Vodka (70 page)

Alexei asked that Borzov restore parliament’s lighting, heating and water supplies.

Lev checked the stockpiles of arms dotted around the White House. Wherever you were in the building, the theory went, it should take you no more than a couple of minutes’ brisk walk to reach the nearest weapon. The parliamentary guard had brought some of them. Lev’s own 21st Century gang had supplied just as many. There were sixteen hundred automatic rifles, two thousand pistols, twenty machine guns and five grenade launchers in the White House alone, not counting the hundreds,
perhaps thousands, hanging from the necks and shoulders of those outside.

Every time Lev looked out, the numbers flocking to his cause seemed to have grown: there were three battalions of Moscow reservists, one hundred crack troops who’d been serving in Moldova, police troops back from Riga, a detachment of Cossacks, and paramilitaries from the Workers of Russia Union.

Farther out, hemming the building in on all four sides, were the police.

Alice stared at the television screen until her eyes began to fuzz, then she went to the window and looked out toward the west, as though if she stared long and hard enough, the intervening buildings would crumble and she’d be able to see the White House, ringed like Saturn with guards and police: arena, battleground, vortex, manifestation of this insane place that jabbed at her like a wire in her blood.

Once again she was watching history unfold. That was all it was. She wasn’t thinking of Lev, leading the resistance; she didn’t even care what happened to him. Wasn’t, didn’t. He could die in there for all she cared. Perhaps it would be better if he did. He wasn’t in her life anymore, so what did it matter either way?

Like all standoffs, the siege was at once excruciatingly boring and unbearably tense. Minutes crawled, hours flew. The only thing that everyone knew was this: the moment the first shot was fired, the situation would take off like a rocket leaving Baikonur, and there’d be no holding it.

Alexei tried again to find common ground. Borzov refused to talk until Lev surrendered all the arms in the
White House; Lev refused to talk until Borzov reversed parliament’s dissolution.

Borzov summoned Sabirzhan to the Kremlin and, by presidential decree, placed him in charge of Red October. Sabirzhan’s efforts at ruining the auction were history. He and Borzov were united in their hatred of Lev, and as ever, an enemy’s enemy was a friend.

Lev’s power at the distillery was absolute when he was there, but in his absence Red October was simply getting on with it—not without confusion or regret, perhaps, but those at the bottom in Russia keep going, no matter what happens up above. The workers didn’t have time to worry about politics and infighting; their job was to work, to make vodka.

Lev had checked out the options for escape and evasion in case Borzov persuaded the army to storm the White House. He didn’t let on to the deputies how flimsy their choices were. The building had a bomb bunker—it had been built when fears of an American nuclear strike had been very real—but the doors were hermetically sealed and no one knew how to open them. The metro passed directly underneath the building—it was on the orbital line, between Kievskaya and Krasnopresnenskaya stations—but the tunnel from the White House basement to the line was rumored to be mined. If Lev came out of the White House, therefore, it would have to be onto the street, and he’d do that only in victory, if Borzov had capitulated. If he left the building in defeat, he wouldn’t be alive. He would die fighting, but he wouldn’t surrender.

The White House’s power and water came back on late in the afternoon. It was a concession to which Borzov
had agreed reluctantly, and only when he’d been convinced that continuing deprivation was simply making Lev appear a martyr. He soured the pill by adding an ultimatum: “To the criminals still inside the White House—you have until midday tomorrow to leave the building. Anatoly Nikolayevich personally assures you safe passage if you comply. After that, he will not be responsible for your fate.”

With lights suddenly blazing and radiators creaking into action, rumors and counterrumors raced through the newly lit corridors like the west wind: Borzov had surrendered, Borzov was preparing for an attack, the American special forces were on the roof. Curiously, the restoration of the building’s power and water seemed to be hindering rather than helping Lev’s attempts to maintain spirits. By imbuing the defenders with a proper Russian sense of suffering, the cold and darkness had fostered a spirit of solidarity. Now people were beginning to succumb to siege mentality in all its worst forms.

