Stalin's Romeo Spy

by Emil Draitser

  Then, in the summer of 2002, on a trip to California, I visited an old friend, Gary Kern. At the time he was finishing a book on Walter Krivitsky, another pre–World War II Soviet spy, and as he told me about it, I thought I would mention my meeting with a Russian intelligence officer. “What’s his name?” Kern asked. “Bystrolyotov,” I replied. “What!” He nearly jumped out of his seat. Bystrolyotov, he told me, was legendary, one of the “Great Illegals.” We spent the rest of the evening talking about him.

  Returning back home to New York, I went through my files and pulled out a brown tattered notebook with my account of the spy I had met at the end of my former Soviet life. After rereading the notes, I decided to track down the facts in his case. Bystrolyotov, I discovered, was long dead. He had died of a heart attack in 1975, less than two years after our meeting.

  Fifteen years later, during the period of Gorbachev’s glasnost’ (openness), his name was made public in Russia. First an article in Pravda paid tribute to his exploits, then other periodicals told various parts of his story.3

  In the West, some of his most successful operations were known, but the person behind them was shrouded in mystery. Thus a 1986 book by William Corson and Robert Crowley, The New KGB: Engine of Soviet Power, attributes one of the most spectacular achievements in Soviet espionage—handling and controlling a British Foreign Office clerk in charge of codes and ciphers—to a Soviet agent whose code name, like Bystrolyotov’s, was HANS, but whose background was quite different.4

  As in Russia, the name Bystrolyotov did not surface in Western accounts of KGB operations until the 1990s, and then only in books coauthored by ex-KGB officers who had access to his file. None of these accounts, however, whether published inside or outside Russia, tells the full story of his life. As I read them, I became increasingly intrigued. For me the man was not just a historical figure, but a real person I had met back in my Soviet days. I dug deeper, trying to find out more. I read his memoirs, Puteshestvie na krai nochi (Journey to the Edge of Night), published in Russian in 1996.

  Actually, this book, devoted to his years in the Gulag, represented only a small portion of his memoirs. It bore a preface by S. S. Milashov, who informed readers that Bystrolyotov had entrusted his papers to him. Here, I thought, was a lead.5

  But how do you go about finding a person in Moscow with only his surname and first and middle initials? Well, I still had some old friends in the city, so I placed an overseas call to one named Boris and asked him for help. He explained that there was still no residential telephone book in Moscow, just as in the old days. And, just as before, if you didn’t know a person’s date of birth, you couldn’t find him through the city’s Information Bureau. Such was the Soviet system. Boris also doubted that the publisher of Bystrolyotov’s book would be willing to reveal the whereabouts of the man who wrote the preface.

  Turning to the Internet, I went to the search engine Yandex, the Russian equivalent of Google, and one by one rounded up twenty-two entries for the name “Milashov.” Then I eliminated them one by one until I finally came to Sergei Sergeyevich Milashov, Bystrolyotov’s grandson, or rather stepgrandson. Milashov was related to Bystrolyotov’s second wife, whom he met and married in the camps.

  Contacting him by phone, I told him about my connection to Bystrolyotov and asked for assistance in my research. By now, I felt committed to it, without really knowing why. Milashov confirmed that he was the guardian of his stepgrandfather’s literary and personal archives and offered me his full cooperation. I could come to Moscow, he said, and get acquainted with Bystrolyotov’s papers firsthand. He even offered to put me up in his apartment, although I declined. What a stroke of luck! How could I refuse?

  It was hot and humid in Moscow in July 2003. Still jet-lagged, I called Milashov, and he came straight over to my hotel. A tall and agile man, an engineer by training, he complimented my spoken Russian, preserved in emigration over so many years. We struck up an immediate friendship and then went to his apartment.

  There he sat me down and placed in front of me a pile of Bystrolyotov’s papers. The first thing I discovered was a worn-out pocketsize address book. With a thrill, I turned to the first page and saw an entry under the letter A: “Journalist Emil Abramov (Draitser).” My old Moscow telephone numbers, both for work and for home, followed. My past Russian life, left behind so many years ago, came back to me in a flash. My curious meeting with the address book owner arose even more vividly before me.

