The Twelfth Department (41 page)

“Now what about Shtange’s death?” the colonel continued.

“Madame Azarova,” Korolev said. “Although, I’m not sure she was quite right in the head at the time.”

And perhaps it was the mention of Shtange’s death that finally jolted his exhausted brain to remember who that damned cigarette case belonged to. Perhaps the realization showed on his face, because the colonel slid it across the table to him once again.

“You recognize it now? I saw you looking at it. Did you see it when you went to visit Shtange at the institute?”

“Yes,” Korolev said, remembering Shtange offering him a cigarette from the case and how the propeller had caught his attention.

“The dedication is curious. Open it up.”

Korolev picked up the case and looked inside.

“Read it aloud.”

“With the fondest regards and enormous gratitude for your efforts,”
Korolev read.
“G.N. Kaminsky.”

“Dubinkin found it in Zaitsev’s office. He thought I might like it as a souvenir. Are you wondering why?”

Korolev was confused—as far as he was aware, Kaminsky was the current People’s Commissar for Health. It had confused him earlier when Rodinov had been talking about this fellow Boldyrev having taken over the job.

“I’ll tell you, Korolev. On Monday evening, not six hours after our Professor Azarov went to meet his maker, Grigory Kaminsky made a speech to the Central Committee. In that speech he denounced the NKVD for making false arrests. By the time he was halfway through it, half his audience had left the room. By the time he’d finished it, our people were waiting for him. That’s how come the position of People’s Commissar of Health became vacant.”

“I see.”

“I don’t know if you do—you see, Shtange’s report was intended for Kaminsky. I don’t know if Kaminsky ever received his copy, but he certainly made veiled references to the institute in his speech. That’s why Zaitsev felt relatively comfortable about it. He knew Kaminsky was discredited and he knew Shtange, because of the sentiments in this cigarette case, could be discredited as well. But the truth will out, Korolev. The truth will out.”

The colonel seemed to consider what that might mean and his expression turned grave, almost melancholy.

“Yes, we must remember that.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Moscow was beginning to wake as he walked home. It must have rained because the streets were wet and their reflection of the yellow morning sky had turned them golden. He was tired, certainly—his shoes felt like they were made of lead—but he was alive and he was safe, relative to the last few days anyway. And a citizen couldn’t ask for much more these days.

Sometimes a murder was like a pebble thrown into a pond, the ripples from it spreading wide—and that had been the case here. A bullet fired on a Monday had killed the professor in the morning and contributed to the arrest of the People’s Commissar for Health in the afternoon. On Tuesday, it had claimed another life—Shtange’s—and seen Priudski arrested. And last night the bullet had claimed Colonel Zaitsev—and Korolev could only guess the colonel’s fall would lead to many others.

One bullet had wreaked havoc.

Korolev walked slowly, thinking it through, amazed that he and Yuri had somehow been spared.

But then he remembered where he was going and who might be waiting there for him—and he picked up his pace. By the time he turned the corner of Bolshoi Nikolo-Vorobinsky he was almost running. He must have woken half the house as he clattered up the staircase to the apartment.

They
were
waiting for him, and as he entered the shared room he saw three faces looking up at him. They must have been sleeping on the chesterfield. Valentina stood, rubbing at her eyes, but Yuri was already running toward him, grabbing him around his waist and Natasha, Valentina’s little girl, joined him a moment later. And then all four of them were holding each other, not saying anything, and Korolev found that his eyes were damp—and it wasn’t from sadness.

HISTORICAL NOTE

The original idea for
The Twelfth Department
came from a BBC documentary series called
The Brain: A Secret History.
The “Mind Control” episode featured footage of 1930s Soviet experiments demonstrating the conditioned reflexes of children to eating biscuits—a variation on Pavlov’s dog experiments, but this time done with hungry-looking teenagers. It also seemed from the clip that some of the young boys had been operated on—although for what purpose remains unknown.

