Armageddon (39 page)

It was on a night in December during one of their many conferences that they became unbearably cold in his heatless office and Olga suggested they finish their work in her flat, where it was warm. Warmth ... that is what one needed in the Leningrad winter. For the masses there was no fuel. Every wooden structure had been demolished and long consumed as firewood. Everyone was cold and hungry ... except important officials like Olga Shiminov.

She had her own room with a private bath and kitchen. It was a luxurious palace in that frozen tomb of a city. And her cupboards held tea and vodka and potatoes and bread and beef.

Did he sell himself for warmth or was it just a weariness of life that afforded him no resistance? In truth, Igor never looked at her as a man looks at a woman in all those months they had worked together. Olga kept herself drab and severe as befitting an official of the party.

She was entirely without Natasha’s female wiles, sensuous looks, soft touches, desirable body. Olga was a daughter of the revolution, the ultimate product of this new way of life. She carried her breasts with a sort of defiance, as though they constituted a challenge to her equality. Olga was a slogan, a dedicated heartless mold which functioned with the machinelike efficiency of the new breed of Russian. Nonetheless there was still something of her that was “woman” ... there was female flesh. No matter how well it was Sovietized, it still existed.

Igor was an attractive man. Despite her objections that he had no background as a Communist, there was a special wartime dispensation for heroes of the Red Air Force. He was of the new legend. Wounded by gunfire, a man of great ingenuity and great courage, a hard-drinking Cossack surrounded by loyal officers. Perhaps it was Igor’s total indifference to Olga that awakened a challenge in her. He took her because he had reached the depths ... and her apartment was warm.

The marriage was not made in heaven. It was a convenient bargain on both parts to make the best of a miserable life.

Neither Igor’s patience or tenderness was able to penetrate Olga’s obsessed dedication. Sex life, such as it was, was dispatched with mechanical efficiency. It was always arranged so as not to interfere with a committee meeting or a lecture to factory workers.

Igor Karlovy, now a decorated major in the Red Air Force, strayed from his warm nest when springtime came and the thaw set in. He sought out his old comrades to drink with and soft and tender women to love.

Olga Shiminov was not without recourse. Igor was hauled before the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Leningrad. He was roundly admonished for his wild Cossack ways and warned that the husband of a leading functionary could not treat her as if she were a peasant woman. If rank and career meant anything to him, he had better stay home evenings. Finally, he was informed there were climates he could be sent to even colder than Leningrad.

Olga became pregnant between speeches. From her immensely practical point of view it was no time to have a child. Aside from room and food, a child would be a damned nuisance and interfere with her work. She made out a standard application for an abortion, against Igor’s wishes.

On this occasion the Central Committee took Igor’s point of view. The comrades “suggested” to Olga that it would be good for the morale of the masses if one of their leaders gave symbolic birth in the middle of the siege. Never a deviationist, Olga adhered to their “suggestion.” She presented her husband and the people of Leningrad a boy. Igor wished to name his son for his father, but the comrades “suggested” that the child be named Yuri after a young boy who had a martyred death at the hands of the SS early in the invasion.

The birth of his son gave Igor a reason to renew his desire to live. Slowly, he began to emerge from the great darkness ... until one day the shell of a siege gun hit Children’s Home #25.

When Igor awoke, the German girl, Lotte Böhm, was staring at him. He had seen such an expression of fulfillment in a woman’s eyes a long time ago when Natasha used to look at him that way.

“Why do you look at me so?” he asked.

“I did not know it could be like this.”

He closed his eyes and pressed her young body against him. Tears filled his eyes and ran down his cheeks. Oh Virgin Mother, he whispered, let me have a few moments of her again.

He washed and dressed silently and returned to his work in the next room. Lotte watched him from the doorway, her eyes riveted on him. At last he snapped his pencil in half, walked to the French windows and flung them open as if choking, and breathed in deeply.

“I wish to make an arrangement with you,” he said. “I shall see to your protection and that you are properly housed and fed.”

“You will not be sorry. I will make you very happy.”

