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Foreword

On 22 June 1941, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, his invasion of the Soviet Union, which was ruled by its dictator Josef Stalin. It was to be the most savage war of annihilation ever fought. Taken totally by surprise, the Russians lost vast numbers of men, tanks, planes and territory in the early months as the Germans fought their way towards Moscow. By September, even the capital was in peril. But Stalin counter-attacked and the Germans were thrown back.

Early in 1942, Hitler planned a new knockout blow. Stalin expected another attack on Moscow but instead Hitler launched Case Blue, an offensive across Ukraine, and then the vast flat grasslands of southern Russia, towards the Don and Volga Rivers, and southwards to seize the oil fields of the Caucasus. The Nazis were aided by their allies: the Italian Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, sent an army of 235,000 Italians to help in the assault. Both sides were short of tanks so, for a short time, they fielded cavalry instead. These battles would see the last great cavalry charges in history.

That summer, Soviet forces collapsed and tens of thousands of soldiers were surrounded or surrendered while hosts of Russian or Cossack anti-Communists turned traitor and collaborated with the Nazis. The German offensive was so successful that it soon appeared as if Russia would be cut in half. The Germans were also advancing across North Africa. If they broke into the Caucasus, there was a real danger they could link up with their forces in the Middle East – and the war would be lost. Hitler smelled victory; Stalin was close to panic. This was the most dangerous crisis in World War II.

Soon the mighty Don River was all that stood between defeat and survival. Beyond the Don was a city on the Volga River, now known as Stalin City.

This was the desperate, uncertain moment that the characters in this novel joined the war …

‘My name is Nothing, my surname is Nobody.’

Saying of Gulag prisoners

Order 227

‘It is time to finish retreating. Not one step back! … Panic-mongers and cowards must be exterminated on the spot … These are the orders of our Motherland … Military councils of the fronts and front commanders should: Form within each front one to three penal battalions (800 persons) where officers and soldiers who have been guilty of a breach of discipline due to cowardice or panic will be assigned, and placed at the most difficult sectors of the front to give them an opportunity to redeem their sins by blood …’

Josef Stalin, People’s Commissar of Defence

Moscow, 28 July 1942

A Cossack rode to a distant land;

Riding his horse over the steppe.

His home village he left forever.

He’ll never come back again.

Cossack song

Prologue

The red earth was already baking and the sun was just rising when they mounted their horses and rode across the grasslands towards a horizon that was on fire. There are times in a life when you live breath by breath, jolt by jolt, looking neither forward nor backwards, living with a peculiar intensity, and this was one of those times.

They had come out of the clump of poplar trees where they had spent the night, sleeping on their horse blankets, their heads on their saddlebags, fingers curled around their pistols, saddles and rifles lying beside them. Their horses stood over them, soft muzzles savouring the air, their deep brown eyes watching their masters whom they knew so well.

The captain awoke them one by one. They saddled the horses, tightening the girths under their bellies, inspecting hooves and fetlocks, stroking withers or neck, talking to them in soft voices. The horses tossed their heads at the horseflies that tormented them, their chests shivering, tails swishing, rolling their eyes at what lay just beyond the trees.

The horsemen scanned the plains fretfully, each knowing that their future was as ominous as the land was boundless. Their struggle under the burning sun made no sense – they were hunted as well as hunters – yet their thoughts were not hopeless, not at all, for each of them had known hopelessness before, and this was far better. Here they could be redeemed by the blood of their mission: they believed this with a baleful conviction, and for some of them it was the first decent thing they had ever done …

They turned to their horses, whom they loved above all things, giving them some fodder and hay that they carried in a net on the saddles. The horses needed calming, but the grooming, the loving care, the routine of so many mornings, reassured the animals.

The swab of sun had turned the sky a pinkened yellow yet the horizon behind them was jet black with a slow-billowing plume of smoke so solid in appearance that it resembled the domes of a dark cathedral. In the distance the crumps of explosions were deep yet they ignored them. It was already hot, burning hot, and there were jewel-drops of sweat on every man’s nose and upper lip. There was a wind but it too was burning, a swirl of blackened straws of stubble and the chaff of wheat. The grass had turned blond with the slanting golden rays of invincible summer.

