The Devil's Alternative

WHILE ADAM MUNRO was changing trains at Revolution Square shortly before eleven A.M. that morning of June 10, a convoy of a dozen sleek black Zil limousines was sweeping through the Borovitsky Gate in the Kremlin wall a hundred feet above his head and thirteen hundred feet southwest of him. The Soviet Politburo was about to begin a meeting that would change history.

The Kremlin is a triangular compound, with its apex, dom­inated by the Sobakin Tower, pointing due north. On all sides it is protected by a fifty-foot wall studded by eighteen towers and penetrated by four gates.

The southern two thirds of this triangle is the tourist area, where docile parties troop along to admire the cathedrals, halls, and palaces of the long-dead tsars. At the midsection is a cleared swath of tarmacadam, patrolled by guards, an invis­ible dividing line across which tourists may not step. But the cavalcade of custom-built limousines that morning purred across this open space toward the three buildings in the northern part of the Kremlin.

The smallest of these is the Kremlin Theater to the east. Half exposed and half hidden behind the theater stands the building of the Council of Ministers, seemingly the home of the government, inasmuch as the ministers meet here. But the real government of the USSR lies not in the Council of Min­isters but in the Politburo, the tiny, exclusive group who constitute the pinnacle of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or CPSU.

The third building is the biggest. It lies up along the western facade, just behind the wall’s crenelations, overlook­ing the Alexandrovsky Gardens down below. In shape it is a long, slim rectangle running north. The southern end is the old Arsenal, a museum for antique weaponry. But just behind the Arsenal the interior walls are blocked off. To reach the upper section, one must arrive from outside and penetrate a high, wrought-iron barrier that spans the gap between the Ministers Building and the Arsenal. The limousines that morning swept through the wrought-iron gates and came to rest beside the upper entrance to the secret building.

In shape, the upper Arsenal is a hollow rectangle; inside is a narrow courtyard running north and south, and dividing the complex into two even narrower blocks of apartments and of­fices. There are four stories, including the attics. Halfway up the inner, eastern office block, on the third floor, overlooking the courtyard only and screened from prying eyes, is the room where the Politburo meets every Thursday morning to hold sway over 250 million Soviet citizens and scores of mil­lions more who like to think they dwell outside the bound­aries of the Russian empire.

For an empire it is. Although in theory the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic is one of fifteen republics that make up the Soviet Union, in effect the Russia of the tsars, ancient or modern, rules the other fourteen non-Russian re­publics with a rod of iron. The three arms Russia uses and needs to implement this rule are the Red Army, including as it always does the Navy and Air Force; the Committee of State Security, or KGB, with its 100,000 staffers, 300,000 armed troops, and 600,000 informers; and the Party Organi­zations Section of the General Secretariat of the Central Committee, controlling the Party cadres in every place of work, thought, abode, study, and leisure from the Arctic to the hills of Persia, from the fringes of Brunswick to the shores of the Sea of Japan. And that is just inside the empire.

The room in which the Politburo meets in the Arsenal Building of the Kremlin is about fifty feet long and twenty-five wide, not enormous for the power enclosed in it. It is decorated in the heavy, marbled decor favored by the Party bosses, but dominated by a long table topped with green baize. The table is T-shaped.

That morning, June 10, 1982, was unusual, for they had received no agenda, just a summons. And the men who grouped at the table to take their places sensed, with the per­ceptive collective nose for danger that had brought them all to this pinnacle, that something of importance was afoot.

Seated at the center point of the head of the T in his usual chair was the chief of them all, Maxim Rudin. Ostensibly his superiority lay in his title of President of the USSR. But nothing except the weather is ever quite what it appears in Russia. His real power came to him through his title of Gen­eral Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR. As such, he was also Chairman of the Central Committee, and Chair­man of the Politburo.

