His sympathies cold and wide as the Arctic Ocean; his hatreds as tight as the hangman’s noose. His purpose to save the world: his method to blow it up.… Their worst misfortune was his birth; their next worst—his death.

—Winston Churchill on Vladimir Lenin in 1929

I.

Reconstructing the events fell to Ivan Gavrilovich Kuprin. He was a heavyset man, light on his feet despite his bulk, a scout and sharpshooter who had deserted the Imperial Army at the end of the war. His title was Deputy Commissar for Internal Affairs; he had read the chairman’s lectures, understood the value of the proletariat and the need for counterrevolutionary measures to ensure the future—the future they were fighting for, the world they wanted to shape. He was twenty-nine years old.

The chairman had ignored their warnings. Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, now known by his adopted surname, Lenin. He was a professorial man, a domineering intellectual, and problems presented themselves to him as abstract forces. You could see him calculating. Weighing his options. He would screw his eye up when he was looking at you until it seemed he could see right through you into history. That’s what the deputy commissar remembered about him. That and that he was always laughing. Everything was chess to him. This was in his office at the Kremlin in Moscow. They were explaining someone had assassinated a police commander earlier that morning.

‘I will not cancel my speeches,’ the chairman said. ‘People must see me.’

‘Where are you speaking?’ one of the advisers asked. ‘What part of the city?’

‘Two places,’ said Kuprin’s commanding officer, Deputy Chief Peters, trying to sound disinterested. ‘The first is at the Corn Exchange in the Basmanny District. That speech is at 6 p.m. Following that, the chairman will speak at the Mikhelson Armaments Factory.’

‘Who will accompany him?’ someone asked.

‘As you know,’ Kuprin said, ‘security requires we conceal some details even from people in this room. But the Cheka will be watching. We always are.’

At the mention of the secret police, the room fell silent; no one seemed to know what to say or how to phrase it.

‘Yes,’ Lenin said, finally. He sounded bored. ‘It is decided. I will not be deterred. We have worked too hard for too long, and we have shed too much blood, to turn away now. We must defend the revolution.’

‘We will make arrangements to heighten security,’ Deputy Chief Peters said. ‘I will brief you on the new arrangements soon, chairman.’

‘Very good, comrade,’ Lenin said. ‘Thank you for your dedication.’

Kuprin knew Peters was worried. The shooting of the police commander, Pavel Ivanovich, had rattled him; the counterrevolutionaries were growing bolder every day. The only man who didn’t seem worried was the chairman himself, their primary target, who was, by his very nature, calm, dictatorial, incapable of fear. But Lenin could not be reasoned with—especially not about this. He loved holding forth on his theories to crowds of people. He viewed it as essential to educate the Russian people. He despised men and women who refused to listen to his theories and to learn his methods. He demanded obedience.

‘You must go with him,’ Deputy Chief Peters said. ‘There’s no other way.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Keep him safe.’

‘Yes. I will.’

At the Corn Exchange, the chairman’s speech passed without incident. People gathered to hear from their leader directly, to absorb his ideas, including his theories, ambitions, allies, and enemies—his worldview was becoming theirs. His grievances against the enemies of the Russian people. Deputy Commissar Kuprin stood nearby. He wore his black leather greatcoat and the insignia of the Cheka. There was no mistaking his presence. After the speech, Lenin shook hands, and laughed with the audience, smiling. He got into his car, and his driver, Gil, took him to his next engagement. Kuprin followed in another car.

It was summer, August 30, 1918, and the weather was good.

At the armaments factory the air smelled of iron and cordite. That smell—smoke, ammunition—reminded Kuprin of the trenches during the war with Germany. He didn’t realize it until later, but it set him on edge, prepared him to act. The memory of the terror of war, brought back to him by the smell of munitions, might even have saved his life. It was hard to say. But Lenin was unconcerned. He was lost in his own mind, as he often was, and in his twenty-minute speech.

‘There is only one issue!’ Lenin thundered. ‘Victory—or Death!’

As he concluded his speech, the sun was setting. Blues, oranges, yellows, and reds, blended as if by the hand of a master of oil painting, a breathtaking sight. Kuprin relaxed. All that remained was the return trip to the Kremlin. Yet the smell of cordite remained. He could not let down his guard. Not yet.

