I gestured to the pile of crates in the corner and they each upturned one and sat round our table. The candlelight flickered on Anton’s blond beard. Once or twice I tried to catch his eye but he seemed to be only interested in what Bubo had to say.
Bubo in turn was now addressing himself exclusively to Laryssa Navratovna. “My dear lady,” he said in a courtly manner I’d only seen in books, “even in this place we have the established customs of the house.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Laryssa Navratovna said. “Even more glad if you gentlemen are prepared to respect them.”
“We are indeed. I especially.”
Laryssa raised her eyebrows coquettishly. Even deprived of makeup she managed to look like a cheerful Leningrad tart. I found myself feeling very proud of her.
“And what are these customs that you so deeply respect?” she asked.
“First come, first served,” Bubo said.
Laryssa burst out laughing. Anton at last glanced at me, but shyly as ever.
“So?” Laryssa was still chuckling to herself.
“So I’ve come to make you the usual offer.”
“Offer?”
“There’s no force involved,” Bubo said seriously, “I’m making my offer, request, call it what you will, now, before anybody else gets a chance. It’s up to you whether you act upon it. Or when.”
“What is this offer your friend’s making?” I leaned across to Anton.
He turned to Bubo. “It’s his offer,” he said gruffly. “Let him explain.”
“The offer is to be my woman,” Bubo said simply.
“Then I accept,” Laryssa said. “But if I’m not well treated I shall sue for divorce, that’s a warning. Will you fight for me?”
“If necessary. Why do you ask?”
“The one they call Uncle Vanya has already been sniffing around.”
Bubo nodded. “I’ll fight.”
“Good,” she laughed now. “And what else can you promise me?”
“I’ve brought a half loaf,” Bubo took the parcel from the bunk, “to celebrate.”
“And we have vodka here,” I said.
“Then let’s begin the wedding feast,” Anna spoke for the first time, her eyes sparkling uncharacteristically.
“Your friend here, I suppose he’s to be best man?” Laryssa was shooting quick glances from Anton to me. “Or did he come over on an errand of his own?”
It was a long silence. “I came as witness, of course,” Anton said at length. For the first time he turned full face toward me. “You should not be offended.”
I poured the lab vodka, spilling it over the wooden table in my sudden discomfiture. “Offended? How could I possibly be offended, gospodin,” I said, deliberately using the old-fashioned means of address.
Laryssa burst out laughing. To the shouts for silence from the other women in the hut we sat there in the candlelight and toasted Bubo and Laryssa’s happiness.
In these spring days Semyon Trofimovich Kuba emerged from under his stone. References to him in Pravda increased from perhaps one a day to at least a dozen. It was by now commonly accepted that Natalya Roginova was under arrest or dead. Her position as First Secretary of the Russian Federated Republic was now taken by the florid-faced Bukin who had been elevated to Prime Minister and elected to full membership in the Politburo. Natalya Roginova’s name was now quite simply never mentioned. If a head of state visited Moscow it was Kuba who received him, flanked by other members of the Politburo, but clearly the first among equals in the familiar fashion of Soviet collective leadership.
Western Kremlinologists speculated, but answers eluded them. Clearly Kuba had defeated his arch rival Natalya Roginova. But did that mean he had carried the rest of the Politburo with him? Or were the armed forces, for instance, standing between him and the full fruits of unchallenged leadership?
No one in the West knew for certain. In the meantime they continued, government Kremlinologists and journalists alike, to dig into the background of this squat, shambling figure with the high cheekbones of a Slav and the slanting eyes of a central Asian. Few, at that time, came very close to the truth.
Semyon Trofimovich Kuba had been born in 1917 or 1918, almost certainly in western Russia, the son of a Slavic mother and a Siberian soldier of the Czar’s retreating Army. His mother was the daughter of an adequately well-off corn merchant and the difference in status between her and the Siberian muzhik suggests the possibility of rape. Certainly she took the child’s grandfather’s name for his patronymic. Semyon could have come from anywhere. At that time his last name was Garodsky.
As the winds of war and civil war reached gale force the mother was blown toward the south. Perhaps she was, as Kuba would sometimes claim, an infantry officer in the new Red Army. Certainly she died in the battle against Denekin’s Officer Corps at Tsaritsyn, later Stalingrad, later still Volgograd.
There is no record of the next years. Only a child’s fitful memory. Possibly, as he claimed, Kuba was adopted by a Red Army unit; he claims memories, at the age of six, of the bitter war fought by the Uzbeks against the invading Red Army in 1924. But he was also known to claim a similar experience of the equally bitter civil war that finally forced the Georgian peoples into the Soviet Union.
In the 1930s the picture becomes clearer. Barely 14, but we can guess hardened and experienced far beyond his years, Kuba (by now he had discarded his own name and adopted Kuba, a former code name of his hero figure Joseph Stalin) took part in the “struggles against the kulaks.”
There is no need to say much more about the barbarity of the forced collectivization of the country’s villages. In practice it was a piece of calculated savagery only comparable with Hitler’s final solution. In Russia and the Ukraine peasants starved to death, literally in their millions. It is now virtually certain that the 20 million Soviet dead claimed by Stalin to have been suffered by Russia in World War II include some millions at least from the forced collectivization period. The ten-year census of 1938 was never published in full. By the time of the 1948 census the Hitlerite Legions had intervened to be awarded some of the blame for the huge death toll.
Kuba’s rise from 1938 when he entered his twenties was rapid. As an NKVD (an earlier designation for KGB) officer he served at the front for four grueling years. There is no reason to doubt that his medals were less than justly awarded. There was no need to build him into a military figure as had been done earlier with Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. He fought with and exhorted the retreating armies of Stalin and fought and exhorted again as the Russian masses, responding now to the call of a socialist Rodina, marched through their own blood back toward the Nazi border.
At the age of 27, as the war ended, he had paid his dues. Under Beria he now began to rise rapidly in the secret police nexus. He was assigned as commandant to a labor camp and acquitted himself well. A period on the Finland border followed when he reduced the number of Soviet escapes to almost nil. He also increased the number shot trying to cross the frontier by at least three times. Called to Moscow, he was appointed to colonel in counterespionage. He acquitted himself again well enough to survive Beria’s execution by Khrushchev and in the early 1960s was given responsibility for the Fifth Chief Directorate at the Bureau of State Security’s Lubyanka Headquarters.
Under the Soviets the Fifth Directorate was a key post. He controlled first the Jewish Department, an area always open to lucrative bargaining with the West. He controlled the clergy, sects, State criminals, and most important of all, the intelligentsia and the nationalities. It is a matter of some interest which groups were considered worthy of inclusion in Fifth KGB Directorate responsibilities. It provides an interesting and surprisingly accurate commentary on the state of things to come.