Russian Spring (79 page)

By forcing the issue in the Common European Parliament, the Ukrainians had transformed their cause from an internal Soviet matter
into a transnational debate on the nature of Common Europe itself in which ethnic nationalists all over Europe would be their rabid allies.

And the worst was surely yet to come.

The President of the Assembly rapped his amplified gavel for order, and the tall, elegant, silver-haired figure of Reagan Smith, the American Ambassador to the United Nations, slowly paraded down the center aisle to the podium.

“We now recognize the delegate from the United States,” the President said, and Franja held her breath, no doubt along with the rest of the world, as Smith ascended to the podium, and the camera moved in for a head-and-shoulders shot, and the shouting died away into a terrible, pregnant silence.

Smith slowly drew a single piece of paper out of the breast pocket of his suit jacket, placed it before him, took out an old-fashioned pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses, and put them on, as if to distance himself personally from the official nature of what he was about to say.

“I am authorized to read the following statement from the President of the United States,” he said in a strange flat voice, as if he were trying very hard not to choke on his words.

“The government of the United States hereby formally recognizes the sovereign and duly elected government of the Republic of the Ukraine and takes great pleasure in welcoming the formerly oppressed people of the Ukraine into the community of free nations. And in keeping with our long and honorable tradition of protecting the national integrity of threatened peoples from the depredations of Soviet imperialist hegemonism, the government of the United States hereby formally notifies the government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that the Republic of the Ukraine has been placed under the nuclear shield of Battlestar America. Any nuclear attack upon the Republic of the Ukraine will be tactically regarded as a nuclear attack upon the territory of the United States and dealt with accordingly with the full defensive resources at our command.”

Franja goggled at the videowall as pandemonium broke loose in New York. What on earth did they mean by placing the Republic of the Ukraine “under the nuclear shield of Battlestar America”?

How far would they go if Gorchenko called their bluff? Would they merely use their defensive weapons to neutralize incoming Soviet missiles, or would they launch a strategic strike themselves? And what would they do if the Red Army simply marched on Kiev and Lvov and Odessa?

As the screen cut to a shot of the Soviet delegation, Franja saw that the representatives of her own government seemed just as confused as she was. Whispering heads crowded around Malinin, the
Soviet Ambassador, who in turn kept shrugging, and grimacing, and turning his head back and forth like a distracted spectator at a tennis match.

Finally, he rose rather shakily to his feet and asked for the floor. And when the President of the Assembly recognized him and he walked slowly down the central aisle like a man on his way to the chopping block, the dreadful silence was heart-stopping.

“The Soviet Union regards Vadim Kronkol’s speech as an act of treason and not only does not recognize the existence of any such thing as an independent Ukrainian state, but no longer recognizes Vadim Kronkol as the legal President of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Soviet Union is perfectly capable of resolving this internal matter without resort to nuclear force, rendering the bellicose threats of the United States meaningless. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union warns the government of the United States that any use of American military force to interfere with the legal suppression of an internal insurrection may be regarded as an act of war by the Soviet Union and dealt with accordingly.”

And that was
all
that he said. He stepped down from the podium leaving every meaningful question unanswered, and the coverage shifted to some studio in Moscow, where a general, a Eurorussian delegate, a notorious Bear, and two television commentators had been assembled to babble foolishly into the vacuum.

Franja turned off the TV and just sat there facing the blank screen with an equally blank mind for several minutes. The walls of the apartment seemed to be closing in. The silence was terrifying.

What she needed was to be among people, Russian people, her people, lots of them, and the more anonymous the better. Somehow, what she needed now was to be out in the street.

It was a clear early spring night in Moscow, and there was a bite of cold in the air. Though the fashionable restaurants of Arbat Street were closed, and the clubs and bars, normally still buzzing at this hour, would have been pretty much empty as people sat at home to watch the disaster on television, Franja was surprised to find the wide pedestrian street thronged with people.