Lenin walked to the factory entrance; his security detail followed closely, but there were fifty people or so with him, factory workers, volunteers, ordinary citizens. He shook their hands, smiling, and crossed into the deepening twilight of the courtyard. That was when a woman approached him. Later, as he worked to untangle the threads of the case file, Kuprin learned she was a shopkeeper, and that she’d walked over to the speech from a nearby hospital. She approached Lenin as his driver, Gil, was starting the car’s engine.

Lenin paused to speak to the shopkeeper. He rested his foot on the car’s running-board; he said later that he could feel the chassis vibrate under his shoe as the engine sprang to life. Kuprin watched him. Get in the car, he thought. Don’t waste time. We’re too exposed here. Anything could happen.

And it did. Someone shouted the chairman’s name. Not Lenin. But Ulyanov.

As Lenin turned toward the voice, someone fired three shots into him at point-blank range—deafening reports. The first bullet passed through his coat, wounding the woman he’d been speaking with, felling her instantly. The second bullet struck him in the shoulder, fragmenting and spinning, lodging in the muscle. The third struck him in the neck. He collapsed, hemorrhaging, his left lung filling with blood. He did not lose consciousness.

‘Comrades, quiet,’ he gurgled. ‘It isn’t important.’

People were screaming. Everyone fled in different directions.

‘They’ve killed him!’ someone was screaming. ‘They’ve killed him!’

Kuprin was only fifteen or twenty steps behind the chairman. He helped Gil get their wounded leader into the vehicle, and he pressed his fingers to Lenin’s neck, trying to staunch the bleeding—he could hear his officers shouting, trying to restore order. Adrenaline flooded his bloodstream. He could still save his comrade’s life. Maybe.

But in the larger sense Kuprin knew he had failed. He had to find a way to make it right. he had to find who had done this and why. He had to discover the conspiracy and the people who had organized it. He had to make them pay.

‘Not important,’ Lenin kept saying as they sped away. ‘It’s not important.’

But it was.

II.

At once, a suspect emerged in the shooting of Lenin, and to Kuprin’s chagrin, a consensus formed about her guilt. Death was the only punishment that fit the crime. There was only one problem with the theory: She couldn’t have done it.

Kuprin created a headquarters in his Kremlin office. He laid out what he knew, what he’d seen and heard, writing every detail on a separate notecard. These he tacked to the walls, grouping them as appropriate. The voice of the attacker: a man’s voice. Ulyanov. The driver, Gil, and the United Kingdom’s ambassador, Bruce Lockhart, as well as the shopkeeper, the woman talking to Lenin, also wounded in the attack.

While he worked Kuprin could almost smell the cordite. Munitions.

Things had begun to shift politically in the country. Kuprin couldn’t explain it, but he sensed it, in his heart. Something had changed among the Bolsheviks after the attempt on the chairman’s life. Blood in the water, he thought, and he pictured the sharks from the Anton Chekhov short story ‘Gusev’ that circle as the body spirals into the deep of the ocean. But this isn’t the shark as a metaphor for the counterrevolution, Kuprin thought, it’s the shark as represented by naked power. Ambition.

He had come to realize the counterrevolution was disorganized. Fragmented. Outside the walls of the Kremlin—what could it do, out there alone, in the dark? No, Kuprin thought. The threat is inside these walls. Your superiors are the sharks. Your friends.

A few weeks after the attack Kuprin went to visit the chairman and his doctors. He found one of them, Vladimir Obukh, taking down Lenin’s vitals. The chairman himself was too weak to say anything much. He blinked in recognition of Kuprin, though.

Dr. Obukh grew rigid at the sight of Kuprin’s black greatcoat and the insignia of the Cheka. No one loved the secret police or trusted them; they only feared them. In the uniform, Kuprin wasn’t an individual, but a symbol of terror.

‘Comrade,’ Dr. Obukh said. ‘Good evening.’

‘Gospodin Doktor,’ Kuprin said. He winced at his own formality. ‘Hello.’

To his surprise, the physician smiled, softening his demeanor. 

‘You’re so young, my friend,’ Dr. Obukh said. ‘A true believer? As am I.’

