Elvira Baryakina - The Prince of the Soviets

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:

The Red Army is the ever-vigilant guard of the Land of the Soviets. Strengthen the Union of Workers and Peasants, and the USSR will be invincible! Death to the blood-soaked Imperialists!

“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.

6

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.

1

The city was shrouded in a damp mist. On every side, trucks rattled past, and soldiers marched along wordlessly in felt helmets with the ear flaps down. Armored cars crouched darkly in the lanes and alleyways, and from time to time, the sound of a horse’s whinny or the hollow echo of hooves could be heard as the Red Cavalry prepared for the parade.

Nina walked along in the crowd, clutching Magda’s camera in its case to her chest. Magda had only one roll of film left and had instructed Nina to guard it with her life.

Everybody was gawping at Nina’s ridiculous coat. One little girl was so distracted by the sight that she dropped her bunch of chrysanthemums on the ground.

Her mother immediately fetched her a clip on the back of the head. “Look after those flowers,” she scolded. “What are you going to wave at the parade if you lose them?”

At the approach to Red Square, all was excitement and anticipation as if before a battle. Huge banners and portraits of Soviet leaders swayed in the swirling mist; military instructors made their rounds of the workers’ brigades, giving instructions about the order of procession, while the shivering men hopped from foot to foot in an effort to keep warm.

 Nina was also shivering, but more from anxiety than cold. She was certain that at any minute, she would be accosted by a policeman who would ask her to explain just how she had managed to get ahold of a foreigner’s pass for the tribune.

But all went well. At the Iversky Gates, Nina showed her pass and walked out onto Red Square where the unpaved ground had frozen hard during the night.