The Prince of the Soviets

2. THE WORKERS’ CAPITAL

A month later, the fugitives crossed the border with the USSR and reached a nameless outpost where an international sleeping car sent from Moscow awaited them.

The Bolshevik agents began to breathe more easily. If they were being welcomed in this manner, surely they were not about to be reprimanded? Perhaps this was a sign that the party leadership knew they had done everything they could in China to further the world revolution and had failed only through force of circumstance.

They were gripped by a childlike excitement. Here they were, back home at last, among their own people. They had survived the journey across the desert and had met neither soldiers nor the Honghuz bandits who preyed on trade caravans. Now, they felt sure, everything would be all right.

Covered head to foot in dust, their faces burned dark by the desert sun, the fugitives began to stow their baggage onto the overhead racks of the sleeping car.

“The train will leave in five minutes!” shouted the attendant, a handsome old man with impressive gray whiskers.

Nina and Magda got into the compartment allotted to them.

There were bundles of stiffly starched bed linens on the seats. A vase holding a single flower and a menu for the restaurant car were on the window table.

On the other side of the compartment came the sound of laughter and water splashing. One of their fellow passengers was clearly marveling at the fact that there was running water on the train.

Nina walked up to the mirror on the back of the door and lifted a strand of curly hair above her head where it stayed stiffly standing on end.

“When we finally take a proper bath, we’ll wash away a ton of dirt,” said Magda. “I hope they still have bathtubs in Moscow.”

Somebody knocked at the window, and Magda opened it. It was Borisov.

“Get Nina for me,” he ordered.

Nina walked reluctantly to the window. “What do you want?”

Borisov took a newspaper from his pocket and tossed it to her. “Look at this. I just bought it in the station.”

On the first column was a large headline: “Trotsky expelled from the list of candidates for the Comintern Executive Committee.” The same article told of the arrest of several traitors who had “undermined the very basis of the party’s social construction project” and “introduced division among the Bolshevik cadres.”

“It would be suicide to go to Moscow,” Borisov whispered. “If they’ve got rid of Trotsky, they’ll eat us alive. And you into the bargain.” Borisov looked about him to make sure nobody was listening.

“Come with me to Khabarovsk,” he said under his breath. “I have money—we’ll be all right. Don’t tell me you want to go with that great English heifer to the slaughter.”

Nina closed the window with a rattle.

“What did he say?” asked Magda as the train began to move.

Nina sat down on the seat and hugged herself as if she were cold.

“Miss Thomson,” she said, “it’s dangerous to go to Moscow. Why don’t we get out at the very first station and go to Vladivostok? We could get a steamer to Shanghai from there.”

Magda refused point-blank. “I understand you’re anxious to get back to your husband, but I don’t want to lose Friedrich either. I can take care of you. My father has lots of friends in parliament. We can send Klim a telegram, and he can wire you the money for the return trip.”

“The Bolsheviks couldn’t care less about your parliament,” Nina said. “You won’t find any diplomats here or any legal system to speak of. They can just accuse you of spying and shoot you on the spot.”

Low hills covered in reddish grass stretched away outside the window. From time to time, a chain of railcars would pass, and they would glimpse horses’ faces and the broadcloth helmets of Red Army soldiers. Troops were being sent off somewhere.

Magda slurped at the tea that the attendant had brought in for them. “I don’t know whom Frederick thinks he’s trying to fool,” she said. “Nobody can live without love. He’s just worried about getting me into trouble. But I told him straight away that I’m not afraid of anything… well, perhaps except my father when he’s angry. We just need time to get to know one another better.”

Nina sat in silence. All she could think of was that every second was taking her farther and farther away from Klim.

The train flew across half the length of Russia and eventually arrived in Moscow.

Nina was preparing herself for the worst. Any minute, officers from the OGPU might come to the door of their compartment and begin to question her: How had she ended up in China? What had she been up to there?

Magda was also looking as if she had seen a ghost. She was staring through the window at a porter stamping about on the station platform, an enormous man with a brutish face, a matted beard, and a lighted cigarette dangling from his thick lips. He was the spitting image of the Bolsheviks on political posters shown making their way toward a horrified Europe.

“If they try to arrest us,” Nina said in a trembling voice, “jump out onto the rails and hide under the train. Then we’ll run in different directions: you go toward the station, and I’ll go over there to that freight train. We can meet in twenty-four hours on the square in front of the station—in the place where the cab drivers wait for fares.”

There was a knock at the door. Nina pressed her hand to her lips. That was it. They were done for.

But it was only Friedrich.

