A Time for the Fury
Salty rain ran in streams down the young man's acne-spotted face as he stood on the street corner near Red Square. In a flash of lightning, he could see the Kremlin, red brick spires lit from behind. The storm had taken the city by surprise, and the Kitay-gorod crowds huddled under awnings and clustered under the stone gates. Crossing Lubyanka Square, his light brown hair dark and slick with rain, the young man felt exposed. The plastic explosives were heavy in his pockets, and though he wore loose pants and a long shirt in the style favored by young men in Moscow, he imagined that everyone could see the lumps it made at his sides.
The man looked up to the dark clouds as another bolt of lightning silhouetted the Lubyanka across the square. The tan building had the flat, rectangular design of prisons and schools but with decorative pilasters that seemed almost out-of-place between many of its windows.
"Boy!" he heard a man's voice shout gruffly. A figure in a militsya uniform hurried toward him through the gray curtains of rain.
He would normally run from an officer, but this was central Moscow in front of the headquarters for the NKVD, the USSR's secret police, and the young man was no longer a child who could call an officer "musor" without consequence. The militsya officer approached with a broad smile under his mustache.
"You look like a drowned rat, boy," the officer chuckled. His nonchalance disgusted the young man. "What's so important that it can't wait until the rain stops?"
The young man had no answer prepared. "I am… ah… taking some lunch to my brother."
He had half of his own meager lunch in a bag which he showed to the officer.
"Not much food, son. What does he do?"
"He… he is doing construction on the back of the Lubyanka." At least it was true that repairs were being made to the building. The young man had seen the workers in thin white shirts climbing over a scaffold with their toolboxes.
"He'll get a long break for lunch today if this rain doesn't let up. You have an accent, boy. Ukrainian?"
The young man glanced sharply at the officer's face. He still smiled. In truth, the young man had been born in Moscow, but he had lived for six months with Ukrainians.
"Yes," the young man answered. "Born near Kiev."
"You have a name?" The officer spoke casually and used the colloquial dialect of the Kursk area.
"Ilya," said the young man though that was a name the sixteen-year-old drifter had used for less than a year. It was a name of no real importance for he had chosen it only because it was common, unremarkable.
"Not the talkative sort. You'll do well for yourself," the officer chortled. Water ran off of his cap as if it were an awning. "I'll bet your brother is getting hungry. Stay warm."
The officer nodded his goodbye to the young man called Ilya and marched through the rain toward Kitay-gorod. Ilya breathed deeply, filling his throat and lungs with humid air. The Lubyanka cast its shadow over him, its institutional face asking for destruction.
Not today, Ilya thought. Someday, perhaps.
Construction workers hunkered under the tarpaulin at the back of the building, eyes and lunch pails bright in the darkness. Ilya passed them silently. He stopped at the place far down the wall that Petro had marked with a small blue stone the day before. The masonry foundation was rough under his hand. No windows. Breaking a political prisoner required insulation from the outside world. No notes could be passed from the Lubyanka, they said, except those which declared you an enemy of the People. Ilya hoped that Petro's estimation was correct as he placed the explosives along the wall. He was a small man, and so was Dmytro, but a hole the size of a mountain in the wrong cell would help no one.
He drew his revolver and tucked it into his waistband before laying the fuse.
"Hey! Ilya!" a voice shouted. The officer from the street ran toward him.
"Govno!" Ilya cursed. The officer had not drawn a weapon. Ilya reached for his.
Two arms suddenly caught him under the armpits. A leg swung across his shins so that he fell, helpless, against his captor's chest. An NKVD arm patch flashed past red and gold as the officer who held Ilya wrenched his arms backward.
"You dog-fucking pieces of shit!" Ilya screamed. "I fucked your mother and your sister in the - !"
"Cursing will change nothing," said a graceful voice beside him.
The short, swarthy man who passed in front of Ilya squinted his eyes one at a time as he examined the young man. He was thin and pointed with full lips and ears that swept back from his face. To Ilya, he looked like a goblin in uniform. He would have told the man, but the demeanor of the other officers indicated that the goblin was a creature of some importance.
"Comrade Yezhov!" the man holding Ilya cried. "I didn't - !"
