Another Man's Freedom Fighter Page 3
For a more personal reference, he had picked up the phone to talk to the young man’s commanding officer. That conversation with his respected peer changed a lot. The near-retirement general was full of praise for the young conscript.
He had not performed any heroic deeds in battle but he was highly intelligent, and the general loved playing chess with the boy. “The youngster is smart enough to always let me win, but every time he makes it an interesting challenge. Some of his moves are daring, and most of the time they work out for him,” the old soldier said.
From then on, young Roman enjoyed increasing levels of protection and favors in his postings. His girlfriend’s father had managed to coerce him into training to become an officer. He had turned out to be a good leader in his field postings, and when the time came, he had graduated with honors from the Combined Arms Academy. Eventually, Roman and Lyudmila had gotten married, and their two sons brought additional joy into the general’s life.
After General Startsev had died in a car crash, his brother Gleb Yevgenievich took the husband of his beloved niece under his wing. His influence made sure that Roman could further advance in the new Russia, Lyudmila would be able to lead a comfortable life, and her children would get a good education.
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Mark Sanders closed the window, and the heavy rain’s tapping sounds were muffled by the double glazing. He sat down on a stool at the kitchen counter and took the first bite of his chicken-lettuce-tomato sandwich. Alexander sat in his high chair, he had already eaten his potato-and-carrot mash. Now, his eyes wide and his mouth open, he watched his father move the large bread-and-meat combination toward his mouth.
The iPhone vibrated and danced a quarter-inch across the kitchen counter. Mark pulled it closer and saw that he had received a message via the end-to-end encrypted messenger app TLKS, spoken telex. He swiped open the application.
The message from ‘SB’ read ‘Come see me Friday. Usual time and place’. Svetlana wanted to see him. Well, it’s been a while since we last met, he thought and smirked.
This day, the news came on Mark’s iPad mini via DIE WELT’s app. He read about the dead Polish soldiers and the claims and counter-claims about what had really happened. There were commentaries clearly taking the Polish storyline seriously and labeling the Russian version as propaganda. There were also other commentators simply stating that sending NATO soldiers close to the Russian border, be it in Luhansk or Crimea, had been a bad idea in the first place. Mark put the iPad down. Four dead. For what? he thought.
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“It was high time, we got you out of GRU and into the civilian intelligence services. You will find much better opportunities there,” Gleb Yevgenievich stated.
“Yes, and I look forward to that. My feeling was that I made good use of the contacts to our arms industry and helping them with opportunities to demonstrate our latest generation weapons in live environments.”
“You did. East Ukraine and Syria were wonderful showcases. We are on our way to be the world’s foremost arms exporter again. And for the first time, our weapons are not bought because they are cheap but because they are high-tech.” The minister was clearly proud. “But the arms trade is a limited field. There is much more money in the commodities trade, the real estate business, and in telecommunications. Your new position gives you access to people in these fields and to information they need. You will use the assets of your organization to help them do business, to protect their interests, and they will help you establish a healthy portfolio of shares in their corporations. Your predecessor was the krysha to many influential men for many years. Soon, you will be able to send Misha and Sasha to a Swiss boarding school or to England. They could go to college in Oxford. How about that?”
Roman Konstantinovich smiled. “Lyudmila keeps talking about Oxford and Cambridge. And the house in Spain she wants to buy.”
“She will be able to decorate it next summer, at the very latest,” the older man grinned. “There is one item of business I need to discuss with you before we part.”
The minister made it clear to the intelligence man that the affair of the dead Polish soldiers is currently the most critical operation of the SVR’s active measures department, and that he trusts his younger ally to personally make sure the narrative is spun as long and as loudly as possible. They will get away with their version of the story again, if only they keep repeating it stubbornly enough and slandering the Western mainstream media for being liars in bed with degenerate politicians.
There would probably be additional sanctions and rising food prices to be dealt with. Maybe jobs would be lost in the consumer-goods industry for lack of export opportunities. But those would be other people’s problems. The sanctions made it increasingly hard to keep up the well-dosed improvements of living standards for ordinary Russians while skimming off the cream of the economy for themselves. It was a good thing they had had the Sochi Olympics and the Soccer World Cup to provide distraction. Bread and circuses were essential to keep the people happy enough to stay off the streets.
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Russia is the largest country in the world. Its Asian portion makes it the largest country in Asia and its European portion the largest in Europe. Its nearly one hundred fifty million inhabitants had never experienced a truly free and democratic system of government.
Viking warriors from Sweden who called themselves Rus People started to settle in what is today Ukraine sometime in the ninth century. By the end of the eleventh century, they had subdued and assimilated all Slavic tribes between the Carpathian mountains and the Ural. After the early Russian state, the Kievan Rus, had been weakened by in-fighting between rivaling feudal lords it ultimately disintegrated in the thirteenth century and came under the yoke of various Mongol khanates.
Russia rose again under the rule of the Grand Dukes of Moscow and the Tsars of the Russian Empire. The idea that drove expelling the Khans, re-establishing Russian rule and expanding Russia beyond the Ural into Siberia and for some time even into Alaska was to create a Third Roman Empire.
