The Devil's Alternative

later, what will be the outcome in terms of national discipline?”

Petrov broke the ensuing silence. He admitted that there already existed a groundswell of restiveness among the broad masses of the people, evidenced by a recent rash of small outbreaks of disorder and resignations from the Party, all re­ported back to him in the Central Committee through the million tendrils of the Party machine. In the face of a true famine, many Party cadres could side with the proletariat.

The non-Russians nodded in agreement. In their republics Moscow’s grip was always likely to be less total then inside the RSFSR itself.

“We could strip the six East European satellites,” suggested Petryanov, not even bothering to refer to the East Europeans as “fraternal comrades.”

“Poland and Rumania would burst into flame for a start,” countered Shushkin, the liaison man with Eastern Europe. “Probably Hungary to follow suit.”

“The Red Army could deal with them,” snarled Marshal Kerensky.

“Not three at a time. Not nowadays,” said Rudin.

“We are still talking only of a total acquisition of ten mil­lion tons,” said Komarov. “It’s not enough.”

“Comrade Stepanov?” asked Rudin.

The head of the state-controlled trade unions chose his words carefully.

“In the event of genuine famine this winter and next spring through summer,” he said, studying his pencil, “it would not be possible to guarantee the absence of the outbreak of acts of disorder, perhaps on a wide scale.”

Ivanenko, sitting quietly, gazing at the Western king-size filter between his right forefinger and thumb, smelled more than smoke in his nostrils. He had scented fear many times: in the arrest procedures, in the interrogation rooms, in the corridors of his craft. He smelled it now. He and the men around him were powerful, privileged, protected. But he knew them all well; he had the files. And he, who knew no fear for himself, as the soul-dead know no fear, knew also that they all feared one thing more than war itself. If the So­viet proletariat, long-suffering, patient, oxlike in the face of deprivation, ever went berserk ...

All eyes were on him. Public “acts of disorder,” and the repression of them, were his territory.

“I could,” he said evenly, “cope with one Novocherkassk.” There was a hiss of indrawn breath down the table. “I could cope with ten, or even twenty. But the combined resources of the KGB could not cope with fifty.”

The mention of Novocherkassk brought the specter right out of the wallpaper, as he knew it would. On June 2, 1962, almost exactly twenty years earlier, the great industrial city of Novocherkassk had erupted in worker riots. But twenty years had not dimmed the memory.

It had started when by a stupid coincidence one ministry raised the price of meat and butter while another cut wages at the giant NEVZ locomotive works by thirty percent. In the resulting riots the shouting workers took over the city for three days, an unheard-of phenomenon in the Soviet Union. Equally unheard of, they booed the local Party leaders into trembling self-imprisonment in their own headquarters, shouted down a full general, charged ranks of armed soldiers, and pelted advancing tanks with mud until the vision slits clogged up and the tanks ground to a halt.

The response of Moscow was massive. Every single line, every road, every telephone, every track in and out of Novo­cherkassk was sealed so the news could not leak out. Two divisions of KGB special troops had to be drafted to finish off the affair and mop up the rioters. There were eighty-six civil­ians shot down in the streets, over three hundred wounded. None ever returned home; none was buried locally. Not only the wounded but every single member of every family of a dead or wounded man, woman, or child was deported to the camps of Gulag lest they persist in asking after their relatives and thus keep memory of the affair alive. Every trace was wiped out, but two decades later it was still well remembered inside the Kremlin.

When Ivanenko dropped his bombshell, there was silence again around the table. Rudin broke it.

“Very well, then. The conclusion seems inescapable. We will have to buy from abroad as never before. Comrade Komarov, what is the minimum we would need to buy abroad to avoid disaster?”

“Comrade Secretary-General, if we leave the irreducible minimum in the countryside and use every scrap of our thirty million tons of national reserve, we will need fifty-five million tons of grain from outside. That would mean the entire sur­plus, in a year of bumper crops, from both the United States and Canada,” Komarov answered.