‘I’ve seen enough of this life.’

‘Of course. I meant no disrespect.’

‘Of course.’

Kuprin knew the value of remaining quiet. He had heard, through his superiors and peers, of the chairman’s injuries. But he needed to see for himself. He needed unfiltered information. After all, how can you trust information from the mouths of the sharks. Everyone was lying.

After a while, encouraged by the silence, Dr. Obukh began to speak.

He started with the injuries. Three bullets. We’ve left them in him, he explained. You remember the famous case of the American president, James Garfield, wherein his surgeons dug into his wounds, causing an infection. They didn’t know about such things—he would have survived, yes, if they’d left him alone. Americans are so brash. They need to be seen doing things. Acting on the world. Subverting it to their will. As do some Russians, Dr. Obukh added, stealing a glance at Kuprin. But not me.

His name saved his life, Dr. Obukh went on, the sound of his name. His unconscious response, to turn his head toward the voice, let the bullet pass through his neck without hitting an artery. Yes.

Kuprin thought of his grandmother. How she had prayed over the ikon in the red-painted corner of their shack when he was a child.

‘Thanks be to God,’ he said, without thinking, wishing he could take it back.

‘Perhaps,’ the doctor said. ‘Probably it is dumb luck.’

‘Yes. Forgive me.’

‘Oh,’ the doctor said. ‘I don’t care what did it, so long as he lives.’

Kuprin nodded. ‘Thank you for your knowledge,’ he said. ‘We’re grateful. As a people.’

‘He might not fully recover,’ Dr. Obukh said. ‘You need to know. This I haven’t told your superiors. Or anyone really. But the chairman has also suffered several small strokes—or aneurysms, in his brain. You understand?’

‘I think so.’

‘His mind—’

‘Please.’

‘I’m not sure what will happen,’ Dr. Obukh said. ‘Cognitively. Our comrade’s great strength is his mind. But I am very unsure of everything.’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you have any idea of who might have done this?’

Kuprin paused. He did, of course.

But how can I say it, he thought. How can I think it?

Had someone attempted to kill the chairman, or were they simply taking advantage of the chaos to consolidate their power?

Kuprin couldn’t say. But in particular he distrusted the Georgian, Besarionis dzе Jughashvili, the short one, who wore stacked shoes to appear taller. Many would have suspected Yakov Sverdlov or Leon Trotsky. But no, Kuprin thought. They’re true believers. Disciples of the high priest of the October Revolution. They love Vladimir Ilich. The Georgian doesn’t—he is cruel, loves only power, and might be insane. Insecure in the extreme. Why else would he choose an alias like Stalin, eh?

A man who had changed his name to Man of Steel could not be trusted.

The woman suspect would hold some kind of key. Kuprin decided he had to interview her. His commanding officer, Deputy Chief Peters, might understand. Luck providing. He would not make his suspicions known, though. Not to anyone. It wasn’t safe.

Kuprin said goodbye to Dr. Obukh. The old man bowed graciously to him. We’re in this together he seemed to say. They were building a government of the people: the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Now, the fate of the revolution was at stake. Utopia itself. Kuprin took a deep breath. He would not fail it.

III.

Days of woe. Replaced by days of determination and strength. Kuprin continued his investigation. Yet things were changing. Evolving.

Workmen had begun already to build the House on the Embankment, or the House of Government, near the Kremlin. Furnished apartments, a movie theatre, a library, a tennis court, a shooting range—it represented, for Kuprin, the promise of his country. His people. He promised himself he’d live there. He would earn a place in the House. That’s my goal, he thought, watching the construction. I can die happy if I do.

His interrogation with the suspect who had shot Lenin had reached an impasse. Because she didn’t do it, he thought. She was innocent. Her real name, he’d discovered, was Feiga Roytblat, but already her given name was receding into history, replaced by newspapers with her alias: Franny Kaplan. As Vladimir Ilyich replaced his surname Ulyanov with the alias Lenin. We’re a country of reinvention. Or we were.

Nationwide, bright revolutionary hope had evaporated with the assassination attempt. Hatred was corrupting the nascent Soviet Republic; terror had spread through the political systems, and bureaucrats were unable to trust one another.