What
is
known is that the Soviets were very interested in psychological manipulation from the earliest years of the Revolution—and that both they and the Nazis, despite having repressive regimes, achieved genuine loyalty from their populations through propaganda and the careful exploitation of perceived internal and external threats. It’s also true that Soviet interrogation methods were very sophisticated by the 1930s and some of their techniques, particularly sensory deprivation, are still being used by American and British intelligence-gatherers today. Indeed the term “brainwashing” was coined in response to the inexplicable behavior of American and British prisoners of war captured during the Korean War—who almost overnight appeared to have become devout Communists.

That having been said, the parts of
The Twelfth Department
that deal with Soviet research into mind control are fictional and none of the events portrayed in this novel are based on actual events.

Three real people are mentioned in
The Twelfth Department
—Nikolai Ezhov, Isaac Babel, and Grigoriy Kaminsky—and it’s probably worth saying a little bit about each of them.

Nikolai Ezhov became People’s Commissar for Internal Security in September 1936, taking over from his predecessor, Genrikh Yagoda. Yagoda was later arrested and sentenced to death and, on Ezhov’s orders, was severely beaten before his execution. Ezhov kept the bullet that killed Yagoda in his office. While the Great Terror began under Yagoda, it reached its peak under Ezhov’s direction and, in the brief period he held his post, millions were arrested, many of whom were executed. By 1938 Ezhov had eliminated all internal opposition to Stalin—as well as countless innocents—and had become a threat himself in the process. As a result, he was replaced by Lavrenti Beria in late 1938 and, after a few months awaiting a certain fate, was arrested. He was severely beaten before his execution in early 1940.

Isaac Babel wrote some brilliant short stories in the 1920s, before, like many other Soviet writers, becoming relatively unproductive during the 1930s—a time when the state viewed all forms of artistic expression with suspicion. Babel’s situation wasn’t helped by his having had an affair with Ezhov’s wife, and when Ezhov fell from power, the NKVD chief took the opportunity to denounce Babel as a French spy. The writer was arrested not long afterward and in January 1940 joined a long list of Soviet writers who perished during the Great Terror. It’s said he and Ezhov are buried in the same unmarked grave in Moscow’s Donskoi cemetery.

Grigory Kaminsky, a lifelong Bolshevik, had reached the rank of People’s Commissar for Health in 1937. He was arrested after making a speech at a Central Committee plenum in June of that year during which he criticized the NKVD’s indiscriminate arrest of innocent Party activists. Reportedly he also clashed with Stalin, saying, “If we go on like this we’ll shoot the whole Party,” to which Stalin replied, “You wouldn’t by chance be friends of these enemies—well, then, you’re birds of a feather.” Kaminsky was executed by firing squad at the beginning of 1938 but rehabilitated under Khrushchev in 1955. Kaminsky’s brave action is mentioned in Khrushchev’s famous Secret Speech of 1956, which revealed the full extent of Stalin’s crimes.

I based the building that houses the completely fictional Azarov Institute on the Igumnov House, which is located at 43 Bolshoi Yakimanka Street. The Igumnov House was built in the 1890s for a wealthy merchant but, by 1937, it had become home to the Moscow Brain Institute, an establishment that investigated Lenin’s brain, among others. I’m confident the Brain Institute never engaged in any of the research that occupies the Azarov Institute in these pages. The building was allocated to the French Embassy in 1938 and currently serves as the French ambassador’s residence in Moscow.

The Hotel Moskva, where Korolev meets Madame Shtange in chapter 27, opened in 1935 and was designed by the architect Alexei Shchusev, who was also responsible for Lenin’s mausoleum on nearby Red Square. The Hotel Moskva was one of the most prominent of the new Stalinist-style buildings that replaced so much of the old Moscow during the 1930s and 1940s. The hotel was knocked down in 2004 and replaced with a modern reproduction, but both feature mismatched wings to the facade that faces on to Okhotny Ryad—one wing having larger windows and a more ornate design, while the other is simpler and with smaller windows. The story that Muscovites tell to explain this lack of symmetry is that Stalin mistakenly authorized two alternate plans for the hotel and, rather than ask for clarification, those responsible for the construction implemented one design for each wing, giving the hotel its unbalanced appearance. I’ve posted some photographs of the original hotel on my website (
www.william-ryan.com
), including some of the roof terrace where Korolev and Madame Shtange have their conversation.

