Krasnoyarsk. 1946.

In a quiet outskirt of Krasnoyarsk that looked more like a forgotten village than part of the city, several buildings stood surrounded by a neglected wooden fence. It was once a hospital and a surgical center. Despite its uninviting look, the hospital was well equipped and had an excellent reputation. Most of the nurses and doctors who worked at that hospital, lived there, including the Chief Surgeon. He was in his fifties and always wore a pair of round spectacles. His signature look.

His office was on the first floor of the small two story building, which stood next to an icy cold creek. A long flight of outdoor wooden steps lead to the second floor apartment, where he lived with his wife, Ekaterina. She had been his operating room nurse for many years before and throughout World War II.

Ekaterina often sang folk songs to the wounded soldiers, and once, in 1944, Rodion Malinovsky, one of the highest ranking Soviet military commanders, visited that field hospital and heard her singing. He immediately organized a concert tour for soldiers at the front, with her headlining it.

Ekaterina was Tanya’s grandmother, and since then she would continue a very successful singer’s career for the next fifteen years. But that will be another story.

That night, Chief Surgeon Vladimir Moisseevich Ushakov sat on the steps leading to their apartment. Earlier that evening he returned home from a two day long inspection of operating rooms in a nearby town. Ekaterina was on her concert tour, so on his return he went to the hospital’s dining room. His assistant, a young doctor, saw him there, came and whispered in his ear, “Vladimir Moisseevich, NKVD came here last night and asked about you.”

He could not eat after that. People in Soviet Russia knew what a visit from the NKVD meant – GULAG. He came back to his apartment and packed his travel bag with a few changes of underwear, socks and shirts, a bar of cheap soap and several packs of “Belomor-Kanal” – popular Russian cigarettes with a paper mouthpiece. Now he sat on the steps with a bottle of vodka and drank one shot after another, in silence.

He thought that the name of the cigarettes was very symbolic – Belomor-Kanal was a real canal which connected the White Sea and the Baltic Sea, and was built by GULAG prisoners in the mid-1930s. Very few of them survived. At the time, almost nobody knew who really built it. Bolshevik propaganda said that the canal was the achievement of youth communists – Komsomol – and the common people believed it.

He placed his bag on the steps next to the bottle of vodka. The NKVD usually came to pick up arrestees in the middle of the night. He drank and waited.

About a year ago we read a new novel by Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time. It was a book about Dmitri Shostakovich, set in the mid-1930s, the same time as the Belomor Canal was built. Shostakovich had a reason to fear for his freedom and his life. The book shows him standing on the landing outside of the his apartment, in front of the elevator, all night long, night after night, waiting for NKVD to arrive.

When we read this book we talked about Vladimir Ushakov in a similar situation and about millions of others in Soviet Russia, who did not do anything wrong, did not commit any crimes, but either displeased somebody at the top, or had just been listed by “concerned” uneducated NKVD officers as a “person in question”. I highly recommend this book – one of the best of the year.

Summer nights in Siberia are short. The bottle was still half full when the dawn showed its first sign. Vladimir Moisseevich Ushakov, Communist party member, Chief Surgeon of the hospital and decorated Soviet Army veteran, decided to sing a hymn to the dawn light. But first, he thought, he needed a refreshment. He undressed and, wearing his round spectacles of course, went for a swim in the icy cold water of the creek next to his house. When he came out of the water, he faced the rising sun and started singing the only anthem he remembered at the moment – the National Anthem of the Russian Empire – “Боже Царя Храни” (God Save the Tsar!) – totally forbidden in the Soviet Russia since the Bolshevik Revolution.

His assistant, a young doctor, the same doctor who warned him about the NKVD visit, jumped out of the office and ran to stop him – not too fast, really, as he was able to snap a picture of Vladimir Moisseevich Ushakov at that historic moment. As the story goes, the Chief Surgeon and his assistant finished that bottle of vodka together. What songs they sang, no one knows. 

The NKVD did not return for Vladimir Moisseevich Ushakov that night. Or ever again.

He died waiting.