Nikolai Nikolayev was told to report to a field hospital, where his scorched hands and face were treated with a smelly salve, and then return to the general’s headquarters. There he was given a field commission, a lieutenancy, and a platoon of three KV1s. Then it was back into combat.
That winter, with the Kursk salient miles behind him and the Panzers on the retreat, he received a captaincy and a company of brand-new heavy tanks fresh from the factory. They were the IS-2s, named after Josef Stalin. With a 122mm gun and thicker armor, they became known as the Tiger Killers.
At Operation Bagration he got his second Hero of the Soviet Union medal for outstanding personal bravery and on the outskirts of Berlin, fighting under Marshal Chuikov, the third.
This was the man, almost fifty-five years later, that Jason Monk had come to see.
If the old general had been a bit more tactful with the Politburo he would have got his marshal’s baton and with it a big retirement dacha out along the Moskva River at Peredelkino with the rest of the fat cats, all free as a gift of the state. But he always told them what he really thought, and they did not always like it.
So he built his own more modest bungalow for his declining years, off the Minsk road on the way to Tukhovo, an area studded with army camps where he could at least be close to what remained of his beloved army.
He had never married—“no life for a young girl” he would say of his numerous postings to the bleakest outposts of the Soviet empire—and at seventy-three he lived with a faithful valet, a former master sergeant with one foot, and an Irish wolfhound with four feet.
Monk had tracked down his rather humble abode simply by asking the villagers in the nearby communities where Uncle Kolya lived. Years earlier, when he had entered middle age, the old general had been given the nickname by his younger officers, and it stuck. His hair and moustache had turned prematurely white so that he looked old enough to be the uncle of all of them. General of the Army Nikolayev was good enough for the newspapers, but every ex-soldier in the country knew him as Dyadya Kolya.
As Monk was driving a Defense Ministry staff car that evening and was dressed as a full colonel of the General Staff, the villagers saw no reason not to point out that Uncle Kolya lived at such-and-such a place.
It was pitch-black and freezing cold when Monk knocked at the door a little after nine in the evening. The limping valet answered, and seeing the uniform let him in.
General Nikolayev was expecting no visitors, but the staff colonel’s uniform and the attaché case caused him no more than mild surprise. He was in his favorite armchair by a roaring log fire reading a military memoir by a younger general and occasionally snorting in derision. He knew them all, he knew what they had done and, more embarrassing, he knew what they had never done, no matter what they claimed now that they could make money by writing fictitious history.
He looked up when Valodya announced he had a visitor from Moscow and left.
“Who are you?” he growled.
“Someone who needs to talk to you, General.”
“From Moscow?”
“Just now, yes.”
“Well, since you’ve come, better get on with it.” The general nodded at the briefcase. “Papers from the Ministry?”
“Not quite. Papers, yes. From somewhere else.”
“Cold outside. Better sit down. Well, spit it out. What’s your business?”
“Let me be perfectly frank. This uniform was to persuade you to receive me. I am not in the Russian Army, I am not a colonel, and I am certainly not on anyone’s general staff. In fact I am an American.”
Across the fireplace the Russian stared at him for several seconds as if he could not believe his ears. Then the points of his bristling moustache twitched in outrage.
“You’re an impostor,” he snapped. “You’re a damned spy. I’m not having impostors and spies in my house. Get out.”
Monk remained where he was.
“All right, I will. But as six thousand miles is a long way to come for thirty seconds, will you answer me one single question?”
General Nikolayev glowered at him.
“One question. What?”
“Five years ago when Boris Yeltsin asked you to come out of retirement and command the attack on Chechnya and the destruction of the capital Grozny, rumor has it you looked at the plans and told the then Defense Minister Pavel Grachev: ‘I command soldiers, not butchers. This is a job for slaughterers.’ Is that true?”
“What of it?”
“Was it true? You allowed me a question.”
“All right, yes. And I was right.”
“Why did you say it?”
“That’s two questions.”
“I’ve still got six thousand more miles to get home.”
“All right. Because I don’t believe genocide is a job for soldiers. Now get out.”
“You know that’s a rotten book you’re reading?”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve read it. It’s bunk.”
“True. So what?”
Monk slipped a hand into his briefcase and extracted the Black Manifesto. He opened it at a page he had tagged. Then he held it out across the fire.
“Since you have the time to read rubbish, why not glance at something really unpleasant?”
The general’s anger vied with his curiosity.
“Yankee propaganda?”
“No. Russian future. Have a look. That page and the next.”
General Nikolayev grunted and took the proffered file. He read quickly the two marked pages. His face mottled.
“Bloody rubbish,” he shouted. “Who wrote this crap?”
“Have you heard of Igor Komarov?”
“Don’t be a fool. Of course. Going to be president in January.”
“Good or bad?”
“How should I know? They’re all as bent as cork-screws.”
“So he’s no better or worse than the rest of them?”
“That’s about it.”
Monk described the events of the previous July 15, covering the ground as fast as he could, fearful of losing the old man’s attention or, worse, his patience.
