Before the war Sverdlovsk had been the fourth largest city in the Soviet Union; and remarkably, neither it, nor Chelyabinsk approximately one hundred and thirty kilometres to the south, had been attacked on the night of the war. The two undamaged cities, some nine hundred miles east of Moscow, had been like islands of hope in the first days after the cataclysm and since then, the bedrocks upon which the Central Committee — mainly Kosygin and he — had started to rebuild. That so much could have been achieved in so short a time; and that the potentially disastrous but essential ‘spoiling’ war in the Mediterranean and the Balkans had initially gone so well, only for all their plans to be — possibly — completely de-railed by Krasnaya Zarya madmen and those pathetic little men in Bucharest, was very nearly beyond forbearance.
Presently, Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin stood before his partner in the ‘collective leadership’. The two men exchanged the normal formal kisses, gripped hands, hard. Alexei Kosygin, looking and feeling as grey, cold and worn out as he felt, saw the murder in Leonid Brezhnev’s hooded eyes. People saw Leonid Ilyich’s leaden footed, clumsy gait and social awkwardness, misinterpreted his long silences in meetings for slowness of mind and thought. Brezhnev personified the dignified Russian bear and people wrongly assumed that Kosygin was his puppet master. However, beneath the stolid peasant mask lurked a brain the equal of any of his Politburo contemporaries and a will that was relentless, because nothing in life had come easily to Leonid Brezhnev.
Brezhnev had been born the son of a metalworker 1906 in what was now Dniprodzerzhynsk, formerly Kamenskoye in Tsarist Russia, but renamed in 1936 in honour of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police and the forerunner of the NKVD and the KGB. Brezhnev had joined the Komsomol, the Party youth wing in 1923, becoming a full member of the Party in 1929. In the 1930s he had worked as a metallurgical engineer in the steel industry of the Ukraine. During his compulsory military service he became a political commissar at a tank factory, and later a director of the Dniprodzerzhynsk Metallurgical Technical College. Like so many able men who survived Stalin’s pre-Great Patriotic War purges, after the German invasion in June 1941 he was rapidly promoted. By 1942 he was deputy head of political administration of the Trans-Caucasian Front, and afterwards of the 1st Ukrainian Front whose Political Commissar was none other than Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev…
“You look tired, Alexei Nikolayevich?” Leonid Brezhnev suggested, breaking his friend’s chain of thought.
“Ah,” the slighter, older-looking man grunted. “Next time I say ‘wait and see’, Leonid Ilyich,” he grimaced, “I will take my own advice!”
Brezhnev coughed a laugh, his breath misting instantly in the frozen air.
“The Securitate did not give you a hard time?”
“No, they were too busy with Yuri Vladimirovich. I think the clowns actually believed he was in charge of Krasnaya Zarya!”
Leonid Brezhnev looked past Kosygin.
“Where is the Comrade Marshal?”
Kosygin allowed himself a smile. Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov had drunk himself into a comatose stupor on the flight back from Romania; as had many of the other survivors. Only Kosygin and the physicist Andrei Sakharov had religiously abjured the free flowing Vodka. Sakharov had been horrified when he had learned the fate that had befallen Bucharest; he was an interesting man showing the first signs of becoming an interesting conflicted man. Kosygin could not help wondering if the father of the Soviet H-bomb had belatedly started down the same road that Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the American A-bomb had walked when his usefulness to his masters had waned.
“Vasily Ivanovich is in almost as bad a way as Yuri Vladimirovich,” Kosygin half-smiled, raising his gloved hand in a glass raising gesture.
“Klavdia Andreyevna was beside herself with worry,” Leonid Brezhnev went on. His friend’s wife had been unwell for several weeks and it had been all he could do to persuade her not to leave her sick bed in Chelyabinsk to make the early morning journey through the snow to Sverdlovsk. “My wife is comforting her. Be assured that Klavdia Andreyevna was the first to know that your flight had departed safely from Bucharest and was being escorted by our fighters.”
“Thank you. We are lucky men to still have our wives by our sides. Very lucky men.” Yuri Andropov’s wife and children had perished in the war, as had so many of their colleagues’ spouses, offspring and siblings, parents, aunts and uncles. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had been turned into a great charnel house. The tragedy was far from over; millions of those that the thermonuclear fires had temporarily spared in October 1962 had since succumbed to the cold, hunger, disease or simply lost the will to live.
The tragedy surpassed anything experienced in the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis and it lived in the souls of the survivors; a flame that would not die. Even Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin, the toughest and most pragmatic of men hardened by a life of fear and strife in the service of the Mother Country wanted only one thing, revenge. However, not just any kind of revenge; no, he wanted vengeance upon the West of a particular flavour. Revenge of a flavour and a colour that would forever and for all time deny the ‘victors’ of the Cuban Missiles War the spoils of their victory, and eventually, perhaps, restore the Mother Country to its rightful place in the order of things. The West had not defeated International Socialism, the march of Marxist-Leninism might have been temporarily halted, briefly in its tracks, but it had not been defeated.
“The weather is supposed to clear from the south later,” the grim-faced First Secretary of the Communist party of the Soviet Union growled as he and Kosygin, his First Deputy Premier settled into the back of the big black armoured car for the short trip to the main terminal of Koltsovo Airport. “We’ll warm ourselves inside and drink to your return while they defrost the helicopters to take us back down to Chelyabinsk.”
“I broke my own first rule of diplomacy, Leonid Ilyich,” Kosygin confessed darkly, staring out at the row of MiG-21 supersonic interceptors beneath their camouflage shrouds in the middle distance. “I gave those bastards in Bucharest the benefit of the doubt.”
“Never again,” the other man rumbled menacingly.
“I think they eventually meant to hand us over to the West,” Kosygin added bitterly.
“As if that would have made any difference if Kennedy and the Witch had had the guts to finish off the job they started in the October attack!”
Both men understood why President Kennedy had ordered a massive first strike against the USSR in October 1962. He would have known he could win the war if he struck first and the people in Cuba, nobody knew if it was Castro’s people or Russians, had given the American President the perfect excuse to pull the trigger. There was a compellingly twisted logic to it; both men might have done the same thing had they been in John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s shoes. What they could not, and would never understand was why after landing such a devastating, crushing first blow the Americans had not struck again and completed the job. It was like a heavyweight boxer landing a punch that shattered his opponent’s jaw promptly retiring to his corner and at the moment his foe was at his most vulnerable throwing in the towel. What hunter shot a bear and walked away without checking to see if it was dead? Was it weakness, shame or hubris? The fools had not begun sending over their high-flying U-2 spy planes again until a couple of months ago; long after the time when there would have been anything on the ground for them to see! The Red Air Force was aching to shoot down the interlopers — sitting ducks — trespassing in their skies.