When Ivanenko dropped his bombshell, there was silence again around the table. Rudin broke it.
“Very well, then. The conclusion seems inescapable. We will have to buy from abroad as never before. Comrade Komarov, what is the minimum we would need to buy abroad to avoid disaster?”
“Comrade Secretary-General, if we leave the irreducible minimum in the countryside and use every scrap of our thirty million tons of national reserve, we will need fifty-five million tons of grain from outside. That would mean the entire surplus, in a year of bumper crops, from both the United States and Canada,” Komarov answered.
“They’ll never sell it to us!” shouted Kerensky.
“They are not fools, Comrade Marshal,” Ivanenko cut in quietly. “Their Condor satellites must have warned them already that something is wrong with our spring wheat. But they cannot know what or how much. Not yet. But by the autumn they will have a pretty fair idea. And they are greedy, endlessly greedy for more money. I can raise the production levels in the gold mines of Siberia and Kolyma, ship more labor there from the camps of Mordovia. The money for such a purchase we can raise.”
“I agree with you on one point,” said Rudin, “but not on the other, Comrade Ivanenko. They may have the wheat, we may have the gold, but there is a chance, just a chance, that this time they will require concessions.”
At the word concessions, everyone stiffened.
“What kinds of concessions?” asked Marshal Kerensky suspiciously.
”One never knows until one negotiates,” said Rudin, “but it’s a possibility we have to face. They might require concessions in military areas. ...”
“Never!” shouted Kerensky, on his feet and red-faced.
“Our options are somewhat closed,” countered Rudin. “We appear to have agreed that a severe and nationwide famine is not tolerable. It would set back the progress of the Soviet Union and thence the global rule of Marxism-Leninism by a decade, maybe more. We need the grain; there are no more options. If the imperialists exact concessions in the military field, we may have to accept a drawback lasting two or three years, but only in order all the better to advance after the recovery.”
There was a general murmur of assent. Rudin was on the threshold of carrying his meeting. Then Vishnayev struck. He rose slowly as the buzz subsided.
“The issues before us, Comrades,” he began with silky reasonableness, “are massive, with incalculable consequences. I propose that this is too early to reach any binding conclusion. I propose an adjournment until two weeks from today, while we all think over what has been said and suggested.”
His ploy worked. He had bought his time, as Rudin had privately feared he would. The meeting agreed, ten against three, to adjourn without a resolution.
Yuri Ivanenko had reached the ground floor and was about to step into his waiting limousine when he felt a touch at his elbow. Standing beside him was a tall, beautifully tailored major of the Kremlin guard.
“The Comrade Secretary-General would like a word with you in his private suite, Comrade Chairman,” he said quietly. Without another word he turned and headed down a corridor leading along the building away from the main doorway. Ivanenko followed. As he tailed the major’s perfectly fitting barathea jacket, fawn whipcord trousers, and gleaming boots, it occurred to him that if any one of the men of the Politburo came to sit one day in the Penal Chair, the subsequent arrest would be carried out by his own KGB special troops, called Border Guards, with their bright green cap bands and shoulder boards, the sword-and-shield insignia of the KGB above the peaks of their caps.
But if he, Ivanenko alone, were to be arrested, the KGB would not be given the job, as they had not been trusted almost thirty years earlier to arrest Lavrenti Beria. It would be these elegant, disdainful Kremlin elite guards, the praetorians at the seat of ultimate power, who would do the job. Perhaps the self-assured major walking before him; he would have no qualms at all.
They reached a private elevator, ascended to the third floor again, and Ivanenko was shown into the private apartments of Maxim Rudin.
Stalin had lived in seclusion right in the heart of the Kremlin, but Malenkov and Khrushchev had ended the practice, preferring to establish themselves and most of their cronies in luxury apartments in a nondescript (from the outside) complex of apartment blocks at the far end of Kutuzovsky Prospekt. But when Rudin’s wife had died two years earlier, he had moved back to the Kremlin.
