January 14, 11.17AM 1985 - Central Clinical Hospital, Moscow.
Valery Rhykov (Private Secretary to General Secretary Chernenko)
"What do you mean the same hospital? Why are you bringing him here?! Chernenko will have a fit! He doesn't need to see this in his condition, let a sick man have some peace!"
It was just after 7 in the morning, when Mikhail Sergeyvich Gorbachev was walking his dog a short distance away from his dacha in Crimea, that he encountered a troubled former soldier, Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Only two shots of the four Zhirinovsky fired managed to hit "Gorby", as he was affectionately known to some, but that was all that was needed. The first bullet passed innocently enough through the left shoulder, coming out clean the other side. The second however, entered the lower abdomen, perforating the appendix and leading to serious loss of blood and bodily infection.
Zhirinovsky was also shot twice by protection agents of Mikhail Sergeyevich, but neither bullet caused a life threatening injury and he was taken alive into KGB custody. His motives were later said to be part of a familiar Soviet conspiracy, but were in fact simply the actions of a lone madman. Not that this fact mattered within the USSR's hierarchy. It never seemed to.
Konstantin Chernenko (General Secretary of the CPSU) January 14, 1.17PM 1985
"Mikhail. Mikhail. Why Mikhail I don't understand. *Cough*. We must relay this to Brehznev at once"
Chernenko was suffering from one of his bad days in terms of lucid thought during his stay at the hospital. Since the year had started, he tended to have more bad days than good. Brehznev of course had been dead for three years, and the chain smoking Chernenko attended his funeral. It had been a stressful day for the aged premier though, and perhaps his confusion was understandable. But then again, perhaps not.
Gorbachev died officially at 6PM on January the 15th, 1985. In reality however he was dead upon arrival at the hospital at around 11 am the previous day. The death of "Gorby" made the succession to the ailing Chernenko a increasingly hot topic in whispered conversations around the Politburo. First to officially speak on the topic was Gorbachev's sometime rival and hardliner, Viktor Grishin. At an emergency plenum of the Soviet Politburo, Grishin called for a rigorous investigation into the perpetrators of the attack, accusing foreign interests of "attempting to de-stabilize the utopian ideals of this, our perfect and unbending Soviet Motherland". It was clear Grishin was associating the death of Gorbachev with the Americans, and in the atmosphere of the Politburo one could not disagree, even though many doubted his claims.
The coming months, indeed the last of Chernenko's reign, would be of cataclysmic importance in both Soviet, and World history.
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