Moscow Rules

by Robert Moss

  ‘The men won’t have to be asked a second time,’ he commented. ‘But what about Party officials?’

  ‘What about them?’ Sasha shrugged. ‘They have been told to remain at their posts, to carry on as usual, that special instructions will follow.’

  ‘And when they do?’

  ‘That’s something we still have to agree on among ourselves. And it’s one more reason I want you with me in Moscow. Now, there are some details we need to discuss.’ Sasha spread out a large-scale map of the Moscow region on his desk and began explaining his ideas on the redeployment of the Kantemirov and Taman divisions, to relieve the airborne forces that had seized the airports and railheads, and to tighten security around the perimeters of the capital.

  *

  General Gukhov, the commander of the Moscow Military District, didn’t take his abrupt dismissal lying down. He arrived at Gogol Boulevard in the company of a formidable delegation, including Marshal Vorontsov, the commander of Strategic Rocket Forces, and an old rival of Zotov. They insisted on seeing the Chief of Staff at once. They got no further than Sasha’s outer office. He had them relieved of their duties and placed under close arrest. Then he went up to the Marshal with a list of other senior officers whose loyalties were questionable.

  Zotov glanced through it, and nodded his weary approval. ‘Make the changes,’ he said. let’s hope that there’s an end of it. If the country sees that we’re not united —’

  ‘The army is solid,’ Sasha interjected. ‘The men are with us. We only have to worry about a few politicians in general’s uniforms. The others will obey without question. That’s the way they’ve always lived.’

  ‘All right, all right, but we have to justify ourselves to the people, and we have to do it in a way everybody can understand.’

  ‘We’ve already issued several statements,’ Sasha pointed out. ‘I have a group that is preparing a basic policy document that should be ready for your approval in a matter of hours. Even though the people have been told little, I believe that they’re with us.’

  ‘I’ve come to a decision, Sasha.’ Marshal Zotov got up and lumbered around his office, shoulders forward, his hands behind his back, like a bull circling the ring, gathering speed. ‘I’m going to summon the entire membership of the Central Committee to Moscow. You remember ‘Fifty-seven, don’t you?’

  Sasha nodded, while thinking that the precedent didn’t apply. In 1957, when a cabal on the Politburo was getting ready to dump Khrushchev, Marshal Zhukov had come to the rescue by using the army’s transportation networks to rush all the members of the Central Committee to Moscow, where they voted obediently to keep Nikita in his job. Now Zotov wanted to assemble the Central Committee in the same building that had just seen a shoot-out between Zaytsev’s men and the KGB guards, counting on the bulletholes in the walls, no doubt, to keep the Party delegates in line.

  ‘Just what do you think you’re going to accomplish?’ Sasha asked. ‘Do you imagine they’re going to proclaim you a national savior?’

  ‘They might elect me General Secretary.’

  ‘They might,’ Sasha conceded, ‘if they thought they could keep their jobs. Is that what you want?’

  ‘All we have at the moment is a holding operation. We need a stronger basis, something that can pull everyone together.’ He bunched his fingers into a fist. ‘We’ve been ruled by the Party for more than two-thirds of a century. We need some kind of Party endorsement, the way the Tsars needed the blessing of the Church. We can’t change everything overnight.’

  Sasha said, ‘We just have.’

  The Marshal studied him. ‘Don’t be too hasty, Sasha. You put on a first-rate technical operation, and you’ll be given full credit. But remember who’s in charge. I want to be kept fully informed. I want copies of every directive that goes out from this headquarters. Am I making myself understood?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  *

  As Sasha walked back to his own office, brooding over what the Marshal had said, one of his aides intercepted him.

  ‘Your wife’s waiting for you,’ he reported.

  ‘I thought it was understood no civilians were to be admitted to this building.’

  ‘Yes, but under the circumstances —’

  ‘Tell her I’ll see her at home tonight.’

  ‘She’s got someone else with her. Olga Nikolskaya.’

