Stalin's Romeo Spy
Page 7
The school was set up to train émigrés in Russian law. The program was based on that of prerevolutionary law departments of Russian universities, and former professors of those universities now living in Prague as émigrés constituted the school faculty. Studying Russian law in earnest at this school made sense only for those who strongly believed that the Soviet regime wouldn’t last for too long. Otherwise, knowledge of the laws of an empire that no longer existed would render the school’s degree worthless. For many, including Dmitri, it was a temporary refuge, a social niche that provided them with the support of the Student Welfare Committee set up by the Czechoslovakian government as part of the Russian Action program. They also received legal status in the country, being granted Czechoslo vakian citizenship. At the time, no other Russian educational institution in Prague could provide these benefits to the Russian émigré students.2
The classes were to begin in early October. Meanwhile, Dmitri stayed in the gymnasium dormitory housed in army camp buildings, vacant since the end of World War I, near Moravská Tebová, a town 160 miles southeast of Prague. Here his depression returned with renewed force. During the first months, the “fresh impressions” of his adopted country helped him to recover from the disease that had attacked him so powerfully in the last months of his Constantinople life. But his condition weakened when the White Army veterans among the gymnasium students learned about his escape from the White Army ship and his subsequent, albeit short, service in the Red fleet. They began harassing him. At night, they would smear his clothes with dirt, spit at him, and make his life miserable in every way possible. Despite his physical strength, Dmitri had difficulty thwarting these attacks because of his emotional vulnerability. The attacks depressed him and even made him suicidal.3
The depression caused by the hostility of his classmates was exacerbated by the sense of disaster on a grand scale produced by the news of hunger in the USSR. Czech and Russian-émigré papers were filled with reports on the subject along with photos of emaciated Russian children and their mothers begging for bread on the streets. Ostracized by the rest of the students, frustrated, and desperate, Dmitri became obsessed with his dying compatriots. With his native land on the verge of perishing, he felt compelled to return home to die along with his countrymen. His mother’s letters containing eyewitness accounts of hunger reached him in Prague and served as a trigger for action. “Psychopaths are the most energetic people,” he writes in his memoirs about that moment in his life. He threw himself into action. In June 1922, he sold whatever decent clothes he had and bought an old suit, a blue cap, a pair of rough boots, and a train ticket to Berlin. There he found the Soviet naval attaché and told him about his desire to return to Russia.4
Wary of letting saboteurs or spies seep into the country, the naval attaché sent Dmitri first to the town of Velikie Luki, a detention center where thousands of other repatriates—former World War I prisoners of war, Ukrainian peasants from Argentina, Polish Jews, and others—were held for clearance. Once cleared, Dmitri went first to the Russian naval base at Kronshtadt on the Baltic Sea. There, on July 4, he was assigned to the Baltic Sea Transportation Department and then to Sevastopol, the Black Sea naval base. However, the civil war was over, and neither place needed sailors. Left on the streets of Sevastopol with no money, Dmitri set out on foot and reached Anapa, where his mother lived.5
He didn’t get a warm welcome from her either. She scolded him, calling his return to Russia “foolish, senseless, and criminal.” Why had he come back? He had a chance to get an education, and he’d behaved irresponsibly. Civic minded as always, she told him angrily, “Your place is in Russia, of course. But only if you become useful to your country . . . It’s time to end your wanderings. Settle down and get a profession.” She repeated Lenin’s call to the nation’s youth: “Study and study and study.” With these words, she gave him her last bits of bread and salt pork and saw him off to the outskirts of town. “I went down the road but then looked back, thinking that my mother was still standing and waving good-bye. But she lay in the grass, her body shaking with sobs.”6
On the road again, Dmitri went to the port of Novorossiisk. There was no work there either. He managed to board a little steamship and, in search of work, stepped ashore in every port on the ship’s route south to Batumi. One night he overheard a conversation about the rebirth of Russia between two passengers, both Communists. That conversation helped him to clarify his world outlook, realize his place in life, and situate himself politically. He felt that now his duty was to go back to Prague and take the enemies of his country, the émigrés, by their throats. He was emotionally set up for it on a personal level: after all, they had been the people who spit in his soup and pricked him at night with safety pins.7
