The same way of thinking characterized Bystrolyotov. Early in life, he had also embraced the idea of fighting for the victory of world Com munism. Although, as he came to realize later, he had chosen the wrong side, he stuck to it anyway. Once and for all he attached himself to the cause he believed in. Although he knew that his return could be his undoing, the Nietzschean Übermensch who sacrifices himself for the sake of the future served as his inspiration.
For Soviet spies abroad who agonized over the decision to return or not, the fear of hurting their loved ones back home was legitimate. If they defected, they would have to relinquish their families. (Some spies, like Poretsky and Krivitsky, had their families with them in the West, which made a great difference. In fact, it was the crucial factor in their decision to defect, which took place a year later, in the summer of 1937.) Back in 1929, on November 21, the Soviet government had passed the law on defectors. It characterized flight from the Soviet Union or any of its agencies abroad as high treason. Later, on June 8, 1934, a decree was passed specifying the responsibility of all relatives of the defector. If they had facilitated the defection in any way or had even just known about the intention to defect and did not report it to the authorities, they were to be punished by confiscation of all of their property and five to ten years of confinement. Other relatives were to be exiled to the remote regions of Siberia for five years.29
Before his return to Russia, Dmitri was aware of this danger, as he confided to his fellow camp prisoner, Konstantin Ivanov. However, defecting would not have guaranteed his personal safety either. In his Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn cites the case of a Soviet man kidnapped abroad, in Brussels, Belgium. He also recalls the notorious kidnapping of Russian émigré General Kutepov in 1930; the general was snapped up in broad daylight from the streets of Paris by OGPU operatives. (Perhaps Theodor Mally had that event in mind a year later, in the summer of 1937, when he decided to go back to Russia. One of Mally’s reasons was that the NKVD would murder him anyway, whether he returned or not.)30
Besides, at the time of his trip back home, the end of December 1936, Dmitri could not possibly have known yet about the special mobile groups of assassins created to take care of Soviet spies who, once recalled, refused to follow orders and were hunted down and eliminated on foreign soil, as would happen to Ignace Reiss in the summer of the following year. There were many others among intelligence officers in this situation who couldn’t fully grasp what a devoted Soviet man, who had selflessly subjugated himself to his country’s interests, often risking his life, could possibly be incriminated for.31
Perhaps the most compelling reason of all for Dmitri’s decision to return was that he was unable to disassociate himself from the Motherland, which would have permanently violated his sense of be longing. This was the sense that, after his years of abandonment as a child, he had obtained for the first time when he rang at the doors of the Soviet Trade Mission in Prague back in 1922, a homeless young man, a prodigal son of his native land. The only undisputable and sacred concept for him was the Motherland. “Motherland remains Motherland,” he repeats many times in his memoirs. (Even after he had not only witnessed but experienced firsthand—“on his own skin,” as the Russian expression goes; and in his case, in the direct meaning of the phrase!—what was in store for those Soviet diplomats and intelligence officers who didn’t defect but, following orders, returned to the Soviet Union, he remained adamant in his outrage at those who betrayed the Motherland by refusing to return.
