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

But he still doesn't know what to do.

Andropov's kidney disease requires finding a better medical solution, perhaps dialysis technology introduced from the West, or some treatment method that is not yet widely used at the time—but all of this requires time for research and preparation.

"In short, let's focus on doing the things at hand first. The first few months after Andropov takes office are the most crucial honeymoon period. All reform measures must be rolled out during this window; once this opportunity is missed, it won't come again."

"What about that cotton case you mentioned? What's going on in Uzbekistan?"

"Andropov will move, and Rashidov's good days are over."

“What I’m worried about is how far this case will go. If it only goes as far as Uzbekistan, that’s fine. But what if it goes all the way to Moscow? I’m worried that Andropov is using you as a tool and will eventually sell you out.”

“If he can use selling me out as a price to purge both the central and local governments, I have no objection. Anyway, he won’t live much longer. Gorbachev and I have a pretty good relationship. It wouldn’t be a problem if he got me out of trouble.”

Slava spoke calmly, clearly indicating that he had a contingency plan.

"No matter what, Rashidov has to die first!"

He remembered that night two years ago in the burning apartment building in Fergana. The thick smoke, the gunshots, and the bullet scar on his right arm were still there!

That night nearly cost him and Director Nian their lives, while the person who orchestrated that night is now sitting in his office in Tashkent as the First Secretary, living the life of a local tyrant under the protection of Brezhnev.

But now Brezhnev lies buried in the earth beneath the Kremlin wall, forever resting with his more than two hundred medals. Meanwhile, the new master of the Kremlin holds a safe containing evidence obtained two years ago at the cost of the lives of two young men.

Rashidov's good days are over!

Chapter 27 I'm the kind of person who isn't afraid of being discouraged (8K)

As the saying goes, a new broom sweeps clean, and with President An having just taken the seat of General Secretary, it is time, according to the tradition of the alliance, to say goodbye to the old comrades who were the previous secretary.

Andropov, being a former KGB officer, acted swiftly and decisively in his first month in power, accomplishing three major tasks.

The first thing he did was to dismiss Brezhnev's old friend, Interior Minister Shelokov, and replace him with Fedorchuk, a former KGB officer, to purge the deeply rotten police system.

The second thing was that Pravda began to regularly publish brief summaries of Politburo meetings.

This was an unprecedented event in the Soviet political tradition. In the past, what the Politburo said, discussed, and who voted at meetings was as distant to ordinary people as something happening on the far side of the moon.

Is this a harbinger of democratization? Many Western observers are speculating.

The third thing was to go to a machine manufacturing plant in Moscow to chat with the workers, asking them how much they earned and what their opinions were about life. There wasn't much formal talk, but I did learn some things from their conversation.

Pravda devoted a full page to reporting on his factory inspection and the transcript of his conversations. Foreign observers said that no Soviet leader had been so down-to-earth since Khrushchev. However, Khrushchev would talk incessantly when he went to the factory, occasionally coming up with some "outlandish ideas" that eventually led to his downfall. In contrast, Andropov listened more and spoke less when he went to the factory, giving the impression of someone who knew where the problems were but was still thinking about how to solve them.

Brezhnev also visited the factory, but when he went to the factory in Uzbekistan, many workers were visiting him, and due to years of disrepair, a factory fence collapsed and crushed him, sending him to the hospital.

Slava believed that the KGB must have inspected the factory's safety conditions before President An's visit.

After completing these three tasks, President An began to implement political traditions.

In just two weeks, from late November to early December, more than a dozen names disappeared from the cadre rosters of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the constituent republics—some retired due to health reasons, some were transferred to other positions, and some were described more bluntly as being removed from all posts and handed over to judicial authorities for serious violations of Party discipline.

These people have one thing in common: they are all old men from the Brezhnev era, and all of them have accumulated varying degrees of documented corruption over the past decade or so.

Andropov had been the KGB chairman for fifteen years, and the amount of incriminating material he had amassed was thicker than the annual circulation of Pravda. Now he finally had the authority to use it.

Slava was summoned to Lubyanka by Andropov on the evening of December 2nd. The building was no longer his office—the new KGB chairman, Chebrikov, had moved in—but the fifth-floor reception room was still reserved for Andropov, and everything was left unchanged at his request.

Andropov seemed to be in good spirits that night, much better than on the day of the funeral. Although his face was still pale, his eyes were bright, and he spoke faster than before.

Clearly, power gave him a boost that drugs couldn't provide.

After pouring a cup of tea for Slava and Director Nian, he got straight to the point:

"It's time to deal with the situation in Uzbekistan. You should prepare to go back."

“Rashidov?” Slava asked.

“Rashidov,” Andropov read the name aloud, as calmly as if he were facing a dead man in an account book.

"The evidence from the cotton case has been locked in a safe for two years. Now that the owner of the safe has changed, it's time to open the lock."

He handed a document to Slava—an authorization letter for an investigation signed in the name of the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, stamped with a bright red seal, authorizing the holder to "conduct a comprehensive investigation into the suspected falsification of cotton production statistics in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, and to provide full cooperation from all levels of party and government organs, law enforcement departments, and economic management departments."