Lev called everyone into the chamber again, the better to show that his authority here was absolute. “We must remain sober!” he yelled. “Whether that imbecile Borzov tries to attack us may depend on how drunk he gets. Heaven preserve us if we lower ourselves to his level.”

There was an argument away to Lev’s left. It spun and escalated, sucking in more participants as it gathered momentum like a giant snowball, fragmenting, reabsorbing, reproducing. The deputies were middle-aged men two decades out of shape, and they fought that way, flailing ineffectually, pulling jackets and shirts over each other’s heads, swaying this way and that, and probably managing to land less than half a dozen decent blows between them.

Lev waded into the mêlée, selected the two men nearest the middle, took a collar in each of his hands and cracked their heads together with such force that only his restraining grip kept them from bouncing halfway across the chamber. When he let them go, they dropped to the floor like sacks of grain. The others stopped fighting.

“That’s enough!” he shouted.

He sat in the speaker’s chair and led the deputies in a medley of old Russian folk songs: “Rustling Reeds,” “Slender Roman-Tree,” “Crimson Moon” and the “Song of Stenka Razin.” His voice cracked when he smiled through the words; they were going to win this thing.

The police had been ordered not to fire. Everyone remembered what had happened on Defenders of the Motherland Day, when someone had been panicked into pulling his trigger. The memory seemed to inflame rather than frighten the protesters. They began to push against the police, confident that they of all people wouldn’t be up for a fight, and indeed they weren’t. The policemen glanced at each other with wide and frightened eyes. This wasn’t what they’d joined the force for, this wasn’t something that responded to bribery or extortion, and they were massively outnumbered to boot, the thinnest of blue lines without any backup from OMON black or army green. The retreat began almost imperceptibly, with the protesters disarming some policemen and beating others. As the pressure became greater, the line heaved and stretched and cracked, the policemen fleeing with their overcoats flapping, half marching and half running, looking like frightened penguins. One of them tripped and fell. Rodya and Galina, who’d come to support Lev, jumped instantly onto the
fallen cop—not to hurt him, but to prevent him from being trampled to death.

Friday, March 13, 1992

C
hannel One had pulled all scheduled programs and was showing
Swan Lake
—a bad omen if ever there was one; Tchaikovsky is the nation’s harbinger of wars and coups d’état. At seven o’clock,
Swan Lake
went off and Borzov came on to declare a state of emergency in Moscow, now divided into seven military districts: Borovistsky, Stretensky, Tverskoy, Vorobyory, Tryokhgorya, Taganka and Lefortovo.

The army had taken over the functions of the police, and Moscow was filling with troops by the hour. The first T-72 tanks were seen on the outskirts at dawn, and the pale sun was burning up the east by the time they came down Kutuzovsky Prospekt, slowly so as not to lose control on the slippery concrete, and pulled up on the Kalininsky Bridge opposite the White House. This was the same route the coup plotters had taken the previous year; the same route, indeed, along which Napoleon had entered Moscow in 1812.

The troops, most of them no more than boys with eyes streaming in the wind, came from all over: the Fourth Guards Kantemirovskaya Tank Division in Narofominsk, the 27th Motorized Infantry Division in Moscow, the
106th Guards Airborne at Tulskaya, and the Second Guards Tamanskaya Motorized Infantry Division in Golitsyno, widely seen as the toughest of them all. Their commanders had orders to fire if necessary.

The army had taken control of all the main bridges and arterial routes into Moscow, leaving snaking white tracks on the road as they patrolled the city. They assumed their positions around the White House, from where the police had been chased the previous evening. The building has nineteen stories, and the tank barrels nodded slowly as they took sightings, as if wondering idly where to aim first. The message to the parliamentary guard who still circled the building was clear: the posturing would soon be over, it was time for action.

