Here Dmitri’s fortunes changed for the worse. At night, an American destroyer accidentally ran into their ship and ripped it in half. Suddenly, along with the rest of the crew, Dmitri found himself in the water. He grabbed the ship’s mast floating nearby, pulled himself onto it, and lost consciousness. In the morning, Dmitri and his shipmates, minus two who had drowned, were picked up by the Americans and taken to Constantinople’s Navy Hospital.4
The situation in the city was even worse than before. With the National War for Independence raging and Atatürk’s troops controlling half of the Turkish territory, Constantinople was awash in refugees, over one hundred thousand Russians among them. Without proper documents, it was almost impossible to get work of any kind. Kavetsky was only able to find employment as a deep-sea diver recovering the remnants of sunken ships. One day, because of strong currents in the Bosporus, the air-supply pipes of his diving suit became entangled. He was trapped underwater for too long and suffered extensive bleeding. With the money received as compensation for the damage to his health, he bought an American passport on the black market and left for the United States.
Seeking some help in finding employment, Dmitri visited the Russian consulate in Constantinople. The consul, one Professor Gogel, was willing to oblige his compatriot and issued him a passport in the name of “Walt Antonio Guerrero.” Now, having a passport with a Spanish name, Dmitri finally landed himself a job as a stoker on the Farnaiba, a huge Brazilian dry-cargo ship that made regular trips to Alexandria and farther into the Red Sea to the port of Djibouti.
Work aboard that ship proved to be another trying experience for Dmitri. It was already summertime, and as the ship passed through the Red Sea, the heat became unbearable. Working near the furnaces felt like being in hell. There, on the Farnaiba, Dmitri discovered that he had acting ability. He would often use this talent in his future intelligence work, but here, aboard a cargo ship, it helped him to survive. Despite his having experienced many rough times, the other stokers, a bunch of hoodlums, perceived him as a cultured youth and made him a routine target of their insults. He felt like “a lamb surrounded by wolves,” as he put it.
Dmitri realized he had to come up with some survival strategy, because if he allowed their insults to go unchallenged, they would eventually kill him. At a stopover in Alexandria, he bought a long, “sinister-looking” knife and hid it in his clothes. One day, at mealtime, his persecutors began throwing crusts of bread at him. Dmitri figured out a way to avert their attacks. At the dinner table, he sat opposite one of the weakest and least aggressive of the stokers. When he was hit right on the forehead with a bread crust thrown by a huge stoker sitting at the far end of the table, Dmitri shouted at the stoker sitting across from him, “Last warning! One more time, and I’ll slash your guts out.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man said. The huge stoker threw another crust at Dmitri. Making a wild face, Dmitri jumped to his feet and pulled out the gigantic knife. Shrieking, “Now you’re going to die!” at the top of his lungs, he ran around the table toward the innocent man. To give the other stokers enough time to grab the hand with the knife in it before he reached his target, he purposely entangled himself in the chairs. When ten stokers caught up with him, Dmitri roared and tossed about in their strong arms as they calmed him down and reasoned with him to “forgive” the innocent.
His strategy worked. The incident earned him a reputation as a man of violent temperament, and no one bothered him after that. “I was going on twenty. I was alone abroad, without my Motherland, without help. Among the wolves, first I pretended to be a wolf, and then I became one.”
