Andropov's Cuckoo

Then it was over… and an eerie silence reigned, for a moment, just long enough to pick up your head and wonder what had happened and look around at the devastation. Then the wind came back from where it had gone, but not all of it returned… it was less fierce, less hot and less angry, as if it were ashamed of the havoc it had wrought.

As the ringing in their ears eased, they could hear screams of pain and fear from people lying in the road or wandering along it aimless. Some were naked other were wearing rags. Many were wounded with poles or sticks poking out of them like Spanish bulls in a ring. Others were blind… many of them were blind, they were bumping into one another, falling into the ditches along the road and tripping over the bodies that were either too lifeless or too frightened to get up.

Suzume opened her eyes and screamed. She yanked her thumb from the thing she had been hanging on to for some kind of stability – the open mouth of a long-dead body. The corpses in the ditch had been revealed when the water was either blown away or evaporated, probably both. The other arm was around Hiroto, he scooped her up in his arms and took her to the top of the mound. Cautiously at first, but the tempest seemed to have passed. She was shivering, in danger going into shock, but there was nothing he could do except talk to her.

“Wha… wha… what kind of a Devil was that, Hiroto?” she stammered, her eyes as wide as saucers.

“I don’t know, my dear. Perhaps a munitions factory exploded – sabotage, bombing or an accident. Don’t worry about that now. Have a drink of water”. He took a flask from inside his robe and held it to her lips as she was trying to clean imaginary bits of rotten flesh from her thumb on the grass.

“Did you see what I had my hand in?”

“Try not think about it, my dearest”, he admonished tipping a few drops of water onto her thumb and drying it in his clothing. “Let’s take a little rest, then we’ll continue and get away from these sad, awful people”.

In fact, those who could stand up were already wandering off in all directions except theirs, but some just walked until they fell and stayed put, crying like babies.

An hour later, the road was pretty clear of southbound travellers, and the traffic from the south was starting to increase. Most of those walking, which was not many, were in the same sorry state that they had already seen, but there were a few cars and buses, few of which were still trying to avoid the people in the road whether they were dead or alive.

“Stay here, Suzume, I must find out what happened. Take this”, he said handing her his Home Defence Type 14, 8-shot Nambu semi-automatic pistol. I’ll remain within sight, I just want to stop a car and ask what that cloud was”.

“Please, don’t be long, I don’t like this place. The Kami are angry here and very powerful. Please hurry”.

“I will my dear, don’t worry, but I have to know… my parents… you understand?”

She did, and acknowledged that he had to leave her a while.

The vehicles heading north were not travelling quickly because of all the dead bodies on the road, some of which were badly mangled by the traffic with puddles of brains and intestines every few yards. However, nobody wanted to stop to talk to him either. Eventually, an army officer did stop and wound down his window, but held Hiroto at gun point.

He was a terrified young man, but he was not the officer he was pretending to be. He had an officer’s pistol, a Nambu just like his own, and a lieutenant’s cap on his head, but a private’s uniform.

“Don’t try anything”, he ordered, “I’m not afraid to use this, you know?”

“No, I’m sure you’re not. I won’t come any closer. I am unarmed and mean you no harm. I just need to know what just happened. My parents live down there…”

“I doubt that they do any longer, sir. Nobody’s alive down there… the whole of bloody Hiroshima has disappeared… there’s just miles and miles of nothing… nothing at all, just ash and wisps of smoke and dead bodies… even more than this!” he said waving his pistol at the road. This is a bloody children’s picnic compared to back there”.

“What was it? Did a munitions factory or an ammo depot go up?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never seen an exploding bomb make a cloud like that before or kill so many people. Whatever did that is fiendish, and so’s the person who made it”.

“Are you sure there’s nothing left?”

“Nothing at all for twenty miles outside the city, sir, now I have to be going. Good luck, sir!”

