AllFreeNovel
Share Us
That was not all. Planes had been lined up neatly on airstrips with no camouflage, and the Luftwaffe had destroyed twelve hundred Soviet aircraft in the first few hours of the war. Army units had been thrown at the advancing Germans without adequate weapons, with no air cover, and lacking intelligence about enemy positions--and in consequence had been annihilated.
Worst of all, Stalin's standing order to the Red Army was that retreat was forbidden. Every unit had to fight to the last man, and officers were expected to shoot themselves to avoid capture. Troops were never allowed to regroup at a new, stronger defensive position. This meant that every defeat turned into a massacre.
Consequently the Red Army was hemorrhaging men and equipment.
The warning from the Tokyo sp
y, and Werner Franck's confirmation, had been ignored by Stalin. Even when the attack began, Stalin had at first insisted it was a limited act of provocation, done by German army officers without the knowledge of Hitler, who would put a stop to it as soon as he found out.
By the time it became undeniable that it was not a provocation but the largest invasion in the history of warfare, the Germans had overwhelmed the Soviets' forward positions. After a week they had pushed three hundred miles inside Soviet territory.
It was a catastrophe--but what made Volodya want to scream out loud was that it could have been avoided.
There was no doubt whose fault it was. The Soviet Union was an autocracy. Only one person made the decisions: Josef Stalin. He had been stubbornly, stupidly, disastrously wrong. And now his country was in mortal danger.
Until now Volodya had believed that Soviet Communism was the true ideology, marred only by the excesses of the secret police, the NKVD. Now he saw that the failure was at the very top. Beria and the NKVD existed only because Stalin permitted them. It was Stalin who was preventing the march to true Communism.
Late that afternoon, as Volodya was staring out of the window over the sunlit airstrip, brooding over what he had learned, he was visited by Kamen. They had been lieutenants together four years ago, fresh out of the Military Intelligence Academy, and had shared a room with two others. In those days Kamen had been the clown, making fun of everyone, daringly mocking pious Soviet orthodoxy. Now he was heavier and seemed more serious. He had grown a small black mustache like that of the foreign minister, Molotov, perhaps to make himself look more mature.
Kamen closed the door behind him and sat down. He took from his pocket a toy, a tin soldier with a key in its back. He wound up the key and placed the toy on Volodya's desk. The soldier swung his arms as if marching, and the clockwork mechanism made a loud ratcheting sound as it wound down.
In a lowered voice Kamen said: "Stalin has not been seen for two days."
Volodya realized that the clockwork soldier was there to swamp any listening device that might be hidden in his office.
He said: "What do you mean, he hasn't been seen?"
"He has not come to the Kremlin, and he is not answering the phone."
Volodya was baffled. The leader of a nation could not just disappear. "What's he doing?"
"No one knows." The soldier ran down. Kamen wound it up and set it going again. "On Saturday night, when he heard that the Soviet Western Army Group had been encircled by the Germans, he said: 'Everything's lost. I give up. Lenin founded our state and we've fucked it up.' Then he went to Kuntsevo." Stalin had a country house near the town of Kuntsevo on the outskirts of Moscow. "Yesterday he didn't show up at the Kremlin at his usual time of midday. When they phoned Kuntsevo, no one answered. Today, the same."
Volodya leaned forward. "Is he suffering"--his voice fell to a whisper--"a mental breakdown?"
Kamen made a helpless gesture. "It wouldn't be surprising. He insisted, against all the evidence, that Germany would not attack us, and now look."
Volodya nodded. It made sense. Stalin had allowed himself to be officially called Father, Teacher, Great Leader, Transformer of Nature, Great Helmsman, Genius of Mankind, the Greatest Genius of All Times and Peoples. But now it had been proved, even to him, that he had been wrong and everyone else right. Men committed suicide in such circumstances.
The crisis was even worse than Volodya had thought. Not only was the Soviet Union under attack and losing, it was also leaderless. This had to be its most perilous moment since the revolution.
But was it also an opportunity? Could it be a chance to get rid of Stalin?
The last time Stalin had appeared vulnerable was in 1924, when Lenin's Testament had said that Stalin was not fit to hold power. Since Stalin had survived that crisis his power had seemed unassailable, even--Volodya could now see clearly--when his decisions had verged on madness: the purges, the blunders in Spain, the appointment of the sadist Beria as head of the secret police, the pact with Hitler. Was this emergency the occasion, at last, to break his hold?
Volodya hid his excitement from Kamen and everyone else. He hugged his thoughts to himself as he rode the bus home through the soft light of a summer evening. His journey was delayed by a slow-moving convoy of lorries towing antiaircraft guns--presumably being deployed by his father, who was in charge of Moscow's air raid defenses.
Could Stalin be deposed?
He wondered how many Kremlin insiders were asking themselves the same question.
He entered his parents' apartment building, the ten-story Government House, across the Moskva River from the Kremlin. They were out, but his sister was there with the twins, Dimka and Tania. The boy, Dimka, had dark eyes and hair. He held a red pencil and was scribbling messily on an old newspaper. The girl had the same intense blue-eyed stare that Grigori had--and so did Volodya, people said. She immediately showed Volodya her doll.
Also there was Zoya Vorotsyntsev, the astonishingly beautiful physicist Volodya had last seen four years earlier when he was about to leave for Spain. She and Anya had discovered a shared interest in Russian folk music: they went to recitals together, and Zoya played the gudok, a three-stringed fiddle. Neither could afford a phonograph, but Grigori had one, and they were listening to a record of a balalaika orchestra. Grigori was not a great music lover but he thought the record sounded jolly.
Zoya was wearing a short-sleeved summer dress the pale color of her blue eyes. When Volodya asked her the conventional question about how she was, she replied sharply: "I'm very angry."
There were lots of reasons for Russians to be angry just now. Volodya asked: "Why's that?"
