Eagle, I don't want to form an alliance anymore.

"So what? Do you take me for some kind of game cheat code? You think I can just say 'Ding! The dining table is the best negotiating table for all politicians,' and all the officials will be 100% loyal to you?" Director Nian joked.

"How can the disciplinary committee handle our alliance's more than 30 million members? I can't just enact a law to relax restrictions and make everyone a 'privileged class,' can I?"

"Good heavens, you're going to follow Khrushchev's example too? I'm not asking you to maintain socialism forever, I'm not Comrade Stalin, but what does 'three peace and two perfections' mean? What happened to your ideology?"

You're only the eighth generation leader, right? If this continues, the ninth generation leader will be rife with personality cults and ideological stagnation, the tenth generation leader will be plagued by deep-seated problems and have no way to reform, and the eleventh generation leader will be old, conservative, and inactive. In the end, it will lead to the collapse of ideals and the disintegration of the alliance.

As the system's daughter, I might have to forever brand you with shame, really.

Slava was about to retort, but suddenly had an idea: "Hey! Let's first dismantle the private dependency networks that are so prevalent among the cadres. Let's fight both the flies and the tigers. After destroying the core groups that can lead a group of cadres to resist us, we can solve the problem from the systemic level."

"Okay, then go ahead and do it."

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

The cleaning began in September 1993.

Slava's rhetoric included "cadre rectification," "deepening anti-corruption efforts," and "special disciplinary inspection campaigns," but everyone in the Kremlin corridors, in the offices of various ministries, and in the meeting rooms of local Soviets knew what was happening.

They say it's like the Great Purge of the 30s has returned.

What they don't know is that in the not-too-distant future, "requesting retirement for health reasons" will be a luxury.

The first to fall was the National Construction Committee.

As expected, the catalyst for the civil engineering case was the Construction Committee. The corruption chain outlined in Gerdrian's report—from community officials to the district administrative committee to the Construction Committee to the Information Technology Committee to the 063 Cybernetics Institute—had the Construction Committee as the thickest link.

In early September, an investigation team from the CPSU's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) entered the State Construction Committee. They brought not only investigative authorization but also technical support from the KGB. Barthemos's cybersecurity team remotely coordinated to examine the operation logs, modification records, and fund flows of every terminal.

The investigation revealed shocking results: the construction committee was corrupt from top to bottom, with everyone from the Moscow ministry to its branches in the various republics systematically involved in the corruption surrounding the Ivanovsky Building construction project!

The amount of work was overstated. For example, 8,000 tons of concrete were actually used for a building, but the report stated 10,000 tons. The difference of 2,000 tons was used to cover the shortfall.

They used inferior materials to make up the difference. The design required C30 grade concrete, but the concrete used in the actual pouring was C25 or even C20 from other places. The lower grade meant lower cost, and the difference went into their pockets.

The steel bars allocated to construction site A by the system were intercepted and sent to project B, which was a private project of a certain official.

A fictitious project was created. Some audacious local organizations even submitted a "Khrushchev Building Replacement Project in an Earthquake-stricken Area" in a remote region. In the end, the project was fake, but the budget was real, and the money was divided up!

These were all old tricks that the Soviet construction industry had been using for decades. But when the Discipline Inspection Commission piled up all the case files, the stack of files, almost two meters high, silenced everyone.

Slava decided not to disclose the details of the corruption. What would be the consequences if the full extent of the construction committee's corruption were made public?

The people's confidence in Ivanov will likely be greatly diminished. Even more frightening is that if the people lose faith in the party, how will Slava continue the reforms?

Slava chose to disclose the results of the investigation to a limited extent, without revealing specific details of the corruption.

Within a month, more than 400 people from the State Construction Commission were isolated for investigation, and more than 150 senior officials, from the bureau level to the vice-ministerial level, were directly sent to Siberian labor camps to serve their sentences.

They amassed thousands of properties through corruption, including but not limited to large apartments in the suburbs of Moscow, villas along the Black Sea coast, and holiday cottages in the Caucasus Mountains, all of which were nationalized.

