The hand-to-hand fighting between Dmitri and his fellow students came to the attention of the OGPU operatives at the Soviet Trade Mission. Instructed “by all means possible to foster quarrels in various [Russian] émigré circles and to publicize these quarrels, disagreements, and scandals,” the operatives acted accordingly. They also used the opportunity noted in these instructions: that some Russian émigrés could be “bought at little expense because most of them [were] destitute.”27
Evidently, what also helped to establish Dmitri’s loyalty was the arrival of a letter from Comrade Kudish of the Constantinople Trade Mission, in which he vouched for Dmitri. The head of the Prague Mission, Comrade Alexandrovsky, had a change of heart toward the young man and took him under the Mission’s wing. Since Dmitri’s pro-Soviet activities twice caused public disturbances and made him a candidate for deportation, the Soviet Mission intervened on his behalf and gave him cover. In August 1923, they helped to restore his Soviet citizenship, and he became permanent secretary of the Union of Student Citizens of the USSR Living in Czechoslovakia, organized by the Mission. The union’s task was to divide and demoralize the émigré students, most of whom had opposed the Bolsheviks. The Mission also charged the union with putting pressure on those students who were undecided about repatriation, which the Mission had begun promoting since June 1922. Another of the union’s tasks was finding prospective intelligence agents.28
Dmitri led an active pro-Soviet propaganda campaign among the students. His most aggressive actions were reported in the Czechoslovakian press. For example, on January 25, 1924, a few days after Lenin’s death, all the major Prague papers ran the story of the fight he picked with a monarchist student who wanted to tear down the deceased Soviet leader’s portrait, displayed in a store window.29
Because of Dmitri’s knowledge of foreign languages—Czech acquired locally, French, German, and English studied first with private teachers in his foster family and then in the Anapa gymnasium, and Turkish learned from his nanny and improved during his long stay in Constantinople—the Mission made him a freelance translator in its press department. Gradually, they involved him in intelligence work. He was asked to collect information about politics and the economy not only from a variety of open-press organs but also from his Czech acquaintances. Then they gave him a part-time job as a librarian. Soon he got a full-time position as the Mission’s registering clerk. “For the first time in my life abroad,” Dmitri underscores in his memoirs, “I ate my fill, moved to a decent apartment, and clothed myself well.”30
At the end of April 1925, in Moscow as a delegate to the First Congress of Proletarian Students, in Prince Dolgorukov’s former mansion, his true consecration as an intelligence operative took place. Dmitri didn’t know at the time that the man who interviewed him, Artur Artuzov, wasn’t so much testing him as a potential agent abroad as making sure Dmitri wasn’t a Czech spy, recruited from the White émigré community in Prague.
Dmitri would learn many years later in the camps that, unbeknown to him, the Czech secret police had considered recruiting him as their agent, which very fact the OGPU might have learned through their own agents in Prague. Thus, already employed by the Mission, Dmitri was sent to Moscow to be cleared of that suspicion first of all. This also explains the rather cautious attitude toward him during the interview on the part of the other interviewer, Mikhail Gorb, at that time assistant to the head of the Foreign Intelligence Department of the OGPU.31 He wanted to determine whether, once recruited by the OGPU, Dmitri would become a double agent.
Apparently, on hearing Dmitri’s story, Artuzov trusted him and said to Gorb, “We’ll use him in the upper circles [of European society].” It was then that he asked the young Dmitri what kind of intelligence work he wanted. Dmitri returned to Prague sworn in as a full-fledged operative of the OGPU Foreign Intelligence Department (INO). As his employment record shows, his cover job title was “translator.”32
Prague wasn’t only the city where his career in intelligence was launched; here he would also meet and fall in love with two young women who would play a dramatic role in his life. He would marry one and be brought to the verge of murdering the other.
FOUR
Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places
Dear God, spare me from love. And I’ll take care of the rest of my troubles.
