The Time of the Assassins

by Godfrey Blunden

Genres: General Fiction; Historical Fiction; Historical Mysteries; International Crime & Mystery; Political Thrillers

Synopsis

A terrifying novel of the totalitarian mind in action.

In the late fall of 1941 the Germans entered Kharkov, at that time capital of the Ukraine. Sixteen months later the Red Army drove them out. The Time of the Assassins concerns what happened in the city between these two historical events.

A terrifying dissection of German and Russian psychology, this is the story of the city's inhabitants, man of whom were hanged by the Germans when the retreating NKVD abandoned intact their records of Party membership. Others lived on with simple survival their only goal. Then, as the tide of war turned westward from Stalingrad, the Communist underground returned surreptitiously to Kharkov - and a new fear was abroad. Already distant artilllery fire was buising the empty windows. New assassins were soon to come.

The subject is one few Westerners would have been equipped to write about, but Mr Blunden was among the handful of foreign correspondents to return to Kharkov with the victorious Russians. What he saw at first hand, plus his imaginative insight into the complex and desperate forces which had been at work during the German occupation, provided the genesis of The Time of the Assassins.

Release date: January 1, 1952

Publisher: Lippincott

Print pages: 406

Sample

I have no knowledge of what literary model Godfrey Blunden had in mind for his remarkable novel, The Time of the Assassins. But if I had to guess by whom he had regulated his tone and attitude, I should think it was not a novelist at all. My own
reference as I read Mr. Blunden’s book was to certain historians, to Thucydides and to Tactitus, and, in a lesser degree,
to Josephus. Like them, Mr. Blunden tells a story to which the only possible response might seem to be despair. Like them
he maintains the power and fortitude of his mind, and of ours, before the terrors of actuality.


This is, I believe, a very considerable achievement, possibly a great one. It is first to be thought of as a literary achievement.
Nothing could be more difficult than to present human extremity without, on the one hand, falsifying or mitigating the facts,
or, on the other hand, assailing and subduing our minds with the details of horror. It is also a moral achievement, of the
intelligence put at the service of the emotions.


The historical occurrence with which Mr. Blunden deals is the German occupation of the Ukraine up to the time when the Russians
first retake the stricken city of Kharkov. Perhaps nothing that the old historians describe was quite so dreadful as this, although it is not unique among the events
of the last war. The Athenian genocide at Melos is one of the great crimes of the ancient world, yet this awful act was understood
by its perpetrators to be exactly what it was, or so Thucydides leads us to believe. But the modern slaughter of the Jews,
in the Ukraine as elsewhere, was undertaken, like everything else that the Germans undertook, not as a contravention of morality
for the sake of expediency, but as a cogent example of a cultural faith, the hideous fruit of a carefully nurtured theory
of ghastly morality. And the rationale of the Russian courses of action is a negation of human decency no less complete than
the German.


And then those who suffered in the ancient world were likely to have had but a single enemy, dreadful as he may have been.
But the victims of the situation that Mr. Blunden sets before us had two enemies, equally implacable, equally evil. If the
Russian cruelty is more formal, less personal and fanciful—one almost says less fancy—than that of the Germans, it is no less
ready and no less terrible; as one of the characters of the novel says, the MKVD, equally with the SS, provides its members
“with the opportunity, within the rule of society, to experience the pleasures of absolute freedom,” of which the most intensely
enjoyable is the killing of the defenseless. Between these two opposing powers, it is not only men who are destroyed but even
the idea of man.


Yet if what Mr. Blunden tells us is more terrible than what we read of in the old historians, still Thucydides’ account of
the Melian massacre, or of the plague at Athens, or of the death of the Athenian army in the Sicilian quarry, or, again, Tacitus’
record of the tyranny, torture, and treachery of the Roman civil wars, or Josephus’ narrative of the war against the Jews,
are the ancient analogue of what the modern world has experienced in more extravagant form. And in the attitude of the historians,
in their determination to maintain the power and integrity of the mind before the decay of the very fabric of society and
the human soul, we have the tradition in which Mr. Blunden has put himself.


