“They all had demonstrated a commendable degree of loyalty to the Czar. The Oprichnina would physically include certain districts of Russia and certain cities, and the revenue from these places would be used to support the Oprichnina and of course the Czar, who would live among them.
“The old establishment would remain in place. The boyars not included in the Oprichnina would retain their titles and privileges; the council — the Duma—would continue to operate, its decisions subject of course to the Czar’s approval. But the communication would be one way. Except in extraordinary circumstances, no one not an Oprichniki would be permitted to communicate with the Oprichnina.
“The Czar’s offer was accepted. God’s man was back in charge. The boyars had their titles. The church was now supported by the state, so most of the priests and bishops were happy. Just about everybody was happy but Philip the Second, Metropolitan of Moscow, who let it be known that he thought the idea of the Oprichnina was un-Christian.
“The Czar understood that he could not tolerate doubt or criticism. And so Ivan set out for Tver, where the Metropolitan lived. On the way, he heard a rumor that the people and the administration in Russia’s second-largest city, Great Novgorod, were unhappy with having to support Oprichnina.
“Just as soon as he had watched Metropolitan Philip being choked to death in Tver, the Czar went to Great Novgorod, where, over the course of five weeks, the army of the Oprichnina, often helped personally by Ivan himself, raped every female they could find, massacred every man they could find, and destroyed every farmhouse, warehouse, barn, monastery, church, every crop in the fields, every horse, cow, and chicken.”
He paused, then said, “And so was born what we now call the SVR.”
“Excuse me?” Jake Torine asked. “I got lost just now.”
“Over the years, it has been known by different names, of course,” the archimandrite explained. “It actually didn’t have a name of its own, other than the Oprichnina, a state within a state, until Czar Nicholas the First. After Nicholas put down the Decembrist Revolution in 1825, he reorganized the trusted elements of the Oprichnina into what he called the Third Section.
“That reincarnation of the Oprichnina lasted until 1917, when the Bolsheviks renamed it the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Suppression of Counterrevolution and Sabotage — acronym Cheka.”
“That sounds as if you’re saying that the Czar’s secret police just changed sides, became Communists,” D’Alessandro said.
It was his first comment during the long history lesson.
“My son, you’re saying two things, you realize,” the archbishop said. “That the Oprichnina changed sides is one. That the Oprichnina became Communist is another. They never change sides. They may have worked for different masters, but they never become anything other than what they were, members of the Oprichnina.”
“Excuse me, Your Eminence,” D’Alessandro said, “but I’ve always been taught that the Russian secret police, by whatever name, were always Communist. Wasn’t the first head of the Cheka — Dzerzhinsky — a lifelong Communist? I’ve always heard he spent most of his life in one Czarist jail or another before the Communist revolution. That’s not so?”
“The Dziarzhynava family was of the original one thousand families in Ivan’s Oprichnina,” the archbishop said. “Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the Cheka, was born on the family’s estate in western Belarus. The estate was never confiscated by the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks or the Communists after they took power. The family owns it to this day.”
The archimandrite picked the narrative up.
“The Czar’s Imperial Prisons were controlled by the Third Section. How well one fared in them — or whether one was actually in a prison, or was just on the roster — depended on how well one was regarded by the Oprichnina. The fact that the history books paint the tale of this heroic revolutionary languishing, starved and beaten, for years in a Czarist prison cell doesn’t make it true.”
The archbishop took his turn by asking, “And didn’t you think it was a little odd that Lenin appointed Dzerzhinsky to head the Cheka and kept him there when there were so many deserving and reasonably talented Communists close to him?”
D’Alessandro put up both hands in an admission of confusion.
“The Cheka,” the archimandrite went on, “was reorganized after the counterrevolution of 1922 as the GPU, later the OGPU. A man named Yaakov Peters was named to head it. By Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, who was minister of the interior, which controlled the OGPU.
