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Page 114
''Look at him, Misha; see how far we have fallen.''
General Piotr Kondratiev, at his ease in czarist-style silk tunic and uniform trousers, was the Russian romantic's ideal of the pan-Slavic leader. Tall, but solid to the point of bulkiness, he was deep-chested and square-jawed as a Soviet heroic statue. His complexion was pale, his eyes deep set and blue, and his only slightly graying hair blond. He might have been thought handsome but for his mouth. It was small and thin-lipped, a torturer's mouth. A bitter, plotter's mouth.
Kondratiev had been a young officer in the KGB at the time of the attempted coups in the early nineties. He had watched Yaneyev and his followers at close range, tallied their failures. Later he had raged at the rebellious and inept parliament, their panic as they allowed Russia to slip from their grasp into Boris Yeltsin's after a few cannon shots. He had resolved even then that if he ever had such opportunities, he would not so misuse them.
On the television the colors were muted. It was three in the afternoon and raining in Moscow. Red Square glistened. Phalanxes of children waving bouquets of flowers and holding aloft soggy blue, white, and red banners with soggy blue, white, and red slogans plodded through the rainy square.
Atop the now-empty mausoleum, Aleksandr Cherny, swathed in fur coat, scarf, fur hat, boots, and gloves, returned the children's salute with a stiff wave. Behind him, banked flags of the Russian armed forces gave precedence to more blue, white, and red: the insipid striped flag of the new Russian state.
"Asshole," Kondratiev said contemptuously. "Barbarian."
"Don't underestimate the son of a bitch," Mikhail Orgonev said as he sucked asthmatically on a tube connected to a cylinder of oxygen. "He's devious as hell."
In the center of the circle of men seated in the gun room of General Kondratiev's seaside dacha, Orgonevalways "Misha" to Kondratievstared angrily at the spectacle on the television screen. This celebration was a pitiful substitute for

 
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