Yet there are novelists to whose work, in one aspect or another, one does compare The Time of the Assassins. Flaubert, out of his great disgust with humanity, imaged in Salammbo scenes and atmospheres which make his Carthaginian novel in some ways comparable with Mr. Blunden’s book. But Flaubert was
corrupted by his subject. Its horrors “interested” him. They suggested to him the extremes of aesthetic response. The militant
objectivity of his prose and pose is, as it were, the license for a kind of luxury of emotion. By this luxury Mr. Blunden
is never tempted. He is not concerned to make us shudder even in a good cause. His moral resistance to evil does not fail
for an instant. It is at all times supported by his intellectual, by his moral and political, commitment. His prose, with
its stern restraint and precision and its grim pitying irony, is the sign and instrument of a mind that will not abrogate
its function of asserting the order and worth of things even though the skies are falling.


And then it is inevitable that The Time of the Assassins should be compared with two other novels of contemporary history, Malraux’s Man’s Fate and John Hersey’s The Wall. Mr. Blunden brings to his story gifts which are comparable with, even superior to, those of Malraux. It may be said, however,
that as a novelist he is less fortunate than Malraux in the subject that history has given him. The historical circumstance
of Man’s Fate permits Malraux’s characters to have the sense of the future, the awareness of history itself, the belief in the possibility
of victory, the expectation that, even in defeat, their lives and deaths will have counted, even if only symbolically. And in The Wall, although the characters are without the hope of personal survival, still the past exists for them; the ideal future exists;
the social group exists and is believed by its members to have an ideal permanence which makes the quality of its action important,
however futile this action may be in a practical way, and the recording of its behavior an act of piety.


Mr. Blunden is not permitted to avail himself of the inestimable novelistic advantages which are implied by these circumstances
of relative moral freedom. For example, the Ukranian Communists he represents are not free agents, thinking men and women,
like those of Malraux—people who bring their minds, their hearts, and their pasts to the service of a cause, and who enter into a living relation with that cause, which implies that they may quarrel with it, or
leave it. Almost three decades have passed since people could be in this kind of relation to Communism. Now, in The Time of the Assassins, the old Bolshevik, Lydia Artemova, may at moments feel dim stirrings of the free humanism of her student days, but she scarcely
understands them. She has wholly identified herself with the Soviet regime and has made herself its entire tool. To her fellow
party members in Kharkov, before the Germans took the city, she had been an awesome being because she had survived so many
purges—for one naturally asked, “How many lives did you deliver that you are here?” And the young Communist partizan, Fomin, the type of ideal Soviet citizen, he has been bred up as the creature of the Party, capable of great courage and
efficiency and wholly without the power to think or feel what has not been prescribed.


As for the two men of Mr. Blunden’s novel who do have some vestige of the power to choose, they have virtually no real choices
to make. Dr. Karandash, formerly a Ukranian nationalist, formerly an anarchist, formerly a Communist, now an agent of the
SS in charge of certain politico-cultural manipulations, is the most fully developed character in the novel in the sense of
being the most fully articulate, the one person who believes that he might possibly have charge of his own fate. His situation
is somewhat similar to that of one of the ancient historians I have mentioned, Josephus. For Josephus, although in spirit
a Jewish nationalist, was an official of Rome, attached to the army of Titus, and it was from this sad vantage-point that
he observed the ordeal of his people. Dr. Karandash had been absorbed into the German apparatus through no original will of
his own but with his grudging consent. A man of essential innocence, he accepts, while trying vainly to meliorate, the German
methods, because, in the “long view,” which his early Communist training made it the easier for him to take, any means of
destroying the corrupt Soviet power are acceptable. Yet he cannot inure himself to the horror with which he has made common
cause. With a naivety which is at odds with his knowingness, he commits himself to the Communist underground in Kharkov, only
to be betrayed by it to his German masters. A fate of a similar kind befalls another ex-Communist, the German Muller, who, having suffered at the hands of the Russians, had accepted
enlistment in the SS in order to gratify his hatred of Russians. Muller too is destroyed by the vestiges of the old humane
values. Unable to endure his guilt as a member of the SS, he permits himself to be betrayed to the Communists.