Slava issued an instruction: these properties will be converted into workers' sanatoriums for people to use for vacations and recuperation.

"Workers were allowed to live in the villas of corrupt officials," Soviet media reported.

The construction committee was just the beginning. Those more than four hundred people who were isolated and interrogated revealed even more names during their tests.

Corruption is never a one-man game. Behind every corrupt official is a network—people above him protecting him, people below him doing his bidding, and people around him sharing the spoils. You investigate one person, and he implicates three others; you investigate those three people, and each of them implicates several more.

The network that spread from the construction committee gradually spiraled out of control.

The first layer of corruption spread to state-owned construction companies. The cadres of the Construction Committee and the management of these state-owned construction companies were long-time partners; one was responsible for approving projects, the other for implementing them, and they had a decades-long tacit understanding on how to divide profits and how to take kickbacks. The Discipline Inspection Commission's investigation team entered more than a dozen large state-owned construction companies and found problems identical to those uncovered by the Construction Committee.

Dozens of general managers and deputy general managers of state-owned enterprises have been suspended from their duties pending investigation.

The second layer extends to the material allocation system. Where do building materials come from? Usually, they are allocated through the OGAS system, but when materials are scarce, the cadres of the Material Reserve Bureau have the power to approve orders. Whose order is approved first, and who gets a larger quota, is subject to huge manipulation.

An investigation by the Discipline Inspection Commission revealed that a group of mid-level cadres in the Material Reserves Bureau were on the same chain of interests as those in the Construction Committee.

More than 20 senior leaders of the Material Reserves Bureau have been isolated for investigation.

The third layer extends to the financial system. Where did the funds for the Ivanovskaya Tower construction project come from? From the Ministry of Finance. However, the Ministry of Finance's allocation process, from the central budget to local matching funds, is subject to interception at every stage. The national automated system currently doesn't manage finances, and the information system is unable to solve the problem of bureaucrats using their ingenuity to continuously inflate project budgets and embezzle funds.

The disciplinary inspection team found that in some places, construction funds, after being allocated by the central government, went through three or four layers of strange and complicated ancillary projects before reaching the construction units, and by then, the amount had decreased by 10% to 15%.

Several bureau-level officials from the Ministry of Finance were suspended from their duties and sent directly to Siberia.

The fourth layer of problems spread to local governments. Azerbaijan is not the only one; Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Ukraine... every republic with large-scale construction projects has been found to have similar issues. Local government construction departments, planning departments, land management departments... these agencies holding approval authority—none of them have been spared.

Hundreds of local officials were expelled from the Party, a small number of whom were sent to prison, while the majority were directly sentenced to labor camps in Siberia.

By the second month of the cleaning process, the fire had spread to the OGAS system itself.

The issue mentioned in the Gedriyan report—technocrats using algorithms for corruption—was not overlooked by the disciplinary commission. The 063 Cybernetics Institute was investigated as a whole, and the director who had been transferred was found in an apartment outside Moscow and taken back to Baku for interrogation.

The interrogation confirmed Gerdrian's judgment: the technicians at Institute 063 did indeed write the shell algorithm and conspired with local officials to embezzle building materials.

But the problem didn't stop there. The disciplinary committee's investigation found that Institute 063 was not the only one.

Similar phenomena existed throughout the Soviet Union in various technical maintenance and algorithm development agencies under the OGAS system. The degree and methods varied, but the essence was the same: technical personnel used their control over the algorithms to collaborate with local officials and extract illicit benefits from the system.

Some manipulate algorithms to create surpluses, others plant backdoors in the system to bypass normal approval processes and directly allocate materials, and some are even simpler—directly modifying data in the system, reducing the inventory number in location A and increasing the number in location B, creating the illusion that there is a shortage of materials in location A and an emergency allocation is needed, and then intercepting the excess!

Slava's most prized system is becoming part of a nationwide tool of corruption.

The system design is good; the problem lies with the people operating the system and the management system.

Then the fire spread to academia, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences was thrown into turmoil.

