Vanguard Elite

By Andre Jute

THE GREATEST CONSPIRACY THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN STARTED WITH THE STORMING OF THE WINTER PALACE.

In the beginning they were impassioned young revolutionaries risking only their own lives for justice. The prince, the soldier, and the peasant became the patriarchs of three families whose generations are enfolded in the sweep of humans and inhumans, inquisitors and victims, that tells the story of the KGB — which is the story of Russia in the Twentieth Century — from the day Lenin created it as the Cheka in the Smolny Convent: the Extraordinary Commission from the beginning and from the inside, motivated by its own imperatives of fear and fanaticism, through the murders of whole classes, the massacres of kulaks, the betrayals of friends and family, the show trials of colleagues, the psychiatric tortures of dissidents, right up to glasnost, when the fourth generation must answer the question, Was the result worth three generations of suffering and sacrifice?

An epic historical saga of three intertwined families who live and die by their love of their Russian motherland and the searing passions they arouse in each other.

VANGUARD ELITE is
Book 1 of
COLD WAR, HOT PASSIONS.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andre Jute
• Release date: Nov 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9781908369055

Andre Jute

André Jute is a novelist and, through his non-fiction books, a teacher of creative writing, graphic design and engineering. There are about three hundred editions of his books in English and a dozen other languages.He was educated in Australia, South Africa and the United States. He has been an intelligence officer, racing driver, advertising executive, management consultant, performing arts critic and professional gambler. His hobbies include old Bentleys, classical music (on which for fifteen years he wrote a syndicated weekly column), cycling, hill walking, cooking and wine. He designs and builds his own tube (valve) audio amplifiers.He is married to Rosalind Pain-Hayman and they have a son. They live on a hill over a salmon river in County Cork, Eire.

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CONTENTS

Book Jacket

Start Reading VANGUARD ELITE

Family Tree

Glossary

More Books by André Jute & Friends

Book Jacket

THE GREATEST CONSPIRACY THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN

STARTED WITH THE STORMING OF THE WINTER PALACE

In the beginning they were impassioned young revolutionaries risking only their own lives for justice. The prince, the soldier, and the peasant became the patriarchs of three families whose generations are enfolded in the sweep of humans and inhumans, inquisitors and victims, that tells the story of the KGB — which is the story of Russia in the Twentieth Century — from the day Lenin created it as the Cheka in the Smolny Convent: the Extraordinary Commission from the beginning and from the inside, motivated by its own imperatives of fear and fanaticism, through the murders of whole classes, the massacres of kulaks, the betrayals of friends and family, the show trials of colleagues, the psychiatric tortures of dissidents, right up to glasnost, when the fourth generation must answer the question, Was the result worth three generations of suffering and sacrifice?

An epic historical saga of three intertwined families who live and die by their love of their Russian motherland and the searing passions they arouse in each other.

VANGUARD ELITE

Book 1 of

COLD WAR, HOT PASSIONS

Wild but exciting. A grand job with plenty of irony.

New York Times

So bizarre, it’s probably all true.

London Evening News

This is an important book."

Sydney Morning Herald

Keeps up such a pace and such interest that it really satisfies.

Good Housekeeping

A masterly story that has pace, humor, tension and excitement with the bonus of truth.

The Australian

Jute has clearly conducted a great deal of research into everything he describes, investing the novel with an air of prophecy. His moral and ecological concerns are important.

Times Literary Supplement

Cold War, Hot Passions

Book 1

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VANGUARD ELITE

André Jute

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CoolMain Press

For

Roz and Charles

***

VANGUARD ELITE

Copyright © 2012, 2013 André Jute

The author has asserted his moral right

First published by

CoolMain Press 2012

www.coolmainpress.com

Editor: Sarah Dixon

Glossary: Lisa Penington

Cover Photo: Belovodchenko Anton

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

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Cold War, Hot Passions

VANGUARD ELITE

André Jute

*

Glossary

RUSSIAN / TRANSLATION

Bolshoi cheroy / ‘Big Boil’, euphemism for big shot, important personage

Bolshoi drap / Big panic (in the face of German assault in WW2

Chernozhopy / Black asses (racist epithet)

Cheka / Secret Police

Chekist / Member of the Secret Police

Dacha / Country cottage/house/second home

Ekaterinburg / Large city in Russia. Tsar and family executed here in 1918

Electromontor / Torturer (usually with electricity)

Frunze Ulitza / Street in Samara, Russia

Glasnost / Openness and transparency

Glavni protivnik / Main adversary

Gulag / Acronym for the general administration of prison camps

Kholkos / Those engaged in the construction of modern society.

Khulighanism / Hooliganism

Kolkhos / Collective farm

Komsomol / Youth organisation

Koshka-mishka / Cat and mouse, children's game

Kremlin / Official residence of Russian Government

Kulak / ‘Fist’, prosperous peasant

Matushkas / Grandmothers

MVD / Previously Cheka

Nash / One of our own

Nechevo / Nothing

Nomenclatura / The higher officials of the Soviet Union

Perestrelka / Shooting, euphemism for executions

Perestroika / The overcoming stagnation program

Petrograd / Later Leningrad/St Petersburg

Pizda / Female genitalia (perjorative)

Politburo / Political bureau of the Central Committee

Referenture / Country-specific officers-in-charge

Sluzhba / Pejorative slang term for secret police

Smert spionam / Death to Spies

Spetsnaz / Special Commandos

Stukachi / Informers

Tovarich / Comrade

Veruyushchii / Literally believers, meaning the religious

Vosdushna Desontniki Voist / Air assault forces

Dreams

Bread! Land! Peace!

