This Novel, Kremlin Devils (1988), Predicted August 1991 Failed Soviet Coup

This is my 700th post. Thank you, readers, for inspiring me to share what I know in order to help any reader better understand the history and circumstances of Armstrongism. I hope what I have written have been of benefit to you.

My thoughts are with the people of the USA, especially the poor, as they are forced to endure the House Republicans' petulant shutdown of the Federal Government because they still cannot accept they lost the argument over health care reform in the Congress, the Senate, the Supreme Court and the 2012 election. This shutdown is not a legitimate way to discuss legislative matters. I hope this shutdown ends soon.

For this post I wish to show an largely unknown example of predicting future events and see how it compares to the predictions of COG leaders.

The various leaders of Armstrongism claim to be able to foresee with great accuracy events which will occur in the near future. Let us see how they compare to this other person I discovered.

Awhile ago I went into a second hand bookstore. I went and looked around for about an hour. I felt it would be rude to stay so long and not buy anything so I bought a book entitled Kremlin Devils by Jack Hild. It was printed January 1988. It is the twenty third book in a series entitled Soldiers of Barabbas.

Early in the book one of our heroes, Nate Back, has a mysterious meeting with some Russians in a house out in the wintry countryside outside of Moscow. These Russians show him a doctored video which appears to show the wife of the "first secretary" (Mikhail Gorbachev, who is left unnamed in the book) conducting an adulterous affair. 

One of these Russians, Nikolay Popolov, is here speaking to Nate Beck.

"...This videotape circulates underground in Moscow and Leningrad, and the capitals of some of the other republics. An earlier video showed the first secretary's wife using a credit card to buy jewelry and fashionable clothing on state visits to Western cities. But this is much worse. It is intended to embarrass the new leader. To undermine his authority. To remind him that there are others in the Soviet state who are also powerful."

"KGB?" He [Nate Beck] ventured. "A campaign against glastnost." He used the Russian word that had become a clarion call for a new Russia. Roughly it meant openness. In fact, it meant much more--the accelerating release of dissidents and political prisoners, films and books freed from the censors' files, economic revival in a country where people lined up to buy meat and bread, and even a Communist version of democracy in elections.

"Is it your own production, Nikolay?" [Nate Beck asked.]

"There are many who stand to lose their privileges. They will do anything to stop it, " Popolov said...

Nikolay turned to Nate. When he spoke, his voice was urgent. "There is going to be a coup d'état."

Nate looked at him.

"A military takeover of the Soviet Union." (pp. 31-2.)  

Shortly afterwards Popolov further discusses his knowledge of this reactionary conspiracy to overthrow the government to halt the glastnost reforms. 

"The reforms in our country have threatened many party members and bureaucrats who have become accustomed to the pleasures their privileges have brought them. And some of the generals still remember with fondness the steel fist of Marshal Stalin. They fear the first secretary is growing weak with concessions for disarmament. A small group has banded together, calling itself the Committee of Nine. They have formed a counterrevolutionary leadership tribunal. They have an apparatus of disaffected and threatened bureaucrats everywhere. Their aim is to overthrow the present regime. We know this--"...

"I know these people. They will stop at nothing. I myself was one of them. But no longer."(pp. 32-3.)

Needless to say this conspiracy is a major plot point for this novel.

How amazing!

In 1988 an American writer presented a scenario in a fictional book of bureaucrats staging a coup to overthrow the reformist government of Gorbachev. Just three years later, in August 1991, that is exactly what happened. A faction within the Communist Party arrested Gorbachev and tried to overthrow him, but thanks to the heroic resistance by the people of Moscow this plot was thwarted. 

This book has presented theories and speculations that are much more accurate and prescient then what the leaders of Armstrongism have devised and propagated.

I remember hearing how after the fall of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe Garner Ted Armstrong complained that he predicted that and was being vindictively ignored.

That is total nonsense.

HWA also predicted the Communists would conquer Asia, including India, and that the Communist system, including the Soviet Union, would outlast the United States to be destroyed by the returned Christ a few years after Christ's return. HWA did not at all foresee the fall of the Soviet Union before the return of Christ.

HWA also predicted and promoted all kinds of other absurd and ludicrous predictions. To cite one example in 1965 the Plain Truth preached that Hitler was still alive and insinuated he would play a role in creating the European Beast Power.

Despite this some COGs, such as Roderick C. Meredith's LCG, continue to deceptively insinuate that HWA had remarkable insight in predicting events before they were apparent. Nothing could be further from the facts.

Jack Hild's novel is certainly far more accurate than Dave Pack's recent prediction that the other COGs would miraculously disintegrate and by August 30, 2013, the COGs would be unified under Dave Pack.

Also it turns out Jack Hild is just a pen name. The author is one Robin Hardy. And he also wrote this book in 1999, The Crisis of Desire: AIDS and the Fate of Gay Brotherhood. So this remarkable prediction was provided by a man who struggles for greater acceptance by society of LBGT people. Meredith will not be impressed.