Babadzhanian had always regarded the original timescale for Operation Nakazyvat as being ludicrously optimistic but this was not the time to concede ground to his enemies.
“In the matter of the KGB ‘police’ units operating within Army Group South they are consuming huge amounts of fuel, food and other war supplies needed by the men who are actually doing the fighting. This further drain on the pitiful level of supplies reaching my spearheads securing the north and currently ‘pacifying’ Baghdad means that I must shortly order a halt to all offensive operations in central Iraq.”
Shelepin looked as if the top of his head was about to explode with rage.
“My troops are also taking part in those pacification operations, Comrade Marshal.”
Babadzhanian snorted derisively.
“I don’t need fucking policemen who’ve been sitting on their fat arses ever since they put on their uniforms intimidating old ladies and so-called ‘enemies of the state’, I need fucking soldiers, Comrade First Director! The first time your boys get into a serious fight they shit their pants and run away. It’s like Budapest all over again; the Red Army always has to clean up your shit!”
The veteran of Kursk and a score of other battles turned his attention back to the three men seated to his front, curious to discover if they still ruled the new Union of Soviet Social Republics. If they did he might get out of Chelyabinsk alive, if not, well so be it…
The silence that followed was of the icy, frightened kind.
While each member of the Politburo wordlessly considered his next move there were heavy sighs, shaken heads and hooded glances across the crescent of tables as the strength of untested alliances was gauged, and the risks of breaking cover to throw the first stone were meticulously calculated by men who had spent their whole adult lives plotting and counter-plotting to attain their current positions of power.
Eventually it was the oldest among them; the last ‘Old Bolshevik’ who broke the silence.
Sixty-eight year old Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan, whom the collective leadership had elected Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet — a largely honorific sinecure in the post-Cuban Missiles War governmental arrangements — was a grey, ashen shadow of his former self. He had almost died from radiation sickness sixteen months ago and had been an infrequent attendee at Politburo sessions. Infirm and without any kind of power base within the Party, Brezhnev and Kosygin had kept him close; he was a vote in their pocket and a tangible, albeit fading, link to a more glorious past.
“I am not long for this world,” the old man said, his rheumy eyes fixed on the face of the soldier at the nexus of the firestorm. Like Babadzhanian, Mikoyan was an Armenian but nothing he planned to say had anything to do with any kindred spirit he might have felt for a fellow countryman; that was not the kind of man he was, he had never been in any way sentimental in his devotion to the Motherland and the Party and he was not about to change the habit of a lifetime at this late juncture.
Only Mikoyan had served in and survived the governments of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and now that of the ‘Troika’, or as it was euphemistically know ‘the collective leadership’ of Brezhnev, Kosygin and Chuikov. No man had survived more purges and internecine Party wars than Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan, and before he died — which would be soon now — he intended to make his voice heard.
Born to a father who was a carpenter and a mother who was a rug weaver, Mikoyan was the elder brother of Artem Ivanovich Mikoyan, who with Mikhail Iosifovich Gurevich had founded — and still at the age of fifty-eight remained with Gurevich the guiding light of — of the MiG aircraft design bureau. The brothers had been educated in Tiflis in Georgia, and at the Georgian Seminary in Echmiadzin in their native Armenia. While Artem was too young to play a leading part in the Revolution, Anastas, aged twenty had formed a workers’ soviet in Echmaidzin, enlisted in the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party — the forerunner of the Bolshevik Party — and become a leading figure in the revolutionary movement in the Caucasus. In Baku he had edited subversive newspapers, robbed a bank in Tiflis and brawled in the street like a ‘good’ revolutionary ought to!
In retrospect those were days of innocence.
The Revolution of 1917 was only the first of many terrible struggles. Bringing down the Tsar had been the easy part; the ensuing civil war against the anti-Bolshevik, ‘White’ Russians was a desperate and dirty business. It was in those days when he was a commissar in the newly formed Red Army that he met and saved the life of Grigol — generally known as ‘Sergo’ — Ordzhonikidze, a close associate of another Georgian Bolshevik, a certain Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, now better know to history at Joseph Stalin. Together, the three men became known as the dreaded ‘Caucasian Clique’.
At the time of the Cuban Missiles War, Khrushchev had asked Mikoyan to go to Havana to talk sense into Fidel Castro. Ever the dutiful, utterly reliable staunch right hand of the Party’s leader he had been preparing to leave on his mission — notwithstanding that his wife was dying at the time — when the ‘crisis’ had exploded into the cataclysm of the war. He had been at his dacha north of Moscow when the first bomb went off; and stumbled into his shelter just before the next two strikes arrived. He had been sick, dying basically, ever since.
“I am not long for this world,” Anastas Mikoyan repeated wearily, “so whatever I say probably has little or no weight in this forum. No matter. I will say what I must say and then I will have done my duty. In times such as this that is all a man, a true Party man faithful to the Revolution can do.”
The Old Bolshevik paused to regain his breath.
Unconsciously he brushed his formerly boot black, now silver moustache before clasping his emaciated hands on the table before him.
“After we threw back the Fascists before Moscow in December 1941 it took us over three years to get to Berlin. If any one man in this Politburo actually honestly believed that the great work upon which the Red Army embarked a little less than two months ago could sweep all before it in sixty days then they were deluding themselves, Comrades.”
Mikoyan coughed hurtfully, fought for breath.
“How would we have fared at Stalingrad if after a month or two we had thrown up our hands in horror and said ‘the battle is lost because it is not yet won’? What would have been our fate if we had surrendered Leningrad to the Germans after only two months of siege?” The questions were asked with slow, excoriating sarcasm.
Presently, he nodded to Babadzhanian.
“Comrade Marshall Hamazasp Khachaturi is correct to demand that the KGB start shooting the counter-revolutionary traitors at home and behind the lines responsible for the failure to adequately support our armies in the field.” He forced a cruel smile. “On that subject it seems to me that we could do worse than to shoot a few Red Air Force generals at the same time; if only to ‘encourage the others’ to get on with the job of supporting the courageous men on the ground in Iraq.” He glanced at Shelepin as his exhaustion threatened to slur his words. “It doesn’t matter which generals, the example is the thing, Comrade Alexander Nikolayevich.”
Nobody spoke.
The last Old Bolshevik had not yet finished.
“There were those around this table who said we should hold our hand. Wait another year until we are stronger. That was a counsel of despair. Our enemies surround us and they will always be stronger…”