December (26 page)

Grigory quickly slid into his chair at the mixing desk in the dimly lit director’s gallery overlooking Studio 2 and put his headset on. The team around him were right in the middle of the final preparations for Roman’s broadcast.

The room hummed with activity and with terse instructions going back and forth from controllers to technicians in Studio 2 and in the production rooms of all the different TV and radio stations on the five floors of the tower.

Assistants darted behind the line of controllers sitting at the long mixing desk. It was covered in dials and sliders, and in front of it was a bank of screens showing all the different shots from the studio cameras and from the five camera crews spread out around Moscow, ready to catch the public’s reaction to the speech.

Next to Grigory was Ilya Witte, who would be directing the cameras on the actual live show. He was busy moving the two joysticks in front of him for the remote-controlled cameras they had set up in Studio 2, checking that they all moved correctly and that he would get the shots he wanted. Further along from him the sound engineer was talking to the technician on the studio floor as he fitted Roman and Lara’s mikes and tested them. Grigory glanced through the window under the bank of screens and could see them now
standing at the front of the studio, looking tense. The floor manager was bustling around them checking his clipboard and directing people. In his headset Grigory could hear Ilya calmly counting back to everyone: ‘On air in one minute.’

The vision mixer next to him was running through the graphics package they had made to front the programme. It had to be eye-catching but also authoritative. After many changes, he was finally happy with it and now had his finger over the play button, ready for when the presenters of the morning TV shows cut off their usual performances and handed over to him.

All eleven terrestrial stations and the seventeen satellite channels that broadcast from the Ostankino tower would carry the programme live, and further along the desk the sound engineer was checking his connections to the twelve radio stations that also transmitted from there.

Grigory quickly brought the microphone on his headset down to his mouth and punched in the dial numbers to Captain Lev Darensky’s mobile in the 568th barracks, twenty miles north of him. They had spoken earlier that day and Darensky had been briefed to get the regiment into the canteen and get the TV turned up loud.

Those soldiers were the key to the whole revolution. If they didn’t come out in support and bring their tanks down to defend the tower then it was open to a counterattack from Krymov. The one big advantage they had over the President was control of the airwaves, but if they lost the tower, then they lost that, and the revolution would be finished.

Darensky’s voice sounded nervous as he answered his mobile. ‘Grigory?’

‘Yeah, it’s me. We’re on in one minute. Are your guys watching?’

‘Yes, they’re all here.’ Darensky sounded nervous. ‘I told them there was an important announcement this morning.’

‘Good, well, there certainly will be! Good luck!’

Grigory hung up and punched in another speed dial to Gerry Kramer, the newsdesk editor at CNN in Moscow. They were old friends but he hadn’t said anything to him about the coup yet.

‘Hey, buddy?’ The American sounded as chipper as ever.

‘Gerry, whatever you’re showing now, stop it, get a translator on line and take this feed from me.’

‘Say what?’

Grigory paused; he couldn’t believe he was actually going to say this. ‘There’s going to be a revolution.’

There was silence on the other end.

‘I’ll take it.’

Grigory hit the button and then dialled his counterparts at BBC World News, France 24 and Al Jazeera.

Ilya continued his countback to the floor manager standing in front of Lara: ‘Forty seconds to on air.’

She was standing on a dais at the front of the studio in the full glare of the lights. A large crowd stood around in front of her, waiting to play their part.

Studio 2 was the biggest the station had, and the back wall of it was double-height plate glass that followed the curve of the outside of the tower. They had decided that it was important to be able to show people that Roman really was out of prison and back in Moscow, broadcasting live from Ostankino, and that the best way of doing this was with a huge panoramic view of the city behind him. A thin dawn light was filtering through the snow clouds now, but the floodlights on the cathedrals and landmarks were still on and anyone could see that it was the capital.

The sound technician finished clipping the talkback earpiece onto her collar and then quickly stood back to see that the wire behind her ear didn’t show. He did one more check on the radio mike and handed it to her.

Lara was glad she had something to clutch onto. She felt sick with fear about Sergey, knowing that in doing what she was about to do right now she would be contributing to his death. Half of her wanted to just run off stage, burst into tears and switch off the whole of the world.

The other half of her knew that she had to do this
for
Sergey. It was his whole vision of
Russkaya dusha
—insanely maddening as she found it—that had propelled her to love him so much in the first place. This broadcast for her then would be both an ode of love and a funeral oration in one.