  Thereafter, I took the train every day to Solntsevo, the Moscow suburb where Milashov lived, to work my way through the materials. As a source of information, they proved to be difficult reading. Bystrolyotov had written his memoirs in the hope of seeing them published. To make his work acceptable to the censors, he resorted to a practice common among Soviet writers: self-censorship. I knew this practice only too well.

  Talking with Milashov, I learned that he knew Bystrolyotov for the last twenty years of his life, from the time of his release from the camps in 1954 to the day of his death in 1975. Milashov credited him with exerting a decisive influence on his upbringing and world outlook. He recalled many conversations with his relative and mentor over the years, and these recollections provided me with many insights into Bystrolyotov’s inner life.

  Milashov also introduced me to Anatoly Razumov, a library scholar who published a study of the manuscripts Bystrolyotov deposited for safekeeping in 1968 at the Saltykov-Shchedrin State Public Library (now the Russian State Library) in Leningrad. The study contains excerpts from interviews Razumov conducted with some of Bystrolyotov’s former fellow prisoners, the most famous being Lev Gumilyov, son of two of Russia’s great poets, Nikolai Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova. Her long poem about her son’s imprisonment, “Requiem,” is considered one of the glories of twentieth-century Russian literature. Razumov directed me to the “Prague Archive,” a collection of Russian émigré documents at the Moscow State Archives. As Bystrolyotov had spent several years in Prague, perhaps it would contain something related to him. Soon I was holding in my hands a violet folder from the Russian Law Faculty of Prague containing the student file of Dmitri Aleksandrovich Bystrolyotov. It took me back in time to the youth of the old man I had met. I was getting to know him pretty well.

  Back in New York, I studied my booty. While it answered many questions about Bystrolyotov’s life, it prompted new ones, especially about the beginning of his tumultuous career. He began as a “legal” intelligence worker—that is, as an employee of the Soviet Trade Mission in Prague bearing legitimate credentials. The work he actually did, of course, was not legal. It was there that he began his recruitment of women as Soviet agents. His turbulent married life also started there. I decided that I would have to wait for a break in my teaching schedule and then pursue my subject in Prague.

  In October 2005, I flew to the city, walked the same streets that Bystrolyotov had walked some eighty years before, and sat in a reading hall of Charles University where he had read his textbooks to prepare for his law classes. On the city outskirts, I visited a dormitory where he had roomed. I stopped by a café in the fashionable Steiner Hotel (now Grand Hotel Bohemia) that had served as a meeting place for him and his spymaster. I walked the paths of Rieger Gardens, a city park where he pursued his femme fatale, Isolde Cameron. Then, at the Czech State Archives, with the help of Anastasia Koprivova, a Czech scholar working on a book about Russian immigrants in Czechoslovakia in the 1920s, I uncovered many items related to Bystrolyotov’s life in Prague: college documents, police reports, and newspaper articles.6

  I also traveled to Istanbul and Berlin, Paris and Zurich, following in my protagonist’s footsteps. I looked into the French Foreign Ministry Archives in Nantes and the British archives in London.

  Meanwhile, political developments in Russia have made me increasingly aware that telling Bystrolyotov’s story was no longer my private and self-imposed mission but an urgent order of the day. While I was doing my research, an ex-KGB officer became the country’s
president, and many features of Russian life began making a comeback from the time of Bystrolyotov’s spy career, the country of Stalin. Under President Vladimir Putin, state control of the economy, media, politics, and society had tightened, and Russia has begun sliding back to its Stalinist past. And, as in Stalin’s era, behind a modern democratic facade, Russian nationalism and anti-Westernism have made a full comeback. The most troublesome of these developments are the revision of history and attempts to whitewash the KGB’s bloody role in it.7

  It has become clear to me that the time has come to set the record straight about the life of a man who bore witness to Soviet history and testified about it both in ink and blood.

  PART I

  THE MAKING OF A SPY

  Bystrolyotov’s Travels (1904–1921)

  ONE

  Sowing the Wind

  It so happened that [young] Bystrolyotov saw his parents rarely.