“What are you doing sitting around in here?” he said. “Go to the Second House of Soviets. They’re expecting you there.”

“And what about you?” fretted Magda. “Where are you going?”

“To the Comintern Hostel.”

Friedrich called a porter, who tied Marga’s suitcases with a leather strap and hoisted them onto his shoulder.

“Where to?” the porter asked.

“To the exit,” ordered Friedrich as he led Magda and Nina through the crowds of passengers.

Nina wondered whether she ought to make a run for it before it was too late. Or would it be better to stay close to Magda? If she were to run away, where could she hide, and how could she survive when she knew no one in the city? And then there was Magda’s influential father who could mobilize the British Parliament if anything were to happen—or so she claimed.

“Friedrich?” said Nina. “What’s the Second House of the Soviets?”

“You’ll see in a minute,” he answered.

Nina assumed it was the place foreigners were taken for interrogation.

Nina had been expecting Moscow to be like some abandoned citadel ransacked by the enemy, but it was quite different. The smart station building had been recently refurbished, and there were lots of people on the streets, although nobody here was dressed in the European manner.

Moscow had its own distinctive style of dress. The men wore trousers of woolen cloth, Russian shirts, and peaked hats while the women were all in calico dresses and headscarves tied low over their foreheads.

Friedrich took Nina and Magda out into the square outside the station and pointed to a small Renault parked close by.

“Get yourselves a cab,” he said.

“When will I see you again?” asked Magda with a pleading note in her voice.

“I’ll come and find you.”

Once they were in the car, Magda began her ruminations about love again, but Nina wasn’t listening; she was watching the twilight city as it rushed by outside the window of the cab. So, here it was, the city that was talked of the world over as the embodiment of all evil.

There were crowds of people streaming along the narrow pavements and into open shop doorways. But every minute, it was harder for Nina to make out the shop signs, which were not illuminated as they had been in Shanghai.

There were far fewer cars in Moscow than there had been in China. People got around using horse-cabs or trams, which were full to overflowing. The windows in the buildings were lit up from top to bottom, and even the basement windows below pavement level threw out yellow rectangles of light.

“Why are all the lights on?” Nina asked their driver.

“There are tenants in every room,” he said. “Before you might have had some gentleman taking up a whole apartment by himself. But things are different now. Every family gets a room, and there’s no waste.”

Nina translated his words to Magda.

“Could you imagine if you had to share your house with strangers?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t mind if one of them was Friedrich,” answered Magda

The magic charms of the medicine man in South America had done more than protect Magda from violent death, it seemed. They had also cured her of common sense.

The Second House of Soviets turned out to be the former Hotel Metropol. Before, it had been used by members of the government. Now, they had been given private apartments, and the hotel rooms were being rented out to foreigners once again.

Magda’s spirits lifted immediately when she saw the lobby, which was more than respectable with its marble floors and glittering chandeliers.

“There. You see?” she said to Nina. “Things are looking up.”

On the downside, the prices at the Metropol were extortionate. They had to pay as much to stay a night as they would have paid for a whole month in a Peking hotel.

“The country needs hard currency,” explained the receptionist bluntly.

When he asked for their documents, Magda gave him her passport with a five-pound-note inside it.

“This woman is my guest,” she said, indicating Nina.

“I see,” said the receptionist quietly, dropping the note into a desk drawer.

As it was elsewhere, so it was in the land of the Soviets: money might not buy you everything, but it certainly helped solve most problems.

Nobody thought to arrest Nina and Magda. They stayed in the Metropol, dining in the restaurant on the ground floor and getting to know the foreigners who had come to the capital to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Magda kept asking after Friedrich, hoping that some foreign communists might know where to find him, but the days passed without a word or sign of him. Friedrich clearly had no intention of resuming relations with his old sweetheart.

“He’s just very busy,” Magda kept saying. “He needs time to sort out his affairs, and he knows where to find me.”

Nina had also had bad news. She had sent a telegram to Klim at home and at his workplace, but they had come back marked “Addressee not known here.” She was beside herself now at the thought that something might have happened to Klim and Kitty.

The telegrams she had sent to her friends had also gone unanswered. There was unrest in Shanghai, and a many of the white settlers had decided to leave, to be on the safe side.

There was nobody to help her out, and Nina would have to find the money for her journey home herself. It would take months to save up the sum needed on the salary she was getting from Magda, and then she had to get the necessary documents to get across the border—a seemingly impossible task.

Magda could not increase Nina’s pay. She did not have enough money herself as her father had refused to pay her bills.

“Come back to England immediately,” he sent back a cable in reply to her request. He did not want to invest a single penny in Bolshevik Russia.

