Simon Montefiore: Red Sky at Noon

‘All right, squadron forward,’ said Captain Zhurko as if there was a full squadron, as if so many of them had not died, as if there were not just seven of them – and the eighth member wasn’t seething with flies just behind the copse. ‘Let’s lope and cover some distance before the heat. Ride on, bandits!’

They walked at first, Captain Zhurko followed by Little Mametka on his tiny pony that Benya thought was not much taller than a big dog, then Panka on Almaz followed by Spider Garanzha with the rest of them bringing up the rear.

They loped through a sunflower field, divebombed by sparrows. Prishchepa leaned over and grabbed the wide, happy heads of the flowers and shook out the seeds, pouring them into his mouth as if this was a day out with his pals. And as the flat land dipped slightly in tribute to the stream that ran before them like a trickle of mercury in the sun, they spotted the mirror flash in the village far ahead, and through the binoculars Zhurko saw horses and field-grey men and khaki metal.

They checked and rechecked their weapons. Panka rode alongside Benya now. Chewing on his whiskers, he put a huge hand, dark as teak, on his arm. ‘This is big country,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to stretch yourself just to keep up with it.’

Benya looked into Panka’s narrow eyes, not much more than glinting wrinkles in that weather-beaten, foxy face, but blessed with almost miraculously sharp sight. Panka never ceased scanning the steppes, listening for the sounds of birds, the bark of deer, the grumble of engines. ‘That’s a swallow,’ he might say. Or: ‘That’s the grunt of a buck on the rut.’ He might point ahead. ‘Watch out! A gopher’s burrow there.’ Then there were the planes: ‘It’s one of ours, a tank-killer.’ Or a gun: ‘That’s an eighty-eight millimetre.’ He always knew.

The adrenalin pumped into Benya’s throat, making his palms slimy, his belly churn and, for a moment, the heat made him dizzy. His parents were somewhere out there. Sometimes he knew they were dead and he wanted to join them, but today hope surged and he was sure he would find them. For a moment, he recalled the woman he had loved in Moscow. He smelled the skin on Sashenka’s throat, her grey eyes, the sinews in her neck straining as they made love – it was all so vivid that it made him ache. Life after her was truly an afterlife, ground down to its essentials: trial and the Camps. He had been at war for months now but somehow this simple life, this lethal struggle, the company of Cossacks and their horses in the realm of sunflowers and grass, this empire of dust and horse sweat and gun oil, made him feel more alive than he could remember. If you had asked him later if he had been afraid, he would have said, ‘Afraid? More terrified than you can ever know.’ And yet beyond fear too. ‘We are singing a song,’ wrote Maxim Gorky, the great writer who had once been so kind to Benya, ‘about the madness of the brave.’ Benya was riding to kill a man, perhaps many men, and, struck with a presentiment of catastrophe, he was unlikely to survive. But he still believed in his own luck. He had to. They all had to.

As she headed through the sunflowers, Silver Socks turned her head to the right, ears pricked, and Benya Golden felt her shorten her stride. She was telling him something. Panka and Prishchepa were already dismounting, guns cocked. Benya rested his hand on the PPSh sub-machine gun hanging over his shoulder.

If you die now, he told himself, you died long before…

‘Stand up, Prisoner Golden!’

Benya stood, his knees buckling. It was two years earlier, the winter of 1940, and the three judges were filing into the plain room in the Sukhanovka Special Prison. In front of him were two fat grey men in uniform and boots, and the third he knew, not just from the newspapers, but in person. Slim and lean in his Stalinka tunic and high boots, his nose aquiline, grey-black hair en brosse , Comrade Hercules Satinov, a favourite of Stalin and member of the Politburo, took the right-hand chair. Once Benya had been excited to know such potentates, proud that Stalin knew who he was. Such sickening folly in his younger, restless self! Now he wished they had never even known of his existence.

Benya also recognized the man in charge, a shaven-haired bulldog in uniform with a patch of moustache under a puce nose the texture of pumice stone. Vasily Ulrikh, Stalin’s hanging judge.

‘I, V.S. Ulrikh,’ he droned, ‘presiding, declare this sitting of the Military Tribunal to be in session here in Special Object 110.’ He meant Sukhanovka Prison. ‘It is four thirty a.m. on the twenty-first of January 1940. Considering the case of Golden, Beniamin.’

It was the middle of the night? Benya looked at Ulrikh’s scar-puckered face first, still not quite believing that they could possibly find him guilty when his only mistakes were childish curiosity – and falling in love with the wrong woman. But in Ulrikh’s boozy, watery eyes he saw only a bored disgust and Benya recalled with a shudder that the judge was said not only to attend executions but even do the job himself.

Benya savoured the strong smell of cigarettes, vodka, coffee, pickles emanating from the judges – the fug of grown men without sleep in airless offices. It was familiar, reminding him of long happy nights when writers sat up till dawn in Muscovite kitchens to bicker about that bestselling poet, or the best movie, or the latest scandal… A life gone forever.

Glancing down at the papers in front of him, wiping his fuchsia-tinged eyelids, Ulrikh read: ‘Golden, Beniamin has signed a confession admitting to his crimes and he is hereby found guilty of terrorism, of conspiracy to murder Comrades Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich and Satinov (who is present on this tribunal), and of membership of a counter-revolutionary Trotskyite group, connected to White Guardists, controlled by Japanese and French secret services, under Article 58.8.’

‘No, no!’ Benya heard his own voice, high-pitched, from somewhere far away.

Ulrikh pivoted to the right. ‘Comrade Judge Satinov, would you read the sentence?’

Satinov did not reveal the slightest emotion but then Stalin’s grandees were masters of sangfroid. They had to be.

He coolly raised his eyes to Benya: ‘In the name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Military Tribunal of the Supreme Court has examined your case and you are hereby sentenced by the Military Tribunal to Vishnaya Mera Nakazaniya , to be shot.’

The words – the Highest Measure of Punishment – hit Benya in a hot rush, winding him. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe and he gulped frantically for air. He was close enough to see Ulrikh scrawl the fatal initials: ‘V. M. N.’ – known as the ‘Vishka’; everything in Russia, every department, every job, even killing, had its sinisterly neat acronym. But this was a mistake, a terrible mistake! The words bounced around his head. He knew how the Vishka worked because, ever the curious writer, he had once asked a top Chekist how they killed their prisoners, a question he had asked in the naive certainty that he himself would never face this moment. We take them to a cell deep under the streets, he was told. Two guards hold their arms while, quickly, before the prisoner can think, a third fires Eight Grammes from his Nagant pistol into the spot where your neck meets your head. Finally there is the ‘control shot’ to the temple.

‘I didn’t confess. Never! I didn’t…’

Ulrikh sighed, whispered to Satinov and showed him a wad of papers.