by Bart Gauvin
“Goddamn it, Khitrov!” exploded the colonel. “Look around you. None of these people are even armed!”
Medvedev’s eyes were adjusting to the low light coming in from outside now, and he could see the bodies that dotted the floor of the broad room. One of the corpses was wearing a ski mask, with an AK-74 carbine on the ground nearby.
“Some of them were,” responded the major, still nonchalant. “Not that it mattered.”
“Not that it mattered?” raged the colonel. “These are Soviet citizens!”
“I do not say that it does not matter that they were unarmed and were killed,” answered Khitrov coolly, “only that the ones that were armed did not matter. My men are too good to be bothered by such amateurs.”
“These were traitors, Colonel,” Medvedev interjected. “They were working against the state, protected by men bearing arms against the state. Their death helps ensure the survival of our country. Had they lived, they would have been a danger to the legitimate government. Keep these things in mind.”
The colonel looked at Medvedev for a moment, then stalked off to inspect the carnage elsewhere in the building.
Khitrov lit up another cigarette, eying Medvedev the whole time. Finally, he spoke. “So, tovarich, what next, eh?” There was amusement in his voice that grated on the older man.
“What is next, major, is that we all do our duty to save our country,” came the frosty response. “I thank you for doing yours.”
He turned and walked between the sprawled bodies back to the front doors, picking his way awkwardly through the charnel house of his own creation by the faint light coming through the building’s front bank of doors. A gentle rain was beginning to fall. The damp felt refreshing on his bare head. Looking down the broad steps he saw the familiar thin figure of Oleg Drugov, ascending towards him at the head of a plain-clothed security detail, several more than the two accompanying him earlier. Drugov had remained behind at the Kremlin when Pavel returned to the White House. There was the trace of a smile on his face.
“Oleg Sergeyevich,” Pavel hailed, “what news?”
“Good and bad,” the man said as he reached the top of the wide steps. Medvedev could see that his friend had much more to say.
“Well?” Medvedev prompted. “Out with it!”
“The Emergency Committee was meeting while the attack here was going forward,” Oleg said. “When it succeeded they took a vote.”
“On what?” Medvedev asked, on his guard now.
“On you, Pavel Ivanovich. They took a vote on you,” Drugov answered.
“What about me?” Medvedev was starting to see where this was going.
“They voted to make you interim President of the Soviet Union, Pavel,” Oleg announced, before going on quickly, “The vice-president said he wouldn’t stand in the way, that he thought you were more qualified to lead us through this difficult time.”
He’s right, I am more qualified than that fool, Pavel thought. Even so…
“Do you accept, Pavel?” asked Drugov, somewhat anxiously.
Medvedev looked down, past the wrecked black metal gate and the BMD, and across the wide boulevard, flowed the wide Moscow River, ancient lifeblood and protector of his country. Of course, I accept, Medvedev thought, but some of those blind men on the Emergency Committee will not like it when they realize that I consider them part of the problem. They think they are getting a mouthpiece, someone they can control. Won’t they be surprised?
“Yes Oleg, I accept this responsibility,” Pavel said quietly, looking across at the slowly flowing river. Then he turned. With a wry look he asked, “Was that the good news, or the bad?”
Drugov smiled. “The good news, of course, tovarich President.”
“And the bad?” asked Pavel.
His friend grew serious. “Just a few minutes ago the Estonians declared independence. Several of the other republics are making similar noises.”
President of the Soviet Union Pavel Ivanovich Medvedev gritted his teeth at the news. Not while I still draw breath they don’t. He turned his good eye toward his friend.
“Come, Oleg Sergeyevich. There is much work to do.”
CHAPTER 3
0805 EST, Monday 2 November 1992
0305 Zulu
Times Tower, New York City, New York, USA
“YOU MOONLIGHTING FOR other employers now?” The almost-unfriendly challenge was offered in a nasally New York accent.
