The Battle of the Senate Palace

The Battle of the Senate Palace

4:59 A.M., June 22^nd, 1951

Moscow, Soviet Union

The only sound inside the Senate Palace as night becomes morning, perhaps in the entire Kremlin, was the hammering of Stalin’s fingers on the typewriter keys. The sound mercifully pauses for a second. Stalin coughs, then returns to his tireless work, only pausing in his keystrokes to move to a new line. Presumably, he is preparing for his speech to commemorate the ten-year mark since the German invasion.

“Should we check on him?” Valery whispers to the other guard on watch duty just outside the door, transferred from who-knows-where to guard the most strategically valuable man in the Union. “He’s been in there for a while, no food or water.”

“Quiet,” he snaps. Valery never even got his name. “I’m supposed to be the new guy, and you’re asking if we should interrupt him?”

“My point exactly. I’ve served guard duty for years. Comrade Stalin is a busy man, but this is unusual, even for him.” The typing stops again. There is another wet cough, which soon descends into a fit of wheezing. “For all we know, he could be dying of poison. And besides, I outrank you.” Valery spares a smug smile through the dim hallway. “Go check on him.”

The other guard wordlessly acknowledges, knocking on the door. The coughing continues. The guard looks back to Valery with concern, their bickering seconds ago disappearing when presented with a possible situation. Before Valery can second-guess himself, the guard opens the door and barges in. Valery catches Stalin’s glance as he turns from his typewriter, deep bags under the old man’s eyes. Wide-eyed, he stares at the blood Stalin has coughed up over his jacket.

And startles in surprise as his fellow guard draws a revolver and puts a bullet in Stalin’s head.

“What are you doing!” Valery shouts, drawing his own gun. The guard just stands there, looking down at the corpse. “Traitor!” But just as he is about to pull the trigger, the study’s lone window shatters, and a bullet tears through the closed blinds and takes off the guard’s head, the gunshot echoing through the twilight outside.

Valery enters the room, surrendering to shock. His military training tells him to take cover. He doesn’t, until another shot rings out, missing him. He ducks behind Stalin’s wooden desk. There is quieter gunfire in the distance. Two more bangs go off; the sniper must be engaged in a battle somewhere else. Valery takes his opportunity to survey the room. They’ll think I did it. Or at least, that I was in on it. What now? And how am I supposed to explain that my guard partner betrayed the Union? Will they punish me for negligence because I didn’t check his identity? His hands trembling, Valery rises. Noticing the time displayed on the clock, another piece falls into place: 5:00 A.M. Moscow Time, on the 22^nd of June, 1951—ten years to the minute since the invasion. Were fascists behind this?

His eyes drift to the blood-splattered paper hanging off Stalin’s typewriter and the sheets beside it. Stalin was writing letters. Dozens of them. The one still in the typewriter reads:

IVAN,

I NEED YOU BACK IN MOSCOW. YOU WERE THE ONLY ONE OF MY AGENTS WHO ACCURATELY REPORTED THAT TRUMAN HAD CALLED OFF THE 1945 NUCLEAR STRIKES ON JAPAN, AND I NEED SOMEONE OF YOUR SKILL TO HELP ME HERE. SOMETHING IS

The letter abruptly cuts off. This doesn’t look like an official notice. But the content is obvious enough. Stalin has personal spies in America, deep enough to know about its leaders’ most secretive decisions, but was too late in extracting them to prevent his own assassination. Valery stands back leaning heavily against the wall just as footsteps pound down the hallway.

“Come out with your hands raised!” a soldier shouts. “Don’t you dare try anything, traitor.”

“I’m not a traitor,” Valery replies desperately. “The other guard on duty killed Stalin before I could do anything!”

“Really? Then, where is he? You kill him to cover up the evidence?”

“No, the sniper killed him.”

“What sniper?”

“The sniper! The one you’re fighting, presumably across the courtyard!”

A pause, and the soldier continues quietly. “They said only gunshots came from this wing.” More footsteps. “Who are you? What is your—” The hallway lights up with automatic weapons fire. There is shouting, and explosions sound nearby.