V I Lenin — Slogan

1

On December 7, 1918, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, leader of the two-month old Bolshevik Government, approved the creation of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Struggle against Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, in Russian Vse-Rossiyskaya Chrezvychainaya Komissya po Borbe s Kontr-revolutiseiy i Sabottashem, soon to be known as ‘Cheka’ from the initials Ch.K. for Extraordinary Commission. Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky was appointed Chairman of the Extraordinary Commission. He would create the Cheka in his own image: saturnine, fiery-eyed and single-minded in the protection of the Revolution and the Party. The next evening, December 8, Lenin assisted Dzerzhinsky in staffing the Cheka by sending a handwritten note to the Petrograd Party Committee:

‘Please send not less than 100 persons, absolutely reliable Party members, to room No. 75, second floor—the Committee to Combat Looting. (For performance of commissar duties)

‘The matter is arch-important. The Party is responsible. Approach the districts and factories.’

A number of men were recommended by name to Dzerzhinsky by various personages in the Bolshevik inner circle, and Dzerzhinsky had a list of his own. Among those recommended to Dzerzhinsky by Lenin, by the important railmen’s leader Sergei Alliluyev, by Foreign Minister Leon Trotsky, by Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko of the Military Revolutionary Committee (which had hitherto been in charge of the functions the Cheka was created to perform), by the Party’s chief administrator Joseph Stalin, and on Dzerzhinsky’s own roster, only four names appeared in common on every list as ideal candidates for the Cheka. Ironically, one of them, who would later be known as the Last of the Old Bolsheviks, had come into the trusted inner circle only three days before the storming of the Winter Palace.

2

It was more a bedlamite antechamber to Hell than a railway station, but it exhilarated him. It was Petrograd and he was a Bolshevik. That was all that mattered. He had come to make the Revolution.

He had never been to a big city, or any city at all, but he was not frightened. Already this was his city. He wanted to linger on the step of the train, to imprint on his mind the sight and the sound of the city, if not the smell of the gangrene that rose from the limbs of the wounded soldiers laid in almost orderly rows on their pallets. But the man behind him, a peasant hung with calico bags from which wafted the maddening smell of bread no more than a week old, cursed his parentage and shoved him heavily in the small of the back. Only his youthful agility saved him from sprawling face first on the platform. Instead he landed lightly on the balls of his feet, crouching instinctively so as not to overbalance. ‘Profiteer!’ he snapped at the back of the peasant already scurrying away.

His mouth watered at the lingering smell of the bread, then he almost gagged as the smell of suppurating wounds from the soldiers on their pallets supplanted salivation. It was never this bad at the front, just the good clean smell of fresh blood, much like slaughter-day on the farm; perhaps the smell was why the authorities tried to hide the field hospitals from the fighting men. He suppressed a stab of pity for the men whimpering in pain or crying out to a nurse scurrying by in a daze, her hollow eyes bespeaking a fatigue that would haunt the rest of her life long after her mind built scar tissue over the horror of this and every other day of the war their country had lost. Lost against the stupidity of its own despotic rulers and generals and capitalists long before they lost against the Germans. This great mass of damaged humanity was not the result of a great battle today or yesterday or even the day before, for there had been none for months. No, it was the smallest visible signature of the Devil of Chaos, besporyadok, that even Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great with all their ruthlessness were unable to eradicate from the deepest recesses of the Russian soul. His grandmother whispered to him in his seamless memory that the Devil of Chaos was greater than all the other devils, even the Devil of Lust and the Devil of Greed, that it was right to fear besporyadok, the chaos of disorder, above all other disasters.

In the multitude, only a few slept. Many stared with open eyes into the mysteries of the cast-iron rafters so far above the platform that the ceiling could almost be a shadow-green Heaven. The sleepers might recover, he thought, but the staring ones were as good as dead. The great thing was never to give up hope, never to resign yourself. While you breathed, hope was alive. He suppressed the pity: it was as Lenin was supposed to have said, that things must grow worse before they could become better. That was almost peasant wisdom. A green boil hurts but it must come to a yellow head before you can squeeze it and enjoy relief.

He almost lost his footing again in the rush of soldiers for the train. They were peasants in uniform. There were also peasants out of uniform. All Russia’s peasantry, what in February he heard an officer call ‘Russia’s dark heart’, seemed to be crowding him back to that train. He could smell them even over the stale sweat left on him by carriages overheated by too many confined bodies. He struggled to stay upright, lashing out to clear space around him. When the tide receded he heard a railwayman shouting close by that the train was going nowhere, that it would be serviced before it would leave again, that nobody knew when it would go and where it would go when it left. None of those scrabbling onto the train with their elbows and fingernails paid any attention.

The tide washed around him and, gasping for breath, he noticed for the first time that more soldiers and peasants squatted on their heels among the wounded, each place marked by a heap of sunflower shells on the station floor. These were the more experienced ones, waiting for a train that would depart for somewhere further than the marshalling yards and the service sheds. Russia, he thought, was like that, an uninformed peasant squatting in an ill-fitting, scratchy uniform among the husks of spat-out ideas and promises, waiting for a train going somewhere.

Waiting. All Russia was waiting, that much he knew already; that was why he was here. But in Petrograd the suspension of life was tangible, a thing to see and reach out and touch. An opportunity. Why had no one taken it?

He looked around for soldiers or police who might want to inspect his papers. Other deserters had told him there would be none but he practiced the caution of his own peasant stock. Satisfied, he walked towards the light falling through the towering arches on his right. Outside the station he turned right, wandering without sense of direction, marveling first at the height of the buildings, then at the deliberate waste of their symmetry. He did not know the names of the classical styles but books had taught him to associate such edifices with power. Petrograd was a shining city even before dawn, despite the dirty sidewalks, unwashed windows and the roving