Pantaleimon, the oldest of the band, extinguished the night’s campfire, treading the ashes into the earth, and packed the coffee pot into his saddlebags, which were a sort of Aladdin’s Cave of food and tools and supplies. ‘Never throw anything away,’ he would say. ‘Everything has its moment, brother, everything’s useful in the end.’

The Cossacks called each other ‘brother’ just like the Communist Party members called each other ‘comrade’. Pantaleimon, always known as ‘Panka’, pressed Benya Golden on the shoulder. ‘Be cheerful, Golden,’ he said. ‘It’s always sunny on the steppe.’ Then they checked the sabres were in their scabbards, the guns over their shoulders, the zinc ammunition boxes packed into the leather pouches, the dried meat, bread and sugar and rolled-up horse blankets in the bags behind the saddles. They had left nothing behind … nothing, that is, except the body that lay down the slope from them, with the blood blackening like a ridge of tar on its throat. Benya glanced at it but only for a moment; he had become accustomed to the dead.

‘I don’t think he’s going to miss us, do you?’ said Mametka in his high-pitched voice. He was tiny – he claimed to be five foot – with the rosebud lips of a faun and a voice so girlish and eyes so childishly tameless that the Criminals in the Camps had nicknamed him ‘Bette Davis’.

They were lost behind enemy lines and Benya Golden sometimes felt they were the last men left alive in the world. But their little squad wasn’t a typical Red Army unit. These were sentenced men, and the rest of the army called them the Smertniki, the Dead Ones. Yet these men would never die in Benya’s mind. Later, he found they were always with him, lifelike, in his dreams – just as they were that day. Some had been in prison for murder or bank robbery, some for stealing a husk of a maize, many merely for the misfortune of being surrounded by German forces. Only he, Benya, was a Political and this meant he had to be even more careful: ‘My name is Nothing, my surname is Nobody,’ was his motto. This discretion had once been a challenge for him; now they were all beyond the control of the Organs or even the military.

It was July 1942 and the Red Army was falling apart, Stalin’s Russia was on the verge of destruction, and the distrust and paranoia of the Camps still gnawed at each of them. Having broken through enemy lines at a terrible cost, adrift on the endless blond sea of the grasslands, they had one more mission to pull off.

Benya tested the girth of his horse, Silver Socks: ‘Better to forget your pants and ride naked than forget your girth,’ the older man, Panka, had taught him. ‘A loose girth means a ride with the angels!’

They were ready. Their captain, Zhurko, gestured with a small motion of his head: ‘Mount your horses. Time to ride out.’

Prishchepa, his spiky hair gilded into a metallic sheen by the sun, had lost none of his easy, feral joy. Spurs chinking, he vaulted into the saddle, laughing, and his horse, Esperanza, as playful a daredevil as he, tossed her head with the game. Benya wondered at Prishchepa’s capacity for happiness, even here: wasn’t that the greatest gift on earth? To be happy anywhere.

He watched as Panka, who must have been at least sixty, laid a light hand on his mount’s withers and mounted Almaz without bothering with the stirrups. He had a slight paunch but he was sinuous, strong, effortless. Not all of them were so gentle with the horses and it showed. When Garanzha approached Beauty, she flattened her ears and rolled her eyes. All the horses were scared of ‘Spider’ Garanzha and no wonder; Benya was scared of him too. His lumpy, shapeless head looked as if it had been hewn out of wood by a wild blind man with an axe; his mouth was a tiny-teethed scarlet gash and he was covered from head to foot in long, straight black hair. He never rushed but moved with a hulking slowness that always stored the energy of concentrated menace. And then there was ‘Smiley’, the Chechen, who from a distance was lean with noble features and that prematurely grey hair which make Caucasian men so handsome – until he was happy enough or angry enough, and then, thought Benya Golden, you knew …

Benya was last, always last. Agonizingly stiff, his thighs were chafed and arse bruised by so long in the saddle. He had only learned to ride properly during his short spell of training, and now he placed his booted left foot in the stirrup and huffed as he pulled himself up and into the saddle.

‘Careful, Granpa!’ Young Prishchepa caught him by the shoulder and held him with an iron grip until Benya was steady.

Panka, whose white whiskers and topknot placed his youth before the first war, chewed a spod of tobacco and sucked on his moustache vigorously, usually a sign of amusement.

