While the two others watched him, he sat down at his desk and drafted a telex to all military, militia and KGB units throughout the Soviet Union:
At a recent conference at Archangelskoye, State Security Minister Kuba and Marshal Kolotkin, in concert, agreed that in these times of international crisis only the closest cooperation between the Soviet Armed Forces and the forces of State Security can liquidate the present threat to the Soviet system. This threat has now revealed itself as an anti-Party movement in sections of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union. This order, until rescinded, places all Soviet military formations under the direct command of equivalent local KGB and militia commands. Resistance to this order by local military headquarters must be interpreted as evidence to anti-Party activity. Such anti-Soviet elements must be resisted wherever they raise their heads. Only the fullest mobilization of the armed forces of the Bureau of State Security can ensure the defeat of anti-Party elements. All orders which do not come through strict Party and KGB Command channels must be resisted by force if necessary.
The signatories of this order require it to be carried out with the utmost ruthlessness and determination.
Kuba waved the two men over. “Read that.”
He stood up from the table while they leaned forward to read what he had written. Bukin nodded at each paragraph. Dora read through to the end and straightened.
“Well?”
“It’s a mobilization order for civil war,” Dora said.
Chairman Kuba nodded, then turned to Bukin. “Telex this signal to all State Security Bureau Commands. And all military formations.”
Bukin took the signal and hurried out.
“I want you to move tonight,” Kuba said, turning back to General Dora. “You’ve got your list. I want every senior officer on it arrested at the first possible moment. It’s Katyn forest, Dora,” he said grimly. “It’s our only chance to save the Revolution.”
The door opened and Bukin reentered, his normally flushed face drained white. Behind him six officers came into the room. The leading major general was carrying the signal.
“Semyon Trofimovich,” the major general said. “I am instructed to inform you that at an emergency meeting of the Politburo this evening you were removed from all offices of State. Former Chairman of the Party of the Russian Federated Republic Roginova was restored to all her previous offices in the government and the State. I must also inform you that by the same authority of the Politburo, I am instructed to place you in protective custody. Former Prime Minister Bukin and former Defense Minister Dora are also to be placed in protective custody,” he ended curtly.
From outside in the extensive grounds of the dacha came the thin clatter of automatic fire. The major general consulted his watch. “We will wait until all opposition has been disposed of,” he said.
Semyon Trofimovich Kuba sat down at his desk and took out his pipe. Not looking toward the center of the room, he sucked on the pipestem, one elbow on the desk which Stalin had once used. Try as he might, he could not imagine where he had gone wrong, or how Joseph Vissarionovich might have done better.
Chapter Forty-Five
During the night of December 20th-21st Moscow waited in darkness. Throughout the city, responding to a call in Iskra signed by Joseph Densky, power workers had failed to come in to the night shift, as had transportation workers and snow-plow operators. The only lights on the streets around the city center were now from the slowly moving patrol vehicles of the militia. A few candles glimmered feebly behind apartment windows but the great wedding-cake skyscrapers and hotels of Moscow disappeared now into the darkness of a starless sky.
The only exception was the Kremlin. Operated by their own generators, searchlights, pointing down from the crenellated wall, isolated bright pools of light in the darkness of Red Square. Above the ancient towers of the Kremlin, spotlights hit great rectangles of red cloth writhing slowly in the freezing wind. Perhaps most bizarre of all was the brightly lit multicolored onion domes of St. Basil’s against the pitch-black background of the city.
From apartment blocks on the eastern side of the capital a steady trickle of people left to cross to relatives in what were believed to be the safer, southern suburbs. As ever in the land of the Soviets, it was information above all else which was lacking. Rumors of the anarchy in towns north of Moscow had circulated for some days, but while those few Penal Brigades reaching the city rail stations had been more or less contained by the militia, there bad been no panic. Then the news began to filter through of a vast ragged army marching through Balashiki and of the failure of the militia to turn them back. And for the first time, too, Muscovites heard the term the Gulag Regiments.
During the night all foreign airlines canceled or diverted their flights to and from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. Long before morning Aeroflot operations had ceased too. While broadcasting continued no mention was made of the crisis and all news items were replaced with programs of patriotic music.
In thousands of apartment blocks throughout the city people speculated on whether or not the vlasti had already fled to safety. Some claimed to have seen limousines racing south or west down the privileged center lanes throughout the afternoon. Others said that militia units had been withdrawn from the menaced eastern suburbs to protect just those vlasti who were supposed by others to have left. Of certainty there was very little, and more than anything the darkness overhanging the city added to their fears.
Before first light people living in the area of workers’ flats around the Kursk Station began to hear scattered rifle-fire and the thud of heavier armament. Coming out onto the balconies they could see, far across the city ring road, points of leaping light as fires started in the Reutov District.
Every apartment now had an appointed watcher at the window whose task it was to report on the advance of the Gulag Regiments. By three or four in the morning the early confidence that the armed militia would turn them back had dissipated. The approaching rifle-fire and buildings burning ever closer were evidence enough of a steady advance by the Gulags. Now the first families of refugees, those without relatives in other parts of the city, began to leave their homes and trudge through the snow-covered streets toward the city center. Soon, from the area of the Aviamotor Metro Station the Shosse Entusiastov was thick with people carrying suitcases and children wrapped in blankets. And for these refugees already moving toward the center of the city, the clatter of militia helicopters and the beams of their headlights shining down from among the dark tower blocks added a new dimension of eeriness to their fears.
At first light it was evident that the city was in chaos. Thousands of refugees tramped westward along Kirov Street past the Lubyanka in Dzerzhinsky Square and on down Marx Prospekt. Thousands more exhausted people huddled for protection in Red Square, along the Kremlin Wall and around the GUM department store. Some lay in the snow, wrapped in sleeping bags or blankets. Others produced small stoves or even lit wood fires to boil kettles for their tea. Like some huge marketplace, which once it had in fact been, Red Square steadily filled with people.
Then the first two shells exploded among them. In indescribable panic the vast crowd scrambled across the snow. The point of impact of each shell was marked by mangled bodies hurled in a bloody ray-like pattern across the trampled snow.
The next two shells struck the GUM department store showering glass over the fleeing crowd. As four more shells were fired in quick succession, women screamed wildly, men cried for help and children lost their parents and scattered for the safety of the side streets.