—RUSSIAN PROVERB
“Has that hobo gone yet?” These words rang in his ears long after he heard them. They belonged to a woman who would play a sinister role in his life, although at the moment he met her he never would have guessed this. Little did he suspect that in a year or so he would fall in love with her, hopelessly and fatally. He heard the scathing remark sometime in late 1922, soon after returning from his impulsive trip to Russia. It was at the time when, having refused support from the Czechoslovakian government, he was leading a dismal existence and living in a poorly heated attic on the outskirts of Prague. He read all day long, leaving his hideout only for law school classes or to search for work of any kind. One of his few sources of income was tutoring in Russian one Mr. Fischer, a wealthy Czech businessman. That was how Dmitri met a young Englishwoman, Miss Isolde Cameron, a governess in charge of Mr. Fischer’s two adolescent girls, Camilla and Evelyn.1
It was hardly love at first sight. Moreover, his first impression of Miss Cameron was highly unfavorable. Her svelte figure, her energetic and pale face, and her shiny blue eyes notwithstanding, he found the young woman obnoxious and haughty. Although, like himself, she was a poor foreigner working for a rich Czech man, she showed nothing but contempt for the destitute young Russian. One day, as he stood on the balcony of Mr. Fischer’s luxurious apartment waiting for his pupil to come for their scheduled lesson, he overheard the governess asking the housemaid, “Has that hobo gone yet?” The words made him uncomfortable. For a while, he couldn’t even force himself to come in from the balcony for fear of being ridiculed on account of his patched-up pants and tattered shoes. But what happened next had ramifications that he could hardly have foreseen. He was about to leave the balcony when, through the lace curtains of the girls’ bedroom lit from inside, he saw the governess undressing Mr. Fischer’s young daughters. Unaware of being watched, she dropped on her knees and began passionately kissing intimate parts of the girls’ bodies.
The scene was hardly a shock to Dmitri. Several months in Constantinople bordellos had exposed him to every imaginable form of human sexuality. Leaving Mr. Fischer’s house, he dismissed what he saw as “sweet poison,” a metaphor for homosexual sex he borrowed from Charles Baudelaire, whom, together with other decadent poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both French and Russian, he had eagerly read in his youth:
What a dizzying pleasure—
Through these new lips,
The most exciting and beautiful,
To infuse you with my poison, my sister!2
Before leaving the quarters of his pupil, he called the housemaid and angrily demanded to be paid for the lesson: it wasn’t his fault that Mr. Fischer hadn’t shown up for it. The episode set the stage for his later fixation on Mr. Fischer, who duplicated his father in an emotional sense. His father had paid for his privileged upbringing but never took any interest in him personally, and by skipping a lesson without advance notice, Mr. Fischer also undermined Dmitri’s feeling of self-worth.
Soon dramatic changes in Dmitri’s life eclipsed the unpleasant episode in his memory. With the beginning of his employment at the Soviet Trade Mission in Prague, his daily struggle for survival ended and, with it, so did the ascetic phase of his life. Under the wings of the Trade Mission, he finally gained a sense of belonging. Self-disciplined and industrious, he quickly rose in rank. His full-time Mission employee salary made it possible for him to move to a decent room, where, in a matter of a few months, a shy and ragged fellow turned into a strong and self-confident man.
