Of course, he also remembered Geneva barman Emile, who had taught him that the scraps of paper could be retrieved and glued back together, but this precaution, which he would undoubtedly have taken if he were working abroad, seemed silly at home, on the soil of his Motherland. Nontheless, he noticed some rather crude attempts at trapping him into doing something illegal. Thus, a pretty hotel cleaning lady turned to him and, cursing the Soviet authorities in French, asked him to take some papers out of the country, a major offense in Soviet times. He cut her short and left for Anapa. On his way back when he called the INO department, Gursky roared with laughter: “Are you still alive? Haven’t they shot you yet?”
At first, Dmitri laughed, too. But then his feet went cold. In the evening, when Gursky came over with his lover and they went as usual to dine at the Metropol restaurant, Dmitri learned what had happened. The cleaning lady glued together the pieces of documents he had discarded and passed them to the NKVD Operative Department. The head of the department quickly cooked up the case that a foreign spy with forged documents was heading for Crimea, Sevastopol, the location of the major Soviet Navy base on the Black Sea. He asked for permission to liquidate the spy. Luckily for Dmitri, Abram Slutsky, still in power at the time, checked things out and saved Dmitri from the meat grinder into which Slutsky himself would fall a few years later.47
Now, Dmitri found that anticipating arrest was torture in itself. He lived with his wife and his mother in the settlement of Sokol, on the Moscow outskirts, in a building occupied by NKVD employees. Every night, black Marias (the nickname for the cars that took arrestees to their prison cells) rolled up to the building. It was impossible to fall asleep. Their apartment was on the first floor. The beams of headlights and the grinding of motors kept them awake all night long. Through the drapes, they watched their recent comrades-in-arms being taken away into the darkness of the night.48
At the break of day, numb and exhausted, they would fall back into their beds and sleep for maybe a couple of hours before going to work, dreading the next nightfall. Every morning, the caretaker of the building had the sad duty of blacking out the names of those who had been arrested from the tenant register board in the entrance halls. As was the custom in all households at the time, in preparation for her husband’s possible arrest, Iolanta put together a bundle of warm clothes, a bowl and a spoon, and a food package containing some sugar and butter. No matter how much they discussed it, they couldn’t find a reason for the nightmare they were going through.
During this highly volatile and suspenseful time, with the question of life and death hanging by a thread, it looks as though his nerves finally snapped. He picked up the phone and called his former employer, the Foreign Department of the NKVD. Since Dmitri had been dismissed before his full attestation took place, he worried about not having documents that proved his service to the country as an intelligence operative (in fact, his work record book shows only that back in 1930 when he began his undercover work, he was hired simply as a senior translator), and he asked the person who took his call how those documents could be obtained. That turned out to be a truly life-altering move, the grave consequences of which he could possibly have avoided if he had continued to keep a low profile, as he had since leaving the agency for the Chamber of Commerce: acting on instinct, he had not contacted his former comrade-in-arms. That proved to be the right tactic. As a precautionary measure, foreign intelligence officers knew only the code names of their colleagues. Therefore, when Bystrolyotov was dismissed from the Foreign Intelligence Department, nobody in the office knew exactly where he went. In the leapfrog of the agency’s bosses that followed the murder of Abram Slutsky, Dmitri disappeared from their radar, at least temporarily.
Recently published archival materials from Russia’s State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI) disclose with clarity the chain of events triggered by Bystrolyotov’s fateful phone call. Renowned Soviet spymaster Pavel Sudoplatov, at that time an operative executive (operupolnomochennyi) of the department, picked up the phone and was taken by surprise when he heard Dmitri’s voice. A few days before Dmitri’s call, Sudoplatov had asked the new acting head of the department, Zelman Passov, who replaced his predecessor, Sergei Shpigelglas, under whom Dmitri worked for over a month, about the whereabouts of HANS. Passov replied that he had been arrested, which was a quite realistic assumption on his part. After all, at that time, the meat grinder of terror aimed at the first generation of Soviet foreign intelligence operatives of various ranks was in full swing, with many operatives at Dmitri’s level being thrown in jail on an almost daily basis. (Passov’s own turn would come a few weeks after Bystrolyotov’s; he was arrested on October 23, 1938.)
