That hadn’t been quite the end. Some remnants of Kappel’s army had attempted to by-pass Irkutsk, crossing the ice of Lake Baikal. But Kappel died of frostbite on the march and, with him, any last resistance to the Bolsheviks in Siberia. Straggling detachments, Poles and Ukrainians, Rumanians and Serbs, and other nationalities who had not wished to live under the Bolshevik yoke and had emulated the Czechs and Slovaks by forming legions were overrun and annihilated by the advancing Red Army.
Exactly what had happened to Voitzekhovsky and Diterikhs, the Russians who had served with the Legion, Paul had never discovered. Kolchak’s designated heir, Semenov, bent on banditry to the end had tried to halt the Legion’s progress to Vladivostok. But he found the Czechs a tougher opposition than the defenceless villagers he was more accustomed to murdering. The Legion got through, weakening Semenov sufficiently so that, when the Bolsheviks finally caught up with the ogre, his army disintegrated. Semenov tried to escape dressed as a woman but was caught. Mostly, his men were shot although the Bolsheviks reserved the hangman’s noose for their leader; Semenov being allowed more rope than he had ever given his victims.
Across the road a man approached the apartment block. He moved haltingly on the icy pavement, leaning heavily on a walking stick. In the fading light Paul could see only his outline but knew he was the man he had come to find. Paul lit another cigarette, allowing the man time to reach his flat and settle in. There was still no hurry.
His back had stiffened while sitting on the hard chair in the café and he stretched to unknot it. He had tried to tell them in London that he was too old to go back into the field but they maintained there was no one else qualified for the job. This time it hadn’t been just their usual blandishments; Paul spoke both Czech and Russian and was the one man who knew the people they needed to contact.
There were no steamers having to avoid U-boats this time. He had flown to Vienna as a low-grade civil-servant attached to the British Trade Mission. After a couple of nights in a second-rate hotel he had slipped away to a safe house where a girl from the embassy equipped with hair-dye and photographic equipment had turned him into Artur Zelinka, a Czech salesman of agricultural machinery. No nonsense about pit-props this time. Two days later he crossed the border into Czechoslovakia.
London needed a network in place before what they saw as the inevitable communist take-over of Czechoslovakia. But as soon as he arrived he saw that they were far too late. The communists were already in positions of power. The Czechoslovak leader, Edvard Beneš, that old stalwart of the Czech National Council, had given in to Stalin two weeks earlier and had appointed a Communist-dominated government in the hope of avoiding civil war. The only non-Communist in the government had been Jan Masaryk. Now he was dead. Suicide. Or so the newspaper maintained.
Paul had begun with the men he had known in the Legion. They may have been SRs but they hadn’t been Bolsheviks and London thought they might be persuaded to work for them.
At the top of his list had been the name of his old friend, Karel Romanek. But Karel, he found, was dead. He had apparently been involved in the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942 and had been shot by the Gestapo shortly afterwards. Others had survived the Nazi occupation, though, and he had set up the network as best he could. He had recruited individual handlers with sufficient cut-outs, that should the StB — the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s political police — arrest any of its constituent parts, the others at least had a chance of evading capture.
In truth, he had little expectation that the network would last long. The StB might be a fledgling service but they always had the expertise of the MGB to fall back on. MGB was the current designation of the old Cheka, or OGPU, NKVD… Paul sometimes thought they changed their name more often than they must swab the blood off the cellar floors.
But call the gloves what you will; they still held a mailed fist. Some things never changed. It hadn’t quite become the brave new world the revolutionaries of February 1917 had foreseen. Nothing like it in fact.
Paul had often wondered if he had ever heard Stalin’s the name while he had been working his way across Russia and Siberia. He didn’t think he had. The man had been there, certainly, a junior cog in Lenin’s relentless wheel of state. Odd how Stalin had wound up on top when the wheel finished turning. Who would have thought he could have out-foxed Trotsky? Most of Lenin’s other cronies had been little more than journeymen who wouldn’t have got far at all if he hadn’t arrived back in Petersburg to chivvy them along the road to dictatorship. Given instruction and their head, they had become ruthless enough, though, and it was with some satisfaction that Paul had watched from the safety of England while Stalin had played one against the other before removing all the old Bolshevik pieces from the board.
He didn’t suppose Stalin would have ever managed to outmanoeuvre Lenin if it hadn’t been for Fanny Kaplan’s bullets weakening him back in Moscow the day Paul had arrived in Petersburg. Lenin had never been the same after that, they said. Some — communist apologists back before the war — had maintained that the Soviet Union would never have been as repressive as it was had Lenin lived. Paul never bought that. Between Lenin and Dzerzhinsky, the machinery had already been put in place. All Stalin contributed was a new subtlety to Bolshevik authoritarianism. Somehow his victims during the show trials — first of the SRs, then the Mensheviks, and finally his former Bolshevik comrades — had been made to believe that they actually had betrayed the February Revolution and that they deserved their fate.
Well, they did. They had all betrayed the Revolution, although perhaps not in the way that either they or Stalin saw it.
Paul would have liked to know if they had come to realise exactly what they had done during those last moments of life. Had there been any feeling of remorse, of pity for their countless victims? Had it all become clear — in one last blinding flash of comprehension — that it had all been a gigantic mistake?
He didn’t think so. If there was pity in them it was self-pity; if there was remorse, it would have been remorse for not having squashed Stalin when they had the chance. As for mistakes, they had probably believed that the only one they made was in not reading their Marx closely enough.
He tried to remember the name of the corporal he had shared the shell-hole with, the one who had talked about Bolshevism while they’d sat up to their chests in filthy water. The name wouldn’t come — perhaps there had been too many others in the years between — but he did remember that the man had been Jewish. Well, at least he had been spared the knowledge of the horrors of Hitler’s holocaust. Before the war those same apologists who had defended Lenin maintained the choice was a simple one — even a moral one — between Fascism or Communism. Paul had never believed that although he supposed that Jacobs would have. Jacobs, that had been his name. He would have chosen Communism and supported the Bolshevik Revolution through thick and through thin. Not, had he been there, would it have done the man much good; Paul suspected that sooner or later Jacobs like so many others would have ended up against a wall. Caught by bigotry somewhere between the Nazi belief that Communism was a Jewish plot, and the Communists’ belief that Capitalism was a Jewish invention.
Paul stood up, easing his aching limbs back into life. It was dark now on the street although a light showed in a window across the road. Time for his last interview.
The man’s name was Milos Jelen and Paul had been given it by an old Legion colleague who thought of Jelen as someone who might be useful. The name hadn’t been familiar to Paul although there was something about it that tripped a wire in his head; sufficiently enough for him to stop by a bookshop earlier that day to satisfy his curiosity.