For Stalin, Lenin’s style of giving out written orders to execute millions was an idiotic waste of authority. The Master never implicated himself, putting his puppets in charge of the purges.
So formally, it was Kaganovich who conducted the repressions of the 1930’s, and proving his worth, he hunted for Stalin’s enemies with wild-eyed zest. The bloodletting wasn’t limited to Party ranks alone. Ferocities in Ukraine brought that land to a famine that claimed two million lives. Under his supervision, a local hard-hitting cadre by the name of Nikita Khrushchev emerged as the most remorseless headsman. In rural Russia, thirteen million people were terminated by the agricultural collectivization that Kaganovich commandeered. The Cossacks were annihilated as a nation that endangered the Communist cause.
Orchestrating the mass murders, Kaganovich felt that his own time would soon come. The words in his last testament poured across the pages in waves of relived desperation, the anticipation of doom. There was the horror of witnessing Molotov’s wife betrayed by her husband, and Lazar’s own brother, Mikhail, betrayed by himself. And throughout all the treachery, the bestial scramble for self-preservation among killers, no one felt remorse or regret. A son would kill his own father; a mother would strangle her child. They were fighting for a just cause. No form of insanity was unacceptable if the Master demanded it, if the enemies within were still plotting against their Soviet Motherland. Those who were branded as enemies pleaded guilty and begged to be shot, if only their deaths could benefit their great country.
Night after night, as Kaganovich returned from Stalin’s drunken parties, he expected to see visitors in a black NKVD car pulling up to his house to arrest him. When the Master was especially cordial, everyone knew it was a bad sign, his last goodbye to a dear comrade he was about to dispose of.
But no one came for Kaganovich then, as everyone around him in the Party list dropped dead before a firing squad, their relatives, wives and children freighted to Siberia in his trains. Only the war had come.
Kaganovich’s description of the wartime effort amazed Constantine — not by what was written there, but rather, what wasn’t. His account of the first days was shockingly brief, disjointed, irrelevant. Constantine knew why. No undue elaboration, no self-implication. Something had happened — something too frightening for Kaganovich to mention in a secret diary forty years later, as if Stalin would come back from the dead and crush him.
After the war ended, fear needed to return to the triumphant country. It was coming: new terror, new purges, new blood. Unlike anything seen before.
As Constantine finished reading the last pages, what he learned about Kaganovich chilled him to the core. He set the rusted papers aside, fingers trembling, stunned by the final revelation.
There was even more on the encrypted disk — written by another dead old man. All the answers were there.
A sudden thought gripped Constantine. He knew a lot about Lazar Kaganovich… But who was Maxim Malinin?
7
Every morning as he walked around the Novodevichy Convent, the pain in Ilia’s foot pulsed where the toes should have been. All these years, his mind denied that a part of his body was no longer there. He had lost the toes to frostbite in a Moscow bombed by the Germans and swept by the cold. He remembered the air raid shelters, and his father and brothers who went to the frontline and never returned. It was the cold and the self-sacrifice that had won the war. If not for the Battle of Moscow stopping the blitzkrieg, the world would never be the same. It had made Stalingrad and Kursk possible, but the Germans had met their doom in 1941; from then on victory had come down to throwing enough Soviet bodies at Hitler’s armies.
Ilia was a survivor who should not and would not have survived, if it were not for God’s mercy.
In Moscow, he’d once had a home and a loving family — before an air raid that took away everything except his life. Struggling on his crutches, he towed himself to the Novodevichy Convent.
The Convent, too, was a survivor.
Over the five centuries, these walls had seen the fall of two dynasties of Russian czars. After the revolution, in 1922, it was shut down, the nuns driven out by cutthroats. By 1939, it remained as one of only 400 churches in all of Russia; the other 80,000 had been vaporized.
And it survived the war — the waves of German bombings that rained on Moscow.
The Great Patriotic War was a term coined by Stalin intentionally as homage to the original Patriotic War that ended in victory over Napoleon. His years at a seminary had taught Stalin that when tragedy came, the people would not turn to communist ideals to save them. To win, the people needed patriotism.
They needed God.
And God’s help.
Thus, Joseph Stalin, demolisher of churches, brought religion back. But there weren’t enough priests. A seminary was opened at the Novodevichy, officially titled as a “theological institute” that offered quick Christian education. The Novodevichy had become the largest repository of Orthodox texts, and Ilia’s mind consumed them eagerly.
The gates of the Novodevichy were still the same as when he had passed through them for the first time. He had joined the Church after Stalin’s death, at a time when Khrushchev persecuted religion with renewed fervor. Ilia remembered the cloudless morning… the elation of touching holy books.
With passing years, Ilia had learned about the Kremlin collection — and the atrocities of the Bolsheviks. And he also saw that his clerical brethren did not always share his motives of entering priesthood.
The Convent stood as it had for centuries, while the Communist empire crumbled. Yet the age of democracy brought heartbreak instead of change. He had fought against the repressive system from the outside, and now found himself inside it. He felt that atheists governed the Church.
His post as Metropolitan of Kolomna was symbolic. The Novodevichy was where everything had started for him. But it was less of a monastery and more of a tourist landmark. In effect, by this appointment Ilia had been ousted from the politics of the Church — a trade-off that equally satisfied the Holy Synod and Ilia himself. He still led his private crusade against the aftermath of Bolshevism — as before, covertly. New declassified documents, more facts, hidden crimes of the Soviets against the Church emerged. At times, he thought his investigation would yield no tangible results, until a human rights group approached him to offer assistance. A liberal group, come to think of it! Free Action. They claimed their mission was searching for truth, fighting the governing bureaucracy that did everything to shut them down. At first Ilia treated them with cautious skepticism, but the findings they shared with him were too convincing, too important to discard. And they shared Ilia’s cause: a final denouncement of Communism.
And then a brilliant student appeared at Sergiev Posad.
Ilia’s monastic vow of celibacy did not prevent him from having a son like Constantine. But his heart was full with anguish at the guilt he felt for making the child part of his dangerous search. Old fool! Dear Lord, forgive me! What madness had he thrown Constantine’s pure, innocent soul into?
Now, as he walked along the Novodevichy’s courtyard, with every step the Metropolitan’s cane tapped lightly against the ancient stones. Solitary sounds in the endless vacuum of silence. The early morning was as desolate as his heart. Perhaps everything was pointless, he wondered. His personal quest was not worth the cost of threatened lives.