Volodin distanced himself from organized crime and wrapped himself tighter in the flag of Russian nationalism.
His approval rating had dipped, but despite the fact he was the leader of an ostensible democracy with many enemies, Volodin wasn’t going anywhere. He retained control over the media, the defense ministry, the intelligence services, and, more important, he retained the support, if not the love, of the oligarchs he had made rich and powerful in exchange for their support and compliance, and the siloviki, the former intelligence officers who now held power over the nation.
Volodin was not in a good place politically, but he was essentially a dictator, so it didn’t really matter.
Now things weren’t going as smoothly as far as the national picture went, and he knew the sixteen other members of the siloviki who would be here this evening would be a particularly surly bunch. His talk would be met with more skepticism and fewer toasts than usual.
Volodin told himself he didn’t need this bullshit. He owed these men nothing. It was they who owed him everything for his careful management of their lives and careers.
But he did not tell his driver to leave. This yearly summit was set in stone; if he missed it he would be perceived by these weaklings as intimidated, and he could not let that happen.
And in truth, he did need them.
Volodin had been owned by a Russian organized-crime syndicate as far back as the late 1980s, even if he never actually admitted this to himself. They’d propped up his career in KGB, and then FSB, and then they’d advanced his business interests in the 1990s. The siloviki meetings had been more important for the other men than they had for him, because he had the protection of the Seven Strong Men.
Now that protection was gone, the Mafia group to which he had been tied wanted him dead, so his siloviki brotherhood was more important now: a necessary evil.
A gentle rapping on the window of his limousine brought him back to the moment, and he opened the door and climbed out into the cold night.
Volodin entered the café and looked around at the familiar confines; Café F had the same floor plan and tables and wall paneling as had all the other iterations of the venerable locale — it looked much the same as it did forty years earlier, the first time Volodin set foot inside the door.
In his twenties he shoveled hot borscht into his mouth at the bar on quick lunch or dinner breaks, before rushing back two blocks south and returning to his office. He’d spent entire evenings at a table in the corner here, designing plans and operations, and he’d met with coworkers from KGB or colleagues at GRU here, and he’d made plans of a tactical nature here long before he was entrusted to make plans of a strategic nature at the Kremlin.
He entered the back room now, shook hands that weren’t as firm as usual, exchanged bear hugs that were not as long, strong, or demonstrative as they had been in years past.
He shook hands with Derevin, the president of the massive oil concern Rosneft, and he drank a vodka with Bogdanov and Kovalev, former KGB rezidents and now directors of the state-run mining and timber concerns.
Though these men still addressed Volodin using his patronymic, Valeri Valerievich, he felt the malevolence in the room, and although he couldn’t say he did not expect it, this was a new feeling for him.
A year earlier the group was cautious. Estonia had not gone well, but this was before his annexation of the Crimea, when the Ukrainians put up surprising resistance, and a phone call from the President of the United States to Volodin revealed that the Americans knew about Volodin’s ties to organized crime.
Volodin had then pulled his troops back to the eastern and southeastern oblasts of Ukraine, and he’d kept them there, giving in to the blackmail of the Americans. To the men in this room this looked like Volodin had suffered a defeat, but Volodin knew they simply did not understand the full dynamics of the events.
Estonia had not gone well, Ukraine was still in question, Volodin could concede these facts, but he knew the men were angry about the economic problems that most affected them. And these, Volodin was adamant, were not his fucking fault.
He addressed the men in the back room of the café for a half-hour, most of it extolling the good things that had happened in Russia during the past year. Virtually all of his examples involved his successes in reining in his opposition, quashing media and Internet outlets that spoke ill of the Kremlin, the siloviki, and the governmental decrees and decisions that Volodin claimed perpetuated the success of the sixteen men in the room — seventeen including Volodin himself, who was essentially the crown prince of the siloviki.
At the end of his planned speech he tacked on a few minutes more of extemporaneous talk, mostly because he was putting off starting the Q&A portion of the event.
As he neared the end, a round of vodka shots was passed around. Every year there was a toast to him before the beginning of the questions.
But he was still speaking, wrapping up by talking about the new breeze of nationalism blowing across the nation and how this benefited the status quo, when he noticed that Levshin had begun drinking his vodka, not waiting for the toast.
Diburov noticed this, too, and he downed his own.
Around the room, others began reaching for the glasses on the table in front of them.
This was an insult.
As Valeri Volodin offered a high, reedy spasiba, thank you, at the end, he saw that almost all the glasses were empty, facedown on the table.
These men had been his peers, his equals, for most of his adult life, but in the past few years Valeri Volodin had become a reverential figure among them. He was not their equal, this he knew.
But now he saw they were treating him as if he was their lesser. Beneath them. Who the fuck do they think they are?
A combination of fury and paranoia began to well up in the pit of his stomach.
Slowly, he nodded his head. In a measured tone he said, “I see the malice. You express it clearly. So… which of you would like to begin? Who among you wants to start off by telling me how you would have steered the national economy in a manner that would have brought the past year to a different conclusion? Who here would have been a better steward for Mother Russia? You, Levshin? Are you the one to say your face should be on every newspaper and not mine?”
Levshin looked back at Volodin with a placid smile. “Of course not, Valeri Valerievich. You were chosen to lead because of your skills, your abilities. No one is denying this.”
It was a smooth backhanded compliment, Volodin knew. “Chosen to lead” indicated to Volodin that the foreign minister was pointing out that he didn’t think Russia’s president could have made it into that role without the help of the other men in the room.
Volodin said, “You are my foreign minister. This precludes you from complaining too much about international events, because you are our conduit to the rest of the world.”
Levshin simply said, “I follow your instructions, Valeri Valerievich.” Again, he was smooth, but there was ice in his words.
Bogdanov sat at a table right in front of Volodin. He spoke up now. “We are concerned about the oil prices, but no one blames you for this. But the sanctions… these are a direct result of the attack in the Ukraine. This was your decision, and you are in day-to-day control. I speak for those of us caught up in the sanctions. We are angry, Valeri. We could have weathered the storm caused by the drop in oil prices. But our international relations have been a disaster.”