The Devil's Alternative

  “And how much of the spring planting has been affected?” asked Vishnayev coldly.

  “Just about four fifths, Comrade. The seventy tons of reserve compound was perfectly all right. The two hundred eighty tons of new compound were all affected by the jamming hopper valve.”

  “And the toxic dressing was all mixed in with seed grain and planted?”

  “Yes, Comrade.”

  Two minutes later the professor was dismissed, to his privacy and his oblivion.

  Vishnayev turned to Komarov.

  “Forgive my ignorance, Comrade, but it would appear you had some foreknowledge of this affair. What has happened to the functionary who produced this ... cockup?” (He used a crude Russian expression that refers to a pile of dog mess on the pavement.)

  Ivanenko cut in.

  “He is in our hands,” he said, “along with the analytical chemist who deserted his function, the warehouseman, who is simply of exceptionally low intelligence, and the maintenance team of engineers, who claim they demanded and received written instructions to wind up their work before they had finished.”

  “This functionary, has he talked?” asked Vishnayev.

  Ivanenko considered a mental image of the broken man in the cellars beneath the Lubyanka.

  “Extensively,” he said.

  “Is he a saboteur, a fascist agent?”

  “No,” said Ivanenko with a sigh. “Just an idiot; an ambitious apparatchik trying to overfulfill his orders. You can believe me on that one. We do know by now the inside of that man’s skull.”

  “Then one last question, just so that we can all be sure of the dimensions of this affair.” Vishnayev swung back to the unhappy Komarov. “We already know we will save only fifty million tons of the expected hundred million from the winter wheat. How much will we now get from the spring wheat this coming October?”

  Komarov glanced at Rudin, who nodded imperceptibly.

  “Out of the hundred-forty-million-ton target for the spring-sown wheat and other grains, we cannot reasonably expect more than fifty million tons,” he said quietly.

  The meeting sat in stunned horror.

  “That means a total yield over both crops of one hundred million tons,” breathed Petrov. “A national shortfall of one hundred forty million tons. We could have taken a shortfall of fifty, even seventy million tons. We’ve done it before, endured the shortages, and bought what we could from elsewhere. But this ...”

  Rudin closed the meeting.

  “We have as big a problem here as we have ever confronted, Chinese and American imperialism included. I propose we adjourn and separately seek some suggestions. It goes without saying that this news does not pass outside those present in this room. Our next meeting will be a week from today.”

  As the thirteen men and the four aides at the top table came to their feet, Petrov turned to the impassive Ivanenko.

  “This doesn’t mean shortages,” he muttered, “this means famine.”

  The Soviet Politburo descended to their chauffeur-driven Zil limousines, still absorbing the knowledge that a weedy professor of agronomy had just placed a time bomb under one of the world’s two superpowers.

  Adam Munro’s thoughts a week later as he sat in the circle at the Bolshoi Theater on Karl Marx Prospekt were not on war but on love—and not for the excited embassy secretary beside him who had prevailed on him to take her to the ballet.

  He was not a great fan of ballet, though he conceded he liked some of the music. But the grace of the entrechats and fouettés—or as he called it, the jumping about—left him cold. By the second act of Giselle, the evening’s offering, his thoughts were straying back again to Berlin.

  It had been a beautiful affair, a once-in-a-lifetime love. He was twenty-four, turning twenty-five, and she nineteen, dark and lovely. Because of her job they had had to conduct their affair in secret, furtively meeting in darkened streets so that he could pick her up in his car and take her back to his small flat at the western end of Charlottenburg without anyone’s seeing. They had loved and talked, she had made him suppers, and they had loved again.

  At first, the clandestine nature of their affair, like married people slipping away from the world and each other’s partners, had added spice, piquancy to the loving. But by the summer of 1961, when the forests of Berlin were ablaze with leaves and flowers, when there was boating on the lakes and swimming from the shores, it had become cramped, frustrating. That was when he had asked her to marry him, and she had almost agreed. She might still have agreed, but then came the Wall. It was completed on August 13, 1961, but it was obvious for a week that it was going up.