“Don’t believe it,” the general snapped. “You come here with some fancy story …”
“If it’s a fancy story, then three men did not die in attempts to recover it. But they did. Are you going anywhere this evening?”
“Eh, no. Why?”
“Then why not put down Pavel Grachev’s memoirs and read Igor Komarov’s intentions? Some parts you will like. The re-empowerment of the army. But it’s not to defend the Motherland. There’s no external threat to the Motherland. It is to create an army that will carry out genocide. You may not like Jews, Chechens, Georgians, Ukrainians, Armenians, but they were in those tanks too, remember. They were at Kursk and Bagration, Berlin and Kabul. They fought beside you. Why not spare a few minutes to see what Mr. Komarov has in store for them?”
General Nikolayev stared at the American a quarter of a century his junior, then grunted.
“Do Americans drink vodka?”
“They do on freezing nights in the middle of Russia.”
“There’s a bottle over there. Help yourself.”
While the old man read, Monk treated himself to a slug of Moskovskaya and thought of the briefing he had had in Castle Forbes.
“He’s probably the last of the Russian generals with an old-fashioned sense of honor. He’s no fool and he’s got no fear. There are ten million veterans who will still listen to Uncle Kolya,” the Russian tutor Oleg had told him.
After the fall of Berlin and a year in occupation, the young Major Nikolayev was sent back to Moscow, to Armored Officer School. In the summer of 1950 he was appointed to command one of the seven regiments of heavy tanks on the Yalu River in the Far East.
The Korean War was at its height, with the Americans rolling back the North Koreans. Stalin was seriously thinking of saving the Koreans’ bacon by throwing in his own new tanks against the
Americans. Two things prevailed to prevent him: wiser counsels and his own paranoia. The IS-4s were so ultra-secret that details of them were never revealed, and Stalin feared to lose one intact. In 1951 Nikolayev returned to a lieutenant-colonelcy and a posting to Potsdam. He was still only twenty-five.
At thirty he commanded a Special Ops tank regiment in the Hungarian uprising. That was where he first upset Soviet Ambassador Yuri Andropov, who went on to become chairman of the KGB for fifteen years and General Secretary of the USSR. Colonel Nikolayev refused to use his tanks’ machine guns to rake the crowds of protesting Hungarian civilians on the streets of Budapest.
“They’re seventy percent women and children,” he told the ambassador and architect of the crushing of the revolt. “They’re throwing rocks. Stones don’t hurt tanks.”
“They must be taught a lesson!” shouted Andropov. “Use your machine guns.”
Nikolayev had seen what heavy machine guns can do to massed civilians in a confined space. At Smolensk in 1941. His parents had been among them.
“You want it, you do it,” he told Andropov. A senior . general calmed things down but Nikolayev’s career hung by a thread. Andropov was not a forgiving man.
In the early and mid-sixties he got the outposts, years along the banks of the Amur and Ussuri rivers facing China across the flowing water while Khrushchev debated whether to try to teach Mao Tse-tung a lesson in tank warfare.
Khrushchev fell, Brezhnev succeeded him, the crisis calmed down, and Nikolayev gladly forsook the frozen barren wastes of the Manchurian border to return to Moscow.
In 1968, as a forty-two-year-old major general, he commanded a division in the Prague uprising, far and away the best-performing division in the operation. He won the undying gratitude of the airborne, the VDVs, when he saved one of their units from the frying pan. A too-small company had been dropped into central Prague, was surrounded by Czechs and in trouble, when Nikolayev personally led a tank company into the city to get them out.
He spent four years lecturing on tank warfare at the Frunze Academy, turning out an entire new generation of tank corps officers who adored him, and in 1973 was adviser on armored warfare to the Syrians. It was the year of the Yom Kippur War.
Though he was supposed to remain in the background, he knew the Soviet-supplied tanks so well that he planned and mounted an attack against the Israeli Seventh Armored Brigade out of the Golan Heights. The Syrians were no match for it, but the planning and tactics were brilliant. The Israeli Seventh Armored survived, but for a while the Syrians had them severely worried; it ranked as one of the few occasions when Arab armor gave them any problems at all.
On the basis of Syria he was invited onto the general staff, planning offensive operations against NATO. Then in 1979 up came Afghanistan. He was fifty-three, and was offered the command of the 40th Army that would do the job. The post meant promotion from lieutenant general to colonel general.
General Nikolayev looked at the plans, looked at the terrain, looked at the indigenous people, and wrote a report that said the operation and occupation would prove a man-killer, had no point, and would constitute a Soviet Vietnam. It was the second time he upset Andropov.
They assigned him the wilderness again—recruit training. The generals who went to Afghanistan got their medals and their glory—for a while. They also got their body bags, tens of thousands of body bags.
“This is garbage. I won’t believe this rubbish.”
The old general tossed the black file across the hearth to land in Monk’s lap. “You have a nerve, Yankee. You come barging into my country, into my house ... try to fill my head with these pernicious lies. …”
“Tell me, General, what do you think of us?”
“Us?”
“Yes, us. The Americans, the people from the West. I have been sent here. I am no freelance. Why have I been sent? If Komarov is a fine man and a great leader-to-be, why should we give a fuck?”