It was a comparatively modest apartment for this most powerful of men: six rooms, including a well-equipped kitchen, marble bathroom, private study, sitting room, dining room, and bedroom. Rudin lived alone, ate sparingly, dispensed with most luxuries, and was cared for by an elderly cleaning woman and the ever-present Misha, a hulking but silent-moving ex-soldier who never spoke but was never far away. When Ivanenko entered the study at Misha’s silent gesture, he found Maxim Rudin and Vassili Petrov already there. Rudin waved him to a vacant chair, and began without preamble.
“I’ve asked you both here because there is trouble brewing and we all know it,” he rumbled. “I’m old and I smoke too much. Two weeks ago I went out to see the quacks at Kuntsevo. They took some tests. Now they want me back again.”
Petrov shot Ivanenko a sharp look. The KGB chief was still impassive. He knew about the visit to the super-exclusive clinic in the woods southwest of Moscow; one of the doctors there reported back to him.
“The question of the succession hangs in the air, and we all know it,” Rudin continued. “We all also know, or should, that Vishnayev wants it.”
Rudin turned to Ivanenko.
“If he gets it, Yuri Aleksandrovich, and he’s young enough, that will be the end of you. He never approved of a professional taking over the KGB. He’ll put his own man, Krivoi, in your place.”
Ivanenko steepled his hands and gazed back at Rudin. Three years earlier Rudin had broken a long tradition in Soviet Russia of imposing a political Party luminary as chairman and chief of the KGB. Shelepin, Semichastny, Andropov—they had all been Party men placed over the KGB from outside the service. Only the professional Ivan Serov had nearly made it to the top through a tide of blood. Then Rudin had plucked Ivanenko from among the senior deputies to Andropov and favored him as the new chief.
That was not the only break with tradition. Ivanenko was young for the job of the world’s most powerful policeman and spymaster. Then again, he had served as an agent in Washington twenty years earlier, always a basis for suspicion among the xenophobes of the Politburo. He had a taste for Western elegance in his private life. And he was reputed, though none dared mention it, to have certain private reservations about dogma. That, for Vishnayev at least, was absolutely unforgivable.
“If he takes over, now or ever, that will also mark your cards, Vassili Alekseevich,” Rudin told Petrov. In private he was prepared to address both his protégés familiarly by using their patronymics, but never in public session.
Petrov nodded that he understood. He and Anatoly Krivoi had worked together in the Party Organizations Section of the General Secretariat of the Central Committee. Krivoi had been older and senior. He had expected the top job, but when it fell vacant, Rudin had preferred Petrov for the post that sooner or later carried the ultimate accolade, a seat on the all-powerful Politburo. Krivoi, embittered, had accepted the courtship of Vishnayev and had taken a post as the Party theoretician’s chief of staff and right-hand man. But Krivoi still wanted Petrov’s job.
Neither Ivanenko nor Petrov had forgotten that it was Vishnayev’s predecessor as Party theoretician, Mikhail Suslov, who had put together the majority that had toppled Khrushchev in 1964. Rudin let his words sink in.
“Yuri, you know my successor cannot be you, not with your background.” Ivanenko inclined his head; he had no illusions on that score. “But,” Rudin resumed, “you and Vassili together can keep this country on a steady course if you stick together and behind me. Next year I’m going, one way or the other. And when I go, I want you, Vassili, in th
is chair.”
The silence between the two younger men was electric. Neither could recall any predecessor of Rudin’s ever having been so forthcoming. Stalin had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and had probably been finished off by his own Politburo as he prepared to liquidate them all; Beria had tried for power and been arrested and shot by his fearful colleagues; Malenkov had fallen in disgrace, as had Khrushchev; Brezhnev had kept them all guessing until the last minute.
Rudin stood up to signal the reception was at an end.
“One last thing,” he said. “Vishnayev is up to something. He’s going to try to do a Suslov on me over this wheat foul-up. If he succeeds, we’re all finished—perhaps Russia, too—because he’s an extremist. He’s impeccable on theory but impossible on practicalities. Now I have to know what he’s doing, what he’s going to spring, whom he’s trying to enlist. Find out for me. Find out in fourteen days.”
