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Alexei II made his first and last intervention in the political arena of Moscow. He urged that to continue with plans for a new presidential election on January 16 would be impossible, and that the date should be consecrated to a national referendum on the issue of the restoration of the monarchy.
Ironically, Markov was very susceptible to the idea. For one thing he was no fool. He had been appointed four years earlier to the post of premier by the late President Cherkassov as a skilled administrator, a gray suit with a background in the petroleum industry. But with time he had come to enjoy the power of executive office, even in a system where most of the power lay with the president and much less with the premier.
In the six months since Cherkassov’s fatal heart attack he had come to appreciate the panoply of high office even more.
With the Union of Patriotic Forces in ruins from an electoral standpoint, he knew the issue would be between himself and the neo-Communists of the Socialist Union. He also knew he would probably come in second. But a constitutional monarch would, as almost his first act, need to call on an experienced politician and administrator to form a government of national unity. Who better, he reasoned, than himself?
That evening Ivan Markov by presidential decree summoned the deputies of the Duma to return to Moscow for an emergency session.
During January 3, the deputies streamed back across Russia from the farthest corners of Siberia and the northern wastes of Archangel.
The emergency session of the Duma on January 4 was held in the largely undamaged White House. The mood was somber, not least among the deputies of the Union of Patriotic Forces, who were each at pains to tell anyone who would listen that they personally had had no inkling of Igor Komarov’s mad act of New Year’s Eve.
The session was addressed by acting president Markov, who proposed that the entire nation still be consulted on January 16, but concerning the issue of restoration. As he was not a member of the Duma, he could not formally propose the motion. This was done by the Speaker, a member of Markov’s Democratic Alliance Party.
The neo-Communists, seeing presidential power slipping from their grasp, opposed it with their entire voting bloc. But Markov had done his preparatory work well. The members of the UPF, fearful for their own safety, had been interviewed privately, one by one, on the same morning. The strong impression given to each one of them was that if they supported the acting president, the whole question of the lifting of their parliamentary immunity from arrest could well be dropped. Such a step would mean they could keep their seats.
The Democratic Alliance votes added to those of the Union of Patriotic Forces outweighed the neo-Communists. The motion was carried.
Technically the change was not so difficult to administer. Polling booths were already in place. The sole task was to print and issue a further 105 million ballot papers bearing the simple question and two boxes, one for “Yes” and one for “No.”
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ON January 5, in the small northern Russian port of Vyborg a dock security policeman called Pyotr Gromov made his small mark on the footnote of history. Just after dawn he was watching the Swedish freighter Ingrid B prepare to leave for Gothenburg.
He was about to turn away and return to his cabin for breakfast when two figures in blue donkey jackets emerged from behind a pile of crates and made for the gangway just as it was to be hauled up. On a hunch he called on them to stop.
The two men had a brief, muttered conversation and then ran for the gangway. Gromov pulled his gun and fired a warning shot in the air. It was the first time he had used it in three years on the docks, and it pleased him mightily to do so. The two seamen stopped.
Their papers revealed both were Swedes. The younger man spoke English, of which Gromov had a few words. But he had worked long enough on the docks to have a better grasp of Swedish. To the older man he snapped: “So what was the hurry?”
The man said not a word. Neither of them had understood him. He reached out and tore off the older man’s round fur hat. Something familiar about the face. He had seen it before. The policeman and the fleeing Russian stared at each other. That face ... on television ... a podium ... shouting at the cheering crowd.
“I know you,” he said. “You’re Igor Komarov.”
Komarov and Kuznetsov were arrested and flown back to Moscow. The former leader of the UPF was immediately indicted for high treason and remanded in custody pending trial. He was lodged, ironically, in Lefortovo Jail.
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FOR ten days the national debate occupied the newspapers, magazines, airwaves, and TV channels as pundit after pundit intoned his or her opinion.
On the afternoon of Friday, January 14, Father Gregor Rusakov held a revivalist rally in the Olympic Stadium in Moscow. As with Komarov when he had spoken there, his address was carried across the nation, reaching, so the pollsters later estimated, eighty million Russians.
His theme was simple and clear. For seventy years the Russian people had worshiped the twin gods of dialectical materialism and Communism and had been betrayed by both. For fifteen years they had attended at the temple of republican capitalism and seen their hopes traduced. He urged his listeners on the morrow to go back to the God of their f
athers, to go to church and pray for guidance.
Foreign observers have long gained the impression that after seventy years of Communist industrialization the Russians must be a mainly city-dwelling people. It is a mistaken assumption. Even by the winter of 1999 over fifty percent of Russians still lived largely unseen and unrecorded in the small towns, villages, and countryside, that vast spread of land from Belarus to Vladivostok, running across six thousand miles and nine time zones.
Within that unseen land are the one hundred thousand parishes that comprise the hundred bishoprics of the Orthodox Church, each with its large or small onion-domed parish church.
It was to these churches that seventy percent of the Russians streamed through the bitter cold on the morning of Sunday, January 16, and from each pulpit the parish priest read out the Patriarchal Letter. Later known as the Great Encyclical, it was probably the most powerful and moving missive Alexei II ever uttered. It had been adopted the previous week in a closed conclave of the Metropolitan bishops, where the voting, though not unanimous, was convincing.
After morning service the Russians went from the churches to the polls. Because of the size of the land and the lack of electronic technology in the rural districts, it took two days to count the votes. Of valid votes cast, the outcome was sixty-five percent in favor, thirty-five percent against.
On January 20 the Duma accepted and endorsed the result, and passed two further motions. One was to extend the interregnum of Ivan Markov for a further period, until March 31. The second was to institute a Constitutional Committee to pass the referendum verdict into law.
On February 20 the acting president and the Duma of All the Russias extended an invitation to a prince resident outside Russia to accept the title and the functions, within a constitutional monarchy, of Czar of All the Russias.