It was a great comfort when Nikita Sergeyevich had crushed the Hungarian uprising with a truly Stalinist iron fist and thus reassured, Gheorghiu-Dej had stamped down harder than ever on his own counter-revolutionary troublemakers and dissidents, turning a deaf ear to the pusillanimous mutterings of the West about ‘so-called’ human rights and civil liberties in his country. His Securitate — the General Directorate for the Security of the People — was free to go about its business untrammelled. If firm government required the widespread use of intimidation, torture and imprisonment without trial, so be it for that was a price worth paying. Notwithstanding, in the years before the October War, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s government had pursued a tentative trade, diplomatic and political rapprochement with the West, slowly moving towards becoming a semi-detached member of the Warsaw Pact. The Romanian economy had grown, the Securitate had restricted its activities to within the borders of the nation, and Romania’s relations with the World’s richest and most powerful democracies had threatened to one day become the envy of many other impoverished Eastern Bloc countries. Inevitably, in Moscow, Krushchev’s people had begun to view the Romanian leader as a weak link, a possible Trojan horse within the body of the Marxist-Leninist polity. Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had always known that there were limits to his freedom of manuever and been very careful never to push his Muscovite overseers too far.
Old habits die hard.
He coughed.
“I surrender the floor to the esteemed members of the Troika.”
The bunker was crowded; as many as twenty men standing or sitting, mostly around the walls, or just behind their principals. The majority of the men in the bunker were aides, bodyguards — each member of the Troika had at least two seconds, big men with badly fitting suits bulging where pistols or other murderous implements were deliberately poorly concealed — and there were half-a-dozen of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s own people, ministers or representatives of the key departments of state. The ‘conference’ was a security nightmare, a rush job organised in a panic and no matter how calm the atmosphere, nobody in the bunker pretended that this was anything other than the darkest hour faced by the dysfunctional ad hoc alliance which had coalesced out of the ashes of the recent war.
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej was genuinely curious to discover which member of the Troika would speak first and if the man who spoke first, actually spoke for the Troika as a whole. Up until now the Soviet response to the devastation of the October War had been on one level, utterly stoic and on another, insane. The Dictator of Romania had ‘called’ this conference to curb the insanity, without for a moment really believing that anybody was in a position to do anything about the chaos that was, sooner rather than later, going to consume them all. He had not expected the Troika to respond to his entreaties but, incredibly, here the three great men were, fulminating inscrutably behind clouds of evil tobacco smoke, less than forty-eight hours after he had ‘summoned them’.
He had these men in his power at last; he had honestly believed revenge would taste sweeter. Now all he tasted was bile.
Nothing happened in the smoky silence for perhaps thirty seconds.
A horrible stillness settled, stirred only by men breathing the foul air. Most of those present had bad chests, maladies associated with the bitter winter, and from living their lives in damp, claustrophobic, ill-lit subterranean rat holes like this bunker beneath an airfield less than twenty kilometres from the centre of Bucharest.
“There are too many people in this room,” Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov said, his voice deafening in the quietness.
“Far too fucking many,” agreed the gnarled older man in the uniform of a Red Army tank commander with the street-fighter’s face who sat on the left hand side of the third member of the Troika. There was gravel and a breathless huskiness born of a life smoking bad tobacco in that growling, bear like utterance.
The man sitting between the urbane, reptile-eyed Andropov and the grizzled, oddly cherubic brutal-featured soldier sighed and leaned forward a fraction in his seat.
“My comrades are right,” Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin said mildly. He looked Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej in the eye with a sudden directness. “Your people do not need to be here.”
The dictator of Romania shrugged. He glanced over his shoulder at his most trusted lieutenant.
“Nicolae,” he reminded the room at large, “is the man whose work has made possible the restoration of a functioning command economy in the undamaged areas of our former Empire, and the restoration of communications with the surviving closed cities in the East. He needs to remain.”
Sixty-four year old Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov, Marshal of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics guffawed like an asthmatic Walrus with a two day old hangover.
“Sakharov ought to stay, too.”
Those who knew who Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb was, and recognised him in the crowd glanced in the direction of the tall, aesthetic, rather diffident man lurking in the shadows. The nuclear scientist did not care for the sudden scrutiny and shrank as far back out of the loom of the lights as he could before he felt the moist concrete at his shoulder.
“We need at least one person in the room,” Chuikov, the most decorated Soviet soldier of his generation went on, his face cracking into what might have been a broad grin or a mask of contempt, “who knows what he’s talking about.”
“Everybody else should go,” Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin suggested and the man to his right, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov brusquely nodded his concurrence.
Instantly, the bunker began to clear.
Feet scraped and shuffled, nobody spoke.
Presently, the heavy blast doors clanged shut.
“Well, Gheorghe,” Kosygin asked sombrely, viewing the Romanian dictator with unafraid, curious eyes. He was a man who had lived in fear for his life when Stalin had ordered him to spy on and undermine the most senior members of the Party in the years after the Great Patriotic War. “We’re here. What do you plan to do next?”
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej was genuinely put aback.
“What do I plan to do?” He retorted, his nostrils flaring with offence. After the events of the last few days he did not deserve to be mocked by men for whom he had risked everything since the war.
The Russians frowned, each in their own uniquely distinct fashion. Chuikov’s whole face moved around his narrowed eyes, Andropov raised an eyebrow, Sakharov could not mask his confusion, while Alexei Kosygin watched the Dictator of Romania with cool, oddly respectful reserve.
“When I saw the reception committee on the runway I expected to be arrested, Comrade,” he admitted flatly.
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej relaxed, allowed himself a glance at the phone on the table directly in front of his chair.
If he had ever been tempted to throw in his lot with the West it would have been on the day after the war. Now it was too late; and in retrospect it would have been too late by noon on the day after the war. Dozens of Soviet and other Warsaw Pact aircraft had landed on Romanian airfields, countless survivors from shattered Russian divisions had flooded across his borders, and then there had been the first civilian refugees, a bedraggled trickle, and shortly afterwards an irresistible flood that never seemed to end. Cruisers, destroyers and submarines of the Black Sea Fleet had anchored at Constanta. Within weeks the remnants of the Soviet High Command had made contact from their hideaways beyond the Urals. By then the bastards had already inflicted the bane of Krasnaya Zarya — Red Dawn — upon him and in the weeks and months that followed he had watched in horror as the monster devoured his country. If he had known then what he knew now he would have ordered the Securitate and the Army to liquidate Krasnaya Zarya, drown it in its own blood before it was too late. But everything had been a mess. Belorussia, the Ukraine, the Baltic States, Poland, East Germany, most of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Crimea and countless places north and east of the sea of rubble that had previously been Moscow were just, well, gone. Nobody had comprehended in those first days after the war that the USSR was so vast, and its peoples so dispersed that here and there whole cities and large sections of the empire’s military and industrial infrastructure had survived untouched, intact.