‘So what do we have with Sergei Platov?’ he began. The manager of Daunts was sure that no more of the thirty seats set out in the bookshop would be filled by curious passers-by and had asked Gaddis to begin. ‘Is he saint or sinner? Is Platov guilty of war crimes in Chechnya, of personally authorizing the murder of journalists critical of his regime, or is he a statesman who has restored the might of Mother Russia, thereby rescuing his country from decadence and corruption?’
The question, as far as Gaddis was concerned, was rhetorical. Platov was a stain on the Russian character, a borderline sociopath who had, in less than ten years, destroyed the possibility of a democratic Russia. A former KGB spy, he had green-lit the murder of Russian civilians on foreign soil, held Eastern European countries to ransom over the supply of gas, and encouraged the murder of journalists and human rights activists brave enough to criticize his regime. One such journalist — Katarina Tikhonov — had been a good friend of Gaddis’s. They had corresponded for over fifteen years and met whenever he visited Moscow. She had been shot in the elevator of her apartment building three years earlier. Not a single suspect had been arrested in connection with the murder, an anomaly which he had exposed in his new book.
He turned to his notes.
‘History tells us that Sergei Platov is a survivor, from a family of survivors.’
‘What do you mean?’ The Hampstead matriarch was sitting in the front row and already asking questions. Gaddis flattered her with a patient smile which had the useful simultaneous effect of making her feel embarrassed for interrupting.
‘What I mean is that his family survived the worst excesses that twentieth-century Russia could throw at them. Platov’s grandfather worked as a chef for Josef Stalin and lived to tell the tale. That in itself is a miracle. His father was one of only four soldiers from a unit of twenty-eight men who survived after they were betrayed to the Germans at Kingisepp in 1941. Sergei Spiridonovich Platov was pursued into the surrounding countryside and only avoided capture by breathing through a hollow reed while submerged in a pond. Sean Connery had the same trick in Dr No.’
Somebody laughed. Traffic hummed on Holland Park Avenue. Sam Gaddis was looking at a sea of nodding, attentive faces.
‘Do you know about the siege of Leningrad?’ he asked. He hadn’t meant to start on that, not tonight, but it was a subject on which he had lectured many times at UCL and the Daunt crowd would go for it. The manager, standing near the door, was bobbing his head in a way that looked enthusiastic.
‘It’s the winter of 1942. Minus twenty degrees at night. Three million people in a city surrounded by German troops, a million of them women and children.’ The matriarch gasped. ‘There is so little food that people are dying at the rate of five thousand a day. Leningrad’s entire supply of flour has been destroyed by German firebombs. The fires cause molten sugar to saturate the earth at the Badayev warehouses. People are so hungry that they are prepared to dig into the frozen ground to extract the sugar and sell it on the black market. The top three feet of soil sells for one hundred roubles a glass, the next three feet for fifty.’
A bell and a sudden burst of traffic. The door of the bookshop opened and a young woman stepped inside: shoulder-length black hair, knee-high leather boots over denim jeans, and the sort of figure that a forty-three-year-old, divorced academic who has drunk three glasses of Sauvignon Blanc notices and photographs with his eyes, even while giving a talk at his own book launch. The woman whispered something to the manager, briefly caught Sam’s eye, then settled in a seat at the back.
Gaddis wished that he had brought his props. At UCL, his annual lecture on the siege of Leningrad was a must-see sellout, one of the very few events that every student in the Russian history programme felt both obliged and enthused to attend. Gaddis always began by standing behind a table on which he had placed a third of a loaf of sliced white bread, a pound of minced beef, a bowl of bran flakes, a small cup of sunflower oil and three digestive biscuits.
‘This,’ he tells the packed auditorium, ‘is all that you get to eat for the next thirty days. This is all that an adult citizen of Leningrad could claim on their ration cards in the early years of World War II. Kind of puts the January detox in perspective, doesn’t it?’ The lecture takes place in the early weeks of the New Year, so the joke always whips up a satisfying gale of nervous laughter. ‘But enjoy it while you can.’ Confused looks in the front row. Plate by plate, bowl by bowl, Dr Gaddis now tips the food on to the floor until all that remains on the table in front of him are ten slices of stale white bread. ‘By the time the siege really starts to bite, bread is more or less the only form of sustenance you’re going to get, and its nutritional value is nil. The people of Leningrad don’t have access to Hovis or Mother’s Pride. This bread’ — he picks up a piece and tears it into tiny pieces, like a child feeding ducks — ‘is made mostly from sawdust, from sweepings on the floor. If you’re lucky enough to have a job in a factory, you get 250 grams of it every week. How much is 250 grams?’ Gaddis now picks up six slices of the bread and hands them to a student in the front row. ‘That’s about how much it is. But if you don’t work in a factory’ — three of the slices come back — ‘you get only 125 grams.’
‘And I warn you not to be young,’ he continues, channelling Neil Kinnock now, a politician from yesteryear whom most of his students are too young to remember. ‘I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to grow old in the Leningrad of 1942. Because if you do’ — at this point, he gets hold of the final three slices of bread, tossing them to the floor — ‘if you do, you’ll most likely starve to death.’ He lets that one settle in before delivering the coup de grace. ‘And don’t be an academic, either. Don’t be an intellectual.’ Another gale of nervous laughter. ‘Comrade Stalin doesn’t like people like us. As far as he’s concerned, academics and intellectuals can starve to death.’
The beautiful woman in the knee-high boots was staring at him intently. At UCL, Gaddis usually picked out a volunteer at this stage and asked them to take off their shoes, which he then placed on a table at the front of the lecture hall. He liked to pull grass clippings and pieces of bark from the pockets of his jacket. Christ, if Health and Safety had allowed it, he’d have brought a dead rat and a dog in, as well. That, after all, was what the citizens of Leningrad survived on as the Germans tightened the noose: grasses and bark; leather shoes boiled down for sustenance; the flesh of vermin and dogs. Cannibalism was also rife. Children would disappear. Limbs would mysteriously be removed from corpses left to freeze in the street. The meat pies on sale in the markets of war-torn Leningrad could contain anything from horse flesh to human being.
But tonight he kept things simple. Tonight Dr Gaddis spoke about Platov’s aunt and first cousin surviving three years in a German concentration camp in the Baltics. He related how, on one occasion, Platov’s mother had passed out from hunger only to wake up while she was being taken to a cemetery by men who had assumed she was dead. Towards eight o’clock, he read a short extract from the new book about Platov’s early years in the KGB and, by eight fifteen, people were applauding and he was taking questions from the floor, trying to make the case that Russia was reverting to totalitarianism and all the time wondering how to persuade the girl in the knee-high boots to join his party for dinner.