Empire

By Andre Jute

EMPIRE
Book 6 of the 75-Year Saga

Cold War, Hot Passions

by André Jute

On Christmas Eve 1968 Yuri Andropov, soon to be Chairman of the KGB, returns home unexpectedly to discover an orgiastic party thrown by his son. In his own bed Andropov finds Babe Bibikov and Nadia Kerensky. Andropov calls for the files of his son’s friends...

These grandchildren of revolutionary heroes are high-flying students at the prestigious Institute of International Relations. Piotr, an old-style hardliner who believes that the glorious aims of Lenin’s revolution justifies any means, however base, is sponsored by the KGB and, even more sinisterly, by Marshal Kurusov of the Politburo. But Babe and Vladimir, even as students, are starting to grasp that communism has failed Russia.

Babe, Vladimir and Piotr all join the KGB. Vladimir shortly becomes an aide to Andropov and marries Nina. Babe distinguishes himself in Egypt and meets the CIA agent Hubbell Adams, whom he does not report to his superiors. His marriage to the supremely beautiful but selfish Nadia is strained by his questioning attitude which threatens their good life. On a boar hunt with grandfather Nikolai and Brezhnev, Sergei Kurusov and Andropov recruit Babe and Vladimir for a mysterious plan to regenerate Russia. Meanwhile Piotr is rising through the ranks of the spetsnaz, the most thuggish and loyal of Russia’s special forces.

Babe betrays Soviet machinations in Egypt to the Americans and in July 1971 defects to the US. Nadia returns to Moscow and becomes a ‘swallow’, using her body to extract secrets from diplomats. In the US, Babe is incarcerated in solitary confinement by the brutal CIA man Conrad Drexler (one of Nadia’s lovers).

EMPIRE
is Book 6 of Cold War, Hot Passions

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andre Jute
• Release date: Nov 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310259685

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.

Book preview

CONTENTS

Dustjacket Text

Title Page

Family Tree

Start Reading EMPIRE

Dedication, About the Author, & Copyright

More books by André Jute & friends

EMPIRE

Book 6 of the 75-Year Saga

Cold War, Hot Passions

by André Jute

On Christmas Eve 1968 Yuri Andropov, soon to be Chairman of the KGB, returns home unexpectedly to discover an orgiastic party thrown by his son. In his own bed Andropov finds Babe Bibikov and Nadia Kerensky. Andropov calls for the files of his son’s friends…

These grandchildren of revolutionary heroes are high-flying students at the prestigious Institute of International Relations. Piotr, an old-style hardliner who believes that the glorious aims of Lenin’s revolution justifies any means, however base, is sponsored by the KGB and, even more sinisterly, by Marshal Kurusov of the Politburo. But Babe and Vladimir, even as students, are starting to grasp that communism has failed Russia.

Babe, Vladimir and Piotr all join the KGB. Vladimir shortly becomes an aide to Andropov and marries Nina. Babe distinguishes himself in Egypt and meets the CIA agent Hubbell Adams, whom he does not report to his superiors. His marriage to the supremely beautiful but selfish Nadia is strained by his questioning attitude which threatens their good life. On a boar hunt with grandfather Nikolai and Brezhnev, Sergei Kurusov and Andropov recruit Babe and Vladimir for a mysterious plan to regenerate Russia. Meanwhile Piotr is rising through the ranks of the spetsnaz, the most thuggish and loyal of Russia’s special forces.

Babe betrays Soviet machinations in Egypt to the Americans and in July 1971 defects to the US. Nadia returns to Moscow and becomes a ‘swallow’, using her body to extract secrets from diplomats. In the US, Babe is incarcerated in solitary confinement by the brutal CIA man Conrad Drexler (one of Nadia’s lovers).

EMPIRE

is Book 6 of Cold War, Hot Passions

What the critics said

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

EMPIRE

Cold War, Hot Passions

Book 6

*

André Jute

*

CoolMain Press

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Empire

The Russian is a delightful person till he tucks in his shirt. As an Oriental, he is charming. It is only when he insists on being treated as the most easterly of western peoples instead of the most westerly of easterns that he becomes difficult to handle.

