The Soviet Comeback Read online

  About the author

  Jamie Smith was born and raised in Birmingham, and studied history and journalism at the University of Wales, Bangor, before working as a journalist in Wales, Australia and Warwickshire. He then bounced around London and Brighton for several years and qualified as a therapeutic counsellor. Now living in Oxfordshire with wife, Anne, and daughter, Órla, when not working or parenting, he can be found playing and watching too much sport, pottering around at his allotment, travelling and cooking (with mixed results!).

  The soviet comeback

  Jamie Smith

  The soviet comeback

  Vanguard Press

  VANGUARD PAPERBACK

  © Copyright 2021

  Jamie Smith

  The right of Jamie Smith to be identified as author of

  this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All Rights Reserved

  No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication

  may be made without written permission.

  No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced,

  copied or transmitted save with the written permission of the publisher, or in accordance with the provisions

  of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended).

  Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to

  this publication may be liable to criminal

  prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is

  available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-80016-049-1

  Vanguard Press is an imprint of

  Pegasus Elliot MacKenzie Publishers Ltd.

  www.pegasuspublishers.com

  First Published in 2021

  Vanguard Press

  Sheraton House Castle Park

  Cambridge England

  Printed & Bound in Great Britain

  Dedication

  For Anne

  Acknowledgements

  This book took a decade to complete, and I am indebted to a lot of people who have helped me get to this point along the way. Not least the book has lived with me in Australia, Leamington Spa, Brockley, Brixton, Brighton, Islington, Bounds Green and Thame along with various solo writing trips at home and abroad, so it has been both a physical and emotional journey!

  From its very humble beginnings as an idea while living in Brisbane, I thank Ariane Cohin for putting a roof over my head and encouraging me while I began to draw the concept together. Over the years a lot of people have been given eyes on various iterations as the story began to take shape, and I particularly thank Kirsty Smith for providing the hugely positive feedback just when I most needed it, and Ben Williams and Alex McDonald for their great insights.

  I consulted hundreds of books, articles and websites while preparing this manuscript, far too many to cite here, but I would be remiss if I didn’t cite a couple of places that gave me extra help. I’m grateful to the staff at the Civil Rights Room in the Nashville Public Library for sharing their experience and wisdom, the owner of the KGB Museum in Prague for the incredible depth of knowledge, and the excellent feedback of Will Piovano. I’d also have been completely lost without the Greek translations of Harry Papadopoulos (s’ efharistó!) and the Russian translations of Vitaliy Drohomyretskyy, (spasibo!).

  I thank everyone I have spoken to who has been able to give me, a white man, even the faintest understanding of what life was like as a black person in the 1980s. Some of it sits uncomfortably, but I am continually trying to educate myself and further my understanding. I felt it was a story I wanted to try and tell and have tried to write it as sensitively as possible, albeit in the vein of a spy thriller! Getting it completely right was impossible, and I can only hope I’m in the right ballpark and have told a good story.

  My love of writing is a direct result of my parents, Baden Smith and Deborah Williams, who always encouraged creativity. Their editing and feedback, has been invaluable.

  And finally, to my amazing wife, Anne, I am forever grateful to you for never doubting me, even when I doubted myself, and for all of the proof reading and positivity in the final few months, despite being heavily pregnant with our wonderful daughter. Simply put, I love you.

  Author’s Note

  The Soviet Comeback and the story of Nikita is a work of fiction from beginning to end. That said, it is set in a real period of history and works around some real events. However, it is essentially a rewriting of history, and real events have been moved around for the story.

  Nikita’s family and his story, are a complete fiction, but the KGB was a real and ruthless organisation that existed until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. They invented and used a number of creative and gruesome weapons, including the Spetsnaz ballistic knife used in this story, and it is also fact that the nerve agent novichok, which has unfortunately reappeared in the news in recent years, was invented in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and ’80s. They really did manage to weed out almost all of the US spies on Soviet soil, and it is generally accepted they had their own spies embedded in various organisations in the US, including the CIA.

  The Cold War took its toll on the Soviet Union, which by the 1980s was beginning to struggle. The USSR had been engaged in a long and expensive war in Afghanistan, in which hundreds of thousands of innocent Afghan civilians were massacred. In turn, the Soviets suffered significant casualties themselves at the hands of the mujahideen who fought a guerrilla war in rugged mountain terrain, where battles were fought for control of the mountain caves.

  The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty) which underpins much of The Soviet Comeback was a real treaty signed, in a watershed moment of the Cold War, between the US and the USSR. It signified an important thawing in relations between the two superpowers. In 2019 the USA suspended its compliance with the treaty… how quickly the world forgets the mistakes of the past.

  It’s important to note that there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that the police in Skyros are, or ever were, in the pay of the KGB. It’s just a very lovely place, that is situated in a convenient location for the story.

  Pamyat is a real neo-Nazi group that came to prominence in the late 1980s in the Soviet Union, at a time when unrest was growing throughout the constituent republics and throughout Russia itself.