Valery has no idea what is happening. From what it sounds like, nobody does. So he does the only thing he can think of, firing three bullets into the window and charging through it shoulder-first. He falls to the ground outside the raised first-story window. Scrambling to his feet and ignoring the new pain in his shoulder, he grips his gun and scans his environment.

Black smoke billows from the Senate Palace’s domed rotunda, where an explosive has blown open the roof. Windows periodically shatter in the rest of the building, gunfire escaping to the outside. The Kremlin has descended into chaos, and Valery is stuck in the worst of it. He hears the roar of an armored vehicle’s engine, and barely-coherent orders barked through a loudspeaker. Valery is trapped in the Senate Palace’s stone courtyard.

He runs for the building’s tall, wooden doors as bullets pepper the ground beside him. There is motion in his peripherals. He slams his fist on the door, but there is no answer. The sound of tank treads on stone stops, replaced by the movement of gears as a turret rotates.

Valery dives to the ground just in time to avoid the shell aimed at where he had just been standing, but the blast as it hits something inside the Senate Palace knocks him out cold.

#

Flashes of consciousness. Men dragging him along. Shouting. Valery’s ears ring. A lone gunshot. A helicopter flies overhead, and searchlights illuminate the sky like the Luftwaffe is in the skies again. Someone notices Valery is waking up, curses, and tugs a black bag over his head.

He sees nothing.. The passage of time is alien to him. Valery’s back aches; he’s been lying down for way longer than it seems. He hears men arguing, but cannot make out their words. Another lone gunshot, followed by the flutter of birds’ wings. Are they in the forest?

Someone grabs Valery by the legs. He tries to struggle, and finds he is not bound, but a rifle butt in the guts keeps him in line. Another pair of hands grabs his shoulders, and the unknown pair carry him a short distance. His heart rises to his throat when they toss him, but he lands almost immediately. Hurriedly, he takes the cloth bag off his head.

Valery finds himself lying prone in a ditch. Between gaps in the trees, the sky is lightening, but little of the sun’s light penetrates the canopies of the trees. A soldier’s fresh corpse lies in the ditch next to him. He rolls onto his side, then all fours. His vision blurs, even as he rises to a kneeling position; this isn’t the first time he’s been concussed, and probably won’t be the last.

If he survives the next few minutes, of course.

They have taken his weapon. His uniform is ripped, dirty, and bloody. Valery presses himself against the wall of the ditch; when he is kneeling, it conceals him. Two men are standing nearby, clearly not paying close enough attention to their prisoner. They argue with each other.

“So, why do you think these guys did it?” one asks.

“No idea,” answers the other. “Maybe they’re with the Japanese, trying to get back at us for our part in the partition. Or they could be Americans. Or maybe it really is an inside job. Someone taking out a personal vendetta against him. Fascists, Trotskyists, Ukrainians, Jews…”

“You should really stop talking, Comrade.”

“Right.” There is silence. “Wait, where’s the other traitor?” Valery closes his eyes, waiting for the man to get a little closer. A footstep comes close enough for him to feel it in the dirt. He rushes to stand, ignoring the pain in his head, grabbing the man around the knees and hauling him into the ditch. He is holding an older light machine gun, the weight of which keeps him from extending his arms. Valery’s would-be executioner falls into the ditch, hitting his head on the other side. Valery rips the machine gun from his grip, firing a quick burst into his back. At this range, the hole in him is big enough to see through.

Valery dives back to the ditch wall just as the other soldier opens fire with a smaller rifle. Folding out the bipod under the barrel, Valery fires back from the ditch, reminding himself of the war once again, rounds flowing like water from the record-player-shaped magazine mounted on the top of the gun. Bullets decimate flesh and metal. Valery only realizes he is firing on the truck that brought him out in the woods when the bullets strike one of the fuel drums, which explodes. The flames soon spread to the entire vehicle, including the driver taking cover behind the wheel.

Only the lack of returning fire after a few seconds convinces Valery that it is safe to leave. He considers ditching the gun, but since black smoke is still rising from what is presumably the direction of Moscow, he’ll probably need all the help he can get in the future. Leaving the ditch, he shoulders the machine gun and starts walking west. He still has no idea what is going on in his Union, but with Stalin dead, the capital in chaos, and the Union now suffering from a dangerous power vacuum, he has only one priority now:

To survive in a world that will never be the same again.