Vortex

Within the Kremlin’s walls, the Soviet State Defense Council met in a small, elegantly furnished chamber. Ten chairs surrounded a rectangular oak table topped only by notepads, pens, and a tray holding two bottles of vodka. The State’s anti alcohol campaign continued unabated, but serious decisions always seemed to call for something more stimulating than tea or fizzy mineral water. A German-manufactured word-processing system occupied one corner of the room, ready for use by the secretaries who would record any major decisions for later translation into action directives for specific ministries or individuals.

Only six of the ten chairs were occupied. The Soviet State Defense Council was made up of the highest-ranking members of the Politburo, itself a body of elite decision makers whose power had been only partly diluted by the

USSR’s newly formed Congress of People’s Deputies. Any large body takes its lead from a smaller body, and from smaller and smaller groups, until finally the power is wielded by a few key individuals.

The President of the Soviet Union looked wearily around the table, his red-rimmed eyes roving from face to face. The minister of defense, plump and pudgy despite a precisely tailored suit and rows of unearned medals.

Next to him, the chief of the general staff, seated stiffly in full dress uniform. Directly across the table, the cherubic, bushy-eye browed chairman of the KGB, who sat next to the foreign minister

-apparently on the general principle that one should always stay close to one’s greatest rival. And to his immediate right, the boyish face of a comparative newcomer, the academician who now served as the President’s chief economic advisor.

One face was missing, the gray, skeletal visage of the Communist Party’s chief ideologist. The old man had been in the hospital for several weeks, fighting a losing battle with pneumonia. It was just as well, the President thought. If he wanted lectures on abstract political philosophy, he could always get them from his wife. The Soviet Union’s national security decisions needed a firmer basis in reality. Now more than ever.

Behind him, a clock softly chimed three times, signaling the passage of as many fruitless hours since they’d begun debating Fidel Castro’s astounding call for the direct invasion of South Africa. He rapped the table sharply with a pencil, interrupting a heated exchange over the KGB’s failure to give them advance warning of Castro’s intentions.

“Comrades, please, we’re not getting anywhere with this squabbling. Time is short. We should confine ourselves to the matter directly at hand.”

In theory, this discussion was unnecessary. In theory, he held more personal power than any Soviet leader since Joseph Stalin. In theory, he could simply impose his will on these five men, and through them on the

USSR’s still potent instruments of political power-the military, the secret police, and the bureaucracy. The President laughed inwardly. As usual, theory meant little in the real world.

The members of the Defense Council couldn’t topple him from power. He had that much security. But their opposition to his policies could render him an ineffective figurehead. He’d seen it happen to other Soviet leaders as illness or repeated mistakes robbed them of their authority. Orders could be misinterpreted or simply shunted to the wrong place within the USSR’s vast, unresponsive bureaucracy. Directives could either be simply ignored or put into action with crippling slowness.

No, he needed a consensus from these men.

Castro’s proposition had hit them hard. Accepting it would mean dramatically altering the USSR’s established national security policy.

No one knew that better than he did.

Under his guidance, the Soviet Union had turned inward in the late 1980s-no longer interested in costly “foreign adventures. ” The change hadn’t come out of the goodness of his heart. It had come as part of a desperate attempt to head off total economic collapse.

By cutting its losses overseas, the USSR had been able to reduce its military spending-freeing more resources for the production of the consumer goods increasingly demanded by Soviet citizens. Those sweeping changes in foreign policy had been accompanied by equally sweeping changes at home-changes symbolized by the terms glasnost and perestroika.

But both glasnost and perestroika were foundering. Too many of the USSR’s constituent republics were clamoring for full independence. And too many of perestroika’s economic reforms were being smothered by the dead weight of a Soviet system unable to tolerate individual initiative and private enterprise.

The President shook his head.

So now Cuba, which had rejected and condemned his reform program, and which cost billions of rubles in military aid and price supports for its sugar crop, wanted to involve the Soviet Union in a war at the end of the world!