage truck,” said Friedrich. “I don’t want her in my car.”

Englishwoman Magda Thomson felt like a pariah among the Bolsheviks. She had an inherent and irreparable defect in their eyes—she was the heiress of a large soap factory near Liverpool. Tall and heavily built, she looked more like a butcher’s daughter than a “soap princess,” but that did not help—the Bolsheviks looked askance at her. Sometimes they would even mock her openly.

Magda had traveled the world at her leisure before settling in Peking. She took a room in a hotel not far from the Legation Quarter, and one night as she sat reading in her room, she had heard a suspicious scuffle outside the door. Looking out into the corridor, she saw a man clutching a bloody wound on his arm.

“The Chinese police are after me,” he panted. “Could I hide out here with you for a while? My name is Friedrich. And yours?”

At the sight of this Teutonic knight with his haughty stare and close-cropped head of graying hair, Magda had been unable to resist. She let Friedrich stay and began helping him in any way she could: driving him to the apartments of fellow conspirators and organizing the evacuation of Chinese communists and their Russian advisers. At night, they would make love.

Magda asked Friedrich about his plans for the future.

“I’m going to Moscow,” he said.

“But why? You’re a German. What is there for you in Moscow?”

“A new life is dawning there. As for your beloved West, it has nothing to offer but vulgarity, tedium, and moneymaking.”

Friedrich told Magda of how he had been taken prisoner by the Russians during the Great War and how he had become friendly with Bolsheviks and realized that it was his fate to try to bring about world revolution. In China, he had instructed National Revolutionary Army pilots in aerial warfare.

Magda gave Friedrich a nickname in private: Friedrich der Große (Frederick the Great). He knew no fear and was less concerned for his own welfare than he was for that of his comrades and for the general good—as he understood it. He was the first man that Magda had ever met who cared nothing for her fortune. In fact, he thought of it as a burden that she should get rid of as soon as possible.

“I can’t,” Magda explained apologetically. “It’s not my money, you see. It’s my father’s. He just pays all my bills.”

Friedrich never spoke to Magda of love. He assumed that she wanted to help not him personally but his cause, and he was grateful to her for it.

One day, he clasped her tightly by the hand and told her that he was leaving for the Soviet Union.

“The Party will never forget your kindness, Miss Thomson!”

“I’m coming with you,” declared Magda without a second thought.

Friedrich was dumbstruck. He told Magda she had lost her senses and hinted that, as a British capitalist, she might run into some serious problems in the USSR. In reply, Magda said that she was not really scared of anything. She had been traveling around South America and met an Indian medicine man who had given her a special herb to smoke and put a charm over her that was supposed to protect her from a violent death.

Next day, Magda went to see new friends she had made in the Soviet Embassy and managed to get herself a visa.

“Have they lost their minds?” Friedrich yelled, furious, when he found out. “How did you talk them into it?”

Magda smiled enigmatically. She had offered Friedrich’s comrades in arms a large medical truck that they could use to take personal possessions out of China. The Soviet government was only providing enough money to evacuate people, the party archive, and weapons. Everything else was to be left behind.

Friedrich was furious with Magda and warned her not to come near him. The other Bolsheviks kept their distance from her too as if she might infect them with “British Imperialism.”

The journey from China was a long one, and Magda, worn out from fear and loneliness, was overjoyed when Nina Kupina was put into the truck with her, especially as this new fellow passenger spoke excellent English. It was a good thing that Nina was thin too as it meant she could squeeze into the space behind the passenger seat. There was no room in the back; the van was crammed full with bundles, baskets, and boxes.

Day after day, the medical truck trundled across the desert like a solid, stony sea. Watermelons rolled about underfoot while feathers from a number of ladies’ hats nodded overhead, pinned to the ceiling of the driver’s cabin. The Embassy women were hoping to sell them for a profit in Moscow, opting to forget about their anti-capitalist convictions for a while.

Their Chinese driver sang songs, interrupting his singing now and again to curse their guides, who kept getting confused and more than once led the column of vehicles in the wrong direction completely.

“What are we going to do if we run out of gas?” the driver muttered now and again. “Or if there’s a sandstorm?”

Magda was listening with only one ear. Up ahead of them was the Buick driven by Friedrich der Große. She would have given anything on earth to be next to him right now. If there were some disaster, she thought how good it would be to die with him at his side in a single moment! The sands would cover them, and three-hundred years later, they would be discovered by some archeologist, sitting side by side and holding hands. Even death would be powerless to separate them.

But Friedrich had taken Borisov in his car with him, together with an extra water cask—there was nothing there to delight the archeologists of the future.

Magda could not understand why Friedrich was rejecting her. It was true that she was no beauty; it was true that she was English, but these things had never bothered him in the past. And what if he had no desire to make it up to her when they got to Moscow? What if he just disappeared, leaving her to do whatever she wanted?

Magda had no idea what to expect in Soviet Russia. There had been a revolution there ten years ago, followed by civil war and a famine that had claimed the lives of five million people. One of her friends had been in Petrograd in 1921 and told her of rats running around in the hotels. Hotel guests had been issued with a bucket of water a day to wash and to prepare food.

“When did you leave Russia for China?” Magda asked Nina now.

“In October 1922,” Nina said. “There was a terrible shortage of food back then.”

It’s safe to assume, thought Magda, that things wouldn’t have changed too much in five years.

Magda felt anger rising up in her like a wave. The Bolsheviks could not get their own house in order, but here they were trying to teach the world how to create a “bright future.”

She turned to Nina, who was sitting on the floor of the truck and holding on to the armrest of Magda’s seat as the truck kept lurching and bouncing as it went over stones and ruts.

“Do you have a place to stay in Moscow?” Magda asked.

Nina shook her head. “No.”

“Would you like to be my interpreter? I don’t know a word of Russian.”

Nina was silent for a moment. “How long are you planning to stay in Moscow?” she asked. “Until Friedrich changes the anger to mercy?”

Magda had not realized that it was so easy to guess her state of mind.

“I don’t know yet,” she replied, embarrassed.

She had been studying Nina for some time and had noticed that anything and everything merely enhanced this woman’s beauty—she looked lovely even in a shabby skirt and blouse, even with that ever-present look of sadness in her eyes.

Nina attracted attention without any effort on her part. It was just the way she was with her large gray-green eyes, wavy dark hair, and the graceful lines of her neck and shoulders. She was like a fascinating porcelain figurine found at an antique market; to see her was to want her.

Magda, on the other hand, had always had to strive her utmost to prove to others that she was deserving of love and attention.

“I wonder what it would be like to be like you?” she asked, staring quizzically at Nina. “Men are attracted to you immediately. Don’t tell me it isn’t true.”

Nina frowned. “I can’t choose who is attracted to me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Magda smiled. She had the same problem exactly.