temporary hitch. Some new Zakrevsky would be appointed and the summons would be renewed.
Three weeks after the Marshal’s arrest he was shot, together with the elite of the Red Army. The generals’ plot to assassinate Comrade Stalin had been discovered just in time. Among those in Tukhachevsky’s immediate entourage to be arrested and shot was their mutual friend Nikolai Sergeyevich Zhilyayev, the distinguished musicologist. Perhaps there was a musicologists’ plot waiting to be uncovered, followed by a composers’ plot and a trombonists’ plot. Why not? ‘Nothing but madness in the world.’
It seemed such a brief while ago that they were all laughing at Professor Nikolayev’s definition of a musicologist. Imagine we are eating scrambled eggs, the Professor used to say. My cook, Pasha, has prepared them, and you and I are eating them. Along comes a man who has not prepared them and is not eating them, but he talks about them as if he knows everything about them – that is a musicologist.
But it did not seem so funny now that they were shooting even musicologists. Nikolai Sergeyevich Zhilyayev’s crimes were given as monarchism, terrorism and spying.
And so he began his vigils by the lift. He was not unique in this. Others across the city did the same, wanting to spare those they loved the spectacle of their arrest. Each night he followed the same routine: he evacuated his bowels, kissed his sleeping daughter, kissed his wakeful wife, took the small case from her hands, and closed the front door. Almost as if he was going off for the night shift. Which in a way he was. And then he stood and waited, thinking about the past, fearing for the future, smoking his way through the brief present. The case resting against his calf was there to reassure him, and to reassure others; a practical measure. It made him look as if he were in charge of events rather than a victim of them. Men who left home with a case in their hands traditionally returned. Men dragged from their beds in their night-clothes often did not. Whether or not this was true was unimportant. What mattered was this: it looked as if he was not afraid.
This was one of the questions in his head: was it brave to be standing there waiting for them, or was it cowardly? Or was it neither – merely sensible? He did not expect to discover the answer.
Would Zakrevsky’s successor begin as Zakrevsky had, with courteous preliminaries, then a hardening, a threat, and an invitation to return with a list of names? But what additional evidence could they need against Tukhachevsky, given that he had already been tried, condemned and executed? More likely, it would be part of a wider investigation into the Marshal’s outer circle of friends, the inner circle having been dealt with. He would be asked about his political convictions, his family and his professional connections. Well, he could remember himself as a boy standing in front of the apartment building on Nikolayevskaya Street, proudly wearing a red ribbon on his coat; later, rushing with a group of schoolfellows to the Finland Station to greet Lenin on his return to Russia. His earliest compositions, predating his official Opus One, had been a ‘Funeral March for the Victims of the Revolution’, and a ‘Hymn to Liberty’.
But proceed any further, and facts were no longer facts, merely statements open to divergent interpretation. So, he had been at school with the children of Kerensky and Trotsky: once a matter of pride, then of interest, now, perhaps, of silent shame. So, his uncle Maxim Lavrentyevich Kostrikin, an old Bolshevik exiled to Siberia for his part in the 1905 Revolution, had been the first encourager of his nephew’s revolutionary sympathies. But Old Bolsheviks, once a pride and a blessing, were nowadays more frequently a curse.
He had never joined the Party – and never would. He could not join a party which killed: it was as simple as that. But as a ‘non-Party Bolshevik’ he had allowed
Three weeks after the Marshal’s arrest he was shot, together with the elite of the Red Army. The generals’ plot to assassinate Comrade Stalin had been discovered just in time. Among those in Tukhachevsky’s immediate entourage to be arrested and shot was their mutual friend Nikolai Sergeyevich Zhilyayev, the distinguished musicologist. Perhaps there was a musicologists’ plot waiting to be uncovered, followed by a composers’ plot and a trombonists’ plot. Why not? ‘Nothing but madness in the world.’
It seemed such a brief while ago that they were all laughing at Professor Nikolayev’s definition of a musicologist. Imagine we are eating scrambled eggs, the Professor used to say. My cook, Pasha, has prepared them, and you and I are eating them. Along comes a man who has not prepared them and is not eating them, but he talks about them as if he knows everything about them – that is a musicologist.
But it did not seem so funny now that they were shooting even musicologists. Nikolai Sergeyevich Zhilyayev’s crimes were given as monarchism, terrorism and spying.
And so he began his vigils by the lift. He was not unique in this. Others across the city did the same, wanting to spare those they loved the spectacle of their arrest. Each night he followed the same routine: he evacuated his bowels, kissed his sleeping daughter, kissed his wakeful wife, took the small case from her hands, and closed the front door. Almost as if he was going off for the night shift. Which in a way he was. And then he stood and waited, thinking about the past, fearing for the future, smoking his way through the brief present. The case resting against his calf was there to reassure him, and to reassure others; a practical measure. It made him look as if he were in charge of events rather than a victim of them. Men who left home with a case in their hands traditionally returned. Men dragged from their beds in their night-clothes often did not. Whether or not this was true was unimportant. What mattered was this: it looked as if he was not afraid.
This was one of the questions in his head: was it brave to be standing there waiting for them, or was it cowardly? Or was it neither – merely sensible? He did not expect to discover the answer.
Would Zakrevsky’s successor begin as Zakrevsky had, with courteous preliminaries, then a hardening, a threat, and an invitation to return with a list of names? But what additional evidence could they need against Tukhachevsky, given that he had already been tried, condemned and executed? More likely, it would be part of a wider investigation into the Marshal’s outer circle of friends, the inner circle having been dealt with. He would be asked about his political convictions, his family and his professional connections. Well, he could remember himself as a boy standing in front of the apartment building on Nikolayevskaya Street, proudly wearing a red ribbon on his coat; later, rushing with a group of schoolfellows to the Finland Station to greet Lenin on his return to Russia. His earliest compositions, predating his official Opus One, had been a ‘Funeral March for the Victims of the Revolution’, and a ‘Hymn to Liberty’.
But proceed any further, and facts were no longer facts, merely statements open to divergent interpretation. So, he had been at school with the children of Kerensky and Trotsky: once a matter of pride, then of interest, now, perhaps, of silent shame. So, his uncle Maxim Lavrentyevich Kostrikin, an old Bolshevik exiled to Siberia for his part in the 1905 Revolution, had been the first encourager of his nephew’s revolutionary sympathies. But Old Bolsheviks, once a pride and a blessing, were nowadays more frequently a curse.
He had never joined the Party – and never would. He could not join a party which killed: it was as simple as that. But as a ‘non-Party Bolshevik’ he had allowed
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