  Feliks’ widow. He had already received a report from Orlov. The details were confused, but Sasha had understood them well enough. He had given instructions for Elaine to be kept in protective custody until the situation had stabilized. One of them, at least, had been spared. What on earth could he say to comfort Olga, when only the pressure of events prevented him from experiencing the void that Feliks’ death had opened in his own world?

  But he said to the aide, ‘Bring them into my office.’

  Lydia was subdued. She looked at him with a kind of pride. But he also sensed uncertainty and fear. Neither he nor the Marshal had said anything to prepare her for what had taken place.

  Olga’s face was red with weeping. He opened his arms to her, and she fell upon his chest.

  ‘All of us loved him,’ Sasha said quietly. ‘And all of us will remember that but for him, this day would never have come.’

  ‘He left something,’ Olga said, pulling out an envelope. ‘He gave it to me just yesterday. He said I was to open it if anything happened to him. I think he meant it for you as well.’

  Sasha glanced through the letter, scrawled in Feliks’ minute hand. Feliks described the dream of a Russia ‘in which God and the people will be rehabilitated like the survivors of Stalin’s terror.’ He expressed his fear that the ‘old gang’ would cling to their privileges under the protection of ‘the generals they bought long ago,’ and that a militarized dictatorship could still prove that ‘imperialism is the highest form of communism’ — a dictum that would have Lenin rolling in his grave.

  Sasha lingered over the closing lines, a couplet from Vissotsky:

  I want to believe that our dirty work

  Will permit you to see the sun tomorrow, without bars.

  He folded the letter and handed it back to Olga.

  ‘You have to do something for him,’ Lydia said. ‘He ought to be buried in the Kremlin Wall.’

  He looked at her and wondered whether she, or her father, would ever be able to comprehend Feliks’ letter.

  Olga was shaking her head. ‘Feliks would never have wanted anything like that.’

  Sasha saw a place in his mind that Feliks had described, the place where Vissotsky was buried, and knew what to do.

  ‘Is Father going to be the new General Secretary?’ Lydia asked, shaking him out of his reverie.

  ‘No,’ he said firmly, and ushered them out.

  *

  The borders of the Soviet Union were sealed, international telephone services were cut, and a total embargo was imposed on foreign news reports. Harassed Foreign Ministry officials knew about as much as, and often less than, the ambassadors and attachés who called them, demanding information. Guy Harrison prowled the streets like an alley cat, counting tanks. He managed to sneak a photograph of the bullet-riddled Central Committee building, but the sentries caught him and smashed his camera, after offering to smash his face.

  While Russia turned its back on the world, the wildest rumors were accepted as fact, and, indeed, were hardly more sensational than the reality itself. The London Times ran an editorial entitled ‘The End of Soviet Communism,’ but a sober hand added a final question mark. The Communist press, both in Eastern Europe and in the West, began by putting a brave face on affairs with articles about the need for ‘resolute measures’ against ‘imperialist intrigues’ and ‘industrial sabotage,’ but soon lapsed into an embarrassed silence. From Peking, the Hsinhua news agency commented that the ‘fascist coup’ in Russia had demonstrated the quintessence of Soviet revisionism. In Paris, the Soviet Ambassador paid a courtesy call at the Elysee, advised the Socialist
President of France that his home country had passed under the sway of ‘Slavophile fascists,’ and asked for political asylum.

  In Washington, the alarm bells were ringing. Since the first announcements had been carried by Moscow radio and TV, a crisis team had been assembled in the War Room in the White House basement.

  ‘There are large-scale troop movements going on all over the Soviet Union,’ a senior Defense official reported. ‘Satellite reconnaissance has also detected several previously unknown ICBM silos in the Soviet Far East, targetting our military bases. Furthermore, two-thirds of the Soviet nuclear submarine force is reported at sea, a much higher proportion than normal.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ the National Security Adviser asked. ‘That this whole thing could be a blind? A cover for a preemptive strike?’

  ‘We know that Zotov, like his predecessor as Chief of Staff, is well versed in strategic deception. By closing down all normal channels of communication and leading us to think that they’re in the throes of a bloody leadership struggle, the Soviets could conceivably be hoping to catch us off guard. We can’t rule it out at this point. They’ve left us literally in the dark, sir.’