Kuprin decided he would visit Roytblat one last time before her execution. He couldn’t save her, and he knew her death meant nothing, but something compelled him to see in her a human being instead of a conspirator. A dangerous impulse.

Sentimental, he thought. Weak. Yet the feeling remained. So he went.

‘They’re going to shoot me,’ she said, when she saw him. ‘Tomorrow.’

He crossed the paving-stones damp with rainwater and slick sepulchral mud. This was in the Cheka’s secret prison under the Kremlin. On his way in he had paused to admire the golden onion-domed spires of the Cathedral of the Dormition. You’re a fool, old man, he thought, although he was still young, relatively speaking. Too much softness in you. Art and poetry and music. One of these days, he thought. You will find your weaknesses used against you and you will run out of luck and die.

‘Why did you shoot Comrade Lenin?’ Kuprin asked Roytblat. ‘What was your goal?’

‘Why do you have to know?’ Roytblat said. ‘What is this place where I am?’

Her voice had a high, manic quality; she was deaf, semi-blind, and anxiety-prone, dressed in the same flat, black clothes she’d worn on the day of her arrest, now tattered and dirty. Her hair was the same black and her eyes had great dark purple rings under them. Otherwise her skin was colorless. She could have been any age.

She never took her eyes off Kuprin. 

‘Where is my briefcase?’ she asked. ‘Where is my umbrella?’

Kuprin lit a cigarette and passed it to her through the rust-caked iron bars on her cell. Then he lit one for himself. He shivered. Nothing about her made sense. For one, the Cheka had recovered a gun, but they weren’t sure it was the one someone had used to shoot Lenin—after all, the bullets were still in his body, and ballistics couldn’t be matched to the firearm. The arresting officer had indeed taken Roytblat’s umbrella and briefcase; however, he had never offered a theory as to her marksmanship while so encumbered with these items. How could she have shot Lenin with an armful of luggage? It made no sense. This woman, Kuprin thought, she’s a holy idiot, demented, swinging between rapture and despair, strange and broken from her time in the prison camps in 1906. Why would a terrorist who bombed a target in tsarist times turn against the regime that had destroyed the tyranny she had also opposed?

‘You’re insane,’ he said, doubtfully. ‘You didn’t know what you were doing.’

‘No reason for anything,’ Roytblat said. ‘No one knows what they’re doing.’

Kuprin smiled. ‘Your accomplices. Who are they? What’s their plot?’

‘Eh,’ Roytblat said. ‘They already asked me this. Your friends.’

‘What did you tell them?’

‘They already know I shot him.’

‘You did shoot him then. You admit it.’

‘I said, “They know I shot him,” not that I did it.’

‘You’re innocent?’

‘Innocent,’ she said. ‘Who isn’t, comrade? Are you not innocent?’

‘Oh,’ Kuprin said. ‘I don’t think you’re a child.’

‘You do. I can see it, Gospodin Deputy.’ She gave a crude salute.

They had tortured her, Kuprin knew. Deputy Chief Peters and the others. She had refused to sign the confession they’d written for her. He wondered: What questions had they shouted? Had anyone tried asking a simple question about the night in question? Sometimes you could find your way to the truth in a roundabout fashion. Asking about someone’s life. Trying to figure out what they were feeling. Or maybe that was more romantic nonsense. But it couldn’t hurt. She’d be dead in the morning.

‘The speech at the armaments factory,’ Kuprin said. ‘Why were you there?’

‘I wanted to hear Comrade Lenin speak on the promise of communism.’

‘No,’ Kuprin said. ‘I mean, why did you come to that speech, and not to the one at the Corn Exchange in the Basmanny District. The 6 p.m. speech. You understand?’

‘Oh,’ she said, easily. ‘Sergei said to meet him at the gun factory.’

As she spoke Kuprin could smell cordite. He could feel the panic.

‘Who is Sergei?’

‘My mother’s lover, I think,’ Roytblat said. ‘Also mine. I don’t know.’

Kuprin stood very still; hair on the back of his hands stood up, and on his arms and neck, and he said nothing. A good interrogator knows when to be quiet and let his subject speak. He was bad at many things, but not at being a policeman.

