Stroika Read online

  STROIKA

  Mark Blair

  Copyright © 2016 Mark Blair

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Matador®

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  Tel: 0116 279 2299

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  ISBN 9781785898013

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  To Ben, Helena, Sarah…and, of course, Willow.

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  April 1977

  Prologue

  December 1982

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  June 1986

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  February 1987

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  March 1987

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  January 1988

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  April 1988

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  July 1989

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  August 1989

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  September 1989

  Chapter 33

  October 1989

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  11 October 1989

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  12 October 1989

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  13 October 1989

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  14 OCTOBER 1989

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  15 OCTOBER 1989

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Epilogue

  Main Characters

  Acknowledgement

  ‘We have to see and react to the times, otherwise life will punish us.’

  Mikhail S. Gorbachev

  Author’s Note

  It is some twenty-seven years since the Berlin Wall fell. The millennial generation may have little to no knowledge of the Soviet Union. For others, perhaps those that are older, the world was a very different place when the Soviet Union challenged the West, seemingly everywhere, and battle tanks massed along the Iron Curtain that divided Western from Eastern Europe. The Cold War saw the world on a nuclear knife-edge balanced between two competing ideologies. It is strange today to think of a divided Germany, the Berlin Wall itself, and that people died trying to cross it to the West.

  Stroika, a fiction that foreshadows the real events of August 1991, is set at a time of massive change, when the old Soviet Union was making way for the new and the Soviet Army was increasingly bogged down in an unwinnable conflict in Afghanistan. After only one year in office, the ailing Konstantin Chernenko was succeeded in 1985 as general secretary by the Politburo’s youngest member. Mikhail Gorbachev had very different ideas to his predecessors. In 1986 he launched glasnost (openness) and in January of the following year his perestroika (restructuring) programme. Only by these means – open discussion and reform of the economic and political system – could, he argued, the communist system be saved. In the end, Gorbachev unwittingly set in motion a train of events that ultimately brought the Soviet Union to its knees and eventual collapse.

  There are many competing articles and books on the subject of what actually did happen. Scouring second-hand bookshops for books written at the time and glued to my screen for many hours, I discovered that analysis is often contradictory and basic information sometimes hard to corroborate.

  What is clear is the extent to which the Soviet people were deceived. Travel restrictions and little contact with the outside world shielded citizens from appreciating quite how far the Communist Soviet system had failed them; those that did challenge the status quo were silenced. In a mundane way, this was vividly brought home to me by the report of Yeltsin’s visit to a supermarket in Texas in September 1989. The pure abundance of goods on display shattered his view of communism.

  When Gorbachev assumed power, there was little real understanding of how a market economy worked and even less of how to transition a command economy into a modern, competitive one where goods were made that people wanted. Prices remained, by and large, fixed centrally. But there were a group of people who did understand, and they saw the opportunity, often functioning on the fringes of society. In the black market economy, that in many respects was the real economy, these budding, talented and, one has to say, brave entrepreneurs arbitraged the system and made fortunes.

  In 1989, the Soviet Union comprised fifteen federated republics and occupied one-sixth of the earth’s land surface, a staggering statistic. Its borders stretched for sixty thousand kilometres, the longest border of any country on the planet. Yet its economic plight was such that it could not feed itself and struggled even to distribute the food that it did have. In stark contrast, the Soviet Union’s military budget had mushroomed, by some estimates, to one-fifth of national income, employing directly or indirectly one in five of the working population. Gorbachev appreciated this was unsustainable and, in the same year, shocked the Congress of People’s Deputies by announcing that military expenditure was four times the published figure
.

  Glasnost and perestroika loosened the bonds that held both the Soviet Union and the communist bloc of Eastern Europe together. Increasingly, governments took an independent course as the central Soviet government began to buckle under the strain and dissent that emerged from within the ranks of the Politburo, the Soviet Union’s supreme executive body.

  In 1956 and 1968, Soviet troops had bloodily repressed uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Thousands had died and thousands more had been arrested as political prisoners. Gorbachev recognised the time for change and began openly to encourage Eastern European governments to reform. The genie was out of the bottle. The year 1989 saw Eastern Europe consumed with civil unrest. In Leipzig, Monday demonstrations grew from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand. The question, of course, that hung in the air was whether the Soviet Union would respond in the same way it had done in 1956 and 1968.