Yezhov held a finger to his forehead. "Give me a moment."
He hunched over Ilya's handiwork like a hound on a trail. The long nails of his spindly fingers stroked the explosives, followed the fuse.
"Shielded the fuse from the rain. Well done," Yezhov muttered. "This would have been quite controlled. I assume you were breaking into... ah… the Ukrainian…" He motioned to one of his inferiors.
"Dmytro Petrenko," a brick-faced man offered.
"Yes. The red-headed anarchist." Yezhov snapped his eyes eyes up to meet Ilya's. "And you could have done it too, if you'd only known these walls were two feet thick. You had help, didn't you, Mr. Pyro? Someone gave you a little information but not enough. You'll tell me who that was later tonight. Take him to the basement."
Ilya leaned his head against the hard stone wall and arched his back. The only light in the tiny cell was artificial – a bulb ensconced high in the ceiling. So this was it, off to fucking Siberia. He swung his arms back and punched the cement. A series of knocks vibrated through his body from the adjacent cell. They had a goddamn tap code, and he didn't know it. Even one of Petro's loose-rolled cigarettes, sour with ersatz tobacco, sounded good right now.
After an hour, Ilya heard a door open somewhere. Harsh voices shouted. Chains clanked. Then there was silence for another two hours. Ilya's empty stomach regretted saving half of his lunch for Dmytro. The guards had taken that when they took his gun and shirt.
New voices and footsteps stopped in front of his cell. A bolt fell inside the thick metal door. Two guards rushed into the cell, pistols drawn. A third stood in the doorway with his hands behind his back. No handcuffs this time. The guards bound Ilya up to his elbows with ropes.
"Ilya Petrenko, eh?" the goblin called Yezhov asked once Ilya was tied to a chair in his office. He looked at a small green ledger rather than Ilya. "Somehow I doubt that you are related. Must be distant brothers, twice-removed perhaps?"
"I don't know, sir," Fury muttered. The man was wasting time. "When are you going to shoot me?"
Yezhov laughed, shrill and echoing in the stone-walled room. "Shoot you? What makes you think I want to do that?"
"Siberia? You're going to send me to goddamned Siberia, aren't you?"
"Comrade Yagoda will have the final say, but no, that wasn't the plan." Yezhov glanced at Ilya with eyes much softer than they had been in the rain.
"Whatever it is, I won't sign it," Fury said. "I won't sentence my own brother to - ."
"That is far from necessary, Ilya. Your loyalty is admirable, but I'm afraid he feels none of the same for you. The moment I mentioned you were here, he was ready to sign a confession that you were the leader of their entire operation."
"Bastard!" Ilya groaned.
"Quite," Yezhov chuckled. "He wrote me a nice letter detailing your position as organizer of the ring of anarchist counter-revolutionaries." He spread the letter across the desk in front of Ilya. "No torture at all. He was ready to toss you to the wolves to save himself."
Ilya read the letter in silence.
"What do you want me to say?" he asked when he had finished.
"Nothing today. This has been refreshing. We shall speak again tomorrow."
A heavy wool blanket lay on Ilya's bed when he returned to his cell.
After he had been awake several hours, Ilya was taken again to see Yezhov. Two arc lamps bathed him in fierce light. Yezhov stood in the surrounding darkness and spoke softly.
The door opened with a clank, and Ilya heard Yezhov ask, "Is this the man?"
Dmytro answered confidently, "This little fucker? Of course. He pulled us into it because we were angry, but he was very wrong."
"Dmytro!" Ilya shouted, but the young man had left with Yezhov.
When Ilya was brought the next day, Yezhov sat across the desk with his fingers steepled.
"What to do. What to do," he said like a chant.
"Looks like you'll have to shoot me," Ilya growled.
Yezhov stared at him without changing expression and continued his chant.
"You hear me, goblin bastard? You'll have to kill me."
"What to do. What to do."
Ilya pulled himself as far forward in his chair as he could. The ropes crushed his arms. "FUCKING SHOOT ME!"
Yezhov blinked. "That's what Yagoda suggested, yes. I had a different thought."
