Red Hammer 1994

Robert Ratcliffe RED HAMMER 1994

CHAPTER 1

Marlina Tatralova collapsed, overcome by anguish. Tears streaked her reddened, wind-chapped cheeks. She stared blankly at the graffiti-covered, red brick walls surrounding the Uralmash Zavod factory in Yekaterinburg, Russia. It was true, just like the gossips had said at the butcher shop, the one that hadn’t had any meat for six months. Marlina saw through frightened eyes that the factory gates were locked for good. A dozen or so surly looking men roamed the cluttered grounds, apparently to keep potential looters at bay—as if there was anything worth taking.

Marlina cowered like a beaten child, an empty plastic shopping bag at her side. She rocked on her haunches, each breath labored, surrendering to the dark forces that had crushed her unmercifully. What did the politicians want? Blood? The fools in Moscow did nothing but strut like peacocks and bicker and then make bold promises that were no better than lies. She couldn’t begin to fathom the intellectual downpour that tormented her meager existence. Free markets, participatory democracy, hard currencies, private ownership, these words were nothing but gibberish to the common Russian. Outside of Moscow proper, the people lived like animals.

The ominous slate canopy that smothered the rugged Urals seemed particularly threatening this fall day. As usual, the climactic monotony was intensified by the cold drizzle that seeped into the drab, poorly constructed apartments and filled the interiors with the pungent odor of mildew and wet wool clothes. The black mood suited this dismal industrial city that brooded like a condemned soul. Everyday life in Yekaterinburg had ground to a halt.

Founded by Stalin in 1933, the onetime showpiece factory town had bolstered the old Soviet Union’s power and prestige during the difficult, formative years. Throughout the Great Patriotic War, Uralmash Zavod had churned out sturdy T-34 tanks by the hundreds to beat back the vicious German invaders and lead the Red Army to victory. Production hummed unabated for decades, both with military hardware and heavy construction equipment, and promised cradle-to-grave security for the thousands of tough workers who braved the frontier city with its substandard housing and brutal weather.

But past glory had vanished into confusion, panic, and recrimination. It hadn’t been American bombs or tanks, as the propagandists had direfully predicted for so many years during the Cold War. Instead, mysterious and insipid free-market forces and muddled economic reforms had done the deed. They had sapped the life from Uralmash Zavod, like an infectious disease that rotted the innards while leaving a crumbling shell to serve as a testimonial to their collective failure.

Production had fallen precipitously to less than a third of its 1980s peak, when the 39,000 workers churned out modern T-72 and T-80 main battle tanks and massive oil-drilling rigs that rivaled the best produced in the West. After lingering for a few years on life support, the final deathblow for the diseased patient had been the complete and rapid deregulation of energy prices—a capricious and callous edict that had been like a dagger to the heart. The bureaucrats in Moscow had convinced themselves that it had to be done. Soaring fuel-oil prices had beaten them into the ground, as easily as a steam-driven pile driver pounding steel girders.

Sister cities throughout Russia’s industrial heartland had suffered the same irreversible fate. The supposedly sympathetic Western press called it a necessary and quite natural initiation, a much-needed slap in the face, and a tough dose of medicine for those who would enter the competitive world economy on the threshold of the twenty-first century. The Russian people called it betrayal. Like shell-shocked war victims, they drowned their sorrows in copious servings of alcohol and prayed for someone, anyone, to rescue the struggling nation from the twin evils of runaway inflation and looming starvation. Dreams of democracy quickly vanished when competing with empty stomachs and the fear of starvation.

The Western political dynamic was impossible for the average Russian to fathom. For decades, their world had been a rigid one of necessary order and accepted struggle. But if one had performed his or her obligation to the state, they would be cared for—albeit at a standard of living that would make those in the West groan. But in the early nineties, they had been cruelly seduced by the Westerners’ constant covetousness for material possessions, a fatal diversion from the path of socialist purity, that had lead them straight to economic hell.