The rest followed in quick succession. Sudoplatov told Dmitri that he would make inquiries about the documents and invited him to call back in a few days. The moment Dmitri hang up the phone, Sudoplatov duly reported the incident and Dmitri’s arrest became imminent. (In fairness it has to be stated that, in the paranoid atmosphere of the time, Sudoplatov hardly had a choice: if he chose not to report Bystrolyotov’s phone call and it were discovered later on, he would inevitably be arrested for attempting to harbor an “enemy of the people.” In fact, at the end of the year, Sudoplatov himself would barely escape the purges.)49
It may well be that Dmitri, a man of high intelligence, knew perfectly well what he was doing when he picked up the phone. In his memoirs, he recalls tremendous relief that the torment of dreadful anticipation was finally over. He was even elated, and a paradoxical thought registered in his mind: “What a joy! I’ve been arrested!”50
PART III
AFTERLIFE
FOURTEEN
In Ink and Blood
If the facts aren’t confirmed, too bad for the facts.
—JOSEPH STALIN (APOCRYPHAL)
“Do you want to write your testimony in ink,” the NKVD officer asked him, “or in your own blood?”
Dmitri knew he was innocent; he found himself incapable of self-incrimination. He refused to write in either.
At midnight, two hefty prison guards walked into his cell, twisted his arms behind his back, and dragged him, his head lowered, through the prison corridors to the interrogation room. There, investigator A. P. Solovyov and his young assistant, Fyodor Shukshin, were waiting.1
After a short talk, during which Solovyov stated that NKVD officers like himself were the strongholds of Comrade Stalin, the beatings began. The two wardens again twisted the prisoner’s hands, and with two precise jabs, Solovyov knocked out the teeth on both sides of Dmitri’s mouth. Then he began kicking the prisoner in the shins with his boots. Meanwhile, the assistant removed Dmitri’s shoes, and Solovyov began stomping on his toes.
After that, they handed the prisoner over to the security guards, who hammered him from the left and right. Dmitri’s face swelled up, and all he could discern were his torturers’ fists, smeared with his blood, as they came in for the next blow. (As Dmitri sarcastically remarks in his memoirs, at that moment the only other things he was able to see clearly were the Komsomol pins on the guards’ uniforms.) Next, they threw him down on the floor and began kicking his abdomen with their boots.
Finally, they grew tired. Their hands and faces covered with Dmitri’s blood, they washed themselves at the sink and asked again, “Now, will you write it?” Dmitri tried to say no but his lips were so swollen that he couldn’t speak. Solovyov decided this was enough for the first time, and Dmitri was dragged back to his cell.2
As Dmitri would realize decades later, September 18, 1938, the day of his arrest, cut his life in half. That was the day he crossed the line separating his life from the “afterlife.” He even titled the opening chapter of “Zalog bessmertiia” (“The Key to Immortality”)—his memoir covering his first period of imprisonment—“How I Died.” There was good reason to call his postarrest existence the “afterlife,” for life as he knew it, the life that made sense to him, would be over, once and for all. He would gradually turn in
to a shadow of himself, a ghost descending into an underworld filled with millions of ghosts like him: the netherworld of the Gulag.
On the night of his arrest, when the door of his cell in the Butyrka prison slammed shut behind him, Dmitri’s first thought was that he had been imprisoned by mistake, and he was agitated, so for starters, they put him in a solitary cell. There he tried to calm himself and figure out what possible reason there could be for his arrest. The NKVD men who brought him in hadn’t given any clues.
First they had taken him to Lubyanka, the NKVD headquarters in the center of Moscow, and locked him up in an “envelope,” a tiny room the size of a phone booth.
