Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

“As long as I have known Vladimir Vladimirovich, which has been for all of our lives, I always suspected—probably because of his father; the apple never falls far from the tree—that he was more of a Communist than a Christian, which means that he was far more interested in lining his pockets than promoting the general welfare of the Oprichnina.”

“That characterization, I would suggest,” the archbishop said, “qualifies as a rare exception to the scriptural admonition to ‘judge not,’ et cetera.”

“I gather you are a Christian, Mr. Pevsner?” Naylor asked.

“Of course I’m a Christian,” Pevsner said indignantly. “I’m surprised our Charley didn’t make that quite clear to you.”

“It must have slipped his mind,” Naylor said.

“Where was I?” Pevsner asked.

“You were saying that Mr. Putin was very much like his father,” D’Alessandro said.

“He is.”

“The story I’ve always heard is that his father was a foreman in a locomotive factory who became Stalin’s cook.”

“That’s what the official biographies say. Actually, he was Stalin’s cook as much as Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky was a tortured prisoner of the Czar until he was twenty-six. Vladimir Putin the elder was a general in the KGB, who served, among other such duties, as political commissar during the siege of Stalingrad.”

Pevsner paused long enough to let that sink in, then said, “With the gracious permission of His Eminence, I will continue.”

“Keep it short, my son,” the archbishop said.

“Where to begin?” Pevsner asked rhetorically, and then answered his own question. “At the beginning…

“During the revolution of 1917, a substantial portion of Third Section, the Czar’s secret police, was co-opted by the Bolsheviks of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and renamed the Cheka—”

“‘A substantial portion’?” D’Alessandro interrupted.

“If they had taken it over completely, Vic,” Pevsner said, “none of us would be here today, and there would be no Oprichnina.”

“And with no Oprichnina, God alone knows what would have been the fate of the church,” the archbishop added.

“Who didn’t get co-opted?” D’Alessandro asked.

“My family, obviously, and the Alekseev family, and perhaps fifty or sixty others,” Pevsner said. “May I continue?”

“Alek,” Castillo said, “all Vic is trying to do is make sure he and everybody else understands what you’re trying to tell them.”

“Be that as it may, friend Charley, if I am continually interrupted, I’ll never finish.”

“Sorry, Alek,” D’Alessandro said.

“The Cheka,” Pevsner went on, “arrested the Imperial Family—Czar Nicholas the Second, Czarina Alexandra, their five children—Czarevich Alexei, and Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia—and a half dozen of the intimate friends and servants and took them to Yekaterinburg, which is some nine hundred miles east of Moscow.

“There, on July seventeenth, 1918, at the personal order of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, they were murdered and their bodies buried in unmarked graves in a forest.

“The Bolsheviks then turned to destroying the church.”

“Their greatest mistake, in my humble judgment,” the archbishop said. “Wouldn’t you agree, Father Boris?”

“Absolutely, Your Eminence,” the archimandrite said.

“They murdered clergy, confiscated church property, burned seminaries, turned churches and cathedrals into warehouses… that sort of thing. Shipped millions of Christian people to Siberia. But the church was stronger than they thought it would be.”

“In large part because of the faithful within the Oprichnina, it must be admitted,” the archbishop furnished.

His face showing that while he appreciated the archbishop’s kind words, he still didn’t appreciate being interrupted, Pevsner picked up his history lesson.