Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev came in last of all, walking like the aged peasant he was, his skin drooping on his once manly face. He was approaching eighty years, a number he might meet but would not surpass, by the look of him. That was both good news and bad. There was no telling what thoughts wiggled their way around the inside of his doting brain. He’d been a man of great personal power once—Andropov could remember it plainly enough. He’d been a vigorous man who’d enjoyed walking in the forests to kill elk or even bear—the mighty hunter of wild animals. But not now. He hadn’t shot anything in years—except, perhaps, people, at second or third hand. But that didn’t make Leonid Ilyich mellow with age. Far from it. The brown eyes were still sly, still looking for treachery, and sometimes finding it where there was none. Under Stalin, that was frequently a death sentence. But not now. Now you’d just be broken, stripped of power, and relegated to a provincial post where you’d die of boredom.
“Good afternoon, comrades,” the General Secretary said, as pleasantly as his grumbly voice allowed.
At least there was no obvious bootlicking anymore, every communist courtier jousting with each other to curry favor with the Marxist emperor. You could waste half the meeting with that twaddle, and Andropov had important things to discuss.
Leonid Ilyich had been prebriefed, and after sipping his post-lunch tea, the General Secretary turned his face to the KGB Chairman. “Yuriy Vladimirovich, you have something to discuss with us?”
“Thank you, Comrade General Secretary. Comrades,” he began, “something has come up which commands our attention.” He waved to Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy, who quickly circulated around the table, handing out copies of the Warsaw Letter.
“What you see is a letter dispatched to Warsaw last week by the Pope of Rome.” Each man had a photocopy of the original—some of them spoke Polish—plus an exact translation into literary Russian, complete with footnotes. “I feel that this is a potential political threat to us.”
“I have already seen this letter,” Alexandrov said from his distant “candidate” seat. In deference to the seniority of the terminally ill Mikhail Suslov, the latter’s seat at Brezhnev’s left hand (and next to Andropov) was empty, though his place at the table had the same collection of papers as everyone else’s—maybe Suslov had read them on his deathbed, and he’d lash out one last time from his waiting niche in the Kremlin wall.
“This is outrageous,” Marshal Ustinov said immediately. He was also well into his seventies. “Who does this priest think he is!”
“Well, he is Polish,” Andropov reminded his colleagues, “and he feels he has a certain duty to provide his former countrymen with political protection.”
“Protection from what?” the Minister of the Interior demanded. “The threat to Poland comes from their own counterrevolutionaries.”
“And their own government lacks the balls to deal with them. I told you last year we needed to move in on them,” the First Secretary of the Moscow Party reminded the rest.
“And if they resist our move?” the Agricultural Minister inquired from his seat at the far end of the table.
“You may be certain of that,” the Foreign Minister thought out loud. “At least politically, they will resist.”
“Dmitriy Fedorovich?” Alexandrov directed his question at Marshal Ustinov, who sat there in his military uniform, complete with a square foot of ribbons, and two Hero of the Soviet Union gold stars. He’d won them both for political courage, not on the battlefield, but he was one of the smartest people in the room, having earned his spurs as People’s Commissar of Armaments in the Great Motherland War, and for helping shepherd the USSR into the Space Age. His opinion was predictable, but respected for its sagacity.
“The question, comrades, is whether the Poles would resist with armed force. That would not be militarily threatening, but it would be a major political embarrassment, both here and abroad. That is, they could not stop the Red Army on the battlefield, but should they make the attempt, the political repercussions would be serious. That is why I supported our move last year to bring political pressure on Warsaw—which was successfully accomplished, you will recall.” At the age of seventy-four, Dmitriy Fedorovich had learned caution, at least on the level of international politics. The unspoken concern was the effect such resistance would have on the United States of America, which liked to stick its nose where it didn’t belong.
“Well, this might well incite additional political unrest in Poland, or so my analysts tell me,” Andropov told his colleagues, and the room got a little chilly.
“How serious is this, Yuriy Vladimirovich? How serious might it become?” It was Brezhnev speaking for the first time from beneath his bushy eyebrows.
“Poland continues to be unstable, due to counterrevolutionary elements within their society. Their labor sector, in particular, is restless. We have our sources within this ‘Solidarity’ cabal, and they tell us that the pot continues to boil. The problem with the Pope is that if he does what he threatens and comes to Poland, the Polish people will have a rallying point, and if a sufficient number of them become involved, the country might well try to change its form of government,” the Chairman of the KGB said delicately.
“That is not acceptable,” Leonid Ilyich observed in a quiet voice. At this table, a loud voice was just a man venting his stress. A quiet one was far more dangerous. “If Poland falls, then Germany falls…” and then the entire Warsaw Pact, which would leave the Soviet Union without its buffer zone to the West. NATO was strong, and would become more so, as the new American defense buildup began to take effect. They’d already been briefed on that troublesome subject. Already, the first new tanks were being given to line units, preparatory to shipping them to West Germany. And so were the new airplanes. Most frightening of all was the vastly increased training regimen for the American soldiers. It was as though they were actually preparing for a strike east.
The fall of Poland and Germany would mean that a trip to Soviet territory would be shortened by more than a thousand kilometers, and there was not a man at this table who did not remember the last time the Germans had entered the Soviet Union. Despite all the protestations that NATO was a defensive alliance whose entire purpose was to keep the Red Army from driving down the Champs Elysees, to Moscow NATO and all the other American alliances looked like an enormous noose designed to fit around their collective necks. They’d all considered that before at great length. And they really didn’t need political instability to add to their problems. Communists—though not quite so fervent as Suslov and his ideological heir, Alexandrov—feared above all the possible turning away of their people from the True Faith, which was the source of their own very comfortable personal power. They’d all come to power at second hand to a popular peasant revolt which had overthrown the Romanov dynasty—or so they all told themselves, despite what history really said—and they had no illusions about what a revolt would do to them. Brezhnev shifted in his chair. “So, this Polish priest is a threat.”
“Yes, comrades, he is,” Andropov said. “His letter is a genuine and sincere thrust at the political stability of Poland, and thus of the entire Warsaw Pact. The Catholic Church remains politically powerful throughout Europe, including our fraternal socialist allies. If he were to resign the papacy and travel back to his homeland, that in itself would be a huge political statement.
“Josef Vissarionovich Stalin once asked how many army divisions the Pope had. The answer is none, of course, but we cannot disregard his power. I suppose we could try diplomatic contacts to dissuade him from this course…”
“A complete waste of time,” the Foreign Minister observed at once. “We have had occasional diplomatic contacts in the Vatican itself, and they listen to us politely, and they speak reasonably, and then they take whatever action they want to take. No, we cannot influence him, even with direct threats to the church. They merely see threats as challenges.”
And that put the matter squarely in the middle of the table. Andropov was grateful to the Foreign Minister, who was also in his camp for the issue of succession. He wondered idly if Brezhnev knew or cared about what would happen after he died—well, he’d care about his children’s fate and protection, but that was easily handled. Sinecure Party posts could be found for all of them, and there would be no future marriages to require the china and tableware from the Hermitage.
“Yuriy Vladimirovich, what can KGB do about this threat?” Brezhnev inquired next. He is so easy to manage, Andropov reflected briefly and gratefully.
“It may be possible to eliminate the threat by eliminating the man who makes it,” the Chairman replied, with an even, unemotional voice.