  The peoples of Eastern Europe and the world held their breath.

  Stroika…

  April 1977

  Prologue

  Leningrad

  Miniature lakes form where the pavement has subsided. People hunch against the wet, making their way home, skirt familiar tarns, avoiding the kerb, wary of cars and trucks and soaking sheets. Grey turns to darker grey as the run-down façade of the Nevsky Prospect undergoes an unambiguous Soviet metamorphosis.

  She rubs the wet off the dial. He is late, fifteen minutes. She takes cover under the overhang of a tall building, her eyes searching the crowd.

  He is easy to spot. She can see him now, a hundred metres off, head up, running full tilt through the open spaces in the crowd. Two men some way behind are giving chase but the gap is widening.

  A pedestrian inadvertently steps in his path. He slips, regains his balance. The gap between him and his pursuers closes momentarily. His hand moves inside his jacket, reaches for something. He is only metres from her now. She steps out into the pavement, directly in front of him, and braces herself for the impact. He sends her reeling.

  Concerned passers-by help her up, ask if she’s all right. Does she need assistance home? She says no, brushing the water from her coat; her gaze fixed a hundred metres ahead.

  A car blocks his path. The men following grab him from behind. He doesn’t struggle. He raises his hands, protesting.

  They pull his jacket off, search him, find nothing, and drop it onto the wet pavement. A policeman arrives on the scene and quickly exits. A man climbs out of the back of the car and walks over to the small group. She can see him gesturing with his fist, a look of fury on his face. He lands a heavy blow to the man’s arm and they release him, pushing him roughly forward. He stumbles and nearly falls. Empty-handed, they move off, leaving him alone and rubbing his arm.

  Passers-by pay him no attention. He retrieves his sodden jacket and looks back, finds her and smiles. She smiles back, turns and walks away.

  December 1982

  Chapter 1

  Leningrad

  Viktoriya made her way over to a small group of men seated at the far corner of the Muzey bar, their laughter and guffaws puncturing the general babble of the room.

  ‘Viktoriya!’ one of them shouted out, as hands reached for the beers she unloaded from the tray.

  ‘This is Pavel Pytorvich Antyuhin, from Khozraschet, visiting us from Moscow,’ said Roman, introducing the man seated next to him. He was dressed in an ill-fitting black suit, his hair plastered flat over his forehead.

  ‘Economics must be economical,’ Viktoriya quoted the general secretary.

  Antyuhin looked impressed. ‘You know about Khozraschet?’

  He reminded Viktoriya of Brezhnev and his official portrait that littered the walls and offices of every municipal building: the familiar dark, bushy eyebrows and permanent facial expression somewhere between surprise and a frown.

  ‘Viktoriya is an economics undergraduate at Leningrad State,’ interrupted Roman.

  ‘Maybe you should come and work for us when you have graduated?’

  ‘Maybe,’ she answered, only too familiar with the pick-up line. ‘And what would you like to drink?’ she said, smiling back.

  ‘A beer… Baltika,’ he said, pointing at Roman’s bottle.

  By the time she returned with his order, he had pushed back his hair and rearranged his tie.

  ‘Are you free later for dinner… or tomorrow evening?’ he asked before she could make a retreat. ‘There is a new restaurant off Dumskaya. We could talk about your future opportunity.’

  Viktoriya had heard of the new dining room reserved for party members.

  ‘Perhaps another time.’

  She did not want to offend him, nor did she want to spend an evening with some mid-level bureaucrat trying to get her into bed with the tenuous promise of a job.

  Antyuhin looked disappointed, a little put out, as though he had expected her to say yes without hesitation.

  ‘I go back to Moscow in a couple of days. I’m staying at the Baltic Hotel off the Griboedova Canal,’ he added to impress her.

  ‘I’ve got a lot on… exams coming up,’ she replied, trying to be final.

  Another customer signalled her across the room; it was the excuse she needed to make her exit.