In the grim ambiguities of their situation, Muller and Karandash are trying to reach, not faith—that, in the circumstances,
would be too much to ask—but simply some ground for believing that they are, in the old sense of the word as they had once
understood it, human. Only two of Mr. Blunden’s characters are secure in their humanity and have no occasion to question it.
Professor Shevchenko—he bears the name of a great Ukranian poet—had once been an eminent philologian, a lover of cultures
and languages, in especial his native Ukranian. Under Soviet rule he had for a time been in favor with the authorities until
a turn of the line had thrown him, not into the outer darkness from which there is no return, but into a limbo from which,
should a counter-turn ever seem desirable, he might be drawn to be useful again. For many years before the German occupation
he had scarcely lived at all, yet he knew himself to be the repository of the past, of the unique life of his people, and
so his humanity had survived.


Shevchenko is, as it were, preserved in humanity by means of an idea, even though it is not, as Mr. Blunden presents it, an
idea that has extensive power. The most luminous character in the book has no ideas at all, and perhaps she is the more enduringly
human because of this. The young schoolteacher Maryusa had never been, as a Soviet citizen, political. Although entirely loyal,
she had never joined the Party. When the Germans come she knows nothing else to do except keep open her little schoolhouse
to receive and care for the children whose Communist parents had been summarily shot by the SS. But Maryusa is not long permitted
to indulge her simple humanity and to run the school simply as the agency of natural mercy. The orders come that she must
maintain “party vigilance” even though this is certain to mean the destruction of the school and its little inmates. When, in common humanity and common sense, she refuses, her doom is sealed.


The narrowness of the circumstances in which Mr. Blunden’s characters must exist, the limitation of their power of choice,
is, as I have suggested, a disadvantage to the novelistic imagination. It is a measure of Mr. Blunden’s quality, of his literary
power, his intelligence, and his moral commitment, that he overcomes this disadvantage. He overcomes it by realizing the power
of the historical imagination. Like Thucydides, he derives his information in part from personal observation—he was for many
years a correspondent in Russia and in that capacity was with the Red Army at Stalingrad and when it made its first reinvestment
of Kharkov—and in part from careful inquiry. His commitment is to fact and to essential truth, which he serves no less by
his imagination than by his experience and research. There is no page of his work that does not compel our admiring interest.


In the late fall of 1941 the German Army, sweeping through the Soviet Ukraine, entered the city of Kharkiv. The people of
Kharkiv came out into the streets to meet the Germans. Many people hailed the Germans as liberators. But on the morning of
the third day the city was silent.


About eight o’clock that morning the door of the Krasnaya Hotel swung open and a man in a Homburg hat and a black overcoat
stepped into the street.


The only other people to be seen were two young officers in long-skirted cavalry greatcoats who were standing before a neighbouring
building. The officers were discussing the suitability of the building as a headquarters for General von Paulus. There had
been a frost during the night and their voices rang loudly in the cold quiet air.


As the man in the Homburg hat walked by the officers he stopped.

“If I may be permitted,” he said and he indicated a sign by the doorway of the building, “you are now looking at what was,
until a few days ago, the home of the All-Ukraine Central Committee.”


The officers stared at him.

“A handsome building,” the man in the Homburg hat went on. “Allow me to point out to you the eighteenth century windows. In
my time it was said to be the finest in Kharkiv.” He wagged his head. “Ah, but in my time it was known as the Club of the
Nobility.”


The man in the Homburg hat resumed his walk, wondering why he had gone out of his way to practise this deceit. He had never
been inside the Club of the Nobility; indeed he remembered that in his youth he had despised the whole street, which he had
known as the Nikolaevskaya, because it had been composed of such buildings: institutions, banks, houses of the great trade organisations.
Looking at them now he was sure their character had not changed; though without a doubt renamed commissariats, they were as
he remembered them: aloof, remote, impenetrable.