  ‘Are you suggesting that Marshal Zotov isn’t actually the one minding the store over there now?’

  ‘I don’t have sufficient facts to pass judgment on that, sir. But if he is in control, I’d say we’re in a lot of trouble.’

  ‘Joel.’ The National Security Adviser cocked an eyebrow at Carson, the head of the CIA’s Soviet Division. ‘What’s your people’s appraisal of Zotov?’

  ‘He’s fairly primeval, even for a Russian,’ Carson responded. ‘I’d say that Zotov’s idea of a Soviet security zone is a chain of Finlands or Bulgarias stretching all the way to the English Channel. According to sources with access, he has a plan to invade Iran, which would destabilize the whole Gulf area and panic the Saudis. He’s contemptuous of the United States. He doesn’t think we’ve got the stomach for a fight. He’s violently antisemitic, and wants to avenge Israel’s humiliation of Moscow’s Arab clients on the battlefield. A few years back he authored an article in a Soviet military journal that some of our people read as a thinly veiled justification for a nuclear first strike.’

  ‘Not somebody it will be easy to do business with.’

  ‘Not at all. Our reading is that one of the factors that precipitated the coup — if that, indeed, is what it is — was a rift between Zotov and the political honchos over the use of military force. He wanted to raise the stakes in Afghanistan, send combat troops to Angola, and so on. Our reading is that he will be more prepared than the men he has ousted to risk general hostilities. I think we have to prepare for the worst-case scenario: that we could be dealing with a bunch of mad bombers in the Kremlin who are actually prepared to start a nuclear war.’

  ‘Does anybody disagree?’ The National Security Adviser glanced around the room. There was much tamping of pipes and clearing of throats. ‘All right, I’ll get this to the President right away. He’ll want to start battening down the hatches. We’ll reconvene at three.’

  Before the crisis team reassembled, the President had issued the order to place all American forces on full alert and had requested his country’s NATO allies to follow suit.

  *

  A time of revolution is a good season for insomniacs. The lights burned all night on the Marshal’s floor at Gogol Boulevard, and both he and Sasha became round-the-clock residents of the building. Since the normal channels of command had been superseded, every kind of inquiry was brought to them. Was Pravda to continue publication? If so, who would act as censor? The Party offices in Togliatti had been sacked. Were any reprisals to be taken? The First Secretary of the Party in Moldavia had been caught trying to cross the Rumanian border under a false passport. What was to be done with him? Younger officers had organized revolutionary military committees in a number of districts, in solidarity with the men who had seized the Politburo. Were they to be given official recognition?

  Few people had any firm idea what direction the country’s new masters intended to steer; it was enough that they represented a break with the past. Despite the ban on public meetings, students and workers organized demonstrations to show their support. The day after the coup, ten thousand people assembled in Red Square, and no one interfered with them. The next day, there were two hundred thousand. Some of the demonstrators displayed the banners of the Association of Russian Workers, the underground union organization. Others, ultranationalists, swaggered around in their leather jackets, promising a purge of ‘cosmopolitan elements.’ There were people wearing crosses and carrying icons, and a madman who clambered on top of Lenin’s Mausoleum and claimed to be the grandson of the Tsar until the guards pulled him down.

  There was no organized resistance, not yet. Headless, the vast body of the Party seemed to be paralyzed, if not lifeless. There had been a few minor incidents, dogfights between army units and KGB or MVD personnel who refused to obey the directives from the Chief of Staff. In Eastern Europe, there were ominous rumblings that could presage an avalanche. Polish workers had taken to the streets in their millions, apparently convinced that the hour of liberation was finally at hand. Rumania’s dictator had made a speech that suggested he was about to defect from the Warsaw Pact. There was rioting in East Berlin, and the East Germans had sent a special mission to Bonn. But in Moscow, and in Russia as a whole, the coup seemed to be uncontested. Askyerov and the other members of the Politburo were being held under armed guard at the Aquarium, pending the Marshal’s decision on their fate — a decision that he was still resolved to share with the Central Committee, whose members were now arriving by plane and limousine, under army escort, for the special meeting scheduled to begin at 4:00 P.M.

