One might have expected that a grateful U.S. electorate, later that year, would
have returned the Republican leader for a second presidential term with a
thumping majority. But the electorate is notoriously fickle. In 1992 the
Republicans were skinned by the Democrats, led by an aging Democratic figure, a
long-time politician from a family of political stars, a man with a terrible
driving record in his native Massachusetts.
The American public had had it up to its collective back teeth with the GOP.
Over the previous twelve years there had been too many close calls, too many
near disasters. It was time to turn to a symbol of the past, time to revert to a
New Frontier style of politics.
But the presidency of this East Coast aristocrat—whose political acumen, never
particularly strong in the first place, had been frayed and shredded by years of
self-indulgence and self-pity—was an unmitigated disaster. After four years of
inept rule, verging at times on the catastrophic, the electorate demanded the
return of the devil they knew, and in 1996 the previous President, in any case
still regarded by the mandarins of his own party as a sound, even muscular,
choice, took the country by a landslide and became, for only the second time in
American history, an ousted President who returned to the White House in
triumph.
But this had little effect on the global situation, and toward the end of this
man’s second term, in the spring of 1999, there occurred an event that was to
have a shattering effect on the course of world history. Or what was left of it.
In a spectacular and bloody coup the Soviet leader N. Ryzhkov was gunned down,
in the corridors of the Kremlin itself, by hardline Stalinist revisionists. Most
of Ryzhkov’s key associates, inherited from his predecessor, Gorbachev, who had
died in a plane crash in the Urals in 1993; were shot, and for six months the
USSR was racked by a civil war far more atrocious in the short term and far more
damaging in the long term than that out of which Soviet Russia had agonizingly
emerged back in the early 1920s. The upper echelons of the Soviet army, in
particular, were decimated.
The coup had been masterminded by KGB chief V. N. Pritisch who, it was rumored,
had already disposed of the previous head of the KGB, V. Chebrikov, five years
earlier. Chebrikov, a close ally of both Gorbachev and Ryzhkov, had died of a
brain tumor and been given a full and impressive state funeral; however, some
said a lethal injection, administered by Pritisch himself, had helped Chebrikov
on his way.
Pritisch was a hard-liner who detested the West, favored the bleaker aspects of
Stalinism and was determined to revert to the original Marxist-Leninist line of
total world revolution leading to total world domination. On the other hand he
was as much of a pragmatist as any serious politician, and although it might be
supposed that the bombs that destroyed Washington were detonated at his
instigation, this was by no means the case. Pritisch needed time to plan, a
ten-year breathing space, after the short but savage mayhem he had inflicted on
his own country, in which to develop his global strategies. The bombs that
destroyed Washington gave him nothing.
They were the work, in fact, of a secret and even more extreme junta of
disaffected senior internal security officers who, for five years or more before
the Pritisch coup, had been plotting not simply for revolution but for outright
war. This group, headed by two shadowy figures in the Soviet hierarchy, B.
Sokolovsky and N. D. Yudenich, were fanatical purists who believed that over the
past generation there had been too much humiliation and marking time, too little
action. They called themselves vsesozhzhenie, or “terrible fire.”
Their grievances, real or imagined, were many. The fat-cat corruption of the
Brezhnev era had, they felt, never been entirely eradicated, even under the
brisk, no-nonsense rule of Gorbachev. The gradual erosion of influence over the
lesser partners of the Warsaw Pact and Russia’s European satellites during the
1970s and 1980s worried them. The growth of consumerism, the importation of
decadent, Western-style petit bourgeois values into western Russia appalled