I Am the General Secretary's Son
Savelyev led me somewhere more secluded still.
"Come with me."
The place he took me to was an instructor's room hidden away in a corner of the main school building.
— Thud!
The door of a basement without so much as a single window shut behind us, and darkness swallowed the room whole. Only a faint thread of light seeped in through a ventilation slit near the ceiling, no wider than two finger joints. Even that was blurred by dust, making it impossible to guess when this room had last been used.
"Wait here a moment, Svanidze."
— Thud, thud.
Savelyev's footsteps receded. He vanished into a darkness so complete that even his outline disappeared, then stopped somewhere farther in.
— Rustle.
A sound like something being picked up, followed by—
— Hiss.
The scrape of a match being struck. A moment later a small flame rose in the heart of the dark. That wavering light lit only Savelyev's fingertips and body. With practiced ease he transferred the flame to a lamp wick, and before long a round of yellow light spread and filled the room.
Looking more closely at what he held, I saw it was a kind of konogonka—a Soviet lamp of the type used in mines and workshops.
"Come in now. And shut the door tight."
Savelyev, who had been glancing toward the ventilation slit, beckoned me over.
— Creeeak… Clang!
"Sit."
He gestured toward the chair opposite him. It was a remarkably courteous motion, nothing like his usual arrogance.
"……"
For a while he said nothing.
"Cigarette?"
"…I'm fine, thank you."
Savelyev gave a careless nod and drew a pack of tobacco and a scrap of newspaper from his coat.
— Click.
He opened the box, rolled the powder in the newspaper, and sealed the end with spit.
— Hiss…
"Hahh…"
A fierce menthol reek of smoke filled the narrow room. The sharp sting in my nostrils told me it was makhorka—the harsh, unlovely tobacco that Peter the Great and Catherine II had supposedly favored. The reason this crude leaf was the most popular in Russia was simple enough: the cold climate made finer tobacco almost impossible to grow.
"First, I expect you're wondering why I called you to a place this out of the way."
Savelyev cut straight to the point without ceremony.
"Naturally, it's about Valentin's situation. Hahh… The boy made a proper mess of things. Trying to frame someone else for his own wrongdoing. Unbelievable."
"…So you saw everything, Instructor."
"No. All I saw was the greed in my nephew's eyes. That boy gives himself away whenever he lies. In that sense he's already disqualified as a political commissar. I still wonder who on earth passed him…"
Savelyev drew on the newspaper again; the tip glowed red. He exhaled slowly and studied the cigarette pinched between his fingers, as if the words he needed were written on it.
"Valentin Kuzmin is expelled."
"Expelled…"
"Assaulting the General Secretary's son was bad enough; adding false accusation on top of it makes even expulsion too light. The boy will probably be sent to a labor-correction camp in Siberia."
"…You knew all of it?"
My breath caught in my throat. Once for Kuzmin's road to the Siberian gulag. And again for the fact that Savelyev already knew who I was. My heart dropped hard.
"I hadn't meant to reveal it this way, but…"
Savelyev reached into his coat once more and handed me a neatly folded sheet of paper.
"What is this?"
"Read it."
"…Sir?"
A Party membership recommendation…?
I hurriedly scanned the paper he had given me. At the very bottom of the recommendation stood the signature of Anastas Mikoyan.
"To become a political commissar you must join the Communist Party. I had planned to give you this paper on the coming Subbotnik, in Comrade Mikoyan's place. But… since this may be our last meeting, I'm giving it to you now."
Savelyev spoke calmly, yet the meaning was impossible to miss. If my father, Stalin, learned of this affair, Savelyev himself might well be sent to join Valentin…
A Party membership recommendation. The paper between my fingers suddenly felt heavy. I folded it carefully and slipped it into my coat.
"Instructor… have you no intention of saving Kuzmin?"
Only after the words left my mouth did I realize I was asking it.
Savelyev looked at me with surprise.
"Saving him…?"
"He's your nephew. And before that, a cadet under your instruction."
