Chapter 24

Sverdlovsk, USSR
January 1979

The two looked at each other for what seemed an eternity. Neither spoke, and neither felt a need to avert his intensely inquisitive stare. They sat in opposing leather chairs in Yeltsin’s cramped study in a converted bedroom of the small but elegantly furnished apartment that passed for the first secretary’s official residence in Sverdlovsk. An almost empty bottle of Georgian cognac and a small dish of sliced lemons had been pushed away to the corner of the antique desk to make room for the pirozhki with meat and cabbage that Nastya had prepared. Less than twenty-four hours had passed since Mako Sloane’s unexpected but fortuitous arrival in Sverdlovsk.

Armed guards were in the hallway outside the front door, and the street below was blocked to traffic and patrolled by Spetsnaz troops loyal to Onegin and Yeltsin. The situation was under complete control now, but neither Yeltsin nor Onegin was in any mood to take chances. It would take weeks to clean up the mess at the dacha compound and even more to begin construction of a new residence there, not to mention sorting out the political ramifications of the disaster. In the meantime, Boris Nikolayevich, Nastya, and Vasiliy would be living in town.

Nothing would ever appear in the Soviet news media of the brazen assassination attempt that took place at the Yeltsin dacha compound, much less the KGB’s role in the failed coup d’état. Radio Moscow would never broadcast interviews with the survivors of the unsuccessful raid, and political commentators would never sit down at a round, mahogany desk in a television studio to discuss the implications of the tragedy for the future of reform in Sverdlovsk oblast. In fact, the very subject would become a forbidden topic, and the local citizenry would speak of the rumors only in conspiratorial tones, and only in the company of intimate friends when vodka, cognac, and Sovetskoye semi-dry champagne had dulled the almost instinctual aversion a Soviet citizen had for politically controversial subjects. Vague whispers of what had transpired would eventually reach the ears of western intelligence services in the ivory towers of their Moscow embassies, but would be dismissed as the ranting of the disgruntled masses. Fact finding missions to Sverdlovsk by the western media would come away with nothing more than painful bedbug bites from the bed linen in the Intourist hotel and first-hand knowledge of the shortage of meat at the markets of this provincial city.

For those not directly involved, the incident, shocking as it was, would always remain a riddle swathed in the mystery and enigma for which Russia was famous. At least that was Winston Churchill’s opinion of Russia back in 1939, and surely he would have agreed that this backward country had hardly changed since then. If anything, the enigma since 1917 had become even more difficult to unravel.

For Boris Nikolayevich, the riddle of Mako Sloane’s arrival in Sverdlovsk had lost some of its mystery, and he was struggling to put all the pieces of the puzzle together. Mako was not proving to be of much assistance as he sat across from Yeltsin with an impish grin on his face. Inhibitions were beginning to drop by the wayside, though, as Yeltsin reached into his liquor cabinet for more cognac, this time a 20-year-old, half-liter bottle of Tbilisi, which he opened with relish. He poured Mako a full snifter of the amber liquid.

“Misha, chto za khernya! What the fuck?” Boris Nikolayevich asked with his characteristic tact and with the diplomatic skills of the Siberian peasant he was at heart.

“Boris Nikolayevich, could you be a little more specific?” asked Mako with his usual cocky grin.

“Let me try to spell it out for you in terms that even a politically illiterate and morally unstable American can understand,” retorted Boris Nikolayevich with more than a trace of sarcasm.

Yeltsin was certainly not angry. How could he be? He owed his life and that of Nastya and Vasiliy to the young, arrogant American sitting across from him. In fact, he loved Mako like a son. However, he was a member of the Soviet nomenklatura, the highest ranking CPSU official in Sverdlovsk Oblast, the fifth most populous region in the USSR. The thought that the father of his great-nephew might be an intelligence officer from the ‘Main Enemy’ was rather unsettling. The fact that he had probably traveled to Sverdlovsk using forged identification papers and was now sitting in his official residence and punishing the Georgian cognac with him was causing Boris Nikolayevich more than just slight discomfiture. In his mind, he saw Mako unwittingly finishing off the job the KGB had botched. By his mere presence in the first secretary’s apartment, Mako was accusing, convicting, and sentencing Yeltsin in the eyes of the Party, the Army, and the KGB, or at least that’s what Boris Nikolayevich was thinking. In the Soviet Union, that was all that mattered. Of course, what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them, and Boris Nikolayevich was desperately hoping they would never find out.

“Let’s start with the most obvious, and then we’ll go slowly and address a few ticklish questions I have for you, Misha. Agreed?”

“Just don’t ask me a question if you’d really rather not know the answer,” replied Mako playfully.

“Misha, I’m almost fifty years old. You may think I’m nothing but a Siberian peasant with an education, like the KGB apparently did, but I’ve lived in the USSR my whole life. Did you catch the name of the country we’re in...the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics?”

