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He could still recall the day he and his father had been passing a church and the older man had forgotten himself and made the sign of the cross. The son had asked what he was doing. Startled and fearful, his father had told him never to tell a soul.

Those were the days when another Soviet youth had been officially declared a hero for betraying his parents to the NKVD for anti-Party remarks. Both parents had died in the camps, but the son had been made a role model for Soviet youth.

But young Kolya loved his father and never said a word. Later he learned the meaning of the gesture, but accepted the word of his teachers that it was all complete rubbish.

He was fifteen when the Blitzkrieg erupted out of the west, on June 22, 1941. Within a month Smolensk fell to the German tanks and with thousands of others the boy was on the run. His parents did not make it and he never saw them again.

A strapping youth, he helped his ten-year-old sister along for a hundred miles until one night they jumped a train heading east. They did not know it, but it was a special train. Along with others it carried a disassembled tank factory out of the danger zone and east toward the safety of the Urals.

Cold and hungry, the children clung to the roof until the train came to rest at Chelyabinsk in the foothills of the mountains. There the engineers re-erected the factory called Tankograd.

There was no time for schooling. Galina went to an orphanage, Kolya was put to work in the factory. He stayed there for almost two years.

By the winter of 1942 the Soviets were taking horrendous losses in men and tanks around Kharkov and Stalingrad. The tactics were traditional and lethal. There was neither time nor talent for subtlety; the men and tanks were thrown into the muzzles of the German guns without thought or care for losses. In Russian military history that was how it had always been.

At Tankograd the demand was for more and more production; they worked sixteen-hour shifts and slept beneath the lathes. What they were building was the KV1, named after Marshal Klimenti Voroshiov, a useless article as a soldier but one of Stalin’s favorite toadies. The KV1 was a heavy tank, the Soviets’ main battle tank at the time.

By the spring of 1943 the Soviets were reinforcing the bulge around the city of Kursk, an enclave 150 miles from north to south that jutted 100 miles into the German lines. In June, the seventeen-year-old was detailed to accompany a trainload of KV1s west to the salient, unload them at the railhead, deliver them, and return to Chelyabinsk. He did all but the last.

The new tanks were lined up by the track when the regimental commander for whom they were destined strode up. He was amazingly young, not twenty-five, a colonel, bearded, haggard, and exhausted.

“I’ve got no fucking drivers,” he screamed at the tank factory official in charge of the delivery. Then he turned to the big flaxen-haired youth. “Can you drive these bloody things?”

“Yes, Comrade, but I have to go back to Tankograd.”

“No chance. You can drive, you’re drafted.”

The train steamed east. Private Nikolai Nikolayev found himself in a rough cotton smock, deep inside the hull of a KV1, heading toward the town of Prokhorovka. The Battle of Kursk began two weeks later.

Though referred to as the “Battle” of Kursk, it was in fact a series of raging and bloody clashes that spanned the whole enclave and lasted two months. By the time it was over, Kursk had become the biggest tank battle the world has ever seen, before or since. It involved 6,000 tanks on both sides, 2 million men, and 4,000 aircraft. It was the battle that finally proved the German Panzer was not invincible after all. But it was a close-run thing.

The German army was just deploying its own wonder weapon, the Tiger, packing a fearsome 88mm cannon in its turret, which, with armor-piercing shells, could take out anything in its path. The KV1 carried a much smaller 76mm gun, even though the new model Nikolai had delivered mounted the improved ZIS-5 longer-range version.

On July 12, 1943, the Russians began to counterattack, hand the key was the Prokhorovka sector. The regiment Nikolai had joined was down to six KV1s when the commander saw what he thought were five Panzer Mark IVs rand decided to attack. The Russians rolled in line abreast over the crest of a ridge and down into a shallow valley; the Germans were on the opposite crest.

The young colonel was wrong about the Panzer IVs; they were Tigers. One by one they picked off the six KV1s with armor-piercing sabot.

Nikolai’s tank was hit twice. The first shell tore off all the tracks on one side and peeled open the hull. Down in the driver’s seat he felt the tank shudder and halt. The second shell took the turret a glancing blow and careened off into the hillside. But the impact was enough to kill the crew.

