Poets and Chess Players #2-1: In Which Comrade Lieutenant Seleznyov Proposes A Conspiracy (Part One)

It was this new war - if Sudoplatov could be believed - that justified amnesty for sufficiently skilled traitors.

This is chapter 2 of Poets and Chess Players, a WWII spy adventure and drama serial. Previously, we met Dr. Klemens Haber in the act of selling his soul to the Soviets. In this chapter, we get a sense of how that may have turned out - for both parties.

This post originally contained the entirety of chapter 2. Parts two and three have since been moved to their own posts.

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FOUR MONTHS AGO: July 10, 1941
Moscow, Russian SFSR

Comrade Senior Major Sudoplatov¹ leaned down towards his desk and picked up the rehabilitation papers which lay between him and his prisoner. Around them rose the whitewashed walls of his very enviable second-floor office. The floors were real wood, the ceilings high and clean. There were tall arched windows looking out on Dzerzhinsky Square, and painfully bright skies visible above the buildings opposite, and dozens of people freely moving about in the street below. But the prisoner could not take his eyes off those papers. At his distance he could read only a few words, not enough to be sure that they were signed - not even to be sure that they bore his own name. Probably Sudoplatov had found some new allegation to which he wanted him to confess. Surely a guard was posted outside the door. The prisoner did not know the man behind the desk, but - like himself - Sudoplatov was an agent of State Security, the feared and renowned Soviet NKVD. That was enough not to trust him. 

Shortly, Sudoplatov set the papers down again and picked up an unassuming folder, which he flipped open. “Your foreign experience is good, Comrade Polzin,” he said. “Three years in Berlin, then two years in Spain under Comrade Major Syroezhkin², yes?” Polzin kept his mouth closed and his head down while the director of Special Tasks waited several minutes for him to speak. Every second was counted off aloud by the small, cheap clock which sat on Sudoplatov’s desk in defiance of the pre-Revolutionary grandeur surrounding it. This was the nicer half of the Lubyanka - NKVD's handsome main offices, alias Moscow Center - the outer building where Polzin himself had once shared a small office eons ago. After so long locked up beyond the inner courtyard, he could not even clearly remember how it looked from the street. 

The stifling heat in his cell had told him only that it was summer again; Director Sudoplatov had had to tell him that he’d been inside for nearly three years now. It was already 1941, and the month was July. Their old, grudging truce with the National Socialists had been formalized and then broken in the meantime, and German forces were now advancing further into Soviet territory every day. It was this new war - if Sudoplatov could be believed - that justified amnesty for sufficiently skilled traitors. Of course a prisoner might be rehabilitated on any excuse. That was politics. To restore his rank and give him a mission was an enormous risk for the man responsible, though, and that was what Polzin could not comprehend. It was because too many dissenters were found among his recruits that he himself had been condemned to isolation and torture in the first place. 

“Well, come on, I know you can still speak,” the Director said, a little less formally. “Didn’t I say everything is forgiven? You're a changed person. Hozyain is benevolent." 

Hozyain, the Master, meant General Secretary Stalin. Even the allusion was enough to make the former agent’s muscles tense. “Yes, Comrade Major. I know.” 

“They send me the dead and broken for the glory of the Motherland… Look here, Polzin. No one has ever disputed that you did excellent work. I saw some of it myself when I worked in Berlin.”

“Thank you, Comrade Senior Major.”

“You will call me Sudoplatov.”

Polzin looked up sharply and saw that if the Director looked a little exasperated, his face was also not unkind. There was a scrap of pride left in him, though, that bristled at the suspicion of pity. He found himself squaring his shoulders again, pulling himself up to hide his weakness.

"That's very irregular of you, Comrade Sudoplatov," Polzin said, allowing a suspicious edge to remain in his tone. 

"I'm not concerned with regularity," Sudoplatov said. "I want to know that you could still think for yourself if I turned you loose again."

Polzin considered this for a moment. Perhaps some sunlight had finally begun to filter through the traumas darkening his intellect. What worse, after all, could they do to him? If he were really lucky, perhaps Sudoplatov would send him directly downstairs for execution. "I believe I could do that," he said. 

"Good. Good." The Director's searching eyes seemed to sharpen against him, and then to smile. He put the file down again and began to pace slowly beside his desk. "What it comes down to is this: I need an illegal resident in Vienna. You speak German fluently; you have experience keeping up a cover, living abroad, and organizing saboteurs; I naturally thought of you."

“I see,” Polzin said, and his thoughts were now moving quickly enough that he did. His new boss had been thoughtful enough not to mention his most important quality: after three years in the dungeon, he knew next to nothing that might interest the enemy. As an ethnic Russian, a privileged race under the old scheme of oppression, he had always been considered something of a defection risk³; but what information would he bargain with? Then, too, he thought - if he understood the situation right, then it was difficult to get further behind enemy lines right now than Vienna. Perhaps the purges had changed some things about State Security, but they would still never send a good Party man on a suicide mission. 

