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“Coup d’état?”
“It has happened before, Mr. President. All Russian and European history is a story of men of vision and determination who have seized the moment and taken the state. Mussolini took Rome and all Italy. The Greek colonels took Athens and all Greece. No civil war. Just a fast strike. The defeated flee, their supporters lose their nerve and seek an alliance. By New Year’s Day, Russia can be yours.”
Komarov thought. He would take the television studios and address the nation. He would claim he had acted to prevent an anti-people conspiracy canceling the election. They would believe him. The generals would be arrested; the colonels would seek promotion by changing to his side.
“Could you do it?”
“Mr. President, everything in this corrupt country is for sale. That is why the Motherland needs Igor Komarov, to scour the pigpen. With money I can buy all the troops I will need. Give me the word and I will put you in the state apartments of the Kremlin at noon of New Year’s Day.”
Igor Komarov rested his chin on his steepled hands and gazed at the blotter. After several minutes he raised his gaze to meet that of Colonel Grishin.
“Do it,” he said.
¯
IF Grishin had been required to organize an armed force to capture the city of Moscow, and to do so starting from scratch in four days, he would never have been able to do it.
But he was not starting from scratch. He had known for months that in the immediate aftermath of Igor Komarov’s presidential victory the program for the transfer of all state powers to the UPF would begin.
The political side, the formal abolition of opposition parties, would be for Komarov. His own task would be the subjugation or disarming and disbanding of all the state’s armed units.
In preparing for this task, he had already decided which would be his natural allies and which his obvious enemies. Chief among the latter was the Presidential Security Guard, a force of thirty thousand armed men of which six thousand were based inside Moscow and a thousand in the Kremlin itself Commanded by General Korin, successor to Yeltsin’s notorious Alexander Korzhakov, they were all officered by nominees of the late President Cherkassov. They would fight for the legitimacy of the state and against the putsch.
After them came the Interior Ministry with its own army of 150,000 men. Fortunately for Grishin, most of this enormous force was scattered the length and breadth of Russia, with only five thousand in and around the capital. The generals of the Presidium of the MVD would not be long working out that they would be among the first on the cattle trucks for the Gulag, aware like the Presidentials that there could be no room in the New Russia for them and the Black Guard of Grishin.
Third in line, and a nonnegotiable demand from the Dolgoruki mafia, was the arrest and internment of the two gang-buster divisions, the Federal unit ruled from the MVD’s national headquarters at Zhitny Square and the Moscow City unit, the GUVD, run by Major General Petrovsky from Shabolovka Street. Both divisions, and their rapid reaction forces, the OMON and the SOBR, would be in no doubt that the only place for them in Grishin’s Russia would be a labor camp or the execution courtyard.
Yet in the cauldron of departmental or private armies that abounded in the collapsing Russia of 1999, Grishin knew he also had natural or purchasable allies. The key to victory was to keep the army unaware, confused, at odds with itself, and finally impotent.
His own immediate forces were his six thousand Black Guards and the twenty thousand teenaged Young Combatants.
The former was an elite force he had created over the years. The officer corps was comprised entirely of battle-trained former special forces, paratroopers, marines, and MVD men, required to prove in savage initiation ceremonies both their ruthlessness and their dedication to the ultra-right.
Yet somewhere in the top forty among them must be a traitor. Someone, clearly, had been in touch with the authorities and the media to denounce the four attempted assassinations of December 21 as Black Guard work. The deduction had been too fast to be unprompted.
He had no choice but to detain and isolate those top forty men, and this was done on December 28. Intensive interrogation and the unmasking of the traitor would have to come later. To preserve morale, the junior officers were simply promoted to fill the gaps and told their commanders were away on a training course.
Poring over a large-scale map of the Moscow Oblast, Grishin prepared his battle plan for New Year’s Eve. His great advantage was that the streets would be almost empty.
Virtually no work is possible on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve as the Muscovites drift away with their stocks of booze to the private homes or group parties where they intend to spend the night. Darkness comes by half-past three in the afternoon and after that only those desperate to replenish inadequate liquor supplies venture into the freezing night.
Everyone celebrates, including the unfortunate night watchmen and skeleton staffs forbidden to take time off and go home. They bring their own supplies to work.
By six, Grishin calculated, he would have the streets to himself. By six every major ministry and government building would be empty apart from the night staff, and by ten even they and the soldiers still in barracks would be unable to defend themselves.
A first priority, once his attacking forces were inside the city, was to seal Moscow from the outside. This was the job he allocated to the Young Combatants. There were 52 major and secondary roads into Moscow, and to block them all he needed 104 heavy trucks loaded with concrete ballast.
He divided the Young Combatants into the 104 necessary groups, each under the command of an experienced soldier from the Black Guard. The trucks would be acquired by renting them from long-distance haulers or stealing them at gunpoint on the morning of New Year’s Eve. At the given hour each pair would be driven into position, moving out from intersections until they were nose-to-nose across every highway, then immobilized.
On every major road into Moscow the border between the Moscow Oblast and the neighboring province is marked by an MVD militia post, a small booth with several bored soldiers and a phone, and a parked armored personnel carrier (APC). On New Year’s Eve the APC would be unmanned while the crew celebrated in the hut. In the case of the single highway Grishin needed to enter the city, this post would be suppressed. In the case of all the others, the Young Combatants would drive their blocking trucks to the first intersection inside the city, leaving the militiamen at the border to get drunk as usual, and park the trucks straddling the road. Then the Combatants, two hundred to a group, would mount their ambushes on the city side of the trucks and prevent any relief column from entering Moscow.
Inside the city he needed to take seven targets—five secondary and two primary. As his Black Guard was quartered in five bases out in the countryside, with only a small barracks inside the city to supply Guards for Komarov’s dacha, the easiest way would be to drive in on five axes. But to achieve coordination, that would mean a storm of radio traffic. He preferred to bring his whole force in radio silence. He therefore favored one single truck convoy.
His main and headquarters base was to the northeast, so he decided to bring the entire force of six thousand men, fully armed and in their vehicles, to that base on December 30, and invade the city down the main highway that starts as Yaroslavskoye Chaussee and becomes Prospekt Mira—Peace Avenue—as it nears the inner Ring Road.
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One of his two primary targets, the great television complex at Ostankino, would lie only a quarter of a mile off that highway and for this he intended to detach two thousand of his six thousand men.