them.
But if the domestic scene was one at which they looked with sour eyes, the
international scene, and Soviet foreign policy in general, seemed to these
philosophers of the “terrible fire” one of gross mismanagement, a succession of
blunders and embarrassments.
The disastrous intervention in Lebanon during the mid to late 1980s had led a
number of Middle Eastern allies to back away from Soviet influence right into
the welcoming arms of the United States. The tactical retreat from Afghanistan
in the late 1980s had been, for them, a humbling experience. And the return of
Soviet forces in even greater numbers only three years later had merely resulted
in an even more debilitating and long-drawn-out war of attrition with the rebels
that still smoldered into the late 1990s.
The bloody holocaust that had swept South Africa in 1988-9, when President
Botha, after three years of vacillation, finally offered the black population
limited as opposed to universal suffrage: far too little, far too late, had been
a shambles politically as well as literally, for the victorious,
Marxist-oriented African National Congress had turned its back on its Soviet
mentors and accepted aid from the increasingly capitalistic China.
The back-down over Latin America had been, the vsesozhzhenie thought, nothing
short of an act of cowardice. And the assassination of Fidel Castro in 1993,
probably engineered by rogue members of the American CIA, had not been dealt
with at all with the firmness—the sternness, even—that was, the plotters felt,
required. The subsequent uprising had been put down by the Cuban army with no
help from the Soviet Union, who were still uneasy, so soon after the Latin
American crisis, about cruising into dangerous waters. The fact that the U.S.,
for the same reason, had not poked its oar in when for a couple of weeks Cuba
had been theirs for the taking, proved that the Americans were just as stupid as
those who sat around the mahogany conference tables in the Kremlin.
The gradual spread of Islamic fundamentalism from Iran into Turkmen and
Uzbekistan had slowly but surely, like a relentlessly insidious maggot, reached
up into the southern parts of Kazakhstan: extremely sensitive territory. On the
other side of the Golodnaya Steppe lay some of the most secret military
establishments in the whole of the USSR.
All in all, the past thirty years seemed to them to have been a time of
confusion and disorientation, a time of feeble men and feeble policies. In spite
of the massive strides forward in agriculture, historically the weak link in
Soviet domestic affairs, the huge leaps in industrial manufacturing and, more
important, technological development in outer space, there seemed to those of
the vsesozhzhenie to have been a loss of direction. A loss of faith in the old
Marxist-Leninist ideologies. A loss of purity.
Purity, it was argued, could only be regained in the heart of the fire. Fire
cleansed. The world must be set alight.
And not in ten years’ time. Or twenty. Or a hundred.
Now.
IN THE U.S. THERE WAS UNEASE at the Pritisch coup, alarm at the subsequent show
trials that dragged on through the spring of 2000, and then a ground swell of
pure panic as it was realized that the face of Soviet Russia had undergone a
complete and utter transformation, an almost total reversion to the stony,
obdurate, uncompromising mask of Stalinism.
The strong feeling in the country was this: the Republicans, in general, were
politically right of center; the Democrats, in general, were politically left.
Better, therefore, to go for the party that might—just might—find some common
ground with the new rulers of Russia than the party whose inveterate and
historic belligerence might—just might—upset the Soviets into doing something
drastic and irreversible.
The American electorate could well have gotten it right. There could have been
some kind of cobbled-together short-term accommodation with Pritisch, although
Pritisch himself viewed matters in the longer term and had made up his mind that
within a decade the entire world scene must be transformed.
But this, too, is academic. The vsesozhzhenie—who also called themselves the
obzhigateli, or “igniters”—had other ideas. More to the point, they had contacts
in what remained of the armed forces. Owing to the Byzantine and intensely