The OGAS algorithm was not created out of thin air; its theoretical foundation comes from papers published by mathematicians and cybernetics experts at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Every adjustment to the algorithm parameters requires citing relevant academic papers as theoretical basis.

During its investigation of Institute 063, the disciplinary committee discovered that some of the papers used to justify the rationality of the algorithms were fake.

These papers are tailored to provide academic endorsement for specific algorithm adjustments. First, there is a need to "change the algorithm to this way", and then a paper is written to prove that this change is scientific, reasonable and optimal.

The disciplinary commission has given this behavior a new name: "political academic fraud".

Several institute directors and senior researchers were summoned for talks. The president of the Academy of Sciences was forced to make a self-criticism at a meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, acknowledging the existence of academic misconduct within the Academy.

In November, the flames continued to burn.

Each department investigated led to new leads, which in turn pointed to new departments.

The Ministry of Transport, the Ministry of Energy, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Health, and even the Sports Commission were all affected!

Every department that was investigated was surprised: "Are we going to be investigated too?"

Yes, you will also be investigated.

The reason is quite valid, because the Ivanov Building project is a mega-project involving more than a dozen ministries, hundreds of local governments, and thousands of enterprises and institutions, and there are people profiting from every aspect of this project.

The event that truly plunged the entire Soviet cadre ranks into a state of widespread fear was the new law passed by the Supreme Soviet in November:

Crime of Possessing Unexplained Wealth

The Soviet Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) frequently encountered situations where it was clear that an official was corrupt, but it was difficult to find evidence of their corruption in a short period of time. As more and more officials resorted to this behavior to resist investigation, Slava was greatly annoyed and thus passed this decree.

If the disciplinary committee discovers assets that are inconsistent with an official's income during an investigation, the official will be required to explain the source of the assets; otherwise, they may face consequences.

Everyone panicked a bit, because almost every cadre had a dirty past.

Have you ever received your salary in an envelope? Have you ever had someone use connections to buy things for you at a special store? Have you ever used an official vehicle for personal errands? Normally, no one would care about these things, but in the atmosphere of the Great Purge, where everyone is insecure and feels compelled to betray others, who knows where the Discipline Inspection Commission's line is drawn?

Some people began to turn themselves in, voluntarily confessing their problems to the disciplinary committee in hopes of leniency. The disciplinary committee's visitor register grew thicker and thicker after November, with people coming to talk every day.

Some people began returning embezzled funds, quietly returning the benefits they had previously received. The finance departments of some state-owned enterprises discovered a sudden influx of unexplained remittances into their accounts. It was later discovered that certain officials were secretly returning money they had previously embezzled, hoping to cover their tracks before being caught.

Some began destroying evidence, burning documents, deleting data, and wiping terminals. Bartmouth's cybersecurity team discovered that the number of file deletions on OGAS terminals across the Soviet Union had increased by 300% this month compared to usual. The KGB's 16th Bureau urgently issued a system-level order: all deletion operations on OGAS terminals must be recorded and backed up to the central database immediately.

Seeing that the initial results had been achieved, Slava planned to first suspend the expanded purge and reform a suitable system that would no longer encourage loyalty to individuals or corruption.

But he underestimated the power of this three-month wave, especially the "unexplained wealth" charge, because so many people have committed this crime that it has been considered a catch-all charge by many!

Most importantly, the Soviet military-industrial complex had been developing for so many years, with one-eighth of its annual tax revenue going to the military industry, until recently when it dropped to 7%. The historical legacy of corruption in the military-industrial system during the Brezhnev era has not yet been resolved.

During that period, more than half of the ministries in the Soviet Union's heavy industry were related to the military industry, and light industry was also largely affiliated with the military industry before the reforms. Even now, with the separation of military and civilian sectors, if the disciplinary commission investigates the historical legacies of the military industry system...

I'm afraid eight out of ten ministries in charge of production will have to go to labor camps.