Ilya panted but said nothing.
"Your brother or friend or whatever he is has been lying. He is one of those despicable creatures with no conscience. Self-preservation is his only goal. He cares nothing for ideals and less for people. You, young man, are no anarchist, but you would do an anarchist's dirty work if it meant helping a friend."
"No," Ilya said impassively. "He told you the truth. I organized everything. I'm a goddamned traitor."
Yezhov stood and flitted around the large wooden desk. He lay the back of one long finger against Ilya's cheek.
"When I was young, " Yezhov said distantly, "I knew a boy who followed the call of revolution. He had no family, no home… a new name." He sat heavily on the edge of the desk and met Ilya's eyes. "But he had friends. He was luckier than you that his friends were loyal and fair, and one even became the leader of this great country."
"Is there a fucking point?"
"The boy was me." Yezhov was smiling, ignoring Ilya's comment. "I have no one to call my son."
Footsteps passed, some marching and another pair being dragged every few meters. Hysterical cries. Shouting like a dog's bark. Then a thud against a soft human body and sobbing down the echoing corridor.
"Dmytro," Ilya whispered.
"He is being taken to be executed."
Yezhov's unmerciful face turned into the shadows for a moment. "Do not waste your love on those with no conscience."
Over a year later, on a Thursday night in late November, Ilya Nikolaevich Yezhov slipped into the Lubyanka with a small bag under his arm. He was out of uniform and unremarkable with slightly mussed brown hair and the plain coverall of a maintenance worker. In his adoptive father's office, Ilya opened the bag and pulled on a pair of thick gloves. Then he carefully unwrapped a clear vial of silver liquid that's surface shimmered like oil. A dropper curved the tiny rainbows as Ilya drew a thread of mercury into it. He rubbed the tip of the dropper along his father's dark linen curtains and squeezed the bulb. Miniscule drops of glimmering mercury clung to the fibers. Ilya used the entire vial.
"Check for yourself!" the elder Yezhov shouted at a young captain named Madovsky. "Someone is trying to kill me!"
Yezhov refused to reenter his office. Madovsky reached for the contaminated curtains.
"Don't touch!" Yezhov cried. "Do you want to be poisoned?"
Doctors and scientists and cleaning crews hurried in and out of the Lubyanka as Yezhov and his deputies pored over evidence in his makeshift office.
"Only two men have the key to my office," Yezhov said. "Me and Yagoda."
"Certainly not - ," a deputy cried.
"Are you saying my father is trying to poison himself?" Ilya snapped.
The deputy's face paled, and he was silent.
"Just three days ago," another deputy simpered, "Yagoda was entertaining a man from Germany, some sort of leader in their National Socialist party. He invited me to join, but I ardently refused."
The first deputy joined with confidence. "I find Germans repugnant. They've made a joke of the one-party system."
Yezhov nodded gravely. "Any endorsement of German political activities should be met with great distrust if not swift repression."
"Is there a possibility that Yagoda…?"
"Comrade Stalin has given me authority to punish corruption and espionage wherever it is found," Yezhov said sadly. "I regret that I must use this authority against my mentor and dearest friend. Please, gentlemen, arrest Yagoda, and we shall see what other evidence surfaces."
Yezhov and Ilya were left alone in the office, and the older man was quiet for a while, staring hollowly at a stack of papers that were uncontaminated by mercury. He raised his head with a weary sigh.
"You did well, my son. The spectre of discord lurks within the Party. Some men may love truth, but Comrade Stalin understands that one must commit adultery against that often ugly lady Truth when Justice demands it. Yagoda is a filthy rat, but now the evidence is indisputable thanks to you."
Ilya nodded. Justice. That blind bitch.
Yezhov kissed his son lightly on the cheek. "We will build the future of this country."
Ilya spent December at Yezhov's dacha. He arrived in uniform, looking ten years older and handsome as the sun to little Natasha. When she heard him on the long driveway, crunching snow under his boots, she flew out the door in striped stockings.
"Ilya!" she squealed, messy brown hair like falling leaves around her face. "You're here for my birthday!"
"You're still having those?" he asked irritably. "Well, you won't be having any more if you go outside without your goddamn shoes."