Jack Young, rising star foreign affairs reporter for the New York Times, felt his pulse quicken. The advance copy of next month’s The Atlantic had finally landed on his untidy desk, shoehorned at the margins of the buzzing, cubicle-filled newsroom floor. Seeing his name on the front cover of a publication always thrilled him. Jack looked up from the magazine to his pudgy, spectacled editor who was peering down at him with a mixture of amusement and annoyance.
“Not moonlighting, Bill, just practicing my craft,” said Jack with his typically disarming grin. “Doing my part to make the Times look good.”
“We’d rather you do that in the pages of the Times,” retorted Bill half-heartedly.
“I know, I know,” Jack said, raising his palms in mock surrender, “but the article was too long for even a Sunday edition, remember. You said so yourself.”
Bill waved one hand dismissively. “Is that article on our president’s relationship with the Russian president ready? I want to run it tomorrow.”
“Trying to swing the election, are we?” teased Jack.
Bill scowled in return. The editor didn’t have much of a sense of humor.
“It’s right here. I’m just making my final edits and I’ll walk it over.” Jack tapped his screen.
“Make sure it’s not late,” Bill warned as he turned to walk back to his office. Then the older man paused. “And Jack?”
“Yeah Bill?”
“Good work on that Atlantic piece.” Then the man stomped off, annoyed by the sliver of humanity he’d just shown.
“Thanks,” Jack said to his back, surprised, but grinning again.
As the editor disappeared into his windowed office, Jack leaned back. He loved being a reporter, but sitting here at his desk Jack knew that he cut a far different figure from his colleagues around the newsroom. Instead of a cheap suit or blazer that seemed to be the uniform for his peers, Jack wore clothes more suited for a hike in the Catskills than a stroll through the concrete canyons of Manhattan. His Land’s End collared shirt and blue jeans were distinctly out of place, and his tall, lanky frame, topped by an angular head with a severely receding hairline, made him easy to pick out even from across the newsroom.
His workspace set him apart, too. Around his desk and on the off-white wall behind his chair were taped clippings of stories and pictures he’d sent back from places like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Yugoslavia, the Ukraine, and Poland; testimonies to his thirst for a meaty story and, if he was honest with himself, to a certain vanity in seeing his name in print. He had another trip planned for Poland. He wanted to get closer to the simmering unrest brewing there as it tried to shake off the influence of the newly resurgent Soviet Union.
The readership of the Times leaned towards the cosmopolitan, but Jack’s interests lay squarely in the drama of human conflict in the earthier parts of the world. Indeed, that interest was what had prompted him to secure funding from the Times a few weeks ago for a circuit of Eastern Europe, which had borne the fruit of the article in the magazine now on his desk.
Jack looked down at the magazine. He touched his name on the glossy cover while savoring the satisfaction of the moment. Then he lifted it from his desk, flipped to the piece he had authored, and began to read:
BACK IN THE USSR?
Jack Young, reporter
As Washington prepares for a turbulent election night that will see US voters choose between “it’s th
e economy, stupid” or “who’s going to stand up to the Soviets?” now would seem a good time to take a step back. A review of the truly stunning reversals to the revolutions of 1989 that have taken place in the USSR and its sphere of influence over the past eighteen months is pertinent. A year-and-a-half ago the Soviets showed every sign of relinquishing their control over the states of the more or less defunct Warsaw Pact and withdrawing into their heartland to lick their economic and social wounds. Today, however, they are reasserting their dominance in ways more reminiscent of 1968 than the heady days of 1991.
Indeed, since the August 1991 coup and the untimely death of the previous Soviet president, the USSR’s charismatic new leader, Pavel Medvedev, has presided over a stunning and unlikely re-emergence of Soviet geopolitical and military power. How has he accomplished this turnaround? What are its implications for European and global security in the near future? The man who takes over in the Oval Office next January would do well to consider these questions.
Jack noted with satisfaction that his photo of the stocky Russian leader reviewing this year’s May Day Parade in Red Square headed the next section.