At the age of seventy-one he was craggy, brooding, and immensely cunning; had he not been the latter, he would never have occupied the chair that had once supported Stalin (who rarely ever called Politburo meetings), Malenkov, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev. To his left and right he was flanked by four secretaries from his own personal secretariat, men loyal to him personally above all else. Behind him, at each corner of the north wall of the chamber, was a small table. At one sat two stenographers, a man and a woman, taking down every word in shorthand. At the other, as a countercheck, two men hunched over the slowly turning spools of a tape recorder. There was a spare recorder to take over during spool changes.

The Politburo had thirteen members, and the other twelve ranged themselves, six a side, down the stem of the T-shaped table, facing jotting pads, carafes of water, ashtrays. At the far end of this arm of the table was one single chair. The Po­litburo men checked numbers to make sure no one was miss­ing. For the empty seat was the Penal Chair, sat in only by a man on his last appearance in that room, a man forced to lis­ten to his own denunciation by his former colleagues, a man facing disgrace, ruin, and once, not long ago, death at the Black Wall of the Lubyanka. The custom has always been to delay the condemned man until, on entering, he finds all seats taken and only the Penal Chair free. Then he knows. But this morning it was empty. And all were present.

Rudin leaned back and surveyed the twelve through half-closed eyes, the smoke from his inevitable cigarette drifting past his face. He still favored the old-style Russian papyrossy, half tobacco and half thin cardboard tube, the tube nipped twice between finger and thumb to filter the smoke. His aides had been taught to pass them to him one after the other, and his doctors to shut up.

To his left on the stem of the table was Vassili Petrov, age forty-nine, his own protege and young for the job he held, head of the Party Organizations Section of the General Secre­tariat of the Central Committee. Rudin could count on him in the trouble that lay ahead. Beside Petrov was the veteran Foreign Minister, Dmitri Rykov, who would side with Rudin because he had nowhere else to go. Beyond him was Yuri Ivanenko, slim and ruthless at fifty-three, standing out like a sore thumb in his elegant London-tailored suit, as if flaunting his sophistication to a group of men who hated all forms of Westernness. Picked personally by Rudin to be chairman of the KGB, Ivanenko would side with him simply because the opposition would come from quarters who hated Ivanenko and wanted him destroyed.

On the other side of the table sat Yefrem Vishnayev, also young for the job, like half the post-Brezhnev Politburo. At fifty-five he was the Party theoretician, spare, ascetic, disap­proving, the scourge of dissidents and deviationists, guardian of Marxist purity, and consumed by a pathological loathing of the capitalist West. The opposition would come here, Ru­din knew. By his side was Marshal Nikolai Kerensky, age sixty-three, Defense Minister and chief of the Red Army. He would go where the interests of the Red Army led him.

That left seven, including Vladimir Komarov, responsible for Agriculture and sitting white-faced because he, like Rudin and Ivanenko alone, knew roughly what was to come. The KGB chief betrayed no emotion; the rest did not know.

“It” came when Rudin gestured to one of the Kremlin praetorian guards at the door at the far end of the room to admit the person waiting in fear and trembling outside.

“Let me present Professor Ivan Ivanovich Yakovlev, Com­rades,” Rudin growled as the man advanced timorously to the end of the table and stood waiting, his sweat-damp report in his hands. “The professor is our senior agronomist and grain specialist from the Ministry of Agriculture, and a member of the Academy of Sciences. He has a report for our attention. Proceed, Professor.”

Rudin, who had read the report several days earlier in the privacy of his study, leaned back and gazed above the man’s head at the far ceiling. Ivanenko carefully lit a Western king-size filtered cigarette. Komarov wiped his brow and studied his hands. The professor cleared his throat.

“Comrades,” he began hesitantly. No one disagreed that they were comrades. With a deep breath the scientist stared down at his papers and plunged straight into his report.

“Last December and January our long-range weather fore­cast satellites predicted an unusually damp winter and early spring. As a result and in accordance with habitual scientific practice, it was decided at the Ministry of Agriculture that our seed grain for the spring planting should be treated with a prophylactic dressing to inhibit fungoid infections that would probably be prevalent as a result of the dampness. This has been done many times before.