For example, such was the case of Fyodor Raskolnikov, a Soviet diplomat who, in 1938, refused to return to the USSR for fear of being arrested. Dmitri wasn’t able to accept as a mitigating circumstance that the man was betraying not their Motherland but its usurper, Stalin; Raskolnikov wrote an open letter to the dictator, accusing him of betraying the revolution. By the same token, he praised another diplomat, the Soviet ambassador to Romania, Mikhail Ostrovsky, who could easily have fled for freedom but, as Dmitri would soon do himself, returned to Russia to his own doom. What Dmitri didn’t know was that Ostrovsky hesitated before making this fateful decision and opted to return only after Kliment Voroshilov himself, Marshal of the Soviet Union, personally guaranteed his security. Ostrovsky was seized the moment he crossed the Soviet border and later died in the camps.)32
Now Dmitri had finally made his fateful decision to return, but he discovered he was not at liberty to do so. To quit the Soviet foreign intelligence was not a simple matter. Now he realized that back in 1930, when they had offered him the opportunity to stay in Europe and work underground, the OGPU had entrapped him (as it had its other émigré recruits) with false promises that they would let him go at a later time. (Years later, serving his term in the Gulag, he would come to the sobering conclusion that the “OGPU has an entrance door but does not have one for exit.”) Now, in the summer of 1936, tired and sick, he found that he had to fight for permission to leave his job, which was slowly killing him. He had to fight the authorities and fight hard. Sticking to the current policy of ennobling the KGB post factum, in the last version of Dmitri’s biography, the FSB (the KGB’s successor) makes it seem that his wishes were readily accommodated. To that end, they airbrushed from the record the fact that the response to his plea for replacement due to exhaustion and illness was a harsh reprimand. The suppressed document that refutes this picture-perfect treatment of their hero was made public under Gorbachev:
Dear Comrade Hans:
I ask you to gather patience and hold on to your job for a month and a half or two . . . More than anything else I’m surprised at your being unnerved . . . Though I understand that I might cause you a few unpleasant moments, I must state that these thoughts of total despondency are completely unworthy of our [NKVD] worker, no matter how hard his circumstances are and how badly distraught he is in performing his work . . . Cast off your dejection and in the two remaining months do not smear all of your many years of work in the past. Artem33
The harsh reprimand of a valuable worker for reporting that he was tired was nothing unusual; in fact, it was characteristic of the prevailing Soviet moral standards. The attitude toward human limitations as a sign of ideological weakness was indicative of the high ideological spirit of the time in which the revolutionary, self-denying spirit prevailed. In fact, Felix Dzerzhinsky was nicknamed “Iron Felix” for his self-sacrificing ways of serving the revolution: reportedly, he had died of a heart attack, widely assumed to have occurred because, in his fierce fight with the enemies of the revolution, the man refused to rest for even a moment.
They made Dmitri wait several months before he finally received permission to return. In his words, he “succeeded in breaking away from work” and arrived in Moscow on the eve of the new year 1937. He met the new year at one of the secret dachas belonging to the top NKVD brass. In his memoirs, he does not relate how he and Iolanta got back together. There is no question that she loved him, and perhaps this was enough for her to forgive him all his transgressions. He could hardly wait to start the life he had always longed for, the life of an artist and writer. When he returned home he brought along two book-length manuscripts—one journalistic in nature and the other related to the medical field. He even brought with him a set of lithographic plates for the latter, which he had prepared in Paris. He also brought fifty paintings, mostly done during his African trip. He applied for membership in the Union of Soviet Artists and was accepted unanimously. His personal exhibition was scheduled for the coming fall season. He submitted his manuscripts to publishers and was ready to devote himself fully to artistic life.34
However, “circumstances of a higher order,” as he characterizes them, forestalled his plans. He was promised that, to compensate him for several years of work with no break, upon his return he would receive a year of paid vacation and then be allowed to leave his job. But, citing the urgent need for his language skills, they did not allow him to quit the NKVD. They assigned him a desk job in the twentieth sector at NKVD headquar