“Wait… wait, can my wife and I come with you. We live in Tokyo… we can give you money when we arrive at my wife’s parents’ house… We were coming down to visit my own parents who live… lived just outside Hiroshima”, he beckoned his wife to join him and she scrambled down the hill. “There doesn’t seem much point in going on now and we’ve been walking for ten or eleven days. Here she is, it would be a great comfort to her, if we could ride some of the way with you”.

“OK, hop in, but hurry I want to put all this as far behind me as quickly as I can. She’s got a full tank, so she should get us most of the way, although I’m not sure where I’m going yet, just as far from this madhouse as I can get”.

They got back to Tokyo on the 9^th, just as it was announced that another, even larger atom bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki. Within a week Emperor Hirohito had capitulated and the rape, pillage and plundering of Japan began in earnest.

The Mizukis moved in with Suzume’s parents as Hiroto’s place was no more and a homeless family had squatted the ground. He didn’t have the heart to turn them away, when he had a real roof over his head. Then they returned to work on Monday 13^th as if nothing had happened, but they only did that because of the money and the stability it gave them in their topsy-turvy lives. However, something had indeed changed and quite fundamentally so.

The Mizukis couldn’t believe how stupid they had been to put so much blind faith in their so-called god-king, and they never wanted to see a war again. They found themselves drawn to the Communist Party of Japan as much by the phrases it used, like: ‘Workers of the World Unite!’ as by the horror and the disappointment Hirohito’s folly had inflicted upon them, and the senseless atrocities that the American soldiers were committing every day.

Four years to the day after the end of the war in Japan, on August 14^th, 1949, Suzume gave birth to a girl, whom they called Yui. They brought her up to behave like other Japanese girls, and her grandparents taught her Shinto, but her parents taught her Communist ethics, and showed her that the official explanation for events in the paper was never the only one, and often not even the correct one.

However, they kept all that ‘non-traditional’ Japanese side of their life secret, because the Mizukis had learned to trust no-one but their local Communist Party leaders. Life was very different in those early years after the war as the Mizuki family’s fortunes changed with MacArthur’s whims, though the CPJ looked after it’s own with donations from Mother Russia and the Mizukis held good jobs. They were doing far better than most.

They rewarded their political benefactors with snippets of information, which were sent back to Moscow.

In 1967, Yui was accepted into Tokyo university to study languages - English, Russian and Chinese – her favourite subjects and her father put her name down for a job at the Ministry. They had three years to amass enough money to pay the necessary bribe for the job, but they were not concerned about that. They only wanted her to be able to move to the Foreign Office with an option to sit the examinations for the Diplomatic Service.

Yui’s future was guaranteed, as long as she passed her finals at university. She never revealed her communist leanings, not to anyone ever. Her parents had instilled their own caution into her, and she had seen the wisdom of their strategy. Nevertheless, she attended some CPJ meetings as a member of the public and sometimes played Devil’s Advocate by asking awkward, predetermined questions of the leaders on the podium.

However, some of the higher members of the CPJ did know who she was and her parents continued to play an active, but secret rôle. Despite her privileged position, all that Yui really longed for was the day when she could take up a job, earn some really decent money to help her parents in any way they wanted, and get out of Japan to escape it’s stuffy traditions and old-fashioned ideas. She was a modern woman with ideas to match, so she felt stifled in her own country.

She had no real preferences, but the UK, Canada or the USA, would do for a start. Her upbringing and philosophy made her hate the rich elite of those countries as much as she hated those of her own, but also as a communist, she didn’t blame the ordinary working classes who lived there.

She had no idea how she could achieve that goal and still honour her parents, but joining the Ministry of Finance, switching to the Foreign Office and then applying for a position in the Diplomatic Service, was the nearest that she had been able to come up with so far, and what was more, her parents were willing to help her achieve her ambition.

Yui buckled down and took one hurdle at a time, but she was not happy.

