“Nadya,” the old man took her face in his hand. “I thought perhaps the snow would be too heavy. In the village it’s always worse than here.”
“Would I let the snow stop me?” she said. “Now let go of my face and let me give you these things before I forget Some pork cutlets… already cooked but if you want them hot, make sure you cook them through again, thoroughly. And some soup… did you bring a bag?”
Obediently he took a creased plastic bag from his pocket. She put the cutlets and the jar of borsch in it and followed them with a round of butter and some cheese. Finally, and with evident reluctance, she took a liter of vodka from her bag and transferred it to his. “Now just a glass in the evening. Promise me?”
He smiled. “I promise.”
“At heart you’re a crafty old peasant,” she hugged him. “I don’t know why I’ve believed you all these years.”
At Barricadnaya station Alexei Letsukov circled the statue of the worker-soldier for perhaps the tenth time. The cold was biting through his topcoat. He decided to take another walk through the connecting tunnel between the two Metro stations. There at least it was warmer than out in the open.
He thought of his parents on the bench outside the Widows’ House. It was not warm there either, but he doubted if they would notice. Once a month was not often. And whatever the weather it was never long enough for them.
As he turned toward the columned Metro entrance a convoy of four official cars raced down the reserved lane in Barricadnaya Street. He stopped to watch them jump the red lights and speed west to some warm well-lit dacha outside the city.
Letsukov shuddered with cold and anger. He found it impossible at times to contain the bitterness he felt against the Red vlasti when an old couple like his parents had been reduced to a monthly meeting in a public square.
Perhaps things, somehow, would change. And if they did, perhaps there would still be the chance of a few years together.
He walked the length of the tunnel to the old Red Presnya station. Then turned and walked back. As he emerged from Banicadnaya his mother was walking toward him, dabbing at her tears with an embroidered yellow handkerchief.
By the middle of December Natalya Roginova appeared back in Moscow. On December 16th she attended the Politburo meeting with, under the rotating chairmanship arrangements which had been established by Leonid Brezhnev, General Kuba in the chair. Here she fired her first heavy salvo.
“Collective Reporting” was her term for it. Her proposal, which was carried by a majority of that meeting (Kuba and two others dissenting), was for a review of the state of the Union by all ministries at this crucial point in its history. A perfectly reasonable proposal on the surface. But people like Politburo administrative assistant Rinsky, one of those charged with planning the big meeting for December 20th, saw clearly the trap Roginova was planning for his colleagues.
Perhaps I should explain first of all something about our peculiar system of government [wrote Rinsky]. There were in fact two systems of Soviet government — one real, one imaginary. It seems strange now but nobody thought it was in the least odd in the early 1980s. Perhaps because all Soviet life in those days had its image and its dark reality.
Let us first take the image of government. The Supreme Soviet had 1,500 elected members, half from constituencies throughout the country, and half, like the U.S. Senate, based on the States or Nationalities of the Soviet Union. In a rough sense therefore the Supreme Soviet was the Congress of the Soviet Union. This in turn elected a 39-member Presidium, which in terms of the image was the government of the country.
Now to understand real power in the Soviet Union it is necessary to appreciate that this vast elective apparatus had, in itself, no authority whatsoever. Because, parallel to this system was a different, but not always totally separate reality: the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Its 16 million members joined the Party by invitation only; blackballing and rejection were common. It was in fact a massive and exclusive club. At the top of this club stood the Central Committee, 287 members, and at the top of the Central Committee was the Politburo of the Party, fourteen of those, most equal among equals. This was Soviet reality: the Politburo of the Party ruled Russia and its dominions while the Presidium and the Supreme Soviet nodded eager agreement. The 1977 Brezhnev Constitution of the Soviet Union did no more than formally recognize what had been the case since Lenin’s day: the dictatorship of the proletariat was a mockery of resounding hollowness. The dictatorship of the Party was hard, blunt fact.
So the man (or woman) who ruled the Party as its General Secretary ruled the Soviet Union. And the death that had just taken place left that vital post unoccupied.
Now to get back to Roginova’s Collective Reporting. The actual ministries who executed policy would be on the spot. The Party who initiated policy, by the image and reality dualism of Soviet life, could be in no way responsible for any ministerial incompetence that the Collective Reporting might reveal. Thus Party General Secretary of the Russian Federated Republic Natalya Roginova had no accounting to make. But Minister of the Bureau of State Security Semyon Kuba had been neatly toppled from his seat among the judges. What exactly Roginova had in mind for the December 20th Collective Reporting none of us could precisely guess…
Leadership issues apart, the other Soviet sensation of that month was the critical reception in the West of the serialized form of Kuletsyn’s novel, To Be Preserved Forever.
American publisher Hal Bashford had been as good as his word. In the United States and Britain a serialized version of Kuletsyn’s novel was rapidly catching the popular imagination. In Germany and France the demand for it was already building heavily.
Western correspondents in Moscow were urged by their home offices to get an interview with Valentin Kuletsyn. The correspondents themselves had not heard of him and often showed great ingenuity in tracking him to the village of Barskoye, outside Moscow.
Even Bukansky’s genial spirit could not suppress a slight note of bitterness at Kuletsyn’s reception of his Western success.
How much vodka can a man drink a day? I know it’s killing me, a half-liter by noon, another by midnight. I ward off troubles with the clear fluid; with it I celebrate victories. These days, of course, the victories are few and small. A trivial success when I gain Ministry acceptance for some second-rate but honest poet of the Dnieper Marshes, his lines full of birdsong and penscratch. I can publish, the Ministry says, with a suitable introduction on our Dnieper Marshlander’s Party background. I am triumphant, so I drink vodka. I am sick at the triviality of it all, so I drink more vodka.
Then I meet Kuletsyn. An authentic Russian voice. A rolling, ungainly ingrate who speaks pure poetry. Well, the risks I have taken are small compared with the reward. The world will know Kuletsyn. Today I can know the world will revere him. Understand him? No! But equally no matter. I, Igor Bukansky, a vodka-soaked trimmer, publisher of much trash, womanizer, fool… I have made sure the world will read Kuletsyn. I reach for the bottle on my desk. I will call in Lydia. She will understand. At least I think she will understand. She sleeps with me for English chocolates, Czech fur boots, a German tape deck — what else is there to sleep with me for now? But still I tell myself she understands.
Earlier today I saw Kuletsyn. I tell him how the West had reacted. I see him now, as if he’s in the room.
“Igor Alexandrovich,” he says. “What can it matter what the West thinks?”