Dima flinches in the face of Gerbil’s onslaught, the knot in his stomach is as tight as it’s ever been, it’s generating a powerful anxious energy that’s running down his legs and up his spine, sucking the breath from his lungs and making his hands shake.
Helmet-hair picks a biscuit from the bowl and slides it between his thick lips, his eyes resting grimly on Dima’s face. Silence. Crumbs are dropping from his mouth and falling into the creases in his shirt. He swallows and reaches for another biscuit, bites a chunk out of it and with his mouth full he says, ‘You’re in our hands now, arsehole. Oh, you thought you had to commit a crime to go to the kartser? Buddy, you’ll be going to that place any time we want you there. So look, bitch, now’s when you start telling us what happened at that platform. No protocol, just you, us and the truth. And you’d better start telling us fucking soon.’
Dima coughs into his hand and takes a breath. ‘I’m under strictest orders from my lawyer and—’
Gerbil screws up his face and slaps the air in front of him. ‘I’m just so disgusted by this man, I’ve got no time for this bullshit. He had his chance but he just sealed his fate.’ He stands up and opens the door. The guard is still standing outside. ‘Get him out of here.’
Helmet-hair pushes the rest of the biscuit between his lips, slaps his hands together, stands up and walks out. Dima gulps. He stares at the empty chairs in front of him then looks up at the guard, who gives a long low whistle.
‘Boy, they don’t like you, do they?’
Dima is taken back to his cell. He lies on his bunk, staring at the ceiling, going over what just happened. He’s still shaken. The fist is like a rock in his belly. They’re out to get me, he thinks. There’s no doubt about it, not now. This is what they did to Dad.
Nearly half a century has passed since Pavel Litvinov sat down in Red Square in the certain knowledge that he would be punished with the full force of the Soviet state. But right now Dima’s thinking of an episode that happened a year before that. The time when his father wrote a letter to the editor of Izvestia, the leading Soviet state-controlled newspaper.
I consider it my duty to bring the following to the notice of public opinion. On 26 September 1967 I was summoned to the Committee of State Security to be interviewed by an official of the Committee named Gostev. During our talk another KGB official was present but did not give his name. Immediately the conversation was over, I wrote it down from memory, because I was convinced that it graphically revealed tendencies which should be given publicity and which cannot but cause alarm to progressive public opinion both in our country and throughout the world… I protest against behaviour of this sort on the part of the state security organs, behaviour which amounts to unconcealed blackmail. I ask you to publish this letter, so that in case I am arrested, public opinion will be informed about the circumstances leading up to this event.
In the letter Pavel gave his verbatim account of the interrogation, explaining how the KGB agent Gostev warned him not to report details of a recent dissident trial; how the officer accused the dissident of ‘hooliganism’ despite the fact that the man had merely read out a poem in Mayakovsky Square; how Pavel would himself face trial unless he stopped his political activism.
‘Pavel Mikhailovich, we don’t intend to have a discussion with you,’ Gostev had said. ‘We are simply warning you. Just imagine if the whole world were to learn that the grandson of the great diplomat Litvinov is engaged in conduct of this sort. Why, it would be a blot on his memory.’
‘Well I don’t think he would be against me,’ said Pavel. ‘May I go?’[106]
Izvestia refused to publish the letter, but it did appear in the International Herald Tribune. A year later Pavel was arrested, put on trial and sentenced to exile. And now, half a century on, 4,000 miles from Dima’s cell in Murmansk, the retired physics teacher is schooling himself in the system that once targeted him, the same system (for he believes nothing much has changed) that has captured his son.
‘It is the Soviet legal machine, so to speak,’ says Pavel. ‘So I started reading the Russian criminal code – for many years I didn’t do it – and the constitution and how it’s formulated and how to fight it, and I talked to lawyers and so on. It was important, because in spite of Russia being a totalitarian state they still have to make something by law, and we had to answer every legal step. Some people didn’t understand it, but I knew. Because they once did it to me.’
Izvestia, the newspaper he wrote to in 1967 seeking justice, is still in print and is playing a leading role in the propaganda war against his son – even speculating that Greenpeace volunteers may have been responsible for beating up a Russian diplomat in the Netherlands. But Izvestia is no longer owned by the Communist Party. Now it’s owned by Gazprom.[107]
Dima is standing in the doorway of his cell watching the guards lifting mattresses and looking under them, flicking through the pages of his books and peering inside jars. Then from behind him he hears a familiar voice.
‘Ah yes, Litvinov. Dimitri, how are you doing, my friend?’
Dima spins around. It’s Popov. He’s standing on his toes and looking into Dima’s cell.
‘They found anything?’
‘Nope.’
Popov nods, then almost absently he says, ‘So, you’ll be leaving us soon.’ He drops onto his heels and flashes a golden toothy smile.
Dima’s heart jumps. ‘We’re getting out?’
Popov sniffs. ‘No, no. They’re moving you.’
‘Moving us? Where?’
‘St Petersburg.’
‘St Petersburg?’
‘Yup.’
‘When?’
‘Couple of days maybe. For all I know tomorrow.’
‘Do you know why?’
‘Dimitri, please.’ Popov holds out his hands in a plea of false modesty. ‘They tell me nothing. You probably know more than I do.’
‘I don’t know anything.’
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything. Silly me.’ The governor looks down at his shoes and chews his lip. ‘No, it’s all a mystery to me. If I was to guess I’d say you’re going to be the subject of a bit of special treatment. But then, I know nothing.’
The fist in Dima’s stomach clenches. ‘What does that mean, special treatment?’
‘It means just that. Special treatment.’
‘And… what, it’s just me moving? The others, are they coming too? To St Petersburg?’
‘I would imagine so, yes.’
‘But you don’t know for sure?’
Popov shrugs, pats Dima on the shoulder and waltzes off down the hallway, running a finger along the wall as he goes.
As soon as the lights are killed and the doroga is up and running, Dima gets the news out. Phil’s cellmate pulls in the sock and hands him a note. (See opposite.)
The road buzzes with the news, it’s shouted over the walls at the gulyat, it’s all anyone talks about.
‘It’s today.’
‘I heard it was next week.’
‘No, it’s definitely tomorrow.’
‘Well, you should know this,’ Roman shouts to Dima over the wall. ‘The Stolypin, it is hell.’ He uses the Russian slang word for a prison transport train, named after the tsarist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, who commissioned railway carriages to transport revolutionaries to Siberia. ‘They are very fucking horrible. They are bad. They are very bad. It can take a month. You stay in transit prisons on the way. Tough places. We will be in a car cell with many people. Not nice people. There’s no water, it’s very hot, there’s no food. We’ll need to bring plastic bottles with us to piss. It is going to be horrible. I’ve heard about these transports.’