But this was not the usual permanent Arbat crowd, milling back and forth, up and down, bar-hopping, eyeing shop windows, haggling with street peddlers, clotting around street musicians.

Bundled up in coats and hats against the chill, moving in clots, in schools and shoals, or as solitary individuals like Franja, everyone seemed to be heading up the street toward the end of the strogat, toward its confluence with Kalinin Prospekt at the Arbatskaya Metro station.

The mob scene around the Metro station was if anything more
packed than usual. The street merchants and musicians were still there, but no one was buying or listening. From the underpass came the rantings of a Pamyat agitator, but the pedestrian flow-through seemed unhindered by his efforts to draw an audience.

Most of the people seemed to be either headed down Kalinin Prospekt or trying to elbow their way through the crush into the Metro station.

Franja thought she understood, for the Metro was still running, and Marx Prospekt was only two stops away, and the same impulse was drawing her to the center of the city, toward the symbolic heart of the country, toward Red Square.

But somehow the last thing she wanted was to be crammed into a crowded Metro carriage deep underground. Besides which, it really wasn’t that much of a walk. So she turned away from the Metro station crowd and crossed over onto the north side of Kalinin into another, this one moving east along both sidewalks, a spontaneous procession elbowing and shoving its way in true Muscovite fashion toward the centre ville.

A huge immobile traffic jam extended down the center of Kalinin Prospekt as far as she could see, but, despite the gridlock, the horns were eerily silent, as if simply being there in your beloved car, under the circumstances, was quite enough.

Though the stores and boutiques were long since closed, and even most of the gaudy neon and wall-screen displays had been turned off, the sidewalks were even more crowded than they usually were on a warm Saturday afternoon on this glittering avenue of commerce and consumption. But while the sidewalks were packed, the pedestrian traffic was moving along unimpeded by the usual eddies and cross currents, for everyone seemed to be moving spontaneously and unanimously in the same direction—inward, homeward, somehow, toward Red Square.

Franja could feel it as she walked through the concrete canyons in the river of people, past the darkened shops and auto showrooms, the office buildings and the huge blank wall screens, the restaurants and cafés, the movie theaters and the magazine kiosks and the bookstores, down this street that seemed to symbolize all that the new Russia had become, all that had been gained on the long journey through time from the first stirrings of glasnost and perestroika to this full glorious flowering of the Russian Spring.

But now, with dark doings half a world away in Washington and New York blowing on a cold biting wind, Kalinin Prospekt also seemed to symbolize all that Russia stood to lose.

She could see it in the faces of the people, young people like herself in trendy European clothes, old babushkas who seemed like refugees
from another time, workers in jeans and black leather, the odd soldier, even the hooligans with their Stalin mustaches, all moving silently and somberly down the street like some kind of timeless Christian procession toward Red Square, backward in time to the days of Brezhnev, Khrushchev, Stalin, the Czars, the boyars, to something vast and immobile, to a sense of belonging, inward to the center of the Russian heart.

And she could feel it in herself too, truly feel it for perhaps the first time, this sense of belonging, this wordless sense of communal oneness, this submergence of the individual into the Slavic soul that had been Russia’s strength and its curse. That had defeated the Tartars and the Poles, that had built a nation and an empire, that had fostered a Communist Revolution and allowed a monster to rule it for decades, that had defeated the Nazis and sought to impose itself on the world and first put men in space, and seemed to have vanished into the bright new morning of the Russian Spring.

But now, with a long shadow once more lying across this ancient and tragic and long-suffering land, something primeval, something gloriously and terribly and essentially
Russian
seemed to have re-emerged in this spontaneous pilgrimage back to Slavic roots, back to the basics, back to the center, back to Red Square.

At Marx Prospekt, Muscovite pedestrians had even managed to somehow shove Muscovite drivers out of their path, for here, amid the stony old government buildings and the glass towers of commerce, they had taken over the gutters as well as the sidewalks, a sea of people pressing inward toward the entrances to Red Square.

