Arctic Front

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General Chernko was a big man, his body hiding hers as he showed her the room. She had been chosen by Chernko’s subaltern purely at random. Despite the severe rationing she had the kind of full figure, accentuated by the dark red dress she was wearing, that the major knew General Chernko liked: kapitalnye titki— “prominent breasts,” as the general would say. “Something to hang onto.”

“Don’t undress,” Chernko ordered her, and for a second the terror in the woman’s eyes harbored a faint hope — dashed by his next words. “We’ll have to hurry,” he told her, as if she had any choice in the matter. “Soon the Americans’ll be here.” As he pulled the drapes closed she glimpsed the Kremlin directly across the square, still burning.

Even the goshawks, traditional guardians of the Kremlin’s snow-capped towers, were fleeing the shell-pocked Citadel, leaving the Supreme Soviet to the crows — the Russian surrender to the legendary American general Douglas Freeman having been signed at Minsk by Marshal Kirov. Though the Allied troops had not yet reached Moscow proper, thousands of red fires, smoking sullenly amid the black-stained snow, marked the end for the city.

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