In December, Romanov, who was in charge of the military industry, Defense Minister Sokolov, and Chief of the General Staff Ogarkov, representing the military, requested a private meeting with Slava to find out where the limits of the General Secretary's purge lay.

Chapter 147 Despite his poor standing posture, his walking style is fast and steady.

The Moscow Kremlin, November 1993.

The three pillars of the military-industrial complex finally came to Slava. Romanov was in charge of approving and budgeting military-industrial projects, Sokolov was in charge of the day-to-day operations and deployment of the army, and Ogarkov was in charge of military strategy and operational plans.

The fact that these three people came to see the General Secretary at the same time without an appointment clearly indicates that the military wants to confront him and demand that the General Secretary express his stance.

Slava looked at the three people who walked in without any surprise; he had long expected this day to come. The purge had been burning for three months, from the Construction Committee all the way to the Academy of Sciences, and now it had reached the doorstep of the military industry. The military couldn't just sit there and wait.

“Sit down, comrades,” Slava said.

The three men saluted him and then sat down.

Romanov, as a member of the Supreme Political Bureau, spoke first: "Comrade General Secretary, we are not here to oppose your purge of corrupt elements in your ranks."

He first stated this to draw a clear line.

"There are indeed many historical problems. Corruption within the Construction Committee, the tampering of the OGAS system's algorithm, academic fraud... these problems are real, and the Discipline Inspection Commission was right to investigate them. The military—"

He glanced at Sokolov and Ogarkov: "The military clearly supports the Party Central Committee's anti-corruption policy."

"But Comrade General Secretary, in the three months from September to now, more than 9 people in the National Construction Commission have been investigated, including more than 3 high-ranking officials who have been expelled from the Party and sent to labor camps. The Ministry of Finance and other major ministries have also been affected. Several thousand people in local governments of the constituent republics have been suspended, dismissed, or expelled. Dozens of research institutes have been investigated as a whole, and the Academy of Sciences—"

He stopped and sighed.

"Currently, more than 40,000 people have been dealt with throughout the Soviet Union, of whom 12,000 have been sent to Siberia for labor reform. As far as I know, those cadres who committed heinous crimes and embezzled tens or even hundreds of millions of yuan—"

"Don't worry, I didn't execute them. They're in labor camps now," Slava shrugged.

The three breathed a sigh of relief; they had almost thought that Slava had really turned into Dalin.

"Once the situation stabilizes, I'll have to bring these people out for a public trial. I'll broadcast it live online and sell tens of thousands of tickets offline so the general public can see the Party's determination to fight corruption. I'll also hold a grievance rally to bring up these people who have been affected by the corrupt officials. Not only that, I'll also bring the local Party and government officials to the front row of the public trial to witness the trial firsthand. After the trial, they'll be hanged. This will serve as both a legal education and a deterrent to potential corrupt officials," Slava said with a smile.

Unlike the independent jury system in countries like the UK and the US, the Soviet Union implemented a unique people's assessor system, a "participatory trial" system within the civil law system. People's assessors and professional judges have equal rights and jointly decide on conviction and sentencing. In contrast, in the UK and the US, juries typically only determine the facts and conviction, with sentencing decided by the judge.

Generally, in the Soviet Union, a panel of judges consisted of one professional judge and two or three lay assessors, while in the UK and the US, separate juries of ordinary citizens were formed and served independently from the judge. Even in public trials involving tens of thousands of people, as in the Soviet Union or in China before its reform and opening up, these tens of thousands of ordinary citizens did not have the right to participate in the trial.

The essence of a public trial rally is a mass political education activity, with the core being "public deterrence," "educating the masses," and "popularizing the rule of law," rather than having tens of thousands of people vote.

"What's the point of those juries of dozens or even hundreds of people in Europe and America? They talk about protecting privacy and upholding the seriousness and impartiality of the judiciary behind closed doors. What kind of judiciary is it without the supervision of the general public? When the internet is developed and video transmission is possible, court trials should be broadcast live simultaneously. If judges and lay jurors make arbitrary or reckless judgments, the public can stop them. Popularizing legal knowledge is a long and arduous journey," Slava said, getting more and more excited.

