The Soviet Comeback by Jamie Smith (best ereader for academics TXT) 📕

Brishnov had been eliminated. He had been a brilliant spy, but had become unpredictable. There was no room for unpredictability in Klitchkov’s KGB, and the order to take down the vice president was the perfect trap to eliminate him. Whether or not the vice president survived was incidental. Now, Nikita was an agent who followed orders, he thought with a smile, thinking back to the news footage of him sending Brishnov plunging to the waters below.

But this smoke. This bomb. This was something else altogether. So much was so carefully poised.

He picked up the phone and dialled. It rang for some time before a sleepy voice answered. “Da?”

“Nam nuzhno pogovorit,” growled Klitchkov. We need to talk.

“Sechaz?” moaned the reedy voice.

“Yes, now!” snapped the colonel, putting down the phone. He stood and walked to his window, overlooking the Moskva River, hazy in the softly falling snow, and watched the bobbing lights of the boats moored there. On the opposite side of the river a kiosk was setting up with a large Pepsi logo painted across its awning. “The wheels of change will come off if we do not regain control,” he muttered to himself, his head disappearing in thick smoke as he lit a huge cigar. It had been a gift from Fidel himself. But nothing could last forever.

***

PERESLAVL-ZALESSKY, ONE HUNDRED- AND FORTY-KILOMETRES NORTH OF MOSCOW

The snow lay in droves around the picturesque town of Pereslavl-Zalessky, which sat upon the banks of Lake Pleshcheyevo. The white walls of the many monasteries glistened in the early morning light, illuminating the winding streets of the town, which lay in the hushed silence that comes with the first snowfall.

The snow covered all manner of sins in the once stunning Pereslavl-Zalessky, the town beyond the woods.

Shortly before the Moscow Olympics in 1980, the government had carried out a mass arrest of people they considered ‘undesirables’ and moved them to Pereslavl, in a bid to improve Moscow’s image when the eyes of the world landed upon it. While Moscow’s reputation soared, so did crime in the once sleepy Pereslavl.

At the heart of the plunge in Pereslavl’s reputation was Lev Veselovsky, who had put the town on the map for a completely different reason. Neo-Nazism.

During the Brezhnev years of economic stagnation, many people in the Soviet Union had begun to look for an alternative, for another extreme. So came the birth of Pamyat, a three-ray-swastika-bearing, white supremacy group intent on an ethnic cleansing that Hitler himself would have been impressed by. When they encountered their own idea of an undesirable, they acted quickly, extremely violently, and with no mercy for their victims.

But this morning Lev Veselovsky refused to contemplate anything but staying in bed for as long as possible. It was cold outside but warm under the covers, thanks to Tatiana. She wasn’t cheap but was worth every penny.

She tried to cuddle up to him, but he pushed her off. He didn’t pay her the big roubles for cuddles.

“Zebis’,” he grunted at her. Fuck off.

Tatiana’s lightly tanned face, clad in fake eyelashes and thick makeup to cover a pimply complexion, pouted.

Veselovsky ignored her completely, and with a sigh swung his short, white legs over the edge of the bed. Standing, he stretched, forcing his grubby white vest up over his huge, bloated stomach. He licked his hands and tried to smooth his comb-over flat to his head before attempting to comb the thin grey moustache perched above his small, red mouth. He hastily pulled on a shirt to combat the cold, fastening it up beneath his several jowly chins.

“Levyyy,” called Tatiana, draping her luscious figure across the bed seductively, her long black hair fanned across her back.

He again ignored her and waddling to the door, opened it and said once more, “Zebis’,” before walking out to face the day with a smile.

As he entered his grubby kitchen, he froze, the smile dropping from his face as quickly as it had arrived.

“You,” he gasped.

“Da, menya,” sneered Taras Brishnov.

CHAPTER 23

It was not by accident that Veselovsky had risen to the top of the Eastern neo-Nazism movement. He took a moment and lit a cigarette. Blowing out a cloud of smoke, he said, “You are not dead, Taras.”

“Not yet, Lev,” croaked Brishnov in reply.

They were silent for a moment, eyeing each other cautiously, before Veselovsky grinned broadly and laughed. “I knew you could never be killed by a chernozhopiy!” he exclaimed, kissing Brishnov firmly on each cheek and embracing him like a brother. Pulling back from the embrace, he surveyed the fallen spy, who had dark circles beneath his eyes and a bloody bandage around his left bicep. “You look terrible.”

“Coming from you, that is damning indeed,” Brishnov said with a smile.

“Come, come, sit with me; I want to hear everything,” Veselovsky said, hefting his huge frame into an unfortunate wooden chair.

“There will be time to tell stories later, but our plans are on a knife edge. They will torture Yerin and he will speak.”

“Viktor would not betray us,” Veselovsky said flatly. “He is a patriot.”

“Yes, but he is still a man. Everybody gives in to torture eventually.”

“Then he will die a dog.”

“Perhaps,” replied Brishnov. “But you should prepare to go underground.”

Veselovsky spat. “I will not hide. Trying to hide is what has brought our homeland to its knees. Hiding and giving refuge to Jews and chernozhopiys, while displacing true Russians to places like this,” he said, raising his arms around him.

Brishnov sat back and grinned, stretching his scar so it went taut and pink, a distraction from the dark circles under his eyes. Fury and madness burned within them. “You lead me to my next point, comrade. We have a unique opportunity to strike a blow to the very heart of the Politburo, and to give us a global voice that