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Beauty And The Russian Beast

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just a short bridging passage -

I must have dozed from time to time, and eventually slept quite deeply, as I awake feeling momentarily bewildered to find Ivan lifting my head, placing a bottle to my lips – it’s a vodka bottle, but in it there’s water, fortunately, that’s what I need.

“Thankyou, comrade,” I sigh, after drinking greedily. He lays my head back gently, I feel the bonds on my wrists and ankles, squirm in a little thrill of pleasure. Naked, bruised, burnt and bitten, stretched out and helpless on this torture-bed, I feel just … right!

He lightly flicks my nipple with his fingernail. “How long are you staying in Brest?” he asks. “Only a week, I have to go home on Wednesday.” He frowns. “This school holiday’s six weeks.” “Yes, but my travel permit – I was lucky to get it at all …” “Oh, I’ll fix that.” H’m, I think, inwardly slightly amused at his self-confidence, but perhaps he really is Mr. Big? “You can stay in my flat,” he continues, in a tone that’s stating a fact, not just making a suggestion, “I’ll be away quite a bit, got to watch those rascals on the collectives aren’t fiddling their harvest returns, but I’ll be back at weekends, we can come out here to the dacha.”

I lie thinking for a few minutes. I feel I ought to go back to the collective, I’m happy enough there, I like the kids, get on with their parents, I ought to help with the harvest… But, if I’m honest, it’s a bit lonely, as schoolmistress I’m not really seen as part of the collective, I’m an outsider from a couple of hundred kilometres south … Then I ought to visit Mamma’s grave, and my sister in that grim hospital outside Kobryn… but what’s the point? If Mamma’s anywhere, she’s certainly not in that hole in the ground. As for Nastja, she hardly recognises me, sometimes she’s quite violent, I’ve had to call the warders more than once to pull her off me… And in any case, he doesn’t seem to be offering me a choice …

I give him a little smile. “Okay, comrade – now, please can I go to the toilet?”

He returns my smile with a wink, undoes my bonds and shackles. I haul myself up stiffly, sit on the edge of the bed for a few moments, then give him a big surprise hug and kiss before scuttling off to the bathroom.

PS the horrible pun on Brest was a Freudian slip, but it might as well stay. In case anyone's interested, it was formerly Brest-Litovsk ('Lithuanian Brest', reflecting another stage in its history) where the treaty was signed that pulled post-Revolution Russia out of the 1st WW.
 
So that’s it. He lets me rest in bed through the morning, then I get lunch and we relax on the veranda for a couple of hours before getting ready to return to town. At last I’m allowed to retrieve my bag and put on some clothes – biking into Brest with a naked woman handcuffed to your pillion might count as traffic offence requiring some embarrassing ‘fixing’, even for such a mighty apparatchik as Ivan!

His flat’s in a nice district near the city centre, it’s tiny but very few people get to live on their own in Soviet cities. Really it’s just a single room that serves as living-room, kitchen and bedroom. There’s a minimal bathroom partitioned off, and another small room at the back with a door he keeps locked. He explains it’s his private study, and indeed he works there some evenings – peeping in when he does I see just a desk with a typewriter and a telephone (I hear it ring sometimes when he’s out), and a couple of large filing cabinets – wonder what’s in them?

We get used to sharing this space through the summer weeks. I’m happy, being domestic. Food’s still not easy, I spend a lot of time waiting in queues for bread or vegetables, though at least when I get it, there’s a bit more quantity and variety than at the collective farm store. And parcels arrive for Ivan from Moscow, I collect them from a grumpy old janitor who sits at the street entrance and clearly doesn’t approve of me, but seems in some awe of Ivan. They’re stocked with things we can’t get in Brest – food in tins and jars, even sweets! He’s elusive if I ask about where they come from, I don’t press him.

I wash our clothes in the sink – he says there’s a communal wash-house along the road, but I feel a bit shy, all the women in the neighbourhood will be there wanting to know who I am. He’s got an electric iron, using it – often nude – I can’t help thinking of mamma’s old flat-iron, my breasts throb at the memory of my branding, I can still see the crimson Λ below each nipple, secretly I’m a bit proud of it!