“The treatment selected was a dual-purpose seed dressing: an organomercurial compound to inhibit fungoid attack on the germinating grain, and a pesticide and bird repellant called lindane. It was agreed in scientific committee that be­cause the USSR, following the unfortunate damage through frost to the winter wheat crop, would need at least one hundred forty million tons of crop from the spring wheat plantings, it would be necessary to sow six and a quarter mil­lion tons of seed grain.”

All eyes were on him now, the fidgeting stilled. The Polit­buro members could smell danger a mile off. Only Komarov, the one responsible for Agriculture, stared at the table in misery. Several eyes swiveled to him, sensing blood. The pro­fessor swallowed hard and went on.

“At the rate of two ounces of organomercurial seed dressing per ton of grain, the requirement was for three hundred fifty tons of dressing. There were only seventy tons in stock. An immediate order was sent to the manufacturing plant for this dressing at Kuibyshev to go into immediate pro­duction to make up the required two hundred eighty tons.”

“Is there only one such factory?” asked Petrov.

“Yes, Comrade. The tonnages required do not justify more factories. The Kuibyshev factory is a major chemical plant, making many insecticides, weed killers, fertilizers, and so forth. The production of the two hundred eighty tons of this chemical would take less than forty hours.”

“Continue,” ordered Rudin.

“Due to a confusion in communication, the factory was undergoing annual maintenance, and time was running short if the dressing was to be distributed to the one hundred twenty-seven dressing stations for seed grain scattered across the Soviet Union, the grain treated, and then taken back to the thousands of state and collective farms in time for planting. So an energetic young official and Party cadre was sent from Moscow to hurry things along. It appears he ordered the workmen to terminate what they were doing, restore the plant to operating order, and start it functioning again.”

“He failed to do it in time?” rasped Marshal Kerensky.

“No, Comrade Marshal, the factory started work again, al­though the maintenance engineers had not quite finished. But something malfunctioned. A hopper valve. Lindane is a very powerful chemical, and the dosage of the lindane to the re­mainder of the organomercurial compound has to be strictly regulated.

“The valve on the lindane hopper, although registering one-third open on the control panel, was in fact stuck at full open. The whole two hundred eighty tons of dressing were af­fected.”

“What about quality control?” asked one of the members, who had been born on a farm. The professor swallowed again and wished he could quietly go into exile in Siberia without any more of this torture.

“There was a conjunction of coincidence and error,” he confessed. “The chief analytical and quality-control chemist was away on holiday at Sochi during the plant closedown. He was summoned back by cable. But because of fog in the Kuibyshev area, his plane was diverted and he had to con­tinue his journey by train. When he arrived, production was complete.”

“The dressing was not tested?” asked Petrov incredulously. The professor looked more sick than ever.

“The chemist insisted on making quality-control tests. The young functionary from Moscow wanted the entire produc­tion shipped at once. An argument ensued. In the event, a compromise was reached. The chemist wanted to test every tenth bag of dressing, twenty-eight in all. The functionary in­sisted he could have only one. That was when the third error occurred.

“The new bags had been stacked along with the reserve of seventy tons left over from last year. In the warehouse, one of the loaders, receiving a report to send one single bag to the laboratory for testing, selected one of the old bags. Tests proved it was perfectly in order, and the entire consignment was shipped.”

He ended his report. There was nothing more to say. He could have tried to explain that a conjunction of three mis­takes—a mechanical malfunction, an error of judgment by two men under pressure, and a piece of carelessness by a warehouseman—had combined to produce the catastrophe. But that was not his job, and he did not intend to make lame excuses for other men. The silence in the room was murder­ous.

Vishnayev came in with icy clarity.

“What exactly is the effect of an excessive component of lindane in this organomercurial compound?” he asked.

“Comrade, it causes a toxic effect on the germinating seed in the ground, rather than a protective effect. The seedlings come up—if at all—stunted, sparse, and mottled brown. There is virtually no grain yield from such affected stems.”

“And how much of the spring planting has been affected?” asked Vishnayev coldly.