She quickly smoothed the jacket of her blue skirt suit down. She wasn’t used to looking so formal and felt constrained by it. The jacket felt tight across her shoulders, but she had decided after discussion with Grigory that she needed to try to look more authoritative than she usually did.

She smiled nervously at Roman across the studio from her and he nodded calmly back. He was standing behind a podium in his dark suit and tie, smoothing the pages of his speech in front of him and gathering himself for his big moment. He flexed his shoulders and thought about all the other spotlight occasions he had been in, the big international matches when he had been the centre of attention and about to play his heart out on the pitch. The fear he felt now was just the same, he just had to make it work for him. He ran through his first lines in his head again and then cleared his mind and waited for Lara’s handover.

On the lectern in front of him was the Russian emblem of state, the double-headed eagle. Two Russian tricolour flags stood behind him, furled on poles, just as if he were a pres
ident making an important announcement. They had all agreed that Russians were conservative people who respected strong authority so the whole tone of the broadcast had to be sombre and dignified.

The only radical touch was the new flag they had constructed that was stretched out fully between the two Russian tricolours. It was light blue with a black double-headed eagle in the middle of it; Roman would explain its significance later.

‘Thirty seconds to on air.’

Lara shielded her eyes against the lights and looked in front of her at the crowd of three hundred United Civil Opposition supporters, who had been summoned by a simple email network. It was important to give the impression of popular support at the beginning to get the whole revolution moving.

‘Twenty seconds to on air.’

‘Cut from other channels. Run graphics.’ Ilya’s voice sounded calm and reassuring in her ear.

Everywhere across Moscow and the whole of Russia now people looked at their TV and radio sets in astonishment as their usual news, music, lifestyle, business and shopping channels all suddenly cut off and handed over to her feed, the graphics package ran and a voice announced: ‘Good morning, Russia and welcome to a new day.’

Lara now knew that she had the attention of the best part of one hundred and forty million people in Russia and that all the main international news channels were also carrying her broadcast live.

In the conference room on the floor below, Alex and the rest of the team sat hunched around a TV mounted on the wall as the baffled presenter on the BBC News channel responded to the shouting of her director in her ear and
handed over to Lara’s feed. ‘We’ve got news of something big coming in now from Moscow…’

‘Ten seconds to on air.’

Lara felt sick and weak.

How could she do this? Her body was about to snap and shatter into a thousand pieces right there on air as the tension built up in her.

The floor manager in front of her was holding up the five fingers of his right hand next to the remote camera with the red light on and her autocue rolling up over it.

He counted out loud, ‘Seven, six,’ and then cut off to allow silence before her cue from the gallery; she watched each of his fingers fold into the palm of his hand. It made a fist and then his index finger shot out and pointed at her.

She remembered the feel of Sergey’s words in her ear when they were together—as soft as snowflakes falling on water—and she suddenly felt beautiful.

She took a deep breath, pulled herself up and looked straight at the camera, her wide blue eyes positive and smiling. ‘Good morning, Russia and welcome to a new day.’

Sergey tried to avoid anyone’s gaze as the Line 9 train ground into Chekovskaya station.

He was standing hunched in the corner of the carriage with his back to it and his head stuck in a copy of a free newspaper he had picked off the floor. At least his scruffy coat made him anonymous from behind.

Fyodor’s uniform was a lot more obvious so he was sitting on the shelf seat, wedged right in the corner, with Sergey standing in front of him. They were both terrified of being stopped by a guard or policeman.

The other passengers, though, were not paying any attention. For them it was just another Tuesday morning journey to work. Things weren’t great at the moment: inflation eating away at their wages, and the petrol rationing was just ridiculous. No one could believe it when it was introduced; the state control of media had been so tight up to the point that foreign oil company staff were withdrawn and the refineries stopped working, that it came as a complete surprise. OMON riot police had then harshly suppressed the protests, but enough word of them had got out onto the street for that to add to the disillusionment with the government. People were beginning to realise the value of what they had given up in the good economic times under Putin when he had
stripped away constitutional freedoms. Now that times were hard they had no choice but to obey a government that they despised.

They were a mixed crowd: businessmen, shop workers, students and a few tourists; all in various stages of early morning daze, thinking about what they had to do today or trying not to.

Svetlana Glazkova was an intense, nineteen-year-old student of political science at Moscow University, heading off for a lecture. She was a news junkie, had her earphones on and was watching the internet broadcasts on a portable DVD player that her parents had brought her.