His participation in intelligence work at the Trade Mission was enhanced. Besides doing research work by
scanning open publications behind the desk, he became personally involved in collecting industrial secrets, using his aristocratic manners and good looks. For that purpose, he began rubbing elbows with members of the Prague business community. Of course, after a decade of destitute life, he had to brush up on his manners and dress appropriately. He gave his efforts an ideological twist: he considered dressing fashionably not an exercise in vanity but part of his armor in the class struggle, which would eventually lead to the victory of those from whose ranks [he had] recently emerged:
Previous ascetic ideals of stern self-restriction now seemed to me a harmful sectarianism: to eat well didn’t mean to commit treason in relation to the hungry, and an elegant suit could be useful in my new work [as an intelligence operative] . . . For all my foreign life, I didn’t have even a gulp of alcohol, didn’t smoke a cigarette, and didn’t visit a night joint just for myself. I learned to do it [to fight] them [the bourgeoisie], and I did it well as though these habits were second nature to me.3
Soon he excelled in drinking whiskey without getting drunk and learned how to behave in the chic restaurants and expensive nightclubs that abounded in Prague in those prosperous years of the First Republic. Founded after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the aftermath of World War I, the Republic of Czechoslovakia inherited a productive industrial and financial infrastructure. Under the leadership of its first president, Tomáš Masaryk, the country found a healthy balance in its economy and politics. Enlarging markets for its products was the only problem that the Czechoslovakian business community strove to solve. Engaged in reconstructing an economy ruined by revolution and civil war, the Soviet Union was a large potential buyer of Czech industrial products and equipment.
Pictures from his archive taken during 1924 and 1925 show how Dmitri gradually changed his appearance—from a poor law student to a well-groomed and fashionably dressed businessman with a clipped moustache. Although he calls these the “work clothes” of his newly acquired intelligence employment, his own description of himself preparing for a stroll in the city betrays his true enjoyment of his elegant looks for their own sake: “Over a gray English-made suit, I throw on an oversized spring coat and carelessly knot a multicolored scarf. I don a fashionable hat and tilt it slightly. Done? Yes, also a pair of light suede gloves. A pack of cigarettes in a pocket. Well, now I seem to be ready.”4
He would retain this penchant for good clothing for the rest of his life. Even after serving sixteen years in the inhuman conditions of Siberian camps, already a broken man, his health permanently ruined, he was nevertheless always well-groomed and, insofar as he could afford it, made it a point to have clothes from the best Moscow tailors. (As the reader may recall, I owe my acquaintance with Dmitri to the fact that, instead of buying a ready-to-wear suit, usually poorly made, in a Soviet store, as the vast majority of Soviet citizens did, he had his new suit made in a tailor’s shop of the Ministry of Defense where my father-in-law worked.)
But Dmitri’s social advances turned out to be insufficient to compensate for the absence of a personal life. He had an unclear, unconscious need for something that he himself couldn’t understand. To suppress this mysterious need, he engaged in sports of all kinds. But neither swimming nor tennis nor fencing nor skiing in the mountains helped much. His strange feeling of emptiness kept growing. At this point in his life, what had seemed to be a permanently discarded memory returned to him and began haunting him with an unanticipated power. The incident that triggered it and set it in motion took place in the winter of 1924 to 1925, during one of his ski trips to the Sudeten mountains, a luxury he could now afford thanks to his new line of work. Shortly before sunset, returning to his hotel, he stopped for a moment to take in the beauty of the landscape, and right there, on the top of a hill, he spotted a statue of the Madonna. Describing the moment in his memoirs, he does not register any religious feelings. For him, the statue was not that of the mother of the Christian God but that of a “svelte girl pressing a baby to her chest.”
The immediate image that came to his mind was that of a woman who was nearby and whom the statue resembled—another svelte young woman whom he had met two years earlier, Miss Isolde Cameron, the governess of the children of his former Russian pupil, Mr. Fischer. (In turn, with her “high forehead, a falcon profile, and a daring and strong-willed facial expression,” she strikingly resembled his own mother, Klavdia Bystrolyotova; it’s easy to see the same features on Klavdia’s photographs and in his drawings of her.)
On a train returning to Prague, he couldn’t wait to see Isolde. He rushed to Mr. Fischer’s home only to find that she had quit her employment there. Since the maid who opened the door didn’t have the former governess’s home address, he obtained it from the city’s information bureau. In the evening, he paced the sidewalk in front of her residence thinking about how he would make her believe that he had run into her by chance. Finally, after hours of waiting, Isolde appeared on the street. His heart skipping a beat, he even forgot to bow politely, as she walked by without even glancing at him.
