Red Ice

Shortly Myshka developed a relative named Vyshinsky and had to plead with Gorshnov—though not too long—to accept money for disclosure of the camp’s place-name. He himself worked in the Moscow Forestry Institute. He compared the camp’s place-name with maps and lists of lumber-product sources in eastern Siberia and crosschecked it with large-scale maps showing railroad spurs. In this way he managed to identify the camp industry and pin its location down precisely. In a sparsely settled area where place-names could cover hundreds of square miles, the location had to be exact.

“He then enciphered the coordinates into one rather bad poem, which he smuggled through the pipeline. If intercepted by the KGB, the simply coded message would likely be overlooked by the KGB in its joy of interception. Finding evidence of one crime, they would be too satisfied to search for evidence of another.

“Myshka, in a flash of literary bravado, code-named Vyshinsky Eurydice—an allusion that would be obvious to any literary-minded pipeline receiver.”

“Eurydice?” I questioned. The name sounded familiar. “Eurydice… now I remember. It’s mythology, she was Orpheus’s wife. Orpheus tried to retrieve her from the home of the dead, from Hades. Yes, very good, the allusion seems appropriate.”

“Not too appropriate, I hope,” Sato whispered. “Orpheus failed.”

“Vyshinsky. Tell me about Vyshinsky. I need to know him when I see him. We will have gone an awfully long way to pick up the wrong Vyshinsky,” I said slowly, trying to work some of the stiffness out of my right shoulder.

“I have a file taped into the dead space of my car door,” the Japanese lawyer responded. “It should tell you as much as you need to know.”

I sat in his car and read by the glove-compartment light.

The file contained a grainy full-length photo of a small, thin man in coveralls. The photo was poor but it showed the receding hairline, the glasses, and the small schoolmaster-ish goatee. He was alone and his posture was stooped and stiff.

The first thing you noticed was that the eyes held you. They expressed a deep lingering, but contained pain. They were sad, compassionate eyes. Pallbearer’s eyes. Here was a man who had lived life as a human punching bag, but instead of bouncing back, he had just absorbed, and the leather had begun to wear thin.

The second quality about Vyshinsky that caught my attention was the pipe-cleaner unreality of his physique. He seemed awkwardly assembled, like a mannequin. Despite his work clothes, it was clear that this was a cerebral man, to whom his body was a mere accessory.

I scanned the photo once more—a round, sensitive head connected to a pencil-thin neck, mounted on uneven, narrow shoulders, teetered on an unlikely waist that left a good deal of coverall fabric to spare. The overall picture was of a man as frail and brittle as an oyster cracker.

Kurganov knew his man; Vyshinsky wouldn’t last six months at forced labor in a gulag.

I flipped through the various entries. Sato’s file had been expertly done.

In 1930 Stalin decided to liquidate the kulaks.

The kulaks were moderately successful peasant farmers who had made their appearance after the overthrow of the feudal landlords during the Russian Revolution. For a little over a decade, the peasants were forgotten while the Bolsheviks turned their attentions to the industrialization of the cities. Untouched, the kulaks gravitated toward a market economy and eventually made the error of holding back the sale of their crops until prices reached what they considered to be the proper level.

To safeguard his industrialization program’s food supply, Stalin set in motion a program with multiple objectives: to break the kulaks’ hold on food distribution, to generally drive the peasants into the cities, and to soften rural Russia for the advent of agrarian collectives.

Setting out with their usual heavy-handedness, Stalin’s henchmen rounded up land, crops, and livestock in the name of the state. The kulaks constituted a very small percentage of all Russian peasants, but once the Soviet machine began rolling, it ground up everything in sight. Five million Russians were displaced. Some were executed outright while others were sent to factories, underpopulated regions, or corrective labor camps. The Red Army managed the program and it was pursued in a warlike manner. Unfortunately, no one was exactly sure who qualified as a kulak. In the interest of “Soviet thoroughness” all peasants became fair game, and the program was expanded to the uprooting of whole villages to clear the way for farm collectives.

In 1931 the Vyshinsky family stood face-to-face with Soviet thoroughness. The Vyshinskys had been peasant farmers and occasional blacksmiths for generations. The grandfather was a farmer and blacksmith; the father a farmer and blacksmith; and the sons, Sacha, age ten, Pyotr, age eight, and with the exception of Yuri, age four, were expected to become peasant farmers and blacksmiths, too.