“Just about four fifths, Comrade. The seventy tons of reserve compound was perfectly all right. The two hundred eighty tons of new compound were all affected by the jam­ming hopper valve.”

“And the toxic dressing was all mixed in with seed grain and planted?”

“Yes, Comrade.”

Two minutes later the professor was dismissed, to his pri­vacy and his oblivion.

Vishnayev turned to Komarov.

“Forgive my ignorance, Comrade, but it would appear you had some foreknowledge of this affair. What has happened to the functionary who produced this ... cockup?” (He used a crude Russian expression that refers to a pile of dog mess on the pavement.)

Ivanenko cut in.

“He is in our hands,” he said, “along with the analytical chemist who deserted his function, the warehouseman, who is simply of exceptionally low intelligence, and the maintenance team of engineers, who claim they demanded and received written instructions to wind up their work before they had finished.”

“This functionary, has he talked?” asked Vishnayev.

Ivanenko considered a mental image of the broken man in the cellars beneath the Lubyanka.

“Extensively,” he said.

“Is he a saboteur, a fascist agent?”

“No,” said Ivanenko with a sigh. “Just an idiot; an ambi­tious apparatchik trying to overfulfill his orders. You can believe me on that one. We do know by now the inside of that man’s skull.”

“Then one last question, just so that we can all be sure of the dimensions of this affair.” Vishnayev swung back to the unhappy Komarov. “We already know we will save only fifty million tons of the expected hundred million from the winter wheat. How much will we now get from the spring wheat this coming October?”

Komarov glanced at Rudin, who nodded imperceptibly.

“Out of the hundred-forty-million-ton target for the spring-sown wheat and other grains, we cannot reasonably expect more than fifty million tons,” he said quietly.

The meeting sat in stunned horror.

“That means a total yield over both crops of one hundred million tons,” breathed Petrov. “A national shortfall of one hundred forty million tons. We could have taken a shortfall of fifty, even seventy million tons. We’ve done it before, en­dured the shortages, and bought what we could from else­where. But this ...”

Rudin closed the meeting.

“We have as big a problem here as we have ever confront­ed, Chinese and American imperialism included. I propose we adjourn and separately seek some suggestions. It goes without saying that this news does not pass outside those present in this room. Our next meeting will be a week from today.”

As the thirteen men and the four aides at the top table came to their feet, Petrov turned to the impassive Ivanenko.

“This doesn’t mean shortages,” he muttered, “this means famine.”

The Soviet Politburo descended to their chauffeur-driven Zil limousines, still absorbing the knowledge that a weedy professor of agronomy had just placed a time bomb under one of the world’s two superpowers.

Adam Munro’s thoughts a week later as he sat in the circle at the Bolshoi Theater on Karl Marx Prospekt were not on war but on love—and not for the excited embassy secretary beside him who had prevailed on him to take her to the bal­let.

He was not a great fan of ballet, though he conceded he liked some of the music. But the grace of the entrechats and fouettes—or as he called it, the jumping about—left him cold. By the second act of Giselle, the evening’s offering, his thoughts were straying back again to Berlin.

It had been a beautiful affair, a once-in-a-lifetime love. He was twenty-four, turning twenty-five, and she nineteen, dark and lovely. Because of her job they had had to conduct their affair in secret, furtively meeting in darkened streets so that he could pick her up in his car and take her back to his small flat at the western end of Charlottenburg without anyone’s seeing. They had loved and talked, she had made him sup­pers, and they had loved again.

At first, the clandestine nature of their affair, like married people slipping away from the world and each other’s part­ners, had added spice, piquancy to the loving. But by the summer of 1961, when the forests of Berlin were ablaze with leaves and flowers, when there was boating on the lakes and swimming from the shores, it had become cramped, frustrat­ing. That was when he had asked her to marry him, and she had almost agreed. She might still have agreed, but then came the Wall. It was completed on August 13, 1961, but it was obvious for a week that it was going up.