Men rode as differently as they walked and their horses each had life stories, charges and retreats, crises and triumphs on this frontier that their riders knew and understood, as if they were their children. And as they moved off, each whispered their own salutations. ‘Klop, klop, graceful lad,’ said Panka to Almaz, his roan stallion, while Prishchepa leaned close to blow over Esperanza’s white-tipped ears, which perked forward and then flattened with pleasure. Benya, a Muscovite who had spent some of his life in Spanish cafés and Italian villas, chanted catechismic praise like a rabbi’s haunting prayers to Silver Socks, his high-handed dark chestnut Don mare with the white blaze on her forehead and white front legs that earned her the name. Silver Socks turned her gleaming neck round towards Benya, and he stretched forward, slipping his arms around her. He loved this horse as much as he had ever loved a person. Besides, he reflected, he had never needed anyone as much as he needed Socks now.

Captain Zhurko raised his hand, his shirt already stained with sweat, his peaked summer cap low over his spectacles. ‘If you’re scared, don’t do it,’ he called to his men. ‘If you do it, don’t be scared!’

For a moment the seven men looked out over the scorched steppe. Their faces were already coated with dust: dust was in their eyes, in their mouths and nostrils, in their clothes. Pungent eye-watering dust hung in the air as they rode over clover and lavender and meadow grass.

Captain Zhurko wiped his spectacles and stared out. ‘I was thinking about my son,’ he said to Benya, the member of the unit with whom he had most in common. ‘His mother tells him he doesn’t have to work at his studies. I blame her …’ How quaint it sounded to Benya to hear a man grumble about normal things amidst this pandemonium.

But Benya was thinking about the body. They had all seen it, understood what it meant and nobody said a word, no surprise, no questions. They had known him well, after all. But they knew death well too. In the Camps, death came fast as a breath. Bodies loomed dark out of the snow as the ice thawed – where they had fallen or been shot in the back of the head by a guard. Sometimes men walked with death on their shoulder for days: there was something about the glassiness of their eyes, the beakiness of their noses, the sunkenness of their cheeks, and they were dead in the morning lying in their bunks in the barracks with their mouths wide open. Benya knew they would not let the body with its tracks of brown-black blood spoil their concentration or distract them from their mission.

Zhurko was still talking about his son’s laziness – his refusal to study, heavy smoking, and his seemingly indefatigable self-abuse. Benya looked around him. His fellow mavericks might never be as at home in a family as they were in this unit. All across the steppe, on both sides, strange misfits had found a place in the hierarchies of this cruel chaos. Benya wondered if there had ever been a more terrible moment on earth than this one. Zhurko was the one straight man in this posse, the only one who, if he lived, could return to a normal job in civilian life, an accountant or manager, someone wearing a suit, the sort of guy you might see on the Moscow Metro swinging a briefcase. He was fair to the men and imperturbable under fire and it was a measure of his coolness that he did not bother to comment on what he had seen.

The plains were almost flat, broken up with bowers of willows and poplars but mostly they stretched forth, a wilderness of high grass sometimes swaying and rich with yellow-headed, black-faced sunflowers, the horizon interminable, the sky fast-changing from scarlet to yellow to lilac: a hazy, dusty, grainy luminosity. The sheer beauty of this vastness gave Benya a sense of floating helplessness that allowed him to live in the present and not try to understand anything other than his intimation that he was a weary man longing to stay alive for one more bewildering day.

In the distance, squadrons of tanks like steel cockroaches ploughed up the coffee-brown dust. They were heading towards the Don, and sixty miles beyond it lay Stalingrad.

In the ripped-open sky above, planes swooped through the haze, Yaks duelling with Messerschmitts. Close to them, a German Storch, watching the Russian forces, resembled a clumsy pterodactyl, Benya thought. The Nazi advance over the last few weeks had been so fast that the steppes were now chaotic. Whole Russian armies had been captured in German encirclements; many traitors had defected to the German side, others left behind on the steppes. Out there in the cauldron of blood it was not just German vs Russian, Nazi vs Communist but also Russian vs Russian, Cossack vs Cossack, Ukrainians against everyone, and everyone against the Jews …

On the roads and the open steppe, peasants with carts stacked with their paltry belongings trekked back or tramped forward, weary and stoical, confused by the advances and retreats of the soldiers. And in villages, woods and high grass, Jews were hiding, lost people who claimed to have witnessed things that sounded incredible in their maleficence. Far from their shabby Bessarabian villages or great Russian cities of Odessa and Dnieperpetrovsk, they fled alone, just darting from haystack to barn, seeking sanctuary.