After a few trips, Dmitri lost his Farnaiba job and joined the vast ranks of the homeless, sinking into Constantinople’s lower depths. Here he witnessed and experienced the horror of destitution and its effect on human morality. In his book Sredi emigratsii (In the Midst of Emigration), a Russian refugee, A. Slobodskoi, who lived in the city about the same time as Dmitri (1920 to 1921), describes the sad state of affairs in the milieu of Russian refugees. Besides quarrels and gossip, drunkenness became rampant and widespread: “Everybody drank. Those [émigrés] who were penniless sold their belongings and their rations. They sold their military uniforms and everything else they could put their hands on. They earned money by chance through work that was unbelievably hard to come by, and they drowned it in drink as soon as they got it. Nothing could stop it. As a result, thievery flourished. An idle and animal-like way of life pushed women to shameless [behavior]. Marriage ties collapsed.”5
Dmitri observed the humiliation to which the destitute Russian refugees were forced to subject themselves:
For a dollar, an American sailor could smear a [White Guard] officer’s face with black and red shoe polish. For two dollars, he could make him climb a tree and urinate on the heads of passersby. For three dollars, he could take part in “cockroach races” [a gambling enterprise widespread in Constantinople]. For five dollars, customers could get into a “Turkish pasha’s harem,” where naked wives of [defeated White Army] officers reclined on carpets, offering hashish and opium . . . On the wet, dirty steps [of the back alleys] thousands of refugees lay, children crawled about, old people, sick and wounded, died one after another.6
In Tartush, the seediest part of the old city, now extinct, there were gambling joints and bordellos. A Jewish woman from Odessa, Madam Rosa Leizer, who owned one of those places, let unemployed Russian sailors sleep in an empty room. Moreover, in their motherly concern for the poor Russian sailors, Dmitri among them, the ladies of the house mended the homeless men’s jackets and darned their socks. To escape the drabness of their lives, his fellow unemployed sailors resorted to crude entertainment. Lodging on the second floor of the bordello, they drilled holes in the floor and watched the action below. When they saw that the lovers had reached the highest point of oblivion, they took turns urinating on the customers’ heads. The enraged customers ran upstairs and engaged in fierce fistfights. At that time in his life, Dmitri experienced the first stages of his mental illness. “Everything seemed to me like a dance in a fiery fog,” he recalls. “I realized that I was falling into an abyss.”
However, there was no time to find out what was happening to his mind. Hunger prompted him to act. Many Russian émigrés in Constantinople made a meager living through trade of any kind. The long Pera, one of Constantinople’s main streets, teemed with his equally destitute compatriots, fellow Russian émigrés. They sold any items they had brought from Russia that had some value: engagement rings, watches, gold chains, earrings, table silver, pillows, blankets, and dresses. The formerly rich sold the expensive carpets they had brought along. There were also those who tried to sell their last torn boots, military uniforms, and underwear donated by foreigners and stolen from the refugee warehouses.7
Because of his aversion to commerce of any kind, to survive, Dmitri had to resort to manual labor. Such work was very difficult to come by. From time to time, he would land a job for a day or two, using the same trick over and over. At the labor exchange, he pretended to be an expert in any profession for which there was an opening. By claiming that he was an ex-chef for the Russian grand duke, he cooked for a while at Doré, a posh French restaurant. As an “expert plasterer,” he repaired the walls of the Black Rose, a cabaret owned by a famous Russian émigré singer, Alexander Vertinsky, who also performed there.
Once, posing as a professional auto mechanic, Dmitri got a job repairing trucks at the British military base. The employees were paid at the end of the workweek, on Saturdays, but they were fed quite well every day. He ate “for ten people” at the job and stole food. He dragged out this job for as long as he could without revealing his incompetence. He managed to disassemble some truck engines and clean the parts, but he couldn’t put them together, and thus he didn’t make it to payday. At other times, he was paid half a lira for a day’s work removing seashells from ship hulls. The money was hardly enough to buy a shish kebab made out
of dog meat.