There were five men in the KV1 and four of them were dead. Nikolai, battered, bruised, and shaken, crawled out of his living tomb to the smell of running diesel fuel on hot metal. Bodies got in his way; he pushed them to one side.

The gun commander and gunner were sprawled over the breech, blood and mucus running from mouth, nose, and ears. Through the gap in the hull Nikolai could see the Tigers racing past, through the smoke of the other blazing KV1s.

To his surprise, he found the gun turret still worked. He hauled a shell up from the rack, pushed it into the breech, and closed the mechanism. He had never done it before, but he had seen it done. Usually it took two men. Feeling sick from the blow to his head down below and the stench of fuel up above, he turned the turret around, put his eye to the periscopic sight, found a Tiger barely three hundred yards away, and fired.

It turned out the one he had picked was the last of the five. The four Tigers up ahead did not notice. He reloaded, found another target, and fired again. The second Tiger took his shell in the gap between turret and hull, and exploded. Somewhere beneath Nikolai’s feet there was a low whump and flames began to trickle across the grass, spreading as they found more pools of fuel. After his second shell the remaining three Tigers noticed they were under attack from behind and turned. He took his third one side-on as it pulled around. The other two completed their turn and came back at him. That was when he knew he was dead.

He threw himself down and fell out of the rent in the KV’s side just before the Tigers’ answering shell took away the turret in which he had been standing. The ammunition began to explode; he could feel his blouse smoldering. So he rolled in the long grass, over and over, away from the wreck.

Then something happened that he did not expect and did not see. Ten SU-152s came over the ridge and the Tigers decided they had had enough. There were two left of five. They raced for the opposite slope and the crest above it. One got there and disappeared.

Nikolai felt someone hauling him to his feet. The man was a full colonel. The shallow valley was studded with wrecked tanks, six Russian and four German. His own tank was surrounded by three of the dead Tigers.

“Did you do this?” asked the colonel.

Nikolai could hardly hear him. His ears were ringing; he felt sick. He nodded.

“Come with me,” said the colonel. There was a small GAZ truck behind the ridge. The colonel drove for eight miles. They came to a bivouac. In front of the main tent was a long table covered in maps, being studied by a dozen high-ranking officers. The colonel halted the truck, strode forward, and threw up a salute. The senior general looked up.

Nikolai sat in the front passenger seat of the truck. He could see the colonel talking and the officers looking at him. Then the senior among them raised his hand and beckoned. Fearful that he had let two Tigers escape, Nikolai came down from the truck and marched over. His cotton blouse was scorched, his face blackened, and he stank of petrol and cordite.

“Three Tigers?” said General Pavel Rotmistrov, Commanding Officer, First Guards Tank Army. “From the rear? From a wrecked KV1?”

Nikolai stood there like an idiot and said nothing.

The general smiled and turned to a short, chunky man with piggy eyes and the insignia of a political commissar.

“I think that’s worth a bit of metal?”

The chunky commissar nodded. Comrade Stalin would approve. A box was brought from the tent. Rotmistrov pinned the order of Hero of the Soviet Union on the seventeen-year-old. The commissar, who happened to be Nikita Khrushchev, watched and nodded again.

Nikolai Nikolayev was told to report to a field hospital, where his scorched hands and face were treated with a smelly salve, and then return to the general’s headquarters. There he was given a field commission, a lieutenancy, and a platoon of three KV1s. Then it was back into combat.

That winter, with the Kursk salient miles behind him and the Panzers on the retreat, he received a captaincy and a company of brand-new heavy tanks fresh from the factory. They were the IS-2s, named after Josef Stalin. With a 122mm gun and thicker armor, they became known as the Tiger Killers.

At Operation Bagration he got his second Hero of the Soviet Union medal for outstanding personal bravery and on the outskirts of Berlin, fighting under Marshal Chuikov, the third.

This was the man, almost fifty-five years later, that Jason Monk had come to see.

If the old general had been a bit more tactful with the Politburo he would have got his marshal’s baton and with it a big retirement dacha out along the Moskva River at Peredelkino with the rest of the fat cats, all free as a gift of the state. But he always told them what he really thought, and they did not always like it.

So he built his own more modest bungalow for his declining years, off the Minsk road on the way to Tukhovo, an area studded with army camps where he could at least be close to what remained of his beloved army.

He had never married—“no life for a young girl” he would say of his numerous postings to the bleakest outposts of the Soviet empire—and at seventy-three he lived with a faithful valet, a former master sergeant with one foot, and an Irish wolfhound with four feet.

Monk had tracked down his rather humble abode simply by asking the villagers in the nearby communities where Uncle Kolya lived. Years earlier, when he had entered middle age, the old general had been given the nickname by his younger officers, and it stuck. His hair and moustache had turned prematurely white so that he looked old enough to be the uncle of all of them. General of the Army Nikolayev was good enough for the newspapers, but every ex-soldier in the country knew him as Dyadya Kolya.

As Monk was driving a Defense Ministry staff car that evening and was dressed as a full colonel of the General Staff, the villagers saw no reason not to point out that Uncle Kolya lived at such-and-such a place.

It was pitch-black and freezing cold when Monk knocked at the door a little after nine in the evening. The limping valet answered, and seeing the uniform let him in.

General Nikolayev was expecting no visitors, but the staff colonel’s uniform and the attaché case caused him no more than mild surprise. He was in his favorite armchair by a roaring log fire reading a military memoir by a younger general and occasionally snorting in derision. He knew them all, he knew what they had done and, more embarrassing, he knew what they had never done, no matter what they claimed now that they could make money by writing fictitious history.

He looked up when Valodya announced he had a visitor from Moscow and left.

“Who are you?” he growled.

“Someone who needs to talk to you, General.”

“From Moscow?”

“Just now, yes.”

“Well, since you’ve come, better get on with it.” The general nodded at the briefcase. “Papers from the Ministry?”

“Not quite. Papers, yes. From somewhere else.”

“Cold outside. Better sit down. Well, spit it out. What’s your business?”

“Let me be perfectly frank. This uniform was to persuade you to receive me. I am not in the Russian Army, I am not a colonel, and I am certainly not on anyone’s general staff. In fact I am an American.”

Across the fireplace the Russian stared at him for several seconds as if he could not believe his ears. Then the points of his bristling moustache twitched in outrage.

“You’re an impostor,” he snapped. “You’re a damned spy. I’m not having impostors and spies in my house. Get out.”

Monk remained where he was.

“All right, I will. But as six thousand miles is a long way to come for thirty seconds, will you answer me one single question?”

General Nikolayev glowered at him.

“One question. What?”

“Five years ago when Boris Yeltsin asked you to come out of retirement and command the attack on Chechnya and the destruction of the capital Grozny, rumor has it you looked at the plans and told the then Defense Minister Pavel Grachev: ‘I command soldiers, not butchers. This is a job for slaughterers.’ Is that true?”

“What of it?”

“Was it true? You allowed me a question.”

“All right, yes. And I was right.”

“Why did you say it?”

“That’s two questions.”

“I’ve still got six thousand more miles to get home.”

“All right. Because I don’t believe genocide is a job for soldiers. Now get out.”

“You know that’s a rotten book you’re reading?”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve read it. It’s bunk.”

“True. So what?”

Monk slipped a hand into his briefcase and extracted the Black Manifesto. He opened it at a page he had tagged. Then he held it out across the fire.

“Since you have the time to read rubbish, why not glance at something really unpleasant?”

The general’s anger vied with his curiosity.

“Yankee propaganda?”

“No. Russian future. Have a look. That page and the next.”

General Nikolayev grunted and took the proffered file. He read quickly the two marked pages. His face mottled.

“Bloody rubbish,” he shouted. “Who wrote this crap?”

“Have you heard of Igor Komarov?”

“Don’t be a fool. Of course. Going to be president in January.”

“Good or bad?”

“How should I know? They’re all as bent as cork-screws.”

“So he’s no better or worse than the rest of them?”