‘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.

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.’

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 have in front of me your signed confession, Prisoner Golden,’ said Ulrikh.

‘No!’ Benya replied. ‘You see, I had no choice – I was beaten. My confession was forced out of me. I deny everything, I was tortured …’

Ulrikh wiped his flat face with his liver-spotted hand. It had been a long vodka-fuelled night of Vishkas – prisoners condemned and executions attended – and Benya could see he wanted to send his report to Comrade Stalin and get to bed.

‘A signed confession carries the full force of the law,’ said Ulrikh, sounding both furious and indifferent. ‘The sentence stands, the verdict is final and to be effected without delay …’

Benya started to hyperventilate. A drop in the belly like the trapdoor of a gallows and then a drenchingly fearsome nausea that buckled his knees; he thought he would die then and there. The guards caught him and held him up like a broken mannequin.

Then Satinov leaned sideways and whispered to Ulrikh. Satinov was the top man present, he was Stalin’s comrade-in-arms, and he was not a judge. He was there for a special reason. Stalin had nominated him to be the ‘curator’ of the trial because Satinov had been friends with the people whom he was going to have to sentence to death. That was a test set by Stalin.

Ulrikh shrugged, and Satinov cleared his throat. ‘Prisoner Golden, your death sentence is reprieved. Instead, you are sentenced to ten years …’ And the rest was lost in the roar of relief in Benya’s ears. Did he really hear it? Yes. There it was. Ten years! The joy of life – all thanks to Satinov!

‘Thank you,’ Benya whispered to the judges but they were no longer paying him any attention. They were standing up, collecting their papers. He rushed forward but the guards caught him, shook him and held him back: ‘God bless you!’ he shouted.

A man who has heard his own capital sentence has lived more profoundly than any other, and for Benya Golden, nothing would ever be quite the same again. Now he could live, passionately, expansively. He could love again. Oh, how he loved life. He barely noticed the judges filing out of the room.

Then there was the march through the corridors and the ride in the Black Maria back to his cell, where he understood it all better. He was condemned to a realm beyond mere death, and now knew his entire life up to his arrest was over. He was almost dead, a death without instant decay, trapped while he still breathed, in the hell of the eternal now. He recalled the slaves who rowed the Roman galleys: now he was to be a galley slave, toiling to death in the Camps known as the Gulags. But then he thought: ten years! It is not forever. I can survive ten years and come back to life, can’t I?

Weeks and months of 1940 passed in that cell. He became accustomed to the routine but he knew that would soon end and every prisoner hates the change of rhythm. Change is dangerous. But he knew what was coming: the transfer, known as the etap, the journey to the east, to the Gulags.

And then it came. Four a.m. reveille. The guards burst into his cell. ‘Wake up! Get your things. Davay! Davay! Let’s go!’

Benya didn’t know where he was going, just that he was heading east in cattle cars, chugging slowly across the endless spaces of the Urals, Siberia and onwards. The trains were packed with filthy, lice-infested prisoners (many Poles, Benya learned, victims of Stalin’s new conquests), the stinking bucket overflowing with urine and dysentery. Sometimes Benya and his companions talked about Stalin’s astonishing alliance with Hitler, how they’d split Poland between them. Paris had just fallen to the Nazis. How long would Britain hold out? But mostly Benya just lay in his corner, saving his energy, trying to stay alive, learning to listen and not talk. Being a ‘Political’, he was the lowest in the hierarchy of the prisoners. Even murderers and thieves were higher than him, and the highest of all were the Criminals who ran the cattle car, received the best food and took whatever else they wanted. A quick shuffling amongst the huddling prisoners and a man was killed for his new boots in the gloom of Benya’s cattle car, quickly stripped for his clothes, coat, hat, ration. There was a sudden glare as the door was slid open; and Benya glimpsed the broken-ragdoll dance of arms and legs as a naked body was tossed out, filling the roaring frame of the open door for a second before the door slid shut again, and Benya wondered whether he had seen it at all. From then on, in this life, the death of a man, once an event remarkable and unforgettable, something you might tell your family or read about in the newspaper or discuss with a friend, was often merely an occurrence in a succession of occurrences for Benya, quickly forgotten in the drone of the day. The seething of lice on his body drove him crazy but he spent his days catching them and crushing them, feeling the pop of their bodies, a rare satisfaction, a lesson that small unlikely pleasures could make life almost tolerable. Sometimes he felt he had become the master of the enjoyment of minuscule things, and that that was the art of living.

