Stateless by Alan Gold Read Free Book Online

in his troop, who walked aggressively through the rows, pushing desks out of the way, and grabbed the young girl’s arm to hurry her to the door.
    Before she left the room, she said to the rabbi, ‘Please, Reb Ariel, tell Mama and Papa that I’m fine and that all will be well. This is Russia . . .’
    Once outside the school, Judita found herself in a truck on the way to the centre of Moscow. She sat quietly on the seat between the captain, whose name she didn’t know, and the other men, who were never identified.
    â€˜Where are you taking me?’ she asked softly.
    â€˜You’re going to the Lubyanka,’ the captain said, looking out of the window at the empty streets of the nation’s capital.
    She gulped. Every Muscovite, every Russian, was terrified of the Lubyanka, even if they’d never been to the centre of Moscow. It had a fearsome reputation. It was a place people went and never emerged, never returned. Some people said at night you could hear screams from inside.
    â€˜What have I done?’ asked Judita, desperate not to cry.
    The captain finally turned and looked at her. ‘To ask a question like that, Judita Ludmilla, indicates a guilty conscience.’
    Judita held her breath and fell silent. She knew she’d find out soon enough.

    Comrade Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria walked the cold Moscow streets with his coat pulled tight around him. It wasn’t a long journey to the Kremlin, perhaps a couple of hundred yards at most, but it could be the most dangerous journey in the world. Not because of criminals or car traffic. Nor was it because of the numerous checkpoints that were a constant threat to Moscow citizens. Beria was the State Security Administrator and Chief of the NKVD and so instantly recognisable to any solider and therefore safe in that respect.
    No, the reason that the fifteen-minute walk was so dangerous was because he never knew whether he would return to his office or be murdered at the whim of his leader. Beria was powerful and influential but he was always walking the tightrope plucked by Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, always in danger of being tossed into the abyss.
    The walk was from the hill on Teatralnyy, down the street from Beria’s office in the Lubyanka, past the Bolshoi Theatre and the Metropol Hotel and into the massive gates that punctuated the Kremlin’s red walls.
    Earlier that day his telephone had rung with the summons to meet with the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Beria assumed a particularly stern voice to the leader’s assistant, saying that although hewas very busy dealing with great matters of state, he would make time to see the General Secretary, and would be there as soon as possible. The truth was that the moment the telephone’s bell sounded, apprehension had gripped him. He could have ordered his car and chauffeur, but he needed the walk. He needed to be focused. He needed to think over the past couple of meetings with Stalin, and try to work out if he’d done something that might have angered the man. But what? Nothing! Or possibly . . .
    He walked through the private entrance in the massive red walls of the Kremlin, and found his way over the vast courtyards to where the nation’s most powerful man lived. While he was climbing the stairs to Stalin’s office he pondered the deeply divergent paths the meeting might take. If Stalin was in one of his jovial moods, the two Georgians would sit for hours eating piroshky, drinking vodka and Alazani wine until the General Secretary fell asleep in his chair, and Beria could stagger home or to the apartment of one of his mistresses.
    But if Stalin needed to be told something, often for the third or fourth time, Beria would have to pretend that the question had never been asked before, and would answer with enthusiasm, praising the leader for his perception. On occasion, if he was lucky,