John Sweeney - The Useful Idiot

Jones stared up at the cathedral, its fantastic multi-coloured onion domes towering above them.

“No better expression of the sugary make-believe that is the love of God,” said Duranty.

A shadow crossed Jones’ face.

“They’ve padlocked the gates. So this sugary make-believe must be kept under lock and key lest it cause trouble?”

Duranty, quick to spot a weakness, a non-Soviet sensibility, pounced. “You’re not a believer in the magic baby, are you?”

Jones shook his head.

“Explain that look on your face.”

“In a packed church I’m an atheist. In an empty church I confess that, sometimes, I am touched by the presence of God.”

“Pathetic. I’m LMG.”

“What’s that?”

“League of the Militant Godless. The league is making good the Party’s five-year-plan, launched by Stalin – who, let’s remember trained to be a priest – to make this country godless in five years. It’s working. Russia used to have 30,000 priests. Now they’re rarer than a black swan. The believers in the magic baby are dying out.”

“But if the League of the Militant Godless is so sure that it’s in the right, why use force to kill off the old ways?”

“Sentimental tosh.”

“I believe in human goodness,” said Jones. Even to his own ears, he sounded stuffy.

“Then you’re in the wrong town.” He gestured to the Kremlin. “In there, they work for the other side.”

“No argument about that,” replied Jones.

Duranty turned his head away from the cathedral to study Jones amiably. “My favourite Bolshevik is Radek,” said Duranty. “Always got a joke on his lips. Heard his latest?”

“No,” said Jones.

“So Stalin tells Radek to stop cracking jokes against the government. ‘OK,’ says Radek, ‘but the latest one, that you are our Vozhd, that’s not one of mine.’”

Jones said nothing.

“You know what the GPU call the peasants in transit out east?”

“I don’t know.”

“White coal.”

“Is that supposed to be amusing?”

“You’ve gone off the great Soviet experiment, haven’t you, old man? Think it’s all a big lie, eh?”

Jones did his utmost not to give away what both of them knew was the truth.

“You with the bourgeoisie, Jonesy? Come on, you can come clean with me. New Soviet Man is a bit of a fraud, that’s what you think, eh?”

Jones shook his head.

“Zakovsky was shot, you say. Where did you get that nonsense from?”

Jones stayed silent, watching his sly interrogator like a dumb animal his abusive master, waiting patiently, helplessly for the next blow.

“Oumansky broke the news to us at a little not-for-publication soirée yesterday. Road accident. Tragic loss. Greatly mourned, etc. No mention of him being shot. Perhaps he was shot, then he had the car accident. Or perhaps,” Duranty smiled to himself, “it was the other way round.”

Deep inside his pocket, Jones’ right hand jerked in spasm. He was not sure if Duranty had clocked it, but then Duranty clocked everything.

“If Zakovsky was shot as you say,” Duranty continued, “you’ve got to wonder who might have done it.”

“The Cheka?” Jones said at length. Remaining silent for too long would risk Duranty concluding that his accusations of Jones’ anti-Soviet sympathies had merit. “I’ve heard they’re not against killing their own if they transgress from the chosen path.”

“Perhaps the Cheka did turn on him,” Duranty continued, “but his killing – if he was killed – doesn’t have their handwriting on it. If one of their own fails, they handle it discreetly. A quickie trial in the bowels of the Lubyanka and then nine grammes of lead in the back of the neck. To kill a Chekist officer in the street, by bullet, that’s not their style. It’s bad for business. So one has to look for other possibilities.”

“Such as?”

“Opposition forces.”

“Come on, Duranty. The opposition to Soviet Communism was snuffed out long ago. Now Stalin is going round picking off all his opponents inside the party itself.”

Duranty’s eyes lost their amusement.

“Did you work them out, those two? Zakovsky and Lyushkov?”

“I don’t quite know what you mean.”

“Zakovsky was an idealist, a true believer in the Communist ideal. Oh, he killed people, lots of people, ‘former people’, Trotskyists, rightists, White Army, Boy Scouts, tennis players, whatever – but he did so because that was the correct path. Lyushkov is different, Lyushkov is…” Duranty hunted for the correct word, a rare break in his usual fluency. “… a mere technician of killing. The end of the idealist, by accident or by design, and the promotion of the technician tells you everything you need to know about where things are going here. So what you’re doing is playing with molten lead.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“A word of advice, from a man with a gammy leg to an acrobat. Take care who you join up there on the high wire. If you make a mistake and hang out with the wrong kind of acrobat, here in Russia, you will have a very long way to fall.”

“Are you actually saying that there’s some kind of effective opposition to Stalin that’s going around killing the Cheka?” Jones’ voice was high-pitched with incredulity. His hand twitched once more.

“No. I’m not saying anything. I’m just passing on what I’m hearing.”

“Hearing from whom?”

Duranty shrugged and waved a hand in goodbye. That was the strangest thing about this extraordinary man, thought Jones, as he watched him hobble diagonally across Red Square towards the Metropol. Clever, smart, and sensitive too, he understood every angle of the dark geometry dissecting this country. He was no Communist, no believer. No-one who could crack jokes in Lenin’s tomb could possibly believe in the higher call of Marxism-Leninism. Duranty knew full well that what was carried out in the name of the great theory was nonsense. He understood the appalling cost of Communism in human life completely. He just didn’t care. It was like someone working out a piece of algebra: if x meant seven million dead, who cared? What mattered to Duranty was understanding power and, better, being close to it, so that power valued him. If millions perished, so what? They were only numbers.

At the Hall of Columns, Professor Aubyn was still going strong. “By which I mean… one means… the extraordinary rise in food production in the Soviet Union. Under the helmsmanship of Comrade Stalin… ermm… bread production…”

One moment, Evgenia was sitting on a wooden chair writing notes in pencil. The next, she had keeled over and was out cold. The physics of it were simple enough. Take a mass of a thousand people and the thermal product of that mass would be no small thing. Heat rises. Heat and exhaustion can lead to a fainting fit. The professor stopped in mid-sentence, irritated at this fresh distraction, and froze where he was. Oumansky wandered off-stage in order to get help.

No-one was attending to the victim, so it would have to be Jones.

Walking down the aisle, Jones used his hands to vault up to the dais. Hurrying over to the stand where the professor stood, immobile, puzzled, he stole the glass of water on it and hurried back to Evgenia. Then, kneeling beside her, he dipped the index finger of his right hand in it and, as tenderly as he could, ran that along her lips. After a moment, she came to and, as she did so, there was a roar of applause from the workers. Bored to distraction by the professor’s dreary nonsense, they knew the score, that booing or catcalling the honoured guest could lead to big trouble. But when an honest citizen did a simple thing like bring back a lady who had fainted, no penalty would ensue. So they cheered and cheered and cheered.