The Devil's Alternative

r images across the world.

Dmitri Rykov painstakingly scrawled his name for the Soviet Union on both copies of the Treaty of Dublin and passed the copies, bound in red Morocco leather, to David Lawrence, who signed for the United States.

Within hours the first grain ships, waiting off Murmansk and Leningrad, Sebastopol and Odessa, moved forward to their berths.

A week later the first Warsaw Pact units along the Iron Curtain began to load their gear to pull back east from the barbed-wire line.

On Thursday the fourteenth, the routine meeting of the Politburo in the Arsenal Building of the Kremlin was far from routine.

The last man to enter the room, having been delayed outside by a major of the Kremlin guard, was Yefrem Vishnayev.

When he came through the doorway, he observed that the faces of the other eleven members were all turned toward him. Maxim Rudin brooded at the center place at the top of the T-shaped table. Down each side of the stem were five chairs, and each was occupied. There was only one chair left vacant. It was the one at the far end of the stem of the table, facing up the length of it.

Impassively, Yefrem Vishnayev walked slowly forward to take that seat, known simply as the Penal Chair. It was to be his last Politburo meeting.

On April 18 a small freighter was rolling in the Black Sea swell, ten miles off the shore of Rumania. Just before two A.M. a fast speedboat left the freighter and raced toward the shore. At three miles it halted, and a Marine on board took a powerful flashlight, pointed it toward the invisible sands, and blinked a signal: three long dashes and three short ones. There was no answering light from the beach. The man repeated his signal four times. Still there was no answer.

The speedboat turned back and returned to the freighter. An hour later it was stowed below decks and a message was transmitted to London.

From London another message went in code to the British Embassy in Moscow: “Regret Nightingale has not made the rendezvous. Suggest you return to London.”

On April 25 there was a plenary meeting of the full Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the Palace of Congresses inside the Kremlin. The delegates had come from all over the Soviet Union, some of them many thousands of miles.

Standing on the podium beneath the outsized head of Lenin, Maxim Rudin made them his farewell speech.

He began by outlining to them the crisis that had faced their country twelve months earlier; he painted a picture of famine and hunger to make their hair stand on end. He went on to describe the brilliant feat of diplomacy by which the Politburo had instructed Dmitri Rykov to meet the Americans in Dublin and gain from them grain shipments of unprecedented size, along with imports of technology and computers, all at minimal cost. No mention was made of concessions on arms levels. He received a standing ovation for ten minutes.

Turning his attention to the matter of world peace, he reminded one and all of the constant danger to peace that was posed by the territorial and imperialistic ambitions of the capitalist West, occasionally aided by enemies of peace right there within the Soviet Union.

This was too much; consternation was unconfined. But, he went on with an admonishing finger, the secret conspirators with the imperialists had been uncovered and rooted out, thanks to the eternal vigilance of the tireless Yuri Ivanenko, who had died a week earlier in a sanatorium after a long and gallant struggle against a serious heart ailment.

When the news of his death broke, there were cries of horror and compassion for the departed comrade who had saved them all. Rudin raised a regretful hand for silence.

But, he told them, Ivanenko had been ably assisted before his heart attack the previous October, and replaced since his infirmity began, by his ever loyal comrade-in-arms Vassili Petrov, who had completed the task of safeguarding the Soviet Union as the world’s first champion of peace.

There was an ovation for Vassili Petrov.

Because the conspiracies of the antipeace faction, both inside and outside the Soviet Union, had been exposed and destroyed, Rudin went on, it had been possible for the USSR, in its unending search for détente and peace, to curb its arms-building programs for the first time in years. More of the national effort could thenceforward be directed toward the production of consumer goods and social improvement, thanks solely to the vigilance of the Politburo in spotting the antipeace faction for what they were.

This time the applause extended for another ten minutes.

Maxim Rudin waited until the clapping was almost over before he raised his hands; then he dropped his speaking tone.

As for himself, Rudin said, he had done what he could, but the time had come for him to depart.

The stunned silence was tangible.

He had toiled long—too long, perhaps—bearing on his shoulders the most onerous burdens, which had sapped his strength and his health.

On the podium, his shoulders slumped with the weariness of it all. There were cries of “No! No!”

He was an old man, Rudin said. What did he want? Nothing more than any other old man wanted. To sit by the fire on a winter’s night and play with his grandchildren. ...

In the diplomatic gallery the British head of Chancery whispered to the Ambassador:

“I say, that’s going a bit strong. He’s had more people shot than I’ve had hot dinners.”

The Ambassador raised a single eyebrow and muttered back: