Warsaw Concerto, page 6
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
Not that this really gave Gorshkov a surfeit of smug complacency. Far from it. He surreptitiously removed the small wads of cotton wool from his ears; ‘the Boss’ as everybody now called Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin – although never in his hearing – would expect him to hear every word of what he had to say to him when he disembarked in a few minutes.
Very few countries outside the old pre-war Warsaw Pact had welcomed machines from Aeroflot’s small fleet of Tu-114s to their skies or airports; not for any ideological reasons, simply because the beasts were far too bloody noisy! These days, none of that mattered other than to the abused ear drums of anybody who got too close to one of the monsters.
Notwithstanding Gorshkov’s customary impatience with maintaining what he personally regarded as useless, albeit grandiose, relics of the former era with all the waste of scarce technical and manpower resources that implied, today for once, he was prepared to admit that the two Tu-114s, the ten Tu-95s and the lines of MiGs fighters and Ilyushin bombers lined up behind them would look intimidatingly impressive against the backdrop of the knocked about but still intact, old Nazi semi-circular terminus of West Berlin’s former airport.
Now, the engines of the T-54 and T-55 tanks recovered from the smashed depots around Berlin, and of the small number of brand-new T-62s entrained and dragged, in some cases, driven - at the price of wrecking them - hundreds of miles across the wilderness of Poland and East Germany, were firing up in the distance and the camouflage netting was coming off the big missile launcher-transporters.
Let the Yankees’ spy planes and satellites – everybody knew the much-vaunted Project Gemini was just a cover for the US Air Force’s spy satellite program - photograph the procession of SS-4, R-12 Dvina ballistic missiles driving around Tempelhof a mile or so south of Checkpoint Charlie!
The eight missiles were actually wooden mock-ups but the enemy was not to know that and besides, the whole point of this exercise – the opening gambit of WARSAW CONCERTO – was, among other things, intended to prompt the murderers of October 1962 to ask themselves who, exactly had won that war?
And who now held all of Berlin?
Whose troops now roamed freely across the wreckage of West Germany, once the great armed buffer between East and West, the only real physical barrier between the massed divisions of the pre-Cuban Missiles War invincible Red Army and the Atlantic coast of France?
So, who exactly had really won the war to end all wars?
Sometimes, what a thing looked like mattered more than what it actually amounted to. Yes, this demonstration was all smoke and mirrors; but if Deputy First Secretary and Defence Minister of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had anything to do with it, the later phases of Warsaw Concerto would be anything but symbolic.
Diplomacy was war by other means; propaganda diplomacy and war by other means! But sooner or later propaganda was never, ever enough. The people had to be able to see real, tangible results: like the remnants of the effete, doomed surviving capitalist states of Western Europe on their knees, with their backs literally pressing against the Atlantic.
For now, Gorshkov was prepared to settle for hurting the British in France, humiliating them if possible, and the hardening of the borders with Norway and Sweden, perhaps attempting to detach Finland from any kind of alliance with its nearest Nordic neighbours, and reclaiming the Baltic as a Soviet Sea. The forces at his disposal were nowhere strong enough to overwhelm distant island garrisons like Cyprus, let alone Malta but Crete would be held, the Aegean would remain the playground of what was left of the Black Sea Fleet and the former Turkish Navy. And somewhere in that European continental calculus he would winkle out a real victory, something that would make the West sit up and take notice!
Somewhere, somehow…
Of course, even Sergey Gorshkov – in his most bucolically intransigent, defiant mood - recognised that there were immutable constraints; options which were not, nor would be for some time, years at least, be on the table.
Putting to one side the growing ‘uncertainties’ – increasingly, a Foreign Ministry euphemism for barely cloaked duplicity - about the rapidity of the Chinese re-colonisation of their bombed Mongolian and Manchurian lands, and the inevitable border tensions that would follow as surely as night followed day, last year’s unrealistically high hopes for a Sino-Soviet pact against the West were fast fading, whatever gloss the regime in Chongqing attempted to put on last year’s Bersk Accords.
As for risking a direct military confrontation with the West, well, there might be scope for sniping around the edges, for making difficulties, for complicating the strategic placement of pawns on the geopolitical chessboard but there was no real appetite in Sverdlovsk for overt action. True, there were factions within both the Party and Gorshkov’s Ministry who longed for a more provocative stand ‘on the ground’, especially on the new, thinly-held Rhine Front; however, persisting with that ‘option’ was fraught with terrible dangers. Moreover, there were those who muttered that the mere fact of the Troika’s ongoing support for the Front Internationale in southern France was a mistake, regardless of valid considerations that it ‘kept the British and their Yankee allies busy’ beyond the Rhine and made more plausible the concept of a future demilitarized zone stretching from that great River all the way to the Vistula. Personally, Gorshkov regarded thinking like that was little better than abject defeatism, as if seeking to eventually cede practically all of Central Europe to the West in some sort of grand peace settlement several years down the line was suddenly a conclusion much to be desired!
