Like most police forces, it has two main strands: the federal police on the one hand, and the local, state, or regional police on the other.
The regions are called Oblasts. The largest of them is the Moscow Oblast, a chunk of territory encompassing the entire capital of the federal republic and the surrounding countryside. It is like the District of Columbia with a third of Virginia and Maryland thrown in.
Moscow therefore plays host, though in different buildings, to both the federal militia and the Moscow militia. Unlike Western police establishments, the Russian Interior Ministry also has at its disposal a private army—one hundred thirty thousand heavily armed MVD troops, almost a match for the real army under the Defense Ministry.
Shortly after the fall of Communism the mushroom-like rise of organized crime became so open, so pervasive, and so scandalous that Boris Yeltsin was forced to order the formation of entire divisions within the federal and Moscow Oblast police to fight the spread of the mafia.
The job of the feds was to fight crime across the entire country, but so concentrated in Moscow was organized crime, much of it economic, that the Moscow Organized Crime Combat Department, or GUVD, became almost as big as its federal counterpart.
The GUVD had only moderate success until the mid-nineties, when it was taken over by General-of-Police Valentin Petrovsky. Petrovsky became the senior ranking general of the Collegium controlling it. He was an out-of-town appointment, brought in from the industrial city of Nizhny Novgorod, where he had established the reputation of a no-bribe “hard man.” Like Elliott Ness, he inherited a situation resembling Chicago under Al Capone. Unlike the leader of the Untouchables, he had a lot more firepower and a lot fewer civil rights to bother about.
He started his reign by firing a dozen top officers whom he designated as being “too close” to the subject at hand, organized crime. “Too close!” yelled the FBI Liaison Officer at the U.S. Embassy. “They were on the god-dam payroll.”
Petrovsky then ran a series of covert will-they-take-a-bribe tests on some of the senior investigators. Those who told th
e bribe offerers to get lost received promotions and big pay hikes. When he had a reliable and honest task force to hand, he declared war on organized crime. His Anti-Gang Squad became more feared among the underworld than any such previously, and he was nicknamed “Molotov.” This was not a tribute to the long-dead foreign minister and cohort of Stalin; the word means “hammer.”
Like any honest cop he did not win them all. The cancer ran too deep. Organized crime had friends in high places. Too many gangsters went into court and came back out again with their smiles still in place.
Petrovsky’s response was not to be overly careful about taking prisoners. To back up their detectives, both the federal and city anti-gang divisions had armed troops. Those of the federal police were called the OMON, and Petrovsky’s own rapid reaction force, the SOBR.
In his early days Petrovsky led raids personally and without forewarning to prevent leaks. If the raided gangsters came quietly they got a trial; if one of them reached under his armpit or sought to destroy evidence or escape, Petrovsky waited until it was all over, said “Tut-tut,” and called for the body bags.
By 1998 he realized that the largest mafia group by far, and seemingly the most impregnable, was the Dolgoruki gang, based in Moscow, controlling much of Russia west of the Urals, immensely rich and with its wealth able to buy awesome influence. For two years prior to the winter of 1999 he had waged personal war against the Dolgoruki and they hated him for it.
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UMAR Gunayev had told Jason Monk at their first meeting that there was no need for him to forge identity papers in Russia; money could simply buy the real article. In early December Monk put that boast to the test.
What he had in mind would be the fourth time he had secured a private talk with a Russian notable while flying under false colors. But the forged letter from Metropolitan Anthony of the Russian Orthodox Church in London had been created in that city. So had the letter purporting to come from the House of Rothschild. General Nikolayev had asked for no identity papers; the uniform of a General Staff officer had been enough. General Valentin Petrovsky, living under daily threat of assassination, was guarded night and day.
Where the Chechen leader got them from, Monk never asked. But they looked good. They bore the photograph of Monk with his short-cropped blond hair and identified him as a police colonel on the personal staff of the First Deputy Head, Organized Crime Control Directorate, Federal Interior Ministry. As such he would not be personally known to Petrovsky, but would be a colleague from the federal police.
One of the things that did not change after the fall of Communism was the Russian habit of setting aside entire apartment blocks for senior officers in the same profession. While in the West politicians, civil servants, and senior officers usually live in their own private homes scattered through the suburbs, the tendency in Moscow is to live rent-free in groups in state-owned apartment houses.
This is mainly because the post—Communist state simply took over these apartments from the old Central Committee and created rent-free residences. Many of these buildings were, and remain, strung along the north side of Kutuzovsky Prospekt where Brezhnev and most of the Politburo once lived. Petrovsky lived on the eighth floor, just below the top floor of a building on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. A dozen other senior police officers had apartments there too. There was at least one advantage to lumping all these men from the same profession into one building. Private citizens would have become exasperated by the security; police generals completely understood the need for it.
The car that Monk drove that evening, miraculously acquired or “borrowed” by Gunayev, was a genuine MVD militia black Chaika, which came to a stop at the barrier leading to the inner courtyard of the apartment building. One OMON guard gestured for the rear window to come down, while a second covered the car with his submachine gun.
Monk offered his ID and his destination, and held his breath. The guard studied the pass, nodded, and retired to his booth to make a phone call. Then he returned.
“General Petrovsky asks what your business concerns.”
“Tell the general I have papers from General Chebotaryov, a matter of urgency,” said Monk. He had named the man who would have been his real superior. A second phone conversation took place. Then the OMON guard nodded to his colleague and the barrier came up. Monk parked in a vacant slot and walked inside.
There was a guard on the ground floor reception desk who nodded him through, and two more outside the elevator on the eighth. They frisked him, checked his attaché case, and studied his ID papers. Then one spoke through an intercom. The door opened ten seconds later. Monk knew he had been studied through a peephole in the door.
There was a manservant in a white jacket, whose build and demeanor indicated he could serve a lot more than canapés if the occasion required, and then the family atmosphere became clear. A small girl ran out of the living room, stared at him, and said, “This is my dolly.” She held up a flaxen-haired doll in a nightdress. Monk grinned.
“She’s lovely. And what’s your name?”
“Tatiana.”
A woman in her late thirties appeared, smiled apologetically, and ushered the child away. From behind her a man emerged in his shirtsleeves, wiping his mouth, as any citizen interrupted at dinner.
“Colonel Sorokin?”
“Sir.”