"We are called Special Tasks," Sudoplatov said. Then he added - with a touch of irony, just enough to show he knew - "Not everyone is suited for such dangerous work. I think you'll excel at it."

He nodded. “Thank you, Comrade Direct- ah - Sudoplatov. When does this assignment start?”

“As soon as we can arrange your documentation. In the meantime, you are free.”

A choking sound arose from Polzin’s throat, and the desk’s edge pressed itself suddenly into his hands. Free - 

Free -

PRESENT DAY: November 10, 1941
Vienna, Greater Germany

Comrade Captain V.A. Polzin found himself again in Vienna, the nails of his broad fingers tapping against the wall as his hand shook back and forth. 

He stumbled across his one-room apartment and wrenched the window open to a rush of cold air, which served to clear his head somewhat. Since his release from Lubyanka, he had found himself regularly haunted by the old life within those walls. Anything might bring it back: a word, an image, an ache in the stumps of his right index finger and thumb (which, in this weather, was not rare.) He took four measured breaths with his face turned out of the window, and then pulled it back in to wipe the moisture from his brow. The bank clock read a quarter to seven, three minutes later than it should have if he were leaving on time. 

Polzin lit his morning cigarette and held it between his teeth as he pulled on his gloves, then threw on a well-worn brown overcoat and hat on his way down the creaking stairs. Both had been bought second-hand to provide the illusion that he had been in this country for some time, but he had never cared about clothes anyway. There were no holes in his coat-pocket, and he was guaranteed a ration of cigarettes to keep in it - not good ones, but better than what he could have got in Moscow - and that was enough for him. He pulled the coat tighter as he stepped out into the street, pushing through a stream of faceless people who all had in mind the same objective as himself. The narrow strip of sky above his head was gray with the shadows of low-lying clouds and the haze of river-fog mingled with industrial smoke, which no wind had arisen to clear away. Though he saw evidence of pigeons on the lampposts, they were not to be heard over the motor traffic. No, it was not very much unlike home. 

Viktor Polzin was a city-boy Muscovite, by now in his mid-forties but still as sturdy as a mine pony, and with something of the same driven look beneath his slick of yellow hair. Polzin thought that he had adapted well enough to Austria since his arrival. With his ethnically vague face, excellent standardized German, and an identity built off his old documents from the Berlin residency (the devil only knew where Sudoplatov had got them), he passed easily for a Northern transplant. The papers he carried identified him once again as one Heinrich Graner, a native German citizen whose Aryan lineage was pure for two generations back, and who by permission of the State earned his living as a commercial printer. 

This last statement, for all the irony involved, was true: the Director had also provided a small amount of capital to set up himself and his partner in the cover business which was to fund their anti-capitalist work. The equipment was a bequest from their predecessors in the residency, whose fate he had thought it better not to investigate; the new premises had been located by his deputy Seleznyov, who handled most of the business under his own cover identity. Polzin himself was content to contribute an air of respectability and then get on with his work in the back room. He had few amusements outside of this makeshift office. Seven days a week and in all weather, he took his daily commute on foot with a single cigarette each way, and afterwards withdrew to his apartment with a glass of Berlin-made vodka, when he could get it, or of some nonsense called Kornbrand, when he could not. In between, he spent his days sequestered with filing cabinets and his evenings with informers. The only meal of the day was taken around one o’clock at a nearby tavern, notable mostly for its convenience. He had not yet learned to enjoy food again. 

Polzin was still ruminating on the three minutes’ disruption which today’s schedule had to suffer when he came across the small footbridge and turned down the alley that backed onto Best-Service Printer. He preferred to go in by the service door, where as always he turned all three bolts behind him before hanging up his hat and coat again in the little hall, already warmed through by the heat of the active machinery. Seleznyov’s things were there already, the long black greatcoat nearly dragging in the unswept dust. Through the door to the left, he could hear the hum and clatter of the Linotype machine in the printing room; the door to the right was still shut and locked against the darkness of his office; straight ahead, the door into the public shop was standing ajar, as if pushed open by the inviting stream of morning light. He ignored it and went directly in to see what was being set so early. The regular work was done by a hired typesetter who didn’t come in until nine.

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1. I could prepare an entire essay reviewing Sudoplatov’s memoirs, Special Tasks. Though sort of dubious as a historical document, it’s an enjoyable and illuminating read, and one of my more influential sources. (Bio here.)

Also, I make no claims for the realism of any dialogue. This is largely because colloquial Russian is about thirty per cent obscenity by volume.

2. Grigory Syroezhkin, whose murderous exploits a single footnote could not hope to contain.

3. The infamous Igor Orlov, who would be inserted behind German lines in ‘42, was allegedly first furnished with two cover identities: one for his targets, who had to believe he was an anti-Stalinist, and one for Stalin, who had to believe he was a Ukrainian.