John Sweeney - The Useful Idiot

Duly authorised, Evgenia hurried out of Lyushkov’s office, curbing her instinct to run off down the corridor. At the central staircase, she halted. Officers strutted to and fro. Clerks, mainly women, walked hurriedly this way and that. Evgenia waited until a woman clerk roughly her own age walked past her and she asked, “Excuse me, I’m new here. Could you tell me where the Registry is?”

The woman explained that it was on the first floor. She took the stairs. The Registry was a cavern of a room, with files in metal stacks climbing to a ceiling. Wheeled ladders helped the clerks, mostly women, access files above head height. A long queue of clerks and Chekist officers, some of them colonels, waited patiently in line to have their request served. Evgenia bit her lip and hurried to the very front of the queue.

“Have you gone blind? Can’t you see there’s a queue?” said a middle-aged clerk, a pin on her breast proclaiming that she was the Chief Registry Clerk.

“Comrade Yagoda has asked for the file on Colonel Zakovsky’s death and all files pertaining to it.”

“Authorisation?”

Evgenia handed over the stamped letter. The chief clerk read it twice, buckled in fear, and then returned the letter, saying, quietly, “At once, Comrade.”

Yagoda’s letter did its dark magic. The chief clerk shouted for clerks to assist her. Three came running. The chief clerk rattled out her commands, nodded to Evgenia and said the dread word, Yagoda. While she waited, Evgenia read Yagoda’s letter properly for the first time. It read:

“To whom it may concern, Comrade Genrikh Yagoda, deputy head of the OGPU, states that Evegenia Mironova is carrying out work of the utmost urgency for the armed fist of the revolution and that every help and assistance must be given to this person.”

She handed it back to the chief clerk. “Please make one copy of this letter and do that now.”

“Certainly, Comrade.”

The copying took two minutes Evgenia had no idea how it was done but it was a perfect copy of the original, down to an exact replica of Yagoda’s signature. She placed both the original and the copy in one pocket of her jacket. The files took longer. After an ocean of time, thirteen files were slammed down on the desk in front of her.

Before she could touch them, the chief clerk pushed across a type-written master list detailing all the files, starting with Zakovsky’s post mortem. Only after she had signed the master list would she be given the files. Her eyes scanned down the list. The last one, the thirteenth, was for “Mironova, E”. For a fraction of a second she blanched. It was a kiss in time but the chief clerk noted Evgenia’s fear. In the Lubyanka, smelling other people’s terror was commonplace, like the buttering of bread. Evgenia, recovering, smiled and signed the list.

The chief clerk smiled sourly. “Is there a difficulty, Comrade?”

“None,” said Evgenia, curtly.

She counter-signed for the thirteen files.

“You’re new here,” the chief clerk said, stating a fact.

“Yes, very,” said Evgenia.

“Watch your step, girl.”

Evgenia hurried off, thirteen files in her hands, including her own – which might, or might not, contain evidence sufficient for her own death sentence. Every human instinct told her to open and start reading her own file but she dared not do that in the Registry. The whole country from the Finnish border to the Bering Sea was cobwebbed with spies, but this room in this building was at the dead centre of all the threads. If she stopped to read, she would be seen, and that would be the end of her.

Walking out of the Registry, as slowly as she dared, she mounted the steps of the great staircase. Every step was a kind of death. She dared not open her file. But if she didn’t she would never get this opportunity ever again.

Trembling, at the fifth floor landing she turned right and headed to the women’s toilets, then hurried past critical eyes into the nearest cubicle. Locking the door behind her, she sat on the closed toilet seat, untied the file and opened it. Hers was the thinnest of all. Mironova, E was, in the Cheka’s terms, something of a nobody. She leafed through her photographs and the closely typed pages, detailing her date of birth, the social position of her parents, her university grades, homes, love affairs, work, attitude to the party, attitude to the “widespread malnutrition” in the countryside. It was a make-believe world she herself had helped create. To her intense relief, the central lies that she had told about herself – that she was born in Ukraine, not Wales, that her mother and father were ordinary peasants, both killed in the war – had been swallowed.

Her fingers scrabbled, turning page after page. Time was against her. But it was all right. The Cheka had nothing bad on her. That is, until she came to the very last page in the file, a report written by an unidentified Cheka officer following a conversation with Duranty. One sentence jumped out at her:

“Duranty noted that Mironova, E. has certain irreddemably bourgeois traits. As a translator, she is second to none. Her mastery of the English language is extraordinary, down to intonation and a command of nuance and irony that makes him suspect that her story that her parents were workers from Stalino who died during the civil war is a fabrication. RECOMMENDATION: At some future point, the armed fist should interrogate Mironova, E. harshly to establish the correct facts.”

Evgenia ripped out the page from the string bindings and ate it. It would do no good, of course, because eventually the bureaucracy would discover the missing page. But it might buy her some time. A week? A month? She closed the file, put it at the bottom of the stack, and hurried out of the cubicle. On the stairwell corner she cannoned into the Uzbek guard.

“I’m so sorry,” she said to the Uzbek.

He grunted that he had been sent to fetch her because she had been gone too long. The way he had grunted it suggested he didn’t really care, but the bosses might and you don’t want to mess with them. Together, they walked to Lyushkov’s office, the Uzbek just behind her.

The moment she opened the door, Yagoda pounced.

“What kept you so long, girl?”

“There was a delay at the Registry. I’m so sorry that I have kept you waiting.”

Yagoda’s dry voice repeated her phrase in a high-pitched girlish falsetto.

“A file was being updated, Comrade Yagoda,” said Evgenia, coolly. “That was the cause of the delay. If there was any fault, it was mine alone.” She handed over the thirteen files and the original of Yagoda’s letter, bowed her head and held her hands behind her back, waiting for the verdict from the man who had power over the life and death of every person in the Soviet Union.

Yagoda said nothing.

“You were too slow,” said Lyushkov.

“Hold your tongue, Colonel, or someone will cut it out. Girl, what is your speciality?”

“I work for Special Services, sir. I’m a translator for the party, the armed fist, when required, foreign dignitaries and from day to day foreign reporters. Such as Walter Duranty of the New York Times .”

Yagoda’s eyes twinkled. “Ah, yes. Duranty is a good friend of New Soviet Man.”

She bowed her head. And New Soviet Woman, she thought.

“You may sit, child.”

Yagoda lined the files up, opened the master file on Zakovsky and started reading, using Lyushkov’s pen to make a crisp note in the margins. It was as thick as a bible.

Sitting on the edge of his seat, Lyushkov’s pink tongue kept darting out and wetting his lips. You could smell his fear.

Twenty minutes later, there was a knock on the door. Yagoda said, “Enter” and the Chief Clerk came in, bearing a file.