“Dzerzhinsky died of a heart attack in 1926. After that there were constant reorganizations and renaming. In 1934, the OGPU became the NKVD — People’s Commissariat for State Security. In 1943, the NKGB was split off from the NKVD. And in 1946, after the Great War, it became the MGB, Ministry of State Security.”
“What you’re saying, Your Grace,” D’Alessandro said, “is that this state within a state…”
“The Oprichnina,” the archimandrite furnished.
“… the Oprichnina was in charge of everything? Only the names changed and the Oprichnina walked through the raindrops of the purges they had over there at least once a year?”
“My son,” the archbishop said, “you’re again putting together things that don’t belong together. Yes, the Oprichnina remained—remains—in charge. No, not all the Oprichniki managed to live through all the purges. Enough did, of course, in order to maintain the Oprichnina and learn from the mistakes made.”
“Excuse me, Your Eminence,” Torine asked. “Are you saying the Oprichnina exists today?”
“Of course it does. Russia is under an Oprichnik.”
“Putin?” D’Alessandro blurted.
“Who else,” the archbishop replied, “but Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin?”
“And that Mr. Pevsner, Swe… Svetlana, and Colonel Berezovsky were — are — Oprichniki?”
Nicolai Tarasov raised his pudgy hand above his bald head.
When Torine looked at him, Tarasov said, smiling, “Yes, me, too. I confess. If there were membership cards, I would be a card-carrying Oprichnik.”
“How do you get to be an Oprichnik?” D’Alessandro asked. “Like the Mafia makes ‘made men’? First you whack somebody, then there’s a ceremony where you cut your fingers to mingle blood, and then take an oath of silence?”
“One is born into the Oprichnik,” the archbishop said. “Or, in the case of women, marries into it. Only very rarely can a man become an Oprichnik by marrying into it. There is no oath of silence, such as the Mafia oath of Omertà, because one is not necessary. It is in the interest of every Oprichnik to keep what he or she knows about the state within the state from becoming public knowledge.”
“May I have your permission, Your Eminence, to make a comment?” Aleksandr Pevsner asked. It was the first time he’d said anything.
The archbishop nodded.
“But please, my son, try to not get far off the subject,” he said.
“The Oprichnina has not endured for more than four hundred years without difficulty,” Pevsner said. “From time to time, it has been necessary to purify its membership—”
“Purify it? How was that done, Mr. Pevsner?” Jake Torine asked.
“I recently found it necessary to purify my personal staff of a man — an American — who betrayed the trust I placed in him.”
“Howard Kennedy?” Torine asked.
Pevsner did not respond directly, but instead said, “As I was saying, we have found it necessary to purify our ranks from time to time and also to place under our protection certain individuals who have rendered one or more of us — and thus the Oprichnina — a great service.
“This was the case with our Charley. Before he met Svetlana and Dmitri, I very seriously considered eliminating him as a threat. God in His never-failing wisdom stayed my hand, and Charley lived to save my life at the risk of his own. Knowing that others, in particular Vladimir Vladimirovich, still wanted our Cha
rley out of the way, I sent word to Vladimir Vladimirovich that I considered our Charley my brother.
“Ordinarily, that would have been enough to protect our Charley, as a friend of the Oprichnina, but Vladimir Vladimirovich apparently decided that our Charley posed a threat he could not countenance and/or that I no longer had the authority to categorize Charley as a protected friend of the Oprichnina.
“He sent Dmitri and Svetlana to eliminate our Charley in Marburg, Germany. That operation turned out disastrously for Vladimir Vladimirovich, as you all know. Not only did Dmitri and Svetlana decide not to eliminate our Charley, but enlisted his aid in helping them to defect.
“Vladimir Vladimirovich had SVR agents waiting in Vienna to arrest Dmitri and Svetlana. Instead, our Charley flew them to Argentina and ultimately brought them here.”
“Can I jump in here, Your Eminence?” Vic D’Alessandro asked.
“I was afraid this would happen,” the archbishop asked. “But yes, my son, you may. Try to be brief.”
“Thank you,” D’Alessandro said.