  That was when she made her decision, and they loved for the last time. She could not, she told him, abandon her parents to what would happen to them: to the disgrace, to the loss of her father’s trusted job, her mother’s beloved apartment, for which she had waited so many years through the dark times. She could not destroy her young brother’s chances of a good education and prospects. And finally, she could not bear to know that she would never see her beloved homeland again.

  So she left, and he watched from the shadows as she slipped back into the East through the last uncompleted section in the Wall, sad and lonely and heartbroken—and very, very beautiful.

  He had never seen her again, and he had never mentioned her to anyone, guarding her memory with his quiet Scottish secretiveness. He had never let on that he had loved and still loved a Russian girl called Valentina who had been a secretary-stenographer with the Soviet delegation to the Four Power Conference in Berlin. And that, as he well knew, was far out against the rules.

  After Valentina, Berlin had palled. A year later he was transferred by Reuters to Paris, and it was two years after that, when he was back in London again, kicking his heels in the head office on Fleet Street, that a civilian he had known in Berlin, a man who had worked at the British headquarters there, Hitler’s old Olympic stadium, had made a point of looking him up and renewing their acquaintance. There had been a dinner, and another man had joined them. The acquaintance from the stadium had excused himself and left during coffee. The newcomer had been friendly and noncommittal. But by the second brandy he had made his point.

  “Some of my associates in the Firm,” he had said with disarming diffidence, “were wondering if you could do us a little favor.”

  That was the first time Munro had heard the term “the Firm.” Later he would learn the terminology. To those in the Anglo-American alliance of intelligence services, a strange and guarded but ultimately vital alliance, the SIS was always called “the Firm.” To its employees, those in the counterintelligence arm, or MI5, were “the Colleagues.” The CIA at Langley, Virginia, was “the Company,” and its staff “the Cousins.” On the opposite side worked “the Opposition,” whose headquarters in Moscow were at No. 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, named after Feliks Dzerzhinsky, Lenin’s secret-police boss and the founder of the old Cheka. This building would always be known as “the Center,” and the territory east of the Iron Curtain as “the Bloc.”

  The meeting in the London restaurant was in December 1964, and the proposal, confirmed later in a small flat in Chelsea, was for a “little run into the Bloc.” He made it in the spring of 1965 while ostensibly covering the Leipzig Fair in East Germany. It was a pig of a run.

  He left Leipzig at the right time and drove to the meet in Dresden, close by the Albertinium Museum. The package in his inner pocket felt like five Bibles, and everyone seemed to be looking at him. The East German Army officer who knew where the Russians were locating their tactical rockets in the Saxon hillsides showed up half an hour late, by which time two officers of the People’s Police undoubtedly were watching him. The swap of packages went off all right, somewhere in the bushes of the nearby park. Then he returned to his car and set off southwest for the Géra Crossroads and the Bavarian border checkpoint. On the outskirts of Dresden a local driver rammed him from the front offside, although Munro had the right-of-way. He had not even had tim
e to transfer the package to the hiding place between the trunk and the back seat; it was still in the breast pocket of his blazer.

  There were two gut-wrenching hours in a local police station, every moment dreading the command “Turn out your pockets, please, mein Herr.” There was enough up against his breastbone to collect him twenty-five years in Potma labor camp. Eventually he was allowed to go. Then the battery went flat and four policemen had to push-start him.

  The front offside wheel was screaming from a fractured roller bearing inside the hub, and it was suggested he might like to stay overnight and get it mended. He pleaded that his visa time expired at midnight—which it did—and set off again. He made the checkpoint on the Saale River between Flauen in East Germany and Hof in the West at ten minutes before midnight, having driven at twenty miles per hour all the way, rending the night air with the screaming of the front wheel. When he chugged past the Bavarian guards on the other side, he was wet with sweat.

  A year later he left Reuters and accepted a suggestion to sit for the Civil Service Entrance examinations as a late entrant. He was twenty-nine.

