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the spectacle of Revolution Day, once celebrated by the entire empire on November 7. This travesty was called National Day.
Piotr Kondratiev had no intention of underestimating the schoolteacher in Moscow. He stood by Orgonev with a glass of vodka in his hand and watched the unimpressive figures on the top of the mausoleum. Orgonev glared at the images on the screen. It was almost more than the old scientist could bear. Breath wheezed in and out of his rotting lungs, driven by impotent fury. Orgonev had a vast capacity for anger.
"There's Yulin, the treacherous bastard," he said. "Look at him. He hasn't even the balls to wear his uniform."
Ivan Yulin had been brought out of retirement to take over as chairman of the ID, once Kondratiev had been passed over for election to the Executive Committee of the parliament and then swiftly dismissed. Yes, Kondratiev thought, the old bastard in the Kremlin is devious enough for a dozen men.
Yulin looked stolid, cold, and uncomfortable in the lineup atop the black marble cube. Well he might. It was rumored among members of the nomenklatura that the bourgeois Cherny planned to dismantle the domestic branch of the Security Service once and for all. Everyone remembered the KGB intrigues that had alienated the Americans during the Gulf War, and the KGB had been at least peripherally involved in the failed Yaneyev coup in 1991. But Ivan Yulin was a trimmer, capable of being on several sides of any question. The consensus on Yulin was that he knew how to survive.
Intelligence assets, all formerly belonging to the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, were to be handed over to the rival GRU, the Military Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff. Andultimate lunacyeventually, to the civil police, the militia.
The mausoleum had housed Lenin's papery corpse as recently as last January. But at the New Year, the mayor of Moscow had ordered the body removed and buried as Lenin's wife had always wished. With proper honors, of course.
Piotr Kondratiev had never been a worshiper of Lenin, even

 
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