Tverskaya Street, Kalinin, Mira Prospekt, they all dead-ended into this innermost ring around the Kremlin, and Franja could well imagine people pouring inward down them all, for surely the people of the Arbat were not the only Russians drawn toward the center of their world tonight.

Franja found herself fighting her way through it all, using her hands and elbows with the best of them, but when she finally managed to shove her way past the old Moscow Hotel and as far as the Kremlinovski Prospekt entrance to the Square, she saw that she could penetrate no farther.

Red Square was a solid mass of people. Lenin’s tomb was dwarfed by the distance, the honor guard completely hidden by the crowd. Beyond it, there were scattered lights in the windows of the government buildings behind the Kremlin wall, and floodlights illuminating the interior of the compound.

From where she stood, Franja could see that most of the people were looking toward the Kremlin, toward the big red stars still shining reassuringly high above its battlements, toward Lenin’s tomb, as if
waiting for someone or something to make a dramatic appearance atop the tomb, or even atop the wall, as if they were waiting for Gorchenko himself, waiting for
any
leader to emerge and give voice and words to their formless feeling, waiting to be inspired and reassured and brought together and given a common purpose, waiting for a Lenin to stand above them at the railway station and stir their Russian hearts.

And indeed, as she stood there, half waiting for such a figure to appear herself, Franja realized that the crowd wasn’t merely waiting, it was demanding.

There was some kind of commotion immediately in front of the tomb. The noise of the crowd was angry and expectant. Voices were shouting things she couldn’t hear. And people were waving Soviet flags and portraits of Gorbachev and Stalin, modern-day icons of the Eurorussians and the Bears. Bottles were starting to fly. She could sense fistfights breaking out at the front of the crowd. Someone was holding up an effigy of Uncle Sam dangling from a noose, someone else a fiery American flag.

And still no one appeared from inside the Kremlin wall. And Franja realized that no one would. What could Gorchenko say? What could anyone say that would focus the energies surging through the crowd, that would bring them all together, Eurorussians and Bears, the fearful and the furious, the old Russia and the new, the dark past that lived in even the most modern of hearts, and the hopes for the future that seemed about to be extinguished by forces beyond any Russian’s control?

In that moment, it seemed to her that all of Russia had somehow been gathered together here in the center of the world. Eurorussians and Bears, the present and the past, the hopes and the fears, all gathered together in Red Square in the dead of night, on a spring evening with a cold wind blowing.

Then she began to notice that many people were not looking toward the Kremlin; older people for the most part, but young ones too, were staring along some other vector down the length of the square, with a different sort of expression, a strange timeless quietude that seemed far older and stronger than the Kremlin’s red brick walls.

And as she followed their gaze with her eyes, she understood what had transfixed them.

Across the sea of people, far away on the other side of Red Square, the onion-dome fantasy of St. Basil’s was brilliantly illuminated by floodlights, the gaudy gold and red and turquoise arabesques floating above the tumult like an eternal icon, like the shining symbol of the immortal Slavic spirit, like a Russia of the heart beyond the reach of history and time.

But as she gazed at the beautiful unreality of the ancient church, glorified by the electric magic of the modern age, her eyes were lifted upward into the night sky by the sweep of the domes and spires.

And there, among the stars, paled by the glow of the city, points of light were moving, and in her mind’s eye, she could see what lay behind them.

Battle stations. Missiles. Orbital lasers. Anti-proton busters. Burning mirrors.

St. Basil’s below, beautiful and precious, the perfect baroque image of the Russian soul, glorious, romantic, but oh so fragile beneath the transparent black sky.

And above it, orbiting the planet, Battlestar America, peering down from the darkness, circling like a cloud of carrion crows waiting for something warm and tender to die.

WOLFOWITZ CALLS FOR IMPEACHMENT

Vice President Wolfowitz, at a press conference called on the Capitol steps, has demanded that Congress immediately impeach President Carson.