For days on end, Nina and Magda would walk about Moscow looking at the sights, from the wooden mausoleum in which Lenin’s embalmed body lay on show to the Anti-Religious Museum, which had been set up in the old Strastnoy Monastery.

The whole of the city was preparing for the 7th of November when the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution would be celebrated. Buildings were being repaired and refurbished right and left, and columns of workers armed with training rifles or wearing gas masks were marching the streets—in a rehearsal of the coming military parade.

The Soviet Union was living in expectation of imminent war. It could be felt everywhere, in the headlines of the papers and the conversations at the markets.

Posters had been put up all around the town:

“Who are the Bolsheviks preparing to fight?” asked Magda, puzzled.

“Why, the English, of course. Who else?” Nina said with a smile. “After all, you’re planning to attack the USSR—all the newspapers are talking about it.”

Magda was terribly upset when she found out that the USSR was seriously expecting English warplanes to appear in the skies at any moment.

“But that’s absolute nonsense!” she argued. “The Soviet government knows that it’s physically impossible. Why are they deliberately misleading the population?”

Nina knew very well why. For years now, the Bolsheviks, dreaming of world revolution, had been spending huge amounts of money on financing strikes and armed uprisings around the globe. As a result, the Soviet Union was now looked upon as a criminal state that supported radicals and thought nothing of carrying out sabotage in neighboring countries while it talked about “friendship between nations.”

Britain had cut off diplomatic relations with the USSR; France had expelled the Soviet ambassador; in Poland, the Soviet ambassador had been killed; in China, communists were hunted down like rabid dogs. Moreover, newspapers around the world were printing documents to prove that the Bolsheviks had carried out subversive action not only in Europe but also in Asia.

All this had been interpreted by the Kremlin as the “eagerness of the imperialists to stifle the new Soviet state,” and they were now preparing for a major war. It was vital too for the government to whip up war hysteria so that the Soviet people would rally around their leaders and don’t complain about the empty shops and queues for bread. It may have been peacetime, but now, ten years after the revolution that had promised prosperity for the working class, the country was back in the same state of economic crisis it had experienced in 1917.

Magda went to the department store to buy Nina warm clothes, but it turned out that she would have to pay forty rubles for a pair of ugly shoes with crooked seams, seven rubles for a pair of cotton stockings, and a hundred and fifty rubles for a winter coat.

“Remember, you told me that the average salary for a Moscow worker is seventy-five rubles a month?” Magda said, puzzled. “How do ordinary people manage?”

Nina sighed. “I wish I knew.”

They left the shop empty-handed, and Magda made Nina a present of a velvet coat she had brought herself as a souvenir in Peking. It was an enormous, bright red horror with a folded collar and dragons embroidered on the back.

“You can alter it as you like,” she told Nina. “You can’t go about without a warm coat, and it would be mad to buy one at Soviet prices.”

Nina worked on it for several days and transformed it into an elaborate but smart oriental-style cropped coat and a beret.

When she wore her new winter clothes, Nina was repeatedly mistaken for a participant in one of the fancy-dress performances staged to discredit the English. Young people from a propaganda brigade would wheel an enormous effigy of an Englishman about the streets of the city. From time to time, they would prop it on its knees, read some fiery, passionate speeches, and then begin to beat the cursed “Anglo-Saxon” over the head. Once, one of these Soviet youngsters even handed Nina a wooden mallet and told her to deal the effigy a blow on behalf of the Chinese insurgents.

Magda was trying to think how she could earn enough money to support herself. Every day, the Soviet papers and pamphlets brought into the Metropol carried announcements about how the USSR was planning to modernize its industry and how the country needed urgent help to acquire and develop the latest technology.

Magda wrote a short instruction book on soap making and asked Nina to translate it into Russian. But to her surprise, none of the publishers she approached offered her a contract.

“It’s an interesting topic,” the editor from the state publishing house, Gosizdat, told Magda, “but we need permission from the Administration for Literary Affairs.”

Elsewhere, she was asked for a piece of paper from the People’s Commissariat for Education, from the Supreme Soviet for Domestic Economy, or even from the OGPU.

“Do they think I’ve written something wrong?” fumed Magda. “They can submit it for scrutiny if they like. Let them send it to a specialist!”

“They won’t be submitting anything for scrutiny,” Nina said, wearily. “They just don’t want any problems with foreigners. Who knows? You could be a foreign agent or a saboteur. And if so, they’ll have to answer for it.”

