Stalin's Romeo Spy

by Emil Draitser

  Big crowds hungry for entertainment attended these events. They observed executions dispassionately, “crunching sunflower seeds.” “This was the style of the times; it formed my psyche as well,” Dmitri comments.

  In the spring of 1919, Dmitri graduated from both the Anapa gymnasium and the Anapa Nautical School. He found a job as a sailor on a coast guard boat. Considering the turmoil and depravation of revolution and civil war, he was relatively well-off, earning enough to get by. But the gnawing sense of worthlessness that had pursued him for as long as he could remember did not subside fully. One day, walking along the Anapa embankment, which was crowded with refugees from the Bolshevist north of the country, he overheard whispers: “Mathilde . . . Nicholas II’s son . . .” They referred to a thin, worn-out woman, who walked through the crowd accompanied by a teenager carrying a bottle of kerosene on a string. The woman was identified as Mathilde Kschessinskaya, a former prima ballerina of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theater, who had been the object of scandalous rumors concerning her sex life. Back in 1890, at age seventeen, she had been romantically involved with the future Tsar Nicholas II. The romance lasted only three years, after which, in 1894, the tsar married the love of his life, the future Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna. Although, after that, according to rumors, the ballerina had formed a ménage à trois with two other members of the tsarist family, the gossipers insisted that her son—born in 1901, the same year as Dmitri—was an illegitimate son of Nicholas, and, supposedly—like Dmitri—the boy never knew for sure who his father was.

  When the crowd expressed affection and reverence toward the teenager, it only irritated Dmitri. “I looked at the out-of-wedlock emperor’s son without pity or reverence,” he recalls. “At the very least, I’m legitimized now . . . And, at our coast-guard motorboat, I can get kerosene without measuring it with a bottle.” He tries to reassure the readers of his memoirs—and himself—that, in the long run, the unfortunate circumstances of his birth turned out to his advantage: “No, no, I’m glad that I was born the way I was born.” A non sequitur that follows this statement betrays his inner struggle to dismiss his own thoughts of later days—his subsequent career as a spy had everything to do with his emotional dependency, with his strong need to belong, developed early in life, which was exploited by the KGB: “As to my thirteen years of work in [Soviet] intelligence, it only proves the strength of my soul, my openheartedness, and my trusting nature.”15

  But the period of stability in Anapa did not last very long. Dmitri lived in the territory controlled by the White Army authorities, and therefore he was eligible for draft into military service. This made it impossible for him to be hired by a merchant ship’s captain. As a result, he wound up as a volunteer first-class sailor aboard the Rion, a big cargo ship undergoing repair in Novorossiisk port. The tsarist government had bought the Rion on the eve of World War I. Soon after Dmitri came on board, it went to Sevastopol, where it was docked and partially rebuilt so that it could carry out landing and cruiser operations.16

  With the fortunes of the civil war turning in favor of the Reds, Baron Wrangel replaced the unsuccessful White Guard army commander, General Denikin. It didn’t help much. The White Army continued retreating. Discontent grew increasingly pronounced, and aboard the Rion, Dmitri was forced to choose his political allegiance. The ship’s crew was socially divided. There were sailors like him who had volunteered to work for the Whites out of their need to earn a living. But, unlike him, all of them came from the lower classes. Given the opportunity to switch sides, they cast their lot in with the Reds. All officers aboard the ship belonged to the upper classes. With tensions between the two groups growing by the hour, Dmitri was hard-pressed to decide which side he was on. Eventually, he chose to stay with his proletarian comrades.

  Soon all volunteers aboard the Rion, including Dmitri, received a draft call from the White Guard authorities. To avoid the draft, his new coworkers decided to flee to Turkey and he agreed. They advised him that to have enough money to survive the first week in Constantinople, he should steal their ship’s compass and sell it to the captain of a schooner anchored nearby. The next morning, Dmitri dismantled the compass, hid it in a basket under his dirty linens, and under a pretext of taking them ashore to his laundress, passed the sentry.