He spent weeks at each transit prison – each one a world of its own, with its own rules of survival – until his next etap was called, and the next. A succession of cities. Petropavlovsk. Novosibirsk. Irkutsk. Everywhere his fellow prisoners said, ‘Pray you’re not going to Kolyma …’ But by the time he saw the blue waters of Lake Baikal, Benya knew that was exactly where he was going.

Still dazed after the horrors of the voyage in the hell ship across the Sea of Okhotsk, they arrived at Magadan, where a new world of snow-capped mountains, bracing air and the lunar landscape of the gold mines awaited them. Benya imagined the gold-rush towns he had read about in his beloved Jack London novels, the frontier of The Last of the Mohicans with its gunslingers, its trackers and Red Indians. It was still September, the last weeks before the Sea of Okhotsk froze, and Kolyma was about to be cut off from the mainland for many months.

The guards marched them up the hill in groups along a muddy lane called the Kolyma Highway and into a compound where Benya and his fellow prisoners were stripped, washed, shaved and their clothes steamed and deloused. In the showers, Benya saw men fall on each other, some on their knees, others bending over, coupling frantically, seizing white-knuckled fistfuls of gratification. Next day he stood naked in front of the medical examination board, a doctor and a Chekist, trying to look as weak and old as possible. But the doctor, a prisoner himself, stamped his file: ‘KOLYMA-TFT. Fit for Hard Physical Labour.’

‘Shut the fuck up, cocksucker,’ said the guard. ‘The sentence for falsifying illness is Eight Grammes in the nut. For complaining you face the Isolator. Get a move on!’

Next day, he was woken at 4 a.m. ‘Davay! Davay! Let’s go! Grab your belongings!’

Riding in a truck, fuelled not by petrol but by a furnace fired with wood, Benya travelled up the Highway into a mountain wilderness of rushing streams, reindeer herds and precipitous canyons. Then he saw first the barbed wire and watchtowers; next the wooden barracks and finally they entered the gate of their Camp: Madyak-7.

Early next morning, the first roll call, hundreds of men standing to attention in the mist: pairs of favoured prisoners – known as Camp Trusties – waved whips and bully sticks to herd them into work brigades. The brigadiers reported to the Commandant. ‘There are twenty-seven in this brigade,’ called out Benya’s brigadier, a Criminal called Shurik. ‘One died at the mine yesterday; one executed for insubordination. One dead this morning in barracks; two sick in barracks; one self-injured in the Isolator. Five new prisoners. Total: twenty-seven!’ He marched them up to the mine. ‘You work, you eat,’ Shurik warned Benya and his fellow Zeks – that was the Camp nickname for prisoners. ‘You don’t work, Zeks, you die.’ Facing Benya was a capacious and gigantic scoop of mud and rock carved out of the mountainside, an ants’ nest of teeming workers and armed guards, all creeping along plank walkways or excavating deep gulches, tiny figures in a landscape that the Zeks already called the Dark Side of the Moon.

‘Bandits, today your training is over,’ announced Penal-Colonel Melishko, the battalion commander. How Benya had survived his time in Kolyma he never knew, and here he was eighteen months later, in July 1942, in southern Russia, not far from the city of Stalingrad.

At sundown on that broiling summer night, they stood in a half-circle around Melishko in the manège of the Marshal Budyonny Stud Farm Number 9, very close to the Don River. It was horse country, land of the Don Cossacks. They had been training for seven months.

‘You are ready to be assigned your first mission – and you will be needed faster than any of us thought. The Motherland is in peril!’ roared Melishko.

Benya caught the eye of his friend Prishchepa next to him. Prishchepa smiled flashily, but Melishko’s gruff confidence did not hide the panic of the other officers. When Benya had started his training in December 1941, the front was far away and the Germans had been defeated outside Moscow. Now the war had come to them; since yesterday, they could even hear the belch of artillery as the Germans approached the Don.

‘You bandits have a special reason to fight hard for the Motherland! I found you as scum. Now you’re as battle-ready as regulars, good soldiers, fine horsemen’ – Melishko’s eyes, under his crescent-shaped eyebrows that looked like wings, glanced at Benya with a stroke of warmth – ‘and even the most unlikely of you can at least keep your seat.’

