Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [113]
Heinrich had heard about the city. Karaganda, built under the first five-year plan, was praised in meeting after meeting.
Karaganda could disillusion the most stalwart servant of the party. This planned city of a quarter of a million, the epitome of the Soviet pioneering spirit, turned out to be a dirty, dilapidated hole beyond description, with an evil film of coal dust infecting it.
On the outskirts Heinrich Hirsch saw thousands of large holes in the ground. These were covered with rags, wood, and tin. These oversized graves served as homes for the less fortunate Kulaks who had not been resettled in the nameless villages. A great number of them were aged, crippled, and helpless. In this place they lived on scraps and awaited merciful death from the final horror of “People’s Socialism.”
There were a few modern buildings in Karaganda. They belonged to the NKVD, the Town Soviet, District Committee of the Communist Party, and the Educational and Cultural Institute. In this forsaken hole, Heinrich Hirsch assumed new duties as a reinstated Komsomol member of the Agitation and Propaganda Corps.
There were two objectives. First, the entire German Volga Republic had been deported, many into this district. He had to continue to enlighten the exiles, and keep up their agricultural and manufacturing quotas.
The second objective became more apparent as the war wore on. Trainloads of German prisoners arrived and were encamped. Heinrich Hirsch was on one of the teams to reeducate them. He found German defectors, obtained signatures for petitions against Nazi Germany and used them for broadcasts and newspaper articles.
He retrained them as Communists. Repentant German prisoners could become members of the “anti-Fascists” who were slated to become important in Russia’s postwar occupation plans for Germany.
Hirsch did his job well. In 1943 Rudi Wöhlman traveled to Karaganda and assigned many Germans to new duties. Among the appointees was Heinrich Hirsch, who had undergone his third redemption.
Once again he crossed the great Kuzkah desert. This time he traveled on an unguarded train and with new papers without the damnations GERMAN and JEW stamped on them. His destination was the city of Ufa in the Autonomous Republic of Bashkir, some eight hundred miles east of Moscow.
As the Russians evacuated citizens and machinery into their vast lands certain cities received certain types of evacuees with similar characteristics; Alma Ata and Tashkent became wartime centers of artists and scientists; others drew manufacturing complexes and became transport or training points.
Ufa became the center of International Communism. Under agreement with the Western Allies, the International Comintern had been officially dissolved. But in remote Ufa, it continued to operate under a different set of titles.
Heinrich Hirsch was attached as a member of the International Society for the Aid of Class War Prisoners. In Ufa he joined the cream of foreign Communist trainees.
Like most Soviet cities in the hinterlands, Ufa was jammed with starving refugees and the horrible privations of wartime. However, this did not affect the Comintern trainees who continued to live splendidly.
His particular school was known as Technical School #77 for Industrial Economy. In this institute Germans, Czechs, Austrians, Spaniards, Bulgars, Poles, Italians, French, South Americans, and Africans all trained for the singular purposes of infiltrating, subverting, and destroying their former homelands.
In this inner sanctum of hard-core trainees the tactics of keeping the imperialists on the defensive were emphasized by use of constant, prodding harassment and pressure. Lenin remained the infallible source of inspiration. “Push out a bayonet. If it strikes fat, push deeper. If it strikes iron, pull back for another day.”
In order to learn how to counter imperialist propaganda the students were exposed to Western books, newspapers,