  There have been many reports of extreme Russian racism stretching back to the days of the Soviet Union, and in 2006 Amnesty International described racism in Russia as ‘out of control’ following a wave of hate crimes. Much of it is rooted in the ethnic cleansing and state-enforced policies of discrimination particularly notable throughout the reign of Josef Stalin. Of course, not all Russians are racist — far from it, but Nikita Allochka is the hero, and as such he needed to encounter some of the villains.

  If the story seems too damning of Russia or the US, that is not my intention. Both are fantastic countries of which I would love to see a lot more, full of wonderful people I would love to meet, but there is no denying that both have severe intrinsic issues with racism — although it often takes different forms in both countries, just as it does in my own country, the UK. It felt important not to overlook or ignore these difficult, and often avoided, subjects.

  PART 1

  CHAPTER 1

  KAMENKA, SIX HUNDRED KILOMETRES SOUTH EAST OF MOSCOW, USSR, 1981

  His piercing blue eyes were the brightest thing on the otherwise colourless landscape, but Colonel Andrei Klitchkov was not there to admire the view. The plain grey suit did little to disguise his military bearing, from the close-cropped grey hair to his stiff, straight posture and highly polished shoes.

  He made his way out of the picturesqu
e and sparsely populated small town, and into the run-down scrublands beyond. He was flanked by two black-suited bodyguards the size of small houses and picked his way over the rubble from dilapidated buildings and garbage towards an isolated shack. As he approached the building standing alone on a bleak, grey stretch of land, he could see that it had been pieced together from sheets of graffiti-covered corrugated iron. The grass around it was sparse and ill-looking, like a stagnant swamp starved of sunlight for years. Soviet winter was on its way.

  He stopped outside the building to read the graffiti. Tilting his head, he read, in large black letters, ‘Иди домой. Мать Россия = беlaya.’ Go home. Mother Russia = white.

  He smiled a crooked smile, and raised a hand cloaked in black leather to knock on the door, but it opened before he could touch it.

  Staring up at him was a small black girl, dressed in rags which had been scrubbed clean and crisp. If this surprised the colonel, no trace of it reached his face.

  Crouching down, he gave a cold smile that did not extend to his icy blue eyes. “Hello Milena, are Mummy or Daddy home? Or… perhaps Nikita?” he asked in a liquid voice.

  Suddenly there was some movement behind Milena and the colonel looked up into the face of her father. Milena hugged her father’s leg, trying to hide behind it.

  The colonel extended his hand. “Ah, Mr Gabriel Allochka… or should I say Solomon Wadike?” he asked conspiratorially. “I am Colonel Klitchkov and I was wondering if I might impose myself upon you and your wife for a moment or two?”

  Gabriel Allochka was a big man with gentle, sad eyes. He stiffened at the mention of his real name, and ignored the outstretched hand. Instead, he looked to see if anyone was watching, eyeing the bodyguards with alarm, and stepped aside to allow the colonel in. The colonel raised a hand to his companions once more, instructing them to stay outside, a hulking menace to any who would try to enter… or leave.

  As he entered the shack, the abject poverty instantly struck the colonel. It was just one room with a bed, some rags on the floor in the rough shape of a second bed, two chairs and several patched pots and pans which were lined against one wall. A woman with a kindly face sat on the bed, looking frightened. The room was very bare. Pushing past the colonel, Gabriel sat down on the bed, putting an arm around his wife, and sat Milena upon one knee. He signalled to the chair for the colonel to sit down.

  “What is it you want, Mr Klitchkov?” Gabriel asked, in African-accented English. “I’m afraid my English is still better than my Russian, after all this time.”

  “It is Colonel Klitchkov, and English is no problem,” he responded buoyantly, waving his hand and smiling, looking a little crazed. He leant back in his chair and crossed his legs. “I see that you, like myself, are not one for idle chitchat so I shall get straight to business matters. Now, my organisation—”

  “Which organisation is that?” asked Gabriel.

  “Is well aware of your family,” continued the colonel, acting as if he had not heard Gabriel. “Indeed, I am afraid that you do rather stand out in this country, as I am sure you have noticed.” He waved his hand in the direction of the graffiti outside. “We know that you are here illegally,” he finished without a pause.

  Hanging his head, Gabriel sighed in defeat. “You must understand, Colonel, I had no choice.”

  “You would be amazed at how poorly that argument holds up in a Soviet court,” Klitchkov replied.

  “Does the murder of all five of my brothers and both of my parents in the Nigerian civil war hold up?”

  “Not when it doesn’t explain how they all died but you and your family survived.”

  “I don’t have to explain myself to you. You cannot imagine what it was like.”

  “I do not have to use my imagination; I fought in the Battle of Stalingrad.”

  Gabriel shrugged. “Seeing one horror does not mean understanding another, and I will not force my wife to relive what happened. When you have a family, nothing else matters, not me or you or this country. I did what I must to get them away from the atrocities, and I bear the scars; they are mine alone now,” he said, lifting his shirt to show an ugly, puckered scar running from his right armpit right down his side.