‘Presently,’ Alexander Shelepin had observed, the last time they met face to face, eleven days ago, ‘we are swimming like drowning men trying to keep our heads above the water. We cannot let our people see this, we must remain strong. That is why Warsaw Concerto is, as they say, worth the risk.’
Gorshkov had stopped pretending he knew what was going on in the General Secretary’s mind. His attitude had become: ‘Well, I haven’t been purged yet so I shall carry on as before and see what happens…’
Shelepin seemed to take him into his confidence, treat him with a healthy respect; but these things only meant so much.
Nonetheless, Gorshkov clung to the belief that it was better to have a plan, than to not have one. He was no diplomat or politician: he simply contemplated how best to salt the battlefield to pave the way for the best possible end game. Some kind of grandiose ‘settlement’ between the great powers which guaranteed the peace for decades to come, noble as it may be, was pure pie in the sky.
Whatever he thought about ‘the Boss’, the man was the ultimate pragmatist, it was not as if he had told Gorshkov anything new about the USSR’s parlous military situation when he had supposedly outlined his ‘long-term objectives’ back at the end of September.
There was, of course, no invincible Red Army anymore; rebuilding it might be the work of a generation. The firepower on display today at Tempelhof, was pretty much the whole spear, everything the Troika could scrape up, or rather spare, east of the Urals without completely relaxing its grip over the devastated western lands of the Motherland but the enemy was not to know that!
After today the military hardware on display in Berlin would hastily disperse all over the ruined metropolis and into the country around it, back into their heavily camouflaged and in some cases, buried bases just in case the Yankees were angry enough to do something stupid.
‘Now is the time to explore the possibilities,’ Shelepin had declared. ‘The Americans are emerging from their own, partial counter-revolution. The British are less paranoid than previously. More importantly, the West has tired of war. As,’ he had sighed, ‘have our own people, those who survive. But before we attempt to look to the future, we must do what we can to conceal our weakness…’
If nothing else today’s exercise was going to be a good test of the mood, and a litmus test of the insecurity of their Western enemies.
Oddly, Gorshkov was more worried about what the British – rather than the Americans - might do. The Berlin Military District, effectively the wrecked city and twenty to thirty kilometres all around it, was protected by six batteries of SS-75 surface-to-air missiles capable of knocking down fast jets flying at over twenty kilometres high at ranges of up to forty kilometres but…
Even if the British knew about the SS-75s, would they care?
Most of the British Isles was well within range of an SS-4 – a medium-range intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying a megaton-range warhead – fired from Berlin, and yet, time and again that witch in Oxford had confounded their every expectation.
Every time Gorshkov allowed himself to think about the catastrophic Iran-Iraq campaign of 1964 he inwardly shuddered. It was a recurring nightmare. Little by little the British and their allies, hopelessly outnumbered with a hostile sea filled with lurking Yankee ships at their backs, had sucked the last two Red Army tank armies on the planet ever farther south to their immolation and their doom in the sands…
In the end Operation Nakazyvat - Operation Chastise – had played out with all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy: of the quarter of a million men and two thousand tanks which had poured into the mountains of Iraq in April 1964 less than fifty thousand men and as few as a hundred tanks had escaped the fiasco. Of the survivors, now that the Iranians had finally retaken the passes through the Sahand, Eynali and Alborz mountains, the fifteen thousand-man Red Army garrison of Tabriz was cut off and the dwindling hopes of re-activating the oilfields of Iraqi Kurdistan had all but evaporated.
We should have cut our losses and pulled back all the way to the Azerbaijani and Armenian borders, abandoned Erbil and Mosul and rebuilt an army in the Southern republics well out of sight of the Yankee spy planes…
In fact, contingency plans had been drawn up several months ago to withdraw the fifty-five thousand Red Army troops still attempting to hold down parts of northern Iraq. To Gorshkov’s way of thinking these men – their numbers whittled away day by day by insurgent attrition, disease and desertions – had long since ceased to serve any useful function in that Godforsaken country.
Nonetheless, at least he had persuaded ‘the Boss’ to let him ‘bring home’ the Red Air Force’s most modern interceptors and missilery. Sanity having prevailed in some small way, since the summer air support for the forces on the ground in Iran and Iraq had been operated exclusively from bases within the Soviet Union, removing the nightmare prospect of Western-backed insurgents capturing any of the USSR’s most advanced aircraft or surface-to-air missiles intact.
Gorshkov had been pleasantly surprised to discover that his views on the ‘pile of shit’ he had been trying to clean up in the Middle East in the wake of Operation Nakazyvat, were, broadly, shared by the man who had dreamed up today’s ‘entertainment’: one of the Boss’s up and coming political secretaries, thirty-five-year-old Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.
Gorbachev was one of the young typos, perhaps, the leading young-tyro, who had drafted the policy paper to be submitted to the full Politburo’s January meeting in Sverdlovsk – by then, hopefully, the Chinese situation would be clearer – to be officially rubber-stamped.
Dolgosrochnoye uregulirovaniye s Zapadom.
The long-term settlement with the West.