Chapter Eight

C
OMMISSAR
V
ASALI
V
LADIMAROVITCH
A
ZOV
drank a glass of white chalky medicine to soothe his burning ulcers, wiped droplets from his thick black moustache, belched, and munched the second half of his meal, crackers. A portrait of Lenin “Speaking to the Workers” hung behind his desk; and a portrait of Stalin was over the fireplace opposite him. He held the new directive from Moscow in thick peasant hands and studied.

END VICTORY CELEBRATIONS IN BERLIN AND STABILIZE SITUATION

Azov was glad the directive finally came. As a man who lived largely by a sixth sense he felt the rising anger among the officer corps over the rape in Berlin’s streets.

The last time the fires erupted in his stomach was during the offensive in East Prussia. Tens of thousands of German troops had been enveloped and trapped in a pocket and attempted to surrender. Azov was ordered to “liquidate the pocket” on the grounds that the Germans were all suspected of being SS troops. For this task Azov brought in Siberian Cossacks, Mongols, and Tartars. The Germans were first disarmed, then slaughtered. During the ten days it took to complete the unpleasant mop-up Azov’s ulcers burned like the fires of hell.

He made a mock salute to the portrait of Stalin with a second glass of medicine and thought that he should switch portraits with Lenin’s so that he would not have to look at Stalin all day. However, in the Soviet life the ritual of taking down pictures had all sorts of connotations. Portraits that suddenly disappeared signified a person had fallen into disfavor; thus, the portrait switching could be reported by some member of political intelligence and used against him.

Azov had not made up his mind whether he liked or disliked his present exalted position. It was the most important of his illustrious but anonymous career. He would remain a mystery man, an enigma to most everyone in Germany; but as Chief Political Commissar and Advisor to German Affairs his “suggestions” to the Army and the Germans would be carried out to the letter. Indeed, this subdued mansion would be the true capital of the eastern parts of Germany.

Azov was painfully aware that the chance for a grave mistake, a miscalculation or error in judgment was much greater in his present post. He did not fathom the exposed position, had deftly avoided it all his life. His mind was like a delicate sail boat, able to react instantly to the slightest shift in the wind.

In the beginning, three decades ago, Azov had caught the eye of Lenin. In those days the Communists supported their illegal activities largely through hold-ups of banks and other robberies. Azov proved a perfect henchman in these operations; he was drab, but entirely dependable; he executed orders without deviation or regard for others.

After the new regime he worked with both the secret and political police as a liaison to Lenin, remaining on the fringe of the inner circle.

After Lenin’s death he stayed clear of involvement on either side of the power struggle that followed. Sensing ill winds, he shifted his sails toward Stalin without ever really expressing an opinion.

Azov was next sent to re-educate a large section of the Ukraine to the new way of life. There was great hope in the Five Year Plan to modernize industry and later collectivize agriculture of that backward land.

Kulaks, the independent farmers, abounded in his territory. This led to his first ulcer. The Ukrainians were always fired with a nationalistic spirit. The Kulaks wished to be Ukrainians first, had no desire to give up their land, and did not understand socialism. There was massive resistance by the burning of crops and destroying of livestock. Azov commanding Action Squads, Agitators, and the Red Army from Russia stamped down the resistance without mercy. The blood bath and deportations brought the economy to the brink of ruin.

He proved to be utterly merciless. Still a man without an opinion, he carried out the edicts to Sovietize the Ukraine with brutal efficiency. His personal hand sealed the fate of a quarter million people.

Once the resistance was crushed he set about building the secret police, military and Propaganda and political units so that they were controlled by Russians, not Ukrainians.

Azov did his job so well that he was recalled to Moscow as a top deputy of the NKVD. His specialty was obtaining confessions and his pride was that no one ever went to trial without first confessing.

This position brought him the usual rewards; he had his own three-room flat, a phone, a car at his disposal, a daughter in Komsomol, and a son in the University of Moscow.

