FUOCO RUSSO SEGRETO
In the spring of 1999
Europe is deeply troubled by the events in Kosovo and is about to
be bombed. In Paris Andrej
Klimkin, military attaché at the Russian embassy, shoots himself. He leaves a
strange suicide note……..I have been being hunted down for 13
years…Chernobyl….I can no longer bear to watch helplessly the massacre which is
taking place before my very eyes…. Signed in a different name by which
everyone knew him: Andreev, the name he was known by in the KGB.
Chernobyl….KGB…What really
happened on the night of April 26th, 1986 which seemed like the beginning of the end of
the world? Maybe an awkward suicide has uncovered some hidden past some unknown
past?
This mystery intrigues
Elena Skutova, a beautiful, cultivated Russian in her forties, a friend of the
dead man and who, in any case had been personally affected by Chernobyl (her
father, a nuclear scientist, had died of cancer as a result). Elena Skutova, a
clever
diplomat with a promising
future, puts both her career and life at risk to solve the mystery, shocked as
she is by a surprise discovery. In the file containing the dead man’s personal
documents, which is her job to return to Russia, she finds a letter in which
Klimkin-Andreev mentions Chernobyl again and also confesses to his wife his
personal sense of guilt in the deaths of Elena’s father and the other victims
of the disaster as if it were no accident but a terrible planned attack for
which he feels partly responsible!
Elena, whose life had already been seriously affected by the world
events of the previous 25 years (her adored husband having been killed in
Afghanistan) soon discovers that someone else is also after the documents in
her possession (mostly of little interest
except for the letter,
probably someone had already taken or destroyed any other compromising
documents): Klimkin’s Moscow flat had been ransacked. No threat danger deters
Elena from her determination , she is driven by the feeling that a hidden power
is concealing something truly terrible, she remembers her father’s dying
moments (there is a moving description of this in the book in which he utters
some enigmatic words about Chernobyl to which, at the time, Elena gives no
importance). Elena begins living an intense and dramatic double life; on the one
hand as an extremely able and accomplished diplomat in the rich and protected
world of civil service, and on the other, in a dangerous and threatening
underground world which takes her to Rome, Paris, Budapest and Belgrade. It
turns out to be even more dangerous than she thought: in Rome, she has a rendez-vous in the Domus Aurea whit Klimkin’s
supposed brother. It is a trap and she escapes whit her life when an innocent
tourist is killed in her stead. The danger that Elena is in becomes ever more
tangible and the reader discovers something even more unsettling. An intriguing
telephone conversation, a conference call linking London, Singapore,
Johannesburg, New York, Moscow and Shanghai reveals the existence of a kind of
secret sect: a group of unknown but powerful men are openly discussing among
themselves the failed attempt to eliminate Elena and also their plans to
dominate the entire world both politically and economically! Unaware of all
this Elena enrolls the help of a powerful English businessman, an advisor to
Tony Blair, who helps her to meet some influential people in the world of
genetic research and international commerce. Still without any specific leads,
Elena however, develops her own theory, which will not in fact be too far from
the truth: an entire rereading of all the supposed values of the 20th century. Maybe the
Russian revolution had simply been good business for Western capitalists,
isolating Russia, preventing it from developing into a dangerous competitor!
Perhaps the truths presented to the man in the street have been little more
than a stage set, little more than an illusion. The presence of the West in
Russian affairs is immediately confirmed by an enlightening flash-back to a
discussion which had taken place within the Russian government before the
attack on the parliament building: mercenaries and western infiltrators in
Moscow….directing first the uprising and then its repression. Although
nurturing the most terrible doubts Elena never stops behaving like the perfect
Russian and continues her work: she will take part in diplomatic mission to
Paris, Budapest and Belgrade, in a desperate attempt to deflect the growing
crisis, the bombing of Serbia, the isolation of Yeltsin. Meanwhile someone has
stolen Klimkin’s file which Elena had locked up at the railway station in Rome.
It is a difficult time: from Hungary Elena travels to Serbia on unsafe roads,
through poor villages which are soon to be demolished by war. During this time
and years after the death of her husband, she meets and falls passionately in
love whit a German journalist, Stephan Schmidt, who will travel whit her to
Belgrade. Like Elena, Stephan, too, carries the scars of the final years of the
century ( in Argentina, Videla’s coup, the desparecidos…) In forceful images (a
bridge on the Danube, gypsies, jugglers, barges and bombs…) Alberini paints a
picture of Serbia on the eve of war. Elena attends the futile meeting between
Chernomydrin and Milosovic: the meeting breaks down and the Serbian leader
leaves with an enigmatic “remember Chernobyl”. Another jolt to Elena’s memory,
while we, the readers, learn from another world-wide phone call between the
all- powerful that not only have they decided to spare Elena but they will try
and use towards their own ends. The ghosts of Chernobyl torment Elena, who
luckily up again with Stephan at the Metropole Hotel in Belgrade: a powerful
love scene takes place while the bombs begin to fall on the city. Inevitably
the rest of the plot takes place in Moscow : Elena decides to challenge danger
to the limits. In fact the wife of the dead man lives in Moscow and probably
keeps her husband’s secret papers. She lives in a squalid 5 storey block of
flats on the outskirts of Moscow. Elena, however, finds that someone else has
got there first and Klimkin’s wife has been horribly murdered. Yeltsin’s own
police arrive and hold Elena with a series of vague excuses. It is clear that
complex conspiracy is weaving itself around her, in which an ambiguous part is
played by the androgenous beauty, Lilja, who Elena had previously
met in Serbia. In the city, whitened by a late fall of snow, Elena meets Stephan again,
with a Russian journalist friend of his, at the Majakovskij Museum where they
all plan to go and find Sergej Andreev, Klimkin’s brother, also an ex KGB
agent, now hiding somewhere in Siberia. They have adventurous and lucky escape
from Moscow by air. Then in Gloskovskoe (Irkustk) they come very near the
moment of truth. Kimkin’s brother, Sergej Andreev, lives right on the edge of
civilization, holed up in an izba, protected from the ice and snow. On their
arrival the three have a ferocious fight with hired hitmen who have been sent
to kill him, and he, in fact, is the last (and by now the only one) to know.
Hidden under the floor of the izba are the documents that so many spies had
been looking for. The first dates back to the 22nd May 1986: two Russian scientists
inform Gorbachov that strange coded messages warning of a disaster at
Chernobyl, had appeared in the magazine Seven Days (authentic pages of
which appear in the book!), giving those in the know time to get away. The
second refers to 1917: bankers from every nation had financed the Russian
revolution, a document with all their signatures is the proof! Someone
therefore had used Chernobyl to bring Gorbachov to his knees. Are they perhaps
the descendants of those who financed the revolution? Are they the same ones
who cold-heartedly decide the fates of both the world and of single individuals
like Elena and Klimkin? The three heroes leave Andreev to dig deeper into the
frozen Siberia wasteland in search of an improbable serenity. They return to
west and will try and tell the world what they have discovered by publishing an
article called “Planetary Government the dark side of the planet” in Isvestia
and Frankfurter Allegmeine…
The last chapter begins in
a Moscow flat where Elena and Stephan manager to create for themselves a
fleeting moment of love, while we hear again what now seems even more sinister
prophetic warnings from the dead ex KGB agent, forewarning of new and terrible
international terrorist attacks (at this time only a few years before the epoch
making tragedy of the twin towers) whit which the great and the powerful of the
world subjugate the people and crush those who oppose their plans. Whoever
cold-bloodedly planned the millions of deaths in the Ukraine is not going to
hesitate to be the architect of other atrocities, in the name of a “new man”,
perhaps will never exist.