  The CSE examinations are unavoidable for anyone trying to join the Civil Service. Based on the results, the Treasury has first choice of the cream, which enables that department to foul up the British economy with impeccable academic references. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office get next choice, and as Munro had a First he had no trouble entering the foreign service, usually the cover for staffers of the Firm.

  In sixteen years he had specialized in economic intelligence matters and the Soviet Union, though he had never been there before. He had had foreign postings in Turkey, Austria, and Mexico. In 1967, just turned thirty-one, he had married. But after the honeymoon it had been an increasingly loveless union, a mistake, and it was quietly ended six years later. Since then there had been affairs, of course, and they were all known to the Firm, but he had stayed single.

  There was one affair he had never mentioned to the Firm, and had the fact of it, and his covering up of it, leaked out, he would have been fired on the spot.

  On joining the service, like everyone else, he had to write a complete life story of himself, followed by a viva voce examination by a senior officer. (This procedure is repeated every five years of service. Among the matters of interest are inevitably any emotional or social involvement with personnel from behind the Iron Curtain—or anywhere else, for that matter.)

  The first time he was asked, something inside him rebelled, as it had in the olive grove on Cyprus. He knew he was loyal, that he would never be suborned over the matter of Valentina, even if the Opposition knew about it, which he was certain they did not. If an attempt were ever made to blackmail him over it, he would admit it and resign, but never accede. He just did not want the fingers of other men, not to mention filing clerks, rummaging through a part of the most private inside of him. Nobody owns me but me! So he said “No” to the question, and broke the rules. Once trapped by the lie, he had to stick with it. He repeated it three times in sixteen years. Nothing had ever happened because of it, and nothing ever would happen. He was certain of it. The affair was a secret, dead and buried. It would always be so.

  Had he been less deep in his reverie, he might have noticed something. From a private box high in the left-hand wall of the theater, he was being observed. Before the lights went up for the entr’acte, the watcher had vanished.

  The thirteen men who grouped around the Politburo table in the Kremlin the following day were subdued and watchful, sensing that the report of the professor of agronomy could trigger a faction fight such as there had not been since Khrushchev fell.

  Rudin as usual surveyed them all through his drifting spire of cigarette smoke. Petrov of Party Organizations was in his usual seat to his left, with Ivanenko of the KGB beyond him. Rykov of Foreign Affairs shuffled his papers; Vishnayev the Party theoretician and Kerensky of the Red Army sat in stony silence. Rudin surveyed the other seven, calculating which way they would jump if it came to a fight.

  There were the three non-Russians: Vitautas the Balt, from Vilnius, Lithuania; Chavadze the Georgian, from Tbilisi; and Mukhamed the Tajik, an Oriental and born a Muslim. The presence of each was a sop to the minorities, but in fact each had paid the price to be there. Each, Rudin knew, was completely russified; the price had been high, higher than a Great Russian would have had to pay. Each had been First Party Secretary for his republic, and two still were. Each had supervised programs of vigorous repression against their fellow nationals, crushing dissidents, nationalists, poets, writers, artists, intelligentsia, and workers who had even hinted at a less than one hundred percent acceptance of the rule of Great Russia over them. None could go back without the protection of Moscow, and each would side, if it came to it, with the faction that would ensure his survival—that is, the winning one. Rudin did not relish the prospect of a faction fight, but he had held it in mind since he had first read Professor Yakovlev’s report in the privacy of his study.

  That left four more, all Russians. There were Komarov of the Agriculture Ministry, still extremely ill at ease; Stepanov, head of the trade unions; Shushkin, responsible for liaison with foreign Communist parties worldwide; and Petryanov, with special responsibilities for economics and industrial planning.

  “Comrades,” began Rudin slowly, “you have all studied the Yakovlev report at your leisure. You have all observed Comrade Komarov’s separate report to the effect that next September and October our aggregate grain yield will fall short of target by close to one hundred forty million tons. Let us consider first questions first. Can the Soviet Union survive for one year on no more than one hundred million tons of grain?”