My travel permit is indeed “fixed”, it’s delivered by a special courier on the Tuesday, before the other one expires – Ivan evidently is a guy who’s got some influence. And, like he said, he’s away much of the week, though when he does come home it’s good – he’s hardly through the door before he’s stripping me, forcefully but lusciously slowly, fondling and licking at each part as he exposes me. The flat’s too small, the neighbours too nosey, for us to play the games we’d enjoyed at the dacha, but I’d made sure to pack the handcuffs …

While he’s away, apart from doing shopping and laundry, I spend most of my time in the library. The building has been badly knocked about during the war, all the Polish books it once housed have long gone, but Moscow’s supplied a pretty good stock in Russian – obviously part of the ‘Russification’ programme, some people resent it, but as a child of this strip of Europe that nobody really cares about but everyone has to fight over I feel no strong attachment to any particular language, nation or creed – I’m just delighted to get my hands on books!

I’m very conscious of my lack of proper education, schooling such as it was pretty well came to an end with German occupation, though mamma tried to teach us what she could remember of useful bits of mathematics, geography, history and so on, of course we had no books. I enjoyed my time in the College at Kobryn training to be an elementary schoolteacher, and I did well, but the library there was minimal.

So for a start I need to read just to be a few steps ahead of the kids I’m teaching. I find and take notes on the reference books that help me understand the curriculum I’m supposed to teach them. What delights me more is finding stories to tell them – some of them quite new, though many are similar to ones mamma told us when we were little. I cry softly when I find ‘The Little Red Flower’, always my favourite, about the young girl who consented to go and live with the Beast of the Forest, how she came to love him more than she loved herself, how her love transformed him.

And, while I guiltily decide I’ll leave the collected works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin till later, I’m thrilled to find an anthology of poetry, intended for high school pupils, but a revelation to me. Much of it is nineteenth century Russian poetry – I revel in Pushkin – but there are translations from other tongues, Goethe and Heine, Shakespeare and Burns, opening my eyes to the discovery (perhaps not quite what Moscow intended) that German didn’t have to be the inflated rhetoric of Nazism, nor English the vulgar slogans of capitalism. Through the sultry days of that hot summer, I live in a dream-world in a shady corner of that reading-room.
 
But at the weekends, we’re back at the dacha. I only take my washing things, I know I won’t need clothes, but don’t forget the handcuffs! Good as his word, he’s had a supply of barbed wire delivered, the torture-chair is closer still to the way my body remembers it. When I’m not on the chair, I discover the wide range of excitingly different ways a girl can hang from a single iron ring in the ceiling, twirling and twisting, kicking and dancing in delightfully gymnastic gyrations, while the whip wraps round my naked form, urging me on with its sharp bite.

Ivan’s got a camera, a classy German job, something else he got his hands on in the chaos as the Nazis retreated. It’s too dark in the cellar, but outside in the daylight, I pose for him, trying to remember the ways the starlets in the movie mags display themselves. After a few days, he brings prints home to the flat, says a friend of his has a dark room where he’s developed them. I look at myself with mixed feelings – okay, my eyes and hair are quite pretty I suppose, but compared to those busty beauties in the mags, I’m a half-starved strip of skin wrapped round a weedy stalk of jutting bones. Still, Ivan’s pleased with his snapshots.

And for the third weekend, he’s got a surprise – a portable electric generator! He says it will be handy with the chronic electricity supply, but of course it has other uses! That evening, I have the slave-task of cranking the handle till my arm aches, twenty or thirty minutes or more, till the ammeter shows that battery’s fully charged.

Now I take the familiar walk down to the cellar, through to the metal bed. I’m stretched out on it as usual, the manacles holding my wrists to the bed-head so I can move my arms and upper body about a bit. He binds my ankles with bare copper wire, very tight, but allows 10cm or so of slack between them and the knots on the bed-foot, so, though I can’t bring my legs together, I can kick and twist about quite vigorously.

He brings a bucket of water and swabs me with a filthy rag, all over my body, but especially on my breasts and private parts, I’m squirming in anticipation. Then he stuffs the rag into my mouth. He fits the crocodile clips first to my fingers and toes, I wince, and watch as he sits on a packing-case, the generator on another box beside him, starts turning the handle, presses the switch – “Eeeeeeeeeeeh!”

The pain courses through me, right from my fingers to my toes, my arms and legs shoot out, jerking wildly, my torso bounces up and down on the steel springs, I feel burning sparks leap from my skin to the metal. I’m screeching through the gag of dirty rag, my teeth crunching on it in spasms I can’t control.

