Soviet Union – the lost superpower?

This novel is mainly set in Kiev and is about the dismay of Russian commanders as they see the Soviet Union disintegrating around them. They resolve to do something about it. In reality, one of them, Vladimir Putin, actually did.

Kiev, Ukraine, January 1998:

Colonel General Igor Pavlovich Yavlinsky was not a happy man. As he gazed out of the seventh floor window of his office on Krechatik, the main street of Kiev, he pondered on what might have been; what should have been. He had been among the elite of the Soviet Union. First place right through military college; graduated as one of the highest ever performers. He was without doubt destined for greatness; a Captain at twenty three, a Major by age twenty five and a full Colonel at thirty. Incredible for the Red Army where things moved slowly, even for the privileged. But Igor had been special.

Military Parade in Red Square - early 1970's.

His father, Pavel, had been a Major General of course. One of the most decorated officers of his generation; Military Cross; Order of Lenin and the ultimate accolade: Hero of the Soviet Union. As a young Lieutenant, he had taken out an entire German Tank Division at Poznan during the winter of 1944. It had been a turning point in the war; the first time that the Russians had realized that German tanks weren’t invincible. Pavel had gone on to be one of the first into Berlin and had returned home to glory and a secure career. He had been relatively young so, although a decorated war hero, he wasn’t seen as a threat by Stalin or the ruling elite so be bided his time until the old guard had gone. Then he had made his move and had risen to the highest ranks of the Red Army.

For as long as he could remember, Igor had been in awe of his father. Everywhere he went, his father’s name had been mentioned with reverence. When it was discovered that Igor was the son of Pavel Ivanevich, his stature soared. The Yavlinsky’s had been one of the most privileged in Soviet society and life for young Igor had been comfortable; a nice apartment in Sokol, one of the nicer areas of Moscow; a luxury summer house in Khimki; access to the Berioska or hard currency shops; the best schools; the best foreign clothes and foodstuffs. Not for them the daily struggle to queue for what little was available in the State shops.

But Igor had largely eschewed the luxuries of the west. He would remain pure – a true Soviet citizen. Igor believed in the system even though he was intelligent enough to recognise its faults. He had been a brilliant student but had never given a second thought to what career he would follow other than the Red Army. From his earliest memories, all he had ever wanted to be was a soldier. But he would go farther than his father. Igor would rise to the highest rank and from there, he would use his leverage to enter the Kremlin. He had joined the party at the earliest possible age and had been a big star in the Komsomol, the youth section. There were too many half hearted liberals in the higher ranks these days and Igor reckoned a strong shake-up was due. But that would come later. First he had to conquer the military field.

One thing Igor never lacked was confidence. Being the son of General Pavel Yavlinsky opened doors and it certainly did him no harm when he had applied for a place in Moscow’s top military academy. But Igor felt that he hadn’t needed his father’s influence; he felt he would have made it on his own anyway. His successive excellent results were beyond excellent; the fact that he consistently scored 100% and was always, at every stage, top of his class bore testament to his belief. It was his destiny, he knew.

As he how gazed at the snarl of the afternoon traffic, the city choked with the new gleaming foreign cars, he wondered where it had all gone wrong. Perhaps it had started with Afghanistan – Russia’s Vietnam. This had been no fault of Igor’s. He wasn’t just a skilled academic; he was also an astute military commander and a brave one at that. Three years he had spent in Afghanistan; three years in that shit-hole of a country; but they had been three glorious years and despite the privations, he had loved every minute of it. He had not returned in disgrace; on the contrary, Igor had returned a hero. He had led his troops from the front and was widely respected by both officers and men. Like his proud father, he had received the highest military honours.

But what had he returned to? Unlike his father, to a country that was broke, low in morale and wracked with self doubt. People wanted more; new freedoms were taking hold and people’s attitudes were changing; people weren’t loyal any more; all they wanted was materiality. But that could all have been managed he felt. No, the biggest blow, the biggest embarrassment was the retreat. Igor took months if not years to come to terms with it; it went against everything he had ever learned, been told or believed in. The Soviet Union didn’t retreat, did it? But it had; and from what? A bunch of raggle taggle disorganized rebels. Half of them were uncouth savages and the finest fighting force ever mobilized (in Igor’s view) had withdrawn, retreated, given up, admitted defeat. The shock was immense. This was the Army that had been assembled to and could have defeated the combined might of the western powers and it couldn’t defeat a few rebels on horseback with vastly inferior weapons and firepower. Oh for sure they had been assisted by the west but only in an advisory capacity and with a few weapons thrown in but it was nothing that Igor’s troops couldn’t have handled.