Russian culture by then was greatly influenced by the Orthodox Church and the resulting ties with the waning Eastern Roman Empire. To legitimize their claim to succession of this Second Roman Empire, Grand Duke Ivan the Great even married a niece of the last Emperor of Constantinople and adopted the Byzantine double-headed eagle as his coat-of-arms.
At that time, the people of this vast land were mostly subsisting on farming. The trade in furs, ivory, and gold only made the feudal lords rich. In Moscow, and later in the new capital Saint Petersburg, the wealthy aristocrats increasingly enjoyed Western European culture and lifestyles, eventually also certain freedoms. Catherine the Great introduced Western thought and practices to the Russian gentry. The Enlightenment era saw the rise of Russian literature and science as well as the founding of schools for the nobility and those loyal to tsarist rule. Peasants harvesting wheat in Ukraine and toiling away in the steppes of Siberia would not be taught to read.
Eventually, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Red October, promised to bring freedom and education to every Russian. This promise was partly kept. While Lenin’s and later Stalin’s rule brought schools to every village to teach children to read and write, they continued the tsarist emphasis on patriotism in education. Also during the brief attempt at real democracy in the nineteen-nineties up to the nominally democratic state of modern-day Russia, fostering patriotism remained a key goal of the education system.
The new nobility in the post-Soviet era were former KGB operatives, organized crime leaders, and oligarchs. These had used their profits from semi-legal businesses to buy up shares in the most profitable Soviet factories at rock-bottom prices in privatization programs. Patriotism, bread and circuses, and an unforgiving, highly efficient state security apparatus protected the wealthy and powerful.
This protection was granted by state officials on many levels of government for favors, cash bribes, or shares in business ventures channel
ed through off-shore corporations. The term krysha, literally translated roof, described this protection from justice or crime, as the case may be.
Protection was a precious, high-maintenance merchandise. The Russian people rarely rose against the powerful, but when they did, they did it with a furor unknown to Western societies. In the Terror following the Red October, tens of thousands of aristocrats, bourgeois, landowners, intellectuals, but also critical workers died atrocious deaths at the hands of the Communist revolutionaries. Public hangings occurred frequently.
Defenestration, a fancy word for being thrown out the window, was another relatively harmless form of getting killed during this time. There were also accounts of men being tied to planks and slowly fed feet-first into burning furnaces, scalping, impaling, and even water being poured on naked prisoners bound in the winter streets until they became ice statues.
The new Russian nobility knew full well that in order to protect their fortunes and their lives, they needed to keep a close lid on any social movement or individual spreading ideas of transparency, democracy, and modernity in Russia. If a shift of power would occur, they would no doubt be brought to justice in terrible ways.
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After the exquisite meal, Kuvayev stayed at the Beluga for another fifteen minutes. He reminisced about his life, and how good it had turned out so far. Sure, he was a servant. Not of the state, as his official title suggested, but of the powerful and wealthy men that ran it. Everybody sells himself in our society. At least I am charging a hell of a price for myself, he thought while he sipped from the chilled vodka.
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A young man in olive battledress entered the neon-lit room and saluted. When he believed to have the other man’s attention he spoke hesitatingly, “Comrade Sergeant Major, a coded message for you arrived with orders for your group to return to Moscow tomorrow.” Without waiting for a reaction, he saluted again, turned, and left the room.
The long blade of the bayonet slid across the Japanese whetstone with a slight scratching sound. A mess kit with a half-eaten helping of borsht stood next to the stone on top of a heavily scuffed greenish metal table. Steel-blue eyes squinted and evaluated the sharpness of the edge from up close. Sergei Ivanovich Krug was satisfied with the result his four gentle passes over the fine water-soaked stone had produced. He slid the sturdy weapon back into its metal scabbard.
He took good care of this bayonet ever since his grandfather had given it to him on his deathbed. The youngest of three grandchildren and something of a latecomer had been the only one to listen to grandfather’s stories from the Great Patriotic War.
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Sergei had just turned eight when Ivan Ivanovich had died. Up until that day he had been a child like many others, happy to have his grandfather all for himself while his parents had been trying to make ends meet in the new free-market economy. His teenage sisters had been more concerned with clothes and boys than anything else. The oldest and the youngest family member took care of each other as well as the chores around the rented three-bedroom apartment the three generations called home.
Every day was the same, school, a quick lunch, doing the dishes. After that he had gone to the smallest room and sat down next to his dedushka on the small two-seater that at night converted into old Ivan’s bed. Like a sponge, he had soaked up the stories of how his grandfather had shot fascists or had dug his rifle-mounted bayonet into them as he and his comrades had stormed the German trenches.
As the society around old Ivan had started to change, and some of the taboo topics of Russian society could be spoken about again, the veteran also decided to pass on as much of his Cossack heritage to his grandson as he could remember. He told him about the proud warrior people that had populated the banks of the river Don since the 14th century. He told him about famous Atamans, their commanders.