He could hardly wait for another day to pass, a day spent feverishly rehearsing openers with which he hoped to engage the object of his obsession in a conversation. But standing outside her home, when he tried to talk to her the next evening, she dismissed him right away, saying in a tone that left no room for hope, “I’m sorry, but I don’t know you. And I don’t talk to strangers on the streets.”
He wasn’t one to give up easily. Since Mr. Fischer’s maid had mentioned that, after quitting the governess job, Isolde had taken a teaching position at the English College, he signed up for her class: with his good command of the language, he hoped to attract her attention.
He dreaded spoiling things with an overeager attempt made too early, so he waited a few months before summoning the courage to approach Isolde again. But he failed again and failed miserably. The young woman not only replied that she didn’t remember him but also made it clear that she wasn’t interested in seeing him outside of the classroom. Tormented by her rejection, he spent day and night with no more than glimpses of hope against a background of solid despair.
The intensity of his pursuit of Isolde speaks volumes about Dmitri’s need for affection at that time in his life. Clearly, it was more than a plea for a woman’s love. Isolde was the emotional surrogate for his mother, who had been distant, cold, and punishing for most of his formative years. His pursuit of the young woman became an obsession, a desperate attempt to fix the relationship with his mother after the fact.
Finally, after his futile attempts failed again and again, Isolde’s coldness stopped him. However, the experience changed him in one respect: he abandoned the self-imposed sexual abstinence he had practiced during his first Prague years. His sexuality awakened, he began pursuing other women. “I was young,” he recalls, “and once reminded about women, I couldn’t stop. Girls were looking for me themselves, and easy victories supplanted a troubling feeling of emptiness.”
His sexuality was hardly abnormal, but he would sustain his interest in women even in the horrific conditions of Siberian camps. (“He didn’t pass up any opportunity to speak to a beauty,” Milashov said, smiling, during our interview. He recalled how, when walking with him on Moscow streets, already a broken man, an invalid, Bystrolyotov would give his stepgrandson, then a young boy, pointers on how to attract the attention of a pretty girl who passed by.)5
At that time in Prague, tall, handsome, well dressed, and well groomed, emanating an air of respectability, Dmitri had no problem attracting women. In hindsight, he realized that he had hardly been an ugly duckling back in his youth. He recalled now that, at the age of eighteen, shortly after he had fled from war-torn Russia for the first time, dressed in a sailor’s uniform—“a sparkling white tunic with a blue collar, a beret with pom-pom dashingly moved to the side” [his schooner Eglon flew a French flag]—he was irresistible to women in seaport hangouts. They all vied for his attention and offered him their embraces
“for half the price, for a quarter of it, even for free.” He didn’t succumb to the temptations then, because, as he recalls, “amid the coarseness and filth of a sailor’s life,” he “still preserved a shy innocence and a naive belief in a woman’s purity.”6
But, like everything else in his life from the time of his employment at a Soviet institution, his renewed pursuit of women wasn’t a matter of his personal life. No longer the “leaf torn from a branch” at the time of fleeing Russia in 1919, now he willingly subordinated the whole of his self to the higher cause. He wanted to please his kindhearted Motherland, which forgave him his trespasses—leaving her in the trying time of the civil war—and now took him back into her bosom. And he was eager to prove his loyalty to her. His willingness to serve his country with self-abandon was in line with the traditional Russian intelligentsia’s belief in the primacy of the good of the society at large in the life of an individual. After all, back in his early days, his mother gave him ample lessons on what should be of supreme importance in his life.
His allure to women came in quite handy now, when the orders of OGPU operatives at the Trade Mission heavily involved him in economic and industrial espionage. Since the main article of Czechoslovakian import to the Soviet Union at that time was heavy machinery, to facilitate doing business with the Soviets, several machine-building firms created a company called the Continental-Kern Concern. For a small fee and, in his own words, “compensation in intimate relations,” the Concern’s young secretaries and typists supplied him with technological blueprints, production data, and engineering calculations. He saw to it that the flow of information was never interrupted: if one of his informants married or moved to another job, she would assist him in finding a replacement.7
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