At the lowest point of his Constantinople life, while roaming over Galata Street, near the port, Dmitri ran into an old friend, Georgy Georgiev, a St. Petersburg naval cadet. At the time of their meeting, Georgiev was studying at the Constantinople gymnasium of the All-Russia’s Union of Cities (Vserossiiskii Soiuz Gorodov).8
The school was organized in early 1921 to serve Russian children uprooted by the calamities of civil war and emigration. Since Russian émigré organizations were short of funds, foreign philanthropists, mostly American, took part in setting up the gymnasium. On the high hill overlooking the bay, they rented a shabby thirty-two-room mansion with surrounding grounds complete with several terraces planted with fig and quince trees. Since Constantinople was teeming with homeless Russian children and raw youth who, not unlike Dmitri, were poorly dressed (in dirty soldiers’ overcoats, torn underwear) and malnourished, the gymnasium was set up as a boarding school, a shelter.9
Georgiev brought his old friend to the gymnasium at once. At the time of this lucky encounter, Dmitri was already nineteen, but his age wasn’t a problem: there were many other overage students. The school’s founders understood that some young men couldn’t complete their education because of the wartime. In his memoirs, Dmitri claims that Georgiev arranged for him to be accepted into the graduating class not of the Russian gymnasium, but of some “college for Christian youth” run by the American Red Cross. He also claims that he completed the college in a year, obtaining a bachelor’s degree. However, his personal file at the Prague Archive of the Moscow Central Archive of the Russian Federation tells a different story. Later on, in the spring of 1922, when he applied to the Russian Law Faculty (Russkii iuridicheskii fakul’tet) in Prague, the only evidence of his prior education he could submit was a certificate of completion of the Constantinople Russian gymnasium. Moreover, the certificate shows that he graduated from the school after just a month of studies (from July 31 to September 2, 1921). With several of the classmates at the “American college” (Georgiev, Chavchavadze, Tolstaya, Dolgov, Avtokratov, Klodt, Yurevich) he mentions in his memoirs, Dmitri is listed among the Constantinople Russian gymnasium’s graduates. Dmitri’s description of his “American college’s” location and school life also matches that of the Russian émigré gymnasium.10
It is obvious that Dmitri’s duplicity toward his readers in this section of his memoirs comes from the fact that he was not eligible for admission to that gymnasium, having already completed the Anapa gymnasium two years before. But who could blame him for trying to survive by any means possible? There was another reason why, in his memoirs—to be read by Soviet censors, for he longed to publish them in his lifetime—he calls the Constantinople gymnasium an “American YMCA college.” He had to avoid being accused of affiliation with the White émigrés, a political sin that was unforgivable by the Soviet regime of his time. To reassure those anticipated censors, he states, “I was starving and worked as a day-to-day laborer, but I didn’t contact Baron Wrangel’s people [White émigrés].”11
Accepted to the gymnasium, he felt he had entered a paradise. Now he slept not on the floor of a Constantinople bordello, but on a bed with a mattress. In contrast to his meager existence of the past few years, he was now clothed and fed “like a king.” His breakfast consisted of American canned stew with eggs and hot rice cereal topped with condensed milk; he also had jam made of fresh figs, oranges, and lemons and drank a big cup of cocoa. The lunches and dinners were no less abundant and delicious.
However, the mental illness that he had suffered from at Madam Leizer’s establishment for the first time now revisited him with renewed force. This time, he knew what had caused it. It came from the trauma he had experienced witnessing the agony of Armenian and Greek refugees running for their lives from the advancing Turkish troops. “[At the time of the Black Sea adventures] everything I had seen was etched in my memory without reaching consciousness: there was no time to think, I didn’t have a breather,” he recalls. “Later when I did, the impressions gushed with such might that they bowled me over, and for the first time, I [truly] lost my mind. After all, is it my fault I saw all that?”
The scenes of ruination of human lives began haunting him, producing nightmarish visions. One especially vivid scene of that past experience tormented him the most: “As I was lowering my eyes to a starched tablecloth . . . , I saw the lifeboat’s side and the young mother’s thin fingers, blue from cold, and the oar, crushing their bones . . . I saw her eyes full of love [for her baby] and grief [at parting with the baby]. I saw her smiling mouth through the cold blue water . . . The past kept holding me by the scruff of the neck. It refused to set me free.”
To fight off the disturbing vision, he indulged in love games with young female students. But this helped only for a short while. The image of the drowning woman kept haunting him. When classes were over, the students came to the luxurious villa of the Turkish general who had run away with Atatürk’s troops. “It was there,” Dmitri recalls, “at the moment of full relaxation that the hidden mental illness, planted in me by my grandmother, ‘the Wasp,’ and my mother, overwhelmed me . . . Unbearable pain tore me inside out. I was obsessed with the vision of the young mother swimming up to our boat, overloaded with refugees, through strangers’ legs, pushing her baby into the boat and then drowning in front of everyone, smiling happily and looking at me from the water with her radiant eyes.”
