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Authors: Jason Matthews
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Central Committee, and finally on the Collegium of the KGB. Short, mustached, bosomy, with fantastic upswept hair, Ekaterina had worn the
Orden Krasnoy Zvezdy,
the Order of the Red Star, awarded for her “great contribution to the defense of the USSR in war and peacetime and for ensuring public safety” until things changed and it no longer was
modnyi,
fashionable, to continue wearing the red ceramic device.
Nineteen-year-old Alexei was brought into the Service by
bonna,
maternal patronage, but failed to make an impression in various low-level assignments. Bad tempered, at times irrational, and occasionally prone to displays of violent paranoia, Alexei was going nowhere in the bureaucracy: Everyone knew it, but supervisors’ instincts for self-preservation prevented them from recommending he be cashiered. No one dared defy Madame Zyuganova; Ekaterina protected her son with implacable determination. Then Zyuganov disappeared from the corridors of Headquarters: Momma finally had found sonny boy an assignment for which he was singularly qualified.
Zyuganov was read in as one of four subcommandants of the Lubyanka prison, a formal KGB position title sufficiently anodyne to discourage public scrutiny, with no paperwork or records required. In reality he had joined the small staff of present-day Lubyanka interrogators, experts in
chernaya rabota,
black work: liquidations, torture, and executions. They were the successors of the
Kommandatura,
the coal-black department of the NKVD, which was the instrument of Stalin’s purges and had eliminated White Russian émigrés, Old Bolsheviks, Trotskyites, and, in twenty-eightconsecutive nights in the spring of 1940, seven thousand Polish prisoners in the Russian forest of Katyn. In four years Zyuganov was promoted as Lubyanka’s second chief executioner and, when the chief executioner—a patron and protector—faltered, he had reveled in the career high of putting a bullet behind his boss’s right ear. Zyuganov had found a home.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought an end to unrestricted wet work. Part of the KGB morphed into the modern SVR; the Lubyanka cellars closed and the building now belonged to the internal service, the FSB. Zyuganov could have made the lateral move to SVR Department V, colloquially still referred to as the
Otdel mokrykh del,
the department of wet affairs, as one of the “wet boys,” but his mother, Ekaterina, knew better and wanted to forfend his future. She had by that time stepped down from her last position in the Collegium, and a cushy if inconsequential retirement assignment to Paris as
zampolit,
a political advisor to the
rezident,
had been arranged. Mother’s last act from Headquarters had been to place Zyuganov as third chief in Line KR, the counterintelligence department. Alexei would be safe there and could work his way up. It was all she could do for her murderous little boy.
The psychopathy of not feeling pity, mixed with innate aggression fueled by sadism, leavened by the utter inability to relate to others’ emotions, had been singularly well suited to Zyuganov’s ingenue career in the cellars. With the passing of the Lubyanka salad days, when an executioner could be as busy as he wished, the post-Soviet era was a definite disappointment. Things had picked up with President Putin, however. Splashy overseas operations—Yushchenko in Ukraine, Litvinenko and Berezovsky in the United Kingdom—had settled the hash of noisy exiles, and domestic troublemaking journalists and activists—Politkovskaya, Estemirova, Markelov, and Baburova—had been obliterated. But for every one of these high-publicity actions there were dozens of lesser bugs that needed quiet squashing: independent provincial administrators, military logistics managers who did not tithe sufficiently to Moscow, uppity oligarchs who needed a reminder of how Russia worked now. All these and more eventually found themselves in the basement medical wings of either
Orden Krasnoy Zvezdy,
the Order of the Red Star, awarded for her “great contribution to the defense of the USSR in war and peacetime and for ensuring public safety” until things changed and it no longer was
modnyi,
fashionable, to continue wearing the red ceramic device.
Nineteen-year-old Alexei was brought into the Service by
bonna,
maternal patronage, but failed to make an impression in various low-level assignments. Bad tempered, at times irrational, and occasionally prone to displays of violent paranoia, Alexei was going nowhere in the bureaucracy: Everyone knew it, but supervisors’ instincts for self-preservation prevented them from recommending he be cashiered. No one dared defy Madame Zyuganova; Ekaterina protected her son with implacable determination. Then Zyuganov disappeared from the corridors of Headquarters: Momma finally had found sonny boy an assignment for which he was singularly qualified.
Zyuganov was read in as one of four subcommandants of the Lubyanka prison, a formal KGB position title sufficiently anodyne to discourage public scrutiny, with no paperwork or records required. In reality he had joined the small staff of present-day Lubyanka interrogators, experts in
chernaya rabota,
black work: liquidations, torture, and executions. They were the successors of the
Kommandatura,
the coal-black department of the NKVD, which was the instrument of Stalin’s purges and had eliminated White Russian émigrés, Old Bolsheviks, Trotskyites, and, in twenty-eightconsecutive nights in the spring of 1940, seven thousand Polish prisoners in the Russian forest of Katyn. In four years Zyuganov was promoted as Lubyanka’s second chief executioner and, when the chief executioner—a patron and protector—faltered, he had reveled in the career high of putting a bullet behind his boss’s right ear. Zyuganov had found a home.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought an end to unrestricted wet work. Part of the KGB morphed into the modern SVR; the Lubyanka cellars closed and the building now belonged to the internal service, the FSB. Zyuganov could have made the lateral move to SVR Department V, colloquially still referred to as the
Otdel mokrykh del,
the department of wet affairs, as one of the “wet boys,” but his mother, Ekaterina, knew better and wanted to forfend his future. She had by that time stepped down from her last position in the Collegium, and a cushy if inconsequential retirement assignment to Paris as
zampolit,
a political advisor to the
rezident,
had been arranged. Mother’s last act from Headquarters had been to place Zyuganov as third chief in Line KR, the counterintelligence department. Alexei would be safe there and could work his way up. It was all she could do for her murderous little boy.
The psychopathy of not feeling pity, mixed with innate aggression fueled by sadism, leavened by the utter inability to relate to others’ emotions, had been singularly well suited to Zyuganov’s ingenue career in the cellars. With the passing of the Lubyanka salad days, when an executioner could be as busy as he wished, the post-Soviet era was a definite disappointment. Things had picked up with President Putin, however. Splashy overseas operations—Yushchenko in Ukraine, Litvinenko and Berezovsky in the United Kingdom—had settled the hash of noisy exiles, and domestic troublemaking journalists and activists—Politkovskaya, Estemirova, Markelov, and Baburova—had been obliterated. But for every one of these high-publicity actions there were dozens of lesser bugs that needed quiet squashing: independent provincial administrators, military logistics managers who did not tithe sufficiently to Moscow, uppity oligarchs who needed a reminder of how Russia worked now. All these and more eventually found themselves in the basement medical wings of either
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