In the beginning of the purges, Azov became one of the most dreaded of the inquisitors. Tens, hundreds, thousands broke before him; he found the weakness of each person. On some there was use of brutality, on others, starvation. Some broke from the lack of sleep, others quickly succumbed to terror. Eventually he got them all.

But as the purges wore on they began to turn on the hunters. More and more members of the NKVD and OGPU received their own fatal midnight summons. Each day brought another former colleague to Azov to confess.

During these years of the terror he slept with one eye open awaiting the knock for him. The knock often came between midnight and one in the morning. He would lurch up in panic, his heart thumping, and dress in a state of drowsy fear. He would try to recall what he had said wrong or to whom he had spoken. Perhaps it was his own son! They had argued!

By some miracle the summons for Azov always came from Stalin. He would be whisked through the empty Moscow streets in the middle of the night at terrifying speeds to the villa in the suburbs hidden in a pine forest. Here Stalin held his nightly court. Those people summoned arrived one by one in black cars. Each time the cast changed; only Molotov and a personal secretary were there every time.

Stalin, in plain proletarian tunic, looking much like the millions of his portraits, greeted them and led them into a banquet room. The table buckled beneath the weight of roast pig, steaks, caviar, champagne, vodka, borsch, and rare lamb dishes of his native Georgia.

During these nightly orgies of food and drink the business of the Soviet Union was conducted by despots. Molotov and the aides made quick notes of Stalin’s edicts and random ramblings. Sometimes a word or a nod meant moving a half-million persons, putting a thousand to death.

The nights Azov attended it was generally for the purpose of getting the list of new persons to liquidate in the purge for the charges of being a Trotskyite, Bukharanite, deviationist, saboteur, speculator, traitor, opportunist or anti-party. He was stunned to receive names of marshals of the Red Army, members of the Politburo, heroes of the revolution, and great Leninists.

At four or five each morning Stalin would become quite drunk and took pleasure in berating everyone in the room, making them the butt of crude jokes. He shredded their dignity with drunken boisterousness. But Comrade Stalin never got so drunk as to lose his astuteness or deadliness.

“Comrade Azov! I have proposed a toast in honor of our Chief Prosecutor for People’s Justice, Comrade Vishinsky. Why do you refuse to drink? Fill his glass!”

Stalin knew very well of Azov’s ulcers, but Azov drank and his insides turned to flame and his eyeballs rolled back in his head and he burst into an icy sweat. Once during each summons Stalin made him drink a whole glass of vodka. Azov dared not pass out until the meeting broke up at dawn and he was in the car on the way to his office to carry out the new liquidations.

The years of the nightmare waned slowly with the police arms devouring each other and their own members. It was, indeed, a delicate time for Azov.

The climactic Purge Trial ended with a bit of poetic justice when Yagoda, the head of NKVD, was brought to people’s justice. V. V. Azov’s supreme achievement was in obtaining Yagoda’s confession.

Because of his past experience in Sovietizing the reluctant Ukraine, Azov was assigned during the Great Patriotic War to form a German People’s Liberation Committee.

And now, here in Berlin, it was Azov’s turn to do the midnight summoning. His table was not so lavish as Stalin’s, but his rule in Germany was as absolute, and what was more, no one could force him to drink vodka at this table.

Azov peeked through the drapes. In the driveway below the cars began to arrive: Wohlman, Hirsch, the rest of the Liberation Committee, Red Army commanders, and military government officials.

Tonight would be special indeed. Tonight he would introduce a secret plan detailing
The Harassment of the West
e
rn Allies in Berlin.

Part 3

The Linden Trees Will Never Bloom Again

Chapter One

July 1, 1945

D
AYBREAK CAME AT 0548.
S
EAN
O’Sullivan’s convoy assembled in the parade grounds of the former Wehrmacht barracks in the town of Halle where they had been gathered, and waited with growing restlessness to move up to Berlin among the first American echelons.

A curious mixture of vehicles took to the road, conventional military trucks and jeeps interspersed with a variety of confiscated German automobiles. Four armored troop carriers hauled a platoon of infantry to guard against attack by German Werewolves and straggler bands.