This time, they weren't sneaking around gathering information under the guise of preliminary investigation. This time, they were openly and brazenly handling the case, armed with the General Secretary's orders and backed by the entire Central Committee of the CPSU and the KGB!

Those people in Rashidov... Hmph, those plainclothes officers who followed them, the thugs who set fire to the building, the bureaucrats who labeled them on the arrest warrant—this time they'll have to think twice before standing in front of this imperial edict!

"The rest of the investigation team is already being assembled. You and Ivanova don't need to personally run around checking accounts—those things are handled by specialized auditors and prosecutors. Your task is to be responsible for overall coordination and intelligence analysis, ensuring that the investigation stays on track and that key evidence is not destroyed or tampered with."

Andropov picked up his teacup and put it down again: "There's one more thing—does Isaev remember?"

“Of course I remember,” Slava said. The old agent who showed them hundreds of whistleblower letters at the KGB intelligence station in Fergana was later transferred back to Moscow for protection.

“He has returned to Uzbekistan, and I have put him in charge of coordinating with the local KGB branch. You will connect with him when you arrive.”

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.

Tashkent, December 5

As soon as the two landed on their private plane, the official motorcade of the Uzbek KGB branch arrived, heading straight for the government guesthouse in Tashkent.

As for Rashidov? Good luck to him, nobody cares about the opinion of a dead man.

Director Nian stood at the window of the guesthouse, looking at the street scene of Tashkent in December.

She joked, "Last time we came here, we were sneaky mice; this time we're blatant cats."

"They've come with ill intentions—but this time we're the ones who've come."

Slava flipped through the case materials that Isayev had prepared in advance on the table. The materials were twice as thick as they had been two years ago. Isayev had not been idle since returning to Uzbekistan. He continued to collect intelligence by taking advantage of the gradually thawing political atmosphere after Andropov was transferred to the Central Secretariat.

"Don't be careless. Rashidov has been operating here for over twenty years. His roots run too deep. It can't be uprooted overnight just by changing the General Secretary."

His caution proved to be correct.

In the first week after the investigation team arrived in Tashkent, Rashidov's reaction was unexpectedly quiet.

Rashidov did not use his network of connections to obstruct the investigation, did not send anyone to follow the members of the investigation team, and did not even send a single letter of appeal to Moscow—at least the KGB did not intercept any such communications.

He simply went to work and attended meetings as usual, and would occasionally nod politely to the members of the investigation team when he ran into them in the corridor.

This calmness made Slava uneasy. For someone who had been in the business for over twenty years, with countless tainted hands, to remain so composed in the face of an investigation team wielding the General Secretary's authority, there were only two possibilities:

Either he has a hidden card yet to be played, or he already knows he can't play his card and has already prepared for the worst.

On the evening of December 9, the auditors of the investigation team completed a cross-comparison of all statistical data from the Uzbekistan General Cotton Administration from 1978 to 1982.

Over the past five years, Uzbekistan has overstated its cotton production by more than two million tons to Moscow, involving billions of rubles in state subsidies. This money flowed into the pockets of everyone from collective farms to the republican government, supporting a whole chain of vested interests from top to bottom.

Rashidov, as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, is at the very top of this chain.

Around 11:00 AM on December 10th, Slava received a phone call from Gorbachev:

"Ivanov, Rashidov is dead. He died this morning at home, said to be a heart attack."

Slava stood in the room for about half a minute without moving, holding the microphone. When Director Nian came out of the bathroom and saw his expression, he knew what had happened. He went over, took the microphone from Slava, and listened to it for a few seconds—the call had already ended—before putting the microphone back.

"Is it a real heart attack?" she asked.

"The official explanation is more plausible than acute heavy metal poisoning or accidentally falling from a building while cleaning windows out of boredom, right?"

"So what's the next step?"

"Laura was a respectable person in life, so let's make his funeral a joyous occasion."

After Rashidov was honored with the title "Laola" and became a "laola" (a derogatory term for a prisoner), the cause of his death became irrelevant—the important thing was that he was dead.

After all, the dead do not need to go through legal proceedings; all legal procedures automatically terminate upon their death, which saves Andropov a lot of political trouble.

The potential chain reaction that could have been triggered by bringing a former first secretary who had been in power for over two decades and had a deep-rooted grassroots base in Uzbekistan to the dock is now a thing of the past.

The next thing to deal with is Rashidov's political legacy.

Those prefectural party secretaries, collective farm chairmen, processing plant directors who profited from the cotton fraud, and—most sensitively—those who signed off on the falsified figures in the Central Committee in Moscow, are all still alive.

At this stage of the investigation, if the investigation is to be carried out thoroughly, the clues will inevitably extend from Tashkent to Moscow, and from the cotton fields of Uzbekistan to the offices of the Kremlin.

Slava knew this. Andropov knew it too.

-

Rashidov's official memorial service was held two days later, and the Communist Party of Uzbekistan classified him as having "died of illness while on duty" and gave him the appropriate funeral arrangements.

Slava did not attend the memorial service, fearing he would laugh in front of the reporters' cameras.