Pavel the Terrible
In the turmoil that followed the August Coup, the hard-line administration of Pavel Medvedev and his clique seemed ready to collapse under the weight of the same pressures which had prompted the now deposed Soviet government to institute Perestroika and Glasnost. The Soviet economy was sputtering, the military appeared demoralized and inept following the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and republics of the Union appeared ready to declare their independence from Moscow, indeed, some already had.
Medvedev moved quickly to quash these stirrings by renouncing the New Union Treaty and sending troops into the Baltic republics to assert Soviet control in a short, violent campaign. The nationalist movement in Ukraine, however, proved more difficult to defeat. Here the Soviet president was forced to bring in troops from as far away as Siberia, with the bloody results broadcast to the world from Kiev this spring.
A photo that Jack had taken during the violence in that Ukrainian city emphasized the point. It showed a tank on the bloody pavement of Kiev’s October Revolution Square with a score of bodies lying in the background.
Independence movements in the Central Asian republics failed to coalesce after the grim resolve Moscow had shown in the west. Even so, separatists in the Transcaucasus region, particularly the Georgian Republic and its neighboring areas, are still a sore spot for the Soviet administration.
Within the Russian Republic, Medvedev has cracked down on political opposition with a skillful combination of soft and hard power, complementing the violent purges which followed hard on the heels of the August Coup. Medvedev has used the Soviet justice system to make spectacular examples of several opponents who were incautious enough to oppose him while engaging in real corruption elsewhere. Several prominent opposition politicians have ended up in the labor camps that form the bulk of the Soviet penal system, and one district governor was executed for misappropriating state funds. Perhaps most stunning of all was the fall of the KGB chairman and his replacement with Anton Laskin, a Medvedev loyalist. All in all, Medvedev seems to have pulled the USSR back from the brink of political dissolution and set it on a more stable social footing.
Military Reform
Part of the key to understanding Medvedev’s success has been his complex relationship with the Russian military. Army support for the August Coup, we have learned, was in no way assured. We may never know how close the Red Army came to intervention on the side of the sitting government in those chaotic days. Nevertheless, Medvedev quickly won the support and then the loyalty of his generals and admirals by committing the Russian economy to modernizing and expanding Russia’s conventional forces. Strengthening his hand with the military is the commitment of his two sons to a life in uniform, one in the navy and another in the elite parachute forces, the desantniki.
To illustrate this, Jack had included a stock photograph of the Russian president grasping the shoulders of his sons. The older wore the blue uniform of a naval officer, while the younger was dressed in the army uniform, striped undershirt, and blue beret of a Soviet paratrooper. The genuine pride on the face of the father told the story nicely, Jack thought.
Cutbacks to Soviet conventional forces under the previous Soviet president have been reversed, and an aggressive naval build-up has kept Soviet shipyards busy, and workers employed, year-round. In return, the military has supported Medvedev’s reform of its ranks. Corrupt or incompetent officers have been purged and even executed in some cases. The brutal practice of “dedovshchina,” in which experienced conscripts ruthlessly hazed new inductees, has apparently been abolished. Beyond simply upgrading and purchasing new weapons, the Soviet defense establishment has put enormous efforts towards improving the living conditions, pay, and morale of its soldiers, and towards professionalizing some of the junior enlisted ranks. Outside defense observers have noted improvements in the morale and efficiency of a force that just last year appeared to be on the verge of impotence. Today, the Soviet military’s support for Medvedev is unquestionable.
Now, Russia’s conventional forces—ground, naval, and air—appear more powerful than at any time since the Brezhnev era. While President Medvedev’s government appears to have honored all standing treaties regarding the reduction of nuclear weapons, its relationship with the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty has been more contentious. Whether the Soviets can sustain this force structure for the long term remains to be seen.
It’s the (Russian) Economy, Stupid!
A photo of drably-clothed civilians lined up to buy bread in Tallinn was inset into the following section.