ters, headed by Colonel Karl Gursky (code-named MONGOL). Dmitri worked there as a translator. As always, trying to do more than was required of him, he made use of his expertise to write two chapters for the first textbook to be used in the Soviet school for intelligence officers. He chose the subjects on which he was considered a supreme master: the best ways to legalize a spy’s presence in a foreign country and devices to avoid blowing one’s cover. He received an in-house official commendation for this contribution, and instead of the permanent relief from duty he had been promised, they began processing his official attestation for the NKVD cadres. He was to be awarded the rank of senior lieutenant of the NKVD (which was equivalent to the rank of an army major), and he had to join the Party. Three of his comrades-in-arms submitted their recommendations—Ignatii Poretsky, Theodor Mally, and Boris Bazarov.35
Then they made him take another trip abroad. Dmitri does not disclose the nature of this assignment, only mentioning that he “made a round through Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and safely returned home.” Next came another, even more important assignment from INO head Abram Slutsky. This time, his orders were to go via Japan to Canada, and from there to England, the country he knew well from the years he had handled Oldham, the Foreign Office functionary. Now, under the assumed identity of a forest industrialist, Dmitri was assigned to work with another British agent, John Herbert King, a British official connected to the Cambridge and Oxford groups of Soviet agents. After all, not only had Dmitri known him for a long time, but the NKVD had recruited King on his recommendation.36
It took four months to fully prepare for the trip. With Iolanta, still an NKVD operative, he traveled to the White Sea region, to the Karelian Autonomous Republic of the Soviet Union, and photographed himself next to a local log warehouse and sawmill. Since there was a chance that their luggage could be searched as they went through customs or during a hotel stay, they made sure that every item of clothing was of Canadian make. Since Dmitri and his wife had no children, to make them look like a solid family, Iolanta carried a staged photograph of her with a well-groomed young boy provided by the Foreign Intelligence office staff; they nicknamed him Encio.37
When he was ready for the mission, on March 27, 1937, Abram Slutsky, chief of Foreign Intelligence, reported the details of Dmitri’s assignment to People’s Commissar Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD. Yezhov listened carefully, approved the assignment, and said to Dmitri: “We’re giving you our best ‘source.’ You should appreciate it. You’ve been given the rank of senior lieutenant of state security. Apply for Party membership. We’ll accept you. And don’t worry about your mother: we’ll help her with whatever she needs. You may go abroad in peace. Remember: Stalin and the Motherland won’t forget you. Good luck to you.” He hugged Dmitri and kissed him three times in the Russian style: on either cheek and on his lips. Dmitri left Lubyanka excited and inspired.38
He returns to this episode several times in his memoirs and takes understandable pride in the honor bestowed on him by Slutsky and Yezhov in entrusting him with another highly important assignment. But it may well be that Yezhov’s kisses were those of Judas. As Dmitri could not have known in his time, but as we know now, soon after the scene he describes took place, a secret operation directed at destroying Soviet foreign intelligence officers of his generation began. To avoid alarming their comrades-in-arms who were still abroad, the recalled operatives were summoned to headquarters and given new assignments, usually to a faraway country. Soon after they began traveling, during a stop, they were removed from the train, arrested, and hidden in one of the secret NKVD prisons. For months, nobody knew what had truly happened to them.39
Apparently, at the time Dmitri was called in, this operational procedure, not yet fully developed, was still on the drawing board, and his trip was postponed. But the atmosphere in the country was growing increasingly ominous. Between January 23 and 30, 1937, soon after Dmitri’s arrival in the country, the anticipated second show trial, now known as Trial of Radek and Piatakov (Trial of the Seventeen) took place in Moscow. Top Soviet leaders Yuri Piatakov, Karl Radek, Grigori Sokolnikov, and fourteen other distinguished party members were accused of organizing acts of sabotage and murder in furtherance of a plot between Trotsky, Germany, and Japan to overthrow the Soviet government and restore capitalism. All but four defendants were shot, and the others given long prison terms. Elsa Poretsky, who visited Moscow about the time of Dmitri’s return, describes the atmosphere of total suspicion by everybody of everybody, the devastating impact of mass arrests, and the paranoia of those who expected to be arrested at any time, who froze even at the sound of a telephone ring. Surveillance and denunciation to the police became everyday occurrences.40
People around Dmitri began to disappear almost daily. First, some clerks from his Foreign Intelligence Department were arrested. Then, officers of the NKVD central apparatus began to be eliminated one by one. One of the first victims was the outstanding operative Felix Gursky. Even though quite recently, on January 2, 1937, after being recalled from abroad, Gursky was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, they came to arrest him. Knowing well what awaited him in Yezhov’s chambers of torture, he ended his own life by jumping from his office window on the ninth floor of the Lubyanka building.41
