Soldiers and penals cheered together. The KGB major reversed the command vehicle and drove wildly down the narrow hillside track. Beside him the Uzbek general sat white-faced, without speaking.
The disaster at Velinsky was the first occasion on which troops of a National Division were used against the penal threat. On later occasions some, even the majority of the National Divisions, obeyed their orders and suppressed the Penal Brigades they had been ranged against. But from Velinsky onward no local KGB commander or area military commander completely trusted a National Division. Since just these divisions constituted by now a large part of the Soviet Army’s third-line reserve in the northern regions of Moscow, the options of military planners were severely limited in their handling of the Penal Brigades.
Investigating Officer Platonov reexamined Letsukov’s secretary the evening after the Moscow Dynamo soccer match.
“You knew Comrade Letsukov had already left because his jacket was no longer there?”
“That is correct.”
“You then locked the inner door, the door to his office?”
“Yes, Comrade.”
“Does Comrade Letsukov often work late?”
“I am invariably the last to leave the office,” the girl said. “None of the men have ever seen the lights turned out to my knowledge.”
No, there was no office romance here, Platonov realized, not even a little illicit passion for Letsukov on his secretary’s part.
So Letsukov had taken his coat. And had, it seemed, allowed himself to be locked in his office (he of course had a key, too) by the departing secretary. And all this strange behavior was before the fire.
The dogged Platonov worked late into that night. At the Examination Sheds where the burned and broken contents of the sixth-floor offices were kept until Platonov’s signature on the Fire Report allowed them to be disposed of, he examined minutely every item. The fireproof filing cabinets interested him most. They had been crushed under tons of falling concrete. Locks had burst open and in some cases the side wall of the cabinets had been pierced.
Platonov knew the key system in use in the office so he concentrated on those filing cabinets which Letsukov’s keys would not open. Each cabinet whose lock had burst carried at least one enormous dent in the side where falling concrete had caved in the metal. It was possible to relate, in almost every case, an impact to a burst lock or collapsed file drawer. Where there was no evidence of the impact, the drawer locks held. Except in the case of the Estonian file. And when he examined that drawer more closely he could see that the brass edging to the lock was misshapen, on one side bent inward and on the other side of the keyhole, bent outward.
No conceivable impact from the falling concrete could have bent that half-inch brass strip outward. But leverage could.
Platonov proceeded carefully. The next day was Saturday, which enabled him to interview the Department Head at his home.
Zelmetsky was a very worried man. “The Estonian file did contain one critical piece of information,” he said, and told Platonov about General Avgust Pork’s prisoner who had revealed the names of other so-called Free Trade Unionists.
“Were the three men arrested?”
Zelmetsky sat silent. “No,” he said after a moment or two. “All three men had left their work hostel before the officers arrived. None of them have been seen since.”
Platonov nodded. “In your opinion, Comrade Zelmetsky,” he said, “is it conceivable that Letsukov might have illegal contacts with this movement?”
“It’s his function to investigate these movements.”
“Could there be a better cover for a man who was sympathetic to their cause?”
Zelmetsky shook his head slowly. “No, there could not.” He paused, “What will you do now, Comrade?”
Platonov began to fill his pipe. “I am investigating officer with the Arson Squad. If I am right, Letsukov is guilty of an act of arson which falls within my compass. But if I am right, then an altogether more serious question is also involved. The Lubyanka must be informed. From now on the investigation must be turned over to them.”
Chapter Forty-One
To anyone old enough to have remembered the early days of the Revolution, the scenes in the camps of Noginsk and Pavlovsky would have been entirely familiar. Under the perimeter guard system, the penals were free to drift about within the huge compound as they chose. In the first days it was possible to see men standing on piles of crates haranguing great crowds of penals. Shortly afterward committees were formed and, for the distribution of food and what little information was available, the penals divided themselves into national groups of a thousand men. Nobody knows quite when it began but within a week or two the groups were referring to themselves ironically as Gulag Regiments. Soon the titles became accepted — the 1st (Vorkuta) Gulag Regiment, the 10th (Kolyma) Gulag Regiment…
Perhaps the guards or the ration delivery troops carried the terminology from Pavlovsky to Noginsk, but within that first fortnight, in both camps, anarchic in some cases, ordered in others, the Gulag Regiment became the basic unit of the penals’ own administration.
One of the penals at Pavlovsky at this time was to become in later years the distinguished historian of the Georgian nation, C. G. Kodadze. Years later he wrote this description.
I find what happened at Pavlovsky and indeed at Noginsk, too, at that time can only be understood by reference to the way medieval European men sought to organize themselves. I am not, of course, talking of Marxist views of feudalism. I mean associations more like the English inns of court or the old European universities and in particular the free companies of brigands — ex-soldiers who roamed France in the fourteenth century with cheerfully self-mocking names like the Society for Profit or the Society for Acquisition. There are many other examples in medieval times, the Teutonic Knights, for example, the Crusaders themselves…
In the same way that the Knights Templars of medieval universities would have an English Hall or a French Hall, we divided in a remarkably short time into national units of Armenians or Kirghizians or Uzbeks, and like medieval freebooters self-mockingly adopted the tide of Gulag Regiments.
Powerful personalities arose among us. I remember the soldier-orator Oblinsky in particular. He was a Slav, a Belorussian I believe, and he spent his days in Pavlovsky haranguing the penals, ramming home the questions that were troubling all of us: Has the General Amnesty been revoked? Why are we back behind barbed wire and watchtowers? Are we prisoners or are we free?
And the greatest question of all was whether we would ever consent to return to Siberia, would we ever go back without fighting for our lives?
The earliest arrivals had been at Noginsk and Pavlovsky for almost a month now and suspicion of the authorities’ intentions had hardened into the conviction that we were to be sent back. Every night in that last week at Pavlovsky, committees went from each Gulag Regiment to the central warehouse where they and figures like Oblinsky debated our uncertain future.
Sometime in mid-December it was decided that Oblinsky would carry a demand to the camp commandant (whom we had never seen) requiring an answer to the question: Are we prisoners or free?