That was when she made her decision, and they loved for the last time. She could not, she told him, abandon her parents to what would happen to them: to the disgrace, to the loss of her father’s trusted job, her mother’s beloved apartment, for which she had waited so many years through the dark times. She could not destroy her young brother’s chances of a good education and prospects. And finally, she could not bear to know that she would never see her beloved homeland again.

So she left, and he watched from the shadows as she slipped back into the East through the last uncompleted sec­tion in the Wall, sad and lonely and heartbroken—and very, very beautiful.

He had never seen her again, and he had never mentioned her to anyone, guarding her memory with his quiet Scottish secretiveness. He had never let on that he had loved and still loved a Russian girl called Valentina who had been a secre­tary-stenographer with the Soviet delegation to the Four Power Conference in Berlin. And that, as he well knew, was far out against the rules.

After Valentina, Berlin had palled. A year later he was transferred by Reuters to Paris, and it was two years after that, when he was back in London again, kicking his heels in the head office on Fleet Street, that a civilian he had known in Berlin, a man who had worked at the British headquarters there, Hitler’s old Olympic stadium, had made a point of looking him up and renewing their acquaintance. There had been a dinner, and another man had joined them. The ac­quaintance from the stadium had excused himself and left during coffee. The newcomer had been friendly and noncom­mittal. But by the second brandy he had made his point.

“Some of my associates in the Firm,” he had said with dis­arming diffidence, “were wondering if you could do us a little favor.”

That was the first time Munro had heard the term “the Firm.” Later he would learn the terminology. To those in the Anglo-American alliance of intelligence services, a strange and guarded but ultimately vital alliance, the SIS was always called “the Firm.” To its employees, those in the counterintelligence arm, or MI5, were “the Colleagues.” The CIA at Langley, Virginia, was “the Company,” and its staff “the Cousins.” On the opposite side worked “the Opposition,” whose headquarters in Moscow were at No. 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, named after Feliks Dzerzhinsky, Lenin’s secret-police boss and the founder of the old Cheka. This building would always be known as “the Center,” and the territory east of the Iron Curtain as “the Bloc.”

The meeting in the London restaurant was in December 1964, and the proposal, confirmed later in a small flat in Chelsea, was for a “little run into the Bloc.” He made it in the spring of 1965 while ostensibly covering the Leipzig Fair in East Germany. It was a pig of a run.

He left Leipzig at the right time and drove to the meet in Dresden, close by the Albertinium Museum. The package in his inner pocket felt like five Bibles, and everyone seemed to be looking at him. The East German Army officer who knew where the Russians were locating their tactical rockets in the Saxon hillsides showed up half an hour late, by which time two officers of the People’s Police undoubtedly were watching him. The swap of packages went off all right, somewhere in the bushes of the nearby park. Then he returned to his car and set off southwest for the Gera Crossroads and the Ba­varian border checkpoint. On the outskirts of Dresden a local driver rammed him from the front offside, although Munro had the right-of-way. He had not even had time to transfer the package to the hiding place between the trunk and the back seat; it was still in the breast pocket of his blazer.

There were two gut-wrenching hours in a local police station, every moment dreading the command “Turn out your pockets, please, mein Herr.” There was enough up against his breastbone to collect him twenty-five years in Potma labor camp. Eventually he was allowed to go. Then the battery went flat and four policemen had to push-start him.

The front offside wheel was screaming from a fractured roller bearing inside the hub, and it was suggested he might like to stay overnight and get it mended. He pleaded that his visa time expired at midnight—which it did—and set off again. He made the checkpoint on the Saale River between Flauen in East Germany and Hof in the West at ten minutes before midnight, having driven at twenty miles per hour all the way, rending the night air with the screaming of the front wheel. When he chugged past the Bavarian guards on the other side, he was wet with sweat.

A year later he left Reuters and accepted a suggestion to sit for the Civil Service Entrance examinations as a late en­trant. He was twenty-nine.

