On December 19th the requested meeting took place at Archangelskoye with General Kuba, Prime Minister Bukin and the new Defense Minister, General Dora of the KGB. It was later to become known in the history of these times as the Second Archangelskoye Conference.
A last-minute decision by Kuba had brought Mikoyan, the Armenian Party Secretary, by special jet from the south. For the moment he was left waiting in the forehall while the conference opened in the galleried Oval Hall.
On Kuba’s invitation old Marshal Kolotkin opened the session. For long seconds he shuffled the papers in front of him, looked up glaring fiercely round the table, then reapplied himself to his documents.
“In the old days,” he said at last, his voice rumbling from his bemedaled chest, “we revolutionaries fought for the future of Soviet power. Enemies abounded! So do they still!” He snarled down at his papers and everyone present realized for the first time how drunk he was.
“Yes, they do still,” he hammered the table.
Again the 90-year-old Marshal fell silent. “I’ve made my report,” he said at length. “I’ve nothing more to say. Young General Rossasky here will present it for me. It’s detail… detail… but Comrades, don’t lose heart. We have gripped the old world by the throat and shaken it as a bear shakes a wolf. The other wolves gather and snap, but what can they do? What can they do against a Russian bear?”
He raised his old head, his rheumy eyes peering from one to another round the table. “What can the wolves do? Rossasky, read the report. Read the detail…”
Briskly General Rossasky began. He described the deployment and the state of readiness of Soviet forces throughout the U.S.S.R. In the west he said, the armored divisions facing the NATO alliance had been and must continue to be maintained at full strength. Any reduction in forces here would invite Western adventurism.
On the Hungarian and Rumanian borders ten divisions awaited the Politburo’s decision. And on the Chinese border in Amur IV, V and VI areas where there were further reports of large adventurist Chinese troop movements, forty reserve divisions of the Soviet Army were now moving into position. With the current chaos in Trans-Siberian rail transport, airbridge units of the Soviet Air Force were critically stretched. The National Divisions were inadequately equipped for a front-line reinforcement role. It was therefore possible that, on a strictly temporary basis, the National Divisions might be used in an internal security role against the increasingly violent penals. But that, in the present crisis, was as far as it was conceivable to go.
General Rossasky continued:
“Combined military command headquarters has received numerous requests for assistance with the amnestied penals. These have not been granted. Combined headquarters believes that this must remain a militia-KGB responsibility. Involvement of the military in internal security operations has proved counterproductive in the recent past.
“Combined headquarters, however, notes with concern the formation of a number of organized units from the former penal brigades now operating north and east of Moscow. In isolated areas it agrees than an air strike against such units would be feasible if the leadership decided to request it. In other areas the Army repeats that the only forces available for use in a general containment role are the National Divisions.”
When the meeting broke up at Archangelskoye Chairman Kuba called Mikoyan into the huge Oval Room. As the Armenian First Secretary later described the interview, Kuba was standing alone by one of the great windows overlooking the terrace. The room was full of smoke and heaped ashtrays stood next to the places the military had vacated.
I knew immediately that he was in a dangerous mood. His opening words were enough:
“Well, Mikoyan,” he said. “Are your penals coming home to roost?”
I said we had received a few hundred in Erevan but not yet the numbers expected. He sat down at the end of the long table, leaving me standing in front of him.
“The Soviet Union has been good to Armenia,” he said.
I didn’t deny it. Before the coming of the Soviets the Armenian people had been under the Turkish boot. Five years before the coming of the Soviets the Armenians had suffered, in 1915, the full fury of the modern world’s first genocide. By systematic shooting, starving and beating the Turkish “Special Organizations” had murdered almost a million Armenian civilians. The new Soviet government was spared the problem of following a success.
“What have you to complain of?” Kuba asked, soft-voiced. “Your Armenians are highly placed in the academic world. There are Armenians in the ministries of trade and industry… your church, which you hang on to, is left undisturbed…”
All this was true. Visitors from other autonomous republics would often remark enviously on the share of Soviet resources we Armenians were able to command, and in particular how free the Gregorian Church had been for the most part from persecution.
“And yet you still riot in the streets against the mobilization order. Your young men, Mikoyan, still refuse their sacred duty. Why?”
How could I tell him at this late stage. Nationalism was sweeping the republics. Most other men would have known already.
“I believe Armenia, small as it is, occupies an important part in influencing the attitudes of our Central Asian and Transcaucasian republics,” Kuba said. “As we used to say, it’s Armenia that greases the slope.”
He stood up and waddled in his Joseph Stalin walk toward the great double door. Opening it for me, he said:
“Deliver to me an ordered, disciplined Armenia. You have days, rather than weeks.”
Like his uncle Anastas, the man who had served all masters and still died in bed, Mikoyan was a survivor. He took his official car into Moscow center and changed to a taxi at the Rossiya Hotel. At Sheremetyevo Airport he took a flight not direct to Erevan, but first to Leningrad, and caught a connection to the Armenian capital. He later calculated he arrived there just steps ahead of Kuba’s arresting officers.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Among the many hundreds of senior officials who decided to leave Moscow for a week or two were Peter Rinsky and his friend. Fired by the talk in Mother Hubbard’s they had come to the decision to take a short holiday in Georgia. The fact that it was to be at the port of Batumi along the coast from Turkey, Peter Rinsky told himself, was of no importance. But he now had a name in his pocket of someone who would sail them to Turkey.
So although they assured each other that they had every intention of returning to Moscow, they nevertheless packed the valuables from their shared apartment with care.
Their intention was to drive south in Peter Rinsky’s Zhiguli-Fiat and he had already secured ample gasoline ration tickets (necessary under the new Fuel Economy Measures) for the long journey.
We set out on the morning after the first Penal Brigades arrived at the Kazan Station [Peter Rinsky recounted]. It was a fine clear morning as we started, although the weather at this time can change like two sides of a knife. Finding the ring-road after no more than a slight spat between us, we were out onto the road to Podolsk in no time. By lunch, we had already completed the first 125 miles of our journey, arriving in the quite dreadful industrial town of Tula just before midmorning.
If central Tula is uninviting, and it is, the awful monotony of its southern suburb, Nove-Tulsky, is enough to chill the heart. Yet men and women live here and sweat in the great iron-ore smelting works for the long ruble and attend political meetings and stand in queues and suffer shortages. Can it really be Russia’s role to suffer always?