The sum of all fears - Tom Clancy [203]
Union of Sovereign Soviet Republics, he thought. Though the official name-change had not yet been approved, that was how his people were starting to think. That's the problem.
The ship of state was breaking up. There was no precedent for it. The dissolution of the British Empire was the example that many liked to use, but that wasn't quite right, was it? Nor was any other example. The Soviet Union of old had been a unique political creation. What was now happening in the Soviet Union was also entirely without precedent. What had once been exhilarating to him was now more than frightening. He was the one who had to make the hard decisions, and he had no historical model to follow. He was completely on his own, as alone as any man had ever been, with a task larger than any man had ever faced. Lauded in the West as a consummate political tactician, he thought of it himself as an endless succession of crises. Wasn't it Gladstone? he thought. Wasn't it he who described his job as being the man on a raft in the rapids, fending off rocks with a pole ? How apt, how apt indeed. Narmonov and his country were being swept along by overwhelming forces of history, somewhere down that river was an immense cataract, a falls that could destroy everything but he was too busy with the pole and the rocks to look so far ahead. That was what being a political tactician meant. He devoted all his creative energy to day-to-day survival, and was losing sight of the next week even the day after tomorrow
"Andrey Il'ych, you are growing thin," Oleg Kirilovich Kadishev observed from his leather seat.
"The walking is good for my heart," the President replied wryly.
"Then perhaps you will join our Olympic team?" Narmonov stopped for a moment. "It would be nice indeed to compete merely against foreigners. They think I am brilliant. Alas, our own people know better."
"What can I do to help my president?"
"I need your help, the help of those on the right." It was Kadishev's turn to smile. The press - Western as well as Soviet - never got that straight. The LEFT wing in the Soviet Union was that of the Communist hard-liners. For over eighty years reform in that country had always come from the right. All the men executed by Stalin for wanting to allow the merest bit of personal freedom had always been denounced as Right-Deviationists. But self-styled progressives in the West were always on the political left, and they called their reactionary enemies 'conservatives' and generally identified them as being on the political RIGHT. It seemed too great a stretch of imagination for Western journalists to adjust their ideological polarity to a different political reality. The newly-liberated Soviet journalists had merely aped their Western colleagues and used the foreign descriptions to muddle what was already a chaotic political scene. The same was true of 'progressive' Western politicians, of course, who were championing so many of the experiments of the Soviet Union in their own countries - all the experiments which had been taken to the limit and proven to be something worse than mere failures. Perhaps the blackest humor available in all the world was the carping from leftist elements in the West, some of whom were already observing that the backward Russians had failed because they had proven unable to covert socialism into a humanistic government - whereas advanced Western governments could accomplish just that (of course, Karl Marx himself had said that, hadn't he?) Such people were, Kadishev thought with a bemused shake of his head, no less idealistic than the members of the first Revolutionary Soviets, and just as addle-brained. The Russians had merely taken the revolutionary ideals to their logical limits, and found there only emptiness and disaster. Now that they were turning back - a move that called for political and moral courage such as the world had rarely seen - the West still didn't