Roytblat explained that she knew a man named Sergei Valeriyev who had paid her mother for sex. This was a tall, blond man, she said, furry like a polar bear, with one gold tooth on the upper left side of his mouth. He liked to hit her mother. He hit me, too, she said. Not that he did it as a reflex—he enjoyed it, inflicting pain, as many men do. Many of your friends, Roytblat said. Officers in the Cheka. Don’t tell me it’s not a pleasure for them to hurt us, she said. You know it is. Anyway, she went on at length, I was in love with him. He was strong and knew history. I loved his voice and could listen to him talk for hours on end about the Revolution. Oh, yes, and he loved Lenin, and Stalin. He thought they held great promise for the Russian people. That they’d lead us into the twentieth century stronger than ever before. More accomplished and respected than even the days of Peter the Great or Katherine the Great. Yes.

Kuprin listened to her. Sergei Valeriyev, he thought. A common name but a rare patronymic. Easy enough to find if you had the will to find the truth.

This man—this sadist and deviant—had agreed to meet Roytblat at the armaments factory. She had known him. She hadn’t lied, Kuprin thought. She had no co-conspirators. She had only people she loved who had betrayed her. This Sergei would have known of her past terrorist conviction. Her diminished mental acuity. Her emotional volatility. The perfect false trail for investigators—or for someone looking to disguise the identities of the true assassins. A living, breathing alibi. 

Maybe I can save her life, he thought, looking at her. She’s not capable of something like this. She got caught up in something bigger than herself.

He hesitated. Outside, the sun was lowering over the red walls of the Kremlin, and the parade grounds, with the Cathedral of Saint Basil the Blessed resplendent in the light of the dying sun. Not that he could see it from underground where the prisoner was being kept. But he could see it in his mind’s eye. That Orthodox church was a symbol; built in 1561, his grandfather had told him, and he had never forgotten.

A testament to the power of faith.

Kuprin made up his mind. ‘I will do what I can for you,’ he told Roytblat.

She said nothing. He left her in the dark, smoking the last of his cigarettes. A small kindness but one he could afford. He climbed the stairs and stepped out into the dim snowy light of Red Square. There was still time to save her life.

IV.

Nothing he said made a difference. His superiors shot Feiga Roytblat as they’d promised. Then they burned her body in an empty oil barrel and scattered her ashes in the snow. Her bones went into the river. Kuprin helped them do it.

‘Don’t say that name again,’ Deputy Chief Peters said, when Kuprin told him the name Sergei Valeriyev. ‘I’ve never heard of such a person and I never will.’

‘It’s a rare name,’ Kuprin said carefully. ‘I’m already forgetting it.’

‘As am I, comrade,’ Peters said. ‘Gods saves him who saves himself.’

After it was done, Kuprin’s life returned to an uneasy silence. But the assassination attempt had shaken the Kremlin; as he’d feared, his leaders were using it as an excuse to seize power, to corrupt what Lenin and the people had worked for, and although the old man remained alive, and at least nominally the seat of power, he had been sidelined. No strength, no vitality. The series of strokes had left him a shadow of his former domineering self. So, with a shade running the Republic, the others—Trotsky, Stalin, Rykov, Sverdlov—had moved to crush their enemies. Now, instead of solving crimes against the State, Deputy Commissar Kuprin found himself at the head of the Red Terror. Torturing dissidents. Killing innocent Russians. Not that his superiors thought these people were innocent. Though Kuprin wasn’t so sure.

His complicity had finally earned Kuprin his place in the House of Government. In the floodplain, where there had once been a swamp, a place of tradesmen and metalworkers and craftspeople, the government had raised its palace for the communists, and as he had promised himself, he found a home there. This was across the Moskva River from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior on the Bersenev Embankment. Kuprin could see movies at the theater and get his physicals at the walk-in clinic. He ate in the cafeteria. Shopped in the grocery store. Mailed letters to his mother and father from the post office. Everything in one place. A city in its own right. He spent the afternoons reading books in the courtyards by the fountains. Watching the children play. Thinking about the innocent woman they’d murdered.

Knowing she’d done nothing ruined his work. He knew he could not trust the State. That caused him to disassociate from the mission he’d once loved. He went through the motions but felt nothing. His investigations became mechanical.

