Nikolai Golitsyn

I set my thoughts in order and opened my mouth.

"Section Chief Ivan. Please raise your head."

Whether Duke Nikolai Golitsyn was innocent or not was, frankly, of little interest to me.

"It was your selflessness that moved me."

"......"

"That you would go so far for another person... I find that truly remarkable."

There was only one thing that mattered. If Duke Golitsyn lived, both Section Chief Ivan and I stood to gain. If he died, neither of us would walk away with a thing.

"Comrade Supervisor Svanidze...! Th-then that means..."

I had decided to save Duke Golitsyn. Not for his sake — for my own.

Section Chief Ivan stared at me for a long while. He understood well enough what my words had meant.

Nikolai Dmitrievich Golitsyn.

A man who had served as a bureaucrat of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, as a provincial governor of the Empire, and as the Empire's last Prime Minister. The man who had once occupied the chancellor's seat now directed an ordinary galoshi factory.

Some might wonder how thoroughly the present Union must have slighted him, that a former Prime Minister should end up a factory director. But his new motherland had not forgotten Golitsyn for so much as a single hour.

Those called Chekists had courteously summoned him no fewer than six times to inquire after his health, and the men of the GPU who succeeded them had summoned him just as often to ask after the same. Each time they inquired, they would escort him to a guest chamber for three days, sometimes four.

That guest chamber had not a single window, and the hospitality consisted of nothing more than a bowl of thin gruel — but how rare it was, truly, to find such devotion, that they would tend so faithfully to one old factory director and never let him slip from their minds.

Golitsyn, for his part, accepted their invitations with unfailing courtesy, never once declining.

The Chekists would take him, seat him in that windowless room, and always ask the same things. What had he done today? Whom had he met?

Golitsyn always gave the same answer.

"I do not know.... I am old. Nothing comes to mind...."

The Chekists knew well enough. The old former Prime Minister truly knew nothing at all.

The invitation that came one night the previous summer was no different from any other — by then, it had become as ordinary as breathing. That day, too, Golitsyn pulled on his overcoat, expecting to return in about three days. It had always been so.

But the Chekists that night were different. They were neither courteous nor ceremonious. They took Factory Director Golitsyn away with Mosin-Nagants in their hands.

Golitsyn thought to himself, This invitation, I suspect, will last rather a long while...!

"Nikolai Golitsyn. You are under arrest on suspicion of participating in a counterrevolutionary monarchist gathering."

Hearing those words, Golitsyn felt a sense of injustice. All he had done was dine each year with the graduates of the Lyceum! Granted, that Lyceum was the Imperial Alexander Lyceum, which had produced the Empire's highest-ranking officials in droves — but what, truly, could a gathering of toothless old men accomplish?

There were younger men among them as well, of course, but that ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠was not the point. All they had done was speak the names of friends who had died before them, and request a mass for the departed.

But in the eyes of the Chekists, it had apparently looked like a dress rehearsal for an armed uprising. By that logic, every funeral in this country was a counterrevolutionary conspiracy, and every cathedral a rebel headquarters.

Golitsyn did not protest. If a long life had taught him one thing, it was this: nothing confirmed a man's guilt quite so thoroughly as a protestation of innocence.

"The committee's decision has come down. It seems a last supper has been prepared for the members of the Lyceum's counterrevolutionary organization! We thank you for your cooperation thus far. We trust you will continue to cooperate until the very end."

The jailer's voice was calmer than it had ever been. Golitsyn heard those words inside the windowless guest chamber. From the room beside his, and from the room beyond that, came the sounds of sobbing and moaning. The Lyceum graduates who had been dragged in with him recited prayers and wept without a sound.

Golitsyn leaned his back against the wall and quietly closed his eyes. He was seventy-five. He had lived long enough, and seen enough. He closed his eyes in silence and offered a prayer — for the souls of the Lyceum classmates who had gone before him, and to tell them he would follow shortly.

Then, several days later.

"Nikolai Dmitrievich. You are released."

