City of Ghosts by Ben Creed (most important books of all time txt) 📕

I advise you to prepare your confessions now as they will be required in full and in writing. Outside with you.’

More sounds of protest and resistance resounded above their heads. Someone, most probably one of the most senior ranks, prised out of his office for the first time in weeks, was threatening to write to Stalin. Stalin’s in-tray must be overflowing with complaints from outraged citizens certain he would help them, if only he knew of the injustices being perpetrated in his name.

Had this been the army, whose officers hated state security and where the average captain believed he outranked anyone except Beria himself, there might have been a battle. But the militia was no match for the MGB. In meek silence a dozen cops shuffled towards the double doors and to the waiting vans and trucks. Rossel stopped and looked at the scarred face, wondering if it recognised him in turn. Or if it had tortured and broken so many people that one more old victim strapped to a chair and having its fingers crushed with pliers or severed with a cold chisel was very much like another.

‘What is Sergeant Grachev accused of?’ Rossel asked the MGB officer.

One of the security troops drove the butt of his rifle at Rossel’s stomach but he had been ready for such an attack. He sidestepped and parried the blow with his forearm. The trooper swore and pointed the barrel straight at Rossel’s face, cocking the weapon – but at that moment Sergeant Grachev came crashing down the stairs head first, closely followed by the MGB soldiers who had ejected him from the upper floor.

The sergeant had the same question as Rossel.

‘What the fuck have I done?’ Grachev shouted as the soldiers dragged him to his feet. ‘Fuck your mothers, what have I said that was so wrong?’

His hands were cuffed and he held the chain before him as if it was an affront to Lenin himself.

The MGB officer regarded him and sniffed. ‘We do not only look at a man’s words or his deeds as he lives today. Also his class, his ideology, his past,’ he said. ‘And your class is that of a treacherous imperialist. You have been unmasked as a former soldier for the imperialist cause in the Civil War. As a youth living in Kharkov province, you joined Kornilov’s vipers and fought against the Bolsheviks. Your past has just caught up with you, Comrade Grachev.’

‘I am a Soviet worker and only ever a Soviet worker, comrade.’ Still Grachev fought, earning him a punch in the kidneys. He barely winced. ‘And when you check my deeds,’ he snarled, ‘you will see I – I fought at Stalingrad, at Kursk. I fought in Prussia, I fought in Berlin. I have done nothing wrong.’

The MGB major looked at him with a dulled eye before he gave a response.

‘They all say that.’

Grachev’s face fell. For he knew, better than anyone, that they did all say that.

They were led outside, Captain Lipukhin the last to be brought out. He looked up into the grey sky and sighed. As if his main regret was to have not opened a second bottle of vodka that morning.

Rossel clambered into the back of the squat truck and took his place on the bench between Lipukhin and a spotty, trembling private who had only been with them for five weeks. How meekly they all accepted their fate. But then most of them, unlike Rossel, had no idea what an MGB torturer was capable of, what agonies he could inflict and the relentlessness and relish with which he would inflict them. For sure, everyone had heard tales of the filthy, freezing and brutal prison that was The Crosses. They knew how fast the camps of the north and east could annihilate body and soul. But they would trudge to the crowded cells, to the courts to stand before the ranting prosecutors, to the place where they dug their own graves, and there they would stand without a murmur. Because they had not yet experienced for themselves what an MGB interrogator could do to human flesh.

Fear rose in him like bile – better to die in a hail of Chekist bullets than endure for a second time what he had endured then. Even after a decade, the terror of it haunted him. But it was too late; the vehicles were all moving now and Lipukhin and the young militia private were both clutching Rossel’s arms against the truck’s swaying.

He yearned for a believer’s faith – it might comfort him in the cells or in the interrogation room or as they were about to execute him. Around him, men and women were murmuring prayers and shedding tears. But faith had never come easily to him. Even in the 2nd Shock Army.

He fought to suppress the memory and focused on Grachev instead. A former White? Possibly – Grachev had been born belligerent and would pick any side if it meant the chance to kill people. Rossel knew nothing about the sergeant’s life before the Great Patriotic War but Grachev was committed to Grachev, not to the cause of Bolshevism, and if he had done a spell after the 1917 revolution in the service of the monarchist White army fighting for the Tsar’s cause, it would come as no surprise.

Or was the raid linked to their investigation? It seemed excessive when you could just dream up a charge against Rossel himself. But there were always things you didn’t know, enemies you had no clue existed, plots that you discovered only when you were implicated in them.

The column of vehicles rumbled through the arched, red-brick entrance of The Crosses and they were all ushered from the trucks, led under the white dome of the prison’s huge church and formed into an orderly line of the condemned.

Rossel already knew the name of the man with the scarred face. It was the man who had – all those years ago – sung scales as he worked on