Prishchepa wiped away the tears that ran down his young cheeks. He wept and laughed easily; he went through life as happy as a swallow; nothing disturbed his geniality, not his sentence to the Camps, nor this parade today, nor tomorrow’s battle. ‘Life is easy for a simple soul like mine,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You just have to live it.’ Benya enjoyed studying Prishchepa; he’d never lost his interest in human nature, and there was no laboratory so fascinating as the Gulags and this battalion of vicious criminals and court-martialled soldiers.

Benya and Melishko had been in the same Camp in Kolyma. After his arrest, General Melishko had been so severely tortured that he had no teeth or fingernails left; only his moustache, thick, white and stiff as a painter’s old brush, was the same. Nevertheless when the war started, he had been one of the first officers recalled to fight but instead of being assigned a division or corps, he had been made a colonel and given this rabble. He was, however, still called ‘the General’ by everyone and Benya loved the fact that Melishko was unchanging, whether waiting for soup in the dining block in Kolyma or addressing the men as an officer.

In the barn-like manège, its sandy ground designed for training horses, Melishko stood alone at the front. Behind him: Captain Ganakovich, their Politruk, the Political Officer, and Pavel Mogilchuk, head of their secret police Special Unit.

Benya did not know the details – the truth was always ‘Top Secret’ – but he did know the Russians were retreating fast and now there must have been some new debacle. Ganakovich was fritzing with nerves, Mogilchuk visibly shaking. At each crump of the guns, the fear slithered another degree up Benya’s belly.

‘Remember what I always say,’ bellowed Melishko, his false teeth breaking the vowels. ‘You can’t get me!’ It was a line borrowed from his favourite movie and the men loved it.

‘Urrah!’ they cried but then there was the sound of footsteps and Benya peered round as Captain Zhurko ran into the manège and handed Melishko a piece of paper.

‘As you are,’ said Melishko. ‘We’re awaiting an important order from Stavka.’ ‘Stavka’ was headquarters in Moscow. Benya and Prishchepa looked at each other, and Prishchepa started to sing under his breath: ‘Don’t circle over me, black raven …’

III

Far to the north, in Moscow, a small, tired old man, wearing a military tunic and baggy grey trousers tucked into soft calfskin boots, sat at a huge desk in a long office. His face was seared with exhaustion, bleached a sallow pockmarked grey.

Outside, the Kremlin was draped in camouflage netting, and air balloons floated above the city to disorientate German bombers. Inside, the long table, the desk with the T-shaped extension and the chunky row of Bakelite telephones, the dreary drapes over the windows and the illuminated death mask of Lenin on the wall were unchanged, but now the founder of Soviet Russia was joined on the walls by oil paintings of Tsarist paladins, Suvorov and Kutuzov. This office known to regulars as the Little Corner was the headquarters of the Soviet armies, and the phone lines and telegraph wires in the communications room next door linked the man in this office to a boundless and often unpredictable and uncontrollable world of savage struggle between millions of men.

‘We were tricked,’ said Stalin quietly. ‘The whole south is collapsing. Our commanders are fools and yes-men. We lack good men. We still await the main offensive against Moscow.’

At the nearest end of the long table sat three men. Molotov, a squat blockhouse with a round head and pince-nez, nodded. The only one in civilian clothes, he wore a grey suit, grey tie and stiff white collar. He had the clammy pallor of the bureaucrat who never saw the sun, a condition known to Stalin’s familiars as ‘the Kremlin tan’.

‘You’re right, Comrade Stalin,’ said Lavrenti Beria, the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, chief of the secret police. Wearing his blue-tabbed NKVD uniform, he was broad-spanned and grey-faced but bristling with ingenuity, vigilance, ferocity.

The third of them, Hercules Satinov, dressed as an army colonel general, spoke up: ‘Comrade Stalin, I believe this is the main German offensive. They are throwing everything against the Don and the Caucasus. We made the wrong judgement. There is no Moscow offensive. I myself was mistaken and I wish to take responsibility, and if you believe it necessary, stand trial. We were tricked …’

Stalin stared witheringly at Satinov for a long moment. Until today, he might have called him a fool, a traitor, perhaps even ordered his arrest. But Satinov, his favourite and, like him, another Georgian, had always told him the truth. And now he needed the truth. Six weeks earlier, on 19 June, a German Storch plane had crashed behind Soviet lines near Kharkov. Inside was a staff officer, Major Reichel, with a briefcase that contained the plans for Hitler’s southern offensive, Case Blue. Hours later, those plans were reviewed in this very room by Stalin, accompanied by the same Greek chorus of Molotov, Beria and Satinov.