It probably only lasts a few seconds, but it feels an eternity, when it stops and he pulls out the gag, I’m gasping, sobbing, soaked now as much with sweat as with water. He says nothing, just moves the clips to my thighs and armpits, their biting is the more grievous, I’m crying like a child.

The shocks in these parts seem to flow deeper into my flesh, like the burning iron, my trunk twists helplessly back and forth, my hips roll and my thighs stretch In a cruel parody of sexual desire, and indeed the racing of my blood and my hormones is driving me to a wild, tormented kind of ecstasy.

He keeps the torture up longer, pausing then renewing, watching my helpless struggles with a calm, impassive gaze – for sure he’s getting pleasure, but it doesn’t show.

And now he takes a break, pours himself a glass of vodka. I beg for water, but he shakes his head, says it would be dangerous, I could have a seizure that could stop my heart. I’m lying, soaked in sweat, my body still shaken with frequent involuntary spasms, the pain still fresh in my limbs and torso.

The clips now go on my nipples, which are rigid and firm, I squeak at the pain, then sigh as it spreads through my breasts. The other pair on my sex-lips, they too are warm and pulsing – he flicks my clitoris.

And now the climax, the triumph of electric power over the female form, I can only shriek, like the wailing of the wind in a storm, as waves of hot energy surge through my genitals, leaping across my bare skin, boiling In the wetness that wells from my inner organs. I can do nothing to protect myself, nothing to ease the pain, my body is no longer mine, it leaps and shakes and dances at the will of the puppet-master.

At last it ceases, by now I’m babbling, confused. Even when my legs are untied and my shackled wrists released, I struggle to take control of my movements. Finally, I roll over on the bed, lower myself to the floor, and crawl, shaking like I’m having a fit, up from the cellar to the bedroom, where my Master will seal his victory!
 
Perhaps this heightened experience of the awesome power and pleasure of being electro-tortured makes me bolder, perhaps inflicting it on me loosens some of his inhibitions, but at lunchtime the next day, when he’d drunk half a bottle of vodka, I manage to penetrate a little behind Ivan’s reticence and reluctance to talk about himself.

I learn that he’s, like me, an orphan with no real family. When he was eleven years old, his parents were arrested, he never saw them again. He still has no real idea why, his dad was in some government job, Ivan himself was questioned by the police, he heard them saying things about ‘crimes against the state’, but then he was taken off to an orphanage – a ghastly place by the sound of it – until Hitler invaded Russia and he was drafted into the Red Army.

I take his hands, I can see he was fighting back tears. “We’re a couple of rats that have got washed up in a shipwreck – but we’re both survivors!” I tell him.

Next week in the parcel from Moscow, there aren’t just chocolates, there are three sets of nylon undies like I’d only seen in the film mags, and even an amazing garment called a bikini – for a girl who’s never even worn a swimming costume! Ivan informs me that I could – indeed must – wear it at the dacha.

What I’d learnt about his childhood helped me make some sense of his long silences, but there was still a lot I couldn’t fathom. His job’s no doubt important, but the nonchalant way he “fixes” things, these parcels from Moscow, the expert, even ‘professional’, way he tortures me …. who is this man?

Yet, though he’s a mystery, I feel there’s an understanding between us that goes deeper than words, I feel quite differently about him than I’ve felt about any other man. I want our relationship to last. Of course, it won’t be easy. This summer has been an interlude of deliciously painful bliss, but it has to end, we have to work out how we keep in contact in the long months ahead.

I break these thoughts to him on our last weekend at the dacha, lying in my wondrous red and gold bikini beneath the birch trees, my skin still burning from a luscious lashing last night, soothed by the long dewy grass.

I’m happy when he agrees, in his terse way. Getting to Brest for weekends just won’t be on – the travel permit’s no problem, but it’s too long a journey, I’d have to set off home again as soon as I’d arrived. Over the Revolution Day holiday in November, he’d have to be in Moscow for official celebrations and meetings with his superiors, I’d have to supervise the kids on the collective farm parade. But New Year, when families get together, would be a lonely time for both of us, so we’ll get together then!

Meanwhile, he’ll send me prints of my favourites among the photos he’s taken of me, plus the couple I persuaded him to let me take of him ….

And now it’s time for one last, long, lingering visit to the torture chamber!
 