Unlike many of Alexander Shelepin’s closest minions, Gorbachev was no former KGB stooge. Before the Cuban Missiles War, he had been an unknown, anonymous Party apparatchik. His family was from Stavropol, his father a Red Army veteran of Kursk, and in his late teens he had risen through the ranks of the local Komsomol, driving combine harvesters before studying for a law degree at Moscow University, where he had joined the Communist Party. Otherwise, he had remained invisible, unheard of in the latter 1950s prior to turning up at the twenty-second Party Congress in 1961, an event he had apparently, taken advantage of to begin to cement a modest local power base back in Stavropol in the year before the Cuban Missiles War.
All in all, Gorbachev was something of a mystery man. Interestingly, nobody seemed to know if his fingerprints were on the orders to liquidate the old guard, in the coup which had carried Alexander Shelepin to power in the aftermath of the debacle in the Iraq and Iran. The only thing that was known – for a fact – was that Gorbachev was almost always by the Head of the Troika’s side and that he never, ever seemed anywhere near as terrified of his master as everybody else, except Gorshkov, was!
All the cameras were rolling now.
The steps had been wheeled up to the open forward cabin door of the Chairman and First Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR’s aircraft.
Gorshkov straightened his shoulders, shrugging erect despite the rheumatism exploring his old Great Patriotic War knocks. He ignored the dull, ringing tinnitus in his ears – a leftover from being too close to heavy artillery too often down the years – and put on his ‘political’ face, the one that stopped him bawling out fools at the drop of a hat. Today, he needed to be the Boss’s attentive, obedient right-hand man not his feared enforcer.
He fully intended to exploit the opportunities that Warsaw Concerto, the Party’s latest attempt to, as the Yankees would call it, ‘re-brand’ itself and to add weight to the launch of the long-awaited new Five-Year Plan. An up and coming apparatchik like Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, a man with no power base in the Party, reliant on the patrimony of the Supreme Soviet, might make for a convenient scape goat if one or other of Gorshkov’s ‘initiatives’ or ‘interventions’ went wrong.
He eyed the nearest camera team.
Within a day the film would be back in Sverdlovsk and the waiting production teams would be hurriedly cutting and pasting the best material together; within a week the World would know that the supposedly beaten, vanquished Russian bear was in total control of West Berlin and by implication, the whole of Central and Eastern Europe.
In the last week Red Army engineers had cleared the rubble away from Checkpoint Charlie, a kilometre or two north from where Gorshkov stood before the massed ranks of the men and women of the 2nd Guards Tank Division – all ten thousand of them – and filmed an endless procession of T-54s driving backwards and forwards through it, just to make absolutely certain that the Yankees and the British ‘got the message’. To add insult to injury a small number of British and American cars and trucks had been salvaged and driven around by celebrating Red Army men.
If a job was worth doing it was worth doing well!
Or, as Gorshkov liked to say: ‘Better’ is the enemy of ‘Good Enough’!
As the over-powering roar of the Kuznetsov NK-12MV turboprop engines subsided the men, and the handful of women, of the 2nd Guards Tank Division Choir stepped forward and launched into the Soviet Anthem.
United forever in friendship and labour
Our mighty republics will ever endure
The Great Soviet Union will live through the ages
The dream of a people of their fortress.
Gorshkov was a man with a heart long-hardened against sentimentality, yet even he felt a lump rising in his throat every time he heard the opening strains of the ‘one anthem’, dating back to 1944 when the hierarchy of the Party had recognised that the nation, the people and the rest of the Party not only needed but in acknowledgement of their suffering, grief and courage against all the odds, deserved, a call to arms and a validation in music of everything which had been achieved and of what was still to be achieved.
The choir belted out the chorus.
Long live our Soviet motherland
Built by the people's mighty hand
Long live our people, united and free
Strong in our friendship
Long may our crimson flag inspire
Shining in glory for all men to see.
Alexander Shelepin moved into the door of the Tu-114, pausing on the platform at the top of the steps. He was bare-headed, distinctive even from a distance for his high forehead, receding hairline and the visceral intensity of his gaze. He had come a long, long way from those heady days in the mid-fifties when men like he and Alexei Kosygin were seen by the post-war Komsomol generation as the coming men behind Nikita Khrushchev’s loudly trumpeted reforms and modernisations.
Gorshkov wondered, now and then, how much of that dangerously ‘progressive’ zeal remained in Shelepin’s ice-cold soul. The man was the dark prince of the Motherland committed to doing whatever had to be done to restore the USSR to her rightful place in the world, to continue the revolution and to right the wrongs done to it. People muttered that he was simply the latest tyrant to rule the Russias; the veteran admiral thought that was overly simplistic because there was nothing mad or random about anything the Boss did. The man was at one and the same time the most ruthless and yet the most measured of men, and perhaps, that was why he was so terrifying.
Through days dark and stormy where Great Lenin lead us
Our eyes saw the bright sun of freedom above
And Stalin, our leader with faith in the people,
Inspired us to build up the land that we love.
With a crashing of rifle butts and booted feet rank after rank of Red Army soldiers came to attention and presented arms. The barked parade ground drill orders ran through the sea of uniforms like bullets ricocheting off walls.
