Bukansky lurched across the room waving his arms, spilling vodka across his Alexandrine desk. “I was a simple soldier-boy. But without knowing it I’d provided the complete explanation for every apparent failure of Stalin’s leadership. How, if the leader was so all-knowing, so far-seeing, had the Hitlerites reached the gates of Moscow? Strategic counteroffensive! How was it the Hitlerites took the Crimea in nineteen forty-two? Strategic counteroffensive! Even while we lost battles, you see, we were out-thinking the enemy. The godhead in the Kremlin needed a formula. And the simple soldier-boy provided him with one. So Academician Tarle was forced to recant. I, Bukansky, engineer with the 131st Siberians, had got it right. And when the victories came, Stalingrad and the great Zhokov offensives, it was based on our leader’s foresight. Strategic counteroffensive had made him right — even when he was wrong.”
“You still haven’t told me when you will publish,” Kuletsyn said.
“Interest yourself in other people,” Bukansky chided. “I was telling you about my rise to literary eminence.”
“I have traveled all the way from Rostropin. I am more interested in the fate of my novel.”
Bukansky smiled. “I very much doubt if I control that. It’s the greatest book I’ve read in a decade. My blood bubbles with envy.”
“If you like the book that much…”
“Like it? No. But it’s Russian. It’s written from your own Russian gut. It’s not a political compromise masquerading as literature. Trust me, Valentin Sergeivich, I will do my best to publish it. But we have a leader now staring from his open coffin. We have no way of knowing who comes next.” He swayed across the room and rang the desk bell.
“Come back this evening, Comrade. I want to talk to you.”
“I am returning to my village this afternoon.”
“Get off that high horse, Kuletsyn. I’ve got things to show you. Be here this evening, early. Forget your village, it won’t run away.”
When his secretary entered he smiled at her. “Show out this gifted author, Lydia,” he said. “Then come back here and prepare me for the funeral.”
Chapter Eleven
On the day of the death of President Romanovsky, a short tense meeting of the Politburo had taken place. It was fully accepted that on this day there could be no jostling for position among the leading contenders for power. The black armbands of the members and the black dress of Natalya Roginova guaranteed that.
This discussion solely concerned security for the funeral. Not only had the whole length of the route to be protected against demonstrators; at the same time the greatest assembly of Heads of State ever was due to arrive in Moscow with wives, husbands, staffs, all of whom had to be accommodated, protected and conducted safely to the funeral.
It was Natalya Roginova who suggested that the principal planning and security function would be most sensibly controlled by one organization, the KGB.
General Kuba was evidently, and pleasantly, surprised. He saw the planning of the parade as a challenge and an opportunity. Natalya Roginova saw it as a challenge, too, but one she believed Semyon Kuba would find difficult to meet.
Thus, unanimously, the meeting decided that the basic blueprint for the funeral and ceremony should be drawn up at Bureau Headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square, and that security for the mass parade and the ceremony in Red Square was to be the responsibility of no less than Bureau Chairman Kuba himself.
The broad plan devised by two of his senior officers was calculated to remove any predictable elements which might be capitalized on by terrorists or demonstrators. The pattern of so many past May Day parades was therefore abandoned from the beginning.
The parade itself was to begin from two separate forming-up points and would take three separate routes to Red Square. The first, and by far the largest of the forming-up points, was the 1,000-acre Gorky Park which lies between the Lenin Prospekt and the Moskva River almost due south of the Kremlin. The north part of the park is bisected by the broad Krimsky Val along which the tanks and armored vehicles could form up in line of march. Infantry units, hospital representatives and workers’ shock brigades could assemble in the vast open areas to the south of Krimsky Val. The park itself would of course be forbidden to the public, its famous amusement area and restaurants closed. Kuba’s lieutenants had allocated a full 5,000-man regiment of KGB border guards to secure the perimeter of the park alone.
The second part of the parade was to form up in the much smaller Plevna Monument gardens and march from there by the most direct route along the Razina Ulitza, past the north face of the giant Rossiya Hotel and into Red Square at St Basil’s Cathedral. Ten thousand border guards were allocated to the route and a further 5,000 would be on duty in Red Square itself, which would of course be sealed from all but officially invited guests and those units of the parade which were scheduled to take part in the funeral ceremony. The key moment in the whole blueprint was to remain a secret to everybody but senior planning officers until the very last: not more than fifty people were to be informed how, where and when the embalmed body of the leader was to be introduced into the vast parade.
Along the routes themselves militia and Bureau agents drafted in from surrounding oblasts were to occupy official buildings and apartment blocks to secure all windows overlooking the route. In the Rossiya Hotel alone, a vast complex capable of accommodating over 5,000 guests, it was calculated that something like 2,000 windows overlooked, north and west, the parade routes.
When Bureau Chairman Semyon Trofimovich Kuba arose as usual at six-thirty that morning and stood at the bedroom window of his apartment on Kutuzov Prospekt, he knew that the greatest single internal security operation in Soviet history was about to begin.
The KGB security blueprint was handed to Senior Organizing Parade Marshal General N.V. Berisov four days before the funeral. A tall, alarmingly thin officer of nearly seventy, Berisov wore his gray hair short-cropped, accentuating his great fleshy, jug-like ears. He was a soldier, a general who had never seen a shot fired in anger. Indeed, he had hardly seen a shot fired at all that wasn’t a fusillade or a salute. He was the regime’s processional organizer, a man who had planned innumerable May Days, Olympic Parades and Workers’ Production Week celebrations. His permanent staff consisted of over a thousand administrators who on the appointed day would don the white cap-covers and armbands of Parade Marshals.
Yet for all his vast experience General Berisov had only once before organized a similar occasion, on the death of Stalin in 1953. And in those days the world had been different, or at least the Soviet world had. Nobody then expected the demonstrations that the KGB feared today.
On the morning of the funeral Berisov left his command caravan in Gorky Park at 8:00 A.M. Already units of five tank battalions, a total of one hundred T-72s, stood in line along the Krimsky Val, dark masses of steel against the lightening sky. Columns of men were marching across the Krimsky Bridge from the west of the city and white-capped Parade Marshals were directing them into forming-up areas designated by colored tapes. In each reception area smoking field kitchens would serve hot soup to each unit as it arrived. Along the riverbank a line of coaches was already drawn up, each one carrying on its flank details of the factory or oblast from which the workers, now sleeping inside, had been drawn.