Soon after the meeting started, he decided it had to be Petrovsky, who kept licking his lips and nervously chain smoking those old-fashioned paprossy cigarettes, his shirt collar wilted with sweat, while Ivanenko sat there with the self-righteous smile of a club member whose dues are paid in full. The meeting dealt with the latest miserable agricultural forecasts until the old man nodded at Fyedorenko. He took a deep breath and was about to denounce Petrovsky when a horrible thought flashed across his mind, like a spark jumping across a gap. Petrovsky knew! That’s why he was so nervous! He knew what was going to happen and Ivanenko didn’t. That meant that Petrovsky’s information sources were better than Ivanenko’s. Before he exhaled his breath, Fyedorenko had revised his denunciation speech, shocking them all with his sudden vehement attack on Ivanenko. Fyedorenko never forgot the appraising glance the old man had thrown him at the end of the meeting, as the guards led Ivanenko from the Penal Chair. The old man had been a real sukin sin, all right, a son-of-a-bitch from start to finish, Fyedorenko mused.

He studied each of the ministers in turn, trying to calculate from his expression which way he would go when the crucial vote came. Just to his right sat the President of the Soviet Union, Nikolai Bulganov, a rubber-nosed old apparachik. Although he was nominally the chief of state and senior to all of them, in reality his position had become largely ceremonial. Bulganov had survived by going along and he would undoubtedly vote with the majority.

On Fyedorenko’s left was Yuri Suvarov, son of the nephew of the great field marshal, whose famous maxim, “Train hard, fight easy,” had become the watchword of the Red Army. Suvarov had a gray anonymous face made even more anonymous by the shapeless gray suits he always wore. Once Irina, Fyedorenko’s late wife, had said of Suvarov, “Put him in a field of ashes and he’d be invisible.” As Premier, Suvarov shared the top of the table with Fyedorenko and Bulganov, thereby maintaining the fiction that since the death of the old man, the Soviet Union was ruled by what the western press called “the three-man troika.”