Red Moth by Sam Eastland

that the commissar’s own wife had denounced him caused an embarrassment which could not be overlooked. The commissar received a twelve-year sentence in a gulag on the border of Mongolia.
    The reason the commissar’s wife had turned in her own husband was that she suspected him of having an affair. The source of this rumour, which turned out to be false, was believed to be Viktor Bakhturin. At the time, Bakhturin had been a junior commissar of State Railways, but he quickly rose to take the place of the man now in Siberia.
    There were other examples. A bank manager, threatened with exposure for offering to loan money to Bakhturin at an interest rate below that set by the government, arrived for work with flowers for his secretary, then locked himself in his office and blew his brains out. An investigation revealed that the manager had initially refused Bakhturin’s application for a loan, on the grounds that he wanted to pay no interest at all. When the manager suggested a compromise between no interest and that which had been established by the government, Bakhturin turned him in for corruption. Convicting Bakhturin of complicity in this crime proved to be impossible because no documentation of the crime could be found and the only witness, the bank manager’s secretary, refused to testify against Bakhturin.
    Although Viktor Bakhturin had consistently eluded prosecution, his brother, Serge, who was also an official in the State Railways, had not proved to be as lucky. It was well known that Serge’s position in the State Railways had been arranged for him by his brother and, no matter how incompetent and corrupt Serge had proved himself to be, all attempts by officials of the State Railways to dislodge him from his position had been unsuccessful due to Viktor’s influence with the minister of Transport.
    It was Pekkala who finally brought down Serge Bakhturin.
    He had been working on a case which involved the deliberate duplication of bills of lading, which allowed railcars loaded with black-market goods from China, Poland and Turkey to be transported into and then across the Soviet Union. The railcars used in this scheme were special heated wagons known as teplushki which, once sealed, could not be opened until they reached their final destination, in order to maintain temperature control.
    Pekkala’s investigation traced the issuing of the duplicated bills of lading to Serge’s office, and interviews with railway personnel who were also convicted in the scheme confirmed what Pekkala had suspected from the start, which was that Serge himself made sure that the wagons carrying these black-market goods were diverted, before they reached their destinations, to railyards whose workers were complicit in the scheme. There, the wagons were unloaded and promptly reassigned to other transport jobs. Meanwhile, when the original train convoys arrived at their end-points, the number of wagons and their contents matched all bills of lading.
    It was a lucrative business, but also complicated to maintain, since it involved the disappearance of dozens of wagons at any one time and even though this disappearance was temporary, the discovery of even one wagon, loaded with silk, opium or alcohol, would likely have unravelled the entire operation.
    The fact that Serge had been issuing false bills of lading for over three years by the time he was caught led Pekkala to believe that greater minds than Serge’s were behind the scheme. Although Pekkala had suspected Viktor’s involvement from the start, he was never able to prove anything.
    The charges against Serge were very serious, and it was only by thanks to Viktor’s intervention that he did not find himself transported to Siberia, or even executed. Instead, Serge received the very mild sentence of two years without hard labour, to be served at the Tulkino Prison in Kotlas. Tulkino was a place known for the leniency that could be purchased by its wealthier inmates, and Viktor wasted