Had this been the beginning of the end? In his view, it had certainly been the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. They had withdrawn in 89 and the country had broken up by 91. He cursed those idiots in Moscow; they hadn’t had a clue. If only they had given him six more months, he could have smashed those rebels and ground them into the earth. The confidence it would have given the country would have been immense. The U.S.S.R. would then have been in pole position to annexe the huge Indian sub-continent. Having defeated the Afghans, he didn’t foresee much of a fight from the Pakistanis or the Indians and an entire new World order would have been in place. But the decision had not been his. No, it had been made thousands of kilometres away by weak politicians bowing to international pressure. It had made old Pavel sick to his stomach to see all they had fought for thrown away by incompetents.

And yet if they had held on, they could even have recovered from that, Igor was convinced. America had recovered from Vietnam. It had taken them a long time and in the interim, the Soviets had gained a lot of ground but now America had regained its confidence and was effectively the world’s only super power. This was a status that Igor had firmly and truly believed would only ever be achieved by the country with the true belief, the fairest system and the purest and bravest people – his beloved Soviet Union. If only those damned ‘reformers’, Gorbachev and his ilk, hadn’t continued the process of dismantling his beloved State. Glasnost and Perestroika they called it. Igor used referred to these terms in tandem with some of the crudest of the very many swear words in the Russian language.

Yes, it had started with the retreat from Afghanistan. While it was a major loss of face for the then super power, he felt that if it had been handled properly, it could have been a minor blip or when he was feeling braver and more confident, he convinced himself that it could have been a watershed moment. Yes, they could have taken it as a chance to reflect, to re-equip and maybe re-train the Red Army for the major challenges to come. He agreed that they needed to restructure and create a more professional fighting force with elite units. Clearly, throwing men into battle as they had done in his father’s time was no longer a viable solution. The Red Army needed investment in intelligence and technology to compete with the ‘smart’ forces of the west. But where this investment would have been automatically forthcoming in his father’s generation, this group of Soviet leaders had failed him, his country, his father and their heritage.

He remembered his father telling him once, when he was a young cadet, that the fate of nations was often determined by seemingly insignificant incidents. His father’s own experiences during The Great Patriotic War had been a case in point. The young Pavel Yavlinsky had been lucky that day in Poznan (though he only admitted this to his closest friends) but his actions had been a catalyst for the great victory which was to follow. Yes, a catalyst, that was what was needed, Igor mused as he watched the traffic proceed at its usual snail’s pace. Of course there was much more traffic now. Some of the wealth had been redistributed but in Igor’s view, to the wrong people. He abhorred the nouveau riche or the mafia or whatever you wanted to call them. In his pure Soviet Union they were scum, vermin, polluting the city and the countryside with their Mercedes, their Audi’s, their fancy Lexus’. The majority of them were uneducated and certainly uncultured. The pursuit of wealth was everything with them and they walked on everyone in their headlong chase.

Was this what old Pavel and his comrades had fought for? And it was getting even worse; every day, more and more German and American ‘investors’ were arriving. He abhorred every one of them, with their fancy suits and their after shave and their joint-ventures. Igor could not understand it; it was almost as if a collective paralysis had descended on the nation; on all the nations which had formed the Soviet Union. Surely people should have been able to see, as he did, that these people were here for just one purpose – to take as much money from the country as they could as quickly as they could. The country was being raped before their very eyes and the citizens were gladly joining in; and for what? Western clothing; foreign cigarettes; Scotch Whisky? Igor had met many of these people; some had even learned the language. Oh they were outwardly friendly and never tired of assuring people that they were ‘committed’ to their Russian and Ukrainian partners for the longer term. The hell they were; they were, in Igor’s eyes, capitalists – pure and simple.

And there was more than a grain of truth in his beliefs. He knew that in the ten years since these ‘joint-ventures’ had been legalized, vast quantities of natural resources and an innumerable number of treasures had been taken out of the Soviet Union; the ownership of the resources gone forever and the treasures unlikely ever to return. Oh, for sure some citizens had benefited but the oligarchs who had lain in wait for the system to be commercialized had been the greatest beneficiaries. The President had spent most of his first term and his entire second term to date drunk and had signed away vast quantities of the country’s wealth for practically nothing. They had paid for his re-election but at devastating cost to the nation. Igor’s beloved country was being bled dry before his eyes and he was powerless to do anything about it, or was he? Again, he thought, a catalyst – some seemingly small incident or even a large incident; something to turn the tide; something that would change the course of history.