Except for one. The search for Sergei Valeriyev.

I won’t end up like you, he thought, looking at an old photograph of Feiga Roytblat. God saves him who saves himself. But also God judges those we send before him.

He hoped God had judged Feiga worthy of the kingdom of Heaven.

Finding Sergei Valeriyev wasn’t easy. No one by that name lived in Moscow, as far as he could tell from his clandestine searches of Cheka files, but he didn’t dare ask anyone if they knew of such an alias. He also had Feiga’s description: A tall blond man who looked like a polar bear. One gold tooth on the upper left side of his mouth.

Difficult, Kuprin thought. Especially when you were working alone surrounded by enemies. But not impossible. And his search had led him to this moment.

‘You were easy to find,’ Kuprin said. ‘Nothing is really ever a mystery.’

They were standing on the near side of the old swamp overlooking the Moskva River. Behind them, the House of Government rose into the gloom, and before them, the Kremlin. They could see the red walls of the fortress and the golden domes of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.

I hope you’re watching, Kuprin thought. He wasn’t sure if he meant God or his superiors. Maybe both. He wanted the former to know he could still do the right thing, that his soul wasn’t lost, that there was hope for him, despite his sins—and he wanted the latter to know they were not invincible. He wanted them to know that they had outlawed God but that he believed and respected the old ways.

It was a fantasy. No one could see anything. He’d planned it this way.

‘The whorehouse,’ Sergei Valeriyev said. His real name was Akaki Oniani.

‘Yes.’

‘You must have looked at their paper records,’ Sergei said. ‘For my alias.’

‘Once I realized you were Georgian, it made sense,’ Kuprin said. ‘All of it.’

‘He watches over me,’ the blond man lied. ‘The man you fear.’

‘Oh,’ Kuprin said. ‘Ioseb doesn’t remember you. I’m sure of it.’

‘His name,’ Sergei Valeriyev said, ‘is Stalin.’

‘My name is Twelve-Inch Cock,’ Kuprin said. ‘Doesn’t make it true.’

‘He is a Man of Steel.’

‘Steal the future of Russia perhaps,’ Kuprin said. ‘Ha, ha.’

‘You’ll choke on your wit.’

‘Eh,’ Kuprin said. He had no idea why he was joking. Everything’s so serious, he thought. Perhaps that’s why I’m being silly. He said: ‘Who knows.’

‘You won’t get away with this.’

‘You were the triggerman in a conspiracy to kill Lenin,’ Kuprin said. ‘Perhaps the greatest Russian to live for generations.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘You can’t be allowed to walk free. You’ve robbed us of everything.’

‘Lenin died of natural causes,’ Sergei Valeriyev said. ‘I failed to kill him.’

‘You did enough,’ Kuprin said. ‘Whether he died of a stroke or whatever, your bullets killed him—so you shot him in 1918 and it took years for him to die, so what? You assassinated him. There is a straight line from your actions to his death. He might’ve lived another three decades. You did it for your master like a dog. You disgust me.’

‘We’re not so different,’ Sergei Valeriyev said. ‘You follow orders. So did I.’

‘I’ve never done what I’m told,’ Kuprin said. ‘Not really. Do you think they’ve asked me to do this? No. I do what I can and what I must. But I’m not going to do it forever. I keep my wife and child safe. Killing you is the beginning of a new life for me.’

‘It’s the end of your life.’

‘We’ll see,’ Kuprin said. ‘Bol’shomu korablyu—bol’shoye plavaniye. For a big ship, a big voyage.’

‘A ghost cannot make a big mark on this world,’ Sergei Valeriyev said.

‘What a succinct description of your future.’

Sergei Valeriyev trembled. Kuprin almost felt sorry for him.

The Deputy Commissar for Internal Affairs took out his spare revolver. It was an M1895. Seven shots. A strange weapon because of its gas-seal design, manufactured for the ex-tsar by the Belgian brothers Léon and Émile Nagant. He had used it during the Great War in his battles against the Teutonic horde. But long ago he had filed off the serial numbers and made the weapon untraceable—he’d done it, ironically, to protect himself during Red October, when he feared retribution from the Provisional Government, or from the agents of the White Army under General Kornilov and Admiral Kolchak. Those days long gone. What threats we extinguished without realizing the danger we were in as a people. We’d exchanged incompetents for tyrants.

