He remembered the dead in Atbasar, thousands of blistered corpses in postures of torment, far worse than his teenaged memories of the plague years in Gorky, when the river bobbed with dead. Those were hard years, for hard men. But the combination of old-fashioned blood and blister agents, followed by virtually redundant nerve-agent strikes, had created scenes he knew he would carry with him forever.
It was, after all, a racial war. The unthinkable had come to pass. Certainly, few Soviet citizens of his generation— if any — had taken seriously the threadbare ramblings about international and interracial solidarity to which the schools still subjected their charges. But neither had anyone quite expected the peoples of the Soviet Union to explode with such vast and consequential hatred.
Babryshkin wondered which of his many enemies he would fight next. In one engagement or another, as the shrinking brigade had been shunted between sectors, his men had encountered the Iranians, the armored forces of the Arab Islamic Legion, and the rebels, the latter's equipment and uniforms largely mirroring those of Babryshkin's force. He wondered if any of the officers opposing him were men with whom he had attended the combined tank schooclass="underline" Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Tadzhiks, Kirgiz. There had always been a shortage of officer cadets from the central Asian republics, and it told against the rebels now. Even after the military reforms that had allowed recruits from each fringe republic to serve in ethnically uniform units close to home, ethnic Russian or Ukrainian or other European Soviet officers had been required to fill out the command and staff positions. Most of them had been murdered or imprisoned by the mutineers at the start of the revolt, and consequently the rebel units suffered from a pronounced lack of qualified officers. Babryshkin had cut up rebel detachments again and again — only to suffer in turn when the invulnerable Japanese-built gunships returned, or when the Iranians or Islamic Legion forces bullied through with their Japanese-built combat vehicles, whose quality seemed to guarantee success no matter how inept the plan or its execution. The electronics brought to bear by the enemy prevented Babryshkin from communicating and fooled his target-acquisition systems, making a joke even of the Soviet Army's latest acquire-and-fire automatic tank fire control system. Soviet missiles and main gun rounds were drawn astray. And even when Babryshkin's men managed to land their fires dead-on, the enemy's prime fighting systems often seemed to be invulnerable.
He worried that his men would not be able to bear up much longer, that a point would come when the dwindling unit would simply dissolve. But, somehow, the men hung on. Probably, he realized, they felt many of the same emotions he himself felt. Desperation, a battered patriotism, and, above all, a furious hatred that could grow very cold without losing the least of its spiritual intensity. Babryshkin had never imagined himself as the sort of man who would develop a taste for killing, who would ache not only to kill his enemies but to kill them as painfully, as miserably as possible. Yet, he had unquestionably become such a man. The joy he felt when he saw an enemy vehicle explode was certainly different from, but matched in intensity, his best, early nights with Valya. After a time, after he had witnessed enough atrocities, the act of killing attained a sort of purity that would have been unimaginable to the man he once had been.
Babryshkin's brigade had been one of the ethnic Slav organizations garrisoned in Kazakhstan beside local "brother" units, each representing a distinct part of the regional population. Now the blood Russians made up these long columns of refugees, fleeing from the soil that had been their home for generations, that they had struggled to plough and make prosperous, fleeing from the wrath of people they had long imagined or pretended were their brothers in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Certainly, there had been problems before — the old enmity between the Armenians and Azerbaijanis, between dozens of other ethnic groups whose fates had brought them to the same watering trough. But the Soviet Union seemed to have worked beyond the time of troubles that followed the end of the Gorbachev period, the phases of reaction, counter-reaction, and uneasy compromise. A period of somnolence, of dreary but thankfully unmenacing mediocrity seemed to have settled back down upon tundra and desert, steppe and marshland. The clumsy, ultimately unsuccessful repressions, the anarchic impulses, the unsatisfied needs, both spiritual and rawly physical, seemed to drowse off under the cobbled-together solution of dramatically increased federalism, with far more authority devolved upon the individual republics. Racial tensions sputtered now and again, but always settled back down into the prevailing lethargy.
Marx had been right, though. Economics were fundamental. And economics had ultimately exacerbated the smoldering ethnic tensions. As the Soviet Union had struggled to find herself, first under Gorbachev, then under the troika of decayed conservative nonentities who attempted to rule after the blunt end of the Gorbachevshina, the rest of the world rushed by in an explosive series of technological revolutions. While in the Soviet Union, nothing ever seemed to quite work, no approach appeared to solve the ever-worsening problem of relative backwardness. With tremendous pain and effort, the Soviet Union took a step forward. The West took three or four. And Japan took five. Then the great Japanese-Islamic Axis had surfaced in the wake of American retrenchment and European neutrality. The combination of Japanese technology with Islamic natural resources and Islam's population base sparked a dynamism that inevitably attracted the impoverished Asian and traditionally Islamic populations within the Central Asian and Azerbaijani republics of the USSR. The total inability of the state medical system and the central government in general to cope with the stresses of the plague years, and the resultant local famines, lit the fuse. In retrospect, it only seemed remarkable to Babryshkin that the bomb had taken such a long time to explode.
Now, as so often throughout history, the Russian people and their ethnic brethren stood alone against the Asian onslaught. Even the East Europeans, who had long since slipped their tether, looked on with a sense of amusement, almost a black joy, as the mighty Russians got their comeuppance. Thankfully, China slept. The Chinese were lost in another of their long cycles of introspection, occasionally raising an eyelid to check on the Japanese, then closing it again, content that their carefully delineated sphere of influence had not been annoyed. The developing — or hopelessly underdeveloped — world supported the right of the Central Asian republics to complete independence, lashing out at a bankrupt Soviet Union that had sent them neither goods nor weapons for a generation. The Russians stood alone, again, with a fatalistic sense of history repeating itself. Mongols, Tartars, Turks, and now these steel horsemen out of the Asian darkness. Even the possibility of a brisk nuclear response, such as the one that had saved the Americans in Africa, had been stolen away by a world too ready to take the Soviet Union at its word in the aftermath of the American blow against Pretoria and the suicidal exchanges in the Middle East that had taken only three days to gut a circle of nations. The Soviets had bellowed loudly, glad for one last chance to strut upon the world stage, insisting on complete nuclear disarmament. And, indeed, the nuclear arsenals had finally, foolishly been dismantled. Babryshkin's handful of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles were all that remained.
"Comrade Commander?" Two helmeted figures approached Babryshkin in the starlit darkness. He recognized Major Gurevich, the brigade's deputy commander for political affairs, by his voice. The position had been abolished back in the nineties, only to be revived again in the conservative retrenchment, with its archaic language and grim nostalgia. Babryshkin was not certain exactly what the political officer still believed in at this point, but he knew that it was not hard work. Gurevich's fitful attempts at making a contribution were far more self-important than helpful, but thankfully they did not take long to sputter out. None of the men would listen to the political officer anymore, and when Gurevich had complained to Babryshkin, the latter had brushed him off with the observation that the men were too busy for lectures and, besides, what was left to say? The men were fighting. There were no deserters. What did Gurevich expect? The political officer had answered that it was not enough to take the correct action, if it was taken for the wrong reasons. The men had to be made to see the theoretical imperative, the political propriety of their actions. But Gurevich had not pressed the issue further, and Babryshkin suspected that the man was simply lost, trying to find some point to his continued service with the unit, to his continued existence. With the collapse of the empire, Gurevich's world had begun to crumble, as well.