1 3 NATALIA PETROVNA MYRSKII

During the Great Patriotic War of 1941 to 1945, when the main objective of the Soviet government was the repulsion of the German invasion on it’s western frontiers, Pyotr Ilich Myrskii was fighting the Japanese in Manchuria. This battle culminated in the defeat of the Japanese forces in the Soviet-Japanese War of 1945, which helped terminate World War II globally. He had little time off, but he did get home to Alma Ata, the then capital of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, to see his childhood sweetheart, Marina Antonova, once a year. Marina had had to curtail her degree in Japanese at the local university for the duration of the war to work in a munitions factory and she was also giving talks on Political Education to workers, locals, immigrants and migrants, at local factories, and to children at their schools.

Times were hard during the war and food was scarce, despite the number of farmers in the area, although Alma Ata and the province saw no war damage. The problems stemmed from a huge increase in the population. Many European Soviet citizens and much of Russia’s industry were relocated to Kazakhstan during the war, when Nazi armies threatened to capture all the European industrial centres of the western Soviet Union. Large groups of Crimean Tatars, Germans and Muslims from the North Caucasus region were deported to Kazakhstan, because it was feared that they would collaborate with the enemy, and about a million Poles from Eastern Poland, which was invaded by the Soviet Union in 1939, were deported to Kazakhstan. It is estimated that about half of them died there. However, the local people became famous for sharing their meagre food rations with the starving strangers and more than 52,000 residents of the city received the title ‘Gratitude for Your Self-Denying Labour’. Not only that, but forty-eight residents were granted the title of ‘Hero of The Soviet Union’.

When he was demobilised in 1945, Pyotr returned to his job at a local engineering company, but he had an idea to better himself by learning technical drawing at night school. He wanted to design widgets rather than make them. Meanwhile, Marina went back to university and they both resumed their courtship. One starry evening, they made a commitment to one another to get married when they had passed their final exams.

As a member of the Communist Party and a political activist, Marina often regaled Pyotr for his bourgeois desire to ‘improve himself’, because it implied that designing was superior to manufacturing which, she said, created class distinctions and strengthened divisions in society, for such was the Party line, although in private she supported his ambition. She had to play the Stalinist Game though, because everyone knew they were living in dangerous times. Everyone remembered the Great Purge just before the war when at least a million people had been executed and perhaps five million were ‘relocated’, many to the network of Gulags or forced labour camps.

Marina was a realist, she knew that these things happened, but she didn’t want them to happen to her, so she toed the Party line even with regard to her family and boyfriend.

One fine August weekday in 1948, after receiving notification that they had both passed their finals, they went down to the Registry Office in the city centre and tied the knot. Within a year, almost to the day, on August 14^th they were blessed with a daughter, or at least they would have expressed it like that, if high-fliers in Soviet society had been allowed to believe in a God who could bless them.

Natalya Petrovna Myrskii was born, but even before she was twenty-four hours old, she was Natasha to her mother and Tasha to her father.

Marina was ambitious, cautious and faithful to the Party and she enjoyed the privileges that Party membership and her degree brought. In return, nothing was too much work for her, as long as it was the Party that asked her to do it. Consequently, Pyotr spent many nights playing with Tasha in front of the radio, while his wife was out with the activists spreading the latest words of Papa Stalin or Comrade Khrushchev, ‘The Father of The Thaw’.

At first he felt uncomfortable about accepting the privileges that Marina’s rank bestowed upon them, but as his own status in the firm rose, he too was granted extra food, extra drink and invitations to lavish dinners at the company’s expense, to which he could take his wife. He was receiving about six such invitations a year and Marina about twice that, but at least he felt as if he was paying some of his way. On such occasions and when they were working, the grandparents took it in turns to look after Natasha for the first five years, but when she was old enough, she was enrolled in Infants’ School – the best one the city had to offer, courtesy of the Party.

‘That was to be expected’, Marina assured Pyotr when he expressed doubts, ‘all the children of prominent Party officials attended the best schools, so that their parents could concentrate on their jobs without having to worry about their offsprings’ education’. Pyotr reluctantly accepted Marina’s excuse because he wanted the best for his daughter, but in private he still wondered how having the best food and drink helped Party officials do their jobs any better. He often thought of broaching the subject with Marina, but knew that she would have an answer.

