Malinin’s voice reverberated around the courtyard, off the walls of the Church, the stone fence, the leaves of the trees.
“Do you want to reclaim your life? To return to normalcy?”
Constantine stopped in mid-stride. His jaw was rigid with fury.
“My life will never be normal again.”
“I can empower you to change it! The fate of the antiques is petty trivia compared to the rest! The documents in my possession contain the energy of an atomic bomb! What I am about to confide in you will reshape the history of World War Two — the entire twentieth century — and the future of Russia! Enough to destroy anyone standing in your path! You can take your freedom into your own hands!”
Ice coursed in Constantine’s veins.
Suddenly he was disoriented. Could it be? Was it his chance to break away from hell? Did he dare to believe that something could end the delirium of his existence, that one day sharp sounds would no longer startle him, making him look over his shoulder in fear that the killers had come for him after all.
“Constantine, information can be both a blessing and a curse. It alters the mind. I don’t want to make your life a bigger nightmare than it already is. I must know that you are the right man. I want the Metropolitan’s choice to be beyond suspicion. Tell me what made you abandon your home and hole up to rot in the French countryside!”
It came like a slap, as if Constantine were coerced to admit that his plight could not be any worse, that he was a man reigned by despair, one who had nothing to lose. It pained him because it was perfectly true.
Constantine’s chest swelled with bitterness that had boiled inside him far too long. He realized that he was the one in need of a confession. If he was ever going to exorcise his demons, doing it at the doorstep of a Russian church was the most appropriate.
He slumped back on the bench. “Three masked men raided my apartment in Moscow. They pulled me out of bed and beat me up, threatening to kill me and my brother if I didn’t vanish off the face of the earth. And they promised to kill anyone I would involve to help me.”
Constantine paused.
“The President of Russia wants me dead.”
5
After the Berlin Wall came down, the decay spread like never before. Embezzlement and corruption had always been present, in one way or another, but by 1990, the Soviet West Army Group was flooded with marauders.
“Our family lived in Merzeburg. My father was Colonel Ivan Sokolov, commander of a MiG Regiment in the 16th Air Army. He saw what was happening around him, especially as the Soviet troops began withdrawal from Germany. The WAG was a massive machine eliminated in haste. Fortunes were made as funds, materiel and military hardware disappeared.
“My father reported the incidents to his superiors, hoping for an investigation. Instead, the Generals kicked him out of the Air Force. They stripped him of the stars on his shoulders. They took away his honor and dignity. And they did it smiling in his face. He had been unaware just how high up the corruption ran, so his reports went straight into the main culprits. The Generals.”
Constantine lowered his gaze, his mind wandering decades back.
“We were forced to return to Moscow, of course. Disgraced, betrayed and broke. Do you remember what Moscow was like in the nineties?”
“I left Russia in 1992,” Malinin said. “But I remember Moscow too well. A city of twelve million, dark and dirty, reeking of desperation. Ruled by gangs, drug pushers, addicts, rapists, bandits, robbers, sold-out cops, crooked bureaucrats, Mohawk-haired punks and serial killers. Walking the streets was a crazy game of Russian roulette.”
“The promised miracle of economic reforms was a farce. Father stayed unemployed. He didn’t want to choose between washing cars and selling T-shirts on Red Square, but he had to feed us somehow, so he did it, throwing away the last of his pride. I was in my teens then, and Gene was only ten years old. Mother was a teacher, but her salary’s value was soon worth less than the cost of paper it was printed on.”
“Hyperinflation had rocketed to five hundred percent,” Malinin remembered.
The people’s accrued savings had been declared null and void, which had catapulted most of the population into poverty, while the government feasted on the clear-out garage sale that they’d turned the country into.
Russia’s population had started to decrease by a million each year.
Life expectancy had plummeted into fifties as death and birth ratios crisscrossed in inverse lines, stretched further by never before seen rates of suicides and infant mortality.
“But at the same time, billions of dollars were claimed overnight by those who’d shaken hands with the right people in the Kremlin. The nouveau rich caste of tycoons, and a scattering of lesser cronies, soaked the emerging markets in the blood of their competitors.
“By that time, the troops had withdrawn from Germany. The real eye-opener for my father was seeing his former brothers-in-arms, who had been pulled back to Russia literally into an open field, with no roof over their heads. The 3,000 refugee families of the 85th Air Regiment joined a mass of over two hundred thousand other homeless military servicemen across the country who had been discarded as human waste.
“It drove him beyond the edge. So he joined the Moscow uprising of 1993.”
Painfully, a kaleidoscope of terrifying images played out in Constantine’s mind. The views he had seen through the window of the apartment in Presnya district, and the footage of massacre on the television screen in their bedroom.
6
Russia’s death wasn’t abstract. It had a name.
Boris Yeltsin.
Millions voiced contempt for Yeltsin all over Russia. The Parliament denounced his policies, demanding his resignation.
But the ensuing twenty months of confrontation between the two branches of power ended in bloodshed.
Yeltsin was furious that anyone would question his policies.
He was Czar Boris.
On September 21st, 1993, Boris Yeltsin violated the Constitution yet again by dismissing the Parliament as he signed a decree that transferred all legislative functions into the hands of the government. During a televised speech, Yeltsin also pronounced the current Constitution invalid, so that a new one could be drawn up.
Only this time, it would be tailored to suit his person.
In turn, the sacked parliamentarians refused to comply and leave their building, making a last stand against the rampant head of state.
The Parliament building — a tall white house on the bank of the Moskva River. Broad-shouldered. Defiant. The personification of Russia.
Long into the night, at an emergency session of the Parliament, President Yeltsin was unanimously impeached in accordance with Article 121 of the Constitution.
Early in the following morning, army troops began to pull up in BTR transports.
Thus began a two-week siege of the white house on the riverbank.
Thousands of Muscovites poured into the streets to support their Parliament and Constitution. Over 800 unarmed civilians set up barricades, wrapping the House of Parliament in a human shield. Among those protestors waving Russian tricolors was Ivan Sokolov. He was a dogfighter. Once shot down, he took it to the skies again, seeking retribution.
By the start of October, reports from the provinces attested that the number of people backing the Parliament was growing with each day. The longer the parliamentarians held on, the more momentum the protests would gain. Downtown Moscow had already been paralyzed.
Police and Army forces could not move in, kept at bay by the old stock of Kalashnikovs left over at the Parliament ever since 1991. And the besieged MPs’ demands were non-negotiable, echoed by the ever-growing crowd of four thousand supporters that had gathered around them. Yeltsin had to step down. The verdict of the Constitutional Court had already confirmed that he’d broken the law.