7
Vladi
Red Army Intelligence Captain Vladimir Rublev was having tea. Since the British had introduced the habit of afternoon tea to Berlin, he’d adopted this tradition, changing just one small detail: he always laced his tea heavily with vodka, the Russian national drink.
Sitting at the window and looking into the lush gardens of the Soviet Military Administration Headquarters in Karlshorst he mused about the next steps in the big plan to squeeze the Western Allies out of Berlin.
General Sokolov, the Soviet Kommandant in Berlin and counterpart to The Beast of Berlin, as the American Kommandant General Harris was commonly known, had made a brilliant move the past week and walked out of the Kommandatura, while putting all the blame on the aforementioned beast.
Quadripartite rule over t
