Stalin's Children by Owen Matthews Page B

extracted by a stern nurse with long forceps apparently kept for the purpose. Lenina was given a hard smacking for her negligence, and wept because she could not go to her father for comfort.
    After nearly two weeks of worry, Martha decided the only thing left to do was to send Lenina to Moscow to her husband's well-connected brothers. Surely they could pull some strings and find out something about what had happened? She had no money to buy a ticket, so she wrapped a pair of silver spoons from the kitchen in a napkin and went to the station to beg a seat from a conductress on one of the Kiev-Moscow expresses which passed through Chernigov late at night. The conductress stowed Lenina on a luggage rack and told her not to move. She also told Martha to keep the spoons. Martha ran down the platform as the train pulled out, keeping pace as it gathered speed until she couldn't keep up any more.
    Ten years before, Martha's father had sent her away from the home where she'd grown up. On a station platform in Simferopol, she had abandoned her dying sister to her fate. Now, as she stood watching the lights of the train bearing her elder daughter to Moscow recede into the night, Martha realized that the new family she had made was falling apart. She went to the telegraph office and sent a short telegram to her husband's relatives in Moscow telling them that Lenina was on her way. Then she walked home. She found Lyudmila asleep on a blanket on the kitchen floor, picked her up in her arms and, she told Lenina later, 'howled like a wounded animal'.
     
    At Kursky Station in Moscow Lenina was met by her uncle Isaac, Boris's younger brother. Their other brother, Yakov, an Air Force officer, was serving on the Far Eastern Staff in Khabarovsk, near Vladivostok, and was still unaware of Boris's arrest. Isaac was twenty-three, a promising engineer at the Dynamo aircraft engine factory. He embraced his young niece and told her to save her story till after they'd ridden home on the tram to the small apartment he shared with his and Boris's mother, Sophia. In the kitchen they listened to Lenina's story in silence. Lenina began crying, sobbing that she didn't know what her father had done wrong. Isaac tried to reassure her. It was all a misunderstanding, he told her, he knew people who could sort it out.
    The next day Isaac spoke to a friend of his at the Dynamo factory, one of the resident NKVD political officers. The man had until recently been one of the personal bodyguards of a senior NKVD general. The political officer said he'd ask his old colleagues and see if he could arrange an interview to sort out what he was tactful enough to call a 'terrible mistake'.
    Two days later, Isaac came home early, told Lenina to put on her best summer dress and took her by the hand to the tram stop. They travelled to the NKVD's headquarters on Lubyanka Square in silence. The Lubyanka itself was a huge and bourgeois building which had once housed a pre-revolutionary insurance company. By 1937 it had been extended, its cellars converted to a sizeable prison and interrogation centre which was by then bursting with the Purge's nightly crop of new victims. Isaac and his niece went in to the main entrance, presented Isaac's passport to the desk sergeant and were shown upstairs to a waiting room. A man in a dark green NKVD uniform, with breeches and leather boots, came to speak briefly to Isaac - evidently the friend who had arranged the meeting.
    When they were finally shown in to the office Lenina first thought it was empty. There was a huge dark wooden desk, with a bright lamp on it. The heavy curtains were half drawn, despite the summer sunshine outside. There were tall windows and a thick carpet. And then she noticed, behind the desk, a small, balding, bespectacled head. The general, Lenina thought, 'looked like a gnome'.
    The gnome looked up at Isaac and the little girl, and asked why they were there. Isaac, faltering, began to explain that his brother, a good