  —BYSTROLYOTOV’S OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY

  I [was] not a pretty little boy, but a little boy down on his luck.

  —BYSTROLYOTOV, RECALLING HIS CHILDHOOD

  “Where would you like to work for us?” a man with a Mephistophelian beard asked.

  “I don’t know . . .” Dmitri began, but, seeing that this didn’t make a good impression, he straightened his shoulders and added, “I want to be where it’s most dangerous!”

  He got what he asked for.

  The conversation took place at the end of April 1925, during the time of Dmitri’s visit to Moscow as the Czechoslovakian delegate at the First Congress of Proletarian Students. His address to the Congress was published in Pravda. His interlocutor was Artur Khristyanovich Artuzov, head of the Counterintelligence Department of the OGPU. Although Dmitri had been involved in intelligence work at the Soviet Trade Mission in Prague for more than a year, he considered this meeting the true beginning of his intelligence career.1

  The interview had been arranged by Soviet secret service operatives at the Trade Mission in Prague, the only institution representing Soviet interests in Czechoslovakia at that time. Before coming to Moscow, Dmitri had known next to nothing about the inner workings of the Soviet secret service or its intricate structure and organization. He knew only that its headquarters were located on Lubyanka Square in Moscow and that the second secretary of the Prague Trade Mission was an OGPU operative. Before leaving Prague for Moscow to take part in the First Congress of Proletarian Students, he had been forewarned at the Mission that some very important people would talk to him.

  The meeting took place in a mansion that had been owned by Prince Dolgorukov until the Bolshevik takeover in October 1917 dispossessed him. In his memoirs, Dmitri gives a minute description of this pivotal meeting in his life:

  They took me to a small room where a middle-aged man, tired and sleepy, lay fully clothed on a sofa and next to him sat a man, a bit younger, astride a chair, dark haired, slit eyed. They would tell me later that the man on the sofa was Artuzov and the seated one was Mikhail Gorb. They offered me the only other chair. I didn’t know who those men were or what they wanted from me. But I felt that they were big bosses and that my whole future life depended on this conversation . . . Comrade Gorb’s face reflected ill will. He glanced at me and gloomily looked away. But Artuzov examined me and my suit with apparent interest and a benevolent smile: “Well, let’s get acquainted. Tell me everything about yourself. Don’t drag it out, but don’t race through it either. I’d like to know about your background.”2

  Dmitri outlined that he was brought up in an aristocratic family (although he did his own mending from age thirteen), learned foreign languages (French, English, and German), later worked as a sailor on the Black Sea, and when the Russian civil war broke out, with the outflow of refugees, fled to Turkey, eventually winding up in Czechoslovakia.

  This was all true. But there was so much more in his background that he didn’t—and couldn’t—tell, because he would only realize its full meaning many years later. Not until the end of his life did he fully comprehend the profound effect of his formative years on the makeup of his personality and the choices he had made in life. To his credit, he knew that his lifelong troubles had begun early, and he mercilessly examined all the circumstances of that period in his voluminous memoirs, sparing no one, including himself.

  Bystrolyotov’s most recent official biography makes light of the fact that while he was growing up he saw his parents rarely. To begin with, this statement is misleading. He “rarely” saw only one of his parents—his mother. And he never ever saw his father, a situation that deeply wounded him and to which he returns again and again in his memoirs.3

  Born January 3, 1901, in the Crimean village of Akchora (now Gvardeiskoe), the young Bystrolyotov was deprived of a father not because his mother had had an illicit love affair or because she had wanted a child but decided not to marry, but rather because she wanted to make a social statement. She gave birth to an illegitimate child only to challenge conventions. “They didn’t consider the baby and his future,” Dmitri bitterly remarks.4

  “They” is a reference to his mother, Klavdiya Bystrolyotova, daughter of a provincial clergyman, and her best friend, Anastasia Krandievskaya, daughter of a liberal publisher. Both young women were affected by the ideas of women’s liberation then gaining ground in Russia. In 1899, under the influence of a newly organized Society for the Protection of Women’s Health, they called themselves suffragettes, began dressing in men’s pants and hats, and occupied themselves with Swedish gymnastics. Such ostentatious behavior, however, was insufficient for Klavdiya, who burned with the desire “to challenge respectable society in a bolder, sharper, more demonstrative way . . . to spite the whole Victorian world.” The method she ultimately chose was to have an illegitimate child.

