"But by whom and for what purpose?" asked the Chairman of the Committee for State Security, his voice incredulous. "And what we have always thought to be one of the nation's masterpieces," he continued, "turns out to have been painted five hundred years after Rublev's original." "Because, my dear Zaborski, during the past eighteen months the age of all the treasures in the Winter Palace has been tested by carbon dating, the modern scientific process that does not call for a second opinion," said Brezhnev, displaying his newfound knowledge. "How can you be so sure it's a fake, Leonid Ilyich?" the diminutive figure inquired. Yuri Zaborski knew after years of running the KGB who had been cast as the mouse the moment his phone had rung at four that morning to say that the General Secretary required him to report to the Kremlin office-immediately. The head of state security moved restlessly in his chair as the cat-and-mouse game continued.
The Czar must have removed the original sometime before the Red Army entered Petrograd and overran the Winter Palace." "True, Comrade Zaborski," said the old man, "but for fifty years we've been guarding a fake. "The Czar's icon of Saint George and the dragon has been in the Winter Palace at Leningrad under heavy guard for over fifty years." "That can't be possible," replied his Politburo colleague. "IT'S A FAKE," said the Russian leader, staring down at the small exquisite painting he held in his hands.
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