The place you have been brought to is a fort built at the time of Catherine the Great. It is built on the south-west approaches to the city at the top of steep cliffs covered with ancient oaks. Alongside are other forts, an enormous ancient monastery, and an ancient fortress which now houses a military hospital.
Through the centuries military installations of the most varied kinds - stores, barracks, headquarters - have been built on the most dangerous approaches to the city and, apart from the basic purpose, they have also served as fortifications. The fort we have come to also served two purposes: as a barracks for 500 to 700 soldiers, and as a fort. Circular in shape, its outside walls used to have only narrow slits and broad embrasures for guns. These have now all been filled in and the only remaining windows are those that look into the internal courtyard. The fort has only one gateway, a well-defended tunnel through the mighty walls. A brick wall has been added around the fort. From the outside it looks like a high brick wall in a narrow lane, with yet another brick wall, higher than the first one, behind it.
Both the inner and outer courtyards of the fort are split up into numerous sectors and little yards divided by smaller walls and a whole jungle of barbed wire. The sectors have their own strange labels: the numbering has been so devised that no one should be able to discern any logic in it. The absence of any system facilitates the secrecy surrounding the establishment.
There are three companies of men undergoing punishment and one guard company in the penal battalion. The men in the guard company have only a very vague idea of who visits the battalion and why. They have only their instructions which have to be carried out: the men undergoing punishment can be only in the inner courtyard in certain sectors; officers who have a triangle stamped in their passes are allowed into certain other sectors; officers with a little star stamped in their passes are allowed to enter other sectors; and so forth.
Apart from the officers of the penal battalion, frequent callers at the fort are officers of the military prosecutor’s office, the military commandant of the city, and officers of the commandant’s office: investigators, lawyers. And there is a sector set aside for you. The spetsnaz intelligence point has no connection at all with the penal battalion. But if it were to be situated separately in some building, sooner or later people in the vicinity would be struck by the suspicious behaviour of the people occupying the building. Here in the penal battalion you are hidden from curious eyes.
The spetsnaz intelligence point is a small military unit headed by a lieutenant-colonel, who has under him a number of officers, graduates from the Military-Diplomatic Academy, and a few sergeants and privates who carry out support functions without having any idea (or the correct idea) of what the officers are engaged on. Officers of the penal battalion and those visiting the battalion are not supposed to ask what goes on in your sector.
Many years back one of your predecessors appeared to allow himself the luxury of ‘careless talk’, to the effect that his was a group reporting directly to the officer commanding the district and investigating cases of corruption among the senior officers. This is sufficient to ensure that you are treated with respect and not asked any more questions.
Its location in the penal battalion gives the spetsnaz point a lot of advantages: behind such enormous walls, the command can be sure that your documents will not get burnt or lost by accident; it is under the strictest guard, with dozens of guard dogs and machine-guns mounted in towers to preserve your peace of mind; no outsider interested in what is going on inside the walls will ever get a straight answer; the independent organisation does not attract the attention of higher-ranking Soviet military leaders who are not supposed to know about GRU and spetsnaz', and even if an outsider knows something about you he cannot distinguish spetsnaz officers from among the other officers visiting the old fort.
Spetsnaz has at its disposal a number of prison vans exactly the same as those belonging to the penal battalion and with similar numbers. They are very convenient for bringing any person of interest to us into or out of your fort at any time. What is good about the prison van is that neither the visitor nor outsiders can work out exactly where the spetsnaz point is. A visitor can be invited to any well-guarded place where there are usually plenty of people (the headquarters, commandant’s office, police station) and then secretly brought in a closed van to the old fort, and returned in the same way so that he gets lost in the crowd. Fortunately there are several such forts in the district.
A penal battalion, that is to say a military prison, is a favourite place for the GRU to hide its branches in. There are other kinds of camouflage as well - design bureaux, missiles bases, signals centres - but they all have one feature in common: a small, secret organisation is concealed within a large, carefully guarded military establishment.
In addition to its main premises where the safes crammed with secret papers are kept, the spetsnaz Intelligence point has several secret apartments and small houses on the outskirts of the city.
Having found yourself in the place I have described, you are met by an unhappy-looking lieutenant-colonel who has probably spent his whole working life at this work. He gives you a brief order: ‘You wear uniform only inside the fort and if you are called to the district headquarters. The rest of the time you wear civilian clothes.’
‘I understand, comrade lieutenant-colonel.’
‘But there’s nothing for you to do here in the fort and even less in the headquarters. This is my place, not yours. I don’t need any bureaucrats; I need hunters. Go off and come back in a month’s time with material on a good foreign catch.’
‘Very well.’
‘Do you know the territories our district will be fighting on in a war?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Well, I need another agent there who could meet up with a spetsnaz group in any circumstances. I am giving you a month because you are just beginning your service, but the time-scale will be stricter later on. Off you go, and remember that you have got a lot of rivals in Kiev: the friends of yours who have already joined the Intelligence point are probably active in the city, the KGB is also busy, and goodness knows who else is recruiting here. And remember - you can slip up only once in our business. I shall never overlook a mistake, and neither will spetsnaz. In wartime you are shot for making a mistake. In peacetime you land in prison. You know which prison?’
* * *
That was what Kiev was like before the Chernobyl disaster. For hundreds of years barbarians from many of the countries of Asia and Europe had been doing their best to destroy my great city, but nobody inflicted such damage on it as did the Communists. The history of nuclear energy in the Soviet Union is one - very long -story of crime. The founding father of the development of nuclear energy was Lavrenti Beria, the all-powerful chief of the secret police and, as later became apparent, one of the greatest criminals of the twentieth century. The majority of the Soviet ministers, designers and engineers connected with the development of nuclear energy were kept in prisons, and not only in Stalin’s time. All nuclear plants are built with prison labour. I have personally seen thousands of convicts working in the uranium mines in the Kirovograd region. (See V. Suvorov, Aquarium). The convicts have no incentive whatsoever to turn out good quality work.
Sooner or later this was bound to end in disaster. The paper Literaturnaya Ukraina [1] reported on the criminal attitude to construction work and the use of defective materials and obsolete technology at Chernobyl. The paper issued a warning that several generations of people would have to pay for the irresponsible attitude of the people in charge of the building work. But nobody paid any attention to this article or others like it; a month later the catastrophe took place.
* * *
Notes
[1] 27 March 1986. [Return]
Appendix G
Photos
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Spetsnaz Page 24