  The compass sold for three Turkish lira. He sewed the money in his shirt. At night, the Bolshevik sympathizers aboard the ship attempted to destroy the Rion by blowing up the dock housing. The attempt failed. In the morning, all sailors subject to the draft were sent ashore with the order to report to the local military commander. Refusal to carry out the order meant being sent to the front right away. Dmitri had to act as quickly as possible. He climbed aboard the Tsesarevitch Constantine ship bound for Turkey. First, he hid in the ship’s lavatory; then he jumped into the hold. For the first time in his life, he left his native land behind. He was full of anxiety. In August 1919, still a teenager, he was on his way to a foreign country with no idea that it was only the beginning of his long and troubled life.17

  Unaware of it, he thus began a new cycle of separation in his life, now not only from his mother but from his Motherland as well. At this point, life pushed him away from fulfilling his strongest need—the need to belong. For him, who had been given away by his mother and totally ignored by his never-seen father, this unfulfilled need to belong would play a fateful part in his life, forcing him to make bad choices that, eventually, would result not only in the wasting of his inborn talents but also would bring him to the verge of physical destruction.

  But, for now, coiling up in the hold of a Russian ship, he was leaving his native land.

  TWO

  A Leaf Torn from a Branch

  Against his will, he was brought into the White Volunteer Army as a civilian sailor. In 1919, . . . on the ship Constantine, he was taken to Turkey.

  —BYSTROLYOTOV’S OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY

  A leaf torn from a branch, I was carried by storm to an unknown faraway land. Twirling in the wind, I ran on because I couldn’t stop.

  —BYSTROLYOTOV, IN HIS MEMOIRS

  Dmitri’s life in Constantinople began with a stroke of luck. Soon after the ship he was traveling on dropped anchor in the port, and he had climbed out of the ship’s hold covered in coal dust, he ran into his classmate from Anapa Nautical School, Evgeny (Zhenya) Kavetsky, who had fled to Turkey a few months earlier. Kavetsky was employed as a boatswain on the schooner Eglon, formerly St. Sergii. The ship was privately owned and used for commercial purposes. Its crew consisted of destitute men of many nationalities who had fled their native lands in the course of World War I and the Russian civil war. Besides a Russian boatswain, there were three Estonians, Captain Kaze, and two machinists, August and Martin, as well as Turk, Arab, and Greek sailors.1

  Luckily for Dmitri, the position of ship’s cook was vacant, and he was hired at once thanks to his friend’s recommendation. The trouble was that Dmitri didn’t know how to cook. Kavetsky wrote down recipes for him on a piece of paper. Because it was damp in the kitchen, the ink ran, and the recipes soon became illegible. Naturally, angered by the inept cooking, the crew members came close to throwing the new cook overboard many times. Luckily, boatswain Kavetsky intervened on Dmitri’s behalf.

  Little by little, Dmitri learned how to cook. His living conditions on board the schooner were harsh. As maritime tradition dictated, a cook was assigned the worst berth on the ship. Dmitri’s bed near the hold was always damp. Tired from working all day, he slept, often jolted out of his dreams by cold rat tails scurrying over his body.

  The ship’s owners took full advantage of the lawlessness reigning in the country at the time. In 1918, following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, British, French, and Italian troops had occupied Constantinople. Soon afterward, General Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) waged the Turkish War of Independence against the Entente Powers (1919–23). As the war raged on, wartime profiteering flourished. The most lucrative business consisted of transporting re
fugees running from the advancing troops of Turkish nationalists to the Bulgarian and Greek coastlines.

  The schooner’s Captain Kaze worked out a modus operandi—he sailed along the shores looking for distant smoke, which usually came from Greek and Armenian settlements burned by Atatürk’s troops. Once he spotted the smoke, he knew it wouldn’t be too long before, in a frantic attempt to escape over the sea, scores of refugees would stream to the beaches. When the lifeboat was packed to capacity, those who couldn’t squeeze in knew that they were doomed to death, and they howled like animals. As the lifeboat cast off the beach, the refugees—their faces distorted, fists raised to the sky—jumped into the water and tried to cling to the boat’s sides. In frantic pleas for their lives, dangling in the water, choking on it, they offered whatever valuables they had to the sailors. Since the boat was usually already overloaded, the crew bashed the desperate swimmers over the head with the oars until, one after another, they disappeared in the water.

