That morning, June 10, 1982, was unusual, for they had received no agenda, just a summons. And the men who grouped at the table to take their places sensed, with the perceptive collective nose for danger that had brought them all to this pinnacle, that something of importance was afoot.
Seated at the center point of the head of the T in his usual chair was the chief of them all, Maxim Rudin. Ostensibly his superiority lay in his title of President of the USSR. But nothing except the weather is ever quite what it appears in Russia. His real power came to him through his title of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR. As such, he was also Chairman of the Central Committee, and Chairman of the Politburo.
At the age of seventy-one he was craggy, brooding, and immensely cunning; had he not been the latter, he would never have occupied the chair that had once supported Stalin (who rarely ever called Politburo meetings), Malenkov, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev. To his left and right he was flanked by four secretaries from his own personal secretariat, men loyal to him personally above all else. Behind him, at each corner of the north wall of the chamber, was a small table. At one sat two stenographers, a man and a woman, taking down every word in shorthand. At the other, as a countercheck, two men hunched over the slowly turning spools of a tape recorder. There was a spare recorder to take over during spool changes.
The Politburo had thirteen members, and the other twelve ranged themselves, six a side, down the stem of the T-shaped table, facing jotting pads, carafes of water, ashtrays. At the far end of this arm of the table was one single chair. The Politburo men checked numbers to make sure no one was missing. For the empty seat was the Penal Chair, sat in only by a man on his last appearance in that room, a man forced to listen to his own denunciation by his former colleagues, a man facing disgrace, ruin, and once, not long ago, death at the Black Wall of the Lubyanka. The custom has always been to delay the condemned man until, on entering, he finds all seats taken and only the Penal Chair free. Then he knows. But this morning it was empty. And all were present.
Rudin leaned back and surveyed the twelve through half-closed eyes, the smoke from his inevitable cigarette drifting past his face. He still favored the old-style Russian papyrossy, half tobacco and half thin cardboard tube, the tube nipped twice between finger and thumb to filter the smoke. His aides had been taught to pass them to him one after the other, and his doctors to shut up.
To his left on the stem of the table was Vassili Petrov, age forty-nine, his own protege and young for the job he held, head of the Party Organizations Section of the General Secretariat of the Central Committee. Rudin could count on him in the trouble that lay ahead. Beside Petrov was the veteran Foreign Minister, Dmitri Rykov, who would side with Rudin because he had nowhere else to go. Beyond him was Yuri Ivanenko, slim and ruthless at fifty-three, standing out like a sore thumb in his elegant London-tailored suit, as if flaunting his sophistication to a group of men who hated all forms of Westernness. Picked personally by Rudin to be chairman of the KGB, Ivanenko would side with him simply because the opposition would come from quarters who hated Ivanenko and wanted him destroyed.
On the other side of the table sat Yefrem Vishnayev, also young for the job, like half the post-Brezhnev Politburo. At fifty-five he was the Party theoretician, spare, ascetic, disapproving, the scourge of dissidents and deviationists, guardian of Marxist purity, and consumed by a pathological loathing of the capitalist West. The opposition would come here, Rudin knew. By his side was Marshal Nikolai Kerensky, age sixty-three, Defense Minister and chief of the Red Army. He would go where the interests of the Red Army led him.
That left seven, including Vladimir Komarov, responsible for Agriculture and sitting white-faced because he, like Rudin and Ivanenko alone, knew roughly what was to come. The KGB chief betrayed no emotion; the rest did not know.
“It” came when Rudin gestured to one of the Kremlin praetorian guards at the door at the far end of the room to admit the person waiting in fear and trembling outside.
“Let me present Professor Ivan Ivanovich Yakovlev, Comrades,” Rudin growled as the man advanced timorously to the end of the table and stood waiting, his sweat-damp report in his hands. “The professor is our senior agronomist and grain specialist from the Ministry of Agriculture, and a member of the Academy of Sciences. He has a report for our attention. Proceed, Professor.”
Rudin, who had read the report several days earlier in the privacy of his study, leaned back and gazed above the man’s head at the far ceiling. Ivanenko carefully lit a Western king-size filtered cigarette. Komarov wiped his brow and studied his hands. The professor cleared his throat.
“Comrades,” he began hesitantly. No one disagreed that they were comrades. With a deep breath the scientist stared down at his papers and plunged straight into his report.
“Last December and January our long-range weather forecast satellites predicted an unusually damp winter and early spring. As a result and in accordance with habitual scientific practice, it was decided at the Ministry of Agriculture that our seed grain for the spring planting should be treated with a prophylactic dressing to inhibit fungoid infections that would probably be prevalent as a result of the dampness. This has been done many times before.
“The treatment selected was a dual-purpose seed dressing: an organomercurial compound to inhibit fungoid attack on the germinating grain, and a pesticide and bird repellant called lindane. It was agreed in scientific committee that because the USSR, following the unfortunate damage through frost to the winter wheat crop, would need at least one hundred forty million tons of crop from the spring wheat plantings, it would be necessary to sow six and a quarter million tons of seed grain.”
All eyes were on him now, the fidgeting stilled. The Politburo members could smell danger a mile off. Only Komarov, the one responsible for Agriculture, stared at the table in misery. Several eyes swiveled to him, sensing blood. The professor swallowed hard and went on.
“At the rate of two ounces of organomercurial seed dressing per ton of grain, the requirement was for three hundred fifty tons of dressing. There were only seventy tons in stock. An immediate order was sent to the manufacturing plant for this dressing at Kuibyshev to go into immediate production to make up the required two hundred eighty tons.”
“Is there only one such factory?” asked Petrov.
“Yes, Comrade. The tonnages required do not justify more factories. The Kuibyshev factory is a major chemical plant, making many insecticides, weed killers, fertilizers, and so forth. The production of the two hundred eighty tons of this chemical would take less than forty hours.”
“Continue,” ordered Rudin.
“Due to a confusion in communication, the factory was undergoing annual maintenance, and time was running short if the dressing was to be distributed to the one hundred twenty-seven dressing stations for seed grain scattered across the Soviet Union, the grain treated, and then taken back to the thousands of state and collective farms in time for planting. So an energetic young official and Party cadre was sent from Moscow to hurry things along. It appears he ordered the workmen to terminate what they were doing, restore the plant to operating order, and start it functioning again.”
“He failed to do it in time?” rasped Marshal Kerensky.
“No, Comrade Marshal, the factory started work again, although the maintenance engineers had not quite finished. But something malfunctioned. A hopper valve. Lindane is a very powerful chemical, and the dosage of the lindane to the remainder of the organomercurial compound has to be strictly regulated.
“The valve on the lindane hopper, although registering one-third open on the control panel, was in fact stuck at full open. The whole two hundred eighty tons of dressing were affected.”