Golitsyn opened his eyes at the jailer's voice calling his name.

"Released...?"

The jailer calmly held out a paper. Golitsyn took it with trembling hands.

"...Who."

Golitsyn asked.

"Who set me free?"

The jailer did not answer. He merely shrugged, as if to say, Does that matter?

Golitsyn nodded and quietly rose from his seat. Then he walked out of the windowless room.

To his astonishment, he was not the only one set free. The Weiner brothers, Valerian Chudovsky, Pavel Reinbot — the Lyceum graduates came stumbling out one by one.

Golitsyn wept. Every last one of the Lyceum graduates who had been waiting, composed, for the bread of the Eucharist and the wine of the Blood — they had all survived.

They did not know why they had been released. But one thing was certain. An unseen hand had pulled them back from the threshold of death.

Golitsyn wondered who, and by what power, had sent them home — these men who had been waiting for their last supper. And the answer, before long, resolved itself quite naturally.

Golitsyn made his way to his factory.

"Wh-what is this?"

The 3rd Galoshi Factory he had known had changed a great deal. In front of the warehouse, unfamiliar fuel drums labeled Toluene stood in rows, and at the main gate hung a strange new sign.

The weary, darkened faces of the factory girls he remembered were nowhere to be found.

Golitsyn was standing there, dazed before all this strangeness, when a voice rang out from inside the building.

"D-Director, Comrade...!"

Ivan came bursting out of the factory. He ran straight to Golitsyn, dropped to his knees, seized his old master's hands, and broke into tears.

"You've come back alive.... You truly, truly came back alive!!!"

"Comrade Ivan. What on earth has happened here? And why has the factory changed so?"

"It is thanks to Comrade Supervisor Svanidze. While you were gone, Director..."

"Supervisor Svanidze?"

Through a face wet with tears, Ivan poured out everything that had happened, one thing after another. The words tangled, the sequence was all out of order, but from that jumbled account Golitsyn grasped one thing with perfect clarity.

"This Supervisor Svanidze, this production overseer dispatched from the military district — he is the one who saved my life?"

"Yes, that is so, Comrade...!!!"

Golitsyn could not easily believe it. How could a mere supervisor at a galoshi factory possibly extract a man from the cells of the OGPU?

Inside the prison, Golitsyn had learned that behind the men who had arrested him and the Lyceum graduates stood Zinoviev, First Secretary of Leningrad. By his understanding, the only person capable of defying Zinoviev's will and securing the release of the Lyceum graduates would have to be a giant of the Party Central Committee, or the Chairman of the OGPU — at the very least, a man of power who stood shoulder to shoulder with Zinoviev himself.

And yet... a young supervisor who rolled in from the military district is the one who saved me?

Golitsyn could not believe it.

It was at that very moment that an unfamiliar voice called to him from inside the factory.

"Are you Factory Director Nikolai Dmitrievich Golitsyn?"

Golitsyn turned his head toward the owner of that voice. He was, just as Ivan had said, a youth so young he was practically green.

"...You are Supervisor Svanidze?"

"I am, Comrade Director. Yakov Iosifovich Svanidze."

The young man approached Golitsyn quietly, as though greeting someone he had long been waiting for, and held out his hand.

Golitsyn did not take that hand at once. With the eyes of an old fox, he looked from Yakov's hand to his face and back again.

"...Supervisor Svanidze. I am seventy-five years of age. In all those years, I have seen a great many people."

The last Prime Minister of the Empire continued, slowly.

"But I have never encountered a man whose inside and outside I could read so little as yours. Why, exactly, did you save this old body of mine, already fading toward the grave?"

"First, let us go inside and talk, Comrade Director."

At those words, Yakov grinned.

Golitsyn was afraid. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Why, from a young supervisor of barely eighteen, did he feel the aura of Vladimir Lenin — and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠of Lenin's right-hand man, Iosif Vissarionovich Jugashvili?

It was something he simply could not comprehend.