  The discussion lasted an hour. It was bitter, acrimonious, but virtually unanimous. Such a shortage of grain would lead to privations that had not been seen since the Second World War. If the state bought even an irreducible minimum to make bread for the cities, the countryside would be left with almost nothing. The slaughter of livestock, as the winter snows covered the grazing lands and the beasts were left without forage or feed grains, would strip the Soviet Union of every four-footed animal. It would take a generation to recover the livestock herds. To leave even the minimum of grain on the land would starve the cities.

  At last Rudin cut them short.

  “Very well. If we insist on accepting the famine, both in grains and, as a consequence, in meat several months later, what will be the outcome in terms of national discipline?”

  Petrov broke the ensuing silence. He admitted that there already existed a groundswell of restiveness among the broad masses of the people, evidenced by a recent rash of small outbreaks of disorder and resignations from the Party, all reported back to him in the Central Committee through the million tendrils of the Party machine. In the face of a true famine, many Party cadres could side with the proletariat.

  The non-Russians nodded in agreement. In their republics Moscow’s grip was always likely to be less total then inside the RSFSR itself.

  “We could strip the six East European satellites,” suggested Petryanov, not even bothering to refer to the East Europeans as “fraternal comrades.”

  “Poland and Rumania would burst into flame for a start,” countered Shushkin, the liaison man with Eastern Europe. “Probably Hungary to follow suit.”

  “The Red Army could deal with them,” snarled Marshal Kerensky.

  “Not three at a time. Not nowadays,” said Rudin.

  “We are still talking only of a total acquisition of ten million tons,” said Komarov. “It’s not enough.”

  “Comrade Stepanov?” asked Rudin.

  The head of the state-controlled trade unions chose his words carefully.

  “In the event of genuine famine this winter and next spring through summer,” he said, studying his pencil, “it would not be possible to guarantee the absence of the outbreak of acts of disorder, perhaps on a wide scale.”

  Ivanenko, sitting quietly, gazing at the Western king-size f
ilter between his right forefinger and thumb, smelled more than smoke in his nostrils. He had scented fear many times: in the arrest procedures, in the interrogation rooms, in the corridors of his craft. He smelled it now. He and the men around him were powerful, privileged, protected. But he knew them all well; he had the files. And he, who knew no fear for himself, as the soul-dead know no fear, knew also that they all feared one thing more than war itself. If the Soviet proletariat, long-suffering, patient, oxlike in the face of deprivation, ever went berserk ...

  All eyes were on him. Public “acts of disorder,” and the repression of them, were his territory.

  “I could,” he said evenly, “cope with one Novocherkassk.” There was a hiss of indrawn breath down the table. “I could cope with ten, or even twenty. But the combined resources of the KGB could not cope with fifty.”

  The mention of Novocherkassk brought the specter right out of the wallpaper, as he knew it would. On June 2, 1962, almost exactly twenty years earlier, the great industrial city of Novocherkassk had erupted in worker riots. But twenty years had not dimmed the memory.

  It had started when by a stupid coincidence one ministry raised the price of meat and butter while another cut wages at the giant NEVZ locomotive works by thirty percent. In the resulting riots the shouting workers took over the city for three days, an unheard-of phenomenon in the Soviet Union. Equally unheard of, they booed the local Party leaders into trembling self-imprisonment in their own headquarters, shouted down a full general, charged ranks of armed soldiers, and pelted advancing tanks with mud until the vision slits clogged up and the tanks ground to a halt.

  The response of Moscow was massive. Every single line, every road, every telephone, every track in and out of Novocherkassk was sealed so the news could not leak out. Two divisions of KGB special troops had to be drafted to finish off the affair and mop up the rioters. There were eighty-six civilians shot down in the streets, over three hundred wounded. None ever returned home; none was buried locally. Not only the wounded but every single member of every family of a dead or wounded man, woman, or child was deported to the camps of Gulag lest they persist in asking after their relatives and thus keep memory of the affair alive. Every trace was wiped out, but two decades later it was still well remembered inside the Kremlin.