With the remaining four thousand, commanded by himself, he would drive on south, past the Olympic stadium, across the Ring Road, and into the heart of inner Moscow for the greatest prize of all, the Kremlin itself.
Though Kreml simply means fortress and every ancient city in Russia has its fortress at the heart of what was once the walled town, the Kremlin of Moscow has long been symbolic of supreme power in Russia and the visible possession of that power. The Kremlin had to be his by dawn, its garrison subdued and its radio room unable to call for help, or the pendulum could swing the other way.
His five secondary targets he intended to delegate to the four armed forces he believed he could lock into an alliance even in the short time left to him.
These were the mayor’s office on Tverskaya Street, which had a communications room from which appeals could be sent for help; the Interior Ministry on Zhitny Square with its communications network to the MVD’s private army scattered across Russia, and the attached OMON barracks next door; the complex of presidential and ministerial buildings on and around Staraya Ploshad; the Khodinka airfield with its GRU barracks, a perfect dropping zone for paratroops if they were called in to help the state; and the parliament building, the Duma.
In 1993, when Boris Yeltsin had turned the guns of his tanks on the Duma to force the rebellious congressmen to come out with their hands up, the building had sustained considerable damage. For four years the Duma had been transferred to the old Gosplan economic offices on Manege Square, but with the damage repaired the Russian parliament had gone back to the White House on the river at the end of Novy Arbat.
The mayor’s office, the Duma, and the ministries at Staraya Ploshad would be empty shells on New Year’s Eve, and with the doors torn down by explosive charges, occupation would be simple enough. Fighting might erupt around the OMON barracks and the Khodinka base if the anti-gang troops or the handful of paratroopers and army intelligence officers at the old airfield fought back. These two targets he would give to the special forces units he intended to buy.
An eighth and obvious target in any putsch would be the Defense Ministry. This huge gray stone building at Arbatskaya Square would also be thinly staffed, but at its heart was the communications headquarters that could speak instantly to any Army, Navy, or Air Force base in Russia. He assigned no troops to storming the place, for he had special plans for the Defense Ministry.
Natural allies for any extreme right-wing putsch in Russia were not all that hard to find. Foremost among them was the Federal Security Service, or FSB. This was the inheritor of his own once all-powerful Second Chief Directorate, KGB, the vast organization that kept repression in the USSR at the levels demanded by the Politburo. Since the arrival of the despised theory called democracy, its old powers had waned.
The FSB, headquartered at the famous KGB Center on Dzerzhinsky Square, now renamed Lubyanka Square, and with the equally famous and feared Lubyanka jail behind it, was still in charge of counterespionage and also contained a division devoted to combating organized crime. But the latter was not half as effective as General Petrovsky’s GUVD and had thus not generated the insistent demands for revenge from the Dolgoruki mafia.
To assist in its labors, FSB commanded two forces of rapid reaction troops, the Alpha Group and the Vympel, Russian for “banner.”
These two had once been the two most elite and feared of special forces units in Russia, sometimes optimistically compared to the British SAS. What had gone wrong was a question of loyalty.
In 1991 the Defense Minister, Yazov, and the Chairman of the KGB, Kryuchkov, had mounted a coup against Gorbachev. The coup failed, although it brought Gorbachev down and Yeltsin to preeminence. Originally the Alpha Group had been part of the coup; halfway into the coup it changed its mind, allowing Boris Yeltsin to emerge from the Duma, leap onto a tank, and become a hero before the world. By the time a traumatized Gorbachev had been released from house detention in the Crimea and flown back to Moscow to find his old enemy Yeltsin in charge, question marks about the Alpha Group were hovering in the air. The same applied to Vympel.
By 1999, both groups, heavily armed and hard fighters, were still discredited. But for Grishin they had two advantages. Like many special forces, they had a preponderance of officers and NCOs and few greenhorn privates. The veterans tended, politically, to the extreme right; anti-Semitic, anti-ethnic minority, and anti-democracy. Also, they had not been paid for six months.
Grishin’s courtship had been like a siren’s song: restoration of the old powers of the KGB, the pampered treatment owed to a true elite, and double salaries, starting the moment of Komarov’s coup.
On the night of New Year’s Eve, the Vympel troops were assigned to arm up, leave the barracks, proceed to the Khodinka Airfield and army base, and secure both. Alpha Group was given the Interior Ministry and the adjoining OMON barracks, with a detached company taking the SOBR barracks behind Shabolovka Street.
On December 29, Colonel Grishin attended a meeting at the sumptuous dacha outside Moscow maintained by the Dolgoruki mafia. Here he met and addressed the Skhod, the supreme council governing the gang. For him it was a crucial conference.
So far as the mafia was concerned, he had a lot of explaining to do. The raids conducted by General Petrovsky still stung. As paymasters they demanded an explanation. But as Grishin spoke, the mood changed. When he revealed that there had been a plan to declare Igor Komarov an unfit person to participate in the forthcoming elections, alarm took over from aggression. They all had a major stake in his electoral success.
The body blow was Grishin’s revelation that this idea had now been superseded; the state intended to arrest Komarov and crush the Black Guards. Within an hour it was the mafiosi who were seeking advice. When he announced his intended solution, they were stunned. Gangsterism, fraud, black market, extortion, narcotics, prostitution, and murder were their specialty, but a coup d’état was high stakes indeed.
“It is only the biggest theft of all, the theft of the republic,” said Grishin. “Deny it, and you go back to being hunted by MVD, FSB, all of them. Accept it, and the land is ours.”
He used the word zemlya, which means the land, the country, the earth, and all that therein is.
At the head of the table the senior of them all, an old vor v zakone, a “thief-by-statute” who had been born into the underworld like his father and all his clan, and who among the Dolgoruki was the nearest thing to the Sicilian Don-of-Dons, stared at Grishin for a long while. The others waited. Then he began to nod, his wrinkled cranium rising and falling like an old lizard signaling assent. The last funds were agreed on.
So also was the third armed force Grishin needed. Two hundred of the eight hundred private security firms in Moscow were Dolgoruki fronts. They would provide two thousand men, all fully armed ex-soldiers or KGB hoods, eight hundred to storm, take, and hold the empty White House, home of the Duma, and twelve hundred for the presidential office and attendant ministries grouped on Staraya Ploshad, also empty on New Year’s Eve.
¯
ON the same day Jason Monk called Major General Petrovsky. He was still living at the SOBR barracks.
‘‘Yes.”
“It’s me again. What are you doing?”
“What’s that to you?”
“Are you packing?”
“How did you know?”
“All Russians want to spend New Year’s Eve with their families.”