Turning off the old Nikolaevskaya the man in the Homburg hat made his way to a group of buildings he had known as the University
of Kharkiv. Put up some time in the eighteenth century as a palace for the Russian governors of the Ukraine the University
was not unpleasant to look at. Next door there was the Uspensky Cathedral with its high belfry tower. From the tower, he remembered,
there had been a fine view over the city. The doors of the Cathedral were closed and there was the body of a man lying on
the Cathedral steps, so that he was dissuaded from entering and attempting to climb the belfry tower.


The man in the Homburg hat remained looking at the old buildings. This little hill on which the buildings stood, the University
Mount it had been called, was in fact the campus of his Alma Mater. Incongruous thought! Yet, here he had taken a degree of
sorts. More important, here, in these precincts, thirty years ago, he had made the acquaintance with, and then passionately
embraced, the libertarian ideas of his time. How sincere, inspired, brave and gifted his friends had seemed then!


This he said to himself, but he was not deeply moved. The street was narrower and the buildings smaller than he had thought.
All were in need of repair. They were shabby in other ways too. Although he had approved of the old religious institutions
being turned into museums, he was now a little ashamed for them, a little embarrassed for their pretensions as museums. They
were not very old by European standards, nor were they very good examples of their style and age. The architecture was imitative
of whatever had been fashionable in Europe at the time of their planning. But they were not exact imitations, always somewhere
an exaggeration, or a too-strict formalism; always in cupola or cornice, a Byzantine or Baltic dramaturgy had crept in through
the chisels and trowels of the workmen, so that the effect, intended to be worldly, cosmopolite, was in truth somewhat muddled.


The man in the Homburg hat entered a wide plaza. Around the plaza were a number of splendid modern buildings, among them one
of fourteen stories. Standing in the plaza he became aware of the silence of the city. It was an oppressive, tense silence.
Since passing the young officers he had not seen a living person.


He walked across the plaza, his footsteps echoing hollowly against the tall buildings. He thought he detected, in the distance,
some slight sound, and now he walked towards the source. He turned into a long thoroughfare which he remembered as the Sumskaya.


Down the entire length of the Sumskaya there were the bodies of men and women hanging suspended by the neck from first- and
second-story balconies.


There were so many bodies, and the reality was so improbable, that it appeared at first sight as though a great deal of merchandise
had been hung out for sale, and this momentary confusion was prolonged by the mind’s failing to identify the shapes, here
and there, of those who had been hanged by the feet, head down, and whose garments had fallen over their heads and whose arms
were stiffly semaphored. But then, in a flash they were seen for what they were.


And now, from the far end of the street, there was the muffled sound of a machine-pistol, coarse jests in German, and another
body was flung over a balcony, dropping to the rope’s end, there swinging pendulum-wise. An SS officer and two SS men came
out of the building and entered the building next door.


The man in the Homburg hat waited. Then, with a nervous hand, he adjusted his dark glasses. He had noticed a furtive movement
in the still, quiet street, a quick running from doorway to doorway under the heels of the dead. He saw that it was a boy
making his way out of the street.


A few paces from the man in the Homburg hat the boy halted in his tracks.

The boy was about seventeen. He had big bony hands and a gaunt face with big cheekbones. Above the cheekbones, as though supported
by the cheekbones, was a pair of direct-staring agate-coloured eyes.


“Come here, boy,” said the man in the Homburg hat.

It is probable that Sumsk Street, or the Sumskaya, has never been called anything else by the mass of people in Kharkiv, but
at the time of these events, and for some time before, it had been officially known as Karl Liebknecht Street, after the late
German Communist leader of that name.


In a small apartment at the rear of a large building in Karl Liebknecht Street resided a family of Communists named Andrenko.
They were young people of peasant origin, industrious, credulous, impregnable. Five years earlier their position had been
one of slight importance, but a large number of vacancies occurring in the Party ranks about 1937 had made for them a rapid
advancement. They had become functionaries of the Commissariat of Trade. Before them had opened the prospect of many years
of enviable service and entrenched privilege. Jealous of their attainment, and being anxious to maintain and further their
position, they had cultivated in all relationships, even between themselves, the forms of loyalty, obedience and enthusiasm.


