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Page 116
in the days before perestroika. But he disapproved of the desecration of the dead. Not out of any respect for the dead Lenin, but because the move was still another rejection of the nation's history. Whatever direction Cherny imagined he was leading Mother Russia, it could not be allowed.
A rattling snore made him turn his attention from the screen. He looked with distaste at Admiral Eduard Aleyev, commander of the Pacific Fleet, who lay sprawled in an armchair, heavily asleep. An empty vodka glass was in his lap. His dress-blue uniform trousers were stained with food and liquor. The admiral had once been a good officer. He was now a drunkanother loss attributable to the ruinous path first laid out by Gorbachev.
Kondratiev surveyed his guests. Some, like Aleyev, were useless but had to be included. Others had real value. Yuri Kalinin, for example, at age forty-nine the youngest general in the air force. Kondratiev studied Kalinin's handsome, narrow face. The man was bored and exasperated, not knowing why he had been askedcommanded, actuallyby the Soyuz council to attend. His thoughts were transparent, for anyone to read.
Kalinin stirred in his chair. What good, he was thinking, did it do to glare at the television screen and call out insults? When were these old farts ever going to get to the point of this meeting? As far as Kalinin could tell, no actual details of how to handle the takeover of the government had been decided; certainly he had been told only the barest sketch of the overall plan.
Kalinin glanced around the room in the dacha. So, President Cherny thought he could buy General Kondratiev's goodwill by allowing him to keep his privileges at the same time Cherny took away Kondratiev's power. This house on the sea, for example, a dozen kilometers north of the Georgian border. Is Kondratiev playing games with the group, he wondered, keeping Cherny informed? It seemed unlikely, but then
Misha Orgonev was telling anyone willing to listen how it

 
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