She always had an answer for everything.

In truth, he didn’t like to get on the wrong side of her, because he was a little frightened of her. He feared her ambition and her determination, which was first to be elected as Ward Party Delegate, then as Chairperson of the Alma Ata Communist Party, then the Kazakh Republic and finally to become part of the Party Congress – the highest organ of government in the USSR.

She would admit so much to Pyotr, though not to anyone else, but what she could not even tell him was her dream to sit on the Central Committee and even become the first female member of the Politburo, following in the footsteps of her heroine and rôle model Elena Stasova, who had made it to the Central Committee in 1917 and 1918, but that was a lofty goal indeed.

Even Marina had to sit down went she dreamed of achieving that goal. It made her giddy to think about it, but she dared to dream that it was all possible in fifteen to twenty years. Perhaps thirty for the Politburo, but she was still only twenty-three, she had time on her side and lots of work to do first. Pyotr would have been really terrified of his wife, if he had known she harboured those dreams.

Natasha grew into a beautiful, well-educated, well-mannered teenager, although it is fair to say that she was being indoctrinated by her mother and the special schools she was studying at. She and the other pupils had to swear allegiance to the Soviet Union of Socialist Republics, salute the flag and sing patriotic songs and old battle hymns every morning before class, but it was actually no more than happened in the state and church schools of a lot of other countries in the West and the East.

They were trained to analyse current and past events in the light of the historical struggle of class , but they were not shown the weaknesses of their own political system. However, Natasha didn’t know that. She was good at learning and enjoyed the praise of her parents and teachers for doing well. She regularly came top of her class, and showed an exceptional aptitude for languages like her mother, who had been teaching her Japanese since she had spoken her first word. At seven years of age, Natasha’s Japanese was almost as good as her Russian and her native tongue, Kazakh, so her mother hired a private tutor to teach the family English. Natasha took to it like a duck to water, as she seemed to do with any lessons presented to her. However, Pyotr was less keen, and soon left the two high-fliers to their studies ‘lest he held them back’.

That was his excuse anyway.

By ten years of age, Natasha was fluent in four languages and reading books in them too. She could also speak Polish reasonably well. This did not go unnoticed in a school that was looking out for the best students in order to showcase them to the world as examples of a socialist education. Natasha was started in classes on Latin, French and German, the idea being that Latin and French would give her an excellent grounding to all southern European languages and Latin, English and German would open the door to the northern ones. Similarly, Russian would be her entry point into the languages of the Soviet Bloc.

This already-proven strategy worked again and Natasha was soon using her swift mind and commonsense to predict words in languages she was studying even if she had never come across them before. She could see patterns in words and languages as easily as other people could see colours that matched or clashed. None of her teachers had ever come across such a gifted child linguist before.

By fourteen, her French, German and Latin was as good as any of the local high school teachers could take her, so she started sitting in on classes at the university. She had noticed the similarity between Latin, French, Italian and Spanish before, but she had not been in a position to do anything about it, however, now she had access to the university library and its brand-new language laboratory, so she took out a ‘Teach Yourself’ course in Spanish, because she had been learning about the Spanish Civil War in school.

She had a sense of humour as well, and loved to mimic the accents and mannerisms of famous people. The only two that were off bounds were Stalin and Khrushchev, her mother would not allow her to make fun of them in any way whatsoever, but her father enjoyed her performances when Marina was not at home, which was quite often, because as well as her Party commitments, she was Kazakhstan’s foremost expert on Soviet-Japanese affairs, so she was encouraged and paid to spend periods over there. Sometimes, it was for a few days, sometimes a couple of weeks.

They were always disguised as ‘cultural delegations’ but they performed a multitude of tasks including giving pep-talks to the CPJ and bringing them special messages from Papa Stalin or Khrushchev to judging the mood of the people. The CPJ was undergoing a huge growth in membership during this period, partly in reaction to the prolonged American presence and partly because the Americans encouraged it as a counterbalance to civil unrest. She addressed massive rallies in Tokyo and other big cities in their own language.

