It started as a joke. But Khrushchev’s every word was a command. The enormous Soviet state had developed a rigid system of governance. Almost immediately, Khrushchev’s dream was funneled through bureaucratic channels, transformed into stern directives. Power in the USSR was apportioned, essentially, to three separate organs. The party, the military, and the Committee for State Security, aka the KGB. The task of realizing Khrushchev’s dream would fall to the third of these three pillars of the state. Because the KGB would be able to push the plan ahead most efficiently and with the greatest secrecy.
It wasn’t a joke anymore.
Among the largest military organizations within the KGB was the Border Guard. Though it wasn’t really part of the official Soviet military—it was not under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defense—it was sizeable. Usually its forces numbered two hundred thousand; in its heyday it was expanded to include some three hundred fifty thousand. Its forces were highly trained and its units were provided with the latest small arms, firearms, rockets, tanks, armored vehicles, armed helicopters, and military transport aircraft. Naval units, of course, had their own ships. Members of the KGB, as well as their families, were all part of a privileged class in the USSR. This was a necessary consequence of the KGB’s status as an organization dedicated to preserving the peace by collecting intelligence about ordinary citizens. In addition, because the Border Guard’s operations included suppressing anti-Soviet guerrilla activities, and crushing antigovernment minority movements—meaning all such movements, since all minority movements were so regarded—was a regular part of this, Russian applicants were given preferential treatment in hiring. Pure Slavic Russians. Slavs. That was the nature of the Border Guard. It was a privileged military elite.
Each individual defensive platoon in the Border Guard had its own team of guard dogs. A posse of war dogs, in other words. In emergency situations, of course, they used all manner of small arms, firearms, and attack vehicles, but they also used dogs to close the border.
At this point in history, in the vast Soviet state, troops of dogs, who had been fighting all along on the front lines, were active in this context as well.
The stern directives made their way down the chain of command.
And at the end of the chain, where Khrushchev’s dream landed—stripped of its romance, reduced to an ordinary, utterly pragmatic order—was the handler.
He was a major in the Border Guard. A young commissioned officer, twenty-seven years old. Six months before the order was passed down, he had been assigned to head up the Committee for the Purchase and Rearing of Guard/War Dogs. Needless to say, he was a pureblooded Slav. Blond hair, white skin. Mild and yet somehow forbidding features. He had not, however, been born into a privileged class. He had made his way up in the world, but his father was a farmer. His parents worked on a kolkhoz. His blood was pure, but his Slavic lineage contained no trace of any aristocratic blood, no noble seed. He was a second son. After graduating with outstanding grades from a school that trained future military men, he applied to the KGB, eager to show his loyalty to the homeland in some more passionate way—actually, the KGB had first gotten in touch with him, though that was kept highly secret—and after two years spent on the European border as a candidate officer, he was assigned to a detachment that answered directly to the head office. Later, he successfully applied to a special forces training school. He spent a year and a half studying a curriculum centered on guerrilla warfare but which included various other topics, ranging from assassination and advanced firearm techniques to basic procedures for causing confusion behind enemy lines and their applications, methods of torture and how to resist them, medical techniques, the use of codes, and individual survival techniques. Many students found the regimen too demanding and dropped out. The last three months of training took place at a camp on the Arctic Ocean. There the students were housed three to a room—prior to this they had lived in a wide hall—and were encouraged to develop a sense of camaraderie. There were microphones buried in the walls, the floor, and the ceiling, and every conversation was recorded. Anyone who couldn’t keep himself perfectly in control at all times was given the boot. A man needed nerves of steel to survive. If your roommates said, “Man, this is hell, isn’t it?” you had to respond immediately, “Absolutely not.” If they kept pressuring you to agree, saying, “C’mon, you know it is. We’re all exhausted,” you had to tell them right off, “I will either graduate from here, or I will quit the military. One or the other.”
And the young officer did what he had to do.
A smile flickered across his face, faint but brutal. “The day I give up being a military man, I will start calling myself the Archbishop.”
“Why?” his roommates asked.
“Because the only reason I would ever quit is if it was all over anyway—if the glorious promise of the revolution was squandered. And if that day comes, I will call myself the Archbishop. You had better kill me then. Assassinate me.”
Under the Communist system, the Russian Orthodox Church was a symbol of conservative values. “Huh,” the fellow students laughed, “so you’ll take orders?” They laughed, but while they smiled, their expressions were stiff.
1958. After graduating first in his class from training school, he was assigned to the Chinese border. He was a captain now and led a defensive platoon. 1959. He created his own special forces unit and tried to control the conflicts breaking out in Central Asia—in Kazakhstan and eastern Kyrgyzstan, along the Sino-Soviet border. He revealed a talent for putting pressure on Islamic populations as well. 1960. He was promoted to become the head of the Committee for the Purchase and Rearing of Guard/War Dogs. He was a major now, twenty-six years and seven months old, and he took his position seriously. 1961. The directive was handed down. Yes, Comrade Khrushchev’s dream. Here, in this environment, in the eyes of the man responsible for carrying out the directive, the dream was reduced to a realistic strategy, political and military. The adventure lost its sparkle.
1962.
No. Year 5 Anno Canis. I’ve focused too long on the human perspective. Dogs, where are you now? You, Anubis, closest to the origin of the new era. Where are you?
You were getting close. At last.
Yes, Anubis. You still had your erections. You were an old dog now, on the cusp of your tenth year, but your spirit, your vigor, was undaunted. MY DESTINY AWAITS ME, you barked. All along, you kept your nose to the ground, following the scent. The odor of that glorious bitch whose blood, coursing through her veins, was wilder and more powerful than the rest. It was there, you felt it. Your nose led you on. And so, Anubis, you kept heading south. You had faith in the impulses stirring within you, and you continued south. Or perhaps that’s not quite right; it was less impulses in the plural than the lingering trace of a single impulse. Its echoes. That summer, you had felt something gazing down at you from the vastness of the sky. In year 3 Anno Canis. And you had understood. YES, you thought. I MUST PURSUE THAT GAZE.
Therein, you understood, lay the evolution of the canine tribe.
Woof! you barked.
I’LL SIRE THE STRONGEST BLOODLINE!
Your mind was made up; your penis was hard.
I WON’T DIE. MY SEED WON’T DIE. IT WILL LIVE… AND LIVE, FOREVER!
MY FUTURE WIFE! you barked.
Year 5 Anno Canis. At long last you arrived, your massive penis straight as a flagpole. Stirred by the sensation of that gaze from outer space, you had run to the very ends of the earth, and now here you were in the distant outliers of the Soviet Union. Here where the USSR hit up against South Siberia and Mongolia. You were in the west of the Tuvan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Grasslands and squat mountains as far as the eye could see. You emerged from a forest of white birches, and there you were.