And that was a very big thought. Other countries were ruled by dictators, often fascists on the political Right. Fewer countries were ruled by people on the political Left. Hitler represented the most powerful and dangerous of the former, but he’d been overthrown by the Soviet Union and Stalin on one side, and by the Western states on the other. The two most unlikely of allies had combined to destroy the German threat. And who were they? They claimed to be democracies, and while that claim was consistently denigrated by his own country, the elections held in those countries were real—they had to be, since his country and his agency, the KGB, spent time and money trying to influence them—and so there, the Will of the People had some reality to it, or else why would KGB try to affect it? Exactly how much, Zaitzev didn’t know. There was no telling from the information available in his own country, and he didn’t bother listening to the Voice of America and other obvious propaganda arms of the Western nations.
So, it wasn’t the people who wanted to kill the priest. It was Andropov, certainly, and the Politburo, possibly, who wished to do it. Even his workmates at The Centre had no particular bone to pick with Father Karol. There was no talk of his enmity to the Soviet Union. The State TV and radio had not called out for class hatred against him, as they did for other foreign enemies. There had been no pejorative articles about him in Pravda that he’d seen of late. Just some rumbles about the labor problems in Poland, and those were not overly loud, more the sort of thing a neighbor might say about a misbehaving child next door.
But that’s what it had to be all about. Karol was Polish, and a source of pride for the people there, and Poland was politically troubled because of labor disputes. Karol wanted to use his political or spiritual power to protect his people. That was understandable, wasn’t it?
But was killing him understandable?
Who would stand up and say, “No, you cannot kill this man because you dislike his politics”? The Politburo? No, they’d go along with Andropov. He was the heir apparent. When Leonid Ilyich died, he’d be the one to take his chair at the head of the table. Another Party man. Well, what else could he be? The Party was the Soul of the People, so the saying went. That was about the only mention of “soul” the Party permitted.
Did some part of a man live on after death? That was what the soul was supposed to be, but here the Party was the soul, and the Party was a thing of men, and little more. And corrupt men at that.
And they wanted to kill a priest.
He’d seen the dispatches. In a very small way, he, Oleg Ivanovich Zaitzev, was helping. And that was eating at something inside him. A conscience? Was he supposed to have one of those? But a conscience was something that measured one set of facts or ideas against another and was either content or not. If not, if it found some action at fault, then the conscience started complaining. It whispered. It forced him to look and keep looking until the issue was resolved, until the wrong action was stopped, or reversed, or atoned for—
But how did you stop the Party or the KGB from doing something?
To do that, Zaitzev knew, you had, at the very least, to demonstrate that the proposed action was contrary to political theory or would have adverse political consequences, because politics was the measure of right and wrong. But wasn’t politics too fleeting for that? Didn’t “right” and “wrong” have to depend on something more solid than mere politics? Wasn’t there some higher value system? Politics was just tactics, after all, wasn’t it? And while tactics were important, strategy was more so, because strategy was the measure of what you used tactics for, and strategy in this case was supposed to be what was right—transcendentally right. Not just right at the moment, but right for all times—something historians could examine in a hundred or a thousand years and pronounce as correct action.
Did the Party think in such terms? How exactly did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union make its decisions? What was good for the people? But who measured that? Individuals did, Brezhnev, Andropov, Suslov, the rest of the full voting members of the Politburo, advised by the non-voting candidate members, further advised by the Council of Ministers and the members of the Central Committee of the Party, all the senior members of the nomenklatura—the ones to whom the rezident in Paris shipped perfume and pantyhose in the diplomatic bag. Zaitzev had seen enough of those dispatches. And he’d heard the stories. Those were the ones who lavished presents and status upon their children, the ones who raced down the center lane of the broad Moscow boulevards, the corrupt Marxist princes who ruled his country with hands of iron.
Did those princes think in terms of what was good for the narod—the masses, as they were called—the numberless workers and peasants whom they ruled, for whose good they supposedly looked after?
But probably the minor princes under Nikolay Romanov had thought and spoken the same way. And Lenin had ordered them all shot as enemies of the people. As modern movies spoke of the Great Patriotic War, so earlier movies had portrayed them for less sophisticated audiences as evil buffoons, hardly serious enemies, easily hated and easily killed, caricatures of real people who were all so different from those men who’d replaced them, of course…
As the princes of old had driven their troika-harnessed sleds over the very bodies of the peasants on their way to the royal court, so today the officers of the Moscow militia kept the center lane open for the new nomenklatura members who didn’t have time for traffic delays.
Nothing had really changed…
Except that the czars of old had at least paid lip service to a higher authority. They’d financed St. Basil’s Cathedral here in Moscow, and other noblemen had financed countless other churches in lesser cities, because even the Romanovs had acknowledged a power higher than theirs. But the Party acknowledged no higher order.
And so it could kill without regret, because killing was often a political necessity, a tactical advantage to be undertaken when and where convenient.
Was that all this was? Zaitzev asked himself. Were they killing the Pope just because it was more convenient?
Oleg Ivan’ch poured himself another portion of vodka from the nearby bottle and took another swallow.
There were many inconveniences in his life. It was too long a walk from his desk to the water cooler. There were people at work whom he didn’t like—Stefan Yevgeniyevich Ivanov, for example, a more senior major in communications. How he’d managed to get promoted four years ago was a mystery to everyone in the section. He was disregarded by the more senior people as a drone who was unable to do any useful work. Zaitzev supposed every business had one such person, an embarrassment to the office, but not easily removed because… because he was just there and that was all there was to it. Were Ivanov out of the way, Oleg could be promoted—if not in rank, then in status to chief of the section. Every single breath Ivanov took was an inconvenience to Oleg Ivan’ch, but that didn’t give him the right to kill the more senior communicator, did it?
No, he’d be arrested and prosecuted, and perhaps even executed for murder. Because it was forbidden by law. Because it was wrong. The law, the Party, and his own conscience told him that.
But Andropov wanted to kill Father Karol, and his conscience didn’t say nay. Would some other conscience do so? Another swallow of vodka. Another snort. A conscience, on the Politburo?
Even in the KGB, there were no ruminations. No debates. No open discussion. Just action messages and notices of completion or failure. Evaluations of foreigners, of course, discussions of the thinking of foreigners, real agents, or mere agents of influence—called “useful fools” in the KGB lexicon. Never had a field officer written back about an order and said, “No, comrade, we ought not to do that because it would be morally wrong.” Goderenko in Rome had come closest, posing the observation that killing Karol might have adverse consequences on operations. Did that mean that Ruslan Borissovich had a troubled conscience as well? No. Goderenko had three sons—one in the Soviet navy; another, he’d heard, at the KGB’s own academy out on the Ring Road; and the third in Moscow State University. If Ruslan Borissovich had any difficulties with the KGB, any action could mean, if not death, then at least serious embarrassment for his children, and few men took action like that.