Eulalia said:
Perhaps this heightened experience of the awesome power and pleasure of being electro-tortured makes me bolder, perhaps inflicting it on me loosens some of his inhibitions, but at lunchtime the next day, when he’d drunk half a bottle of vodka, I manage to penetrate a little behind Ivan’s reticence and reluctance to talk about himself.

I learn that he’s, like me, an orphan with no real family. When he was eleven years old, his parents were arrested, he never saw them again. He still has no real idea why, his dad was in some government job, Ivan himself was questioned by the police, he heard them saying things about ‘crimes against the state’, but then he was taken off to an orphanage – a ghastly place by the sound of it – until Hitler invaded Russia and he was drafted into the Red Army.

I take his hands, I can see he was fighting back tears. “We’re a couple of rats that have got washed up in a shipwreck – but we’re both survivors!” I tell him.

Next week in the parcel from Moscow, there aren’t just chocolates, there are three sets of nylon undies like I’d only seen in the film mags, and even an amazing garment called a bikini – for a girl who’s never even worn a swimming costume! Ivan informs me that I could – indeed must – wear it at the dacha.

What I’d learnt about his childhood helped me make some sense of his long silences, but there was still a lot I couldn’t fathom. His job’s no doubt important, but the nonchalant way he “fixes” things, these parcels from Moscow, the expert, even ‘professional’, way he tortures me …. who is this man?

Yet, though he’s a mystery, I feel there’s an understanding between us that goes deeper than words, I feel quite differently about him than I’ve felt about any other man. I want our relationship to last. Of course, it won’t be easy. This summer has been an interlude of deliciously painful bliss, but it has to end, we have to work out how we keep in contact in the long months ahead.

I break these thoughts to him on our last weekend at the dacha, lying in my wondrous red and gold bikini beneath the birch trees, my skin still burning from a luscious lashing last night, soothed by the long dewy grass.

I’m happy when he agrees, in his terse way. Getting to Brest for weekends just won’t be on – the travel permit’s no problem, but it’s too long a journey, I’d have to set off home again as soon as I’d arrived. Over the Revolution Day holiday in November, he’d have to be in Moscow for official celebrations and meetings with his superiors, I’d have to supervise the kids on the collective farm parade. But New Year, when families get together, would be a lonely time for both of us, so we’ll get together then!

Meanwhile, he’ll send me prints of my favourites among the photos he’s taken of me, plus the couple I persuaded him to let me take of him ….

And now it’s time for one last, long, lingering visit to the torture chamber!
Click to expand...

The red and gold bikini sounds nice :)

W
 
We keep in touch. He’s no great letter-writer, but he sends the photos as promised, and others that he takes on his travels, of the changing scenery of autumn in the city and countryside, a postcard from Moscow of soldiers marching through Red Square – and even, wow!, nylon stockings.

I get a bit of a telling-off from Yelena Markova, wife of the chairman of the Farm Council, for not being around for the harvest. I tell her politely that I was studying so that I could provide the best possible education for the children of the collective, but she’s not satisfied, “When I was your age, young lady, if I’d bunked off from the harvest, I’d have got a whipping!” I smile sweetly.

A few days later, I’m summoned to the local police station and requested to explain why I greatly exceeded the time allowed in Brest on my travel permit. Anticipating this, I’d brought the one arranged by Ivan, endorsed by the Agricultural Planning Board. The policeman looks perplexed, takes it to a back room to consult his superior, I hear muttered conversation, phone calls being made, after a while he comes out and tells me I can leave. I mention this incident to Ivan in a letter, but he says nothing about it, and I hear no more- at least, not for a while.

I go on enjoying teaching the youngsters, and feeding on my memories of the wondrous summer, I make sure to be seen at the collective’s events and meetings, get the kids to put on a splendid show for Revolution Day. But I’m unsettled, it’s not just Ivan I’ve fallen in love with, the books in that library too – together they’ve whetted my appetite for something more than the life of a country schoolmistress, out here in no-man’s-land.

When we get together for the New Year, we hug like bears on the station platform, in a cloud of steam from the locomotive that’s just ended its journey, in the crisp air, we’re surely steaming too! When we get to Ivan’s flat, he gives me a huge parcel, it turns out to be a gorgeous fur-trimmed coat, with hat, scarf, mittens, even boots, to match. I’m overwhelmed, my heavy woollen winter coat makes me look like something left over from the war, in these new clothes I feel transformed.