“Dmitri—”
“Please call me Tom, Vic.”
“Okay. Tom, why did you defect? From all I’ve ever heard, all the intelligence services in Russia live very well, and I’m guessing that you Oprichniks lived pretty high on the hog. So why did you defect?”
“Because we came to the conclusion that sooner or later, Mr. Putin was going to get around to purifying us. We knew too much. We had family members — Aleksandr and Nicolai — who had, Vladimir Vladimirovich could reasonably argue, already defected.”
“I don’t think Vladimir Vladimirovich, if he could get his hands on us, would have actually fed us to starving dogs or thrown us off the Kremlin wall,” Aleksandr Pevsner said, “but keeping us on drugs in a mental hospital for the rest of our lives seemed a distinct possibility.”
“What did he have… does he have… against you?”
“You didn’t tell them, Charley?” Pevsner asked.
Castillo shook his head.
“Would you have told them if they asked?” Pevsner asked.
“If they had a good reason for wanting to know, I would have.”
“You really have the makings of a good Oprichnik,” Pevsner said. “Well, now there is that reason, so I will tell them.
“In the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, I was a polkovnik—colonel — in both the Soviet Air Force and the SVR. I was in charge of Aeroflot operations worldwide, both in a business sense and in the security aspect. These duties required me to travel all over the world, and to make the appropriate contacts. My cousin Nicolai was my deputy in both roles.
“When the USSR collapsed, the SVR — which is to say Vladimir Vladimirovich — learned the new government had the odd notion that the assets of the SVR should be turned over to the new democratic government.”
“What assets?” Torine asked.
“Would you believe tons of gold, Jake?” Castillo asked.
“Jesus Christ!” Torine said.
“Now that was blasphemous,” the archbishop said.
“I’m sorry, Your Eminence,” Torine said.
“You need Our Savior’s forgiveness, not mine.”
“Plus some tons of platinum,” Castillo said, chuckling. “Not to mention a lot of cash.”
Pevsner, his tone making it clear that he didn’t appreciate contributions from others while he was explaining things, then went on:
“As I was saying. When Vladimir Vladimirovich was faced with the problem of not wanting to turn over the SVR’s assets to the new democratic government, he turned to me. Nicolai and me. He correctly suspected that we would know how to get these assets out of Russia to places where they would be safe from the clutching hands of the new government.
“At about this time, Nicolai and I realized there were some aspects of capitalism we had not previously understood. As Ayn Rand so wisely put it — she was Russian, I presume you know—‘No man is entitled to the fruits of another man’s labor.’
“So Nicolai and I told Vladimir Vladimirovich we would be happy to accommodate him for a small fee. Five percent of the value of what we placed safely outside the former Soviet Union.”
“Jake,” Castillo said, “you’ve always been good at doing math in your head. Try this: In 1991, when the USSR collapsed, gold was about $375 an ounce. How much is five percent of two thousand pounds of gold, there being sixteen ounces of gold in each pound?”
“My Go— goodness,” Torine said.
“‘Goodness’ being a euphemism for God,” the archbishop said, “there are those, myself included, who consider the phrase blasphemous.”
“Again, I’m sorry, Your Eminence,” Torine said, then looked at Castillo. “And you said ‘tons of gold’? Plural?”
“So now you know,” Castillo said, “where ol’ Aleksandr got the money to buy Karin Hall, and all those cruise ships, and the Grand Cozumel Beach and Golf Resort, et cetera, et cetera.”
“We started out with a couple of old transports from surplus Air Force stock,” Pevsner said. “We flew surplus Soviet arms out of Russia, and luxury goods — Mercedes-Benz automobiles, Louis Vuitton luggage, that sort of thing — in.
“Mingled with the arms on the flights out of Moscow were fifty-five-gallon barrels of fuel. You would be surprised how much gold one can get into a fifty-five-gallon drum. That, unfortunately, is how I earned the reputation of being an arms dealer; but regretfully that was necessary as a cover. No one was going to believe I prospered so quickly providing antique samovars and Black Sea caviar to the world market.