Late September 1922, the Italian liner Roma was anchored at one of the Batumi piers, and it gave him an opportunity for escape. Unlike before, the Soviet borders were now sealed. The entrance to the ship was heavily guarded by customs officials. How could he sneak through? A plan came to him at once. He picked up an Italian newspaper lying on the pier and put it in his pocket so that its banner would show. Then, his teeth clenched, “a tiger hitting its own sides with its tail,” as he describes himself, he moved toward the customs guards. When one of them demanded his documents, hands in his pockets, he pretended he was an Italian sailor and that he didn’t understand Russian. He smiled, pulled out—instead of his documents—a pack of Italian cigarettes, took out one for himself, and offered the rest to the guards, saying, “Prego, signore, prego!” The guards took the bait. Dmitri jumped into the rowboat.8
Once on board the ship, he hid in a nook on the upper deck for three long days and nights to escape the ticket collectors. He found scraps and pieces of food at the bottom of a garbage can, quickly shoved them into his pants and jacket pockets, even into his cap, and returned to his nook on the upper deck. He ate hastily and fell asleep. In the morning, he discovered that the ship’s rats had eaten his cap and gnawed holes in the pockets where he had stuffed bits of food. Then the ship’s stokers discovered him. They forced him to load coal into furnaces around the clock, until he was about to collapse from exhaustion. Then the stokers’ boss told him, “You don’t have money for a ticket, and you don’t have strength to work it off.” He pulled out his knife and extended it to Dmitri: “Take it, boy, and cut your throat yourself. Why go on living? Help yourself.”9
But Dmitri’s will to live won out one more time. He forced himself to get up, grabbed his shovel, and went to work. Finally, after endless hours, his shift ended, and he was allowed to take a shower. His slavery seemed to be over, but when he asked for money to buy some food, one of the stokers gave him a terrible kick in the face. He fell and lost consciousness.10
When he landed in Constantinople, he had no documents that would allow him to travel across Europe back to Prague: he had surrendered his Czech passport upon his visit to the Soviet naval attaché in Berlin. With premonitions of atrocities at the hands of the nationalist forces led by Atatürk, Westerners fled the city any way they could. Those who lacked proper papers took the office of the International Refugee Committee by storm. In the confusion of the time, Dmitri managed to obtain a Dutch passport in the name of “Hans Galleni” (he would make use of it in his future intelligence work).11
On the roofs of trains, crisscrossing European countries—Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Hungary—he finally reached the Czechoslovakian border in early November 1922. There, in response to a customs officer’s question about his belongings, he handed over the only item in his possession—a pencil stub. One of the female passengers saw his clothing eaten through by rats, took pity on him, and gave him her bathing suit to use for under wear. “The customs officials and the gendarmes looked with surprise at me, an emaciated boy in a woman’s bathing suit, which showed through the holes of my sailor pants,” he recalls.12
He came first to Brno. His fellow Russian émigrés who had settled there earlier, Konstantin Yurevich of the Consta
ntinople gymnasium and others, collected some clothes for him; one gave him a shirt, another a tie, yet another a cap. On November 18, 1922, Dmitri returned to Prague and paid his first visit to a two-story building behind a stone fence on the far side of Rieger Gardens, a fashionable city park. The building, known in Prague as Villa Teresa, housed an institution that would play a sinister role in his life—the Soviet Trade Mission.13
This outpost of Soviet power in Czechoslovakia, as well as Soviet trade missions in other European countries at that time, served as a center of Red propaganda and a cover for the OGPU operatives. Moreover, these missions were charged with doing everything they could to undermine the political and civic stability of the host countries. Even today, secret instructions to those missions shock with their Machiavellian hypocrisy:
In capitalist countries with a bourgeois and politically right-wing population, the Soviet [trade] mission premises and stores must be luxuriously equipped and all receptions must impress [their guests] with luxury and abundance. By all means possible, it’s necessary to make them believe that the Soviet government is so close to the capitalist system that its official recognition would benefit capitalists, not blue-collar workers.14
In other words, the Soviet trade missions had to imply that the official Soviet statements of being a “country of toiling masses” were just a cover for the true (read: capitalistic) nature of the newly formed USSR. In the spirit of its political agenda at the time, bent on exporting revolution throughout the world, the Soviet government instructed its trade missions abroad to “spread rumors about the possibility of military conflict [with the Soviet Union] and agitate against [the host state’s] government.” The missions’ most important task was to “purchase weapons and ammunition; [and] seize every opportunity to buy arms of all kinds. Ammunition had to be stored in areas where it would be easiest to recruit and arm detachments of blue-collar workers.”15
Because of Czechoslovakia’s strategically important location in the center of Europe, the Soviet Trade Mission in Prague was designated by the Soviet government as a center for espionage in neighboring European countries as well. In planning a Red Army offensive, the Mission was charged with determining measures that would assure its success in the Carpathian Mountains, the Danube Basin, and the Balkans. With Czechoslovakia as a natural source for upgrading Soviet armament during the planned Red Army attack, the secret instructions marked the Czech army, which was well organized and equipped with state-of-the-art military technology, as the prime target for intelligence work. The Soviet agents were charged with full assessment of the country’s capacity to produce ammunition and artillery. The Škoda plants, the main manufacturer of military equipment and arms, were the prime targets for industrial espionage.16
All these tasks required a constant supply of spies recruited from every possible quarter. However, on this first visit to the Mission, Dmitri, emaciated and ragged, was met at the Villa Teresa with suspicion. The head of the Soviet Mission, Comrade Alexandrovsky, heard out his feverish story and told him, “You’re either a spy or a lunatic,” and threatened to call the police.17
Ironically, Dmitri’s enemies, the anti-Bolshevik Russian Émigré Student Union, did want to listen to him. They thought he would give an eyewitness report on hunger and atrocities in Red Russia and invited him to speak at one of their meetings. Despite the danger that such a venue posed for him, Dmitri decided to use his talk as an opportunity to advance a political goal of his own. Instead of describing the horrors of Soviet life, he assured his listeners that their homeland was returning to normal and called on them to repatriate and take part in the reconstruction efforts.18
It seems that, speaking to the émigré students, Dmitri did not believe so much in what he was saying, but he desperately wanted to believe in the future of his country. Although undoubtedly the hardship and social injustice he experienced during the years of his vagabond existence played an important part in forming his political convictions, there were no less powerful emotional reasons for his attachment to Russia. The Soviet secret service as a whole, and his spymasters individually, took the place of the father he never knew. His strong craving to belong, whatever the consequences, would induce him to risk his life many times in his future intelligence work.19
As he could have foreseen, the effect of his speech was explosive. Deeply disappointed, the émigré students attacked him physically. Miraculously, he survived, escaping with minor cuts and bruises, but he didn’t give up on his political convictions. When he began his studies at the Russian Law Faculty, he refused to accept support from the Czechoslovakian government’s Russian Action program because he considered the program hypocritical—a way of keeping “Russian money” in the Czechoslovakian government’s pocket. He believed the Soviet claim that, during the civil war in Siberia, fighting on the side of the White Army, the Czech Legion expropriated a considerable amount of Russian gold. And now the Czech government was giving the very same money back to émigré Russians in the form of support for students, among whom were not only White Guards-men but also those who, in his view, had nothing to do with Russia proper—Jews and Ukrainians from Poland and Romania.20