Natasha giggled and hid her face in Ilya's wool overcoat. Her tiny fingers pressed through his glove. "Mother wants to see you," she said, pulling him to the door.
The dacha was dark and warm. Only two rooms were open with the rest closed off until summer. Ilya smelled sour cabbage and pine smoke. Yevgenia perched on her bed next to her friend Zinaida. The pair was wrapped in satin robes trimmed with rabbit fur, Zinaida's the color of wine and Yevgenia's a creamy yellow. They sat pale and silent as oriental dolls.
"Mother," Ilya said with a polite nod.
Yevgenia rose with a cat's calculated grace and fluttered to Ilya's side. She kissed him formally – a peck on each cheek and a third on his right.
"So Kolya let you out of work?" she tittered. "I heard about Yagoda. Kolya couldn't tell me over the telephone, but he sent a messenger. It is very kind of Comrade Stalin to give your father this position, but Kolya says I must stay with Natasha at the dacha a while longer. I may miss the new year in Moscow. If he keeps me out here like this - ."
"Is this my present?" a small voice asked. Natasha had laid most of the contents of Ilya's bag neatly on the wooden floor. In her open hands, she held a long object wrapped in brown paper – plastic explosives.
He snatched the package away and growled, "No! That's not a fucking present!"
Natasha peered up at Ilya with a kitten's eyes but did not cry.
"Ilya…," Yevgenia gasped. "I thought you came to join us at the dacha, but it seems Kolya has you working even out here in the country."
"I'll return in two days," Ilya said, his eyes still on Natasha. "And I will spend the new year with you."
Then his voice was gentle, almost sweet as he said, "And I do have a present for Tsarevna Magpie here."
He pulled a bag made of crinkly pink paper from his pocket and gave it to Natasha. She sniffed it, tiny nose upturning happily as she realized that it was chocolate. The truffles were dark and rich, decorated with dainty icing lace. Natasha nibbled one, and raspberry jam smeared her lips.
"Ilya!" Yevgenia breathed. "How did you get these?"
"Father helped me get them from Belgium. He worked me eighteen goddamn hours a day for a week over it."
"When are you leaving?"
"In an hour or so."
"I have a list of work that needs done here… repairs and such… when you return, of course."
Her skin was sickly white, and her hands had begun to shake.
"Come sit by the fire again, dearest," Zinaida said. "Let the children play."
Natasha's fingers were dark and wet with chocolate when she touched Ilya's hand. He did not pull away.
"Ilya," she whispered, "please stay."
Yagoda was shot in March of 1938. Ilya, nineteen and taller than his adoptive father by five inches, took down his written confession before the trial. The man was disgusting, Ilya agreed, begging Stalin to spare his life. Back at the Lubyanka, Ilya relished the chance to imprint his boot on the man's naked stomach before the execution. Yezhov brushed his son's sweaty bangs off of his forehead as they listened to Yagoda shudder and weep down the hall to the execution chamber.
In August, Ilya met Lavrentiy Beria, a round-faced man with shaded eyes and pince-nez. Stalin paraded the man into the Lubyanka like a foreign prince, and Beria's eyes prowled every corner.
"Young Mister Yezhov," Stalin said, "where might I find your father?"
"He is out at the dacha." This was a lie. Yezhov had left after lunch, his eyes rimmed red by vodka, to meet his mistress Sofia Igorovna in Kitay-gorod.
"I see," Stalin muttered. Beria clucked his disapproval. "I would have liked to introduce him to his new deputy myself."
Deputy Head of NKVD. That had been Yezhov's position before Yagoda's arrest.
Beria smiled wide and thin like a slit throat. "Let the man have his leisure. I shall be content to meet his son."
He held his hand out to Ilya. The young man hesitated, but when Beria cocked his head to indicate that he saw the hesitation, Ilya took his hand.
On the twenty-second of November, Ilya returned from an assignment in Ukraine to find Beria behind his father's desk.
"Where is my father, you pig-faced traitor?" Ilya demanded.
"Calm down, child," Beria cooed. "He left his post for health reasons. You will find him out at the dacha."
"He hasn't been arrested?"
