Stalin's Romeo Spy

by Emil Draitser

  The order suited Dmitri’s personal agenda. Although he had failed so far, he did not totally discard his hope of finding a way into the young woman’s heart. Though his designs on Isolde were amorous in nature, the way he planned to proceed was not much different from the technique he learned as a recruiter—“to get to know her better, to make her open her soul to [him], so that it would be easier to control her later on.” He was obsessed with uncovering his rival’s identity, so as to challenge this person’s power over Isolde. But weeks and months passed, and Isolde refused to reveal anything about the identity of her one and only true love. Dmitri decided to change tactics. To lower her guard, he began acting as if they were just brother and sister. He took her to dance halls, but he “danced with her as if she were a relative, that is, nicely, but without much enthusiasm.” Once, when she was bathing, he carelessly walked into her bathroom and, without apologizing, took a towel and walked out with an indifferent expression on his face. A few times, under various pretexts, he slept on a couch in her apartment.

  Eventually, he achieved the desired goal: Isolde became totally relaxed in his presence. He had convinced her that he had no sexual designs on her. One day she revealed to him that the reason for her homosexuality was an aversion to men that she had developed in childhood. She told him that, by accident, she had witnessed her widowed father raping one of his young female servants, and her father’s animalistic behavior appalled her and made her forever avoid men. Although this seems implausible according to our current understanding of homosexuality, Dmitri seemed to believe her and didn’t abandon his hope of becoming her lover.

  Finally, his patience expired. One day, when they were dining in a restaurant, he tipped the waiter and told him to make Isolde’s drinks stronger than usual. After she became considerably intoxicated and fell asleep, he brought her to his apartment and put her in his bed. He took a shower and lay down next to her in his pajamas, foretasting his victory: when his beloved awoke next to a true man, she would respond to him with desire. Waiting for this to happen and tipsy himself, he fell asleep. When he woke up, Isolde was sitting up in the bed, furious, full of animosity and contempt for him. She told him that, if he wished, he could proceed with his plan—but he should know that she would hate him forever for this, and now it was all over between them, once and for all. His heart sank. He had blown it. Months and months of obsession went down the drain. He admitted his defeat and left the room.

  Although, on the surface of things, Dmitri’s decision to pursue Isolde romantically looks sudden and rash, in psychoanalytical terms, it is a classic case of an unconscious attempt to heal childhood wounds. The chain reaction of Dmitri’s emotions was triggered by seeing the sculpture of the Madonna during his ski trip, whose physical features reminded him of both Isolde and his mother.

  While, as research has shown, physical resemblance to our primary caretaker in childhood plays a major role in whom we pick as objects of erotic desire, Isolde resembled Dmitri’s mother not only physically but emotionally as well. She shared her negative traits as they were imprinted in Dmitri’s brain from childhood: from the outset, she was equally dismissive and scornful toward him. On his own admission, his mother’s rare visits to him at the foster family burned in his mind like the “whistling of a whip.” Thus, the very coldness with which Isolde met all his advances made her even more desirable: the more she pushed him away, the more relentlessly he pursued her. The childhood wounds reopened and begged to be taken care of.

  As psychologists of today observe, our motivation for seeking a mate is often directed by our unconscious urgent desire to heal childhood wounds, to find one who will help to undo the psychological and emotional damage of childhood, to reclaim our lost selves by proxy. This explains why, in most cases, our spouses’ negative personality traits closely resemble the personality traits of our primary caretakers. As psychologist Harville Hendrix explains it, “[one’s] time-locked, myopic, old brain [is] attempting to return to the scene of [one’s] original frustration so that [one] could resolve [his or her] unfinished business.”12

  It is, therefore, noteworthy that, describing the moment of his sudden decision to pursue Isolde erotically, Dmitri recalls that seeing the statue “painfully touched [his] heart: [he felt that] something wanted to awaken in [him] but couldn’t.” And the scene he had observed through the lace curtains of Mr. Fischer’s apartment flashed in front of his eyes. Even in this, Isolde resembled his mother. Child abuse is an ambivalent act: the abuser loves the child but at the same time abuses him or her. That is why Dmitri’s need for intimacy with the young woman became an obsession, and he decided to get her no matter what.