After one such trip in 1963, she suggested to the Alma Ata Communist Party that they invite a group of Japan’s most vibrant Communist Party activists to come to stay in Alma Ata for a week’s paid holiday. The idea was cautiously liked and sent up the chain of command, from where it came back down again. It was approved by Khrushchev himself and rubber-stamped by the Politburo. Marina photographed the letter for her box of memorabilia and had the original framed and hung on the wall in the Alma Ata Communist Party Central Offices. She felt as if she were being noticed, and that she was another rung up her ladder, although another woman, Yekaterina Furtseva, had beaten her to becoming the first female member of the Politburo in 1957. Marina, studied, emulated and supported Furtseva’s every move.

Funds were made available from Moscow and travel arrangements concluded, although they were not so straightforward. Marina was dispatched to Japan to deliver the good news, the arrangements and the funds.

“It’s like this”, she explained to the hierarchy of the CPJ, “we, that is Comrade Khrushchev and the Politburo, do not trust the Americans. They say they are happy to see the CPJ flourish, but they may just be trying to lull you and us into a false sense of security, so that they can find out more about us and our members. Therefore, comrades, it is imperative to maintain the highest levels of security and secrecy at all times.

“I have been authorised to advise you to select your ten delegates to our ‘conference’ in Alma Ata with the utmost care. They may bring their spouses, but the spouses will have to be vetted just as rigorously. Do you understand me, comrades? With the utmost rigour! We do not want to jeopardise the future of the honourable CPJ and its vanguard of brave comrades for the sake of a week’s conference, which I might add will not be quite so rigorous, if you get my drift.

“Therefore, Comrade Khrushchev has recommended that you make a block booking at this hotel in South Korea and fly there at different times on different flights. You will fly into Seoul, and take taxis to the hotel, which is closer to the border. Your contingent should be assembled by the second Sunday in August. The owner of the hotel is sympathetic to our cause and will arrange for your safe passage into north Korea, from where we will fly you to Alma Ata without receiving entry stamps from either North Korea or the USSR.

After the week is up, we will reverse the procedure, and the hotelier will cover for you if necessary while you are away, but we are not anticipating any trouble, we have used this route many times before. When you arrive back in Japan, no-one will be any the wiser that you have not done exactly as you said you would.

“Last, but not least, here is a bearer bond drawn on an American bank to cover all your expenses”.

“This is most generous of you, Comrade Marina Antonova, I… er we, don’t know how to thank you, Comrade Khrushchev and the great people of the USSR for this honour and your generosity. You can rely on us”.

It worked like clockwork and became a regular, annual event. Marina played host to the CPJ delegation and students of the Japanese language at the university acted as guides and mini-hosts and hostesses to the visitors. They laid on political lectures in the mornings, sightseeing trips or cultural events in the afternoons and dinner and more cultural events in the evening. The visits were a great success and earned the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Marina Antonova herself many brownie points.

Marina could feel her goal getting closer, but it was still so far away. However, the ‘cultural swaps’ were not like working. She enjoyed playing Mrs. Bountiful to their Japanese comrades who were still living under fairly austere conditions in their own country, not that the Soviet Union was as well off as she was presenting it. She had to pick and choose her destinations quite carefully and even the routes to get there, since they didn’t want the visitors to see the rows upon rows of dreary concrete apartment blocks that had been built for migrants in the city’s suburbs, or the shanty farms that many of the peasant-like farmers still occupied.

One year, on one of these visits, she met a couple that she felt a particular affinity for, a Comrade Hiroto and his wife Comrade Suzume. She had read in their dossiers that they sometimes passed over snippets of information which were useful in a minor way, and she had been told to cultivate them with a view to getting higher grade information from them, but she found that she genuinely liked them anyway, which she found made her job easier.

Several times during their visit, when the evening’s entertainment was concluded, she would invite them on to more restricted venues where they could continue eating and drinking the night away. Unfortunately, Pyotr did not speak Japanese and the Mizukis did not speak Russian, although they did speak some English, but Pyotr had given that up before he had learned anything, so she didn’t bother to invite him.

