In the face of his physical handicap and a life of near monastic solitude, combined with fifty years as an officer of the Red Army of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the tall and angular General Aleksyi Polenko still considered himself a man of discipline. It was discipline his father had taught him at a young age that was primary to an officer’s success. His father had also said that discipline should be primary to a soldier’s natural inclinations as well.

General Aleksyi Polenko remembered hearing his mother, Katarina Yelena, berating his father later that same cold November night. Having been silent long enough in the matter, she had carried her soaking wet and shivering son upstairs and toweled him briskly until he was rosy and dry. Then she had helped him on with his nightshirt and tucked him into a goose-down bed covered with pure white pillows, scarlet quilts and fresh linen sheets, and hinting of her husband’s tobacco.