  After finally giving up and making his decision to stop pursuing Isolde, Dmitri thought that he had seen her for the last time. But he was mistaken. A few years later, Isolde would reemerge in his life again and again until their final, deadly standoff. But then, in late November 1925, at the time of their last date, Dmitri did not have much time to lick the wounds of his male ego. Soon, he had to fulfill his spymaster’s order and put his male charms to professional use again.

  FIVE

  Marriage and Other Calamities

  When you’re in love, you’re at the mercy of a stranger.

  —AMERICAN PROVERB

  In his memoirs, Bystrolyotov calls his new target for recruitment “Countess Fiorella Imperiali, the first, and so far the only, woman diplomat of Fascist Italy.” “Golst” characterized her as “pretty, educated, proud, rich, capricious,” ten years older than Dmitri, and an important and difficult target. “Golst” himself and another, younger member of the Prague Mission staff had tried approaching her but failed. She was interested in neither money nor flings. “Golst” advised Dmitri not to spoil things by acting crudely or hastily. He gave him a year or two before actually attempting recruitment.1

  “I was young and not bad looking,” Bystrolyotov recalls. “The assignment seemed only a curious adventure, and the countess a fortress that I lacked both the skills and the strength to conquer. After all, I was only a youthful twenty-six, and she was a worldly woman, a Roman, one of those ladies I could see only from afar.”

  In real life, the woman was neither Italian, nor rich, nor a countess, nor a diplomat. And her name was not “Fiorella Imperiali.” Marie-Eliane Aucouturier attracted the attention of Soviet intelligence because, as a typist at the French Embassy in Prague, she had access to confidential diplomatic material. At that time, the Soviet Union was fighting for full diplomatic recognition of the new proletarian state and was anxious to look into the files of all European power brokers. In his memoirs, Bystrolyotov substituted World War II adversary Italy for World War II ally France, still not disclosing secrets that, as he thought, could have political ramifications even decades later.2

  In writing about her, Dmitri builds up Marie-Eliane as an insurmountable fortress, citing the gap between them in terms of age and social standing, but in reality there was not much disparity between them on either count. Born on July 10, 1900, Marie-Eliane Aucouturier was about the same age as Dmitri and of a modest petty bourgeois background.3

  The only true thing in Bystrolyotov’s description of her is that she was attractive, and unlike little secretaries and typists of the Škoda plants, the Continental-Kern Concern, and the Batia factories, who easily succumbed to his charms, she wasn’t interested in sex without commitment. Her father, a blacksmith in the village of Les Frauds of Brie-Larochefoucault community, Departament Charente (evidently, LAROCHE, her future code name, connoted her birthplace), instilled in her and his three other children a strict bourgeois morality. At the outset of World War I, he moved his family to Paris, where he worked for the city, shoeing streetcar horses, and his wife owned a haberdashery store. Times were tough, and the couple managed to give their children only a high school education. Marie-Eliane followed her brother, Gustave Aucouturier, to Prague.4

  Besides wanting to make his victory over the young woman look more impressive, Dmit
ri had another reason for giving her the name “Countess Imperiali,” a character from Schiller’s tragedy Fiesco; or, the Genoese Conspiracy. As with his other literary allusions, hoping to see his memoirs published in his lifetime, he followed a long Russian literary tradition that had evolved over centuries of draconian censor-ship—he turned to Aesopian language.

  This tactic made it possible for him to talk more freely about his life than the KGB censors would allow. Indeed, the device works successfully: there are many parallels between Bystrolyotov’s life and Schiller’s play. The historical events on which Schiller based his play—the conspiracy against the house of Daria, the sixteenth-century Genoa imperialist dynasty—could easily be seen as a metaphor for the Soviet conspiracy against the imperialist order of the day, of which France was considered a part. Both cases, the plot of Schiller’s tragedy and the real-life OGPU plot, involved feigning love to a woman related to the target of the corresponding conspiracies: Countess Imperiali to the house of Daria by blood (she was the patriarch’s daughter) and Marie-Eliane Aucouturier to the French Embassy by employment.