Midday, the deadline for the deputies’ surrender, came and went. Borzov’s resolve ebbed and flowed like the tide. He’d thrown down the ultimatum without a second thought. Now it had passed, he was suddenly more circumspect. There was so much that could go wrong, and he hadn’t yet had the familiar flash of resolution that accompanied all his greatest decisions. Should he give the parliamentarians another ultimatum? Should he order still more troops into the area, to turn up the pressure? Or should he just go in with what he had, and perhaps catch them off guard by striking fast? The latter made his stomach jump; he was not naturally trigger-happy, and he knew that, irrespective of political persuasion, every Russian would thank him if he resolved the standoff without resorting to violence.

He needed to clear his head, so he went to the Kremlin
banya
, by repute the most luxurious steam bath in all Russia, with benches upholstered in leather and thick
pillows strewn across the floor. The heater was as wide as a truck and reached ten feet to the ceiling; inside glowed a massive heap of round rocks, cannonballs in miniature. Borzov threw some vodka on the heated rocks, inhaled the vapors lovingly, and poured himself a hundred grams.

“Herald!” Borzov threw open the door.
“Herald!” A
herald was someone sent to buy liquor for his friends. One of the presidential guard came running. Borzov, his vodka face as round as a turnip, squinted at him and then began to shout again, even though the two men were no more than a meter apart. “Go fetch me another bottle, on the double. Go!”

Home alone, Irk watched the pictures from the White House with a sense of numb dislocation. It was happening again, he thought. Was this the way it would always be with Russians, their pretensions to civilized behavior torn away every time an argument became intractable?

Denisov had ordered the police to support Borzov, and officially Irk was still bound by that. Not that he’d needed to be told, of course. If he, a progressive Estonian, wouldn’t back the forces of reform, then surely no one would. But if there was to be an assault—and with all the troops involved, there
would
be, maybe not today but certainly tonight, under cover of darkness—it would, Irk thought, simply expose Borzov as being no different from all his predecessors. If he was prepared to spill blood in pursuit of untrammeled power, if he was prepared to bomb his own people, he’d be no better than what he’d beheld.

Irk felt his way through thickets of unfamiliar feelings. Sure, Lev did bad things, but didn’t everyone? He also did many good things. He stood by his own, he
stuck rigidly to his code of honor, and he was a genuine philanthropist—look at the children’s home, for instance. It was no hardship to respect and admire him. Technically, Lev was a criminal. So? The whole nation was becoming criminalized, just to survive. And at least Lev and his lot were competent, unlike Denisov and the half-wits at Petrovka. There was nothing Russia needed more than competence.

Irk had been unable to stop Karkadann, but perhaps he could make a difference now. There were few people more dangerous, he thought as he went to find his chemical protection suit, than idealists who’ve lost their heroes.

Outside the main entrance to the White House, Sveta scowled at the troops through her makeup and emptied onto the hood of the nearest tank the food from her shopping bag. She began feeding and scolding the soldiers simultaneously, as only an old woman can. “Who’ve you come to shoot at? Your mothers? Is that what we’ve brought you up for? Here, you—take this sausage. You look like you haven’t eaten in months.”

A colonel stepped forward to usher Sveta away, and she rounded on him. “You stay out of this, fatface,” she snapped.

“Go home, Grandma,” he said. “Your place is in the kitchen, making borscht. Leave the politics to the men.”

“We’ve been doing that since the time of Catherine the Great. A fat lot of good it’s done us.”

The colonel, knowing when he was beaten, stepped back.

His temporal efforts at negotiation having failed, Patriarch Alexei turned to peacemaking on an altogether
higher plane. Trailed by priests whose black robes gave them the appearance of carrion crows, he went to the Yelokhovsky Cathedral and paraded the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God. An image of the Virgin and the infant Christ, it is the capital’s holiest icon. Many believe that it saved Moscow from Tamerlane. Now, clutching the precious figure tightly to him, Alexei prayed that Russia be preserved from catastrophe yet again.