His reverie was interrupted by the banging of the office door behind him. He swiveled in his chair to find his assistant, Lieutenant Yuri Nesterenko standing in front of his desk. The man threw a half hearted salute – “Colonel Yavlinsky, sir.” There was no ‘Comrade Colonel Sir’ any more. This annoyed Igor greatly. The old formal Soviet ways of addressing ones betters or even ones equals had been dispensed with in favour of western modes of address; something else he would change when the day came. He turned to look at his assistant: Nesterenko was a small, sallow skinned, brown haired man with large bushy eyebrows and small weasel eyes. He wasn’t the cleverest graduate of the Ukrainian State Military Academy but he was among the shrewdest and not a man to be crossed. Igor would be careful with the man even though he was his junior. But of course he also held one other major advantage over his superior officer. Nesterenko was Ukrainian; Yavlinsky was not. This would have been fine in Moscow or anywhere else in the Russian Federation but this was Kiev, capital of newly independent Ukraine. Both armed forces still co-operated and even had joint commands but it was an uneasy relationship. Ukrainians had suffered more than most under the Soviet regime and they had no intention of letting their Russian colleagues forget it. In fact, this uneasy peace was, in itself, a factor in Nesterenko’s visit. As he took in the man’s cautious guarded expression and his averted eyes, he thought what a contrast there was between him and his subordinate. Yavlinsky was tall and blonde with clear, piercing blue eyes. He had a high forehead with his thick blonde hair brushed back. He was light skinned but with a pleasant round face and high cheek bones. He had been described as quite good looking, particularly in his youth but while he had been supremely confident in military matters, he had never managed as well with personal relationships. This aspect of his personality hadn’t improved during his time in Kiev either as the sour face of his subordinate testified to.

“Yes Lieutenant, what can I do for you,” Yavlinsky replied.

“I am afraid to say that Immigration Control have rejected your application again sir.” This was all Yavlinsky needed to add to his melancholic mood. He took the piece of paper from his subordinate and thanked him but with barely suppressed anger. Although he hated to admit it, Igor knew the root of his problem. The Soviet Rulers had been so anxious to convince the west, not to speak of their own people, that they had created the perfect society that they insisted that everyone be gainfully employed. This, allied to an obsession with control, had created the most mindless bureaucracy ever visited on mankind. It was the one aspect of Soviet society with which Igor was constantly embarrassed; his ideal country would be efficient and anyone who made life more complicated would be dealt with summarily. Having created the monster and the culture which sustained it, the bureaucratic machine had resisted all attempts to reform it and had remained as a lasting living monument to the inefficiencies of communism. In fact, when new laws or regulations or systems were introduced to attempt to streamline processes, the machine employed more people and retained the old systems on top of the new ones. The result was one long continuous nightmare if you needed to deal with officialdom and everyone did at some point. People developed systems of queueing where they shared shifts and sometimes even paid people to queue for them. A minor industry sprang up as a result. Later on, whole agencies opened up offering to process your documents for a fee. They still had to go through the process but as they became so well versed in it, they could guarantee a result much more quickly. The ultimate problem vwas that the population had become so used to dealing with ‘the monster’ that they accepted long delays and mindless regulations. One could ‘bribe’ officials for a more speedy result but only the wealthy and mafia leaders resorted to this method and even they didn’t use it all the time.

The source of Yavlinsky’s problem was simple. He was a Russian and this was Ukraine. He had been assigned here as Commanding Officer of all of Ukraine’s armed forces shortly before the break-up of the Soviet Union. It was a major promotion and while he hadn’t relished a move away from his beloved Moscow, he had been assured that it would only be for a short while; he had also been told that it would be of immense benefit to his career, the final step in fact as he was being groomed for the ultimate position as head of the Red Army, effectively head of all the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union. But that had been eight years ago and he was still here and was now unsure of even this position. The Soviet Union had broken up in 1991 and while most of the break-away powers wanted total independence from Russia, it would take time to separate the Armed Forces of fifteen different nations. There was co-operation in Kiev but he was certain no one relished the thought of a Russian as their Chief. He had felt it would be prudent to apply for a Ukrainian passport. The C.I.S. treaty guaranteed all citizens resident in any of the fifteen countries during the time of the break-up, the right to receive a passport from that country and the right to retain their citizenship of the country in which they were born. In reality, the only two countries where this worked well were Russia and Belarus, where the citizens were closely related culturally. Yavlinsky was annoyed because while he would admit that the bureaucracy in Moscow was as bad, he knew of several senior Ukrainian officers who had obtained Russian passports. He sighed and resolved to re-apply again.

