Repressions are educational measures

POSTER SLOGAN

Stasia packed Simon’s things for him, with a kind of contrary satisfaction. She said, almost casually:

‘I won’t come to visit you in Moscow, or wherever else you’ll be. This time, you’ll have to visit us if you want to see me or the children. And I won’t stay here, either. The children and I will live at my father’s until they put me on the list for an apartment. I’ve heard that you can’t rent living space privately any more, but since you’re such an honourable comrade now, I may stand a better chance. I have to get out of here. I hate this farmyard, these cows, I hate my hands stinking of the cowshed, and this mud under my feet.’

‘Stasia, I had no choice. I fear there’s no other path for me now. The path others have taken leads to the Solovetsky Islands, from which no one has yet returned. I would have liked to have spared you all this, believe me — even if I’m no longer capable of proving it to you.’

Four days later, the White-Red Lieutenant took the night train to the capital, and from there to the capital of socialism. He was posted to a training camp, where he was to teach the young, dedicated, honourable men of the Cheka — an association that was on its way to becoming the most powerful and feared organisation in the whole Soviet region — to ‘detect and combat counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs’.

*

Stasia and her two children moved into her father’s halved house. Christine’s room had become free. Just before Kitty’s birth, she had married a man named Ramas Iosebidze: twenty years her senior, with exquisite taste, known in society as one of the best Georgian toastmasters, or tamadas, an art lover, gourmet, and one of the richest and most powerful bachelors in the capital.

Iosebidze was also a Chekist, and he was a subordinate and close confidant of a fellow Georgian with a striking pince-nez, who usually dressed in the typical Cheka uniform of jodhpurs and tunic coat. A short, bald man, who, over many years in the South Caucasus and in Russia, had done everything he could to make a name for himself in the Bolshevik Party, and who had now returned to Georgia; who, at that time, still occupied a modest flat in Griboyedov Street, only to have a splendid villa built shortly afterwards two streets away. Ramas, in stark contrast to his superior, was a majestic-looking man. He had a very imposing belly, a balding head, large, kind, dark brown eyes, huge hands, and he stood at the impressive height of one metre ninety-three. However, in addition to their political convictions and political ambitions, Ramas and his friend had another quality in common: they both appreciated beauty in women.