  In Bystrolyotov’s view, such an outlandish idea could only arise from emotional instability. He attributed his mother’s disorder to two factors. The first was Pavlovian reflexes or, as he puts it, “dominance of psychomotor stimulation of the cortex over the buffering effect of inhibiting centers.” The second was bad heredity, which he traced back to her grandmother Nina and which he thought had been passed on to him as well. The daughter of an Ossetian prince, Nina had married one Ivan Bystrov, a Cossack officer who later changed his name to Bystrolyotov (“fast flyer”) after the nickname friends had given him for his daring horsemanship. Nina was nicknamed Osa (“wasp”), doubtless due to her erratic and irritable character. Shortly after giving birth to a son, she became violent and had to be physically restrained. She died young.

  Nina’s son Dmitri also grew up troubled. His early life injuries prevented him from becoming a Cossack officer like his father, so, on a whim, he chose the priesthood. But his inborn anxiety and restlessness eventually ruined his career. Made pastor of a rich parish with a new church in town, he announced one day to his superior, the archbishop of the North Caucasus, that no one could prove the existence of God. The archbishop exiled him to Solovetsky Monastery in the Far North, where he could reflect and repent.

  One of Grandfather Dmitri’s children, Klavdiya was like her grandmother and father. Restless, headstrong, and erratic, she gave everybody a lot of trouble. Dmitri believed that he, her only child, carried the burden of this heredity all his life.

  Upon graduation from the gymnasium (high school), Klavdiya was thrown out of her parents’ house for some scandalous behavior. At age nineteen, she began her study in the humanities at a private institution called the Higher Women’s Courses in St. Petersburg. But soon, due to her inborn restlessness, she switched to another institution, then another. Finally she abandoned studies altogether and turned to social activism. She served as a liaison between political exiles in the North and their families back home.

  As she became better known in circles of the liberal intelligentsia, Klavdiya met Anastasia Krandievskaya, her future lifelong friend. Anastasia suggested that they join a group of young men and women from all over Russia who were heading to the Crimea to do volunte
er work at Akchora, the estate of a rich landowner, Sergei Skirmunt. Influenced by Tolstoyan ideas, he was building a model village for the local peasants, complete with cottages, hospital, and school. It was there, while working on the estate, that Klavdiya and Anastasia conceived the idea of challenging polite society by openly having an illegitimate child. Born in 1866, considered a spinster already, Klavdiya nonetheless volunteered to be the mother, while Anastasia took on the task of finding a like-minded male. Relying on his mother’s stories, Dmitri identifies him as Count Alexander Nikolaevich Tolstoy, at the time a minor official of the Ministry of State Properties and a descendant of the ancient aristocratic family. The Tolstoy family, in addition to Russian diplomats, scholars, and artists, produced three famous writers: Leo Tolstoy, Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy, and Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy.

  In his memoirs, Bystrolyotov goes to great lengths to describe all the circumstances that made him take the surname Bystrolyotov and not Tolstoy. He painstakingly recounts all the legal obstacles that had to be overcome to make his birth legitimate. First, the laws of the Russian Empire did not allow his father to adopt him at the time of his birth. Then, two years later, when a new law made it possible, other obstacles appeared. Adoption meant granting him the right not only to carry his father’s name and aristocratic title but also to inherit a share of his estate. This circumstance, Bystrolyotov believed, brought about a Tolstoy family feud. Those who did not have a share in the estate approved of the boy’s adoption; those who did opposed it. When this conflict was finally resolved in Dmitri’s favor, a new hurdle arose. Because his father belonged to the titled branch of the Tolstoy clan, his adoption required a decree of the tsar himself.