Chapter 116:
Chapter 116
“Proceed.”
“Yes, Comrade Secretary!”
A small dacha (villa) near Moscow was filled with people who could be considered the top brass of the Soviet political and military circles.
As I gave the order, the agents saluted crisply and dispersed to their positions.
The people who stayed behind either smiled or cheered quietly.
They had also been waiting for this moment eagerly.
“Well… It’s inevitable, isn’t it?”
“Yes. How can a person…”
They all nodded in agreement with my words.
Of course, I also felt a pang of guilt inside.
“Let’s just wait and see.”
Soon, the room was filled with a savory, fragrant, and salty smell.
The agents opened the door and entered with dignified steps, carrying heavy trays one by one.
“Mm… Oh… Ah… Yes…”
This old body needed a strict diet control, weight loss, exercise, and health care to live well for another day.
But sometimes, humans needed some pleasure.
The pleasure of chicken.
I picked up a hot and crispy chicken leg that had just been fried and bit into it.
The oily and salty taste and the juice burst into my mouth with a pop!
“Mmm…!”
The politicians also reached for the chicken hastily.
They were old enough to have eaten their fill, but they fought over certain parts or ate messily with their hands covered in grease.
They showed all kinds of disgraceful behavior, but God would forgive them. Amen.
“How is the development of ‘that’ going?”
“Huh? Which one are you talking about… Ah!”
Beria was momentarily flustered by my sudden question, then exclaimed as if he realized something. But he quickly glanced around.
“Comrade Secretary, if you want to talk about ‘that’, wouldn’t it be better to go somewhere with fewer people?”
“What?”
“Ahem… It’s a secret after all…”
He tore off a chicken leg like a vulture and grabbed another one, earning Kalinin’s resentful gaze. Beria whispered to me.
“No, not that ‘that’! The other ‘that’! Chef?”
“Oh… Ah… If you mean the seasoning sauce, it will be ready soon.”
“Very good. This fried chicken is good, but wouldn’t it be delicious if we coated it with seasoning sauce? What do you think?”
Everyone nodded sincerely, as if they couldn’t be more sincere.
Of course, they couldn’t answer properly because their mouths were full of chicken.
“Kalinin, you should take the lead in spreading this new cuisine. This project will be a good way to show the excellence of Soviet culture to the Soviet and world people. Even if they are anti-communists, once they taste it…”
“Mumble mumble… Of course! Comrade Secretary.”
The name of this project led by Kalinin was Kalinin Fried Chicken.
Under this brand name, we planned to launch a franchise business from the United States.
He diligently tore off the chicken, which was made according to the recipe of KFC’s hot crispy chicken.
Colonel Harland Sanders was still running a small shop in Kentucky countryside.
The first KFC franchise was born in the 1950s, and it didn’t even exist yet, let alone have any recognition.
We took advantage of that gap and went in.
In 1990, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The first McDonald’s in the Soviet Union opened its doors in Moscow. More than 30,000 people gathered to taste capitalism.
“Eating is what stimulates the most primal instinct of humans. As they receive this great gift of the Soviet with their tongues, they will acknowledge us!”
It was nonsense, of course. But so what? If we could secure a company that could become a global franchise and earn dollars for us, that would be enough.
“Ah, and who prepared the entertainment for tonight?”
“Comrade Budenny, Comrade Secretary!”
“Very good! Comrade Budenny? Will you do ‘that’?”
Budenny, who was eating chicken with his mustache stained with oil, juice, and crumbs, shook his mustache when he heard his name.
“‘That’… do you mean? Comrade Secretary? Hehehe…”
“Hoo! Ha! Hoo! Ha!”
“A thousand cavalrymen galloping like a storm! A leader who is blindly followed by everyone, Genghis Khan!”
There was a Russian tradition of ‘good manners’ that involved drinking, dancing, and making a mess together.
But if they drank too much, they wouldn’t be able to work tomorrow, so I ordered the people who had to work to not drink too much.
Of course, they had to relieve their stress somehow, so I allowed them to make a mess.
The problem was that it was easy to make a mess after drinking, but it was harder to do so sober.
Well, there were some people like Budenny who danced around like crazy.
“Geng, geng, genghis Khan! Run, cavalry! Run, cavalry! Geng, geng, genghis Khan!”
Budenny wore a Mongolian fur hat upside down and a fur cloak. He spun and jumped around, singing and dancing.
The song was <Genghis Khan> by the famous group <Genghis Khan>.
It was a song that could be considered a symbol of the 7080 disco music.
The subordinate generals that Budenny brought with him also danced along.
“You dance pretty well. Hahahaha!”
“Hahaha! Heheheh, hahaha!”
The hall was full of laughter.
A cavalry colonel who drank a glass of vodka and danced also imitated the horse’s neighing sound when the instrumental part came.
“Hahahaha! Well done! Well done!”
“Bravo! Bravo!”
Anyway, the night of madness went on like that. Tomorrow we would have to go back to work…
One of Stalin’s original habits was to make his subordinates drink like crazy and ask them difficult questions or make them dance.
But there was something called Stockholm syndrome.
Like hostages who develop attachment to their captors, they became accustomed to the harsh treatment and did well on their own.
While I didn’t drink, they drank vodka on their own and started dancing to the ‘disco music’.
“Heh, Molotov dances quite well.”
Among them, Molotov was quite good at dancing.
He shook his hips and shoulders in rhythm and danced wildly.
It seemed that his claim that he seduced his wife with his dance skills was not entirely false.
On the other hand, Khrushchev was really clumsy.
“Hey! What kind of dance is that bald guy doing?”
“Heheheh, Comrade Secretary!”
Khrushchev, who had drunk quite a lot and turned red from head to toe like a boiled octopus, sang a strange song with wrong pitch and beat and danced wildly.
But everyone else just laughed along.
I also felt a bit tipsy after drinking a few glasses. I had to drink some alcohol to eat greasy chicken, right? That was my excuse. Maybe I drank more than I thought.
“…Dad, I’m going in now.”
“Huh? Ah… Svetlana.”
In the midst of the noisy party, I suddenly heard someone calling me and turned around in surprise.
‘My’ daughter. Svetlana looked at me with a tired face. I knew she was there because I brought her with me for dinner at the dacha for the convenience of security…
This kind of place must have been boring for a fifteen-year-old girl. It was nothing fun for her to see old men drinking and talking and making a mess.
She wore a plain dress and fiddled with a notebook that she held in both hands.
She looked nervous. If only her brothers were here, or her mother.
But they all left. Only the young girl and the ‘man of steel’ father remained.
Whether he was a college student in his twenties who had no girlfriend, let alone children, or a cunning politician in his sixties who had the largest country in the world in his hands, he didn’t know how to deal with this situation properly.
“Just… go ahead.”
She nodded. Svetlana bowed her head and walked away silently, clutching her notebook to her chest.
What was in that notebook? I was curious, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask her to hand it over. I just stared at the back of her head.
Beria, who leaned against the wall and observed the people with an interested look, walked over to me with his bulky body and whispered.
“Is there any problem, Comrade Secretary? Svetlana seems to be having a hard time mentally…”
“Do you think so too?”
Beria nodded cautiously. He knew well about the ‘rumors’ that his enemies spread about him.
That he liked young children.
That rumor persisted despite his attempts to trace the source with the NKVD. Who wouldn’t be wary of him as a father with a daughter?
“Hmm… Maybe it’s because she doesn’t have any friends her age. The Kremlin is not a good place for girls.”
“…”
“If you need, I can arrange some children who can be her friends. Wouldn’t it help if she had one or two of them by her side?”
He spoke with a very careful and thoughtful voice, as if he was worried about me and Svetlana.
One of the reasons why Beria gained Stalin’s trust in real history was similar to this.
He was the head of the Georgian branch of the Soviet Communist Party and took care of Stalin’s old mother Keke (Ekaterina Geladze, nickname Keke).
He impressed Moscow by taking care of Stalin’s ‘weak spot’, his mother, with zeal and passion.
He eventually became the top man of the Soviet intelligence agency by seizing the opportunity of the Great Purge.
“…Do you have any candidates?”
“I will look into it and report to you, Comrade Secretary.”
I nodded and he smiled slyly. He switched from a thoughtful attitude to a cheerful and obedient subordinate.
“By the way, Comrade Secretary. The song you mentioned is very popular! Wasn’t Comrade Budenny’s dance very interesting?”
“Hahaha, yes. It was funny.”
“Yes, yes. Especially using Comrade Budenny’s usual image to dress up like a Khan of Mongolia was very witty.”
His tongue was slick as if it was greased. He balanced between a crafty traitor and a loyal dog to me.
“By the way, how about using that for propaganda?”
“Propaganda? You mean propaganda?”
“Yes. Since the German bastards are very afraid of our cavalry, we can use the image of the cavalry…”
He kept talking after that, but I couldn’t understand him well as I got more drunk. But he was competent enough to do well on his own.
No one could match his competence, even if they didn’t know him.
“You do your best. I should go in soon.”
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