Then they led him through several narrow corridors and threw him into a cell containing four beds. However, only one prisoner was there, a middle-aged man. He introduced himself as chief of the construction sites in Norilsk, a town in the Far North, beyond the polar circle. “After the trial,” he said to Dmitri, “if you aren’t shot, they’ll send you there. You’ll wear a padded jacket, and with a crowbar in your hands, you’ll be crushing permafrost.” This pronouncement irritated Dmitri. No way it would happen to him. He’d been arrested by sheer misunderstanding. “I bet you’re here for some serious offense,” he said to the man, “and you should anticipate a harsh sentence. As for me, I’m not guilty of anything. And, in the Soviet Union, they don’t convict an innocent man. Unlike in the capitalist countries.”
The man, enraged, jumped to his feet, ready to fight, but instead the two men got hold of themselves and decided to talk. From first-hand experience, the man told Dmitri to prepare himself for things to come. If he were lucky enough to escape a death sentence, like thousands of others, he would likely be sent to Norilsk as a prisoner.
Talking at length, the man gave Dmitri as much useful information as he could. But afterward, busy with thoughts of his wife and mother and going through the rituals designed for the newly arrested—a thorough body search, filling out numerous documents, being photographed and fingerprinted, having all his hair cut off, and undergoing a medical examination—Dmitri didn’t pay much attention to what the man had said. (A year later, when he actually did arrive at Norilsk as a prisoner, he came to deeply regret his disregard of the man’s advice—essentially spurning that “extraordinary gift” fate had sent him soon after his arrest.)
The next night, Dmitri and a group of other prisoners were driven through the Moscow streets to the infamous Butyrka Prison, legendary for its brutal treatment of inmates. Butyrka had a long and sad history, stretching as far back as the seventeenth century, when, during the reign of Peter the Great, its quarters were used to imprison rebellious troops (the Streltsy). In the nineteenth century, hundreds of participants in the Polish uprising of 1863 were incarcerated there, as were members of the radical group “The People’s Will” in 1883. Before the October 1917 Bolshevik takeover, among Butyrka’s famous inmates were the revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and Felix Dzerzhinsky, future head of the first Soviet secret police (the Cheka)—one of the few who managed to escape from the prison. At the time when Dmitri was brought there, Butyrka functioned as a place of internment for political prisoners as well as a transfer station for those sentenced to the Gulag.3
To his total disbelief, shortly after being thrown into a cell big enough to accommodate seventy-six prisoners, Dmitri recognized Konstantin Yurevich, his former classmate at the Constantinople gymnasium. To Dmitri’s surprise, the first thing his old and trusted friend did was to ask his forgiveness for testifying against him. He had told his investigator that both he and Dmitri were involved in terrorist activities against the Soviet Union back in their Czechoslovak years. Moreover, Yurevich insisted that Dmitri follow suit and repeat the same lie when facing his own investigator. Still unable to comprehend why he should invite trouble and act against his own best interests, Dmitri studied his decrepit old friend and decided that he must have gone mad.
Meanwhile, Yurevich did whatever he could to set Dmitri up as comfortably as possible in the cell. He arranged for him to get a wooden bed next to a prominent prisoner, the pioneering Soviet aircraft designer Andrei Nikolaevich Tupolev, who had been arrested in 1937 and was accused of being a member of the Russian Fascist Party. (He would only be fully rehabilitated two decades later, in 1955, two years after Stalin’s death.)4
Yurevich urged Dmitri, for his own good, to accept once and for all, no matter how preposterous the charges against him turned out to be and no matter what he did to try to deflect them, that the authorities had arrested him for good, and his fate had been sealed behind locked doors. And if this advice wasn’t outrageous enough, Yurevich then told him to get ready to follow the practice of the day—cooperate with the investigator in drumming up charges against himself. When Dmitri responded that he would rather die than dishonor himself, his old friend reasoned with him, making an even more foolish statement: Dmitri’s refusal to confess would only serve as proof to his investigator of his malicious anti-Sovietism. In the twisted jailers’ logic, if the arrested man was a true loyal Soviet citizen, it was his duty to help his investigators, thus showing his loyalty to the Soviet authorities.5
Dmitri had a hard time believing his old friend; it was just too out rageous. Yurevich must be crazy, or a coward, or a slanderer. No torture could possibly take place in our country. Time and again, he sifted through the multitude of his actions as a foreign intelligence operative. His past was impeccable. There was nothing in his work—nothing!—that could possibly incriminate him.
