Free One Night in Winter by Simon Sebag Montefiore

said Satinov at last.
    ‘Thank you, Comrade Satinov.’
    Satinov looked him up and down. ‘What do you want to do for your motherland?’ he asked.
    Everyone went silent.
    ‘He’s going to be a professor. He really knows his Pushkin,’ George broke in. ‘He’s going to the top of the class.’
    Satinov frowned. ‘So he’s another of your cloud-dwellers, George? At your age, I had no time for literature. I was a revolutionary. Pushkin’s a symbol of our national greatness, of course, but why study him?’
    ‘Because Pushkin teaches us about love,’ insisted George. ‘We need food and light scientifically – but none of it matters without love.’
    ‘For God’s sake, George! What nonsense. We created the first socialistic state. We fought our enemies in a battle of survival – and we’ve won. But the Motherland is ruined. Starving. We need to rebuild. We don’t need poetasters but engineers, pilots, scientists.’
    ‘Yes of course,’ agreed Andrei.
    Satinov took out a cigarette – and Losha jumped forward to light it; he then saluted and withdrew. ‘David, how’s the new plane?’
    ‘Flying well, Father.’
    ‘Good. Well, I’ll leave you to your poems, boys.’ He nodded at Andrei, then he said curtly to his wife: ‘Tamriko?’
    She followed him out of the room, and the barometer in the room rose again.
    ‘Father has something to tell her,’ explained George as he led Andrei back to his father’s little study with the gramophone. He closed the doors, restarted the jazz records and lay down on the sofa with his legs crossed. ‘They whisper in the bathroom. He never tells us of course. The less we know the better. Now he’ll have a nap for a few hours, and then probably he’ll be summoned very late for dinner.’
    ‘You mean—’
    ‘Don’t say the name, you fool,’ said George, pointing heavenwards. Then he whispered, ‘If you work for Stalin, you call him the Master but never to his face. In documents, he’s Gensec for General Secretary. The generals call him “Supremo”; in the Organs, it’s “the Instantsiya”. And when anyone says “the Central Committee”, they mean
him
.’
    ‘So he’ll be having dinner in the Kremlin?’
    George sat up. ‘Don’t you know anything?
He
works at the Little Corner in the Kremlin but he really lives in the Nearby Dacha outside Moscow where my father and the Politburo meet late into the night over dinner. Then my father has to change and shave and be back in his office first thing in the morning. We hardly see him.’
    ‘He was at the fall of Berlin, wasn’t he?’
    ‘Oh yes, and at Stalingrad,’ said George proudly. ‘Now the war’s over, Father says he wants to see more of us – which means taking us to school, with all the bowing and genuflecting that entails. Pure hell! But no one tells my father what to do. No one except . . .’ And he pointed towards heaven again: Stalin.
    ‘I’d better be getting home,’ said Andrei. ‘My mother worries.’
    George put his hand on Andrei’s arm with all the warmth that was lacking in his father. ‘Listen, Andrei, I know you want to get into the Komsomols and I’ve been singing your praises to Marlen. But it would be fun to have you join us in the Fatal Romantics’ Club. We’re planning to play the Game.’
    Andrei felt a stab of excitement. This was what he really wanted – wasn’t it?
    ‘But there’s a problem,’ George continued. ‘It’s Nikolasha’s club and he wants to make it harder to join than the College of Cardinals or the Politburo. And Nikolasha says he’s not sure about you.’
    Andrei swallowed. ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘He doesn’t know you as well as I do,’ George said. ‘Anyway, he says Serafima has the casting vote.’
    ‘Serafima? But Serafima doesn’t know me either. And I’m not sure sure she cares about anything, especially not the Fatal Romantics’ Club.’
    ‘But Nikolasha cares about her, and that’s the important thing.’
    ‘But isn’t he