I’m embarrassed, there really wasn’t anything I could think of to bring as a present for Ivan, only a honey-cake and some nutty biscuits I’d baked for him – you’ll just have to have me for a present, I say, how do you want me? Without needing to answer, he unwraps me, throws me on the bed, we cuddle and roll together with my lovely new coat thrown over us for warmth.

The next day we chug out to the dacha, the countryside’s white with snow, the road a bit dodgy, but we make it there safely. We get the stove roaring in the kitchen, we’ll have to live in there, the rest of the house is unheated, the torture-chamber’s much too cold.

But I’m not short of ideas. “Ivan,” I say, after our evening meal, watching how the iron poker turns glowing red, then scarlet, then gleaming gold, in the heat of the flames, “Why don’t you brand your slavegirl?” As ever, he’s thrown off guard by my enthusiasm for being tortured, he sits on his favourite chair and thinks a bit. “H’m,” he says at last, “How? What are you thinking of?” “Well,” I say eagerly, “You could easily burn your initial И [Cyrillic /ī/ ‘ee’] onto my skin – how about on my thigh? Up the top, where no-one will see it unless they undress me.” “You really want that?” “Mm, please comrade.”

We work out how best to do it. I’ll lie on the kitchen table – legs bare, of course, spread wide and tied to the table-legs, and a strap round my waist tied under the table-top. I’d like to do without any bondage, believing I’m brave and tough enough to stand it, but it’s sensible to make sure I keep my leg and pelvis still.

As I lie with my head thrown back over the end of the table, I get an upside-down view of my torturer preparing. He pushes the poker into the stove, pulls it out after a couple of minutes, it’s not red yet. He gives it a little longer, checks it again, it’s just beginning to turn colour. He touches it against a log in the basket beside the stove, it sizzles, I smell the scent of hot metal and wood-smoke. Now he comes round alongside me, grips my right knee very tight with his left hand, lays the tip of the poker gently on the skin of my thigh…

I shriek, but hold myself rigid. He’s judged it right, quite expertly, it doesn’t need to be white-hot, he doesn’t need to press, I feel the fierce sharpness of the heat slicing a neat little line into my skin. My head shakes, my breasts rise and sink, as I absorb the pain, feel it flowing through my thigh, into my woman-parts.

He withdraws the poker, walks around the head of the table, stroking my forehead as he passes. “Okay?” he askes, “Mm, fine – thankyou comrade.” He dowses the hot iron in a bucket of water, it hisses. I’m trembling, there’s a scent of cooking bacon in my nostrils, it reminds me of the first night.

He heats the iron again, repeats the procedure. I know what to expect now, tense myself in anticipation, which only makes the pain more intense, I’m howling as he marks me with the second stroke, parallel to the first one.

He squeezes my breast, tenderly. “You’re sure you want to complete it?” “Oh yes… oh yes, please comrade…” All the same, he pauses, takes a drink of vodka, lights a cigarette, watches me twitching and squirming gently on the table. I’m not sure if it’s better or worse, letting me experience the pain he’s already inflicted, preparing my body for more…

At length, he gets up, goes to the stove, heats the poker once more. This time he carefully lays the tip between the ends of the two uprights, making the slightly longer – so that much more painful – diagonal stroke. I no longer cry out, just sigh, as the three points of pain unite in one and conquer my bare skin.

He unties me, I lift myself up on my elbows, look at the livid crimson И, lovely on the whiteness of the top front of my thigh. I feel a sense of pride, of deep gratitude, of overwhelming love, swing my legs round, hug and kiss my Master with all the passion of a girl who’s totally enslaved.
 
aaah! :bdsm-heart:
but now we move on to chapter 4 - with a bit of historical scene-setting
(it's May 1st 1952, if anyone's wondering)

4

Although no-one but Ivan and me knew anything about it, I wore my brand-mark with pleasure and pride all through the months that followed, feeling its slight soreness under my skirt when I was moving around the classroom, gazing at it lovingly when I undressed at night, thrilling to the sting when I washed it with warm water.

We kept in touch, and managed to spend a few days together again in the spring, enjoying the now-familiar pleasures of the torture chamber, slaving happily on Ivan’s vegetable plot. But a surprise came for me as May Day approached, a letter from Ivan telling me that he’d have to be in Moscow for that great occasion, but this time he wanted me to come with him!