Ivan had been particularly proud that their family had carried the Cossack heritage through the various waves of repression the Cossacks had to endure since their people had been ripped into different factions first by the civil war between the ‘red’ Bolsheviks and the ‘white’ Tsarists and then by the war between the Nazi Reich and the Soviet Union. The affiliation of some Cossack tribes with the fascists had led to suffering for all Cossacks, also the ones who had fought in the victorious Red Army.
Stalinist society only knew two categories of people, those undoubtedly loyal to Stalin and enemies of the state. Being a proud, strong-willed people in this paranoid state and having a mixed record had cost many Cossacks their properties and in some cases their lives.
The eight-year-old having lost his only friend had started to spend most of his days straying through the fields and woods around Rostov-on-Don. Every day, he had carried his treasured heirloom with him. At some point, the silent blond boy had opened up to a few other boys and had started to tell the tales of the Atamans and how the Cossacks fought on horseback with their shashka. This long, slim, curved saber was the Cossacks’ signature weapon.
One day, when Sergei was nine, an older boy had made fun of him and his stories. From the next day onward, Sergei went by the nickname Shashka and the bully by Four-Fingers.
Four
“We’re not slaves. We need a good salary to feed our families and send our children to school. We’re mad at our president, that fat bastard. He does nothing to protect our jobs, kurwa,” the clearly upset man spat into the Pol-News reporter’s microphone.
President Berka’s aide muted the television while the blonde on-scene reporter seemed to explain the extent of the protests in Katowice’s city center. A news ticker below the live pictures stated that all over Silesia coal miners and their families were protesting. Poland’s two largest mining concerns had announced the closing of two unprofitable sites in the light of the continued coal price depression.
“Well, that was to be expected,” Berka mumbled to himself. “Stupid Germans. Since they started to make their energy green and stopped importing our coal, the market went south. And then the fucking Russians started to pour the fucking stolen coal onto the market and prices went down even more.”
“Mariusz,” he addressed his aide, “make an appointment for this evening with the Prime Minister, Generals Pułaski and Bilinski, also the Ministers of Defense and Foreign Affairs. And do it quietly, I don’t want anybody to think I am assembling a war cabinet.”
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The kitchen was a mess. Mark and Alexander were preparing supper. As starters, they would have crusty bruschetta with tomatoes, basil, garlic, and onions. Mark always let the mix marinate in olive oil for two hours. A light salad of lamb’s lettuce and rocket, red onions, and grated carrots with a homemade Italian dressing would be next. The main course, Mark Sander’s signature Spaghetti Bolognese, would be accompanied by a bottle of Bordeaux from Médoc.
Xandi would get a meatless version of the sauce that did a few turns in the blender to smooth it. Mark would cut his son’s spaghetti into one-inch-strips and try to let him eat with a plastic spoon. The adults would enjoy a thick, meaty sauce with small carrot cubes and just a splash of Tabasco topped with as much finely grated Pecorino Romano as possible. The slight acidity of the wine would nicely balance the fat in this cheese-and-meat festival.
Mark managed to hide the used kitchenware in the dishwasher, clean up a bit, and lay the table before he heard keys turn in the door. The double bolts on all four sides clicked audibly as they sled back from the steel frame. The double-layered twelve-gauge steel door with oak décor swung open slowly. “I’m home,” Ofelia called into the corridor of their two-bedroom condominium. The slim five-foot-five brunette kicked off her high heels. After ten hours of work and a short commute by car she still looked sharp in the black, creased trousers and the sleeveless, striped top.
“We’re in the kitchen,” Mark replied.
“I can smell that.” Ofelia peeked into the open kitchen off the living room and said, “Smells wonderful, honey. Give me a minute to freshen up.”<
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“I will give you five. That’s as long as the wine needs to breathe.” Mark pulled the cork out of the green bottle’s neck. It made a loud plop.
“Woohoo,” his wife replied to the promising sound and closed the bathroom door behind her.
Mark poured the rich, dark liquid into two large wine glasses and put them on the table to aerate. His favorite Médoc was a fine blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot grapes, usually two to three years old. A few minutes of oxygen exposure before the first sip would be more than enough, and if he drank his glass slowly, he would notice the slight changes in character over time. Two pleasures at the price of one, he thought.
Ofelia peeked around the corner and waited until Xandi discovered his mom. He squeaked and threw his hands in her direction. Then she hid behind the corner again. They continued this little game of peekaboo three times before she entered the kitchen and immediately showered her son in hugs and kisses. “Cały dzień tak bardzo mi Ciebie brakowało, Misiu, I missed you so much all day, my little bear” she warbled.
She wanted her son to be bilingual and grow up knowing at least a little bit of his Polish heritage, so she almost exclusively spoke Polish to the boy. Xandi reacted to the overload of affection with a series of happy squeaks and a long wet kiss on his mommy’s cheek.
All three enjoyed their meal together. Ofelia decided after a minute to take the time and feed Xandi his sauce-soaked pasta instead of letting him drop it all over himself. Mark and Ofelia shared their experiences during the day. They also briefly discussed what Ofelia heard about the affair of the Polish soldiers, the Ukrainian coal, and the protests in her former homeland on the radio during her drive home. They both wondered how a boring thing of the past like coal could keep anybody that busy.