The headquarters of the KGB, the Center, is a huge stone complex of office blocks taking up the whole northeastern facade of Dzerzhinsky Square at the top end of Karl Marx Prospekt. The complex is actually a hollow square, the front and both wings being devoted to the KGB, the rear block being Lubyanka interrogation center and prison. The proximity of the one to the other, with only the inner courtyard separating them, enables the interrogators to stay well on top of their work.
The chairman’s office is on the third floor, left of the main doorway. But he always comes by limousine with chauffeur and bodyguard through the side gateway. The office is a big, ornate room with mahogany-paneled walls and luxurious Oriental carpets. One wall carries the required portrait of Lenin, another a picture of Feliks Dzerzhinsky himself. Through the four tall, draped, bulletproof windows overlooking the square, the observer must look at yet another representation of the Cheka’s founder, standing twenty feet tall in bronze in the center of the square, sightless eye staring down Karl Marx Prospekt to Revolution Square.
Ivanenko disliked the heavy, fustian, overstuffed, and brocaded decor of Soviet officialdom, but there was little he could do about the office. The desk alone, of the furniture inherited from his predecessor, Andropov, he appreciated. It was immense and adorned with seven telephones. The most important was the Kremlevka, linking him directly with the Kremlin and Rudin. Next was the Vertushka, in KGB green, which connected him with other Politburo members and the Central Committee. Others joined him through high-frequency circuits to the principal KGB representatives throughout the Soviet Union and the East European satellites. Still others went directly to the Ministry of Defense and its intelligence arm, the GRU. All through separate exchanges. It was on this last one that he took the call he had been waiting ten days for, that afternoon three days before the end of June.
It was a brief one, from a man who called himself Arkady. Ivanenko had instructed the exchange to put Arkady straight through. The conversation was short.
“Better face-to-face,” said Ivanenko shortly. “Not now, not here. At my house, this evening.” He put the phone down.
Most senior Soviet leaders never take their work home with them. In fact, almost all Russians have two distinct personae; they have their official life and their private life, and never, if possible, shall the twain meet. The higher one gets, the greater the divide. As with the Mafia dons, whom the Politburo chiefs remarkably resemble, wives and families are simply not to be involved, even by listening to business talk, in the usually less-than-noble affairs that make up official life.
Ivanenko was different, the main reason he was distrusted by the risen apparatchiks of the Politburo. For the oldest reason in the world, he had no wife and family. Nor did he choose to live near the others, most of them content to dwell cheek by jowl with each other in the apartments on the western end of Kutuzovsky Prospekt during the week, and in neighboring villas grouped around Zhukovka and Usovo on weekends. Members of the Soviet elite never like to be too far from each other.
Soon after taking over the KGB, Yuri Ivanenko had found a handsome old house in the Arbat, the once fine residential quarter of central Moscow, favored before the Revolution by merchants. Within six months, teams of KGB builders, painters, and decorators had restored it—an impossible feat in Soviet Russia save for a Politburo member.
Having restored the building to its former elegance, albeit with the most modern security and alarm devices, Ivanenko had no trouble, either, in furnishing it with the ultimate in Soviet status—Western furniture. The kitchen was the last cry in California-convenient, the entire room flown to Moscow from Los Angeles in packing crates. The living room and bedroom were paneled in Swedish pine via Finland, and the bathroom was sleek in marble and tile. Ivanenko himself occupied only the upper floor, which was a self-contained suite of rooms and also included his study—music room with its wall-to-wall stereo deck by Phillips and a library of foreign and forbidden books in English, French, and German, all of which he spoke. There was a dining room off the living room, and a sauna off the bedroom to complete the floor area of the upper story.
The staff of chauffeur, bodyguard, and personal valet, all KGB men, lived on the ground floor, which also housed the garage. Such was the house to which he returned after work and awaited his caller.