The old man stared at him, not so much shocked by the language, which he had heard many times before, but by the intensity of the younger man.
“I know I’ve spent my whole life fighting you.”
“No, General, you’ve spent your whole life opposing us. And you did so in the service of regimes you know have done terrible things. …”
“This is my country, American. Insult it at your peril.”
Monk leaned forward and tapped the Black Manifesto.
“But nothing like this. Not Khrushchev, not Brezhnev, not Andropov, nothing like this. …”
“If it’s true, if it’s true,” shouted the old soldier. “Anybody could write that.”
“So try this. This is the story of how it came into our possession. An old soldier gave his life to get this out.”
He handed the general the verification report and poured him a generous slug of his own vodka. The general threw it back Russian-style, in one gulp.
It was not until the summer of 1987 that someone reached to a high shelf, brought down the 1979 Nikolayev report on Afghanistan, dusted it off, and gave it to the Foreign Ministry. In January 1988, Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze told the world, “We’re pulling out.”
Nikolayev was made colonel general at last, and brought from the general staff to supervise the withdrawal. The last commander of the 40th Army was General Gromov, but he was told the overall plan would be Nikolayev’s. Amazingly the whole 40th Army came out with hardly any more casualties, though the mujahedin were snapping at their heels.
The last Soviet column drove over the Amu Darya bridge on February 15, 1989. Nikolai Nikolayev brought up the rear. He could have flown in a staff jet, but he drove out with the men.
He sat alone in the back of an open GAZ jeep with a driver in front. No one else. He had never retreated before. He sat bolt upright in his battle dress uniform of combat smock, with no shoulder boards to give his rank. But the men recognized the mane of white hair and the points of the bristling moustache.
They were sick and tired of Afghanistan, glad to be going home despite the defeat. Just north of the bridge the cheering began. They pulled over when they saw the white hair, poured out of the trucks, and cheered him. There were VDV airborne men among them who had heard of the Prague affair and they cheered too. The BMD troop transporters were mostly driven by ex-tank men, and they waved and shouted.
He was sixty-three then, driving north into retirement, to a life of lectures, memoirs, and reunions. But he was still their Uncle Kolya, and he was bringing them home.
In his forty-five years as a tank man he had done three things that made him a legend. He had banned “hazing”—the systematic bullying of new recruits by three-year men, which led to hundreds of suicides—in every unit under his command, causing the other generals to copy him. He had fought the political establishment tooth and claw for better conditions and food for his men, and he had insisted on unit pride and intensive training, over and over again, until every unit he commanded from platoon to division was the best in the line when it counted.
Gorbachev gave him his General of the Army rank and then fell from power. If he had agreed to butcher Chechnya for Yeltsin he would have got his marshal’s baton and his free dacha.
“What do you expect, American?”
General Nikolayev threw down the verification report and stared at the fire.
“If it’s all true, then the man’s a shit after all. And what am I supposed to do about it? I’m old, retired these eleven years, past it, over the hill. …”
“They are still out there,” said Monk as he stood up and put the files back in his case. “Millions of them. Veterans. Some served under you, others remember you, most have heard of you. They will still listen if you speak.”
“Look, Mr. American, this land of mine has suffered more than you can ever understand. This Motherland of mine is soaked in the blood of her sons and daughters. Now you tell me there is more to come. I grieve, if it is true, but I can do nothing.”
“And the army, w
hich will be made to do these things? What of the army, your army?”
“It is not my army anymore.”
“It’s as much your army as anyone else’s.”
“It’s a defeated army.”
“No, not defeated. The Communist regime was defeated. Not the soldiers, not your soldiers. They were withdrawn. Now here is a man who wants to rebuild them. But for a new purpose. Aggression, invasion, enslavement, slaughter.”
“Why should I?”
“Do you have a car, General?”
The old man looked up from the fire, startled.
“Of course. A small one. It gets me about.”
“Drive into Moscow. To the Alexandrovsky Gardens. To the big polished red granite stone. By the flame. Ask them what they would want of you. Not me. Them.”
Monk left. By dawn he was back in yet another safe house with his Chechen bodyguards. It was the night the printing presses blew up.
¯
AMONG the many arcane and historic institutions that still exist in Britain, few are more so than the College of Arms, whose existence goes back to the reign of Richard III. The senior officers of the college are the Kings of Arms and Heralds.
In medieval times, as their name implies, the heralds were first used to convey messages between warlords across the battlefield under a flag of truce. Between wars they were given a different job.
In peacetime it was customary for knights and nobles to gather for mock warfare in tournaments and jousts. As the knights were covered in body armor, often with the visor pulled down, the herald whose job it was to announce the next tourney might have a problem identifying the man inside the armor. To solve this problem, nobles carried an emblem or device upon their shields. Thus a herald seeing a shield with the sign of the bear and ragged staff would know that the Earl of Warwick was inside there somewhere.
From this function the heralds became the experts and arbiters of who was who, and more important, who had the right to call himself who. They traced and recorded the bloodlines of aristocracy down the generations.