Six long freight trains loaded with men had already passed through Pechora, but in each case during the night and without incident. But that morning the town committee had received messages from Vologda (to the south of Pechora) where Moscow orders to delay a penal train had caused a serious riot, bloodily suppressed by the local KGB forces. A second telephone call from Krasibirsk warned of a trainload of mutinous armed penals shortly to approach Pechora.
The committee now panicked and urgently contacted the oblast chairman, who in turn demanded from Moscow the deployment of the brigade of the Uzbek National Division at Pechora. With extreme reluctance Sovcom, the Combined Command Headquarters, ordered the Uzbek brigade to place itself under strictly temporary command of KGB headquarters, Pechora.
The senior officer there was an ageing KGB major who had never before commanded a unit of more than a hundred men. Now, under command, he found himself with an Uzbek junior general and nearly 3,000 troops.
His orders were to stop the approaching train at all costs and to arrest those of the penals prepared to surrender. These orders were transmitted to the Uzbek unit and a position was chosen for the operation some six miles beyond Pechora outside the township of Velinsky where the track passed through a deep wooded cutting.
Across the track a barricade of rock and felled trees was built (the major considered ripping up a section of line but decided that would be to exceed his orders) and the Uzbek troops were deployed in the woods on both sides of the cutting.
The Uzbeks’ armament was of the oldest type. Their heavy weapons in fact consisted of Oerlikon guns captured from the German Army in the Hitler War. Against even light modern artillery they were totally ineffective.
Dragged by horses or manhandled into place, the Oerlikons were now ranged along both sides of the hill overlooking the railway track.
With some confidence the KGB major sat with the Uzbek general in the command vehicle awaiting the coming of the train.
At this point a duplication of orders came into play.
At No. 17 Air Training School outside Vologda, orders had been received from an entirely different channel from the one which had resulted in the deployment of the Pechora Uzbek brigade.
After the debacle at Krasibirsk the KGB commander had radioed a highly colored description of events direct to the Lubyanka. The new Defense Minister, General Dora, informed Semyon Kuba that in the absence of adequate KGB forces, he proposed to invoke the agreement at the Second Archangelskoye Conference to call in a limited air strike against the mutinous penals. Their train was now somewhere north of Pechora in an uninhabited area. The operation could remain entirely secret.
In Stalin’s former apartments at the Kremlin’s Poteshny Palace Semyon Kuba voiced his doubts: drawing on his pipe he told General Dora that he was concerned at the lack of political will in the higher echelons of the Armed Forces. “We, in the Party,” he said, “have allowed ourselves to be overwhelmed by the new military sciences. We have retreated before these young generals with their incomprehensible jargon and their ever-increasing demands on the budget. Most seriously we have ignored their political education.”
“I am in full agreement,” Dora said.
“The military leadership has become an anti-Party force. Even old Kolnikov has been persuaded to offer his support.”
“As Defense Minister, I intend to make it my early task to improve political control at all military levels.”
Kuba nodded airily and walked across to the window which looked down onto a small courtyard. He was conscious of Stalin’s shadow on his shoulder. He knew what he had to do but the precise timing still eluded him.
He turned back to Dora. “At a most crucial point in our Soviet history,” he said, “Joseph Stalin faced this same problem. Two years before the Hitlerites launched their attack he, too, was faced with an anti-Party clique in the officer corps.”
Even Dora swallowed hard. When Stalin had struck at the Red Army in 1938 he had executed half of all officers over the rank of colonel. In the first year of the war the great purge had left the Red Army virtually leaderless.
“When the moment comes, when these temporary crises have been settled, I will know how to act,” Kuba pointed his pipe. “As he did.” The pipe indicated somewhere near the middle of the room, as if Joseph Stalin himself were standing with his quiet merciless smile, there in the middle of the red Turkey carpet.
“And in the meantime?”
“In the meantime, I agree to your proposal. When invoking the Archangelskoye Agreements, emphasize that this is one single request and highly unlikely to be repeated. Stress that there is no breakdown in Security Forces’ capability but that the distances involved require a Soviet Air Force intervention to protect a Soviet town.”
Dora left immediately to transmit his request. Through the Air Defense Force chain of command the order was relayed within an hour to No. 17 Air Training School, Vologda.
The briefing was precise. Instructors from the school were to fly a sortie against the train approaching Pechora with MIG-19 training aircraft, armed with underwing rocket missiles. The slow speed of the training aircraft was intended to increase accuracy in an operation where no retaliation was possible.
A flight of six aircraft took off from Vologda at 12:30 that day, each MIG-19 flown by an experienced instructor pilot. Three-quarters of an hour later the aircraft passed over Pechora and picked up the railway line north.
They sighted the train immediately. It was stationary in a narrow cutting, not ideal for air attack. From their height at the first pass they were unable to see that a great barricade of stone blocked the train’s progress.
It had arrived at the cutting less than fifteen minutes earlier. Its driver, an ex-engineer sergeant, had applied the brakes when he saw the huge stone pile on the track. As the train halted the Uzbeks in the hillsides had watched armed men jump down and take up positions along the banking.
For a minute or two the KGB major had waited. When his powerful loudspeaker equipment echoed his voice through the cutting he announced that the hills were full of regular soldiers with heavy weapons. He gave them five minutes to surrender.
In the hills the Uzbek gunners sat behind their Oerlikons. Along the snowbanks down in the cutting the penals began to shout up to the unseen men in the hills. And many of the voices calling on the troops not to fire on old soldiers were calling in Uzbek!
In the hills Uzbek voices shouted back. Some, hidden only 20 yards away among the snow-covered rocks, half stood, their rifles pointing in the air. The penals responded, climbing head and shoulders above the bank. The major roared instructions over the loudspeaker for all troops to retain cover. The penals jeered and invited their Uzbek brothers out in the open as they themselves now were. Rifles were thrown aside. Troops came streaming out of the hills until penals and regular troops were now hopelessly intermixed.
It was at this moment that the flight of MIG-19s passed overhead. For a few moments the roar of their engines faded as the aircraft disappeared, then the MIGs burst into sight along the narrow cutting, in line ahead not more than 50 yards above the top of the train.
It was a maneuver worthy of the instructors’ skill. The rockets exploded with a terrifying crackle of flame-tinged black smoke, shattering the cattle cars crammed with men. Beside the track soldiers and penals were torn to pieces. Burning bodies were hurled across the snowbanks.
When the slow-flying MIGs came in for the second pass, the Uzbek gunners swung the barrels of their Oerlikons. Streams of cannon shells poured into the air. While the first and second aircraft emerged safely at the far end of the cutting, the third, fourth and fifth each exploded in turn and the last somersaulted dramatically onto its back, hurtling tail first into the hillside with a shattering impact.