I must have smiled because he smiled back.
“So you still need my support,” I said. “Even now.”
“After you make the statement you will be assigned an important ministry. Agriculture or Fuel Supply.”
“There will be no statement,” I said.
“You refuse?” Cinders showered onto his uniform jacket.
“I refuse.”
“Then you will be sent for trial.”
“As a Western agent?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll get no confession from me, Semyon Trofimovich. And without a confession you will be back where you started.”
Kuba stood up. “I don’t need a confession from you,” he said. “I’ll have a confession from someone else, equally damaging. His confession will leave the judges no alternative but to indict you immediately afterward.”
He could only mean one man — Bukansky.
Chapter Thirty-One
In early September a site was carefully chosen for a meeting which Semyon Trofimovich Kuba considered (rightly as it transpired) as the most important of his life.
Built overlooking the Black Sea just west of Odessa, by an eccentric American architect named George Washington Baxter, the Royal American Hotel, as Baxter had chosen to call it, had all the florid elegance of a fin-de-siècle Chicago cathouse.
The very isolation which had originally deprived it of a thriving clientele guaranteed it against requisition for worker housing in the early days of the Revolution. It had been, briefly, a brigade headquarters for the British interventionist force and wineglasses and beer mugs can to this day sometimes be found in London antique shops bearing the legend “Royal American Hotel, Odessa.”
But apart from these early losses to military souvenir hunters, the Royal American stood untouched, although decaying, into the 1930s until, some few years before the war, the First Secretary of what was then the Tatar Soviet Socialist Republic took over the building as his dacha. But before the resumption of peace and plenty, Stalin’s deportation of the Tatar people had left no role for the First Secretary.
Lavrenty Beria was the next occupant, persuaded by one of his local satraps that the now nameless building should be converted to a school for training senior security staff.
A renovation program was put underway. Stonework was repointed, roofs and gutters renewed, broken windows replaced. Inside the building cherry red carpeting was cleaned and found to be in surprisingly good condition. When the new curtains were hung and rotting mattresses replaced, George Washington Baxter would have had no difficulty in recognizing his original interior decorations.
But in 1953 Lavrenty Beria was executed in one of Khrushchev’s swift steps to power, and the Royal American Hotel was once again deprived of a function.
Thus it was that the Royal American, its former name still etched in stonework across the bar, the stars and stripes still carved in mahogany on the ornate newel posts, passed through the possession of the head of KGB, mostly unused, until a subordinate of General Semyon Kuba selected it, as suitably neutral ground, for the private conference of Central Soviet Asian party leaders he called in October of that year.
The government caterers moved in from Odessa. A full staff was supplied by the local KGB directorate, guards were posted and a specialist staff from Moscow wired each room.
Bizarre as was the setting of the conference, for General Kuba, the outcome was vital. The six men invited were the leading Party figures in the most important Transcaucasian and Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union: the Caucasians — Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan; and the Central Asians — Kazakstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Among the leaders, only one, from Kazakstan, was a Slav, reflecting the regrettable political necessities of the last few years.
The first session had been arranged for the afternoon at the conclusion of a banquet luncheon at which Kuba’s most faithful associate, Minister Bukin, would be host. General Kuba himself would join them for the afternoon session.
In the still florid dining room they sat at a long table, the heavy cloth concealing mahogany legs carved with intertwined erotic figures. After caviar and rack of lamb, Bukin began the toasts: to the Union, to the nationalities, to each of the six guests in turn. Bukin knew exactly what Kuba expected of him as cheerleader for the afternoon’s conference. But then so did the six men seated around the table. They responded to each toast. But offered none themselves.
At 3:30 P.M. Kuba’s convoy of automobiles drew up outside the dining room windows and a few minutes later an aide opened the dining-room door.
Mikoyan, the Armenian, a nephew of former Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan, has left this account.
For myself I remember Joseph Stalin well. Family connections, one great-uncle, a deputy premier, another the designer of the MIG airplanes, gave me access to many Kremlin occasions even when I was only sixteen or seventeen. Naturally Stalin dominated every event at which he was present. Some things about him I remember; the yellow teeth when he smiled, the strange side-to-side walk as if each leg in turn was shorter than the other, his habit of surreptitiously (as he thought) wiping his nose with the back of his hand, his appalling Georgian accent, the way he would make jokes about having people shot. But some other things I remember: how he charmed foreigners just by pretending to listen to their opinions about the Soviet Union and how the whole of Moscow fell silent with dread when his death was announced.
He was a great man, make no mistake about it. My Uncle Anastas once said to me, “Only great men are immune to the suffering of others.” But then he was a man, the man, of his times. And in his times suffering was part of the nature of the beast.
Why am I talking of Joseph Stalin? Because as we sat there after lunch that day and the door was flung open to admit General Kuba, it was Joseph Vissarionovich I saw in the doorway, short, in plain uniform, a hooked pipe beneath a heavy mustache. It was deliberate, of course, right down to the rolling walk as he approached the table and the warmth of his smile. He was here to listen to our opinions, and like Stalin with the foreigners he would no doubt listen, pulling on his pipe. But I at least knew that would be the end of it. For the moment he needed our support. So be it, he must be made to pay.
We retired to the conference room with coffee and Armenian brandy. “Better than the French,” Kuba toasted me.
We began with a speech from Mikhail Bukin. He dealt with the immediate past. He had moved from cheerleader to trumpet blower. From the day of the funeral, he said, the Soviet Union’s path was clearly marked. Before us, a matter of four or five years ahead, we could all see the time when the Soviet Union would be by far the mightiest power on earth.
This, we all saw, was a restatement of Stalin’s dream of the 1950s, of Khrushchev’s boast of the 1960s, and of Brezhnev’s claim of the 1970s.
Targets for the new five-year plan were to exceed the United States in almost every area of production. Gross national product would climb by a prodigious ten percent. The military budget alone would expand from seventeen to twenty-one percent.
Throughout this self-deluding litany, Kuba puffed his pipe, nodded agreement or confirmation and occasionally looked across at one of us and raised his eyebrows as a target percentage was mentioned as if to say, “There, you doubters, what d’you think of that?”
From this image of a halcyon future, Bukin passed on to the purpose of the conference. Party organization would have to be strengthened to achieve those massive economic goals. There could be no place for anyone who toyed with the idea of statism.