When her usual programme was interrupted and cut through to the intro graphics from Ostankino, she frowned and tapped the small unit. It stayed on channel and then Lara Maslova came on.

What’s
she
doing?

Lara might be the people’s favourite, but Svetlana didn’t regard her as a serious newscaster.

She was announcing a big new day for Russia. A new government was coming? What the hell was she talking about?

Roman Raskolnikov had been freed from prison and was back in Moscow!

This was serious.

Svetlana realised that something very big was going on and that she had to share it. She jumped up, ripped her headset out of the jack and turned the volume on the small speakers up to maximum.

‘Hey, what are you doing?’ the old lady next to her asked. ‘That’s too loud!’

‘Everybody, shut up!’ Svetlana yelled down the carriage.

People looked up from their newspapers and conversations.

‘Raskolnikov has been freed from prison and is back in Moscow—he’s about to do a live broadcast. Just listen!’

She ran into the middle of the carriage and held the TV up for people to see.

‘Raskolnikov?’ A murmur went up and down the carriage and people gathered round the TV.

Sergey and Fyodor cringed in their corner, while trying to listen at the same time.

Lara kept her intro short, her delivery was modest and to the point. In the gallery, Grigory couldn’t help a moment of professional awareness of the added impact that this would have on ordinary people who were used to her being a lot more bubbly.

They cut to a brief underlay, where she did the voiceover as the screen showed highlights of Roman’s sporting career: all his amazing goals, him lifting trophies in front of cheering crowds and of course the ‘Our last hope!’ moment against Germany.

‘And, so, ladies and gentlemen, in this Time of Troubles, a new saviour has flown in to be with us this morning. Will you please welcome…Roman Raskolnikov!’

Ilya cut the cameras over to Roman as the crowd of supporters in front of him cheered and waved their blue flags. Grigory nodded to Ilya from down the control desk. It really did look like a rally for an established political party.

Roman was famous for his tell-it-like-it-is style, so he didn’t go for flights of rhetoric. The very fact that he was standing in front of people was enough of a shock for them. His face told his story as much as any words could: people could see what two years in the camps must have been like from his weight loss and the frostbite burns on his cheekbones.

He outlined the problems that the country was facing
first, putting forward a lot of facts that the government had suppressed about how and why things had gone so badly wrong, how the
siloviki
control of companies had ruined their competitiveness and driven out foreign investment. Then he turned to the loss of political freedom that people were only now beginning to regret.

He began his finale, and became more high-flown. ‘The last Tsarina once said “Russia loves and needs the feel of the whip”, and we must address this addiction to authoritarianism in our nature.’

There were some shouts of agreement from the audience at this.

‘We must address our paranoia about foreign enemies that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I tell you now that our greatest threats are not external but internal! I am standing here before you now, a prisoner just freed from our country’s most shameful secret, the new Gulag system that the government has hidden from you. I worked there as a slave under that Russian whip, but now I am free, and I have to ask you today to face up to a question about the nature of our beloved Motherland!’

He paused and looked long and hard at the camera in front of him.

‘And we must face this question,’ he pronounced each of the next words slowly, ‘is Russia a slave country?’

There were shouts of ‘No!’ from the crowd.

‘Then if she is not a slave country, she must be prepared to stand up for her freedom. For too long we have had governments that have not matched the spirit of the Russian people. Governments that have lied to us, cheated us and oppressed us!’

The crowd was wild now, shouting, waving their flags and cheering.

Roman’s earnest face filled the screens across the country as he shouted, ‘Is the Russian soul a slave soul?’ He banged the podium insistently. ‘No! No! No! It’s a
free
soul! So I call on you now to demonstrate on the streets! I announce to you now a new Revolution! I want you to join the Blue Revolution!’ He pointed a finger at the stunned viewers across the country. ‘We have chosen this colour from our national flag.’ He turned, grabbed the corner of one of the furled tricolours and pulled it out so he could point dramatically at the different colours. ‘Not for us the Communist Reds or the Tsarist Whites! Not to be the left, not to be the right, but to be the centre of the flag!’

He gripped the central blue stripe and held it up over his head.

‘To be the voice of the ordinary, decent people of Russia, who for too long have been caught up by the whims of the extremes. I call on you now to come out onto the streets and let us make a peaceful protest on a scale that this terrible government cannot ignore! The people’s will cannot be ignored. Let us express our souls! Let us be free!’