Sam Eastland - Red Icon

As soon as he stepped back inside the house, he was confronted by his father. ‘Did you speak with him?’

‘Yes,’ replied the son.

‘Don’t believe a word he spoke,’ warned Viktor. ‘His people are a poison on this earth.’

‘What he said made sense to me,’ answered Stefan.

‘What?’ Viktor laughed angrily. ‘Then perhaps you should go with him when he leaves!’

‘Maybe I will,’ said Stefan.

Viktor had only been trying to scare him, but now he paused as he realised that his son was serious. ‘I cannot stop you,’ he said. ‘You are old enough now to make your own decisions. Choose that beggar or choose your family, but know that you cannot have both.’

At that moment, Stefan’s mother entered the room. She had been listening, as afraid of her husband’s anger as she was of her son’s unyielding temperament. ‘Why must you always be so cruel?’ she shouted at Viktor.

The man stared at his wife, amazed that she would take any side but his.

She made a fist and struck him on the chest. ‘You cannot abandon your son!’

‘It’s all right,’ Stefan told his mother. ‘He did that a long time ago.’

‘Stay,’ she begged him.

But it was already too late. Until the moment when his father had laughed in his face, Stefan’s mind had still been clouded with doubt. But his father’s mockery brought back to him the memory of every insult he had endured at the school in Krasnoyar, and the echoing pain of the beatings which had accompanied them. The sound of that laughter clarified his mind. There are times in a person’s life when they cannot know if they have made the right decision until after that decision has already been made. And now he knew.

‘Remain with us,’ pleaded his mother, ‘here where you know you are safe.’

Stefan shook his head. ‘No one is safe any more,’ he replied.

The next day, just as Bolotov had predicted, Russian soldiers arrived from the barracks at Krasnoyar. With them came a rabble of self-appointed militia, armed with old shotguns, sledgehammers and kitchen knives.

The inhabitants of Rosenheim were given an hour to pack one suitcase each. Then, clutching their bags, they were marched to a barge, which waited for them on the banks of the Volga at Pokrovsk. After being ferried across the Volga to the railhead at Saratov they were put aboard cattle cars and transported to the German border, a journey which lasted several days. At the border, the Kohl family were met by their eldest son, Emil. By Imperial decree, he had been dismissed from the University of Kiev, along with all the other students of German or Austro-Hungarian extraction.

As the people of Rosenheim crossed over into a country they had never seen before, Stefan Kohl was not among them. Even before the soldiers had arrived in Rosenheim, Stefan had set out in the company of Bolotov on the long journey to Siberia.

Tsarskoye Selo, summer estate of the Imperial Family

On the outskirts of the estate stood a small, flat-roofed cottage, flanked on either side by single-storey additions which gave to the structure the impression of a military bunker, with tall and narrow windows where gun slits might have been. The stonework of the house had been painted a warm orange yellow which, in the afternoon sun, glowed like the flesh of a ripe apricot.

Inside the house, whose rooms were small and crammed with mismatched furniture, sat the Tsarina Alexandra and her closest friend, Anna Vyroubova, to whom this cottage had been given as a gift, in order that she might be always close at hand.

For some minutes, there had been no other sound but the faint clink as their tea cups were lowered into saucers. Of the biscuits which Vyroubova had laid out on the small table that stood between them, only one remained. In what had become an almost daily ritual, there was always a single biscuit left untouched, as if by unspoken agreement.

It was the Tsarina who broke the silence. ‘I have just heard,’ she said, ‘that General Brusilov will soon begin a full retreat from Galicia. For all I know, it has already begun. Meanwhile, the Austrians are advancing.’

‘Can they be stopped?’ asked Vyroubova. She was a short, stout woman with a round face and heavy jaw. She wore her thick dark hair piled high upon her head. Her dress, with its simple, embroidered collar, had been carefully chosen not to outshine that of her benefactor, whose white feathered boa draped extravagantly across her shoulders and down into her lap.

‘Or could they even be slowed down?’ she added, glancing at the two walking sticks which leaned against her chair. Following injuries sustained in a train crash earlier that year, Vyroubova could barely move without those ugly canes and she hated the fact that she was now dependent on them. Even before the crash, there had been too many things on which she was dependent, including the woman who sat before her now.

‘Slowed down?’ echoed the Tsarina. ‘I doubt it. I have read in the official reports that, for every ten thousand of our wounded, we can provide only a single doctor. No wonder the men are dying in such numbers.’

‘But is it not true,’ Vyroubova offered, ‘that we have more men to lose? Surely, for every enemy soldier who dies in battle,’ she said encouragingly, ‘we can spare ten, perhaps even twenty men!’

‘We cannot afford to lose any !’ shouted the Tsarina.

Vyroubova flinched, as if she had received an electric shock. The Tsarina seldom raised her voice during these afternoon meetings and now Vyroubova felt a sudden sense of panic that she had finally said something which would lose her the use of this cottage, along with all the privileges to which she had become accustomed in her years of friendship with the Tsarina.

‘What good is our numerical superiority,’ continued the Tsarina, ‘when the enemy has thirty-six heavy machine guns for each battalion, and ours must manage with only two? And what hope do our sixty artillery battalions have against the three hundred and eighty battalions of those who now wage war against us?’

Vyroubova stared at her blankly. She did not know what a heavy machine gun was. She imagined that all machine guns must be heavy. And she had no idea what an artillery battalion consisted of. One gun? Ten? Ten thousand? ‘Our dear friend was right,’ she muttered. This friend, whom they rarely referred to by his full name, was Grigori Rasputin. His influence over the Romanovs, and the shrinking numbers of those who remained loyal to the family, was now so powerful that questions had been raised, even by members of the Russian parliament, as to whether the Tsar, or Rasputin, was truly in control of the country.

Fearing that the privacy of their correspondence had been compromised, Nicholas and Alexandra had taken to using code names to describe those in the inner circle of the Romanovs.

Their son Alexei was known as ‘Sunbeam’, while their youngest daughter Anastasia, had earned for herself the nickname of ‘Imp’. The Tsar himself had been christened ‘Blue Boy’, after a character in a children’s fairy tale. Vyroubova had been dubbed ‘the friend’, whereas Rasputin had become the ‘dear friend’.

But the enemies of the Romanovs had coined names of their own for the Tsarina and her chosen band of followers. They called her ‘Nemka’, ‘the German’, refusing to believe that her loyalties could lie anywhere but with her blood relations who were killing Russian soldiers in their tens of thousands every month. Despising Vyroubova almost as much as the Tsarina herself, they dismissed her as ‘La Vache’, and, among the Okhrana agents who shadowed Rasputin on his nightly visits to the bars, he was quietly referred to as ‘The Dark One’.