"So what am I supposed to do about it? A man who does wrong pays for wrong. Are you telling me to cover up his crime just because he's blood?"
"That isn't what I mean. I simply think the punishment is excessive."
Political prisoners, saboteurs, prisoners of war… Only serious criminals went to the Siberian gulags. Kuzmin's offense was nowhere near heavy enough to send him there.
"As you already know, Instructor, I am the General Secretary's son. I understand perfectly well what being sent to a labor-correction camp means. I cannot allow Valentin to be shipped off over something this small."
This was not humanitarian pity. It was a kind of defiance rooted in the principle of legality that had been burned into my mind like doctrine. Even if my twenty-first-century sense of justice found no understanding here, I did not care. I had no intention of yielding.
"So I will ask you, Instructor Savelyev."
A card I would never normally have played. One that ran straight against the principle I had sworn to uphold—never to borrow the authority of the name "Stalin."
"If I, the General Secretary's son, ask for clemency…"
But right now… the mere provisional cadet Yakov Dzhugashvili intended to borrow that name.
"Can Valentin's expulsion and the labor camp simply… never have happened?"
That night.
Valentin Pavlovich Kuzmin had been lying on his bunk staring at the ceiling for a full two hours and still could not sleep.
The bolt that had slipped from his hands and rolled across the floor. The comrades who laughed while he scrambled after the bouncing parts. And even after he had done the unforgivable out of pure spite—Yakov Svanidze's indifferent face looking down on all of it.
Every time he closed his eyes the humiliations of the day returned, so he had no choice but to force his eyes open and wait out the night.
"…Damn it."
Veins stood out on the hand that clenched the blanket. At the same time the thin, acrid aftertaste of makhorka someone had smoked before bed drifted past.
I was confident about guns if nothing else…
The smell of oil still clung to his fingertips and would not wash away. To him that smell was today's humiliation itself—something no amount of scrubbing could erase.
Kuzmin had wanted to break Yakov's pride in front of everyone. Instead he had been the one broken, and he had earned Instructor Savelyev's cutting glare into the bargain. The shame was beyond words.
"Svanidze, Svanidze… Svanidze…!!!"
The sound of Kuzmin grinding his teeth leaked out. Then, a moment later, the corner of his mouth curved up in a thin smile.
It's all right now. That arrogant bastard got dragged to the instructor's office too… No cadet who ever got called there came out smiling.
A mean little laugh slipped from Kuzmin's lips. On the next bunk a cadet stirred. Kuzmin clamped his mouth shut. Only the hammering of his own heart remained.
Staring into the dark of the ceiling, his eyes and ears suddenly filled with a scene from a few days earlier.
"There's a provisional cadet coming in this time—Yakov Svanidze—who scored perfect marks from every single interviewer. Coming all the way from Georgia to Leningrad is impressive enough, and the young man has real talent besides."
"Valentin. Stay close to that one. You'll learn a lot… and gain a lot, too."
Yakov Svanidze. Long before Kuzmin ever set foot in the Military-Political School, that name had dogged him relentlessly.
Why do I have to get mixed up with some Georgian country boy I've never even seen? I still don't understand the reason…
In his mind rose the image of Savelyev smiling as he mentioned Yakov. The smile drained from Kuzmin's face of its own accord. He yanked the blanket over his head, squeezed his eyes shut, and muttered inside.
You praise him so easily—why won't you ever acknowledge me, Uncle Savelyev…
Just then—
— Creeeak…
The soft sound of the dormitory door opening.
— Thud, thud.
And the familiar tread of military boots.
Kuzmin instinctively threw off the blanket and sat up on the bunk.
"Kuzmin."
A middle-aged man's low voice called him to a halt. Kuzmin held his breath and slowly turned his head. Exactly as he expected, the owner of the footsteps was Instructor Savelyev.
"Uncle…?"
"Come outside for a moment. We need to talk."
Savelyev left only those words and turned away. While Kuzmin hurriedly pulled on his boots, the instructor's voice reached his ears again.
"And from now on, don't call me uncle. Call me Instructor… Cadet Kuzmin."