A Memory of Lies Johnnie Gallop 114,000 words [email protected] 07930 531231 This is a work of fiction but inspired by real events. Footnotes are not essential to the story and are included for additional interest. Johnnie Gallop 2018 Ври, да помни. A liar should be a man of good memory. Inspired by true events this is the story of a single family’s path for survival through the moral maze of war-torn Europe and emerging Africa. A vast and powerful saga spanning five decades. The voices of Pasha and Tanya Zayky tell of Stalinist terrors, Nazi slavery, and British colonial brutality. The wheel turns full circle when grandson Misha returns to a post-Soviet Russia. Survival demands they embrace each prevailing dogma. Ultimately they don’t just survive, they thrive, but at the cost of stealing the truth from subsequent generations. How many memories are merely lies? Prologue As the world watched the attempted putsch in Moscow in August 1991, when Yeltsin spoke to the people from the turret of a tank, leading directly to the dissolution of the Soviet Union by the end of that year, Michael ‘Misha’ Cheshire decided to make his move. He spoke to his boss in London to demand a transfer to the newly formed Moscow office. Credit Suisse was the first international bank to open in Russia for seventy years and Misha became employee number three. Misha was half Russian and his grandmother, Baba Tanya, had taught him well. His language abilities were strong but beyond that, Tanya had nurtured within him a deep love of the country, at least to the south. She had told him of her young life on the Kuban river in the Caucasus; the early days of her marriage, his mother as a child, the privations of life within the Soviet totalitarian regime, and of course the wonder and bravery of the Kuban Cossack Host who settled the eastern shore of the Black Sea in the 18th Century. Misha excelled in the art of client relations. His ability with language and Russian culture, alongside his education in the manners and customs of the people and his natural ability to win friends, afforded him an extraordinary ability to matchmake between the bankers of the west and the resources of the east. While others made the deals, Misha’s forte was drawing clients to the negotiating table and keeping them there even when the spinning coin went against them. By 1993 Misha was living in a large apartment in old Arbat close to the Kremlin. Life was fine for a well-heeled Westerner in Moscow. At Easter it is traditional for Russian families to tend the graves of their departed.1 For Misha Easter 1993 was time for a pilgrimage, not to tend to family graves but instead to tend their memories and the stories he had learned in his youth. The city of Krasnodar in the northern Caucasus was over a day’s ride south by train from Moscow. Departing Kazansky Station in the morning, stopping for a few hours at Rostov for supper, sleeping somewhat fitfully in his seat overnight and finally arriving in the city of the Kuban Cossacks at 10am the following morning. Misha had been transported in place but also in time. Gone was the bustle of the capital, the boulevards beginning to adopt the brand names of Western capitalism, the restaurants, clothes, the cars. As he walked out of the railway station in Krasnodar, life switched to the monochrome of a 1930’s news reel. He made his way through the streets, asking passers-by, and policemen for directions to a grey block of flats on the outskirts of the main centre. He couldn’t have been sure that it still existed but the address had been recounted by 1 Radonitsa (Радоница) "Day of Rejoicing" is the Russian Orthodox Church commemoration of the departed observed on the second Tuesday of Easter. The name is derived from the Slavic word radost, meaning joy. Baba Tanya so many times during his formative years that it was branded on his brain. He walked up the steps of cracking concrete and dandelions to the first floor and along the outside landing until he came to the door – the same door described by Tanya. He knocked. Chapter 1 Tanya Zayky: Berlin, January 1945. Dearest Pasha, the love of my life, wept as we boarded the train at Posen bound for Berlin. Our dreams had fallen apart. In Russia, under the communists, life had been oppressive and claustrophobic. Yet despite the Soviet passion for control - life, thought, and outcomes - their entire empire was beset by a lack of efficiency. Everywhere, and in every aspect of Russian life, machines were broken, the schedules were wrong, the people were untrained. Endless plans, lists, rotas, quotas, all