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There was a stunned silence. Neither the Russian media nor the foreigners knew what he was talking about. In reality, neither did he. Igor Komarov, clinging to the lectern and the remains of his self-control, went white.
“What Manifesto?”
Another mistake.
“According to my information, sir, it purports to contain your plans for the creation of a single-party state, the reactivation of the Gulag for your political opponents, rule of the country by two hundred thousand Black Guards, and the invasion of the neighboring republics.”
The silence was deafening. Forty correspondents in the hall came from Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, and Armenia. Half the Russian press supported the parties destined for abolition, with their hierarchs heading for the camps, accompanied by the press. If the Englishman was right. Everyone stared at Komarov.
That was when the real tumult began. Then he made the third mistake. He lost his temper.
“I will not stand here and listen to any more of this shit!” he screamed, and stalked from the stage, followed by the hapless Kuznetsov.
At the rear of the hall Colonel Grishin stood in the shadow of a hanging curtain and glared at the press with naked hate. Not for long, he promised himself. Not for long.
CHAPTER 19
IN THE SOUTHWESTERN CORNER OF THE CENTRAL ZONE of Moscow, in a bulge of land formed by a hairpin curve in the Moskva River, stands the medieval convent of Novodevichi and in the shadow of its walls the great cemetery.
Twenty acres of land, shaded by pine, birch, lime, and willow, play host to twenty-two thousand graves where lie the notables of Russia for two centuries.
The cemetery divides into eleven major gardens. Numbers one to four cover the nineteenth century, bounded by the walls of the convent on one side and the central dividing wail on the other.
Five to eight lie between the dividing wall and the perimeter, beyond which the trucks roar down the Khamovnitchesky Val. Here lie the great and the bad of the Communist era. Marshals, politicians, scientists, scholars, writers, and astronauts are to be found flanking the paths and lanes, their tombstones ranging from great simplicity to monuments of self-adoring grandiosity.
Gagarin the astronaut, killed flying a prototype while the worse for vodka, is here, a few yards from the round-headed stone effigy of Nikita Khrushchev. Models of airplanes, rockets, and guns test
ify to what these men did in life. Other figures stare heroically into oblivion, chests plated in granite medals.
Down the central pathway there is a further wail, penetrated by a narrow entrance and leading to three smaller gardens, numbers nine, ten, and eleven. With space at a premium there were hardly any plots left by the winter of 1999, but one had been reserved for General of the Army Nikolai Nikolayev, and here on December 26 his nephew Misha Andreev buried his uncle Kolya.
He tried to make it the way the old man had asked at their last dinner together. There were twenty generals, including the Defense Minister, and one of the two Metropolitan bishops of Moscow officiated.
The whole deal, the old warrior had asked, so the acolytes swung their censers and the aromatic smoke arose in clouds into the bitter air.
The headstone was in the form of a cross, carved in granite, but there was no effigy of the dead man, just his name and beneath it the words Russky Soldat, a Russian soldier.
Major General Andreev pronounced the eulogy. He kept it short. Uncle Kolya might have wanted to go to his grave like a Christian at last, but he hated gushing words. When he was done, and while the bishop intoned the parting words, he laid the three magenta ribbons and gold discs of the Hero of the USSR on the coffin. Eight of his own soldiers of the Tamanskaya Division had acted as pallbearers, and they lowered the coffin into the ground. Andreev stood back and saluted. Two ministers and the other eighteen generals did the same.
As they walked back down the central pathway to the entrance and the cortege of waiting cars and limousines, the deputy defense minister, General Butov, put a hand on his shoulder.
“A dreadful thing,” he said. “A terrible way to go.”
“One day,” said Andreev, “I will find them and they will pay.”
Butov was clearly embarrassed. He was a political appointee, a desk jockey who had never commanded combat troops.
“Yes, well, I’m sure the militia people are doing their best,” he said.
On the pavement the generals solemnly shook his hand, one by one, then climbed into their staff cars and hurried away. Andreev found his own car and drove back to his base.
¯
FIVE miles away, as the winter light faded in the midafternoon, a short priest in cassock and stovepipe hat scurried through the snow and ducked into the onion-domed church on Slavyansky Square. Five minutes later he was joined by Colonel Anatoli Grishin.
“You seemed perturbed,” said the colonel quietly.
“I am badly frightened,” said the priest.