Yeltsin was getting himself worked up, and the usual ruddy color of his face was tending toward crimson, either from the Georgian cognac, or more likely, from the stress of realizing that the person who saved him from one crisis might have dumped him in another. He was gesticulating with his right hand, forgetting that he was holding a brandy snifter half full of expensive cognac which sloshed in the glass and spilled over his navy blue sweat pants. Boris Nikolayevich was at home, and there was no dress code in the Yeltsin household. He wiped the cognac off with his left hand and licked his fingers. No use losing any of the precious liquid.

He threw back the remaining cognac to prevent further spillage and continued his diatribe, now free to gesticulate with both hands.

“What are the chances, Misha, that a foreigner, in fact, an American, is able to travel all the way from Moscow to Western Siberia alone and unaccompanied? Bear in mind I’m talking about the Soviet Union in 1979. Screw détente. That’s just a word. You motherfuckers are still the enemy! Especially here in the provinces.”

Yeltsin looked at his young friend with a combination of kinship and fear. Kinship for obvious reasons, and fear because of his increasing certainty that Mako had not pursued a career in academia following his departure from Moscow six years ago, but was probably involved in a more serious line of work and had not come to Sverdlovsk merely for a reunion with his bastard son and former lover.

“You’re not entirely correct, Boris Nikolayevich,” answered Mako, now entirely serious for the first time since they had sat down together in the elder Yeltsin’s office. He too threw down the remaining cognac in the snifter and reached for one of the pirozhki Nastya had served them a few minutes ago. They were still hot and steam rose in the chilly room from their brown crusts.

“You could if you spoke Russian like I do and carried one of these. Looks pretty real, doesn’t it?” Mako reached in the inside pocket of his suit jacket and handed Boris Nilolayevich his forged Soviet passport.

Boris Nikolayevich took the dark red passport and glanced briefly at the emblem of the USSR in the middle of the outside cover. He opened the passport, looked at the photograph on the inside page, and visibly paled. As he turned the pages slowly, Boris Nilolayevich’s hands trembled slightly. He knew perfectly well what he was looking at.

“So, I’m supposed to call you Vladislav Vladirmirovich? What’s it like working as an inspector in Gosplan, Comrade Konev?” the elder Yeltsin asked with an edge to his voice. Boris Nikolayevich looked up at Mako with disbelief in his eyes that slowly faded as he realized how well founded his suspicions had been. Not that Mako had ever lied to him really, as he ran through his mind the history of their acquaintance. Mako truly had been a student at MGU and had been using the library archives for actual research. Yeltsin had the KGB Second Chief Directorate’s report on that somewhere in his files. Boris Nikolayevich, however, had never asked Mako who was financing his stay in Moscow, or who his employer was. He wondered what the answer would have been. Yeltsin had only assumed that Mako was pursuing a career in academia based on his expertise in Russian and his serious attitude toward his literary research.

As Yeltsin recalled the events of the previous day, he remembered being vaguely surprised at how Misha had taken command during the crisis and seemed to be so knowledgeable and expert with the weapons from the guard shack. When he had arrived at the bath house dressed in winter camouflage fatigues and armed to the teeth, Boris Nikolayevich was startled, but not in a negative sense. On the contrary, he felt only gratitude and love toward this young man who had risked his own life to save him and his family. Now, though, the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place, and Boris Nikolayevich quite clearly was at a loss for words. He poured himself yet another full snifter of Tbilisi cognac and began pacing back and forth, continuing to shake his head in disbelief, or perhaps trying to dispel the unpleasant but undeniable truth from his mind.

This part of the operational scenario, unlike the events of the previous day, had been anticipated and rehearsed back at CIA Headquarters before the mission had been approved. Everyone had agreed that Boris Yeltsin would be astute enough to recognize that Mako, as an American, could not possibly have traveled across half of the USSR alone with his own identification documents. His very appearance at the Yeltsin compound would immediately raise suspicions and practically be an admission of his true affiliation and purpose. Both Drake Herrin and Chase Mallory had questioned Sloane at length about the closeness of his relationship with Yeltsin before they were satisfied that Mako even had a chance of showing up unexpectedly in Sverdlovsk without being turned over to the security authorities. Mako himself could not be 100 percent sure of his reception, but this was the thrill of the chase he loved and he downplayed any possibility of being detained by Yeltsin’s people.

“It’s just a job, Boris Nikolayevich, and I’m good at it. You know I’d never do anything that would hurt you and Nastya. Vasiliy is my son too.” Sloane took the passport back from Yeltsin and put it back in his suit coat pocket. He met Yeltsin’s accusing stare without flinching.