Beria looked alarmed, his head to one side. "Not at all. Why would he be?"
Ilya nodded and crossed to the door.
"Young Mister Yezhov," Beria called. "I found out rather recently some information of interest to me. It seems Nikolai Ivanovich is not your father by birth."
"No. No he is not."
"I see. That is all. I wanted to hear it from you."
Ilya grunted and turned the knob. Rough arms caught him as he stepped into the hallway.
Fucking Beria. That dog-fucking, bull-nosed… Ilya heard the tapping again on the wall of his cell and realized that this time he would be a prisoner long enough to learn the code.
By March, a rumor had spread through the bleak basement of the Lubyanka that Yezhov had been arrested. He was imprisoned elsewhere for fear that he would communicate with his son. Ilya was left isolated in his cell with only the unknown prisoners on either side as company. Then even their tapping stopped, and Ilya began to wish they would interrogate him. He would kick and snarl like a mad dog until someone pulled a gun and shot him, an infected animal culled from the herd. This fantasy played for days in his head until he could see the blood congealing on the stone floor, but the blood was real, blood from his knuckles as he punched the masonry walls. His thoughts lost words and became images and sounds like guns and explosions shaking the Lubyanka to the ground. He was crushed, and Beria was crushed, and their bodies were burned in the firestorm that swept through Moscow. The food stopped coming after he forgot to eat for several days, and finally, Ilya was too weak to fight the guards that took him to Beria's office.
"Your mother, Yevgenia, is dead," Beria said. Nonsense syllables.
"She swallowed poison," Beria continued. His skin charred and peeled in Ilya's mind. "You don't have to die, though. I can spare your life."
Ilya begged his exhausted limbs to move.
"Your father spoke highly of you, and in my time with the NKVD, I have seen your usefulness. The problem is your loyalty. It must be to me now. When lovely Yevgenia passed so unfortunately, I had your sister taken into the custody of the NKVD. As long as you cooperate, she will send you one letter each month. If you do not cooperate, you will receive photographs of her dead body instead."
"Sick fuck," Ilya whispered hoarsely.
"Now, child," Beria said. "Don't blame me for this. The times have changed, and we must prepare to usher in a new era for this country. Old ways must die, whatever the cost. What was it your father used to say? Ah, yes. 'When you chop wood, chips fly.'"
The fucking Germans. They shivered on the snowy mountainside in their sleek coats. Ilya buried his chin behind his insulated collar. He probably looked like an olive drab turtle, but he was warm.
It had been over a year since Beria had all but drafted him back into the NKVD, and Ilya's only reminder of his transient life as Nikolai Yezhov's son was his last name. The elder Yezhov's face was obscure in his memory now, an amalgam of Ilya's own image and the official portraits Beria had him burn in autumn. He kept none to remind himself, but he kept every letter from Natasha. The most recent was folded in his breast pocket. She was somewhere near a big hill – she had been taken there blindfolded so that she could give Ilya no hint. A brown-skinned woman with narrow eyes took her sledding last week. Ilya imagined her with snow caked in her hair, mittens stiff with ice and wrapped around a rope to pull the sled. He had seen her dragging it up the mountainside here at Zakopane in his dream last night, but today he was standing in the snow with a cluster of Germans who muttered and glanced at him as if he were a spider on the wall that no one had the courage to smash. He was supposed to teach some of these Gestapo meatheads about creating localized explosions, but the interpreter was a lazy ass afraid to leave his warm bed for the bitter cold.
"None of you understands Russian?" he shouted again. The Germans stared like a herd of oil-slicked sheep.
"Any of you know English?" he said in English. It wasn't his first language, but he'd spent a couple of formative years in the home of an English diplomat.
A shrew of a man with squinting eyes behind huge round glasses held his hand in the air. "I do."
When the interpreter arrived an hour later, Ilya, struggling through the English words for "fuse" and "notch", had resorted to replacing every unknown noun with "thing" so that, while demonstrating pushing a fuse through a drilled hole, he told the Gestapo to, "Put the thing inside other thing and move with fingers."