“They’ll never sell it to us!” shouted Kerensky.

“They are not fools, Comrade Marshal,” Ivanenko cut in quietly. “Their Condor satellites must have warned them al­ready that something is wrong with our spring wheat. But they cannot know what or how much. Not yet. But by the autumn they will have a pretty fair idea. And they are greedy, endlessly greedy for more money. I can raise the pro­duction levels in the gold mines of Siberia and Kolyma, ship more labor there from the camps of Mordovia. The money for such a purchase we can raise.”

“I agree with you on one point,” said Rudin, “but not on the other, Comrade Ivanenko. They may have the wheat, we may have the gold, but there is a chance, just a chance, that this time they will require concessions.”

At the word concessions, everyone stiffened.

“What kinds of concessions?” asked Marshal Kerensky sus­piciously.

”One never knows until one negotiates,” said Rudin, “but it’s a possibility we have to face. They might require conces­sions in military areas. ...”

“Never!” shouted Kerensky, on his feet and red-faced.

“Our options are somewhat closed,” countered Rudin. “We appear to have agreed that a severe and nationwide famine is not tolerable. It would set back the progress of the Soviet Union and thence the global rule of Marxism-Leninism by a decade, maybe more. We need the grain; there are no more options. If the imperialists exact concessions in the military field, we may have to accept a drawback lasting two or three years, but only in order all the better to advance after the recovery.”

There was a general murmur of assent. Rudin was on the threshold of carrying his meeting. Then Vishnayev struck. He rose slowly as the buzz subsided.

“The issues before us, Comrades,” he began with silky rea­sonableness, “are massive, with incalculable consequences. I propose that this is too early to reach any binding conclusion. I propose an adjournment until two weeks from today, while we all think over what has been said and suggested.”

His ploy worked. He had bought his time, as Rudin had privately feared he would. The meeting agreed, ten against three, to adjourn without a resolution.

Yuri Ivanenko had reached the ground floor and was about to step into his waiting limousine when he felt a touch at his elbow. Standing beside him was a tall, beautifully tailored major of the Kremlin guard.

“The Comrade Secretary-General would like a word with you in his private suite, Comrade Chairman,” he said quietly. Without another word he turned and headed down a corridor leading along the building away from the main doorway. Ivanenko followed. As he tailed the major’s perfectly fitting barathea jacket, fawn whipcord trousers, and gleaming boots, it occurred to him that if any one of the men of the Polit­buro came to sit one day in the Penal Chair, the subsequent arrest would be carried out by his own KGB special troops, called Border Guards, with their bright green cap bands and shoulder boards, the sword-and-shield insignia of the KGB above the peaks of their caps.

But if he, Ivanenko alone, were to be arrested, the KGB would not be given the job, as they had not been trusted al­most thirty years earlier to arrest Lavrenti Beria. It would be these elegant, disdainful Kremlin elite guards, the praetorians at the seat of ultimate power, who would do the job. Perhaps the self-assured major walking before him; he would have no qualms at all.

They reached a private elevator, ascended to the third floor again, and Ivanenko was shown into the private apartments of Maxim Rudin.

Stalin had lived in seclusion right in the heart of the Krem­lin, but Malenkov and Khrushchev had ended the practice, preferring to establish themselves and most of their cronies in luxury apartments in a nondescript (from the outside) com­plex of apartment blocks at the far end of Kutuzovsky Pros­pekt. But when Rudin’s wife had died two years earlier, he had moved back to the Kremlin.

It was a comparatively modest apartment for this most powerful of men: six rooms, including a well-equipped kitchen, marble bathroom, private study, sitting room, dining room, and bedroom. Rudin lived alone, ate sparingly, dis­pensed with most luxuries, and was cared for by an elderly cleaning woman and the ever-present Misha, a hulking but silent-moving ex-soldier who never spoke but was never far away. When Ivanenko entered the study at Misha’s silent ges­ture, he found Maxim Rudin and Vassili Petrov already there. Rudin waved him to a vacant chair,