“But turning to Vladimir Vladimirovich, who is really the subject of this meeting…”
“I’m so glad you remembered, my son,” the archbishop said.
“As long as I have known Vladimir Vladimirovich, which has been for all of our lives, I always suspected — probably because of his father; the apple never falls far from the tree — that he was more of a Communist than a Christian, which means that he was far more interested in lining his pockets than promoting the general welfare of the Oprichnina.”
“That characterization, I would suggest,” the archbishop said, “qualifies as a rare exception to the scriptural admonition to ‘judge not,’ et cetera.”
“I gather you are a Christian, Mr. Pevsner?” Naylor asked.
“Of course I’m a Christian,” Pevsner said indignantly. “I’m surprised our Charley didn’t make that quite clear to you.”
“It must have slipped his mind,” Naylor said.
“Where was I?” Pevsner asked.
“You were saying that Mr. Putin was very much like his father,” D’Alessandro said.
“He is.”
“The story I’ve always heard is that his father was a foreman in a locomotive factory who became Stalin’s cook.”
“That’s what the official biographies say. Actually, he was Stalin’s cook as much as Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky was a tortured prisoner of the Czar until he was twenty-six. Vladimir Putin the elder was a general in the KGB, who served, among other such duties, as political commissar during the siege of Stalingrad.”
Pevsner paused long enough to let that sink in, then said, “With the gracious permission of His Eminence, I will continue.”
“Keep it short, my son,” the archbishop said.
“Where to begin?” Pevsner asked rhetorically, and then answered his own question. “At the beginning…
“During the revolution of 1917, a substantial portion of Third Section, the Czar’s secret police, was co-opted by the Bolsheviks of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and renamed the Cheka—”
“‘A substantial portion’?” D’Alessandro interrupted.
“If they had taken it over completely, Vic,” Pevsner said, “none of us would be here today, and there would be no Oprichnina.”
“And with no Oprichnina, God alone knows what would have been the fate of the church,” the archbishop added.
“Who didn’t get co-opted?” D’
Alessandro asked.
“My family, obviously, and the Alekseev family, and perhaps fifty or sixty others,” Pevsner said. “May I continue?”
“Alek,” Castillo said, “all Vic is trying to do is make sure he and everybody else understands what you’re trying to tell them.”
“Be that as it may, friend Charley, if I am continually interrupted, I’ll never finish.”
“Sorry, Alek,” D’Alessandro said.
“The Cheka,” Pevsner went on, “arrested the Imperial Family — Czar Nicholas the Second, Czarina Alexandra, their five children — Czarevich Alexei, and Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia — and a half dozen of the intimate friends and servants and took them to Yekaterinburg, which is some nine hundred miles east of Moscow.
“There, on July seventeenth, 1918, at the personal order of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, they were murdered and their bodies buried in unmarked graves in a forest.
“The Bolsheviks then turned to destroying the church.”
“Their greatest mistake, in my humble judgment,” the archbishop said. “Wouldn’t you agree, Father Boris?”
“Absolutely, Your Eminence,” the archimandrite said.
“They murdered clergy, confiscated church property, burned seminaries, turned churches and cathedrals into warehouses… that sort of thing. Shipped millions of Christian people to Siberia. But the church was stronger than they thought it would be.”
“In large part because of the faithful within the Oprichnina, it must be admitted,” the archbishop furnished.
His face showing that while he appreciated the archbishop’s kind words, he still didn’t appreciate being interrupted, Pevsner picked up his history lesson.
“One of the first things to happen was the formation of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia — ROCOR.”
“The archimandrite and I have the honor of humbly serving the ROCOR,” the archbishop said.
“And it is my honor to humbly serve His Eminence, who heads ROCOR,” the archimandrite said.
“ROCOR remained part of the Russian Orthodox Church,” the archbishop went on, “that is to say, under the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate, until 1927—”
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