The CSE examinations are unavoidable for anyone trying to join the Civil Service. Based on the results, the Treasury has first choice of the cream, which enables that department to foul up the British economy with impeccable academic references. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office get next choice, and as Munro had a First he had no trouble entering the foreign service, usually the cover for staffers of the Firm.

In sixteen years he had specialized in economic intelligence matters and the Soviet Union, though he had never been there before. He had had foreign postings in Turkey, Austria, and Mexico. In 1967, just turned thirty-one, he had married. But after the honeymoon it had been an increasingly loveless union, a mistake, and it was quietly ended six years later. Since then there had been affairs, of course, and they were all known to the Firm, but he had stayed single.

There was one affair he had never mentioned to the Firm, and had the fact of it, and his covering up of it, leaked out, he would have been fired on the spot.

On joining the service, like everyone else, he had to write a complete life story of himself, followed by a viva voce exam­ination by a senior officer. (This procedure is repeated every five years of service. Among the matters of interest are inevi­tably any emotional or social involvement with personnel from behind the Iron Curtain—or anywhere else, for that matter.)

The first time he was asked, something inside him rebelled, as it had in the olive grove on Cyprus. He knew he was loyal, that he would never be suborned over the matter of Valen­tina, even if the Opposition knew about it, which he was cer­tain they did not. If an attempt were ever made to blackmail him over it, he would admit it and resign, but never accede. He just did not want the fingers of other men, not to mention filing clerks, rummaging through a part of the most private inside of him. Nobody owns me but me! So he said “No” to the question, and broke the rules. Once trapped by the lie, he had to stick with it. He repeated it three times in sixteen years. Nothing had ever happened because of it, and nothing ever would happen. He was certain of it. The affair was a secret, dead and buried. It would always be so.

Had he been less deep in his reverie, he might have noticed something. From a private box high in the left-hand wall of the theater, he was being observed. Before the lights went up for the entr’acte, the watcher had vanished.

The thirteen men who grouped around the Politburo table in the Kremlin the following day were subdued and watchful, sensing that the report of the professor of agronomy could trigger a faction fight such as there had not been since Khrushchev fell.

Rudin as usual surveyed them all through his drifting spire of cigarette smoke. Petrov of Party Organizations was in his usual seat to his left, with Ivanenko of the KGB beyond him. Rykov of Foreign Affairs shuffled his papers; Vishnayev the Party theoretician and Kerensky of the Red Army sat in stony silence. Rudin surveyed the other seven, calculating which way they would jump if it came to a fight.

There were the three non-Russians: Vitautas the Balt, from Vilnius, Lithuania; Chavadze the Georgian, from Tbilisi; and Mukhamed the Tajik, an Oriental and born a Muslim. The presence of each was a sop to the minorities, but in fact each had paid the price to be there. Each, Rudin knew, was com­pletely russified; the price had been high, higher than a Great Russian would have had to pay. Each had been First Party Secretary for his republic, and two still were. Each had super­vised programs of vigorous repression against their fellow na­tionals, crushing dissidents, nationalists, poets, writers, artists, intelligentsia, and workers who had even hinted at a less than one hundred percent acceptance of the rule of Great Russia over them. None could go back without the protection of Moscow, and each would side, if it came to it, with the fac­tion that would ensure his survival—that is, the winning one. Rudin did not relish the prospect of a faction fight, but he had held it in mind since he had first read Professor Yakovlev’s report in the privacy of his study.

That left four more, all Russians. There were Komarov of the Agriculture Ministry, still extremely ill at ease; Stepanov, head of the trade unions; Shushkin, responsible for liaison with foreign Communist parties worldwide; and Petryanov, with special responsibilities for economics and industrial plan­ning.

“Comrades,” began Rudin slowly, “you have all studied the Yakovlev report at your leisure. You have all observed Com­rade Komarov’s separate report to the effect that next Sep­tember and October our aggregate grain yield will fall short of target by close to one hundred forty million tons. Let us consider first questions first. Can the Soviet Union survive for one year on no more than one hundred million tons of grain?”

