Siberian Red

‘Poskrebyshev!’
     
     
    ‘Poskrebyshev!’ The voice of Joseph Stalin exploded through the wall.
    In the adjoining room, Stalin’s secretary sprang to his feet. Poskrebyshev was a short, round-faced man, bald except for a fringe of grey which arced around the back of his head and resembled the wreath of a Roman emperor. Like his master, he wore trousers tucked into black calfskin boots and a plain mandarin-collared tunic in precisely the same shade of brownish-green as the rotten apples that two neighbourhood bullies, Ermakov and Schwartz, used to hurl at him from their hiding places along the young Poskrebyshev’s route to school.
    Since the war had broken out, one month before, there had been many such outbursts from the man Poskrebyshev referred to as Vozhd. The Boss.
    On September 1st, 1939, as part of a secret agreement between Germany and Russia, buried in a peace treaty signed between the two countries and known as the Molotov- Ribbentrop Pact, Germany had invaded Poland.
    Justification for the invasion had been provided by a staged attack on a German customs house called Hochlinde and on the Gleiwitz radio substation. Thirteen inmates from Oranienburg Concentration camp, believing that they had been chosen to take part in a propaganda film, designed to improve relations between Germans and the Poles, were trucked towards Hochlinde under cover of darkness. All were dressed in Polish Army uniforms. The inmates had been convinced that they were to enact a meeting between German and Polish troops, somewhere in the forest on the border between the two countries.
    The plot of the film would be simple. At first both sides, mistrustful of the other, would draw their weapons. For an agonising moment, it would seem as if a gunfight might actually break out. But then the men would recognise their common ground as human beings. The guns would be lowered. Cigarettes would be exchanged. The two patrols would part company and melt back into the forest. Upon completion of the film the inmates had been promised that they would be sent home as free men.
    As they neared Hochlinde, the trucks pulled over and the prisoners shared rations with a squad of SS guards accompanying them. Each prisoner was also given what he was told would be a tetanus shot, as a matter of standard procedure. The syringes were not filled with tetanus vaccine, however. Instead, the men were injected with Prussic acid. Within minutes, all of them were dead.
    Afterwards, the bodies were loaded back on to the trucks and the convoy continued to the vicinity of Hochlinde, where the corpses were dumped in the woods and shot with German weapons. The bodies would later be exhibited as proof that Polish soldiers had launched an attack on German soil.
    Meanwhile, at the Gleiwitz radio station, an officer of the SS named Naujocks, with the help of a Polish-speaking German, interrupted regular radio transmission to announce that Gleiwitz was under attack by Polish troops.
    Within hours, German planes were bombing Warsaw. On the following day, German panzers crossed the Polish border.
    Two weeks later, in accordance with the secret clauses of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Russian army began its own invasion from the east.
    Even though the obliteration of Polish forces had been virtually guaranteed from the beginning, the slightest setback – a temporary withdrawal, a mistimed attack, supplies sent to the wrong location – sent Stalin into a rage.
    And that rage fell first upon Poskrebyshev.
    ‘Where is he?’ Stalin’s muffled voice boomed from behind the closed doors of his study. ‘Poskrebyshev!’
    ‘Mother of God,’ muttered Poskrebyshev, the sweat already beading on his forehead. ‘What have I done now?’
    The truth was, Poskrebyshev knew exactly what he had done. He had been dreading this moment for a long time and now, it seemed, his crimes had finally caught up with him.
    On being made Stalin’s personal secretary, the highest appointment a man like Poskrebyshev could ever hope to hold, the first thing he had done was to forge documents of transfer for Comrades Schwartz and Ermakov, the two bullies on whom he had sworn to take vengeance one day. Stamped with a rubber facsimile of Stalin’s signature, the documents ordered the immediate dispatch of these two men, one an electrician and the other a roof tiler, from their home town in a cosy suburb of Moscow to the port of Archangel, high in the Soviet Arctic. There, construction had begun