Rudyard Kipling

Scratch a Russian, and you will find a Tartar.

Napoleon Bonaparte

1

On Babe’s twelfth birthday Nikolai took his grandson into the woods and explained to him the facts of Soviet life which would order his future. ‘Our society is controlled by a small group of men. You can achieve a worthwhile life only by becoming a member of that group. It is not enough to be on the perimeter. You must gain the inner circle—and that is not easy. But it can be done with hard work and study. If you will work and study, I will give you anything, buy you anything you want.’

Babe looked up at his grandfather. The old man was usually lively and fun to be with, full of stories, games, suggestions for outings and jokes pitched exactly at Babe’s understanding. Today he was in absolute earnest.

Though the expression of such concepts was new, the ideas themselves were not. In that instant he deduced their shape from his earlier life. His parents, Timofey and Varvara, by example and guidance daily imbued him with the values and aims of their class: the acquisition and preservation of privilege, possessions and status. His choice of playmates was supervised from the beginning. The children of doctors, engineers and workers were not acceptable; those of Party officials, KGB officers and senior bureaucrats were. When meeting new children the first question was invariably, ‘Who is your father?’ The next subject to investigate was their possession of foreign goods, the ultimate status symbol. Many years later Babe was staggered when he first discovered that Western foreign services did not regard their couriers, keepers of their secrets and men who travelled backwards and forwards far more frequently than the diplomats themselves, with the same near-reverence they are accorded in the Soviet Union. His father was a courier for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He carried a diplomatic passport, attracted a multitude of highly placed friends, and enjoyed constant access to dollars and Western goods. Some dollars he sold in Moscow for a fortune in rubles. With the dollars he kept the family bought Western goods cheaply at the restricted hard-currency stores. Timofey paid for favors by gifts of foreign products. Once Babe went with his father to have his IBM tape recorder repaired by the technicians in the KGB laboratory at the back of an old house on Sadovsky Koltso. Timofey rewarded the technicians with a Parker pen or a Ronson cigarette lighter each. In their spacious apartment near the American embassy virtually everything came from abroad: the furniture from Scandinavia, the refrigerator from Finland, the vacuum cleaner a Hoover from America, the stereo player a Philips, the television an RCA, the shortwave radio a Grundig, the shower head from Sears, Roebuck. The first coffee Babe tasted was Nescafé, his first cigarette a Winston, his first whisky White Horse. His best suit came from J. Press in New York and his father promised him a tweed jacket from the English Shop in Copenhagen as soon as he stopped growing so fast. Babe’s collection of over five hundred American records—Glenn Miller, Stan Kenton, Canonball Adderley, Frank Sinatra, Dave Brubeck, Peggy Lee—was itself worth a fortune.

Babe, twelve, understood what his grandfather meant.

Babe nodded. Nikolai extended his hand and Babe shook it solemnly to seal their bargain.

‘As you make your way upward,’ Nikolai continued as they walked deeper into the woods, ‘you will see with young eyes cruelties and injustices. You cannot change them. It is futile to worry about what you cannot change. Once you are secure with money and position, you will learn to close your eyes and live your own life.’

His family in solemn conclave concluded that the surest route to the inner circle ran through the Institute of International Relations. It was almost exclusively the preserve of the New Class but even so there were only six hundred places annually for nine thousand applicants with the right family credentials. Babe’s family planned a schedule to ensure his entry that consumed his adolescence. Athletic accomplishments counted, so he swam, boxed, wrestled, played tennis, won third place in the Moscow rowing championships, and became the junior national pole vault champion. To set him apart from the other applicants, he took private instruction in German and playing the piano. Khrushchev decreed that university applicants with work experience should receive preference over those with none, so his father arranged through a friend that Babe should have a job at a high-school physics laboratory while continuing his schooling through night classes. The work hours were from eight in the morning to five in the afternoon but Babe never swept a single floor: in the mornings he did his homework and in the afternoons he practiced for his myriad sporting engagements. The Institute required that all candidates bring a written endorsement from Komsomol. Babe was a member of Komsomol, of course, but regarded it as a plebeian absurdity. He paid his dues to keep his card up to date but he would not be seen dead at a Komsomol meeting. His father telephoned a friend of a friend who was Komsomol chairman of the Moscow District. There was some discussion of a portable RCA television Timofey could and would bring back from the United States. The testimonial from the Komsomol chairman described Babe as the ideal Communist youth, cast in the Lenin mold.

