Fall of Giants

“That’s ridiculous. He was chair of the Bolshevik discussion group at the Putilov works in 1914. He was one of the first deputies to the Petrograd soviet. He’s more Bolshevik than I am!”

“Is that so?” said Pinsky, and there was the hint of a threat in his voice.

Grigori ignored it. “Bring him to me.”

“Right away, comrade.”

A few minutes later Konstantin appeared. He was dirty and unshaven, and he smelled like a pigsty. Magda burst into tears and threw her arms around him.

“I need to talk to the prisoner privately,” Grigori said to Pinsky. “Take us to your office.”

Pinsky shook his head. “My humble room-”

“Don’t argue,” Grigori said. “Your office.” It was a way of emphasizing his power. He needed to keep Pinsky under his thumb.

Pinsky led them to an upstairs room overlooking the inner courtyard. He hastily swept a knuckle-duster off the desk into a drawer.

Looking out of the window, Grigori saw that it was daybreak. “Wait outside,” he said to Pinsky.

They sat down and Grigori said to Konstantin: “What the hell is going on?”

“We came to Moscow when the government moved,” Konstantin explained. “I thought I would become a commissar. But it was a mistake. I have no political support here.”

“So what have you been doing?”

“I’ve gone back to ordinary work. I’m at the Tod factory, making engine parts, cogs and pistons and ball races.”

“But why do the police imagine you’re counterrevolutionary?”

“The factory elects a deputy to the Moscow soviet. One of the engineers announced he would be a Menshevik candidate. He held a meeting, and I went to listen. There were only a dozen people there. I didn’t speak, I left halfway through, and I didn’t vote for him. The Bolshevik candidate won, of course. But, after the election, everyone who attended that Menshevik meeting was fired. Then, last week, we were all arrested.”

“We can’t do this,” Grigori said in despair. “Not even in the name of the revolution. We can’t arrest workers for listening to a different point of view.”

Konstantin looked at him strangely. “Have you been away somewhere?”

“Of course,” said Grigori. “Fighting the counterrevolutionary armies.”

“Then that’s why you don’t know what’s going on.”

“You mean this has happened before?”

“Grishka, it happens every day.”

“I can’t believe it.”

Magda said: “And last night I received a message-from a friend who is married to a policeman-saying Konstantin and the others were all to be shot at eight o’clock this morning.”

Grigori looked at his army-issue wristwatch. It was almost eight. “Pinsky!” he shouted.

The policeman came in.

“Stop this execution.”

“I fear it is too late, comrade.”

“You mean these men have already been shot?”

“Not quite.” Pinsky went to the window.

Grigori did the same. Konstantin and Magda stood beside him.

Down in the snow-covered courtyard, a firing squad had assembled in the clear early light. Opposite the soldiers, a dozen blindfolded men stood shivering in thin indoor clothes. A red flag flew above their heads.

As Grigori looked, the soldiers raised their rifles.

Grigori yelled: “Stop at once! Do not shoot!” But his voice was muffled by the window, and no one heard.

A moment later there was a crash of gunfire.

The condemned men fell to the ground. Grigori stared, aghast.

Around the slumped bodies, bloodstains appeared on the snow, bright red to match the flag flying above.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE – November 11-12, 1923

Maud slept in the day and got up in the middle of the afternoon, when Walter brought the children home from Sunday school. Eric was three and Heike was two, and they looked so sweet in their best clothes that Maud thought her heart would burst with love.

She had never known an emotion like this. Even her mad passion for Walter had not been so overwhelming. The children also made her feel desperately anxious. Would she be able to feed them and keep them warm, and protect them from riot and revolution?

She gave them hot bread-and-milk to warm them, then she began to prepare for the evening. She and Walter were throwing a small family party to celebrate the thirty-eighth birthday of Walter’s cousin Robert von Ulrich.

Robert had not been killed in the war, contrary to Walter’s parents’ fears-or were they hopes? Either way, Walter had not become the Graf von Ulrich. Robert had been held in a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia. When the Bolsheviks had made peace with Austria, Robert and his wartime comrade, Jörg, had set out to walk, hitchhike, and ride freight trains home. It had taken them a year, but they had made it, and when they returned Walter had found them an apartment in Berlin.

Maud put on her apron. In the tiny kitchen of her little house she made a soup out of cabbage, stale bread, and turnips. She also baked a small cake, although she had to eke out her ingredients with more turnips.