I was excited, if a little apprehensive, I imagined Moscow as almost on a different planet, a place inhabited by a race of masterful men (and women too, though I got the impression from Zvyazda [the equivalent of Pravda in the Byelorussian SSR] and Radio Moscow that they were few and quite scary) of a different order of wisdom and intelligence, living a lifestyle an earth-girl like me from the outermost edge of the Fatherland could scarcely comprehend. How will I cope? Whatever will they think of me?

By the end of the school term, I was full of excitement, a bundle of nerves. I packed the nicest clothes I had and made my way to Brest, where Ivan met me at the station. He had his luggage with him, he explained we were going to travel on the night train to Moscow, so we left our bags at the luggage office and went for a meal in a nearby restaurant, then joined the train.

It was quite a different world from the dirty, uncomfortable steam train from Kobryn to Brest. This was the pride of the USSR, the newly rebuilt line from Moscow to Warsaw. Whenever Ivan showed his pass to the train staff, we were treated like VIPs. They ushered us to a private two-berth sleeping compartment, offered drinks and snacks, earnestly ascertained that everything was to our satisfaction.

It was a long journey, eighteen hours, I slept peacefully much of the way, the track was smooth, there were few stops, none of the rattling and banging that usually goes with train travel. We were served an excellent breakfast – even coffee, something I’d never tasted before, I wasn’t sure that I liked it, but with lots of milk and sugar I decided it made a change.

And when we got to Moscow in the late morning, again we were treated with priority respect, our bags carried for us as we were escorted, along with several other passengers from the train, to a gleaming coach, not like the rickety buses out in the country, one with plush upholstered seats.

I gazed in wonder at the grand buildings, busy traffic, hurrying people, as we swept through the city. A police car was ahead of us, sounding its horn and ringing its bell, evidently clearing a way for us. We were delivered to a palatial hotel, shown – by way of a lift, another slightly scary new experience for this girl – to a luxuriously furnished room with a wide window through which, as Ivan pointed out to me, we saw Red Square and the towers of the Kremlin beyond.

After a delicious lunch served in our room, Ivan took me down to the hotel’s own beauty salon, apparently I had an appointment booked! My hair – which is something I’m a wee bit vain about, and I’ve always preferred to look after it myself than risk the attentions of so-called hairdressers – is brilliantly styled by a chatty Moscow girl, eager to tell me what an exciting city she lives in, she manages to give my locks a nice wave and ‘body’ without it looking at all contrived. She puts a little make-up on my cheeks, around my eyes, a dab of lipstick – discreet, not garish – trims and polishes my fingernails – I’m feeling like a filmstar!

After that, Ivan takes me to an amazing shop called GUM. He has to show his pass to be allowed in, evidently it’s only for ‘important’ customers, once we’ve been admitted, we’re treated like royalty. I choose a delightful dress in the A-line style I’d only seen in the film mags, and a longer one in a silky fabric for the evening. Shoes with heels. Wow!

We eat in the hotel restaurant In the evening, the meal’s good, the service ‘revolutionary’, attentive but not obsequious. It’s crowded, evidently state officials from all over the USSR are being accommodated here during the May Day holiday with their spouses or partners and families. It’s exciting to see people from so many different regions and nationalities within the Union, some (especially the men) looking solemn and serious, but their families as excited as I am.

There do seem to be a lot of security guards standing or patrolling around inside the hotel, even in the dining room, but I suppose it’s necessary when so many people are here who are important to the state.
 
The next day we were served with breakfast in bed, then we had to be up early as Ivan was to report for his reserved place on one of the wooden grandstands that had been erected outside the Kremlin wall. I, like other relations of official guests, was to watch the May Day Parade from the hotel lounge, a magnificent room with huge windows from which we’d get an excellent view, though the room was also equipped with television sets, quite new to me, so we could see close-up images of the procession and the watching dignitaries.

It was indeed a memorable sight beginning mid-morning and lasting for about four hours. I was fascinated by the groups of folk-dancers, gymnasts and others in traditional costumes representing the diverse peoples of the Soviet Union. The military bands were rousing, unit upon unit of well-drilled soldiers, sailors and airmen – even a few women – certainly impressive, though tanks and artillery were things I’d seen more than enough of when I was a teenager, and the sinister long rockets made me wonder: why do we need all this? Haven’t we put war behind us now? Aren’t we building peace and socialism to show the world there can be a better way?

