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PART 1

CHAPTER 1

IT WAS THE SUMMER WHEN THE PRICE OF A SMALL LOAF OF bread topped a million rubles.

It was the summer of the third consecutive year of wheat crop failures and the second of hyperinflation.

It was the summer when in the back alleys of the faraway provincial towns the first Russians began dying of malnutrition.

It was the summer when the president collapsed in his limousine too far from help to be saved, and an old office cleaner stole a document.

After that nothing would ever be the same.

It was the summer of 1999.

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IT was hot that afternoon, oppressively hot, and it took several blasts on the horn before the gatekeeper scurried from his hut to haul open the great timber doors of the Cabinet building.

The presidential bodyguard dropped his window to call to the man to shape up as the long black Mercedes 600 eased under the arch and out into Staraya Ploshad. The wretched gatekeeper threw what he hoped passed for a salute as the second car, a Russian Chaika with four more bodyguards, followed the limousine. Then they were gone.

In the back of the Mercedes President Cherkassov sat alone, slumped in thought. In the front were his militia driver and the personal bodyguard assigned to him from the Alpha Group.

As the last drab outskirts of Moscow gave way to the fields and trees of the open countryside, the mood of the president of Russia was one of profound gloom, as well it might be. He had been three years in the office he had won after stepping in to replace the ailing Boris Yeltsin, and as he watched his country crashing into destitution, they had been the three most miserable years of his life.

Back in the winter of 1995 when he had been the prime minister, appointed by Yeltsin himself as a “technocrat” premier to lick the economy into shape, the Russian people had gone to the polls to elect a new Parliament, or Duma.

The Duma elections were important but not vital. In the preceding years more and more power had passed from the Parliament to the presidency, most of this process the work of Boris Yeltsin. By the winter of 1995 the big Siberian, who four years earlier had straddled a tank in the attempted coup of August 1991, earned the admiration of not only Russia but also the West as the great fighter for democracy, and seized the presidency for himself, had become a broken reed.

Recovering from a second heart attack in three months, puffing and bloated by medications, he watched the parliamentary elections from a clinic in the Sparrow Hills, formerly the Lenin Hills, northeast of Moscow, and saw his own political protégés hammered into third place among the delegates. That this was not as crucial as it might have been in a western democracy was largely due to the fact that because of Yeltsin, the great majority of actual power lay in the hands of the president himself. Like the United States, Russia had an executive presidency, but unlike the United States, the web of checks and balances that the Congress can impose upon the White House did not exist. Yeltsin could in effect rule by decree, and did.

But the parliamentary elections did at least show which way the wind was blowing and give an indication of the trend for the much more important presidential elections slated for June 1996.

The new force on the political horizon in the winter of 1995 was, ironically enough, the Communists. After seventy years of Communist tyranny, five years of Gorbachev reforms, and five years of Yeltsin, the Russian people began to look back with nostalgia to the old days.

The Communists, under their leader Gennadi Zyuganov painted a rosy picture of the way things used to be guaranteed jobs assured salaries affordable food and law and order. No mention was made of the despotism of the KGB the Gulag archipelago of slave labor camps the suppression of all freedom of movement and expression.

The Russian voters were already in a state of profound disillusion with the two once-heralded saviors capitalism and democracy. The second word was uttered with contempt. For many Russians looking around at the all-embracing corruption and pandemic crime it had all been a big lie. When the parliamentary votes were counted, the crypto-Communists had the biggest single bloc of deputies in the Duma and the right to appoint the speaker.

At the other extreme were their apparently diametric opposites, the neo-Fascists of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leading the ironically named Liberal Democratic Party. In the 1991 elections this crude demagogue with his taste for bizarre behavior and scatological expressions had done amazingly well, but his star was falling. Nevertheless it had not fallen enough to rob him of the second largest bloc of deputies.