  Dmitri witnessed a scene during one of these operations that would haunt him for years, eventually causing paroxysms of incapacitating depression.

  [At that time] only one young woman with a baby is left behind the boat . . . I see her face; it’s an arm’s length away . . . She pushes her baby over the side into the boat toward us and looks at the baby, holding on to the rocking boat with her thin fingers. One of the sailors crushes them with his oar. The bones of her fingers crack. Smiling at her baby, the woman is slowly sinking . . . I’m rowing the boat and see her hair in the clear water. It twines about her face like snakes . . . She smiles and looks at me from under the water. Then she disappears.2

  In the fall of 1920, to supplement their income from trafficking in refugees, the owners of the Eglon also speculated in goods, such as tins of tea and sacks of sugar stolen by the French quartermasters in the Greek army fighting the Turks. One day, the schooner was caught in a storm. To avoid capsizing in the heavy winds, the crew cut down the ship’s masts and got rid of the sails but couldn’t stop water from seeping through the cracks. For the next three days and nights, huge waves pounded the ship; it was a matter of sheer luck that it didn’t sink. Finally, the storm subsided, and powerful currents pulled the schooner into the Bosporus. The exhausted crew was still recuperating from its ordeal on the open sea when the shipowners, concerned about nothing but profit, ordered the crew to repair the masts and sails without delay and return to sea. The sailors argued that the ship’s condition was too poor for a new raid. In need of substantial repair, her damaged body wouldn’t survive the next big storm. In response, the owners threatened to fire anyone who refused to follow their orders. With several hundred thousand refugees flooding into Constantinople, it would be impossible to find another job of any kind, so the crew grudgingly obeyed their masters. “That was my lesson in political literacy,” Dmitri writes. “That [incident] drove home my first passionate political convictions.”

  Back out on the open sea, the ship soon encountered powerful winds. To escape a new storm, the crew hastened to pull into the nearest small port, which was already in the hands of the Turks. Captain Kaze began long negotiations with the authorities. Toward morning, the ship slipped away into the foggy sea, and the fate of everybody on board again looked quite bleak. Resenting the dirty business he was forced to be part of, Dmitri was looking for a chance to escape. He persuaded his boatswain friend Kavetsky to join him in taking over the ship’s command and sailing it back to the Russian shore. One day, when bringing dinner to the captain’s suite, Dmitri managed to get hold of his pistol. Handing it over to Kavetsky and arming himself with a crowbar, the two confronted the captain and demanded that he head the schooner toward the Crimea. To their surprise, Captain Kaze didn’t object to the change of course, and the crew turned out to be equally indifferent to the ship’s destination. Despite the ship’s poor condition, after a few days of sailing, the Eglon made it to the Crimean port of Yevpatoria.

  By that time, the defeated Baron Wrangel’s White Army troops had left the Crimea and fled to Turkey. The Crimea was in the hands of the Red Army. Here, in Yevpatoria, Dmitri had his first ominous brush with the most powerful institution in Soviet history—the Cheka, a vernacular version of VChK, an abbreviation for the All-Russia’s Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage. Founded in December 1917, shortly after the Bolshevik takeover, it soon became the most dreaded of Soviet institutions. From the outset, it carried out both punitive and intelligence functions. The local Cheka summoned Dmitri and his fellow sailors and ordered them back to their ship to carry out an important mission: they were to take on board a group of important Red functionaries and deliver them to Odessa.

  Neither shortage of fuel nor scarcity of food in Yevpatoria presented any problems for the almighty Cheka. The ship was fully resupplied and headed for Odessa. It was a risky and dangerous undertaking. In the course of the civil war, the White Guards and Entente troops had mined all water approaches to the Odessan port, and the mine chart for the area wasn’t available. The crew placed their hope on the ship’s shallow draft, about two feet above the usual mine submersion level, and their fingers crossed, they eventually reached Odessa unharmed.