His old revolver was chambered for an unjacketed shell and he put one in the cylinder and closed it. In his pocket he kept his automatic pistolet. Also untraceable, but just a single bullet only in that one, for this man in front of him. 

Around him there were dozens of witnesses. The people of Moscow. Coming and going, ending their day, beginning their night. So many pairs of eyes.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Do it there.’ He pointed to a spot up the embankment along the river. ‘Try not to make too much of a mess.’

‘You expect me to end my own life,’ Sergei Valeriyev said. ‘Damn my soul to Hell forever in the process.’

‘Don’t put it to your temple,’ Kuprin said. ‘The recoil is liable to make you a vegetable, and you’ll spend your days shitting yourself and gibbering like Lenin did after you shot him. No,’ he went on, ‘put it in your mouth with the barrel toward the back of your head. Trust me on this, Sergei.’

The blond man was crying. Not like in a theater production or anything. Quietly. It wasn’t like they were characters in a Western spy novel anymore. He had only seconds to say goodbye to the world he’d loved and everything in it. 

Ah, well, Kuprin thought. It’s more than most people get. But he wasn’t sure.

He watched Sergei Valeriyev walk with the pistolet to the spot he’d indicated. No, he thought. Akaki Oniani. People’s names were important. Whoever they were.

The pistol shot was very loud. A nearby carriage, still drawn by horses in the old-fashioned way, nearly tipped onto its side as the beasts attempted to run. A woman screamed. The blond polar-bear man, the man who had killed Lenin and Feiga Roytblat, that man collapsed on the sidewalk, dropping like a marionette with its strings clipped by the puppeteer. It was over.

No one will know what you did, Kuprin thought. But I will know and Stalin knows.

He wondered if his enemy had lied about the Georgian in the Kremlin. Better to assume he was telling the truth. That means my time in the House of Government is ending, Kuprin thought. You have been a loyal foot soldier of the Revolution. That the utopia you sought betrayed you doesn’t make your sacrifices any less important. 

Kuprin smiled. The decision was made, he thought. The die was cast. He could take no chances. It was time to leave Russia.

V.

Preparations had been made months in advance. Time to make something of them, Kuprin thought. See if he could outsmart the institutions he’d spent his life serving. He was unsure of the outcome, but had to try something.

His sons packed matching suitcases. His wife, Olga, supervised. She was thin and sharp-tongued and devoted to him. As I am to you, he thought, watching her. She had blonde hair the color and texture of straw. Angular features. In fact, Kuprin thought, she looks a bit like a scarecrow. She was beautiful.

His boys had their mother’s build. They were all acute angles and wide, gap-toothed smiles, blurs of energy and laughter. Pasha was six and Ivan was nine.

He kissed them on their foreheads when it was time to leave.

Deputy Chief Peters of the Cheka had taken over the investigation into Sergei Valeriyev’s suicide. Officially, it was a closed case, since many witnesses had seen him pull the trigger, and no one had seen anyone with him beforehand. Or no one had noticed him speaking to anyone. Several people agreed he had loitered for a while near the embankment. But no one had pointed to Kuprin. Yet.

‘A rare name,’ Peters had said, discussing the case with Kuprin. ‘Valeriyev.’

‘Why is this person so important?’ Kuprin had asked. ‘I don’t understand. You said he was a low-level typist who worked for the diplomats, isn’t that right?’

‘Yes,’ Peters said. ‘But he has some childhood friends worth appeasing. I need to make sure there was nothing out of the ordinary. You understand.’

That was the moment Kuprin understood he’d have to go into exile.

His old friend and superior was a wily man. He’d said you understand in a way that hung apart from his previous thought. As if he’d suddenly caught Kuprin’s eye from across a crowded room and winked. Not a conspiratorial wink, though. A grim acknowledgement that one would have to move against the other if they were both going to survive. Kuprin did understand. But he couldn’t bring himself to kill Peters. That’s not me, he thought. I’m no traitor. I’m a fighter. A believer.

