hurled nasty taunts at the security guards sent to control them. They
erected camps, stockpiled food, heckled and sang, and prepared to stay for the duration; the coup leaders argued more tumultuously
and drank more heavily.
Despite serious attempts to scare away the press, a small pesky army of reporters had infiltrated the mob and was broadcasting
the whole infuriating standoff via satellite, smuggling out photographs and earning Pulitzers by the carton. The whole mess
was on display, in living color for the entire globe to see.
Yeltsin adored the spotlight, and was almost giddy at having all the world as his stage. Televisions were kept on in the Kremlin
offices 24/7. The old boys were forced to sit and watch as Boris—miraculously sober for once—pranced repeatedly in front of
the cameras, calling them all has-beens and wannabe tyrants, threatening to run them out of town. That clown was thumbing
his nose and shooting the bird at them.
For an empire in which terror was oxygen, it was humiliating; worse, it was dangerous.
On the third day the old men had had enough. They ordered the tanks to move, scatter the rabble, and crush ol’ Boris. But
after three hapless protestors were mowed down, the army lost its stomach. As miscalculations go, it was a horrible one. Should’ve
sent in the ruffians from the KGB, they realized, a little sad, a little late. Need a few bones snapped, a little blood spilled,
the boys from the Lubyanka were only too happy to oblige. Soldiers, on the other hand, had no appetite for flattening their
own defenseless citizens. A handful of disgusted generals threw their support behind Yeltsin. A full stampede ensued.
The coup leaders were marched off in handcuffs, tired, defeated, disgruntled old men who had bungled their last chance. And
Yeltsin, caught in the flush of victory, sprinted to the cameras and declared a ban on the Communist Party: a bold gesture,
the last rite for a rotten old system that had run its course. The crowd roared its approval. It was also insane, and shortly
thereafter was followed by an equally shortsighted act: the complete dissolution of the Soviet Union.
With a few swipes of ink the immense empire fractured into more than a dozen different nations.
For seventy years, communism had been the ingrained order—the legal system, the governing system, the economic apparatus of
the world’s largest nation. Lazy, wonderfully corrupt, and spitefully inefficient as they were, its millions of servants and
functionaries were the veins and arteries that braided the country together. They kept it functioning. They doled out the
food and miserly paychecks, assigned housing, mismanaged the factories and farms, maintained public order, distributed goods
and services, kept the trains running. A terrible, horribly flawed system, for sure. Nonetheless, it was, at least, a system.
Yeltsin had given little serious thought to what would replace it, or them. A few vague notions about democracy and a thriving
free market rattled around his brain, nothing more. Apparently he assumed they would sprout helter-skelter from the fertile
vacuum he created.
Worse, it quickly became apparent that Yeltsin, so brilliant at blasting the system to pieces, was clueless about gluing the
wreckage back together. He was a revolutionary, a radical, a demolitionist extraordinaire. Like most of the breed, he had
no talent for what came after the big bang.
But Alex Konevitch definitely did. By this point, Alex already had built a massive construction business, a sprawling network
of brokerage houses to administer an arbitrage business that began with construction materials and swelled to the whole range
of national commodities, and a Russian exchange bank to manage the exploding finances of his hungry businesses. Amazingly,
every bit of it was accomplished under the repressive nose of the communist apparatus. Dodging the KGB and working in the
shadows,
erected camps, stockpiled food, heckled and sang, and prepared to stay for the duration; the coup leaders argued more tumultuously
and drank more heavily.
Despite serious attempts to scare away the press, a small pesky army of reporters had infiltrated the mob and was broadcasting
the whole infuriating standoff via satellite, smuggling out photographs and earning Pulitzers by the carton. The whole mess
was on display, in living color for the entire globe to see.
Yeltsin adored the spotlight, and was almost giddy at having all the world as his stage. Televisions were kept on in the Kremlin
offices 24/7. The old boys were forced to sit and watch as Boris—miraculously sober for once—pranced repeatedly in front of
the cameras, calling them all has-beens and wannabe tyrants, threatening to run them out of town. That clown was thumbing
his nose and shooting the bird at them.
For an empire in which terror was oxygen, it was humiliating; worse, it was dangerous.
On the third day the old men had had enough. They ordered the tanks to move, scatter the rabble, and crush ol’ Boris. But
after three hapless protestors were mowed down, the army lost its stomach. As miscalculations go, it was a horrible one. Should’ve
sent in the ruffians from the KGB, they realized, a little sad, a little late. Need a few bones snapped, a little blood spilled,
the boys from the Lubyanka were only too happy to oblige. Soldiers, on the other hand, had no appetite for flattening their
own defenseless citizens. A handful of disgusted generals threw their support behind Yeltsin. A full stampede ensued.
The coup leaders were marched off in handcuffs, tired, defeated, disgruntled old men who had bungled their last chance. And
Yeltsin, caught in the flush of victory, sprinted to the cameras and declared a ban on the Communist Party: a bold gesture,
the last rite for a rotten old system that had run its course. The crowd roared its approval. It was also insane, and shortly
thereafter was followed by an equally shortsighted act: the complete dissolution of the Soviet Union.
With a few swipes of ink the immense empire fractured into more than a dozen different nations.
For seventy years, communism had been the ingrained order—the legal system, the governing system, the economic apparatus of
the world’s largest nation. Lazy, wonderfully corrupt, and spitefully inefficient as they were, its millions of servants and
functionaries were the veins and arteries that braided the country together. They kept it functioning. They doled out the
food and miserly paychecks, assigned housing, mismanaged the factories and farms, maintained public order, distributed goods
and services, kept the trains running. A terrible, horribly flawed system, for sure. Nonetheless, it was, at least, a system.
Yeltsin had given little serious thought to what would replace it, or them. A few vague notions about democracy and a thriving
free market rattled around his brain, nothing more. Apparently he assumed they would sprout helter-skelter from the fertile
vacuum he created.
Worse, it quickly became apparent that Yeltsin, so brilliant at blasting the system to pieces, was clueless about gluing the
wreckage back together. He was a revolutionary, a radical, a demolitionist extraordinaire. Like most of the breed, he had
no talent for what came after the big bang.
But Alex Konevitch definitely did. By this point, Alex already had built a massive construction business, a sprawling network
of brokerage houses to administer an arbitrage business that began with construction materials and swelled to the whole range
of national commodities, and a Russian exchange bank to manage the exploding finances of his hungry businesses. Amazingly,
every bit of it was accomplished under the repressive nose of the communist apparatus. Dodging the KGB and working in the
shadows,
Similar Books
Lost in Pattaya
Kishore Modak
Tangled
Carolyn Mackler
Dark Gold
Christine Feehan
Dantes' Inferno
Sarah Lovett
Scandalous Heroes Box Set
Serenity King, Pepper Pace, Aliyah Burke, Erosa Knowles, Latrivia Nelson, Tianna Laveen, Bridget Midway, Yvette Hines
Jacqueline Susann's Shadow of the Dolls
Rae Lawrence
Beatrice and Douglas
Kelly Lucille
A Higher Form of Killing
Diana Preston
The Ugly Stepsister Strikes Back
Sariah Wilson