Two years ago, in that burning apartment building, Rashidov almost succeeded—if Andropov hadn't ordered the KGB's special operations unit to be deployed at the last minute, he and Director Nian would have become two corpses in that building, and the evidence of the cotton case would have been reduced to ashes.

Now Rashidov himself is a corpse, while the evidence remains intact, locked in a safe in Moscow.

Slava doesn't really believe in karma or retribution, but the outcome of the event did have a kind of symmetry that's hard to describe.

In the weeks following Rashidov's death, the investigation team's work in Uzbekistan entered a new phase. Andropov's instructions were clear:

The Rashidov regime should be uprooted, those who should be investigated should be investigated, those who should be dismissed should be dismissed, and those who should be prosecuted should be prosecuted, so as to give the entire cadre team in Uzbekistan a complete overhaul.

However, when changing leadership, it is important to pay attention to the sentiments of local officials and the public, to use more local officials and fewer parachuted-in officials, and to appease the public.

However, while carrying out this mission, Slava and Director Nian were also doing their own thing—they were getting rid of the old people and starting to look for and support new people.

Two years ago, during his investigation in Uzbekistan, Slava had already discovered some thoughtful, capable people among the middle and lower-level cadres who had been suppressed by Rashidov for many years. These people were dissatisfied with the status quo but could not find a way out.

Among these people were young state party cadres, technicians who had been marginalized in collective farms, and informants who had provided assistance to Isayev in the KGB intelligence network—their common characteristic was a genuine aversion to the Rashidov system and a vague but real expectation for reform.

Slava compiled a report on the names and backgrounds of these individuals, recommending that Andropov prioritize promoting them to fill vacancies while purging the old cadres. The guidelines, through their network of connections within the KGB, provided these people with some informal protection—ensuring they wouldn't be affected by retaliation from Rashidov's remaining forces during the investigation.

If you simply replace the old people but the new ones are still bureaucrats cut from the same mold, then the blood transfusion is just a change of skin!

What they need is to build a network of people in Uzbekistan, and in many other places in the future, who share their views on the direction of reform.

What they didn't know was that Andropov was also playing a much bigger game in Moscow, and their busy work in Uzbekistan was exactly within Andropov's calculations.

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 time has come to 1983.

One evening in mid-January, while sorting through personnel transfer documents sent from Moscow, she discovered that Andropov's personnel adjustments over the past month had far exceeded the scope and frequency required by the anti-corruption campaign itself!

Those dismissed and transferred were not only officials with clear evidence of corruption—but also a large number of mid-level cadres who did not have major political problems.

If moving high-level officials is to consolidate power, then what is the purpose of moving a large number of middle-level cadres?

The vacant positions were quickly filled by newcomers handpicked by Andropov—Ligachev, Ryzhkov, and that name that appeared more and more frequently on the lists of various important meetings:

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.

“Have you noticed?” Director Nian said, his brow furrowed as he handed the report to Slava, “General An didn’t send us to Uzbekistan just to investigate the cotton case.”

"They're just trying to get us away so they can do their own thing," Slava said, pursing his lips.

“That’s what I think too. The evidence for the cotton case was already complete two years ago, and Rashidov’s men are dead. The investigation can be left to the professionals from the prosecutor’s office and the KGB. There’s no need for you and me to be here watching over it!”

But President An insisted on having us come, and we've stayed for two months without being asked to go back—do you think he genuinely believes you and I are irreplaceable in the investigation, or does he have other considerations?

Director Nian continued, "General Secretary An took office on November 12th, and in early December he sent us to Uzbekistan. Then he carried out a major reshuffle in Moscow, replacing more than a dozen ministers and more than thirty provincial party secretaries, and promoting a large number of his own people to key positions from the central government to the local level."

And all of this happened when the two people in his innermost circle—you and me—were not in Moscow.

"How could such a coincidence happen?" Director Nian said, crossing his arms.

This isn't about distrusting them. It's just that at this particular stage, Andropov needs to operate independently, without anyone interfering with his every move.

They found these two people in the way.

"Damn it, that old fox," Slava sighed.

"He's more than just an old fox," Director Nian spat the sunflower seed shells into the trash can, leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms, and stared at the ceiling.

"This is an open conspiracy. Sending you to Uzbekistan to investigate the case is something we really need you for—the cotton case does need someone to coordinate, Rashidov's system does need to be cleaned up, and these are the tasks that you and I are best suited to do."

You can't complain at all, because what you're doing is truly valuable.

She tapped the table twice with one finger.

"Learn from them; that's political wisdom. They know how to use people."

"Knowing how to use people, why did history promote Gorbachev?"

"Knowing how to use people and being good at judging people are two different things!"

...

The news that followed made Slava even more restless.

In late January, Moscow newspapers began to feature more and more reports about “rectifying labor discipline”.

Pravda devoted a full page to publishing an excerpt of Andropov's speech at a Politburo meeting on "strengthening work discipline and sense of responsibility." Local media also followed suit, reporting on the advanced experiences of local units in actively responding to the central government's call to rectify problems such as absenteeism, tardiness, and alcoholism.

The next day, Slava learned from Isayev about the stories that had already become the talk of the town in Moscow: