Free Palace of Treason by Jason Matthews

Lefortovo or Butyrka prisons.
    Defendants would be remanded to Colonel Zyuganov after extended sessions in the procurator’s office, denying scattershot accusations of fraud, or bribery, or tax evasion. This is when trouble would start. Whispered rumors in Yasenevo held that once Colonel Zyuganov inhaled the bloom of the clammy drains in those desperate subbasements he changed—literally and figuratively—insisting on taking over and directing the interrogations personally, but only after having buttoned the vintage Red Army field tunic he favored while working: a brown-speckled coat, stiff and cracking with blood, reeking of pleural or vitreous or cerebrospinal fluids, all grudgingly spilled by enemies of the State.
    They were already guilty—Zyuganov’s head swam with impatience to inflict pain, he could taste it—and his instructions were to extract a confession—
prisvoenie,
embezzlement;
vzyatochnichestvo,
bribery;
khuliganstvo,
hooliganism;
nizost’,
turpitude; whatever—by means of increasingly vigorous levels of physical discomfort: Levels One through Three. There occasionally were accidents—
when they would not listen, or refused to comply
—and Zyuganov’s vision would clear in time to see guards wheeling broken bodies out of the interrogation theater on gurneys draped with rubber sheets. Zyuganov couldn’t help that: Instruments sometimes slipped, arteries were nicked, and dislodged hematomas would cause the brain to swell.
    Occasionally, a prisoner’s real or imagined potential for embarrassing, resisting, threatening, thwarting, or plotting against President Putin made him or her
inconvenient.
Colonel Zyuganov would receive the vintage “VMN” code-word call on the prison administrator’s
Kremlovka
line direct from the commissariat of the president. VMN,
Vysshaya Mera Nakazaniya,
Supreme Degree of Punishment, from the old Article 58 of Stalin’s state penal code. It meant that the citizen should disappear, and that Zyuganov could indulge himself during an interrogation. He could splinter the bones of the legs and pelvis of a prisoner with a heavy baton—bendy steel reinforcing bars worked best—then walk around to the head of the table, sit on a low stool, stick his face close, and breathe in the shivering groans, watch the rolling eyes, and listen to the silver thread of spittle hit the slippery tile floor.
    A year earlier there had been official trouble—recriminations—during the interrogation of two
Chornye Vdovy,
two Chechen Black Widow suicide bombers. The women had been arrested as they were boarding a busin Volgograd; the bombs around their bellies had not detonated. A directive from the Kremlin secretariat—essentially instructions from the president himself—took primacy away from the internal security service, the FSB, and
by name
designated SVR Colonel Zyuganov, veteran KGB and Lubyanka executioner, responsible for the women’s interrogation. Zyuganov’s swamp-water heart nearly burst with pride: He would not fail the president.
    As chief of Line KR, Zyuganov knew counterintelligence information was urgently needed: the Chechens’ cutouts, bomb-making confederates, and urban safe houses had to be identified. His impatience to extract the info, more to please his leader than to protect and preserve the Motherland, put a ragged edge on his already ragged soul.
    At the start of the first session, the stronger of the two girls—Medna was her name, she was dark, thin, vital—spat on Zyuganov’s vintage Red Army tunic. This was a serious infraction, massive impertinence. The scaly rage that lived in Zyuganov’s intestines roared up and out of his mouth. Before he could stop himself, he dogged the knurled handle of the high-backed garrote chair Medna had been strapped to one turn too far, and the mechanism that had been slowly choking her instead collapsed her trachea with an audible pop, obstructing her airway and resulting in a noiseless, blue-faced death in thirty