Hence the train tickets to the Ukraine under assumed names for his family. His mother and father were dead. He had two brothers in the army and a sister in Leningrad. But Olga and the boys… Yes, he thought. They must come with me to the West. That makes it more difficult, but it will also make it worth it.

His love arrived in Odesa without complication. French passports. From there, they traveled by ship to Istanbul, one of the less-policed routes out of the Soviet Union. She sent a telegram to him under his sister’s name. 

Weather fine, she wrote. See you in Paris.

He boarded a train that evening. Not heading to Paris but to Vladivostok in the Wild Siberian East. From there, he planned to take a ship to San Francisco, and to make his way across North America, eventually leaving New York for France. A solid plan. Except that Deputy Peters had boarded the train with him.

‘Perhaps you should have gone with Olga,’ he said. ‘Is this seat taken?’

‘Maybe,’ Kuprin said. ‘But at least she’s free from this mess.’

‘Yes,’ Peters said. ‘I suppose that’s true.’

‘I haven’t done anything illegal, have I, comrade?’

‘No,’ Peters said. ‘But we both know that doesn’t mean anything.’

‘Feiga Roytblat certainly didn’t do anything wrong,’ Kuprin said. ‘She was innocent.’

‘No one is innocent. You should know that.’

‘All I wanted—’ Kuprin trailed off. He didn’t have anything to say.

Peters laughed. ‘I’m not going to kill you,’ he said. ‘You haven’t done anything.’

They rode in silence for a while. The older man smoked half a dozen cigarettes and Kuprin joined him. ‘Are you coming all the way to Primorsky Krai?’ Kuprin said. It was a six-day journey. ‘That’s a long way to travel to let me go.’

‘Oh,’ Peters said. ‘No, I’m getting off in Novgorod. I wanted to tell you goodbye, that’s all.’ He showed Kuprin his ticket. ‘You’re not the only one with assumed names.’

They were saying goodbye, Peters explained. Not to each other, although that was true, but also to the life they’d shared, and they wouldn’t be able to pick it up again, no matter what happened. They were friends, were they not? The revolution had ended; their dream of a better world, a more just and fairer world, had come to a crashing halt. The Soviet Union was now an authoritarian regime, Peters said, and the same as the one that came before it. He couldn’t say why. Did Russians just prefer dictators? No, no. He couldn’t say what had happened or where it had all gone wrong.

‘That’s not our place to decide anyway,’ Kuprin said. ‘We’re foot-soldiers.’

‘You did the right thing,’ Peters said. ‘I admire that.’

Some good it did me, Kuprin thought. Now I have to leave my home. A place I loved so much I helped destroy it. Although at the time, he thought, I was helping. I know the October Revolution was the right thing. Maybe we made mistakes. But we were doing the right thing in the moment. How could a series of right things add up to such a situation, though? Perhaps I’m giving us too much credit. We did things. We were part of this. But we were also swept up in it. Fish in a river, rushing out to sea.

After a long time, Peters fell asleep. Kuprin watched the old man next to him. Gray hair, whiskers in his ears, snoring lightly. Had they ever been young?

Kuprin watched the countryside out the window. He wasn’t sure if Peters meant what he’d said. Would he really let his old friend and subordinate go free?

Kuprin hoped so. But he went to his luggage and retrieved his revolver. A precaution. He didn’t want to have to shoot Peters but he would if it came to it. And his friend would understand. They knew each other well. He put the gun in his pocket. This is it, he thought. You’re really leaving Russia. Land of your birth. Home of your family for generations. Now, you’ll never see it again, unless something happens that you can’t foresee. That filled him with melancholy. Knowing how many people were suffering. Understanding he would never get a chance to help them, or that he’d never helped them in the way he thought he had, because he’d been instrumental in building a new dictatorship while he’d thought he was dismantling the old one. He thought about Lenin. How sure he’d seemed when speaking of their Marxist future. He had not been equal to the great deeds they’d expected of him. He was a failure. And his dream… One that would never come to pass. Utopia would remain No Place for all time.

Outside, the country sped past, with night rising over it, the sun rotating away from the Earth. Kuprin closed his eyes. He thought about the horizon. What lay beyond it he couldn’t say.