“Do I need to explain to you what would have happened if I hadn’t shown up yesterday when I did?” asked Mako with a little more edge in his voice than normal. “If I was the first secretary, I’d be asking myself a lot of questions instead about life in the worker’s paradise and my role in perpetuating a system that strangles personal initiative, impinges on individual liberties, encourages hypocrisy and moral cowardice, and cannot even ensure a decent standard of living for its people.” Mako had departed from the script and would later attribute his oratory excesses to his blood alcohol level. He looked warily at Boris Nikolayevich who was unexpectedly grinning from ear to ear.

“You Wall Street whelp!” he roared, spitting out a soupy combination of Tbilisi cognac and chewed up priozhki as his sarcastic laughter turned to anger. “You’re going to tell me, first secretary of the Sverdlovsk Communist Party Committee, what’s wrong with this country?”

Yeltsin looked at Sloane incredulously and got up unsteadily from his leather chair and began pacing back and forth across the small office waving his hands and raising his voice.

“Did you ever read Karl Marx, Misha? I doubt it! You Americans criticize us from the comfort of your suburban homes and your churches and your Sunday afternoon barbecues, but what do you really know about life in the Soviet Union? Or what it was like to grow up here? Shit, a drunk Orthodox priest almost drowned me when I was getting baptized. My own mother had to save me from the priest. The son of a bitch said that if I could survive that, I could survive anything. Yesterday showed he was right. He didn’t mention a damned CIA spy having to intervene, though.”

Boris Nikolayevich paused and glanced over at Mako, who was looking back with his mouth half open in surprise. He had never seen the first secretary this wound up. Sloane knew enough to keep his mouth shut and waited for his accidental relative to resume his harangue.

“Can any of you soft Americans imagine what it was like growing up in a log cabin in the Ural Mountains during collectivization?” He paused and looked at Mako who remained silent. “I didn’t think so! Our food was taken away by the government, and we were left to starve. There were gangs of marauding outlaws roaming through the countryside, robbing and murdering. You had nothing like that even during your so-called ‘Great Depression.’ We had to move; my father went to work at a factory, and we lived in a barracks for ten years. I slept on the floor even during winter. Compare that to your split-level houses in the suburbs!”

Boris Nikolayevich looked at Mako and his expression softened. He continued in a softer, more conciliatory tone. “Imagine then, having to study the collected works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin starting in the first grade. Having to read about what a wonderful country you lived in, but not knowing where supper was coming from was confusing for a young child. We had a poster at school that read, ‘Marxism is all-powerful, because it’s true!’ That kind of takes away any possibility for rational debate, don’t you think? You westerners think of Marxism as an economic theory. In the USSR it’s a universal explanation of how nature and society work. It explains everything. Kind of like the way you Baptists look at the Bible.” Yeltsin thought he had hit home with that analogy and he looked over at Mako and smiled.

Boris Nikolayevich’s countenance turned serious again and he continued. “Try disagreeing with the tenants of Marxism or Leninism, though, and see what happens. It’ll make your Southern Baptist churches look quite liberal in comparison.^”

Back at Langley, Drake Herrin, Quinn Mallory, and Mako had discussed at length the limitations on Mako’s mandate in Sverdlovsk. Herrin, in fact, had been quite specific and in no uncertain terms had forbade Mako from any talk with Yeltsin of recruitment or working against the Soviet system. They all knew that Sloane would have to break cover with Yeltsin to explain his presence and would be vulnerable enough as it was without any additional exacerbation of his precarious status. Drake was quite explicit and stated that he would consider the mission a success if Mako was just able to reestablish contact without Yeltsin turning him over to the KGB. Obviously, with the events of the last 24 hours, things had changed dramatically, and Mako felt free to rewrite the rules of engagement.

But Mako wasn’t sure at all how far he could run with the opportunity Yeltsin was presenting him. Boris Nikolayevich was making his own case against the USSR and doing so more eloquently than Sloane could have. The less Mako said: the better.

“Politically, the situation is crystal clear. Nobody believes our communist propaganda, much less our own party leaders. It’s like one of your evangelical preachers on television who cynically uses religious ideology to line his own pocketbook. Communism differs little, really. On the economic side, the issue is just as clear. Why would anyone think that a state-owned monopoly is more moral or efficient than a privately held one? There is one difference: the state manager is not financially responsible for his decisions. Being a communist does not automatically confer on the manager an enlightened ability to make economic calculations without market signals. Probably just the opposite if you want to know the truth. As a result, without rational reactions to market forces, everything is thrown out of kilter. You have shortages and lines for poor quality goods, and nobody is happy.” Yeltsin looked over smugly at Mako and smiled.

“Jesus, Boris Nikolayevich, for a Siberian peasant you sound almost educated!” Mako laughed together with Boris Nikolayevich, the tension in the air dissipating rapidly. Yeltsin could poke fun at himself, and he knew he sounded out of character.

“So why don’t you do something about it?” The question rolled off of Mako’s lips without any premeditation or calculation, but Boris Nikolayevich felt as if he had been hit by a freight train.