  Sasha arrived at the Marshal’s office with Zaytsev in tow. According to the clock, it was nearly lunchtime. The Marshal’s eyes were bloodshot, and the raised vein along the side of his temple was throbbing. He had the drapes pulled against the wintry light outside.

  ‘You ought to take a nap for an hour before the meeting,’ Sasha suggested.

  ‘There’s no time,’ Zotov said impatiently. ‘I’m still working on my speech. Here, take a look at this.’

  Sasha took the paper from him. It listed the names of a dozen members of the Central Committee, half of them with high military rank.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘These are the men who are going to nominate me as the next General Secretary,’ Zotov explained.

  Sasha dropped the paper on the Marshal’s desk and threw himself down on the sofa. Zaytsev remained standing.

  Sasha said, ‘I think you ought to reconsider, Alexei Ivanovich. Fedya, show him the cables.’

  Zaytsev marched up to the desk and deposited a stack of telegrams from military headquarters all over the country.

  ‘Everywhere, our orders are being obeyed,’ Sasha summarized. ‘Everywhere, people are rejoicing. They’re celebrating the overthrow of a regime, not just a government. You don’t need to go through with this charade of the Central Committee. If you do, you’ll risk losing some of the support you already enjoy. You’ve said yourself that the Party is dying. Now is the moment to finish it off. You’ve created the perfect opportunity.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Lock up the Central Committee the way we locked up the Politburo. All of them in one room — think of it! We won’t have a chance like this again.’

  ‘And then what, Sasha? Answer me that. A military junta? The return of the Romanov’s? Civil war? The people may be with us today, but don’t be so sure about tomorrow. We need continuity.’

  ‘We need this,’ Sasha said calmly, placing a document in a slim red folder in front of the Marshal.

  ‘And what’s this, fuck your mother?’ the Marshal glared at the title page, which announced ‘The Draft Program of the Military Revolutionary Committee.’ He barely glanced at the first page before erupting, ‘Either you think you’re a poet or a st
and-up comic.’ But he went on reading.

  The opening paragraph read as follows:

  The ideology of Marxism-Leninism, which has brought the people only misfortune and suffering, has been lifted from our society. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the exponent of this ideology, is dissolved. Ordinary members of the Party are released from all their obligations toward it. They are no longer required to pay Party dues. Members of the Politburo and the Secretariat are being held under detention. They will be brought to trial by people’s courts to answer for their crimes. Other Party functionaries are required to register with the nearest military headquarters. They have no reason to fear. They will be offered the opportunity to return to the occupations they practiced before they became political careerists. Those who had no professional experience prior to their employment as Party officials will be offered vocational training. The All-Union Council of Trade Unions, which never in its entire existence represented the interests of the workers, is also dissolved.

  Zotov snorted, but read on. Paragraph Three stated that:

  The operations of the Committee for State Security, at home and abroad, are suspended. Individual officers who have not been involved in crimes against the people will be considered for assignment to a new department. The Chief Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff will assume primary responsibility for national security. The militia have been placed under the authority of the Ministry of Defense.

  Sasha watched the older man’s face closely. It seemed to relax slightly as he scanned one of the sections that Feliks had proposed, on freedom of religion and the reopening of the churches that had been closed in the course of the long war against the country’s believers. The Marshal actually appeared to nod his agreement.

  Better if he can accept, Sasha told himself. Without the Marshal as their shield, they could never have made their elaborate preparations for the coup. When it came, the Marshal, like the others in the Central Committee, had been taken by surprise. But within hours, he had come to believe that it was his coup. It wasn’t the first time he had borrowed an idea and made it his own. Perhaps he could do so again. Sasha hoped so, not only because, without Zotov, rifts within the armed forces might begin to open, but because he genuinely liked and respected the old warrior. And after all, he was the man who had shot Beria. That should make him a hero of any truly Russian government.