My group, if you like, believed that if we could get rid of the Party bureaucracy we could establish a decent life for all. A place you could speak your mind and where your parents wouldn’t be in constant danger of arrest. We had slogans — “No collective guilt,” “Smash the Party bureaucracy.” You’ll smile now when I tell you but we really believed a brave new democratic world was possible.
Then there was the other group. The Rodinists they began to call themselves from the Russian word Rodina, Motherland. They were the poets and music players, young men with eyes often as dark and smoldering as their nationalist passions.
They believed in Russia. Not the Soviet Union, not the vast empire that the Czars had bequeathed us, but in the Russian peasant and his infinite capacity to suffer. While we were drawn toward the West they were repelled by it. You never saw them in jeans or T-shirts. They wore felt boots and coarse trousers, with a loose belted blouse on top. Boys and girls. Their view was that the Communist Party was a Western conspiracy. Marx was a cosmopolitan German Jew, a known Slav-hater. Lenin had lived most of his adult life outside Russia and had even been brought back to ferment revolution by the Germans. Most of the big figures from the revolutionary days had disguised their un-Russianness with false names: Trotsky (Bronstein), Zinoviev (Apfelbaum), Kamenev (Rosenfeld). I hardly need to say that the Rodinists were to a man, or girl, violently anti-Semitic. And violently opposed to the other republics in the Soviet Empire.
They had a curious view of Stalin, who was, of course, a Georgian, but they seemed prepared to accept him as an adopted Russian. After all, he had forced the Cyrillic alphabet on the Russian dominions and had led the Motherland through the great Patriotic War. Their struggle with the present was with the vast agricultural and industrialization plans which they saw as only necessary to feed Kazaks and Uzbeks and Poles and Hungarians and Cubans and Ethiopians. If Holy Mother Russia (and they meant Holy, too) only slammed its front and back doors tight, the Russian soul — Russian culture, arts and crafts — would flourish in a Slav Utopia divorced from the world.
They believed it. Some of them even lived it. They hated the Party setup in the oblasts as much as in Moscow itself. And as that winter began they decided the time had come once again (it was an old Russian tradition) to defend the Russian soul with the bomb. Leningrad Airport was the first step.
Within an hour of the Leningrad Airport bombing the authorities had made an urgent request to Soviet Army Northwest Headquarters for reinforcement.
Reacting to the near panic of the authorities, the Soviet Command had issued orders to the four Field Police Battalions available in neighboring Estonia. Of the four units heading northeast along the Gulf road to Leningrad that afternoon, three were predominantly Slav battalions with a high standard of training and experience. The fourth, No. 29 Field Provost Battalion, was a recently raised unit indistinguishable from the others in equipment. But in one important sense it epitomized much that was wrong with the Soviet Army in the seventies and eighties. Officered entirely by Slavs, its four hundred enlisted men were mostly drawn from the Soviet Central Asian republics.
As a unit its disciplinary record was bad. Only a month earlier a whole company had been sentenced to five years in a penal brigade for a violent assault on their own company officers. In the court martial hearings nobody had seen fit to mention a clash between repressed Asiatics and dominant Slavs.
By early afternoon, with the weather closing in from the Gulf of Finland, the 29th Field Provost was already lagging far behind the other units. Every 30 miles a truck or armored personnel carrier, poorly maintained or badly driven in the thickening fall of snow, would block the road. Each time, Major Sudorov, aware of his unit’s reputation, would race back in his command vehicle and curse and exhort men working in the unfamiliar cold, men who could in any case barely understand his instructions.
Throughout that freezing afternoon tension among the Provost soldiers increased hourly. Officers, fearful for their own careers, kicked and struck at men trying to drag the broken-down vehicles into the ditch. There were accidents, a broken leg, a crushed arm. As it began to get dark the wind rose. Driving wet snow clogged headlights. In a chaos of skidding vehicles the 29th Field Provost Battalion crept toward Leningrad.
Bubo Musa was a recent recruit to the 29th Field Provost. Unusually tall for a member of the Tatar race, his close-shaven head showed the sharp outline of a narrow skull. He had learned to trade on the menace of his slanting eyes and the Tatar reputation, to defend himself in this unit of desperate, violent men. He was in his early thirties, old to be a new recruit, and had deliberately done nothing to contradict the general belief among his fellow soldiers that his late conscription into the army was due to the delay caused by a seven-year prison sentence for murder. He had in fact served seven years in a labor camp. But the sentence was not for murder. Bubo Musa, a former tailor from Bratsk in Siberia, was a victim of the Stalin past and the Soviet Union’s unrelenting present.
When his parents were born, some three hundred thousand members of the Muslim Tatar race lived in the soft climate of the Crimean peninsula of European Russia. They were a people bound closely by ties of religion and national consciousness. They were thus a people who, on both counts, failed to fit the Russian imperialist dreams of the Georgian, Joseph Stalin.
It was the Hitler war which, at first, had threatened the very fabric of the new Russian Empire and, in victory, had presented Stalin with his greatest opportunity to recreate the Czarist Empire. The early years of defeat and occupation by the German armies had revealed the extent of nationalist feeling. Among every occupied nation-republic, anti-Soviet or anti-Russian movements came into existence.
But as the German armies retreated and nationalist sentiments exploded into new life, Stalin struck. In the middle of the greatest war in history he still found time for vengeance. Six small nations were collectively, every man, woman and child, accused of treason. They were torn from their native lands and deported in endless lines of cattle trucks to Siberia. A million people were uprooted and denied every right under the Soviet Constitution. But among all the lost nations it is the story of the Crimean Tatars that best reveals the chilling lengths to which the Russians have been prepared to go to maintain their dominion in the south of the Soviet Union.
During the Brezhnev years it was unusual to hear in the West anything of the continuing struggle of the Tatar people. But they had not given up. From their exile in Siberia and Uzbekistan, Tatars began to return illegally to the Crimea.
For this crime Bubo Musa was arraigned and sentenced to seven years in a labor camp.
Even the Soviet prosecutor had recognized that no violence had been involved. But the violence practiced against Bubo Musa during his seven-year imprisonment had left its mark. Resistant to hating his fellow men, even when they were Russians, Bubo had already begun to focus his hatred on the city of Moscow itself. He would talk, dangerously, not of the Soviet Union, but of the Muscovite Empire. Never having been to Moscow, he nevertheless saw the city, in its past and present, as the capital of an unchanging Russian Empire relentless in its determination to impose Russian uniformity throughout its vast dominions.