In 1992, he had requested a transfer back to Moscow. This had initially been granted but was then put on hold. The problem was the, quite literally, millions of Russian troops returning not just from the other fourteen republics of the former Soviet Union but those returning from the Warsaw Pact nations such as Poland, Czech Republic and East Germany. Igor had reckoned he was more senior than any of these officers but a visit he made to headquarters late in 1992 revealed utter chaos. There was just no accommodation for the thousands of senior officers not to speak of junior officers and men. All the senior positions were filled and there appeared to be no sign of a vacancy at the top. He had returned to Kiev with a heavy heart and wondered if he might even be better off staying there. His initial task in Kiev had been to broker the division of armaments and equipment between Russia and Ukraine. He had completed this task efficiently but favourably for Russia. As he now worked with 90% Ukrainians, he sometimes wondered if he had erred. Deep down he had hated the task of course as it had symbolized the break-up of his beloved Soviet State. But as soul destroying as it was, it paled into insignificance compared to what he was now charged with – the dismantling on the territory of Ukraine of what had made the Soviet Union a super power, its nuclear weapons capability.

The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks had been in progress before the break-up of course but the disposals had been accelerated afterwards at the behest of the west and with the co-operation of those softies in Moscow. The thought of facilitating Americans in the dismantling of his nation’s greatness would have been abhorrent to Yavlinsky in itself but it was made doubly nauseating by the fact that he had to do it on the territory of Ukraine where he was now being regarded as a foreigner. The awful thing was that he had no choice. Things had changed in Moscow nowadays; nobody wanted war heroes any more; the politicians and the bureaucrats and the partners of the western businesses held sway. There was effectively no place for him; the Red Army had quietly forgotten about him in Kiev; out of sight and out of mind. It had been a mistake to come he knew now but it was too late now. He knew it would have to come to a head soon because he was encountering increasing hostility from the Ukrainians. He was a Russian trying to command Ukrainians in a new independent State; he was a fish out of water. Igor Pavlovich Yavlinsky, war hero and decorated soldier was on the way to becoming a Stateless person. While there had recently been a softening of relationships between Russia and Ukraine at Governmental level with the signing of a pact between Yeltsin and Kuchma, this was not reflected at street level where the old enmities were never far from the surface.

His immediate subordinate officers made no secret of this, particularly when they had had a few beers with their American counterparts and their courage was up. “What do you think of Ukraine John? Aren’t people much more friendly here than in Russia? I mean, you would know as you’ve been to both”.

To which the Americans would always reply:

“Sure Yuri or sure Alexey, I gotta agree. And you know, you guys have got so much more going for you now that you’re independent. You know that down the road you might get the chance to join NATO or even the European Union”.

The Ukrainians would become excited and indulge in the babble but Igor would just sit there stoically and seethe and listen to the charade being played out for his benefit. He didn’t help himself by being aloof and distant, some would even say cold. But he didn’t care; he would show them, by God, he would show them. Just one incident, a catalyst; that was all that was needed.

While he had long since changed his old Soviet Union passport to the modern Russian Federation one, he was finding it increasingly difficult to move around with it. Ukrainian officials turned surly and difficult at the sight of it. It was as if they wished to exact revenge for the hundreds of years of Russian domination. As a citizen of the former Soviet Union, a resident of Kiev, not to mention a high ranking army officer, he was entitled to obtain a Ukrainian passport. But he suspected that it was the combination of the mind numbing bureaucracy allied to the officials antipathy to his Russian heritage that had frustrated his efforts so far. Part of the problem was that nowadays there was no sanction. Ah, he longed for the old days when someone who was inefficient or maybe just plain troublesome or even someone insubordinate to a person of his rank could very quickly be contemplating colder climes. Not that the weather in Kiev in January was particularly benign. But that was another thing he abhorred about the place; now that Global Warming had lessened the severity of the Russian winters, Kiev, which was 1,000 kilometers to the south of Moscow, was constantly miserable in that season. The snows of his youth had been replaced by heavy rains and the ice covered lakes and rivers which heralded the shouts and shrieks of happy children cavorting on sleds and skis had now been replaced by freezing rain and dirty slushy streets. The weather today was particularly foul and this, added to the frustrations he had encountered during the day, led him to break a life long habit.