The discussion lasted an hour. It was bitter, acrimonious, but virtually unanimous. Such a shortage of grain would lead to privations that had not been seen since the Second World War. If the state bought even an irreducible minimum to make bread for the cities, the countryside would be left with almost nothing. The slaughter of livestock, as the winter snows covered the grazing lands and the beasts were left without forage or feed grains, would strip the Soviet Union of every four-footed animal. It would take a generation to recover the livestock herds. To leave even the minimum of grain on the land would starve the cities.

At last Rudin cut them short.

“Very well. If we insist on accepting the famine, both in grains and, as a consequence, in meat several months later, what will be the outcome in terms of national discipline?”

Petrov broke the ensuing silence. He admitted that there already existed a groundswell of restiveness among the broad masses of the people, evidenced by a recent rash of small outbreaks of disorder and resignations from the Party, all re­ported back to him in the Central Committee through the million tendrils of the Party machine. In the face of a true famine, many Party cadres could side with the proletariat.

The non-Russians nodded in agreement. In their republics Moscow’s grip was always likely to be less total then inside the RSFSR itself.

“We could strip the six East European satellites,” suggested Petryanov, not even bothering to refer to the East Europeans as “fraternal comrades.”

“Poland and Rumania would burst into flame for a start,” countered Shushkin, the liaison man with Eastern Europe. “Probably Hungary to follow suit.”

“The Red Army could deal with them,” snarled Marshal Kerensky.

“Not three at a time. Not nowadays,” said Rudin.

“We are still talking only of a total acquisition of ten mil­lion tons,” said Komarov. “It’s not enough.”

“Comrade Stepanov?” asked Rudin.

The head of the state-controlled trade unions chose his words carefully.

“In the event of genuine famine this winter and next spring through summer,” he said, studying his pencil, “it would not be possible to guarantee the absence of the outbreak of acts of disorder, perhaps on a wide scale.”

Ivanenko, sitting quietly, gazing at the Western king-size filter between his right forefinger and thumb, smelled more than smoke in his nostrils. He had scented fear many times: in the arrest procedures, in the interrogation rooms, in the corridors of his craft. He smelled it now. He and the men around him were powerful, privileged, protected. But he knew them all well; he had the files. And he, who knew no fear for himself, as the soul-dead know no fear, knew also that they all feared one thing more than war itself. If the So­viet proletariat, long-suffering, patient, oxlike in the face of deprivation, ever went berserk ...

All eyes were on him. Public “acts of disorder,” and the repression of them, were his territory.

“I could,” he said evenly, “cope with one Novocherkassk.” There was a hiss of indrawn breath down the table. “I could cope with ten, or even twenty. But the combined resources of the KGB could not cope with fifty.”

The mention of Novocherkassk brought the specter right out of the wallpaper, as he knew it would. On June 2, 1962, almost exactly twenty years earlier, the great industrial city of Novocherkassk had erupted in worker riots. But twenty years had not dimmed the memory.

It had started when by a stupid coincidence one ministry raised the price of meat and butter while another cut wages at the giant NEVZ locomotive works by thirty percent. In the resulting riots the shouting workers took over the city for three days, an unheard-of phenomenon in the Soviet Union. Equally unheard of, they booed the local Party leaders into trembling self-imprisonment in their own headquarters, shouted down a full general, charged ranks of armed soldiers, and pelted advancing tanks with mud until the vision slits clogged up and the tanks ground to a halt.

The response of Moscow was massive. Every single line, every road, every telephone, every track in and out of Novo­cherkassk was sealed so the news could not leak out. Two divisions of KGB special troops had to be drafted to finish off the affair and mop up the rioters. There were eighty-six civil­ians shot down in the streets, over three hundred wounded. None ever returned home; none was buried locally. Not only the wounded but every single member of every family of a dead or wounded man, woman, or child was deported to the camps of Gulag lest they persist in asking after their relatives and thus keep memory of the affair alive. Every trace was wiped out, but two decades later it was still well remembered inside the Kremlin.

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 proteges 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 this 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?”