Marina thought that he could be a bit of a bore at social events anyway, so only dragged him along when it was expected that her spouse should show an interest in her career. Pyotr didn’t mind at all, it suited him just fine.

Natasha sometimes took part in the cultural events. For example, she would sing in the choir or perform traditional dances in the university troupe, but in general it was deemed that she didn’t have time to indulge in such frivolous activities as cultural exchanges. Not that they were beneath her, her mother said, but she had to study, because they had other objectives planned for her, although no-one yet knew what they were precisely. Still, anyone who knew children knew that she was special and that her language skills were just phenomenal.

For their part, the Mizukis liked Marina, they respected her aura of power, although they thought that ‘she could lighten up a little’. She always seemed to be scheming or plotting or looking for schemes and plots. Like a presidential bodyguard is always ‘elsewhere’ in his mind, Marina always seemed to be only half-listening. What they didn’t realise was that in Russian society in those days, you only needed to maintain eye contact with the person you were talking to if you didn’t trust them. If you did trust them, you were free to look around to see if anyone else was trying to listen into your conversation. You only stared into the eyes of those you didn’t trust in Soviet society, the purges had taught everyone that lesson.

The Mizukis went on the ‘August Kazakh trip’ every year after their first. The CPJ couldn’t always fund them, and then they would pay for themselves, but Marina always tried to put a good word in for them and always made a fuss of them. Likewise, when Marina visited Tokyo, they usually went out for dinner at least once or met at Suzume’s parents’ for a home-cooked meal. They had their own house by the mid-fifties, but even by the time that their friendship with Marina was flourishing, they were frightened of being spotted out with her in case they were under suspicion and being watched by American spies, although to the casual observer, Marina could pass for Japanese, or Korean, or half Japanese- half Korean and she always spoke flawless Japanese in Japan. She even dressed like a local middle-class woman.

This was not coincidence, many people from Alma Ata could pass for members of other nationalities, both Asian and European. It was a very cosmopolitan city and had been for centuries. The first people to settle there had done so during the Bronze Age in about 1000 BC, and from 1000 AD, it had been an important trading, craft and agricultural centre on the Silk Road and had even boasted it’s own mint. It had been a melting pot of trading nations for centuries.

In fact, Marina’s names were not the ones she was born with and neither were Pyotr’s, who was also Asian in appearance. Their parents’, like so many others, had taken the precaution of Russifying their names by deed pole in order to better blend in with the tens of thousands of real Russians who were being sent to Kazakhstan to colonise it, or help it, as they put it.

The state was building about 300,000 square metres of dwellings a year, and most of them made during this time were earthquake-proof blocks of apartments for non-Kazakhs. One consequence of Khrushchev’s ‘Virgin Lands Campaign’, for that was how it was referred to in the press, was that by 1970, Kazakhstan was the only Soviet Republic in which the indigenous population was in a minority.

Many families had seen the writing on the wall and given up their original Kazakh names. That had been bad enough for many, but giving up the language and culture was another thing completely, except for Marina and others like her.

It was another aspect of Marina that Pyotr found rather unsettling.

1 4 SUMMER 1967

As a special eighteenth birthday treat, Hiroto and Suzume invited Yui to go on holiday with them before she went to university in September. She jumped at the chance to go abroad for the first time in her life.

“Where will you be going?” she asked, “South Korea again?”

Neither she nor the Mizukis’ non-CPJ friends knew that their true destination had been the USSR. Yui was thrilled to discover that they were actually going to the Soviet Union, where she could practice her Russian. She had often wondered why her parents kept going back to the same hotel in South Korea – it had seemed such a boring thing to do. This, however, was extremely exciting.

“We cannot impress on you enough though, Yui, that you cannot tell anyone about Alma Ata. Just say that we are going to South Korea again”.

“I understand, Daddy. I won’t say anything. You can rely on me”.