The pictures on the television screens were foggy, shadowy figures in a dark, snowy mist, though it was actually a fine sunny day. Some of the guests pointed out stern-faced men in the row on the balcony where all in the parade turned to salute. I heard one or two whispered comments about who was standing where, but the older, more knowledgeable folk in the lounge seemed cautious, I picked up an unnerving sense that it was best to keep quiet.

I only recognised one, the man whose avuncular face smiles down from the calendar in my village schoolroom, Comrade Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, Secretary to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Chairman of the Council of Ministers! Through the window, I could only make him out in the distance, at the far end of Red Square, and on the television he was indistinct, but I could tell he was more hunched and age-worn than the dark, swarthy figure on the calendar, yet he still seemed to dominate the grim line-up to his left and right.

We were plied with refreshments during the parade, and when it was over and the dignitaries had departed from their balcony, we were invited to take our seats for an informal lunch. I was still feeling shy and awkward, so I gravitated to a small table in the corner where a bright couple of youngsters were already sitting.

They turned out to be Uzbek girls, their Russian heavily accented and a bit difficult to follow, but they were cheerful, laughing and giggling, drawing some sour looks from stern Russian matrons at the next table. They told me they were the daughters of a major who’s in charge of a team of gymnasts who’d taken part in the Parade, and who would be putting on a spectacular display in the Lenin Stadium in the evening – they urged me to come, but I wasn’t sure when Ivan would be returning to the hotel.

As we finished lunch and were sipping tea, there was a bit of activity at the main entrance to the lounge, hotel staff fussing around clearing things away, still more security guards moving in and positioning themselves around us. Then a man I’d already identified as the hotel manager entered, escorting a shortish, stout man in a dark suit, with a round face and receding dark hair, who peered around the room through rimless glasses. Behind them followed a huddle of half a dozen hefty-looking brutes.

There was a hush, some people probably knew who he was, those of us who didn’t guessed he was important. He moved among the tables, stopping to chat with some of the guests, then pausing and peering around to decide where he’d head next. He reminded me of Father Ignacy, the parish priest who used to visit the school when I was little, he had a similar look, and a similar way of prowling the classroom, choosing the prettiest kids to receive his attentions.

When he was three or four tables away, he turned and cast his eyes over the neighbouring ones, then lit on ours. Following the example of others, the Uzbek girls and I stood up. The hotel manager gestured towards me, but gave us no introduction, I held out my hand and said “Good afternoon, comrade.” He gripped tightly, his hand was cold and hard. “I’m Alisa Innokentaya, comrade,” I volunteered. His eyes peered into mine, dark and piercing, then they moved down, inspecting my body – I was trembling under my pretty new frock – they paused on my pulsing breasts, moved on to my waist, hips, legs revealed by the hem above my knee.

“Where are you from, Alisa?” His voice was quiet, steely. “From a collective farm near Kobryn in the Byelorussian Republic, comrade.” “Ah!” He looked me In the face again, his thin lips slightly curled., “You will know Ivan Taneyev?” “Indeed I do, comrade, he is my boyfriend, he’s brought me to Moscow for the Parade.” “Really?” His eyebrows raised slightly, his eyes started straying over my body again, he was silent for a few seconds, then turned to one of the toughs accompanying him and declared, “He’s a very good man, one of our best – and who are you, young ladies?”

His attention turned to the Uzbeks. If his eyes were x-raying my light clothing, they were quite patently stripping naked the two athletic youngsters as he interrogated them about their father, his gymnastic team, their own sporting achievements.

After a few questions, he moved on, sought out a few more young women to swoop on – yes, it was all too evidently us nubile females who attracted him. The Uzbek girls and I resumed our seats, they just said softly “Phew!” We didn’t need, and knew it was wiser not, to say any more. All three of us were flushed, sweaty, trembling from this threatening encounter.

After he’d departed, the day’s proceedings seemed to be over, people began leaving, staff cleared the tables. Wishing my Uzbek friends a good time in Moscow, I headed back to our room, but called in en route at the ladies’ washroom near the lounge.

As I was washing my hands, I noticed I was next to one of the rather severe ladies who’d been at the next table. Plucking up courage, I greeted her, “Good afternoon, comrade.” She looked at me quizzically, replied, “Good afternoon.” “Forgive me, it must seem a silly question to you,” I stammered, “but who was that gentleman I just met?”

