In Europe

Stalinist show trial in January 1937 he was convicted of ‘sabotage, treason and terrorism’. He ended up in the Gulag and died there two years later: beaten to death, stabbed to death or thrown to his death on a concrete floor, the rumours disagree. Grigori Sokolnikov met a similar fate: he was murdered in 1939 in one of Stalin's prisons, apparently by his fellow prisoners.
    For a time, Grigori Zinovyev was considered Lenin's natural successor, but lost out to Stalin. He was executed in August 1936. Olga Ravitsj, his wife, disappeared in the Gulag. In late 1918 Parvoes fled to Switzerland, where he had a bank account containing more than two million Swissfrancs. Later he returned to Germany, for he had financial interests all over Europe. After his death in Berlin in December 1924, all his personal documents vanished into thin air.
    Inessa Armand did not live long: she served, among other things, as head of the women's section of the central committee of the Bolshevik Party, but became overworked and died of cholera and a broken heart in September 1920. Nadezhda Krupskaya grew fat, interfering and querulous. In 1926 she succeeded in expanding the Soviet Union's list of banned literature by at least a hundred books, including the work of Dostoyevsky, the Koran and the Bible. She died in 1939.
    Lenin survived Inessa Armand by no more than four years. An attempt was made on his life in 1918. He was deeply traumatised, his reign of terror became more intense, and he never completely recovered. After 1921 his health deteriorated. He died on 21 January, 1924, before reaching the age of fifty-four.

Chapter FOURTEEN
Petrograd
    ST PETERSBURG, 15 MARCH, 1999. IT TAKES DAYS TO FALL IN LOVE with the Hotel Neva, but then it is for ever. Who could help but fall for its curlicue staircases and czarist corridors, its unrelenting Stalinist mattresses, the central heating adjustable at all hours by simply opening or closing the window just a crack, its gurgling showers, the yellowish-brown moisture from its taps, the middle-aged
babushkas
who rule over their floors like little empresses, the red beets and soggy eggs at breakfast? Your first instinct is to get away as quickly as possible, but then you start developing a strange affection for all this, and after that you are lost.
    Of course the hotel has its typical Russian quirks. In the canteen, for example, you see a NO SMOKING sign, while everyone there is nonchalantly puffing away. The true Russia hand knows: that sign has nothing to do with smoking, but everything to do with power. It allows the canteen supervisor to ban or permit smoking as she sees fit, to hand out favours and sanctions, to exercise sovereignty, in other words, over her little fiefdom. Clean towels? That has to be discussed at length with two other female supervisors. A table at which to write? But now I have gone too far! ‘You'll have to request permission from the superior!’ our lady of the corridor cries. The table eventually arrives, bringing with it the next problem: what about a chair?
    And so I while away my days here, chez Oblomov. At night the temperature drops to around twelve below zero, during the day the sun shines. From my room I have a view of the stone cannons adorning the front of an old munitions plant, and of a brightly lit branch office of the former KGB. The Neva is a wide, white expanse of ice. The sky is a brilliant blue. Children are playing on the canals.
    Everyone else is talking about what a rotten winter it has been. In August the city was still lively and bright, then the rouble turned into Monopoly money, after that the weather turned cold, companies went bankrupt, building projects came to a halt, and the birds haven't even started singing yet.
    Candles and incense smoulder in the smudgy black vaults of the church nearby. It is full of people, young and old, wrapped up snugly in shawls. A little market has sprung up close to the tiled stove. At least a dozen women have set up a trade in vodka, leeks and assorted obscurities.
    In one of the naves, a priest begins chanting. Leaning against a wall are four coffin lids, and now I see the four corpses as well: two emaciated old people and two somewhat younger souls, a man with a pointed face and a skinny woman with dark hair and bushy eyebrows. The women around the stove genuflect from behind their wares. And the winter holds on, it will never end, even though everyone is long exhausted.
    My growing attachment to this city and