One of Medvedev’s greatest accomplishments has been to turn the anger of the Soviet people at their difficult economic conditions outward. Indeed, western leaders have played into Medvedev’s hand by the punitively ham-handed ways in which they have imposed economic sanctions, punishing the USSR for the violence in Poland while ignoring the excesses of the pro-western faction in that country’s internal turmoil. While one can never really tell in a society as secretive as that of the Soviet Union, all indications are that the Soviet people have wholeheartedly bought into Medvedev’s vision of a rejuvenated USSR, as well as his antagonism towards ‘NATO encirclement,’ economic and otherwise.
The Soviet ‘Near Abroad’
Here Jack had included a map with the states of Central Europe outlined in red.
From the perspective of western leaders, the most troubling aspects of Medvedev’s foreign policy are the USSR’s destabilizing influence in the ongoing chaos in Poland. There, the Solidarity government has apparently failed to solidify its role as a popular governing force. The unrest stems in part from Soviet interference in Poland’s internal affairs. Solidarity’s inability to bring some of the former communist regime’s more notorious figures to trial, as well as the Red Army’s de facto military occupation of the socially and ethnically fractured Czechoslovakia are also contributing considerations.
In Poland, the Soviets have practiced a sort of hybrid engagement, offering material support and even military “volunteers” to the pro-communist and pro-Moscow factions on the one hand while vociferously denying any involvement on the other and condemning the excesses of what they call “The regime in Warsaw.” Every faction in the Polish quagmire has been guilty of excesses on some level, but it has been Russian influence that has kept it in simmering chaos for the past year. The Polish state may suffer political and cultural fracturing akin to what is occurring further south in Yugoslavia.
The Czechoslovak situation is much different. As chaos spread in Poland the Soviet Union negotiated the rights to withdraw their forces stationed in the former East Germany through Czechoslovakia, citing concerns that the conflict in Poland could jeopardize the Baltic and Polish routes. The Czechs were no doubt surprised when they realized that the Soviets understood
the agreement as allowing them to withdraw their forces to their country rather than through it. By the time the Czechoslovak government understood what was happening they were essentially presented with a fait accompli by Medvedev: accept Soviet “protection” or be subject to whatever coercion thousands of Soviet troops already present could exert. Since then the Soviets have skillfully played upon social divisions between Czechs and Slovaks to forestall any meaningful resistance to their occupation. Today, Czechoslovakia is an armed camp, a Soviet dagger in the heart of Central Europe, containing almost all the forces that had been present in the former East Germany along with those that never left Czechoslovakia.
The rest of the Eastern Bloc nations have elected, more or less willingly, to remain in Moscow’s orbit. Hungary has been the most unwilling. Bulgaria and Romania have managed to overcome political unrest within their own borders, reportedly with Soviet assistance, and repress, or at least counterbalance, their more progressive elements. The effect has been to provide Medvedev with badly needed allies as much of the rest of the European community has nominally turned against his country.
Wherefore art thou, NATO?
In the heady days after the near-dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the seemingly impending implosion of the USSR, many pundits questioned whether there would be any need for NATO in a post-Cold War world. Pavel Medvedev himself answered these doubts when he categorically denounced his predecessor’s Helsinki Declaration that Moscow would not interfere in the affairs of eastern European nations and instead demanded the withdrawal of a reunited Germany from the Atlantic Alliance as a precondition of Soviet withdrawal from their erstwhile allies’ territory.
The alliance certainly has renewed purpose; however, many of its sixteen long-standing member states have chosen to pursue “peace dividend” cuts to their militaries as if the Cold War had actually ended. Even the mighty United States, secure in its military superiority following the fireworks of the Persian Gulf War, has seen fit to slash its commitments in Europe and reduce the size of its ground forces there, though the US president has so far managed to forestall reductions to the Navy and Air Force budgets. France remains a vociferous element in NATO’s political branch, but has so far continued in its status as a “non-military” member of the Alliance, though the French military has maintained much of its Cold War force structure. Other member states have made or are planning far deeper cuts to their conventional war-making capabilities, with the Norwegians being the one notable exception. These cuts, while they have freed up significant funds for social programs, have weakened NATO’s hand against the Russian leader.