Although Nina tried to convince herself that she had nothing to do with the Land of the Soviets, she felt ashamed in front of Magda on account of the publishers, the effigy of the Englishmen, and the ugly shoes on sale for forty rubles.

Nina was also trying to think of ways to earn money.

The All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries was handing out free tickets to the Bolshoi Theater to the guests at the Metropol so that foreign visitors could get a taste of Soviet culture. But far from all of them were interested in going to the opera, and some were happy to sell their tickets to Nina.

They did not realize that the Bolshoi Theater was the bastion of Soviet high society. This was where the country’s elite gathered—the wives of people’s commissars, famous writers, and sometimes members of the Central Committee. Many Russians would give their back teeth for a seat in the stalls; as for a ticket for a box reserved for foreigners, it was nothing short of a passport to paradise.

Nina came back to her hotel room after concluding another successful deal with the ticket traders and spread out her profits on the bed. One hundred and thirty rubles—not a great deal, perhaps, but at least now she could sense a glimmer of hope on the horizon.

Tucking the money away into her knitted purse, Nina looked out of the window. The clock in the middle of Sverdlov Square said five o’clock. Where could Magda have got to?

Magda had begun gathering material for a book she was planning to write about the Soviet Union. She had already come to the gypsies who lived in Petrovsky Park, and on another occasion, she had visited a flophouse that was home to hundreds of criminals, prostitutes, and down-and-outs. Given her formidable size and strength, she had decided she had nothing to fear.

Darkness fell, and a light autumn rain began to drum against the window pane. Several times, Nina picked up the novel borrowed from the hotel library, but all her thoughts were of Magda. Where had she got to this time? To interview the cleaners of public toilets, or to attend a meeting of Trotsky’s supporters?

It was one in the morning when Nina heard heavy footsteps in the corridor followed by a knock at the door.

“H’llo—I’m back,” Magda said in a drunk voice.

She stomped damply across the room and fell onto her bed without taking off her boots or her coat.

“What’s the matter with you?” gasped Nina.

“Not with me. With Friedrich. He does care about me after all.”

Magda had found the Comintern Hostel, gained entrance in through the kitchens, and arrived in Friedrich’s room just in time for a celebration. The Party had forgiven him all his Chinese transgressions, both voluntary and involuntary, and appointed him pilot of a new passenger airplane.

“A Fokker-Grulich F II!” exclaimed Magda with relish. “Now Friedrich will be flying from Moscow to Berlin three times a week.”

Suddenly, she blanched, got to her feet, and rushed to the toilet. Soon, dreadful groans could be heard from behind the door.

Magda was in such a bad way that Nina stayed by her side all night. When Magda was feeling a little better, she began to describe her meeting with Friedrich, her voice full of affection.

“Tomorrow, there’ll be a parade in honor of the anniversary of the revolution. Friedrich has given me a special pass for the tribune, for important foreign guests. He told me it will be a military parade by the Red Army to show enemies—well, to show us, I suppose—that the Soviet people fear nothing. Oh, I need to go to the lavatory!”

Nina went to the floor manager and brought some clean towels.

“If you can’t hold your drink, you’ve no business drinking!” she scolded Magda. “Did you talk to Friedrich about your relationship?”

“We didn’t have a chance,” said Magda in a weak voice. “We—I mean Friedrich has had a hard time of it. He’s a loyal supporter of Trotsky, but he was forced to denounce him. He had to sign a document saying that the Chinese revolution was failed on account of the Trotskyites, who were part of a worldwide capitalist plot. Otherwise, he could have been sent to prison.”

So, that’s why they’ve given him a Fokker Grulich, thought Nina.

She had already heard, however, that all Trotsky’s supporters had been given exactly the same choice—to betray their leader or face disgrace and persecution.

She helped Magda to bed and lay down herself but was unable to sleep. Deep down, she hoped that her English benefactress would become disillusioned with Friedrich and come with her to China. Everything would be much easier given Magda’s large, confident presence. But it looked as though that was not going to happen.

“I don’t think I can go to the parade tomorrow,” Magda whispered barely audibly. “But I really need to take some photographs. I want to put them in my book.”

“Just go to sleep, for goodness sake,” said Nina.

The bedsprings set up a doleful creaking.

“You’ll find the pass in the pocket of my coat,” Magda continued. “Please go instead of me.”

“But I’m not even a foreigner!”

“If you go in your Chinese coat, nobody will imagine for a moment that you’re a Russian. The main thing is not to open your mouth and give yourself away. Please!”

Magda stopped suddenly, leaned over the side of the bed, and was sick on the floor.

Nina was ready to agree to anything just to get Magda to calm down and go to sleep.