The Cardinal of the Kremlin (Jack Ryan, #4; Jack Ryan Universe, #5)

by Tom Clancy

least the past eight years all figures on economic performance had been false in one way or another, each compounding itself on the next until the economic forecasts generated by the GOSPLAN bureaucracy were as fictitious as the list of Stalin’s virtues. The ship he commanded was running deeper and deeper into an enveloping fog of lies told by functionaries whose careers would be destroyed by the truth. That was how he spoke of it at the weekly Politburo meetings. Forty years of rosy goals and predictions had merely plotted a course on a meaningless chart. Even the Politburo itself didn’t know the state of the Soviet Union—something the West hardly suspected. The alternative? That was the rub, wasn’t it? In his darker moments, Narmonov wondered if he or anyone else could really change things. The goal of his entire political life had been to achieve the power that he now held, and only now did he fully understand how circumscribed that power was. All the way up the ladder of his career he’d noted things that had to change, never fully appreciating how difficult that would be. The power he wielded wasn’t the same as Stalin’s had been. His more immediate predecessors had seen to that. Now the Soviet Union wasn’t so much a ship to be guided, as a huge bureaucratic spring that absorbed and dissipated energy and vibrated only to its own inefficient frequency. Unless that changed . . . the West was racing into a new industrial age while the Soviet Union still could not feed itse...