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By early summer, after grueling personal effort, Yeltsin re-won his presidency after a runoff. But a year later he was gone. The mantle passed to the technocrat Josef Cherkassov, leader of the Russian Homeland Party, by then part of the broad Democratic Alliance.

Cherkassov seemed to have started well. He had the benign good wishes of the West and, more important, its financial credits to keep the Russian economy in some kind of shape. Heeding Western advice, he negotiated at last a peace deal with Chechnya, and although the vengeful Russians hated the idea of the Chechens getting away with their rebellion, bringing the soldiers home was popular.

But things began to go wrong within eighteen months. The causes for this were twofold: first, the depredations of the Russian mafia simply became too burdensome at last for the Russian economy to bear, and second, there was yet another foolish military adventure. In late 1997 Siberia, home of ninety percent of Russian wealth, threatened to secede.

Siberia was the least tamed of all Russia’s provinces. Yet under her permafrost, barely even exploited, were oil and gas deposits that made even Saudi Arabia look deprived. Added to that were gold, diamonds, bauxite, manganese, tungsten, nickel, and platinum. By the late nineties, Siberia was still the last frontier on the planet.

The problem began with reports reaching Moscow that some Japanese but mainly South Korean underworld emissaries were circulating in Siberia urging secession. President Cherkassov, ill-advised by his circle of sycophants and seemingly oblivious of his own predecessor’s mistakes in Chechnya, sent the army east. The move provoked a double catastrophe. After twelve months without a military solution he had to negotiate a deal granting the Siberians far more autonomy and control over the proceeds of their own wealth than they had ever had. Second, the adventure triggered hyperinflation.

The government tried to print its way out of trouble. By the summer of 1999 the days of five thousand rubles to the dollar of the mid-nineties were a memory. The wheat crop from the black earth country of the Kuban had failed twice, in 1997 and 1998, and the crop from Siberia was delayed until it rotted because the partisans blew away the railroad tracks. In the cities bread prices spiraled. President Cherkassov clung to office but was clearly no longer in power.

In the countryside, which should at the least have been growing enough food to feed itself, the conditions were at their worst. Underfunded, undermanned, their infrastructure collapsing, the farms stood idle, their rich soil producing weeds. Trains stopping at wayside halts were besieged by peasants, mainly elderly, offering furniture, clothes, and bric-a-brac to the carriage windows for money or, even better, food. There were few takers.

In Moscow, the capital and showcase of the nation, the destitute slept out on the quays along the Moskva and in the back alleys. The police—called the militia in Russia—having virtually abandoned the struggle against crime, tried to pick them up and hustle them onto trains heading back where they came from. But more kept arriving, seeking work, food, relief. Many of them would be reduced to begging and dying on the streets of Moscow.

In the early spring of 1999 the West finally gave up pouring subsidies into the bottomless pit, and the foreign investors, even those in partnership with the mafia, pulled out. The Russian economy, like a war refugee raped too many times, lay down by the side of the road and died of despair.

This was the gloomy prospect that President Cherkassov contemplated as he drove that hot summer’s day out to his weekend retreat.

The driver knew the road to the country dacha, out beyond Usovo on the banks of the Moskva River, where the air was cooler under the trees. Years ago the fat cats of the Soviet Politburo had had their dachas in the woods along this bend of the river. Much had changed in Russia, but not that much.

Traffic was light because gasoline was expensive and the trucks they passed belched great plumes of pure black smoke. After Archangelskoye they crossed the bridge and turned along the road beside the river, which flowed quietly in the summer haze toward the city behind them.

Five minutes later President Cherkassov felt himself to be short of breath. Although the air conditioning was at full blast he pushed the button to open the rear window next to his face and let nature’s air blow over him. It was hotter, and made his breathing little better. Behind the partition screen neither driver nor bodyguard had noticed. The turnoff to Peredelkino came up on the right. As they passed it, the president of Russia leaned to his left and fell sideways across his seat.

The first thing the driver noticed was that the president’s head had disappeared from his rearview mirror. He muttered something to the bodyguard, who turned his torso around to look. In a second the Mercedes slewed into the side of the road.