The Andrenkos had one child, a son. Almost as soon as he could talk Fomin Nikolaevich had been entered in the Pioneers. He
had worn the red kerchief, repeated faithfully the slogans, repeated after his teacher’s “Be ready to fight in the workers’
cause,” the resounding, “Always ready!” In the Pioneers Fomin had learned to confess his own mistakes and, on occasion, those
of his parents, though avoiding, and this was appreciated, the more obvious fantasies. Thus had candour been made serviceable,
invention inhibited, and the ability to dissemble disciplined; the infant self-indictment, faintly foreshadowing the great
Party cleansings (but so entertaining to the other Pioneers, among whom, so soon as the cue was given, there would be vociferous
condemnation and the fun of shunning), had another function: the emotion of loyalty had been transferred from human and temporary
objects to the abstract and permanent. Fomin had been a good Pioneer and had risen to be a Link leader, thus avoiding the
fate of most boys his age, namely being drafted into one of the many labour schools or collective farm organisations. Earlier
in the year Fomin had entered the Communist Youth League. Receiving at once high marks in Leninism he had readily understood
the nature of the anti-Party leadership saboteurs and was learning to recognise and be armed against the foreign bourgeoisie.


The news that the Germans had entered the city had been brought home to his parents by Fomin.

After a brief and desperate stand at the bend of the Dnieper, Budonny’s forces had retired to the Donetz. Kharkiv, lying between
the two great rivers, was of small military consequence. Soldiers had passed through, and bombers had been seen over the city.
But there had been no organised evacuation of Kharkiv, no proclamation, no Party directive, no warning of any kind, just the
intelligence, passed from mouth to mouth that the Nemtsy were here. There had been no order to close the commissariats, but they were mostly closed, because the people who worked
in them, like Fomin’s parents, had remained at home, or had gone out into the streets. Nevertheless the Andrenkos had been
confident that they would be told what to do. When Fomin had told his parents that thousands of people had come out to welcome
the Germans and that the first thing these people had done was to direct the Germans to the Narodny Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Djel the Andrenkos had looked grave. But they still had not ventured out and they had bidden Fomin stay with them.


Early this morning, the third day after the arrival of the Germans, the door of the Andrenkos’ apartment had been kicked open
and an officer in a black uniform and a black helmet had stamped into the room. In his hand he had held a paper. Reading from
the paper he had called the names of Fomin’s parents.


“Nikolai Andrenko! Anna Andrenko!”

Having received no instructions to the contrary the Andrenkos had answered to their names. Whereupon an SS soldier had stepped
from behind the officer and with a skilfully-short burst from his machine-pistol had shot them both dead. Erasing their names
from his list the SS officer had debated whether the bodies should be added to the material of the demonstration, had decided against it, and gone
away.


He had paid no attention to Fomin.

For a long time (measured by the retreating, spaced bursts of the machine-pistol) Fomin had stayed in the room. His parents
had died without sound and so swiftly there had been little blood. Fomin had looked down on the fallen man and woman, on the
still-soft hair of his mother, on the rough cheek of his father, and he had known that this was the end of life and that all
he himself had was just such a life, held tight, dry-palmed, dry-mouthed, tremblingly within his breast, but at some time
to be as easily expended. He did not touch the shapes which had contained the lives that had been his parents, nor did he
attempt in any way to sustain the illusion that those lives were extant, but, when the machine-pistol no longer sounded close
to him, he had taken his own life out of that room, holding it cunningly, feeling it nestling dry and hard in his breast,
moving with soft catlike fluidity into the outside.


Staring at the stranger in the Homburg hat Fomin felt his world revive.

There were a few people in Kharkiv, as in other Soviet cities, who wore ordinary felt hats after the modern fashion. Time
was when the wearing of felt hats had been encouraged. But none had ever appeared in Kharkiv wearing headgear such as this.
It was a sooty black hat with an upcurling brim. It was a hat which boldly exposed the face. It was a complacent hat. It was
not the hat of a responsible worker. It was a foreign hat!


