The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man

Russia

After a series of setbacks of a varied nature, Gennady Aksakov could smell the scent of victory once more. And a sensational one at that. He appeared to be the only one who realized that Merkel, in Germany, was on her way to defeat. After all, a victory was no victory if it wasn’t possible to rule after winning.

Gennady administered grotesquely large sums of money for himself and his best friend. The capital was safely held abroad, made even safer in that it was protected by Gennady’s Finnish passport. No matter what sorts of sanctions the world decided to slap on Russia and its citizens, no one could freeze the Finnish Aksakov’s assets. He was financially secure, and so was the president.

Lately they’d had varying levels of success. With the help of 116,000 Twitter accounts, Aksakov and his army of internet soldiers had worked on the voters of Britain before the Brexit referendum. Only an amateur would allow all the accounts to be automated bots: people would notice that. The secret was a perfectly balanced mixture of fully automated, half-automated, and one hundred per cent human accounts. The message, however, was relatively uniform – namely, that the Brits should turn their backs on Europe.

Volodya cackled with joy and thumped Gena on the back when the results turned out to be 52–48 ‘leave’. Gena responded humbly that, even without his help, it might easily have been 51–49.

Not long after Brexit there was the American presidential election, which had gone so frightfully well that by now it was just frightful.

The parliamentary elections in the Netherlands and France, though, showed that Gena and Volodya weren’t invincible after all. Despite massive support from Moscow, the numbers of the Dutch PVV didn’t increase enough to bring about political chaos. It took over two hundred days for the centre right to put together a coalition government, but in the end they succeeded.

In France, the Russians nearly lost in a walkover. The plan was to take sides on both right and left and polemize to the extent that Marine Le Pen would dash past all but one competitor, at which point the Russians would sink said competitor. But when that bastard made a complete fool of himself before Moscow was ready to sink him, a new middle-of-the-road candidate popped up out of nowhere. Gena had no time to reposition, and France ended up with an EU-friendly president. The trolls’ disinformation about Macron’s secret life as a homosexual only fired up Macron and his voters. If there was anything you were allowed to devote yourself to in France, it was diverse alternative romantic encounters.

Up next after that blunder was the fiasco in Sweden: the four million euros in support of the neo-Nazi whose thanks for the financial aid involved getting himself killed. The neo-Nazi’s brother had, according to unanimous intelligence reports, been the one subsequently to shoot a funeral parlour to hell. What was absolutely inconceivable about this story was that the brother (who was just as much a Nazi) had tried to take the life of Allan Karlsson of all people! The hundred-and-one-year-old who had caused such a kerfuffle in Pyongyang had been promoted to diplomat, at which point he had evidently entered the funerary trade and, for the second time in a brief period, acted in direct opposition to Russian state interest. All of these conclusions had been drawn from an intercepted conversation between an individual police inspector and the Swedish minister for foreign affairs, who had, carelessly enough, used a non-secure phone within her department. Perhaps Kim Jong-un was right: they should have tracked down that old man and slit his throat. But now, in any case, he had disappeared again.

Gennady decided to wait a week or two, then get in touch, once again, with the dead neo-Nazi’s living brother to repeat the terms and conditions, or, alternatively, remove him from the equation.

While he waited, he would have to try to relish the thought that it would soon be time for revenge. Everyone said Merkel was the obvious victor in the German election, that the Social Democrat candidate was too weak. No one wanted to see what Gennady saw: the Social Democrats would refuse seats in Merkel’s government if they did poorly in the election, for anything else would be political suicide. The Russian tactic was to further weaken what was already weak, combined with genuine but secret party support to the right-wing nationalist party, AfD. This way they were attacking Merkel on two fronts without actually touching her. So she would win the election, but she wouldn’t be able to build a coalition government. When this dawned on her, she would finally give up. The last thing Russia needed was that hopelessly strong bitch in Berlin.

‘The Social Democrats lost three more percentage points in the latest poll,’ Gennady Aksakov told his president. ‘Two of them landed with our friends in AfD.’

‘You’re a genius, Gena,’ said President Putin. ‘Have I mentioned that before?’

‘Many times, Mr President.’ His best friend smiled. ‘So many times that I’m starting to believe you.’