Then the two prominent NKVD officers who had blessed Dmitri in his intelligence work back in 1925, Mikhail Gorb and Artur Artuzov, were arrested (Gorb on April 29 and Artuzov on May 13, 1937). Accused of taking part in some anti-Soviet plot, they were sentenced to death and shot on the same day, August 21, 1937. (As was widely practiced at the time, Artuzov’s wife would later be informed that he had died on July 12, 1943, while serving his term.) In August 1937, Dmitri’s first OGPU controller in Prague, Nikolai Samsonov, was also arrested, accused of espionage, and shot. The fact that he knew the arrestees firsthand was a great surprise to Dmitri, and he was overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of mass imprisonment, which seemed to be seizing the whole country. Coming home, he discussed what was going on with his wife, wondering how his country had come to be infested with so many traitors and spies.42
By the end of summer 1937, as Stalin’s cult of personality reached its apogee—the entire Soviet media spared no efforts in praising him as “our father, our Sun, our Soviet leader”—his campaign of witch hunt and terror was also in full swing. About forty officers were recalled from abroad and dealt with in short order. Those who refused to follow orders were hunted down by mobile NKVD groups organized back in December 1936 when the whole operation to eliminate the old guard of spies devoted to the ideas of world revolution was still on the drawing board. One such dissenter, “Ignace Reiss,” was murdered in Switzerland and his body thrown out of a car going at full speed.43
After the whole contingent of foreign spies had been taken care of, it was the turn of the INO head, Abram Slutsky. On February 17, 1938, Slutsky (“Comrade Abram,” as Dmitri warmly referred to him) died suddenly under suspicious circumstances. The official version was that the man had suffered a fatal heart attack while visiting the office of Mikhail Frinovsky, the first deputy of the NKVD head, but rumor had it that Slutsky was suffocated with a pillow as he sat in his own office. (It has since been established that Slutsky was murdered in Frinovsky’s office but in a slightly more sophisticated way. First, he was subdued with a chloroform-soaked patch pressed against his nose, and then he was injected with poison.)44
On February 25, 1938, Dmitri was suddenly laid off by the Foreign Intelligence Department and transferred to the State Chamber of Commerce. There, thanks to his working knowledge of nearly twenty languages, he was made head of the Translation Bureau. In March 1938, the third show trial, “The Trial of the Twenty-one” (also known as the Rykov-Bukharin trial), took place in Moscow. As expected, Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda, Krestinsky, and seventeen other prominent party cadres were accused of cooperating, under Trotsky’s direction, with German, Polish, and Japanese intelligence to commit acts of sabotage and diversion i
n industry, transport, and agriculture and to commit murder and terrorism, with the goal of overthrowing the government, dismembering the USSR, and restoring capitalism.45
As the trial proceeded, on March 7, 1938, Dmitri learned about the fate of another spymaster, one of the country’s most distinguished, who had directed several of his operations abroad: Theodor Mally had been imprisoned. (As Dmitri would learn decades later, two days after his own arrest, Mally was sentenced to death and shot immediately.) In June 1938, Boris Bazarov, who had directed many of Bystrolyotov’s operations in the West, was recalled to the USSR and, on July 3, arrested and accused of espionage. One after another, the most talented and courageous operatives working undercover abroad were brought back to the country and thrown into jail.46
The waves of arrests of good and solid workers from all walks of life continued nonstop. Clearly, it was only a matter of time before they would come after Dmitri, too. Now he couldn’t help but recall some ominous signs that he too was targeted for persecution. He recalled an incident that happened during a short vacation to see his mother in Anapa. Carrying a passport issued in the name of a foreign engineer, he stopped in Moscow on the way and checked into the luxurious Hotel Metropol, where foreigners usually stayed. Every evening his supervisor, Colonel Karl Gursky, and other NKVD bosses visited and used Dmitri’s hard currency, which they lacked living in Moscow, to carouse in the hotel restaurant. The INO department secretary used the occasion of his appearance in Moscow to cleanse his file of unneeded documents and pictures. She gave him the packet of documents with instructions to tear up the obsolete papers into small pieces and furtively dispose of them in one of the street garbage cans. He chose to dispose of his old service card from a short stint in the Red Fleet during a hasty trip to Russia back in 1922 and a few photos he had bought to use in an article for the Soviet press. He didn’t heed the secretary’s warning—he tore everything up but threw it into the wastebasket in his hotel room.
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