  By giving Marie-Eliane the name of “Countess Imperiali,” Dmitri invited readers to infer that his own role in the events was similar to that of Schiller’s protagonist Count Fiesco. The men resemble each other in more ways than one. Just as Schiller’s hero comes from a long line of nobility, Bystrolyotov believed himself to be the descendant of an ancient aristocratic line, the Tolstoys. Even physically, the resemblance of the two was uncanny. Schiller’s portrait of Fiesco could easily describe Dmitri as he appears in passport photos of that time: “A tall, handsome young man; his character is that of dignified pride and majestic affability, with courtly complaisance and deceitfulness.” The last quality was hardly negative in Bystrolyotov’s eyes: after all, dissembling feelings was one of the most important talents of a successful recruiter.5

  Assigning him to the case, “Golst” gave Dmitri a blueprint of actions. According to preliminary observations, the target related to the Soviet people “without prejudice,” so Dmitri was to make casual acquaintance with her at a social function. He was to engage her in a conversation about the new Soviet way of life, a subject that intrigued cultured Europeans at the time. As their relationship developed, he would pretend to fall in love with her and act along the lines of the scenario “Golst” had laid out for him. He would propose to her and offer to take her first to Moscow and then to Washington, claiming that he would be appointed second secretary of the Soviet Embassy for ten years. He would have to paint his bride-to-be a picture of the leisurely and beautiful life that awaited them. After she took the bait and craved physical intimacy with him, he was to tell her sadly, with tears in his eyes, that his superiors insist on some proof of her loyalty to her new country. First, he would ask her for some trifle—a couple of decoded diplomatic telegrams, then more and more of them.

  “She’ll give you one finger,” “Golst” instructed. “Demand another one and then the whole hand, and after she is compromised, take her whole. We need [the French] Embassy’s ciphers and codes, all of the diplomatic correspondence.”

  Dmitri immediately threw himself into action. It was easy to become casually acquainted with Marie-Eliane: her brother, Gustave, a Slavist who had come to Prague as a journalist, a correspondent of the Havas Agency, was close to the same circle of Russian émigré intellectuals as Dmitri’s colleague at the Trade Mission’s Press Department, Roman Jakobson, a well-known literary scholar. (With the outbreak of World War II, Jakobson later moved first to Scandinavia and then to America, where he would teach at Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts.)6

  As instructed, Dmitri began courting Marie-Eliane at a restrained pace. He took the advice of “Golst” to heart and avoided rushing; by building up the target’s trust, he slowly brought the relationship to the point where proposing marriage would come naturally. Physical intimacy was an important step in that direction. Unlike his easy victories over the young secretaries and typists at the Continental-Kern Concern and Prague’s Škoda plants, it took Dmitri at least half a year to get this far. But something totally unexpected happened: in the course of two feverish days, he fell in love and married a total stranger.

  On May 1, 1927, in the course of the May Day demonstration of the workers’ parties in Prague, he met the woman who was soon (too soon!) to be his wife. He knew that he should follow the Soviet Trade Mission’s instructions to its employees and avoid any open contacts with the Czechoslovakian Communists. It was bad enough that their leader, Clement Gottwald, had blown the cover of his direct ties with the Soviets when he declared during a speech at the National Assembly, “In reality, Moscow is our external revolutionary headquarters. We travel to Moscow to learn from the Russian Bolsheviks how to destroy you. And they are masters at that.”7

  But the sunny day called for a stroll. Elegantly dressed, full of energy, on his way to the Mission to help prepare for a large diplomatic reception on the occasion of the big Soviet holiday, he stopped for a smoke at the city center at Vaclav Square, near a group of Prague Communists preparing for a demonstration. Bystrolyotov describes what happened next: “At that moment, I noticed something that delayed me for only a half hour—but later, in a fateful manner, broke my life.” He noticed a beautiful young woman standing on the back of a truck and handing out Communist propaganda leaflets. Her finely shaped hands and exquisite demeanor did not seem to belong to the crowd of blue-collar workers who surrounded the truck.