“Tell me, boy, where is the Narody Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Djel?”


Not only did the foreigner wear this challenging hat, but he was otherwise provocatively garbed. He wore dark sunglasses.
His overcoat of fine black cloth had a broad sable collar. His dark striped trousers were neatly creased. His shoes were black and glossy.


The fear that had almost dried up Fomin’s heart now gave place to a profound needlelike suspicion. Suspicion was a familiar
sensation. Fomin embraced the familiar, needing it.


“Please! Show me the way to the NKVD.”

Without thinking of it as a conscious assumption of his duty Fomin knew he must follow the man in the Homburg hat, just as
he would normally have done a week ago had the wearer then appeared in Kharkiv.


Fomin raised his arm, pointing. The man in the Homburg hat walked off in the direction indicated. Fomin followed him.

Presently they were in the street known as the Chernyshevskaya.

Fomin knew that the Germans had taken possession of the NKVD, but his imagination had not prepared him for what he now saw.
Outside the building there was a sentry box painted in black-white-and-red stripes. A sentry was stamping up and down. At
a second-floor window an officer in a black uniform was smoking a cigarette in a long ivory holder.


Fomin felt his world, momentarily rebuilt, falling away. More than anything he had seen that morning the sight of this foreign
officer in nonchalant possession of the NKVD struck at the very roots of the Party and State authority.


The man in the Homburg hat entered the NKVD.

Freely translated, Narodny Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Djel (more often referred to by its initials) means People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Grander buildings there were in
Kharkiv, but none so well suited to administrative supervision. Here were facilities for monitoring all channels of communication
and movement, both civil and military. Here the population was registered and every branch of the bureaucracy—that is the total fabric of life in city and country—charted.


Those Kharkivanians who had led the Germans to the NKVD a few days before, believing the Germans to be the liberators of the
Ukraine, had erred in thinking that the Germans would immediately destroy the hated records. In this firm triple-façaded building
within easy reach of the main centres of government SS Einsatzgruppe C, as it had been led to expect from its experience in the cities behind it, had found quarters fashioned to its exact requirements.
The Soviet cadres, having received no order from Moscow (not knowing that another German Army was at that moment at the western
suburbs of Moscow, continuing to believe implicitly in the wisdom and paramountcy of Moscow, themselves not daring, nor even
thinking, to act without the authority of Moscow), had quietly withdrawn. Thus the Einsatz Kommandos had at their disposal a modern system of prisons, isolators and interrogation rooms; more important to their immediate purpose
were the massive archives.


Entering the archives section of the NKVD the man in the Homburg hat paused to look around. A single electric bulb burned
weakly. By its light he saw tier after tier of filing cabinets, smooth unscalable cliffs of wood and brass, reaching into
the gloomy recesses of the room. In dark canyons between the filing cabinets uniformed clerks, working by candle or flashlight,
were turning out innumerable drawers.


Presently the man in the Homburg hat recognised a young officer he knew slightly. Catching the officer’s eye he removed his
Homburg hat, made the short continental bow. The officer greeted him.


“Herr Doktor Karandash.”

“My dear Oberleutnant Soedermann, this is the real thing. The records of a whole country.”

“For each and every individual,” said Oberleutnant Soedermann, “a dossier.”

Oberleutnant Soedermann inclined his plump, good-natured face towards Dr. Karandash.

“As far as the Wehrmacht is concerned the work is practically at an end. Should I tell you that from information gathered in this room we have been
able to identify every unit of the Russian Army, their order of battle in fact?”


Together they walked across the room. At a nest of tables at the centre of the room officers and translators were working
over a mass of documents by the light of battery lamps. A young officer in a black uniform turned towards them.


“Untersturmführer Doktor Gruber, Vorkommando Kharkiv,” said Oberleutnant Soedermann.


Dr. Karandash bowed. The officer was hatless, evidently very busy and impatient of the interruption. Through thick-lensed
spectacles he stared owlishly at Dr. Karandash.


“I remember you,” he said. “You were in Kiev.”

“Yes,” said Dr. Karandash.