‘It’s a trick,’ Stalin had said. ‘It’s classic disinformation. The bastards expect us to fall for this? The southern offensive will be a diversion. The big offensive will be against Moscow.’ The three Politburo members had agreed – as they always did. But now it was clear they had called it wrong and Hitler’s panzers were charging across the southern plains towards Stalingrad. Russia was about to be cut in half.

Stalin looked down the table at the only other man in the huge room, General Alexander Vasilevsky, his Chief of Staff, who was leaning over a map of the southern theatre, marked with arrows and symbols. ‘Comrade Vasilevsky?’

Vasilevsky, who had the professional air of an old-fashioned Tsarist officer, stood up straight. ‘He’s right, Comrade Stalin. This is the main offensive.’

Stalin nodded, rubbing his face with his hands. Ripples of exhaustion seemed to emanate from him. Satinov could only admire Stalin’s self-control, the steely, intelligent coldness that he radiated despite his egregious mistakes. But he had aged in this past year of war; his clothes hung off him.

The padded door opened silently and a dwarfish figure, Alexander Poskrebyshev, also in boots and uniform, looked in: ‘They’re here, Comrade Stalin,’ he announced.

Stalin beckoned, and two old cavalrymen entered and stood at attention before him. Both had just flown in from the front and been driven straight to the Kremlin. The dust of battle was still on their faces, and Satinov could smell their sweat, and their despair.

‘German Army Group A has broken through the North Caucasus Front,’ said Marshal Budyonny, his barrel chest, his rider’s bow legs in boots and red-striped britches, even his magnificently waxed moustaches, diminished in defeat. ‘Our troops are in retreat. They’ve reached the Don, and are breaking into the Caucasus, targeting the oil fields. We are struggling to regroup. Rostov has fallen.’

But Budyonny ignored him. In 1937, when they had tried to arrest him during the Terror, Budyonny had drawn his pistol and threatened to kill them and shoot himself, shouting, ‘Get Stalin on the line!’ Stalin had cancelled the arrest order.

‘Our forces fell back from Rostov,’ said Budyonny. ‘They turned and fled. Just ran! I admit there was cowardice and incompetence. I take full responsibility.’

‘And you, Marshal Timoshenko?’ Stalin turned to the other cavalryman. ‘What good news have you got for us?’

Timoshenko shook his gleaming bald head. ‘The Stalingrad Front is in disarray. German forces have reached the Don and the only thing holding them back are two armies defending the bend in the river. And we can’t hold Voronezh. I would say …’ He struggled to speak.

Stalingrad! Stalin’s own city where he made his name in the Civil War. Satinov felt breathless suddenly with disbelief.

‘That’s a lie! Stalingrad will never fall,’ said Beria in his clotted Mingrelian accent. ‘Panic-mongers should be shot! The Germans are hundreds of miles from Stalingrad.’

Stalin’s hazel eyes flicked towards Vasilevsky, who was plotting the new information on the maps spread on the table. He trusted Vasilevsky. ‘Well?’

‘We will halt the German forces on the Don Bend but the defence and fortification of Stalingrad must be urgently prepared along with evacuation plans for the tank factories. I propose a radical reconstruction of the southern fronts and I’ve informed them to expect new orders from Stavka.’

Stalin thought for a moment and lit a Herzegovina Flor cigarette. In the silent room, with the two marshals standing to attention, with Vasilevsky again perusing the maps, the three henchmen waiting, the wheeze of every breath of smoke seemed laden with fearsome concentration.

‘Of course Stalingrad is not threatened. Not yet. But I will not tolerate a single step back. Not one step back …’ He allowed this phrase to sink in.

‘Comrade Stalin,’ said Satinov after a pause. ‘The Hitlerites have very successfully used penal battalions in battle made up of court-martialled soldiers and criminal elements. We have punishment units of cowards and criminals already being trained, some recruited in the Gulags, but I propose we formalize this structure, and create penal battalions on every front and throw them into battle …’

‘Desperate men fight like devils,’ said Stalin. ‘Very well.’ He lifted one of the many Bakelite phones on his desk, ‘Get in here.’