  Odessa was also hit by cold and hunger. The ship’s stay was cut short: the Cheka charged the crew with a new mission, this time a secret one. They had to take on board two Red commissars and their wives and, after swinging by Sevastopol, where they had to pick up a suitcase with valuables expropriated from the Whites, take them to the Bulgarian port of Varna and, at night, on a rocket signal, land on a remote beach. The operation was part of the political agenda set by the new Soviet government—to spread the Russian Revolution across the globe. The commissars were to orchestrate a proletarian up rising in Bulgaria.

  On December 31, 1920, after picking up the suitcase in Sevastopol, the schooner headed for Bulgaria. Poorly repaired after the storm lashing in Turkish waters, the ship’s sides yielded to the pressure of the icy sea, and in the middle of the night, water suddenly gushed into the hold. With the ship’s sinking imminent and only one four-person lifeboat available, everybody panicked. To get hold of the boat for the secret mission party, one of the commissars drew his handgun. Condemned to perish in the icy waters about to rush over the ship’s sides, the sailors drew their pistols as well. The situation grew tense. Gunfire seemed inevitable. One of the commissar’s wives fell on the deck crying that she couldn’t move. The commissar aimed his gun at Dmitri’s chest and ordered him to take her to the boat. As Dmitri carried out the orders, sheer luck again saved him and his fellow crewmen. The captain of an Odessa port tugboat passing nearby noticed the ship in trouble and rushed to its rescue.

  (During my meeting with Bystrolyotov, he described his first encounter with the Cheka differently. Upon his return to Yevpatoria, the Cheka approached him and asked whether he was a patriot of his Motherland and wanted to serve her. When he enthusiastically agreed—Bystrolyotov made it clear to me that, at the time, he had a rather vague idea what the Cheka was all about and where Russia as a country was heading—they proposed that he become their sleeper abroad. To do so, he would have to go back to Turkey and wait. They would find him and let him know what to do next.)3

  While the ship underwent repair, Dmitri fell ill with pneumonia. After a long recovery, he and Kavetsky felt they had had enough of sea adventures and asked the Cheka to relieve them of their duties. After some deliberation, they received permission provided that they surrender their Turkish documents and their sailors’ clothing. These items were passed to the commissars, who planned to use them to blend in with the rest of the schooner’s crew.

  In February 1921, Dmitri and Kavetsky headed for Novorossiisk, where they hoped to find work. Their journey from Sevastopol to Kerch on a horse-driven cart, over the frozen and deserted steppes, turned into an ordeal. The horses tired often, and they had to brandish their pistols to get fresh horses in villages along the way. Biting cold combined with fierce winds caused Dmitri to
fall ill again. Kavetsky again proved a good friend. He removed his peacoat and wrapped it around Dmitri’s shoulders; to keep warm himself, he ran next to the cart.

  En route to Novorossiisk, Kavetsky also fell ill with pneumonia. With much difficulty, Dmitri arranged for a horse-driven cab to take his friend to a hospital. While his friend stayed in the hospital, the local authorities appointed Dmitri to the post of chief of the Anapa Lighthouse. The lighthouse had an extensive library that had belonged to Dmitri’s predecessor, before he ran away with the Whites. During the long night hours, Dmitri admired the colorful brochures featuring Switzerland. He had no inkling then that, in time, his future spy work would take him to these very places shown in the brochures, and he would wonder where he had seen them before.

  After Kavetsky’s recovery from pneumonia, both he and Dmitri succeeded in being relieved of military duty. They finally made it to Novorossiisk but could find no work there. In the spring, on a motor launch carrying an American trade union delegation headed by one Melnichansky, they went farther south along the coast and eventually reached the port of Batumi in the Republic of Georgia. In July 1921, hungry and lost, and along with other refugees, they boarded the Italian liner Roma and departed for Constantinople for the second time. Exit visas posed no problem. To get rid of the unemployed and hungry, the new administration let them go without any formalities.

  In Constantinople, luck again graced Dmitri and his friend. At the Seli-Bazaar pier, Kaze, their former captain, spotted them in the midst of the crowd of jobless sailors. Remembering that Dmitri and Kavetsky had saved him from the hands of the Cheka, Kaze reprimanded them strongly for taking over the ship in the first place but took them back on board. Soon, with a load of stolen army blankets on board, their schooner was on its way to the Mediterranean seaport of Izmir.