Three men killed, then. For three men saved. In his torn, dirty clothes Letsukov walked back home as dawn began to break. He was now sure he was safe. A bulldozer had exposed the missing filing cabinets before dawn. Among them, buckled almost in two, was the Estonian cabinet, its top drawer burst open like so many of the others. Letsukov and Zelmetsky had emptied it of files and abandoned it among the debris. To Zelmetsky it was a good night’s work.
A good night’s work. Two dead and one dying. By now probably dead. He had refused offers of lifts from Zelmetsky and the militia. He preferred to trudge back across an empty Moscow as dawn broke behind him. Three men dead, three men saved. Was that still the inexorable equation of his life?
Investigating officer Gregory Sergeivich Platonov had been a policeman for the best part of 40 years. As a young militiaman he had patrolled some of the toughest districts in the high-dam town of Bratsk when the ardor for socialist construction wore thin and the fights and knifings were an every Saturday night occurrence. After that he had served as a desk sergeant in the north Urals town of Perm before being promoted to Moscow in the early seventies as a junior investigating officer. Here he had seen and heard things that made the cropped gray hair rise on the back of his neck. He could hardly believe the way some people lived. But he had kept his head down as they say and stuck to his job. For five years he had been in robbery, and it was there that he had seen some of the apartments of the senior Party men.
Then in 1977 he had been transferred to the Arson Squad. Being the sort of man he was he had applied himself diligently to his work, studying fire reports, working closely with the Fire Service and specializing in what was called “negligent arson,” which perhaps in some other societies might be known as “accident.”
He had inspected the site of the Razina Street fire the morning after it occurred. In overalls and metal helmet, the architect’s drawings in his hand, he had clambered over the wreckage and climbed up to the dangerous sixth and seventh floors. He liked to work alone.
The problem, in terms of establishing culpability, was to identify the precise starting point of the fire, and that was difficult when the collapsed section included at least six separate offices.
He sat, six floors up, his legs dangling over a broken lip of concrete, a mound of rubble below him, and puzzled over the electrical wiring plan. Nothing seemed to fit. At least not if the Fire Service report was to be accepted.
Platonov’s function was to examine the site of a fire and accept or reject the fire report. Normally he found himself in agreement with the fire officers, but on this occasion he simply could not see by reference to the wiring plan and by the visible evidence that an electrical fault could have been responsible.
There in front of him, across a great gap where the floor had collapsed, was the evidence in the torn metal conduit that at least the electricians had worked according to building regulations. He had questioned the officials and secretaries who worked on the sixth floor and nothing suggested illicit electrical machinery or any form of overloading. Yet a fire had broken out, in one of three offices almost an hour after everyone had left.
Two of the guards were dead. The other was in hospital.
Platonov walked down the concrete stairway and emerged at the service door onto the great pile of rubble. For an hour or more he worked over it levering up slabs of concrete, sifting dust, examining charred pieces of office furniture. He did not need his laboratory to analyze the concrete mix to tell him that, whoever else was responsible, the construction brigade was certainly an accessory. But there were far too many examples of bad building in Moscow to make any action worthwhile.
He gave instructions for all items of furniture, scraps of carpet and electrical fittings to be collected from the rubble, and to be removed to the examination sheds. Then he left for the site of the second fire that night, an Asiatic’s hotel in one of the new districts that might or might not have been an arson attack by the Rodinists.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Late into the long summer nights the sound of axes chopping echoed through the birchwoods. Chainsaws buzzed, men shouted warnings and trees toppled slowly to crash among the undergrowth. Even in this wood-scented, free-seeming air, men worked with that slow, grinding determination which is all that’s left when malnutrition and the threat of death by shooting hang over them.
Even Anton’s once heavy frame now showed an outline of ribs and collarbones. Smaller men, less well-fed on arrival at Panaka, took on a hunted skeletal look, moved dangerously listless from the path of falling trees and crouched gasping in the thickets when the guards’ backs were turned. Death was now commonplace and a severed hand or split kneecap might come to any man no longer capable of concentration.
But hard as conditions were in Panaka One, they were ease itself compared to life in the Penal Brigade’s camp at Panaka Five. Like some insatiable and ever-swelling tumor, Panaka Five had grown throughout the summer until it now contained over 30,000 men. No attempt now was made to put them to work. Their ration scale was far too low to make even light regular work a practical possibility. But more than that, tools became weapons in the hands of the penal zeks. Caged like animals they became a terror to their guards. And the guards replied in the only way they knew. A camp whipping was a daily occurrence. To run chained behind the cart soon broke the marrowless legbones of undernourished men. On the camps’ notice boards it was officially stated that cannibalism was punishable by shooting.
The camp commandant was a distraught former Soviet naval officer who had been transferred to camp duties for incompetence at sea. He was no more competent on land. And his responsibilities in terms of human lives were many thousand times greater. When new penal detachments arrived unannounced from the Perm Military District, he would telephone Kraslag headquarters at Krasibirsk and beg for a ration allocation, or for a hundred yards of sewage piping or a supply of roofing felt to build new huts. But a system which could not organize fruit in Moscow in September lacked the will to supply Panaka with the basic necessities. The ex-naval officer, incapable, to his credit, of becoming inured to cruelty on this scale, took his own life that summer after a tour of the new open graves he had ordered to be dug.
By autumn it was beginning to penetrate the thinking of some of the more aware of Kuba’s followers that what Natalya Roginova and the revisionists had been saying before her arrest was that the Soviet Union as it now stood was no longer a viable politico-economic unit.
They had thought that at the Archangelskoye meeting she was predicting an oil crisis, they now became dimly aware that she had been describing an oil crisis, one that the Soviet Union was already suffering.
Bread rationing, the Oil Energy (reduction of use) Measures announced in September and the Restricted Travel Measures of October began to point toward a siege economy.
As the autumn rains slashed across Western Russia and in the north and east the temperatures began to drop, the Soviet economy creaked and groaned like a huge beam, finally overladen. Bread rationing affected the individual and the family, and fuel rationing to factories and enterprises throughout the Soviet Union began to bite sharply into the already pathetic levels of production.
Among Semyon Kuba’s problems at this time must be numbered the appearance and phenomenal growth of the underground trade union newspaper Iskra, “the Spark.” It of course escaped no Soviet citizen that Iskra was the title of Lenin’s own revolutionary paper. But what made the new version’s suppression impossible to achieve was the fact that Iskra appeared to be printed in dozens, perhaps even hundreds of different cities. The main part of the newspaper was clearly based on the Moscow original, but regional news was included by local editor-printers. The techniques of Lenin’s Iskra and of Pravda were thus brilliantly combined.