Poskrebyshev appeared at the door, notebook and pencil already in hand. ‘Take this down,’ Stalin ordered. ‘Order 227 from the People’s Commissar of Defence.’ He stood and started to pace up and down, his hands shaking as he inhaled his cigarette. ‘Telegraph this to all fronts. To be read to all units urgently on this very night … The enemy throws new forces against us … The German invaders penetrate towards Stalingrad … they’ve already captured Novocherkask, Rostov-on-Don, half Voronezh … Our soldiers, encouraged by panic-mongers, shamefully abandoned Rostov … I order: Not One Step Back …’

In the sultry heat of the manège’s arena, Melishko was reading out Stalin’s orders which had just arrived, smoking off the telegraph from Moscow. Benya felt the hair rising on his neck. His life was entering a new and daunting stage.

‘Stavka orders: “Every army must form well-armed blocking squads (two hundred men) and place them behind any unstable divisions. In the case of any retreat, they are to shoot panic-mongers and cowards on the spot … Not One Step Back … We are already training punishment units of prisoners.’ Benya and his comrades concentrated; Stalin himself was addressing them and their destiny. ‘Now I order the formation of penal battalions – shtrafnoi batalioni – of eight hundred persons on every front made up of men guilty of crimes, breaches of discipline due to cowardice or confusion. They are to be placed in the most difficult sectors of the battle to give them the chance to redeem their sins against the Motherland by the shedding of their own blood … These are the orders of our Motherland. This is to be read to all companies, cavalry squadrons, batteries and headquarters. People’s Commissar of Defence. J Stalin.”’

Melishko folded the paper and peered grimly at his ‘bandits’. ‘Comrade Stalin has spoken and—’

‘What does “redeeming sins by shedding blood” mean?’ said Prishchepa. Only he would have dared ask such a thing.

Melishko wiped the sweat from his forehead into the wisps of his meagre rust-coloured hair. The men waited; Benya could feel them craning forward.

‘Comrade Stalin means that there are only two ways to earn your freedom. Death or by being wounded in battle.’

The men held their breath for a moment as they, like Benya, absorbed the primitive simplicity of their fates.

‘See, my bandits?’ said Melishko. ‘You have the chance to free yourselves in battle. Your deployment is imminent. Get some rest tonight … Yes, comrade?’

Captain Ganakovich swaggered to the front. ‘Lads, comrades, muckers, Shtrafniki,’ he started in a deep voice of rasp and raunch that he adopted for momentous occasions. ‘You bear the taint of alien elements, bourgeois illiterates, counter-revolutionary delinquents, murderous degenerates, but you’ve been re-educated and retrained and now you have the honour to fight for the Socialist Motherland and the Great Genius Stalin – and I’ll be right there with you, shoulder to shoulder!’ Ganakovich was in Stalinist commissar mode as he drew his pistol and held it above his head. ‘As convicts and cowards, you have no rights as soldiers. You will not even be informed of the name of your front, and there’ll be no maps for you. You will gratefully receive your mission and you will fulfil it. If I or the Special Unit notice the slightest hesitation, deviation, insubordination, a word, a look, yes, even a thought, you’ll get the Eight Grammes: instant execution!’ He gulped – he had a tendency when excited to forget to swallow his saliva, which then built up in his mouth until it had to be consumed in one phlegmy wad.

Melishko looked embarrassed but the ex-prisoners were unmoved. The things they had seen in the Gulags, or in the great retreats of 1941, had accustomed them to the malignant buffoonery of Soviet bureaucrats.

‘Thank you, very useful, Comrade Ganakovich,’ Melishko said, stepping forward again. The men could feel his disdain for the Party hack – and they shared his disgust. ‘Good luck, bandits! I will be there with you! Long live Stalin!’

‘Excuse me, penal-colonel,’ the secret policeman Mogilchuk interjected. ‘There’s one more thing. Captain Ganakovich will enlighten the men.’

‘They need to rest and tend the horses. Haven’t my bandits listened to us enough?’ objected Melishko.

Also by Simon Sebag Montefiore

FICTION

CHILDREN’S FICTION

NON-FICTION

Foreword

Prologue

Day One

I

II

III

IV