  ***

  By midnight most tables had emptied. Antyuhin had left half an hour before, making a big deal of slowly putting on his fur-trimmed Arctic parka and stuffing a cigarette packet back in his pocket, studiously ignoring her as the regulars waved her goodbye.

  Just after one, the Muzey closed. Viktoriya threw on her short padded frock coat and headed out into the cold night air. She paused. Once elegant façades lingered sooted and mutinous over a deserted prospect, trembling in the flicker of a faulty street lamp. A mouse scurried by, leaving only the telltale trail of its tiny feet in the fresh snow.

  At the next junction, Viktoriya vaulted a rusted pedestrian railing and crossed into Yusupovsky Park. A distant basilica, ice-capped, blinked and vanished. Snow, she thought, on its way. She could not remember the park being so perfect. Frosted willow and larch, skeletal against the moonlight, peppered a perfect white pedestal; park benches, once populated in summer, lay dormant and untenanted. A wedge of snow slid from a nearby branch and landed with a muffled thump.

  Sticking out her tongue, she tasted the icy nothingness of winter. A lonely flake melted on her cheek. Viktoriya closed her eyes and remembered her mother’s hand tightly clasped around her own, of scooping fresh snow and gingerly extending her tongue towards it until she encountered that numbing prickle.

  Snow fell heavily now; what had started as a sprinkling blotted out most of the park. She squinted at a solid shape two hundred metres ahead. At first she wasn’t sure if it was moving, or what it was, but as it passed under a park light she recognised the silhouette of a man, head down against the cold, hands thrust into his coat pockets. She pulled her coat tighter; maybe he was a road maintenance worker returning after a night shift, or a bar worker like herself making his way home. Hesitant at first, Viktoriya started down the footpath towards the approaching figure, telling herself that this was no different to any other encounter, two night-travellers bent on an opposite path. With each long stride, her confidence returned.

  A few feet apart, the man looked up from the barely discernible footpath and stared her directly in the face. The words good evening died on her lips. She couldn’t remember the name at first, only the fur-trimmed coat and that he worked for Khozraschet. She stopped, confused: wasn’t his hotel in the opposite direction?

  ‘Good evening, Viktoriya.’

  He stepped sideways, directly in front of her, blocking her path.

  ‘You really should have accepted my invitation. A pity… You remember me?’ he said, grinning.

  Her mouth went dry. She struggled to find her voice.

  ‘Get out of my way,’ she said as calmly as she could.
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br />   Snow swallowed her words; they dropped frozen into the soft white powder thickening around her feet.

  She turned to run and slipped, only managing momentarily to regain her balance before he threw his powerful arms around her, crushing her ribs, squeezing out all the air. Viktoriya screamed with the breath she had left, struggling desperately to free herself. She kicked him hard on the shin bone. He let out a muffled cry. Furious, her attacker released his grip and swung his fist hard into her solar plexus. Winded, unable to draw breath, she fell to her knees, frantically trying to find air before he was on her again. She managed a lungful before she felt his strong hands clench her feet and begin dragging her away from the path towards the towering yew border. She screamed, clawing at him with her free hands.

  ‘Be quiet!’ he whispered loudly. With that, he jumped on top of her, pinning her down as his fingers found her belt and worked their way round to the buckle. Recovering her breath, she attempted to push him off. This time he punched her in the ribs. For a moment she lost consciousness; the rough pulling off of her jeans jolted her awake. Violently, he entered her, one hand clawing her breasts while the other covered her mouth. Inert, shocked, fearful of another blow, she tipped her head back and stared up blankly at the snow-laden branches of an overhanging tree.

  When he had finished he stood up. Terrified, she watched him zip up his trousers and extract a small wad of roubles from his back pocket. Counting out several, he paused, seeming to change his mind, and roughly stuffed the whole bundle into the pocket of her ripped and abandoned coat that he found at his feet.

  He turned to leave, took three steps and stopped.

  ‘You deserve a tip,’ he said, and kicked her hard in the stomach, knocking the wind out of her a third time. ‘And don’t try anything when I’m gone, like going to the police, not unless you want your next job in Siberia.’