She dried her hands before she answered, then turned to me again. “Well, I suppose you wouldn’t know. He doesn’t get his face in the newspapers. Young lady, you’ve just had the honour of meeting the First Deputy Premier, Comrade Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria!”
 
Beria! The name came up sometimes in conversations among the men on the collective farm, it was spoken with a tone of mingled fear and hatred. He evidently was held responsible for all the disruption and misery of collectivisation, he was sometimes mentioned on Radio Moscow, sometimes in Zvyazda, but, like the woman said, we never saw his face in a photo.

As I lay on the bed in our room, I recalled the most painful memory that name brought back for me. When mamma died, we buried her in the parish churchyard – no priest, of course, the church was in ruins, wrecked in the fighting, but Borys and a neighbour’s farm-hand dug a grave for us, men from the village carried her body in a rough-and-ready coffin, we laid it to rest and heaped back the soil with a few muttered, half-remembered prayers, and a short silence.

Then we invited everyone who’d helped us back to our house. Borys brought in his bottles of firewater, soon the men were drunk and arguing. Borys was declaring that Marshal Beria was a Hero of the Soviet Union, the equal of Voroshilov, second only to Stalin, the other men kept on about something called the NKVD which was, they said, even worse than the Gestapo. Nastja was upset, becoming hysterical, I dragged her into the bedroom and we hugged one another, sobbing quietly till the row died down.

So, hero or villain, that was the man I’d met, the man who’d mentally undressed me, the man who has such a high opinion of Ivan!

I wrote my impressions of the day in my diary, then went to bed. I might as well have gone to the gymnastics display, it was well after midnight when Ivan returned, and he’d had a good bit to drink, soon he was snoring alongside me. He was off again straight after breakfast too, severely hungover, muttering something about a very important meeting. So I spent the morning exploring the sights around Red Square. I stood in the queue, as I felt was my duty as a Soviet citizen, to file past the body of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

It was a weird experience. It reminded me of a trip we took when I was preparing for my First Communion, Father Ignacy took us on pilgrimage to Czestochowa to see the icon of Our Lady of Jasna Gorya.It was a long, long journey for us youngsters, and a tedious wait before we got to see the wondrous icon, but the main thing I remember was Father Ignacy making me sit on his knee in the train on the way back, I didn’t like the way he fingered me.

When I eventually got into the tomb-chamber and saw the stretched-out corpse of Lenin, I had a strange fantasy, imagining he suddenly sat up, thrust out his arm and pointed at me – like he does in so many pictures – and roared “What the hell do you think you’re all doing? Get back at once to the fields and factories – and you, Alisa Innokentaya, get back to your classroom – you’ve got work to do, building socialism, not gawping at a dead body!” But as I filed past, he – no it – just lay there, unable to do anything about the way things are today.

Ivan returned to the hotel in time for a late lunch, and at last we got a little time together, we took a short ride on the very impressive Metro out to Gorky Park, it was a relief to walk in the open air on the green grass, I took my shoes off and walked barefoot.

“Ivan,” I said, “You’ll never guess who I shook hands with!” “Oh,” he replied with a grin, “Well, I’ll start at the top, Comrade Secretary Stalin?” “Not quite, but you’re pretty warm – it was Beria!” He looked a little startled for a moment, but quickly regained his composure. “Oh yes, I expect it’s the duty of a senior member of the Politburo to show their appreciation to the families and friends of us apparatchiks.” H’m, I thought, I suppose you could say that was what he was doing when he ogled me!

But I went on, “And do you know, when I introduced my self and told him where I was from, he asked me if I knew Ivan Taneyev – and when I told him you’re my boyfriend –“ “You told him that?” Ivan sounded more alarmed. “Well, yes, shouldn’t I have done?” He shrugged, “Well, no, I suppose you had no.. I mean….” “Well, it’s the truth, isn’t it?” “Yes, it’s the truth… anyway, if he didn’t know already, he’d have soon found out.”

I felt the same cold shiver at Ivan’s words that I’d experienced when I met Beria, a sense of being a tiny fly caught in the web of a huge spider. But I went on, “Anyway, when I told him that, he said you’re a good man, ‘one of our best.’” That seemed to calm him a little, his face brightened. “Yes, well they seem to be pleased with the way things are going in Brest Region, I was one of the Commissars picked out for special mention at the meeting this morning.” I pressed his hand, “Well, that’s great Ivan, well done!” He put his arm round me, we hugged for a nice long kiss.
 
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