Finally, he calmed himself down with the thought that his arrest was just a precautionary measure. They would go through his file, page by page, and release him. The procedure would take no more than two months, and the current nightmare would be over. In fact, his life would be even better than ever before—free of any anxiety, the life that he, a devoted Soviet citizen, was entitled to. Despite the arrests of many people he knew, he still believed that in his country they didn’t arrest people without a reason. He reassured himself again and again: “I’m innocent, it’s crystal clear.”
Meanwhile, along with the rest of the inmates, he was brought to a bathhouse. Here something strange took place. Before they left the bathhouse, their clothes disinfected with hot steam, they were informed that the whole group had been stripped of yard privileges, because one of the prisoners had written the word “Lenin” on the wall. He realized that he had entered a topsy-turvy world in which fresh air was a luxury and merely inscribing the pen name of the leader of the revolution on the wall was considered a misdemeanor.
This convinced him that the hell he’d descended into was a real one. He decided that Yurevich had been placed in this cell for one purpose only—to undermine his determination to fight off the charges against him. He began distancing himself from his old friend. He wouldn’t be caught by their bait.
On his third day in Butyrka, Dmitri discovered that besides admitting their guilt in general terms, those who “cracked” were expected to cooperate by providing the investigators with detailed accounts of their “crimes.” Some veteran prisoners had even established a wild racket: for a fee, ranging from one to three bread portions, they would coach novices in writing self-incriminating testimonies.
Dmitri decided that he wouldn’t require these bizarre services. His case was different, and he would find his own ways to defend himself. To his relief, he noticed that the investigators didn’t treat all prisoners in the same way. While one man brought back to their cell after interrogation had deep wounds on his back, his broken ribs sticking out from under his flesh, Tupolev returned from one session smiling and carrying a few apples. This gave Dmitri some hope.
But other observations were less encouraging. He searched for a common denominator among the reasons for his cell mates’ arrests—but he found none. The cell was crowded with people from all walks of life and backgrounds: Spanish Communists who had fought Franco, Chinese Communists brought to Moscow for military training, heroes of the civil war of all ra
nks, not to mention illiterate peasants and blue-collar workers oblivious to any kind of politics. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t comprehend why all of these people had been arrested. Who could possibly have benefited from their imprisonment? As the days passed, he gradually came to his senses and accepted the fact that Yurevich was, as always, his true friend and not some investigator’s stooge. Now, totally confused, Dmitri began to suffer from headaches and insomnia.
At last, the day arrived when it was Dmitri’s turn to face his investigator, who turned out to be not some monster but a young, innocent-looking man in an NKVD uniform with no insignia—apparently an intern waiting to be accredited and given his first rank. He showed Dmitri excerpts of testimony from eleven people, all members of the Union of Student Citizens of the USSR Living in Czechoslovakia. They all testified that Dmitri Bystrolyotov, the Union’s secretary from its very beginning, had recruited them for anti-Soviet work, giving them various spy or terrorist assignments. No specifics were given, however; all charges were stated in the most general terms.6
When Dmitri pointed out that some of the dates in these testimonies couldn’t possibly be accurate, because at the time of his alleged actions he wasn’t living in Czechoslovakia, the intern calmly rewrote the date. Astonished, Dmitri asked him how he could change somebody else’s testimony, to which the young man replied with a straight face, “I can do anything.” Then, to Dmitri’s bewilderment, he calmly picked up a novel lying on the desk and began reading it.
Similar interrogation sessions repeated over several weeks. Dmitri would be brought in, the intern would sit there reading his book, and most of the time, not much else happened. Yurevich explained that this wasn’t unusual: to look solid, an investigation should take a certain amount of time. The intern just accrued hours, which were recorded in Dmitri’s file and counted toward the length of service the intern needed for accreditation.
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