Gorky Park, where Korolev meets Count Kolya in chapter 42, was opened in 1928 and named for Maxim Gorky, the writer much admired by Stalin—and also probably murdered on his orders in 1936. The parachute tower and the statue of the oarswoman that they notice during their conversation were iconic images of 1930s Moscow and feature in numerous propaganda posters. The parachute tower has long gone but the oarswoman, who has been moved around a bit over the last eighty-odd years, has finally come to rest down on the embankment, calmly overlooking the Moskva. I’ve posted a number of photographs of the park on my website, both as it was in its heyday and how it is today.

Leadership House, where Professor Azarov lives and is murdered, is closely based on the massive Government House—built in 1931 on the same spot as my fictional re-creation and featured in Yuri Trifonov’s novel
House on the Embankment.
Aside from over five hundred apartments, the building also housed shops, cinemas, theaters, and canteens. The residents of Government House suffered disproportionately during the Terror, probably because so many of them were senior Party members and held important positions within Soviet society. Hundreds of tenants were arrested and many of them executed.

For those who are interested in the period and would like to read further, I can recommend the following books—all of which have been of great assistance in trying to recreate the Soviet Union of the 1930s:

Danzig Baldaev (and others),
Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia
, 3 vols. (Steidl/Fuel, 2003; Fuel, 2006; Fuel, 2008).

Harold Eeman,
Inside Stalin’s Russia—Memories of a Diplomat 1936–1941
(Triton, 1977).

Orlando Figes,
The Whisperers
(Allen Lane, 2007).

Sheila Fitzpatrick,
Everyday Stalinism
(Oxford, 1999).

Sheila Fitzpatrick,
Tear off the Masks—Identity and Imposture in Twentieth Century Russia
(Princeton, 2005).

Peter Francis,
I Worked in a Soviet Factory
(Jarrolds, 1939).

Garros, Korenevskaya and Lahusen,
Intimacy and Terror—Soviet Diaries of the 1930s
(New Press, 1995).

Jochen Hellbeck,
Revolution on my Mind—Writing a Diary Under Stalin
(Harvard, 2006).

Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman,
Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia
(Indiana University Press, 2006).

Hiroaki Kuromiya,
The Voices of the Dead
(Yale, 2007).

Nina Lugovskaya,
The Diary of a Soviet Schoolgirl 1932–1937
(Glas, 2003).

Nadezhda Mandelstam,
Hope against Hope
and
Hope Abandoned
(Collins and Harvill, 1971).

Catherine Merridale,
Night of Stone—Death and Memory in Russia
(Granta, 2000).

Simon Sebag Montefiore,
Stalin—The Court of the Red Tsar
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003).

Peter Pringle,
The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov
(Simon & Schuster, 2008).

Donald Rayfield,
Stalin and his Hangmen
(Viking, 2004).

Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov,
Stalinism as a Way of Life
(Yale, 2004).

Andrew Smith,
I was a Soviet Worker
(Robert Hale, 1937).

Dominic Streatfield,
The Secret History of Mind Control
(Thomas Dunne Books, 2007).

Kathleen Taylor,
Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control
(Oxford University Press, 2006).

Guide to the City of Moscow
(Cooperative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR, 1937).

Any historical errors in
The Twelfth Department
are my responsibility, although they are occasionally deliberate—fiction does, after all, involve quite a lot of making things up. I do like to hear about them, though, so please feel free to get in contact via my website.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are a number of people who contributed to the writing of
The Twelfth Department
and to whom I’m very grateful.

Alistair Duncan, who worked on the BBC series
The Brain: A Secret History
, gave me very helpful research suggestions that pointed me in the right direction at an early stage.

Daniel Petrov managed to get me into places in Moscow I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to visit.

Johnny O’Reilly, the Moscow-based film director, who lives in the House on the Embankment, kindly showed me around his apartment and told me a story or two about the building that made its way into these pages.

Paul Richardson, publisher of the magazine
Russian Life
, read a late draft of
The Twelfth Department
and prevented me from making several embarrassing mistakes.