Arkady, when he came, was a thickset, ruddy-faced man in civilian clothes, though he would have felt more at home in his usual uniform of brigadier general on the Red Army General Staff. He was one of Ivanenko’s agents inside the Army. He hunched forward on his chair in Ivanenko’s sitting room, perched on the edge as he talked. The spare KGB chief leaned back at ease, asking a few questions, making the occasional note on a jotting pad. When the brigadier had finished, he thanked him and rose to press a wall button. In seconds, the door opened as Ivanenko’s valet, a young blond guard of startling good looks, arrived to show the visitor out by the door in the side wall.
Ivanenko considered the news for a long time, feeling increasingly tired and dispirited. So that was what Vishnayev was up to. He would tell Maxim Rudin in the morning.
He had a lengthy bath, redolent of an expensive London bath oil, wrapped himself in a silk robe, and sipped an old French brandy. Finally he returned to the bedroom, turned out the lights, barring only a small lantern in the corner, and stretched himself on the wide coverlet. Picking up the telephone by the bedside, he pressed one of the call buttons. It was answered instantly.
“Valodya,” he said quietly, using the affectionate diminutive of Vladimir, “come up here, will you, please?”
CHAPTER THREE
THE POLISH AIRLINES twin-jet dipped a wing over the wide sweep of the Dnieper River and settled into its final approach to Borispil Airport outside Kiev, capital of the Ukraine. From his window seat, Andrew Drake looked down eagerly at the sprawling city beneath him. He was tense with excitement.
Along with the other hundred-plus package tourists from London who had staged through Warsaw earlier in the day, he queued nearly an hour for passport control and customs. At the immigration control he slipped his passport under the plate-glass window and waited. The man in the booth was in uniform, Border Guard uniform, with the green band around his cap and the sword-and-shield emblem of the KGB above its peak. He looked at the photo in the passport, then stared hard at Drake.
“An ... drev ... Drak?” he asked.
Drake smiled and bobbed his head.
“Andrew Drake,” he corrected gently. The immigration man glowered back. He examined the visa, issued in London, tore off the incoming half, and clipped the exit visa to the passport. Then he handed it back. Drake was in.
On the Intourist motor coach from the airport to the seventeen-story Lybid Hotel, he took stock again of his fellow passengers. About half were of Ukrainian extraction, excited and innocent, visiting the land of their fathers. The other half were of British stock, just curious tourists. All seemed to have British passports. Drake, with his English name, was part of the second group. He had given no indication he spoke fluent Ukrainian and passable Russian.
During
the ride they met Ludmilla, their Intourist guide for the tour. She was a Russian, and spoke Russian to the driver, who, though a Ukrainian, replied in the same language. As the motor coach left the airport she smiled brightly and in reasonable English began to describe the tour ahead of them.
Drake glanced at his itinerary: two days in Kiev, trotting around the eleventh-century Cathedral of St. Sophia (“A wonderful example of Kievan-Rus architecture, where Prince Yaroslav the Wise is buried,” warbled Ludmilla from up front) and Golden Gate, not to mention Vladimir Hill, the State University, the Academy of Sciences, and the Botanical Gardens. No doubt, thought Drake bitterly, no mention would be made of the 1964 fire at the Academy Library, in which priceless manuscripts, books, and archives devoted to Ukrainian national literature, poetry, and culture had been destroyed; no mention that the fire brigade failed to arrive for three hours; no mention that the fire was set by the KGB itself as their answer to the nationalistic writings of “the Sixtiers.”
After Kiev, there would be a day trip by hydrofoil to Kanev, then a day in Ternopol, where a man called Miroslav Kaminsky would certainly not be a subject for discussion, and finally the tour would go on to Lvov.
As he had expected, he heard only Russian on the streets of the intensively russified capital city of Kiev. It was not until Kanev and Ternopol that he heard Ukrainian spoken extensively. His heart sang to hear it spoken so widely by so many people, and his only regret was that he had to keep saying “I’m sorry, do you speak English?” But he would wait until he could visit the two addresses that he had memorized so well he could say them backward.