  Dmitri admired the very things his newly embraced Communist ideology considered bourgeois and, therefore, contemptible: her fashionable clothes. He appreciated her elegant ensemble—her sporty suit, black suede beret, matching gloves and shoes. Already a connoisseur of fine clothing, he was prompted by the woman’s attire to think of London’s Bond Street or New York’s Fifth Avenue boutiques. Was she a foreigner? If so, what was she doing handing out Communist leaflets here in Prague? He also noticed her fine brooch, in the shape of a heart stung by a scorpion. Bystrolyotov recalls the details of that brooch not by chance. Looking back at the circumstances of his meeting with his future wife, he sees the symbolism of the brooch’s shape: in time, his own heart would be stung as treacherously as if by a scorpion. In hindsight, he recalls it as an omen of disaster coming to his personal life, which he seemed to notice right away but ignored, as many people do when they’re in love. Together with the woman’s high forehead and small, childlike mouth, he saw that her wide-open eyes were cold, the color of ice, and appeared empty. As she looked above the crowd, she made an impression of being “either blind or clairvoyant.” He thought her head resembled that of Medusa Gorgona. He decided she was “a bit crazy . . . healthy people don’t have such eyes,” but he was mightily intrigued about the identity of this mysterious female.

  At the moment, Georgy Georgiev, his friend and confidant, happened to pass by. He noticed Dmitri’s interest in the young woman and tried to talk him out of pursuing her right then and there. An experienced “skirt chaser,” as Dmitri characterizes him using the English term, Georgiev guessed that the woman was equally promiscuous. In fact, he had seen her before, in the company of his boss’s wife, Mrs. Goldberg, his occasional lover. The two women had recently traveled to America and had become friends during the trip. Dmitri couldn’t bear his friend’s talking in the same breath about the stranger with a Medusa look and some vulgar Mrs. Goldberg. He was already smitten. He dryly asked Georgiev not to meddle in his private affairs. All he wanted him to do was to find out the young woman’s name and address as soon as possible.

  But he couldn’t wait. He rushed along Italska Street to Villa Teresa, to the Trade Mission, where he knocked on the office door of Comrade Weisskopf, a young German Communist. The Mission’s press secretary–attaché, Weisskopf knew many people in town. Dmitri described the young lady he had just met. When he mentioned her blind eyes, Weisskopf told him her name right away—Maria Milena Iolanta Shelmatova. Devoted to the Communist cause, she f
requented the Mission. Later in the day, Dmitri phoned her and asked for a date. She told him that she planned to attend the All-Workers’ Ball that evening.

  In anticipation of their meeting, Dmitri dined at his favorite restaurant and decided that this young woman was the one he had been waiting for all his life. “All my ability to love was longing to be released,” he recalls. At the ball, he took another look at Iolanta. (From the outset of their relationship, Dmitri addressed her by her third name, Iolanta—using the short forms Iola and Iolochka [“little Iola”], the Russian diminutive and endearing form of the name, perhaps because the word also means a “little spruce,” that is, a thing both beautiful and prickly at the same time.) Although he had initially dismissed Georgiev’s impression of her, now in this different setting, he did, indeed, see something unsettling about her. For one thing, she was dressed inappropriately for the occasion. Blue-collar workers with their families looked disapprovingly at her provocative décolleté and her bare back. And she behaved too forwardly for a lady as she talked to the group of young men swirling around her.

  Only one thing remained unchanged from his first impression of her—her sad eyes. He knew that she saw him, and her sadness made him think the young woman’s frivolous behavior was her way of stopping his pursuit of her. Now she reminded him of one of those “American vamps, making themselves up for a movie shot: sophisticated . . . thrilling . . . they embodied the ideal of [those] depraved times.”

  Much taken with Iolanta, he approached her and invited her for a stroll. They took a table in a restaurant, drank, chain-smoked, and talked all night. He dropped flower petals from a bouquet on their table into her glass. It was about three in the morning when he walked her to her place on the Mala Strana on the other side of the Vltava River. As they walked over the Charles Bridge, he told her how intoxicated he was with his life, full of adventures. Of course, he talked about them in general terms, without revealing their nature.