That evening after dinner, as the sun left only a gleaming aura on the mountains, Beria asked Ilya to walk with him outside. Beria plodded with this head down until they reached an icy precipice with a view into the valley. Black smoke from hundreds of chimneys disappeared into the sky before it reached their high perch.
"Ilya," Beria said quietly. "I have something to tell you which may cause you to shove me from this cliff. I advise that you do not do that, however, as I have many loyal to me here."
"Say it," Ilya growled.
"Two weeks ago, I gave the order for Nikolai Ivanovich, your father, to be shot." He said it without feeling, with none of the glee Ilya's father had taken in condemning Yagoda. For Beria, this was the natural course.
Ilya felt a dull ache like the lingering pain of a punch to the gut the day after. Beria was before him now like a single brick in the wall that had trapped him. One brick might weaken the structure, but he'd need a hell of a lot of dynamite to blow up the wall.
"I can see," said Beria, "that you are frustrated with these menial tasks – installing bugs and teaching Germans. I have a greater task for you, but I still need approval."
By the beginning of April, Ilya was in Kalinin near the border with Poland. He smoked in the cold drizzle. Tonight would begin the execution of thousands of prisoners, Polish men captured in the Red Army's march across their country. Ilya hated them for laying down their arms so easily. He spat in the mud and hated Beria for leaving him out at this damned prison for a month with nothing to do but watch a few other NKVD boys play cards for each other's rations. Now something was happening. Some men had been assigned to sound-proof a room for executions, and they would start tonight. Ilya suggested they give the prisoners weapons to make it more interesting, but he only got vacant stares in return.
The first execution felt good. Ilya lowered a Nagant M1895 to the man's balding head and imagined Lavrentiy Beria splattering on the floor. He killed ferociously, cursing at his captives, drifting away from 1940 in Kalinin and back to 1925 in Moscow and a tall brick house where he had to be seen and not heard, and he saw so much… and told. The Chekists came for the diplomat in 1928, and his wife screamed. Her blood was on the curtains in the old house. In his mind, Ilya was shooting her again and again, then his parents, birth parents but never real parents, who left him with the diplomat's wife because he threw the rock at his brother – it was an accident, but it never mattered to them. His brother's face loomed, twisted and drooling, eyes staring but only moans from his mouth. That was after the rock. Ilya's finger locked on the trigger guard. His hands hurt from the recoil of so many shots.
The prisoner whimpered in Russian, "Please kill… no more wait."
He was a colonel with silver in his blond hair. All Ilya ever saw was the hair. Now he saw the man's face, sallow with terror but awaiting death with seawater eyes. Ilya dropped the revolver to his side.
In three days, he was back in the Lubyanka, a prisoner again, fate in Beria's fleshy hands. He ignored the tapping; his mind refused to translate their convoluted Morse code.
On Thursday, an envelope dropped with a soft whoosh through the slot in the door. It was heavy parchment like the letters he had been receiving from Natasha for more than a year. He tore it open at one end and slid the letter into his hand. Then he saw the pictures.
Author's note:
My putting my protagonist in the midst of the Katyn Massacre in no way implies my endorsement of the terrible event. Many of the events and characters in this story were real, but I have used them fictitiously.
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov was head of the NKVD from 1936 until 1938. Like I do in my other stories, I skewed time a little in here to make the events line up a little more evenly. If you want to learn more about the interesting historical figures I have used in this story, feel free to look them up or read the wonderful book Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Montefiore as it helped a lot with my research. There is also a book called Stalin's Loyal Executioner that I didn't read in full, but it seems to be a good resource on Yezhov. His daughter Natasha, in real life, was adopted from an orphanage and ended up back in the orphanage after he was arrested. She lived a much longer life.
Even though this story may seem like a standalone piece, it is fan fiction. It tells the back story of the Fury from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. His story is continued in my long fanfic The Joy of Battle: Historical Espionage Action.
Some language notes:
Musor means "garbage" in Russian and was a derogatory term for police officers.
Govno means "shit" in Russian and can be used as an expletive on its own.
I use some nicknames and also patronymics (middle names) for characters. "Kolya", for example, is a nickname for "Nikolai".
A tsarevna is the daughter of a tsar.