There were five entrance examinations. The first was a political essay, graded subjectively in order to eliminate all female applicants except the daughters of the very highest Party officials. Girls so excluded, if talented, were sent to the Institute of Eastern Languages or, if pretty, to the MFA school for typists and stenographers—which is what most of them intended from the beginning, because from there they would be going overseas to be placed constantly in the company of the cream of marriageable young men, without the tiresome mental exertions demanded by an Institute whose standards were the highest in the Soviet Union. The next exam was a standard test in geography supplemented by a set of arbitrarily chosen questions; the difficult questions were used to weed out applicants of insufficient family background. The rest of the examinations were truly competitive and scored objectively. When Babe scored twenty-four out of a possible twenty-five points for the five examinations his family celebrated for an entire weekend.

Even prepared as he was, Babe was aware that by virtue of admission to the Institute he entered an exalted caste everyone knew as the source of future oligarchs. He noticed that adults deferred to him. His friend Lydia told him that even students from other privileged schools envied them. It was soon clear that girls looked upon marriage to one of them as an open sesame to a life of affluence and security. But even at the peak of privilege among their age group there were highly refined strata of snobbery. At the bottom of the pile were the few youths accepted for show or because they were assigned to the school by the KGB. They were paid forty rubles a month—less than Babe spent on taxis to and from school in a month so that he would not have to use the Metro—and so willingly became informers in return for KGB patronage. The rest were fixed in the firmament by the positions of their fathers in the oligarchy. When Dmitri Tarabrin’s father was ousted from the American Department of the KGB, Babe noticed that this brilliant and popular student no longer turned up at parties. When Dmitri appeared in Russian clothes rather than the American gear he always wore before, his ostracism was perfect.

Igor Andropov owned the school. His father, Yuri Andropov, was the star of the MFA, the man the Politburo sent to keep troublemakers in order in places like Hungary. Vladimir Kerensky’s father was the iron-fisted hero who went with Andropov to maintain hegemony, and Babe’s grandfather, as the senior general on secondment to the Central Committee, was General Kerensky’s boss. By extension Vladimir and Babe were next in the pecking order to Igor. When Igor returned from an extended holiday in Hungary, professors administered private tests in the Andropov apartment.

The only exception to the social gradation was Piotr Rusanin, who was assigned to the Institute by the KGB. But he was not really an exception, because he attracted the patronage of Sergei Kurusov. None of the students knew precisely who Sergei Kurusov was, except that even mention of his name inspired fear in their fathers. Babe and Vladimir Kerensky were drawn closer together because Kurusov was the friend of their families: their fathers did not fear him. They heard that Kurusov called several fathers and explained that Piotr Rusanin was an exceptional boy who would go far. The fathers told the sons and the sons tried hard to be friendly but Piotr was uncompromisingly ungracious.

There were a few courses of explicit political indoctrination but the rest of the curriculum was free of propaganda and the instruction was outstanding; Babe would later discover that there are very few places in the world, regardless of reputation or tuition charged, where an education of such quality can be obtained, especially in languages, area studies and military intelligence. The semi-military atmosphere he took for granted because all the best schools were suffused with it. In retrospect he would admire the subtle way discipline was enforced by the KGB officers on the faculty. Students worked hard but Babe, accustomed to hard work, found it easy to keep ahead of the pack.

Babe made no friends outside the Institute, he shopped in special stores closed to the common citizens, vacationed at state spas not open to the public, dined at restaurants only foreigners and oligarchs could afford, and took taxis rather then mingle with the common herd