He also refused to accept a free dormitory space offered by the program, instead renting a tiny, cold room in the attic of a building overlooking the Škoda plants on the outskirts of Prague. To support himself, he dug graves in the Olshan Cemetery and occasionally gave Russian lessons to members of rich Czech families. His day-today life consisted of attending his Russian Law Faculty classes and spending most of his time in the State Library, located in the old Jesuit monastery near the Charles Bridge. Here he not only prepared for his classes but also worked on a series of articles on Bolshevik ideology. Although they didn’t promise much income, the articles helped him to develop theoretically the world outlook he had already formed emotionally.21
At that time, he wasn’t alone in embracing the Bolshevik ideology. At the beginning of the civil war, the politics of the Russian emigration, mirroring political life before the Bolshevik takeover, represented a wide spectrum of political views. However, toward the end of 1921, with the final defeat of the White Army, increasing numbers of destitute refugees turned toward Bolshevik Russia. Homesickness engendered idealization of the changes that the country was undergoing. Deprivation, near starvation, and the separation of many refugees from their families in the homeland speeded up this process.22
Besides his hand-to-mouth existence during the past few years and his need to feel attached to his Motherland, young Dmitri embraced Communist ideas because, as he admits himself, by giving him hope, they made his life seem easier. In the late afternoon, he would make the rounds of the stores in the center of the city. One store owner would give him scraps of meat; another offered a loaf of stale bread. As he would recall years later, walking amid well-dressed Czechs along Prague’s main streets, he felt “not envy but great anger, a holy wrath that one day would overturn the world.”23
Since he couldn’t pay for electricity, he hurried back to his room before dark. He had dinner, spreading an old newspaper on his bed. There was no kitchen, so he ate his meat raw. Usually at that hour, the fever, which he attributed to early stages of tuberculosis, resumed. The fever made him feel exalted and enthusiastic. He read his beloved poems aloud and argued with imaginary opponents. In his head he composed apt phrases for his articles on Nietzsche and Lenin, “on good and evil, on the birth of a new man, who, renewed and restructured, will be God.” In these feverish hours, he thought he could “deliver the new word to the indifferent world,” which seemed to him “a bulwark to be taken by storm.” He anticipated the time when the “new men” wouldn’t know the horrors of poverty and loneliness. He imagined the “heroic symphonies of uprising,” and the flames of the steel furnaces seemed to him “victorious banners waving.”24
Apparently, composing those articles, especially on Nietzsche’s work, had a profound effect on the half-starved, lonely, and otherwise deprived young man. It
shaped his character and guided his actions, both consciously and unconsciously. It seems that now, reading Nietzsche, Dmitri had been prodded further into buying the new morality that had begun taking root on Russian soil at the end of the nineteenth century, first, in the artistic milieu, and then among radical politicians. According to that morality, pity had to be rejected as a sign of weakness, and love for “the most distant” was by far more important than love for neighbor. Sacrifice and suffering became the ideal mode of behavior. Among radical political thinkers, populist terrorism began to be seen as a heroic tradition to be emulated by the new generation of revolutionaries. (We will encounter Dmitri’s fascination with the heroic images of populist terrorists in tsarist prisons at the time of his own imprisonment in Soviet ones.) Fulfilling these high ideals gave birth to a revolutionary immorality in which the end justifies the means. An ethic of everyday life was deliberately omitted. It was assumed that the ordinary, everyday aspects of life would be radically transformed.25
Dmitri’s stoicism lasted a few months. Eventually, he was forced to join other émigrés and move to a Russian émigré students’ dormitory, a five-story building, Svobodarnia, in Strašnice, a Prague working-class district. Formerly the residence of workers at a Škoda plant, the building consisted of tiny rooms with just enough space for a bed and a stool. The wooden partitions didn’t reach the ceilings; privacy was impossible. Not surprisingly, Dmitri’s sympathies for Red Russia proved hazardous there. Soon after moving in, he became the target of relentless, at times life-threatening, attacks. The students beat him up often. At night, they attached wires to his body and gave him electrical shocks. Once they even tried to throw him out of a fourth-floor window. He survived only thanks to his physical strength and the help of his old friend, Georgy Georgiev, who also lived in the dormitory. Georgy notified the Czech police, and the attack was stopped before it was too late.26