John Sweeney - The Useful Idiot

Jones had been stupid enough to have left his hat in the courtyard. That made it all the more easier for the Cheka. But instead of being arrested, someone had gone to the bother of leaving it on his bed.

The Cheka could have him arrested at any moment – not for the ordinary wrongs foreigners committed, like changing money on the black market, but for something far darker, as an accessory to the murder of an agent of the state.

Jones wracked his brain, trying to work this thing through. He’d been on a mission to retrieve his show trial copy from the Chekist officer. Duranty knew that and he was their creature. But something was wrong here – because, if the Cheka had found his hat and examined it, they would have found his initials, G.J., in the band. Had that been the case, then he would have been their guest right now, sweating in a Lubyanka hot room. But he wasn’t.

Duranty swanned into the hall, stood at the side of the audience and listened to the professor’s bone-dry incantations for half a minute. Catching Jones’ eye, he stifled a yawn so long and protracted Jones had last seen the like of it at the ape house at London Zoo.

Jones’ right hand started to shake so much that he put it in his pocket to hide it from sight. The last person he wanted to talk to, to mess around with, was the man from the New York Times – but he also knew that it was absolutely essential for him to act as normally as possible. The memory of being bullied at his primary school came back to haunt him: a much bigger boy with freckles lurking in the shadows, waiting to hurt him. The thing that Jones had learnt more than anything was that he must not show fear, not cry, not shy away from an invitation to come out to play.

Jones arranged a grin on his face, and Duranty signalled for him to join him outside. Together, they moved out of the shadows of the Hall of Unions. The day was gin-sharp, the sun bouncing daggers of light off the brilliant snow. Duranty hobbled along by Jones’ side, lit a cigarette and sucked on it hungrily, all the while studying Jones with a sceptical air.

Duranty studied his black eye. “Angry husband?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Who beat you up?”

“I tripped on the pavement.”

“Enjoying the professor?”

“Professor Pig-iron? Enjoyment and him are two words that don’t sit well together. That man bores for America.”

Duranty nodded. “He’ll be droning for two hours, more. Let’s go see Lenin. There’s something about queue-jumping all those Commies waiting for hours in the cold that does wonders for my appetite.”

“No guilty pleasure better than bunking off a boring lecture,” said Jones, his right hand twitching in his pocket. They crossed the main road and headed towards Red Square, climbing uphill on the frozen cobbles.

“Heard about Zakovsky?” Duranty asked.

“Yes,” said Jones flatly. “Awful news.”

“May his immortal soul rest in peace.” Ordinarily Jones would have savoured Duranty’s command of irony but today his wordplay was not to his taste.

“Are you going to report on his death?” asked Jones.

“Don’t be silly. Did you manage to get your copy back from him, old boy? Before he passed away, that is?”

“Yes. I was walking up to Oumansky’s place when I caught up with him. I got my envelope from him, thanked him and turned away. Then I heard a couple of shots from a car. By the time I hurried up, people were already gathered around the dead man. He was lying on the ground in a pool of blood.” Jones paused, for effect. “I thought there was no point in getting involved.”

Duranty took a drag on his cigarette and exhaled, watching the smoke rise into the chill air. They were through now onto the Red Square, the slab of Lenin’s tomb dead ahead.

“Zakovsky died in a car accident. Do keep up.”

The high windows in the turrets of the Kremlin glinted in the sunlight. Jones said nothing.

By the side of the road, a babushka in rags was shovelling an enormous pile of brown slush from one heap to another. The arthritic slowness of her movement attracted Duranty’s mockery.

“Look at that useless cow. It’s as if she’s calibrating just how little effort she can make and still claim that she’s working. The liberals say New Soviet Man is too brutal. Sometimes I think he’s not brutal enough. She’d be better off dead. So many of them would.”

Duranty shook his head, dropped the remains of his cigarette and stubbed it out with his shoe. His nihilism was dark, darker than Jones could take. And yet swallowing it and smiling was his challenge, for the greater good. They strolled past the queue of peasants waiting to pay their respects to the father of the revolution.

“It’s their devotion to unholiness that’s so amusing,” said Duranty. Approaching the militia post at the head of the queue, he took out his letter of credentials from the Foreign Ministry. The officer read it twice, slowly, then ushered them into the Mausoleum. Inside, Lenin lay in warmth in a glass box, four GPU soldiers at each corner of the raised dais. Red spotlights lit up the living-dead god from below.

“Looks like he’s just arrived from hell, eh?” Duranty said through the side of his mouth, causing Jones to laugh out loud. A plainclothes GPU man – Jones felt he could now recognise them rather easily – turned and scowled at him. Jones bowed his head by way of apology.

“No giggling in the tomb, thank you,” said Duranty, but he was off again, using, abusing his protected status as an important foreigner, knowing that it would be a brave GPU soldier to order them out of the Mausoleum.

“So the latest joke is that Stalin has a dream, meets Lenin, and Stalin tells him all about the five-year-plan and how successful collectivisation is going. ‘Look, Comrade,’ said Stalin, ‘the masses are with me.’ ‘No, Comrade,’ says Lenin, who suddenly reeks of the grave, ‘I think you’ll find the masses are with me.’”

Their turn came to approach the glass box. Inside, the skin was puffy, strawberry pink, unreal.

“One of the diplomats told me that they removed his brain and are forever dicing it up to work out the secret of why he ended up so clever. To no avail, I’m told. What you’ve got left is rubbish, frankly. They bleached the dark spots, sewed up all the holes and pumped him full of some embalming fluid. He’s more paraffin than human. Behold their waxwork god.” One of the GPU soldiers stared at him, disturbed as much by the sardonic tone as the alien tongue in which it was expressed. The embalming process had somehow heightened Lenin’s Asiatic features, evidence of his family’s high-born status going back to the old aristocracy under the Tartars.

“Looks like Fu Manchu in a suit, poor dear,” said Duranty.

“Shhh,” said Jones.

“Don’t worry. If we get thrown out, the Cheka will cover it up.”

They followed an old man and his woman, slowly tottering out from the gloom of the mausoleum into the sunlight.

“How many people did Lenin have killed?” asked Jones.

“Tens of thousands.”

“So much adoration for a mass murderer,” said Jones. “Something wrong about this, surely?”

“I like bad people. They make the world go round. They do stuff. Good people, with their pathetic kindnesses, their little acts of humanity, they don’t get embalmed, they don’t merit soldiers standing at attention for years on end, the veneration. There may be a few sentimental tears but no devotion. For that, you need to have done something truly terrible. Good on the bad, I say.”

Their stroll had led them to the front of St Basil’s.

“Look at this. Built by Ivan The Terrible to mark his victory over the Tartars. Word is he had the architect blinded so that he could never build anything comparable ever again. Another bad man, Ivan The Terrible. Yet he broke the Tartar and won Siberia. Bad men do stuff.”