"Ahem! Comrade General Secretary, I understand your ideas on reforming the existing judicial system, and we strongly support them. However, the military is here out of concern for national security."

Sokolov carefully interrupted Slava's eloquent speech, saying that the new General Secretary of the Union was in no way inferior to Comrade Andropov or Comrade Stalin, and that he had surpassed his predecessors.

The current General Secretary is young and vigorous; he could easily serve for another twenty years! It seems that the Party and government officials who follow him will have plenty of good fortune to enjoy.

"1.2 people have entered the Gulag alone. They have family, friends, colleagues, and people who have received favors from them. These people may not necessarily sympathize with corruption, but if this continues, they will develop dissatisfaction and fear towards the system. An official might be working well at his post today, but tomorrow the disciplinary committee will be knocking on his door, and the day after tomorrow he'll be on a train to Siberia—"

What will happen to his family? What will happen to his children? What will happen to his elders?

"If the Americans knew that the Soviet Union was carrying out a massive purge of cadres, what would they do? They would use the families and friends of those being purged."

For example, a former cadre who was expelled from the Party possessed a large amount of classified information before being dealt with. He harbored resentment towards the system. The CIA approached him and said, "What you have is worth a lot of money." Would he sell it?

What officials fear most is losing the protective umbrella that shields them from legal prosecution. Once they feel this umbrella is about to disappear and the purges will continue indefinitely, they might take the most extreme self-preservation measures—and in the context of the Cold War, the 'most extreme self-preservation measures' included contacting Western intelligence agencies to find a way out.

Romanov advised: "Comrade General Secretary, the purge must have a limit. It cannot be expanded indefinitely, especially since the military system must be stabilized."

Sokolov went on to express the concerns within the military: "Comrade General Secretary, morale in the army is currently low. Officers don't know if they will be the next to be investigated. Some officers at the regimental level and above did indeed receive some benefits during the Brezhnev era. There are too many historical issues left over from the past by some designers, senior generals, and major design bureaus. Everyone is worried that their past will be dug up."

The military isn't saying we shouldn't investigate; in fact, we should. But please give us a clear signal: where does the investigation end?

Ogarkov, however, raised another question from a different perspective: "Comrade General Secretary, where are the boundaries of power for this newly established agency, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection? Does it have the authority to investigate the military system? What is its relationship with the KGB?"

This is the issue that the military is truly concerned about.

"If the disciplinary commission has the power to investigate the military—that's like adding another chain of oversight outside the military's command chain. Officers would be accountable to two systems simultaneously—to their superior military commanders and to the disciplinary commission. If the requirements of these two systems conflict, for example, a military project needs to urgently allocate a batch of supplies, which would take two days according to the military command chain procedures, but the disciplinary commission requires all supply allocations to be approved, and the approval process takes a week, what are the officers supposed to do? Whom do they listen to?"

"This problem must be solved in terms of system design. Once war breaks out, the army's combat capability includes efficiency."

Slava was aware of the military's concerns, and he had originally planned to announce them later. Since the military couldn't sit still any longer, he decided to speak first.

"The three issues you are concerned about are the intensity of the purge, the handling of historical issues, and the relationship between the Discipline Inspection Commission and the military."

First, the intensity of the recent purges will be reduced. There will be no more large-scale, concentrated actions like those of the Construction Committee. The next direction will be institutional reform, curbing corruption through systemic changes, rather than relying on campaign-style purges.

"Second, there are historical issues. The problems that have been left over since the time of Comrade Brezhnev are too broad in scope, and if all of them were investigated, it would indeed lead to the collapse of the army's cadre ranks."

He paused for a moment.

"I can let it go."

The three of them looked much more relaxed.

"But problems that have arisen in the three years since the 28th Congress of the CPSU in 1990 must be investigated! The 28th Congress is a line; historical problems before that line will not be investigated, but after that line, the crime of possessing huge amounts of unexplained wealth is limited to 500,000 rubles. Those exceeding this amount must be held legally accountable."