Behind, the Chaika did the same. The head of the security detail, a former colonel of Spetsnaz, leaped from the front passenger seat and ran forward. Others came out from their seats, guns drawn, and formed a protective ring. They did not know what had happened.

The colonel reached the Mercedes, where the bodyguard had the rear door open and was leaning in. The colonel yanked him backward to see better. The president was half on his back, half on his side, both hands clutching at his chest, eyes closed, breathing in short grunts.

The nearest hospital with top-of-the-line intensive care facilities was the Number One State Clinic miles away in the Sparrow Hills. The colonel got into the rear seat beside the stricken Cherkassov and ordered the driver to hang a U-turn and head back for the Orbital Beltway. White-faced, the driver did so. From his portable phone the colonel raised the clinic and ordered an ambulance to meet them halfway.

The rendezvous was half an hour later in the middle of the divided highway. Paramedics transferred the unconscious man from the limousine to the ambulance and went to work as the three-vehicle convoy raced to the clinic.

Once there the president came under the care of the senior cardiac specialist on duty and was rushed to the ICU. They used what they had, the latest and the best, but they were still too late. The line across the screen of the monitor refused to budge, maintaining a long straight line and a high-pitched buzz. At ten minutes past four the senior physician straightened up and shook his head. The man with the defibrillator stood back.

The colonel punched some numbers into his mobile phone. Someone answered at the third ring. The colonel said: “Get me the office of the prime minister.”

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SIX hours later far out on the rolling surface of the Caribbean, the
Foxy Lady
turned for home. Down on the afterdeck Julius the boatman hauled in the lines, detached the wire traces and stowed the rods It had been a fill-day charter and a good one.

While Julius wound the traces and their brilliant plastic lures into neat circles for storing in the tackle box the American couple popped a couple of cans of beer and sat contentedly under the awning to slake their thirst.

In the fish locker were two huge wahoo close to forty pounds each and half a dozen big dorado that a few hours earlier had been lurking under a weed patch ten miles away.

The skipper on the upper bridge checked his course for the islands and eased the throttles forward from trolling speed to fast cruise. He reckoned he would be sliding into Turtle Cove in less than an hour.

The
Foxy Lady
seemed to know her work was almost over and her berth in the sheltered harbor up the quay from the Tiki Hut was waiting for her. She tucked in her tail, lifted her nose, and the deep-V hull began to slice through the blue water. Julius dunked a bucket in the passing water and sluiced the afterdeck yet again.

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WHEN Zhirinovsky had been leader of the Liberal Democrats the party headquarters were in a shabby slum of a building in Fish Alley, just off Sretenka Street. Visitors not aware of the strange ways of Vlad the Mad had been amazed to discover how tawdry it was. The plaster peeling, the windows displaying two flyblown posters of the demagogue, the place had not seen a wet mop in a decade. Inside the chipped black door, visitors found a gloomy lobby with a booth selling T-shirts with the leader’s portrait on the front and racks of the requisite black leather jackets worn by his supporters.

Up the uncarpeted stairs, clothed in gloomy brown paint, was the first half-landing, with a grilled window where a surly guard asked the caller’s business. Only if this was satisfactory could he then ascend to the tacky rooms above where Zhirinovsky held court when he was in town. Hard rock boomed throughout the building. This was the way the eccentric fascist had preferred to keep the headquarters, on the grounds that the image spoke of a man of the people rather than one of the fat cats. But Zhirinovsky was long gone now, and the Liberal Democratic Party had been amalgamated with the other ultra-right and neo-fascist parties into the Union of Patriotic Forces.

Its undisputed leader was Igor Komarov, and he was a completely different kind of man. Nevertheless, seeing the basic logic of showing the poor and dispossessed whose votes he sought that the Union of Patriotic Forces permitted itself no expensive indulgences, he kept the Fish Alley building, but maintained his own private offices elsewhere.

