The Yermakov Transfer. Derek Lambert
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“What is it?” Viktor asked.
“What’s the good news?” her brother asked.
She re-folded the letter, replacing it in the envelope. “I’ve been expelled from the university,” she said.
They were silent for a moment. Then Viktor demanded: “Why?” He paused because he knew the answer. “You were doing well … your examination marks were good.”
Lev Soliman turned on him. “Don’t pretend you don’t know. Don’t be too much of a hypocrite, a half-caste. She has been expelled because she is a Jew.”
* * *
When they returned to Moscow, Viktor Pavlov told Lev Soliman that he thought he should quit university.
They were walking through Gorky Park, filled this late-summer day, with guitar-strumming youths, picknicking families, lovers, union soldiers and sailors. Bands played, rowing boats patrolled the mossy waters of the lake, the ferris wheel took shrieking girls to heaven and back again.
“Why?” Lev asked. “Your guilt again?”
“Perhaps.” They stopped at a stall near a small theatre and bought glasses of fizzy cherry cordial. They were close now, these two, close enough to exchange insults without malice. “I feel like a traitor.”
“Don’t,” Lev Soliman said. “Feel like a hero.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’ll tell you.” Lev pointed at the ferris wheel. “Let’s take a ride. No one can overhear us up there. Not even the K.G.B.”
The wheel stopped when they were at its zenith and they looked down on Moscow glazed with heat; the gold cupolas of discarded religions, the drowsy river, the fingers of new apartment blocks. Lev Soliman pointed down at the pygmy people in the park. “Good people,” he said. “A great country. Make no mistake about that.”
“I don’t,” Viktor told him. “I was born in Leningrad. Any country that can come back after losing twenty million is a great country. But not so great if you’re a Jew, eh?”
“But you’re not.”
A breeze sighed in the wheel’s struts; the car perched in space, swayed slightly.
Pavlov said: “I am a Jew.”
“That’s not what it says on your papers.”
“You can’t blame me for that. There are thousands of Jews registered as Soviet citizens through mixed marriages.”
Lev shrugged. “Maybe. But you’re a more convincing case. All your family records destroyed in Leningrad. Perhaps your mother was pure Russian.”
“She was a Jewess.”
“That’s not what your father told the authorities. And he’s registered as a Soviet citizen, too. So you see, your case is pretty clear-cut.”
Viktor twisted round angrily, making the car lurch. “What are you getting at?”
“Simply this.” Instinctively Lev looked around for eavesdroppers; but there were only the birds. “You can be far more useful to the movement than anyone with Jew stamped on his passport.” He gripped Viktor’s arm. “There is a movement within the movement. That’s where you belong.”
* * *
One month later Lev Soliman was expelled from the University. His one-room apartment was searched under Article 64 – “betrayal of the Motherland”. He was taken to the Big House and interrogated. A fortnight later he was transferred to a mental institution. Viktor saw him once more two years later; by that time he was insane.
* * *
Lev Soliman left Viktor Pavlov with the embryo of an underground movement that had its origins in April, 1942, when the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee of the Soviet Union (JAC) was founded. In those days the Russians needed the Jews to help fight the Nazis and to spread propaganda to the four corners of the world to which the Diaspora had taken them.
For the first time since the Jewish sections of the Communist Party, the Yevsektsia, were disbanded in 1930, Soviet Jewry had in JAC an officially-sanctioned organisation. Its journal was called Unity and Lev Soliman’s parents were among its contributors.
JAC was, of course, another shooting star spluttering in the darkness of prejudice. The Jews thought that, by co-operating with the Soviets in defeating Hitler, they were also constructing a peaceful future in Russia. In 1943, when JAC emissaries Mikhoels and Feffer went on a tour of Jewish communities in the U.S.A., Britain, Canada and Mexico, Joseph Stalin personally wished them well.
Such was the hope of a new understanding between Russians and Jews that Zionist leaders even suggested a meeting between Chaim Weizmann and Stalin. Churchill was asked to get them together at Yalta in 1945; but Churchill turned down the idea: Churchill knew better.
All this time the Solimans worked joyously for the cause and the future of their son, Lev.
The Allies finally beat the Nazis and the Soviet attitude towards JAC began to cool: the Black Years of Stalin’s Jewish purges were beginning. On January 13, 1948, Solomon Mikhoels, director of the Moscow Yiddish State Theatre and one of the two emissaries who had spread the word to the world in 1943, was murdered in Minsk. He was a personality and he was emerging as the leader of Russian Jewry.
The murder was followed by the liquidation of the Committee. Lev Soliman’s parents were charged under Articles 58/10, part 2, to ten years in strict regime camps on charges of “belonging to a Jewish nationalist organisation and spreading nationalist propaganda”. Lev was looked after by the state.
When Kruschev came to power the Solimans were pardoned and the family was reunited in Moscow. Lev continued his education, winning a place at Moscow University.
But JAC had left its scars on him. He despised naïveté, he trusted no one. Organised protest served a function, but to Lev, it had a whine about it, a recognition of Soviet supremacy. Caution, caution. Lev Soliman spat on caution.
He gathered around him half a dozen young fanatics who believed that violence was the only honourable solution. Like other extremists throughout the world they didn’t necessarily represent the beliefs of those they fought for. But this didn’t bother them; they regarded the patient resolve of Soviet Zionists as weakness and they operated clandestinely treating both orthodox Zionists and Russians as the enemy.
This was the nucleus of subversion to which Lev Soliman introduced Viktor Pavlov. The nucleus of which Pavlov was soon to become leader.
* * *
In the autumn of 1962 Pavlov began to construct his cover. He already possessed Soviet nationality but he had to establish impeccable references. The secret police knew about his father; therefore they knew there was at least a strain of Jewish blood in him. So, with the approval of the K.G.B., he worked with the Jewish underground movement publishing samizdat newspapers, smuggling subversive literature out of the country – and informing on his colleagues.
Within a year he was an established agent provocateur in the student movement. He won a brilliant degree in mathematics and went to Leningrad to study computers to make himself invaluable to a country backward in such refinements.
There he met a girl who, at the age of eighteen, had been made a Heroine of the Soviet Union. Viktor Pavlov welcomed her as the means to make his cover unassailable.
Anna Petrovna was the spirit of Russia, the rose of Siberia. Her bravery was the inspiration for a legion of Komsomols to head east, to built cities in the frost, to tap the hostile territories of their wealth.
As a student geologist, Anna Petrovna had flown to Arctic Siberia in an eight-seater AN-2 with two young men. To her, the snow-covered taiga of the north, inhabited by reindeer and primitive tribesmen was a storehouse of precious stones – emeralds, amethysts, topaz, jasper, sapphires, garnets. But