Less than two hundred metres from Yavlinsky’s office, in nearby Mihailovska street lay one of the symbols of the new order in what was known as the C.I.S. The recently opened ‘O’Briens Irish Pub’, Irish in name only of course. These ‘joint-venture’ bars and clubs were in truth mafia run businesses sometimes with a token foreign presence to facilitate the granting of licences or to attract foreign residents. Igor did not drink in bars; he preferred to drink at home or with friends, but he had few of those in this country he reflected. He had heard about this new bar from his Ukrainian colleagues and their American colleagues but he had declined their invitations to join them there for a drink. Igor was a purist and he did not wish to either drink with foreigners or to patronize the establishment that to him was a symbol of their presence. But today was different; today he seemed to reach a watershed; he had come to a decision; something needed to be done and he needed to think. He also needed to be where he knew he would not be disturbed. Nesterenko had gone home and the others were away in Kharkiv with the Americans.

The thought of joining his wife in the apartment brought further depression. Igor Yavlinsky had made few mistakes in his life. Unfortunately, Galina had been one of them. In many ways she was the antithesis of him; small and squat where he was tall and powerful; sallow skinned with black curly hair almost gypsy like, whereas he was blonde and white skinned. Unfortunately for Igor, she had been available when the desires of youth didn’t match the suaveness of middle age. He had been shy and awkward as a youth, superb at his studies but wholly unable to match his fellows in the romantic arena. Galina had never been attractive or bright but she had been clever. She had introduced the shy Yavlinsky to all forms of erotic delights underneath her duvet in her one room apartment while her Mother had conveniently ‘disappeared’. Igor had been rightly set up. Galina had become pregnant at eighteen and Igor had been forced to do the honourable thing and marry her. A young married Lieutenant carried far more respectability than one about which there might be rumours or even the whiff of scandal. Moscow was a different place in those days. She had miscarried after the fourth month and the damage had been permanent. There would be no next generation, unless he married again and he wasn’t really the type. Over the years, he and Galina had drifted further and further apart until eventually there was nothing. She cooked his meals and cleaned his clothes but that was it. Over the years, there had been other women but always to satisfy a need. Igor Yavlinsky only gave love and loyalty to one mistress and right now, she needed him like never before. Something needed to be done; something – but what?

Unlike people in the west, Igor had always had his better ideas after a few vodkas. He sat now in the corner of the bar. He had drunk a shot of vodka at the bar and had brought another one with a beer over to his table. It was late afternoon but the bar was still relatively empty. It wouldn’t get busy for a few hours yet but it would then continue long into the night. Yavlinsky intended to be long gone by then. He took a sip of his beer and pondered his predicament. No one seemed to care, firstly that the Soviet Union had broken up and second, that it’s constituent parts seemed hell bent on imploding into themselves having been stripped of their resources by foreigners and reduced to a shell of their former selves. His own Motherland, Russia, was fast becoming a third or even fourth rate power. It wasn’t taken seriously any longer and didn’t participate in the international summits any more. Why?; because no one feared it any longer. It had lost its direction and sold its soul.

Igor had long appreciated that things do not work out by themselves. Nothing happens unless someone makes it happen. He now resolved to be that person. He had always been a doer; decisive where others had been hesitant; brave where others had had doubts; strong in his beliefs where others had hedged or were just weak. But what would he do? What could he do that would change the destiny of a nation. What could he do to alter history? It was that serious; he downed the second shot of vodka in one; yes, it was that serious; he was convinced. But he was alone, or was he? Surely there were thousands of like minded Russians? What about his former colleagues in the Red Army? His fellow graduates of the Academy? Those whom he worked with in the Komsomol in his youth? Yes, of course there were, he just had to mobilize them. He downed the rest of the beer and signaled to the bar man to refill both.

He then got up and went to the toilet. When he returned, he noticed that his vodka shot and his beer had been placed on the table but there was also a strange man seated there.

“Good afternoon General Yavlinsky”, the man said in English. “Have this one on me, cheers”, he said, raising his glass. Igor eyed the man suspiciously. He had never seen him before and he was not known to anyone in this bar. He calmly sat down and took a sip of his beer. He replied in English:

“I do not know you. I am a busy man. Please state your business with me or else leave”.

“Ach now General, sure there’s no need to be like that. You see, I can’t really state me business here and now but I have a sort of a feeling that we could be of one mind about a few things”.

Yavlinsky continued to stare straight ahead.

“I have no idea what you are talking about. Now will you please leave or I will ask the bar staff to remove you”.

“Terrible talk, awful talk entirely, and I after buying you a drink. You really need to lighten up General. You know, we could be very helpful to each other”. The man lifted his glass and raised it in a toast to Yavlinsky. “Aye General, how shall I put it? I’d say both of us believe very strongly that something should be done”.

Yavlinsky, already pale, went ghostly white. He finished the beer and downed the shot in one. He then signaled the bar man for refills and turned to the stranger:

“Perhaps I will pay for this one. What is it you think should be done?”