wrong, incomplete, unread, misfiled. I hated the inefficiency even more than I hated the dogma. Then had come the Nazis. Brutal yes, (at that time we could not have known the full extent of their atrocities) but also logical, planned, and consistent. I had rejoiced at their arrival in our city of Krasnodar in Southern Russia. Does that seem a terrible thing to say? With hindsight of course it does, but if you had lived under, and understood, the daily workings of both the Soviet and Nazi totalitarian states, you might have also found it hard to choose between the two evils at the time. Thank God we were neither Kulak2 nor Jew. Under the Soviets we had been intelligentsia and thus always suspect to an extent, whereas under the Nazis we were Russian – the enemy – and a feared enemy at that. But the Nazis respected us as intellectuals and for most of the war years at least, that countered our Russian heritage. I’m practical; I rely on logic, form and process. Pasha describes me as ‘matter of fact’ but I know others who say I’m just rude. Pasha, though, is the total opposite. He has an easy manner which removes rough edges. He makes sense of the world and smooths our way through life. His understanding, empathy and respect for others makes everyone like him. He forms easy friendships leading to occasional extra help and little favours coming our way. Whilst alien to me I could see how his charm and humour had shaped our life in Krasnodar. Later on, his qualities facilitated our move to Posen3 where we enjoyed a simply amazing standard of living compared to our established Soviet expectations. We were well paid, and with our cash we could go shopping in stores that actually had goods to sell. There was coal for heating. Hot water on tap. Public baths that actually worked. Fresh meat, expertly butchered, which tasted wonderful. Superb! I appreciate Pasha’s charm but my immense pride for my husband rests on his scientific brilliance. His work as an agriculturalist at the Posen Reichsuniversitat and the advances that 2 Kulaks was the name given to wealthy independent farmers in the Soviet Union. Stalin ordered the kulaks "to be liquidated as a class." Solzhenitsyn suggested 6 million died during the famines of the 1930s whereas Soviet sources estimate deaths at 700,000. 3 Posen is the German for Poznan, the ancient city in the west of Poland. he, and others within his European network, made in botanical science and crop yields changed living conditions throughout the continent, despite the ravages of war. But it was a war the Germans had lost. Modern historians tell of many acts of Nazi stupidity and hubris, and perhaps this, in of itself, was a waste product of their terror. But, for me, the most obvious stupidity by the first month of 1945 was their lack of acceptance that the war had been lost. With the Russians to their east and the Americans to their west, the blindingly obvious choice was to surrender to the US forces and invite them to occupy Germany and the annexed lands before the Russians got there. The Nazi failure to surrender to the USA condemned the majority of the German people to half a century of oppression under Soviet control. When the war was over, the wonderful cultural idiosyncrasies of German people – all those things that I respected most: the logic, the planning, the consistency – then combined with the oppression of the Soviet regime to create the uber totalitarian state. The efficient terror of East Germany. But it is too easy to get ahead of myself. Pasha was weeping. Sofia, then aged eight, held my hand and her coal eyes engaged mine; concern and confusion. As we boarded that train Pasha wept for the life we had lost in Posen, our hopes of watching Sofia grow within a safe and prosperous regime, his research (left behind at the university – never to be seen again), his European academic network (now in tatters), but most of all weeping for our future. We were no longer intelligentsia, to be respected. We were just the enemy. We were feared. We were hated. I didn’t weep. I never weep. I was just angry. The whole thing was a broken-down machine. It could have been fixed. It was like a musical box which Sofia had left behind. The ballerina in the box had twirled slowly in time with the music, but one day Sofia had dropped the box. After that, the entire clockwork movement rotated whilst the ballerina remained quite still. A single screw to anchor the clockwork movement to the wooden box could have fixed it. It would have meant a new screw-hole, and so it wouldn’t have been quite as perfect, but the ballerina would have started to twirl once more.