At Balashika they stopped. In the drab factory suburb the field kitchens were set up along the highway.
Before this day the Balashika suburb had little claim to fame. Its industries were electrical and railway engineering. The new soap factory infused the area with an uncertain, sweet-putrid odor and the workers lived in concrete apartments among graffiti, peeling paint and abandoned, rusting junk. It was no worse than Glasgow, South Chicago or Nanterre, but it fell far short of a brave new world.
Still the Gulag Regiments might have passed peacefully through Balashika if one of the Tajik regiments had not seen signs in their national language over a gateway in a long anonymous brick wall in the back streets behind the main highway.
A few of the more energetic spirits had rattled the gates and pressed their faces between the bars and yelled “Salom… Salom.”
At first the low barrack-like blocks had remained silent, apparently empty, then a window had opened and a smiling face appeared shouting “Salom” in response.
“Hasan Rudaki!” the penals had called. Other windows opened. “Hasan Rudaki!” men shouted down in reply.
As the tenth-century founder of Tajik national literature Rudaki’s name had become a battle cry for Tajik independence.
A great crowd of penals was now gathering round the barrack gates. One man clambered up the ironwork and dropped down the other side. Others followed. Soon there were fifty or sixty in the courtyard, dancing and singing Tajik songs.
“Come and join us, Brothers,” they invited the conscripts. “We’re on our way home, Brothers, come home with us!”
In the headquarter block the Russian colonel and staff of the newly formed Tajik Artillery Training Regiment phoned the militia post at Balashika center. He described the situation at the barracks and requested aid before it got out of hand.
The local militia officer ordered his full force of forty men into their personnel carriers. He knew no way to avoid the request. Yet he could guess what effect militia armored vehicles would have on the penals. With their 30-millimeter guns loaded with riot control gas shells and the men in plastic visors beneath their steel helmets the five vehicles drove by side streets to the barracks.
There is no available account of the next hour. The only thing certain is the outcome. By midday when the Gulag Regimental commanders managed to restore order among their men, the armored vehicles of the militia were burning in the courtyard, the Russian staff had been stripped to their underpants and now huddled fearfully in the snow, and the armory had been broken open and looted. Rifles, light machine guns and ammunition were seized by the Gulag penals. More significantly, three batteries of old German 88 guns, the deadly infantry support artillery of Hitler’s Wehrmacht, were hauled out and linked up to tow trucks.
It was early afternoon when the ragged army got onto the road again and the mood had changed. The Baltic formations — Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians — took the lead. Of all the Gulag Regiments they were the most fiercely anti-Russian. Among them there was no laughter and no songs. Six miles ahead, on the road to the city, a screen of armed militia lay in wait.
The great Trinity Monastery of Saint Sergei dominates the town of Zagorsk, 45 miles north of Moscow. Three hundred yards long and over half as wide, its walls contain two cathedrals and half a dozen churches and chapels. Founded by Saint Sergei in 1345, the monastery was besieged in the Tatar invasions of the next century. It was now a quiet lamp-lit precinct in the middle of Zagorsk, its painted churches and domed cathedrals a secure enclave of old Russia within its walls.
Since March it had been even more secure, guarded by a battalion of uniformed KGB troops, its great seventeenth-century refectory building guarded by armed plainclothesmen who sat outside during their long shifts shivering on wooden benches, running unappreciative eyes over its brightly painted checkerboard exterior.
Inside, above the richly decorated refectory hall were the apartments that Natalya Roginova had occupied since her arrest.
During the afternoon of December 20th, when the chanting of the seminarists in the north section of the monastery murmured through a light snowfall, a green-painted military car drove through the Uspensky Gate. At the checkpoint it stopped and General Rossasky climbed from the back. The KGB guard-lieutenant saluted and followed the young general into the guard post, baffled that no explanation for the visit had yet been offered.
Rossasky, in long gray greatcoat but bareheaded, offered the lieutenant a handful of papers to examine.
“You will see from those, Lieutenant, that I have authority from Army Command to remove Natalya Roginova to a safer region.”
The lieutenant had no understanding of the overlapping areas of authority of the Army and Security Forces. But he did know that he would be unwise to agree to anything unless his captain were first informed.
“One moment, Comrade General,” he said lifting the phone and cranking the handle.
Rossasky waited, his lower lip pushed out to caress gently his rich black mustache.
The lieutenant frowned and cranked the handle again. “I can’t hear it ringing,” he said. “Will the Comrade General excuse me while I speak to the guard-commander?”
“No,” Rossasky said. “You stay here.”
Uncertainly the lieutenant stood his ground. “It is my duty, Comrade General, to report all visitors to the monastery.”
The general went to the door and opened it. Three sergeants wearing parachutist insignia on their uniform topcoats entered the post. Each man was armed. Without another glance at the guard-lieutenant Rossasky left the post and got back into his car.
The whole operation was concluded without bloodshed. Within fifteen minutes of the general’s arrival at the Uspensky Gate nearly 200 soldiers were moving through the gardens beyond the Gate Church, fanning out to face the seminary and to occupy the watchtowers along the south wall. Individual security men protested but were silenced by the impressive array of generals and colonels arriving at the Refectory Building. Those who seized an opportunity to telephone for instructions from higher KGB authority discovered that the lines had been severed.
After half an hour Natalya Roginova came through the Refectory from her apartment above. Oil lamps burned in iron brackets round the richly painted room. In the lamplight the deep-hued crimson and blue and gold beloved of Old Russia merged in a warmth of color. The officers around her stopped respectfully.
She turned to face them. “You are aware, Comrades,” she said quietly, “that this is the great refectory of the monastery of Saint Sergei. On this site six hundred years ago a Russian Army was blessed before marching to victory at Kulikove against the Golden Horde.”
She turned again, her eyes slowly traveling round the room. It was as close as she would allow herself to come to a genuflection to Russia’s distant past.
In his dacha at Zhukova, Semyon Trofimovich Kuba did not respond to the anxieties of Prime Minister Bukin. If suffering were to be inflicted upon the city of Moscow it would serve to justify the harsh measures necessary to face the future. Moscow could burn. If he had learned one lesson from Joseph Stalin it was that Russians were capable of absorbing an infinitude of suffering.
Of much greater concern to Kuba was the timing of the purge of the Army which he realized, since Bukansky’s suicide, was now vitally necessary.
But when Defense Minister Dora arrived with the news of the Army’s release of Natalya Roginova, Semyon Kuba knew that a subtle time schedule for the purge was no longer among his options.