Of course, the incident of the drowning woman would have been an extraordinarily traumatic event for any witness. But Dmitri’s post-traumatic stress disorder was amplified by the episodes of his own life, not only that of his near drowning in the open sea but also—and, perhaps, even to a much greater degree—that of his mother urging him to jump into the rapids to rescue the drowning woman when he was twelve. And there, in the Black Sea water, he witnessed another mother who was the direct opposite of his own. Whereas his mother hadn’t thought twice before abandoning her baby (him) for the sake of some “higher cause,” in front of his eyes, the young Armenian woman sacrificed her own life for the sake of her child. No wonder that her face before she drowned, happy because she knew her child was safe, stuck in Dmitri’s mind.
In fact, he couldn’t shake off this vision no matter how hard he tried. Before falling ill, he had made a new friend, Konstantin (Kotya) Yurevich, a proprietor’s son from Odessa, who now took care of him. He would take Dmitri to the seashore and sit him on the beach. Indifferent to everything, Dmitri sat there, his head helplessly drooping on his chest.
At the end of 1921, with the Turkish troops approaching Constantinople, the League of Nations appealed to all countries to help Russian émigrés. Among others, the newly formed republic of Czechoslovakia, a country populated with brotherly Slavs, offered to host Russian students. When he had somewhat recovered from his psychosis, Dmitri paid a visit to the newly created Soviet Mission in Turkey. There, he told one Comrade Kudish, working at the Mission, that back in 1919, “to avoid fighting against the Red Army, along with a group of revolutionary-minded sailors,” he had fled to Turkey and was now headed for Czechoslovakia. He asked him to write to the Soviet Mission in Prague on his behalf.12
From Dmitri’s writing, it is not clear what the purpose of that visit to the Soviet Mission was. Why did he want to assure the Soviet official of his loyalty to Red Russia while planning to move even farther away from her? If homesickness was his major problem, he could have tried to scrape up the money for a boat ticket and go back, as hundreds of his compatriots did a few months later in the spring of 1922. With the beginning of resettlement of the defeated White Army and numerous refugees abroad, the dream of repatriation occupied the minds of the vast majority of émigrés. If that was the case with Dmitri, then, like many other desperate Russians in his situation, Dmitri would visit the Mission to ask for permission to go back. He could have emphasized the political nature of his escape from Russia as a plea for good treatment upon his return. (According to rumors, often well founded, that circu
lated among Russian refugees in Constantinople, the White repatriates often faced ruthless reprisals upon reaching Soviet shores.)13
His behavior at Comrade Kudish’s office makes sense only if you fill in what he couldn’t write about in his memoirs, which he hoped to see published in his (Soviet) lifetime, and what he confided to me during our private meeting—that, trying to remain a patriot of his country while living abroad, he considered himself already recruited by the Cheka. He visited Comrade Kudish just to remind them about himself, to inform him that he was that young man whom the Cheka had sent as a sleeper with the flow of refugees. From the outset, besides their direct trade functions, Soviet trade missions abroad were involved in intelligence and agent recruitment. By paying a visit to the Mission, Dmitri prompted their recognition of him. That’s why Comrade Kudish heard him out, encouraged him to proceed to Czechoslovakia, and promised to write him a letter of recommendation.14
On December 18, 1921, Dmitri and the rest of the gymnasium students boarded a train headed for Prague.15
Bystrolyotov’s Travels (1922)
THREE
In the Grips of Holy Wrath
For an intelligence agent, it’s best to pose as a student. It gives you freedom. You don’t draw any suspicion when appearing on the streets even at nighttime.
—BYSTROLYOTOV, IN CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR
Dmitri arrived in Czechoslovakia on January 8, 1922, with other students of the Constantinople gymnasium. As part of the Czechoslovakian government’s Russian Action program, the graduates received Czechoslovakian entry visas and could apply to any Czech institution of higher education. Dmitri first applied to the Komensky University in Bratislava. He studied there for only one semester. Then the Russian student program there ended, and he moved to Prague, where he applied to the newly organized Russian Law Faculty. On May 22, 1922, he was accepted there as a full-time student.1
Stalin's Romeo Spy Page 6