  “And you chose Russia? You chose here?” Klitchkov asked incredulously.

  Gabriel dropped his shirt and laughed bitterly. “What I paid the captain of the cargo ship for and what he delivered were two very different things, sir. He told us he would sail to Greece, but the ship never docked there and he kicked us out on the eastern bank of the Black Sea. We had no money and nowhere to go, and were shunned by many towns until we found ourselves here. I have done the best I could. I intended to get enough money to move us to Europe, but nobody will give me proper work. But both of our children are Russians; they were born here; they are your own,” Gabriel finished.

  The colonel raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth to speak, before stopping.

  “Ah… It is a touching story, of course.” It did not look like it had touched him at all. If anything, it seemed to Gabriel, it looked to have amused him. “However, it doesn’t escape the fact that you and your wife have no more right to be here, than that capitalism nonsense.” He chuckled at his own joke.

  “But there is a way to overlook this, indeed a way to greatly improve the quality of your lives,” he continued, enjoying the control he had over the room. “As you may be aware, the Soviet Union is in the midst of a situation that the Americans,” he spat the word out as if it was dirty, “have called the Cold War. If they really want to know about cold, they should spend a couple of days in our Siberia! Right?” He said, laughing again at his own joke, before stopping abruptly, his face suddenly serious.

  “To go straight to the point, we know that your son,” he paused to flick through a notepad, “ah, Nikita? Yes? I do enjoy how you have given your children such thoroughly Russian names!” He grinned. “Yes, Nikita is fifteen years old, and in a position to be of much assistance to this great nation. In return for his services, we could relocate you to somewhere where your neighbours may be… warmer.”

  Gabriel gave a feeble smile and fixed his strong gaze on the colonel. “Mr… Colonel Klitchkov, I don’t have much, anything, in this world. I don’t have any argument with anyone. All I have is my family. I will never give up my son.”

  “That’s a very admirable sentiment Mr Allochka, but ask yourself — what sort of life are you giving your family? You live in poverty, outcast by everyone in this town and subjected to daily abuse, with no prospects for the future. You would give your children no hope?”

  “I would let them make their own choices, a chance to choose a better life than this.”

  “Then it seems like we want the same thing for your family, Mr Allochka.”

  “I do not think so, sir. You would take my child away from me.”

  “Yes, and make a man of him.”

  “But what kind of man?”

  “A Russian! The best kind of man!”

  Gabriel sighed and closed his eyes. His wife, Sophie, was silently shaking her head.

  “I have to say no, Colonel. I will never give up my son,” he repeated.

  The colonel let out an exasperated noise, but before he could say anything, a small but firm voice interrupted from the doorway. “I will go with you.”

  They all turned to see the teenage boy standing almost silhouetted in the doorway. He had a short Afro, and an honest, determined face. Blood was trickling down his cheek from a fresh cut at his temple.

  “Whatever it is you want, sir, I will do it,” he added defiantly.

  Gabriel stood up hastily, putting Milena gently on the bed. “No, Nikita, you will not.”

  Nikita pointed at his temple. “Father, look at this. A stone thrown by an old woman in the town hit me, just for trying to find some firewood in the woods. These people hate us! What happens when they turn on Milena too? I will do this to protect our family.”

  “You are a fifteen-yea
r-old child; it is us who should protect you. You know nothing of the world, and even less what they are asking of you.”

  Ignoring his father, Nikita turned to the colonel. “What protection will you offer to my family?” he asked.

  The colonel had been watching the proceedings with a slightly amused expression. He enjoyed that this filth thought they had any choice.

  “My, my, you are a determined boy, Nikita. The Soviet Union rewards determination. This is excellent news. Of course, for the service you will do to your country we will reward you and your family most handsomely. A proper home away from angry eyes, and food all your bellies!” He bent down to Milena. “Would you like to have some nice cake in your belly, Milena?” he asked, showing all of his tobacco-stained teeth.

  Sophie Allochka quickly pulled Milena to her. “Please do not try to bribe my children, Colonel,” she said haughtily.

  “Of course not, Mrs Allochka! I only want to help your family. Da, Nikita, not only will we give your family a home, but even Russian citizenship. Mother Russia always looks after those who seek to protect her. But, like any deal, we can only give you all of this in return for something. You will not see your family, perhaps for years.”

  Sophie began to sob into Gabriel’s shoulder, who himself was muttering something about ‘madness’.

  “Mother, please. I will do what I must for our family; you know that it makes sense for us,” Nikita said with forced calmness.

  The silence was broken as Klitchkov clapped his hands. “Excellent! I shall give you five minutes to pack your things and say your goodbyes. Your boy will return to you a man, Mrs Allochka.” He rose smoothly, and with a nod to Nikita, walked out of the hovel and lit a Belomorkanal cigarette.