Trained as an engineer, Komarov had worked under Communism but not for it, until halfway through the Yeltsin period he had decided to enter politics. He had chosen the Liberal Democratic Party, and though he privately despised Zhirinovsky for his drunken excesses and constant sexual innuendo, his quiet work in the background had brought him to the Politburo, the inner council of the party. From here, in a series of covert meetings with leaders of other ultra-right parties, he had stitched together the alliance of all the right-wing elements in Russia into the UPF. Presented with an accomplished fact, Zhirinovsky grudgingly accepted its existence and fell into the trap of chairing its first plenum.

The plenum passed a resolution requiring his resignation and ditched him. Komarov declined to take the leadership but ensured that it went to a nonentity, a man with no charisma and little organizational talent. A year later it was easy to play upon the sense of disappointment in the Union’s governing council, ease out the stopgap, and take the leadership himself. The career of Vladimir Zhirinovsky had ended.

Within two years after the 1996 elections the crypto-Communists began to fade. Their supporters had always been predominantly middle-aged and elderly and they had trouble raising funds. Without big-banker support the membership fees were no longer enough. The Socialist Union’s money and its appeal dwindled.

By 1998 Komarov was undisputed leader of the ultra-right and in prime position to play upon the growing despair of the Russian people, of which there was plenty.

Yet along with all this poverty and destitution there was also ostentatious wealth to make the eyes blink. Those who had money had mountains of it, much of it in foreign currency. They swept through the streets in long stretch limousines, American or German, for the Zil factory had gone out of production, often accompanied by motorcycle outriders to clear a path and usually with a second car of bodyguards racing along behind.

In the lobby of the Bolshoi, in the bars and banquet halls of the Metropol and the National, they could be seen each evening, accompanied by their hookers trailing sable, mink, the aroma of Parisian scent, and glittering with diamonds. These were the fat cats, fatter than ever.

In the Duma the delegates shouted and waved order papers and passed resolutions. “It reminds me,” said an English foreign correspondent, “of all I ever heard of the last days of the Weimar Republic.”

The one man who seemed to offer a possible ray of hope was Igor Komarov.

In the two years since he had taken power in the party of the right, Komarov had surprised most observers, both inside and outside Russia. If he had been content to remain simply a superb political organizer, he would have been just another apparatchik. But he changed. Or so observers thought. More probably he had a talent he had been content to keep hidden.

Komarov made his mark as a passionate and charismatic popular orator. When he was on the podium those who recalled the quiet, soft-spoken, fastidious private man were amazed. He seemed transformed. His voice increased and deepened to a rolling baritone, using all the many expressions and inflections of the Russian language to great effect. He could drop his tone almost to a whisper so that even with microphones the audience had to strain to catch the words, then rise to a ringing peroration that brought the crowds to their feet and had even the skeptics cheering.

He quickly mastered the area of his own specialty, the living crowd. He avoided the televised fireside chat or television interview, aware that though these might work in the West, they were not for Russia. Russians rarely invited people into their homes, let alone the entire nation.

Nor was he interested in being trapped by hostile questions. Every speech he made was stage-managed, but the technique worked. He addressed only rallies of the party faithful, with the cameras under the control of his own filmmaking team commanded by the brilliant young director Litvinov. Cut and edited, these films were released for nationwide television viewing on his own terms, to be aired complete and unabridged. This he could achieve by buying TV time instead of relying upon the vagaries of newscasters.

His theme was always the same and always popular—Russia, Russia, and again Russia. He inveighed against the foreigners whose international conspiracies had brought Russia to her knees. He clamored for the expulsion of all the “blacks,” the popular Russian way of referring to Armenians, Georgians, Azeris, and others from the south, many of whom were known to be among the richest of the criminal profiteers. He cried out for justice for the poor downtrodden Russian people who would one day rise with him to restore the glories of the past and sweep away the filth that clogged the streets of the motherland.

He promised all things to all men. For the out-of-work there would be employment a fair day’s wage for a good day’s work, with food on the table and dignity again. For those with obliterated life savings there would be honest currency again and something to put by for a comfortable old age For those who wore the uniform of the Rodina, the ancient motherland, there would be pride again to wipe out the humiliations visited upon them by cravens elevated to high office by foreign capital.