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CHAPTER 27

Nizhny Novgorod


Nizhny Novgorod

February 8, 1638

Nizhny Novgorod was of two minds. It had been of two minds since Czar Mikhail had sailed on a riverboat waving to the populace way back in July of 1636. But it wasn’t thoughtful. It wasn’t like Boris was of two minds or Ivan was unsure. No, Boris and Ivan were both quite confident in their opinions. Boris was terrified and Ivan was out for blood. Even before Czar Mikhail had escaped from the place he’d been held incommunicado and gone to Ufa, Nizhny Novgorod had been less than harmonious. It had had tensions before the Ring of Fire. At their base, those tensions were between the have-a-littles and the have-even-lesses. In a backwater like Russia in the seventeenth century, the number of actual haves was quite low.

The introduction of the Dacha had started to change that and there started to be actual haves in places like Nizhny Novgorod and the have-nots were getting enough so that they were actually able to look up from the plow and see the more that was coming into the world. That increased the tensions a lot. Especially when not all of the new wealth stuck to the hands of the already less impoverished.

So by the time Czar Mikhail steamed by waving, there were serious tensions between the new industrial wealthy and the old landed wealthy. When Birkin put a garrison in Nizhny Novgorod to make it the main supply base for the advance on Ufa, that garrison came down on the side of the old rich. Not the uppity new rich.

And the old rich had used accusations of witchcraft and “treason,” accusing the new rich of supporting the czar, not the Duma, then killed a bunch of them and stole most of their property.

But they couldn’t kill all of them. First, there were too many, and second, a lot of them were skilled with the new machines and so too valuable to kill. Instead, they brutalized them, threatened their families, and made regular public examples. By the time Kazakh had become a state in the United Sovereign States of Russia, the hatred between Boris and Ivan made the Hatfields and McCoys seem the best of buddies.

It was still like that. A walled city with excellent walls, but with a population where about seventy percent hated the thirty percent who were running things. Then came the news of the mutiny in Birkin’s ranks and the surrender of his army. It was at that point that the smartest of the haves of Nizhny Novgorod got out of town. They found excuses to go visit Moscow or just to visit the villages they owned outside town.

What were left were the dumb and the desperate, those with no place to go, and those who had convinced themselves that they’d been right in everything they’d done and justice would prevail.

✧ ✧ ✧

Ivan Belochkin swept out the halls in the radio towers. His father had owned a factory that made leather goods before he’d been attainted for treason for supporting the czar. The family’s property was seized, and his father executed by a drumhead court martial, while his mother was forced to take holy orders. He lived in a basement room and the girl he had been planning to marry was now the mistress of Boris Agapov.

The education his family had provided meant that he could read, and he did. He read every message he could that came in over the radio telegraph, when the soldiers weren’t looking. Nizhny Novgorod’s telegraph station had been taken over by Birkin’s forces and was in the control of the army.

✧ ✧ ✧

Boris Agapov was among the desperate. His family had been deti boyars before the Ring of Fire, and while they’d adopted some of the practical things, like the new plows and horse collars, they’d worked very hard to keep the peasants from getting out of control. The new industrialists introduced by the Dacha had been a threat to the stability of the nation. And when Birkin had arrived, his family cooperated with the authorities in cutting out the rot. In the process, factories and shops had come into the Agapov family’s hands, making them quite a lot of money. Especially since those factories worked quite well by using serf labor, which was much cheaper than paying employees. Production might have gone down a bit, but profits were up.

What Boris was afraid of was what would happen if General Tim came to Nizhny Novgorod. By now it was acknowledged even among Birkin’s forces that Boris Timofeyevich Lebedev was a military genius. If you thought about it, it wasn’t even that much of a surprise. He was a member of an excellent family that had included boyars in it. Yes, it was Lebedev who was the genius, not the baker’s son, Maslov.

All of which didn’t protect them from the insanity of Czar Mikhail. Letting peasants vote? Crazy.

Boris wished every day that someone had shot Czar Mikhail when he’d steamed by on that riverboat. He shouted, “Bring me a vodka,” and his mistress, Marta Vasin, did.

✧ ✧ ✧

Marta Vasin was also from one of the new industrialist families that had fallen on hard times when Birkin arrived. Her family hadn’t been executed. They had just lost a lot of their wealth. The wealth that would have made her a good marriage. Instead, she’d traded her virginity to save her family and lived in this small apartment that Boris kept. She put up with Boris. Most of the time he was a decent enough guy, and he liked to give her presents, new shawls and dresses, the occasional piece of jewelry.

He was better than that bastard, Ivan Belochkin, who she would have married if Birkin hadn’t arrived. He’d called her a whore and threatened to cut off her nose and worse if he ever got the chance, after she’d thrown in with Boris.

The problem was if the news about Birkin’s army was true, he was liable to get that chance. She still had most of the gifts that Boris gave her. He liked to look at them. She was well dressed when she went shopping or went to church, but her wealth wasn’t all that portable. After Boris had his vodka and her, he went home to his wife, and Marta tried to remember what it had been like before Birkin came, when she thought she’d loved Ivan Belochkin.

When she’d loved herself.

Then she crawled into her bed and cried, then slept, while the world prepared to throw another monkey wrench into her life.


Outside Kazan

February 8, 1638

The army of Kazan was well trained, well equipped and had excellent morale. It had chaplains, both Russian Orthodox and Muslim. It had heavy winter cloaks and boots, AK4.7s with at least ten spare chambers for every man, and most had twenty or more. And by now it had a large cavalry contingent made up of Kalmyks. It also had a large infantry contingent who were marching up the Volga toward Nizhny Novgorod along the banks of the Volga. The iceboats scooted ahead and prepared camps for the marchers at noon and in the evening, setting up double-walled tents to keep the cold out. That speeded up the march. It didn’t make marching through Russia in hard winter any fun, though.

And though the prepared camps made things faster, it still took the army of Kazan eleven long dreary days to reach Bor and cross the frozen river to invest Nizhny Novgorod.

That wasn’t an altogether bad thing. It was plenty of time to recall the three Heroes and a Scout from Kazakh.


Outside Nizhny Novgorod

February 19, 1638

General Ivan Maslov saluted as General Boris Timofeyevich Lebedev stepped out of the Hero. “Welcome to igloo central, General,” Ivan said, though in fact it was a tent city, not an igloo in sight.

Tim stepped down from the bottom wing of the Hero and shook Ivan’s hand. “What are you seeing of Muscovy troops?” he asked quietly.

“You’d know better than I, sir,” Ivan said even more quietly with a jerk of his chin at the Hero that Tim had flown in on.

“I didn’t see any large masses of troops,” Tim admitted. Then added with frustration, “Where the hell are they?”

There was no possible way to keep secret the movement of large masses of troops. Not with the radio networks in place. Moscow had to have known that they were marching up the Volga before they got out of sight of Kazan, and yet nothing. Where the hell was the Russian bear?

“Boss, I’m starting to think that M is right. I think every trooper that Uncle Ivan can get his hands on is busy keeping Moscow from going up in flames.”


Moscow Kremlin

February 19, 1638

Assistant Secretary General Ivan Romanov thanked the gods that he hadn’t yielded to the very real temptation to take the crown and become Czar Ivan Romanov. It meant that there was still a chance of a rapprochement between him and Mikhail. Ivan knew for a fact that the reason the boyars had selected Mikhail rather than him was because he was too competent. They and the bureaus hadn’t wanted another Ivan the Terrible. They’d wanted a weak czar that they could manipulate and that’s what they’d gotten.

Until the Ring of Fire.

Mikhail had been manipulated first by his mother and her family, then by Ivan’s brother, Feodor Nikitich. Now he was being manipulated by Bernie Zeppi, the Gorchakovs, and the knowledge in the up-timer libraries. In Ivan’s opinion, Mikhail was still a weather vane, pointing in the direction of the most recent wind.

But the wind was blowing from Ufa now, straight at Moscow. And it was looking to be one of those Russian storms that leaves mountains of snow and anyone unprepared as a block of ice buried under the snow. Ivan had no intention of ending his life as an icicle. He was going to have to make arrangements, but the rest of the Boyar Duma could see the writing on the wall as well as he could. And Ivan had one great advantage. He was Mikhail’s uncle. He had a better chance than anyone else in the Boyar Duma of keeping them all alive. Even what was left of the Sheremetev family. Director-General Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev was still missing, and by now Ivan’s sources were sure that he was either dead or the unwilling guest of one of three Polish or Lithuanian magnates.

Ivan started making arrangements. He would need allies in the Boyar Duma and especially in the army.


Outside Bor

February 20, 1638

Tim sat his horse easily, dressed in his fancy uniform with an aide just at his left, holding up a large white silk flag with gold trim. By now Bor had a population of about four thousand, almost two thousand of whom worked in the dirigible works. Many of those workers were women who were converting the intestines of thousands of cattle into goldbeater skin gasbags to fill with hydrogen and provide lift to dirigibles. It was good, steady, well-paying work. At least for the floor supervisors. A lot of the women actually doing the work were serfs or increasingly slaves from Nizhny Novgorod and points west. In spite of which, it was a surprisingly loyal and dedicated workforce. They saw the mighty airships they made, and they took pride in what they were creating, even though they held no official ownership in it.

On the other hand, Bor wasn’t well fortified. It was fortified, but most of the fortifications were focused on Nizhny Novgorod across the river. Actually, most of what was expected to “defend” Bor was the fort just upriver from Kazan. The place known as Birkingrad. Bor was two hundred miles of hard riding from the front, after all.

It had been when the planning and fortifications had been put in place. Now, of course, they were looking at Mikhail’s demon, General Tim, at the front of an army of ten thousand and more troops arriving every day.

The dirigible hangar was visible above the walls, a huge building that, like the dirigibles it housed, was mostly empty space. Still, it was an impressive sight.

The gates opened and a colonel came out, along with his aide, riding very good horses and carrying their own white flag. They were dressed in their best. And as they got closer, Tim recognized his cousin, Colonel Ivan Borisovich Lebedev.

“What are you doing here, Ivan Borisovich?”

“They needed someone familiar with technology to command the garrison here. And after what you did to me in Murom, I couldn’t stay there.”

His older cousin sounded bitter. He also sounded sober, which was surprising. “Ivan, I didn’t do anything to you in Murom, except act in loyalty to Czar Mikhail.”

Ivan Borisovich looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. And Tim was shocked. Ivan blustered. Ivan blathered. Ivan didn’t bother to learn and never, ever, studied. Tim didn’t know who this was, but it wasn’t the Ivan Borisovich Lebedev he’d known all his life.

Finally, Ivan spoke. “Yes, I know. I knew it at the time. I just didn’t know what to do.”

“Do you know what to do now, cousin?”

“I have instructions from our grandfather, as it happens,” Ivan Borisovich Lebedev said. “Those instructions don’t match the instructions I received from the boyar council when I got this posting six months ago.”

Tim grinned at that. Their grandfather wasn’t a very nice man, but at eighty he still had all his faculties and lots of experience in living in a very tough neighborhood.

“Faced with overwhelming force, and unwilling to sacrifice the lives of innocent civilians for no purpose, I hereby surrender the city of Bor to the forces of Czar Mikhail.” Ivan shook his head then. “You know, Boris Timofeyevich, I was shocked when Grandfather gave me my instructions on what to do in case you or the baker’s boy showed up.”

Well, maybe Ivan Borisovich hadn’t changed that much. He still refused to call Tim Tim, and he still called General Ivan Maslov the baker’s boy. Still, considering he was getting Bor without a shot being fired, Tim could put up with Ivan Borisovich being an ass when it came to his name.

After that it was straightforward. The garrison of Bor, about four hundred and fifty men, surrendered their weapons and were put on iceboats to go down the Volga to Kazan, where those who swore loyalty to Czar Mikhail would be given new jobs well away from Muscovite Russia.


Outside Nizhny Novgorod

February 21, 1638

Ivan Belochkin crunched across the ice on the Oka River. He reached the Czarist lines and was captured by two alert sentries. “I have a message for General Tim.”

“That’s General Lebedev to you,” one of the guards growled, shoving Ivan with the butt of his AK. Ivan struggled not to fall, and yet he knew that if the butt of the rifle had been used with more force or less control he could well have broken ribs or a ruptured gut. They were being gentle with him. “General Lebedev then. But he’s going to want to hear what I have to say.”

It took an hour to get to see the general and by then the sun was up. There was no way for Ivan to sneak back into Nizhny Novgorod. So he spent the day in the general’s tent, having everything he knew about the city brought out and added to a detailed map. He wasn’t the only person being questioned. Dozens had slipped out, either by bribing guards as he had, or by knowing the guard schedule and making a run for it when they weren’t looking. And that wasn’t all. Until a couple of days ago, there’d been regular commerce between Bor and Nizhny Novgorod, and all those people were answering questions too.

There was, however, one piece of information that Ivan had and none of the rest did. Day after tomorrow, if the general agreed, the guards at the west gate would open that gate and let his forces into the city.

The general agreed.


Outside Nizhny Novgorod

February 23, 1638

The boots were wrapped in cloth to muffle the sound of men walking on icy ground as the thousand men of the Second Kazan Infantry battalion made their way to the gate. Their commander had volunteered them.

Faris Shamil was born in Kazan and his family had been forcibly converted to the Russian Orthodox faith in Ivan the Terrible’s time. The conversion hadn’t taken, and for all of his childhood and young adulthood, he’d been a secret Muslim, forced to drink wine and eat pork. When Czar Mikhail had allowed freedom of religion in Kazan, Faris had been thrilled. He’d started going openly to the mosque and discovered several things about himself. He liked wine and beer. He liked pork. He didn’t like praying five times a day. And finally, and most disturbing, he wasn’t convinced that the Koran had all of knowledge in it. He wasn’t the only one.

In the year since General Tim took Kazan without firing a shot, the religion of Islam had fractured, and fractured again. Faris had found himself among the least orthodox of the Muslims in the Sovereign States. His father and brother were among the most. Faris preferred the army life. His battalion was mostly Muslim, but had over three hundred Russian Orthodox and five Ringers, the new religion based on the Ring of Fire.

It was a solid and cohesive unit that had spent most of last year defending the walls of Kazan and Faris knew better than to be wool-gathering in the moments leading up to a battle. But the truth was, Faris didn’t think there was going to be a battle, at least not much of one. He believed Ivan Belochkin.

✧ ✧ ✧

Ivan Belochkin walked up to Peter Ivanovich, the commander of the west gate. He’d talked to Peter Ivanovich before, and knew how frightened he was. The man could count, after all. He knew that with the Sovereigns holding Bor and having camps on the Oka, Nizhny Novgorod was cut off. And by now General Tim’s reputation was downright scary.

“Peter Ivanovich, listen to me. You and your men need to put down your weapons and let us open the gates.”

“I have my duty, Ivan.”

“Duty to traitors. What about your duty to him?” Ivan pulled a banknote from his pouch. The face on the banknote showed Czar Mikhail Romanov in profile. The note was black, red, and gold ink on white paper, and in the corner it said 25 RUBLES. That was a lot of money. Ivan had received a backpack full of them when he’d convinced General Tim that he really was on their side. The money changed hands and so did the rifles. Then Ivan Belochkin and his friends, as well as some of the guards, cranked open the gates.

The first of Colonel Faris Shamil’s soldiers passed through the gates, climbed the stairs, and found about twenty soldiers seated comfortably against a wall, their weapons stacked against the far wall. They held the west gate. Colonel Shamil’s signalman used a battery-powered directional lamp to flash out a signal. “Gate ours.” And the rest of the army, at least a good portion of it, repeated the Second Kazan Infantry battalion’s march, also trying to be quiet about it. Meanwhile, most of Colonel Faris Shamil’s men marched toward the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin.

The Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin was built on a hill and had stone curtain walls, not the sort of walls that would protect you once the artillery was brought to bear, but perfectly adequate to prevent an infantry battalion from taking the place. Colonel Faris Shamil’s job wasn’t to take the place. It was simply to cut it off from the rest of the city. He did this by assigning platoon-sized units to the streets approaching the Kremlin.

It was while he was placing these units that everything went to hell.

✧ ✧ ✧

The guard on the walls of the Kremlin thought it was a mugging at first. Someone shooting at this time of night in the city not more than a couple of hundred yards away from his post had to be a mugging gone wrong. Then there were more shots, and he called his sergeant. There was more shooting from all around the Kremlin. Not everywhere, but in a number of places.

It took five minutes for the commander to be awakened and runners to be sent to the city’s walls. The runners didn’t come back. Then there were shots that grew into a firefight on the wall between the second and third outer bastion and all of it inside the outer walls. The fight didn’t last long. But it lasted long enough and made enough light that the duty officer in the Kremlin could tell what had happened. Someone had opened the gates, at least one, and it was probably the west gate. There was no fighting there. From there the Sovereign States forces went north and south, taking the fortifications from the flank and rear, and with only scattered resistance. The guards on the walls were flanked and knew it. There were a few holdouts, and they died.

It woke the sleeping city.

✧ ✧ ✧

Tim’s troops never got out of control, but Tim’s troops weren’t the only people in the city. Nizhny Novgorod had been a powder keg for over a year, and it had only gotten worse. As soon as the populace realized that Tim’s forces were in the walls, they decided that the best time to get their revenge was in the middle of a sack.

The populace of Nizhny Novgorod got out of control. They knew who’d managed the trials for treason and witchcraft, and while those people lived in the richest parts of the city, they didn’t live in the Kremlin. The Molotov cocktail had been introduced to seventeenth-century Russia by the up-timers. And fuel oil had been traveling up the Volga all summer.

The richer parts of Nizhny Novgorod went up in flames and if the “innocent” got caught in the fire? Well, if they’d really been innocent, they wouldn’t have been there.

Tim was caught completely unprepared. Townhouses and some warehouses burned in the weeks following the day-long riot. It was estimated that half a million rubles worth of damage was done.

✧ ✧ ✧

Marta Vasin was lucky. Her apartment wasn’t in the best part of Nizhny Novgorod. It was near it, but not in it. She heard the riot and could see the burning buildings out her window when she opened the shutters. And she was bright. She gathered what she could, dressed in her worst and least revealing clothing, and crept out of her apartment, down the stairs, and out onto the icy streets. By now the fires just to the southwest of the Kremlin were producing a lot of light, enough to reflect off the low clouds above the city.

She couldn’t run with what she was carrying, but she walked as fast as she could, keeping to the shadows, and heading for the west wall. Her present protector was gone, or would be by nightfall, and her former lover was probably going to try to kill her if he ever found her. She needed a new protector, and it wasn’t going to be anyone from the Muscovite side.

She’d gone several blocks when she had the bad luck to encounter a small group of men who were apparently taking the opportunity to loot the shops on the street she was traveling. She ducked back, but not in time. One of them shouted, and they were on her. Her hands were full with everything she owned wrapped in a bed sheet, and for just that vital moment she couldn’t give it up. She’d earned those dresses and those jewels. So, for just too long, she tried to carry the sheet and they caught her. She threw the sheet at the first to reach her and started hollering for the watch.

There was no watch tonight. She hollered anyway, and they laughed and jeered.

✧ ✧ ✧

Corporal Roman Ivanovich Kazakn heard the noise and alerted the sergeant. “Take your team, Roman, and check it out.”

He led his team in the direction of the shouting at a trot, AKs at port arms. There was a man in the street looking into an alley, and as Roman and his men approached, the man shouted and ran off. There was shouting in the alley and Roman turned the corner to see five or six men running off, and a pretty, young woman with her blouse ripped open and a cut on her face leaning against the wall.

Roman had gotten chapter and verse from General Ivan Maslov, and his colonel, and his captain, and his sergeant on the penalties that he would receive if he went about looting and raping. And Roman’s attitude was, if he wasn’t allowed, no damned civilian was. He didn’t think it out like that, not in the moment. He just brought the AK up and fired into the back of the one in the rear. That was the one who had stopped to pick up the sheet full of clothing and jewels. The bullet hit the man in the left shoulder, a crippling but not necessarily fatal wound.

It didn’t matter. All five of his team followed suit. Three of them hit. The man was dead before he hit the ground. Roman fired again, and thought he winged another, but they were going around the corner and the squad didn’t pursue. There was a half-dressed woman leaning against the wall, trying unsuccessfully to hold her blouse closed with her bloodied fists.

He kicked the body off the sheet bundle and the bundle came open, displaying dresses of good fabric in the new paisley pattern that had become so popular in the last two years or so.

He didn’t figure this was the property of the rapist. He looked over at the woman and asked, “This stuff yours?”

She’d been looking at his team with fear. Now she looked at him, and something like comprehension came back into her face. “Yes, it’s all I own.”

Roman wasn’t sure if he believed her. After all, the clothing in the bundle was a lot better than what she was wearing. “What were you doing out on a night like this?” It would be just his luck if he rescued a thief from the town watch.

“I was trying to get to General Tim’s army.”

“Well, you’ve done that,” Roman said. “Luka, pick up this bundle. No souvenirs, mind, or I’ll have your guts for garters. We’ll let the officers sort this mess.” He turned back to the woman. “Come along, ma’am. You’re with the Second Kazan now.”

They went back to his squad. The rest of that morning she spent with the squad, then around noon they all went to chow, and she was passed up the line. Confirming that she was most likely the owner of her property, it was returned to her, and she was sent along with several hundred other civilians across the frozen river to Bor. By the time she was having a plain meal of cabbage stew in Bor, news of the conquest of Nizhny Novgorod in just three days by General Tim was all over Russia and into Swedish and Polish territory. And, in Ufa, the celebrations had begun.


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