The Yankees and the British did not need to waste missiles on what was left of the Mother Country, they could simply fly across it and bomb it a will!
Besides, somebody somewhere had had to call time on the madness.
Of the great cities of the Soviet Union only Sverdlovsk, until 1924 Yekaterinburg, remained. Many towns and smaller cities elsewhere had survived the Cuban Missiles War, but Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk and all the others ‘great’ cities were seas of rubble. That places like Odessa on the Black Sea coast, and areas of the southern Republics, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan survived, or that towns and bases in the wilderness of the Siberian steppes, or that places like Tomsk or Barnaul had escaped the war, mattered little because at least two-thirds of the pre-war population of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had been consumed by the fires and practically everywhere there had been famine and disease, and unspeakable hardships beyond sane comprehension. That, after all, was why the decision had been taken to fight on; to wrest back something of that which had been lost, to seize and hold clean, unburned land with sufficient natural resources to be able, someday to alleviate the catastrophic situation of the Mother Country.
Sverdlovsk’s population had been around eight hundred thousand before the war, since then it had doubled. The surviving cities had become beacons for the survivors, each one an oasis in a cold, foodless, shattered landscape. Even though killer epidemics swept through the overcrowded city, and the daily food ration was barely enough to keep the young, the old and the infirm alive, the factories of what had been the Soviet Union’s fourth or fifth largest city had become the anvil upon which the first halting steps towards national reconstruction and rebirth had been hammered out the previous spring.
Sverdlovsk had first become a centre of heavy industry under the Five Year plans of the 1930s. Later when Soviet industry was relocated east out of the reach of the advancing Germans in 1941 and 1942, the great Uralmash — an abbreviation of ‘Urals Machine-Building Plant’ — facility became the keystone of a massive expansion in national industrial capacity. During the Great Patriotic War Uralmash built blast furnaces, rolling mills, presses, cranes and drilling and drag-line equipment for the mining and metallurgical industries of the Urals and Siberia. Guns, armour plate, the hulls for tanks and self-propelled artillery poured out of the factories of Sverdlovsk. After that war, Uralmash was redesigned and rebuilt, and production had largely switched to peaceful outputs but always with the caveat that in the event of war, the factories would turn ploughshares back into swords. Thus Uralmash, having escaped the Cuban Missiles War, was now the grate smoking hub of the new Soviet Union’s war production. There had been arguments about further dispersal; in the end the concentration of all the Mother Country’s surviving eggs in the single basket of the Sverdlovsk-Chelyabinsk ‘undamaged zone’ had been the only way to ensure that at least two full strength mechanised armies could be put into the field, and as importantly, in theory at least, mechanically sustained for a sixty day campaign…
Babadzhanian shivered at the thought that, if he or his comrades of the collective leadership made a single mistake, Sverdlovsk might go the way of Moscow, Kiev and all the other great cities of the motherland.
Defence Minister Marshal of the Soviet Union sixty-four year old Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov, stepped up to Babadzhanian and slapped him jovially on the shoulder. It was the first time the two men had met since Babadzhanian’s ‘battlefield’ promotion three days ago.
“Cheer up, Comrade Marshal,” Chuikov observed, chuckling like a bear with an ulcer, his gnarled oddly cherubic features creasing this way and that as he smiled.
Babadzhanian straightened to attention before the other members of the collective leadership, nodding respectful acknowledgments before stepping forward to shake hands and exchange the ritual kisses.
The years were catching up with sixty year old Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin. His face had a grey hue and his eyes were rheumy, when he breathed his chest rattled and as soon as he had greeted the newcomer he sagged gratefully back into his seat at the over-large pine table aligned with one end of the rectangular hall.
Fifty-seven year old Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was the de facto ‘chairman’ of the ruling triumvirate. Unlike his old friend Alexei Kosygin he was in good health, radiating bull-like strength and confidence. Throughout his career people had underestimated Brezhnev’s feral intellect and his innate political nous, and like every man who had risen through the Party during the Stalin years he was as tough as an ox and a born survivor.
He and Kosygin were alike and superbly matched in that respect. Of the two Kosygin had been closer to Stalin, so close that he had daily feared for his life and never left home without updating his wife on what to say to the secret police — the NKVD in those days — if he failed to return, or if they knocked on the door in his absence. Brezhnev had been Nikita Khrushchev’s man, leapfrogging Kosygin in the Party pecking order in the years before the Cuban Missiles disaster; but both men were wise enough to put past differences and old suspicions behind them.
“Comrade Alexei Nikolayevich and Comrade Leonid Ilyich,” Chuikov guffawed, “are nervous that the advance has stalled around Tabriz, Comrade Marshal?”
Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian had been born in Armenia. Chuikov was one of the few men alive who sometimes employed the Russian form of his name, Amazasp Khachaturovich Babadzhanyan, which he detested. For all that he was a soldier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics he was no Russian, proud of his ancient Armenian ancestry and his roots in a culture that pre-dated the upstart ‘Russian’ interlopers of the last millennium. That today the Minister of Defence had not troubled to tease him was a good sign, confirming that no matter how panicked the civilians in the room were by the setbacks and delays in the Zagros Mountains, Chuikov was relaxed.
“Tabriz is too heavily garrisoned to be taken by an airborne assault,” Babadzhanian stated. “Even if my airborne component had not been critically weakened by the Malta operation,” he paused, tempted to point out that he had objected to that ‘unnecessary diversion’ at the time, “I decided that the surviving elements 51st and 53rd Guards Airborne Regiments were better employed securing the lightly defended communications hub of Urmia. This blocking operation has been entirely successful and casualties thus far have been minimal. Leading elements of 3rd Caucasus Tank Army have now bottled up the weak Iranian force defending Qoshachay. A reconnaissance unit has patrolled twenty kilometres west of that town to the outskirts of Mahabad which is only lightly undefended. Mechanised units of 3rd Caucasus Tank Army will probably be in Piranshahr near the Iraqi border by the end of the week.”
The Commander of Army Group South spoke with calm, detached professional assurance.
“What about Tabriz?” Kosygin asked quietly.
“The garrison has little or no armour or artillery. Iranian air activity is non-existent. Frankly, local partisan groups are giving my boys more problems in that sector than the troops inside the city. We control all the roads into the city. We have partially disrupted the city’s water supplies. 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army is now relieving 3rd Caucasus Tank Army, freeing it to resume the advance south. Once we have significant armour and sufficient logistical backup in depot at Mahabad, brigade-strength battle groups will be deployed west to the north of Dukan Lake and south to break through the Iraqi border defences opposite Erbil.”