After three months, during one of these silent sessions, a middle-aged NKVD captain walked into the room. Dmitri didn’t like the very look of him and mentally nicknamed him “Toad.” The officer, A. P. Solovyov, asked the intern what the prisoner was accused of and how the case had been progressing. The intern reported that Dmitri was charged with espionage, and Solovyov left.
The next night, when they came for Dmitri, the guards ordered him to put on his coat and hat and drove him to Lubyanka. They brought him into the interrogation room where another NKVD officer sitting at his desk remarked that three months had been wasted, and it was time to get down to business. The officer stated as an irrefutable fact that, in a matter of a few days, Dmitri would confess to all of his crimes. The only question remaining for the prisoner to clarify was the method of his confession. This was the moment when the officer asked Dmitri which he would prefer: to write his testimony in ink or in his own blood. He gave Dmitri twenty-four hours to consider his options.
Back in Butyrka, Dmitri began discussing the situation with his cell mates. They split into two groups. One group advised him to cooperate with the investigator, and thus save his life, in the hope that an opportunity to prove his innocence would come up in the future. The other group felt that the threat of torture was just that, a threat, and by standing tall, he had a chance of proving his innocence.
Agonizing over this fateful decision, Dmitri made the rounds of the cell. In the end, he came upon a homely and quiet Jew, a Party member, formerly an engineer in a state forest export firm. The conversation he had with this man made a deep and lasting impression on Dmitri, reshaping his world outlook and serving as a guide through many future perturbations in his life. When the prisoner asked him how he would characterize his work as an intelligence operative abroad, Dmitri answered with three adjectives: “filthy,” “bloody,” and “heroic.” He explained, “We did base and cruel things for the sake of the future . . . I fought for my Motherland, and that says it all. We did evil things for the sake of the good.”
The Jewish prisoner mulled over Dmitri’s words and replied, “If you understand that you did evil things, then I’ll tell you the following: evil deeds must be atoned for.” Besides doing evil things abroad, wasn’t he guilty of evildoing in their homeland? Hadn’t he, with many others, raised his hand when voting to condemn the “enemies of the people”? After all, the two of them had built their Soviet home, “both its beautiful rooms and its stinking toilet,” where they had now ended up. In his view, millions of other honest Soviet people imprisoned now should feel responsible for their own misfortune.
The engineer reasoned that there were only two options: either to “spit at [themselves] and become Fascists [read: anti-Soviet] or to keep going forward along the honest Soviet road to the end and see what else was there, even if that turned out to be something still more horrible.” He found that to denounce oneself right away, without fighting, was despicable. “Let’s get to Lefortovo prison [where torture awaited them—E.D.] and see what they’re doing there,” the prisoner said. “Together we built Lefortovo, too; it’s part of our Soviet home, and we are responsible for it. If they let us live, let’s go to the camps to work, atone before our people, and gain a new understanding of how to live and what to do in the future. We’ll keep on building our Soviet home as if we are free. In the name of the evil you did abroad, don’t make it easy for yourself.”
He went on encouraging Dmitri to believe that the Party itself, not necessarily its Central Committee members, would finally find the right course of action. Sticking to the Communist ideals would mean remaining at his post, thus making himself immortal. Dmitri’s encounter with the Jewish engineer had a lasting and profound effect on him. As do many men who grow up with absent (or weak) fathers, Dmitri often sought advice from strangers he subconsciously substituted as father figures. Although he doesn’t acknowledge it openly in any of his memoirs, his readers will find endless retellings of the ideas expressed by the Communist Jewish prisoner during their conversations. Those ideas, an odd mixture of Communists’ belief in the eventual triumph of their just cause and Judeo-Christian notions of atonement for sins committed while fighting for that cause, helped Dmitri to resolve his inner conflict caused by the clash of the proclaimed ideals of Marxist-Leninist teaching and the realities of the mass terror that enveloped the whole country.
Finally, after much emotional turmoil, torn between one inner voice telling him it was “better to be a living dog than a dead lion” and another demanding that he prove his innocence, he made his decision. He let the twenty-four-hour deadline lapse, tacitly choosing the torture alternative. As promised, the guards came and took him to Lefortovo prison. Built in 1881, it was used mainly to conduct investigations. Named after the Lefortovo District of Moscow, where it was located, the prison was well known for its harsh treatment of political inmates. Over the decades of Soviet rule, among many prominent political prisoners incarcerated in Lefortovo were Raoul Wallenberg, Yevgenia Ginzburg, Alexander Dolgun, Vladimir Bukovsky, Natan Sharansky, Andrei Sinyavsky, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.7
To begin with, Dmitri was placed in a dark squalid cell containing two beds with no mattresses. A middle-aged man was lying on one of them. After a while, feeling the need to exchange at least a few words with another human being, Dmitri turned to the man, only to discover that he was talking to a corpse. He realized that this was his captors’ attempt to break him down psychologically. After a prolonged struggle with himself, he gathered all his will to show that the proximity of a dead body had no effect on him. He even forced himself to hum a song under his breath. A few more days passed until, finally, what he had been dreading the most began in earnest. One midnight, his captors took him to another cell, and the beatings started. They sat him on a high chair and shone a huge lamp in his face. They repeatedly threw him against the wall. Once they made him stand on his feet during the whole seventy-hour-long interrogation session while shouting furiously into both of his ears simultaneously. He was physically fit, and because of years of underground work abroad, he’d grown used to the thought that, sooner or later, he would wind up in enemy hands and die a painful death.8
During that first beating they broke his breastbone and his stomach muscles had begun to give way. They brought him back to his cell. After a few days, he gradually came to his senses and found that, if he lay still, there was no pain; if he dared to move, the pain resumed. He became preoccupied with deciding how much damage to his health he could endure before he would be forced to surrender. “In our villages, in old times during Shrovetide,” he writes, recalling his thinking after that first round of beatings, “[during ritual fist fights] our young Russians inflicted such pain on each other just for fun. Will my suffering now justify my surrender later on?” He decided to endure the pain for as long as he could. Otherwise, he would feel ashamed for giving in too soon.
Several more days passed, and the beatings resumed on a regular basis. Each time he would assess the damage and again tell himself that it hadn’t been enough to justify his surrender. One day, during renewed beatings, People’s Commissar Yezhov, the head of the NKVD, suddenly entered the interrogation chamber. Solovyov jumped to his feet to salute him. Yezhov didn’t (or pretended not to) recognize Dmitri as the man whom, just a few months ago, he had blessed before sending on his next intelligence mission abroad. Now he just asked the investigator, “How many foreign intelligence services has he admitted to spying for?” Solovyov lied, “Four.” “Not enough,” Yezhov said and left the room.9
After every new thrashing, Dmitri ransacked his memory, recalling other beatings he had endured in his life. One that came to mind had taken place in his youth. At one time, during the civil war, having wound up in Turkey, he worked as a cook on a boat. In an act of mischief along with other sailors, he stole the geese that the Turks had brought for the market in Constantinople. One day the Turks caught the sailors in the act and began beating them over their heads with boards. A
nail in one of the boards punctured Dmitri’s skull just above the bridge of his nose. He screamed, which frightened the Turk who had hit him and made him run off. Dmitri’s friends led him away with the board still stuck in his forehead, but he suffered no lasting injury. These were just regular sailors’ pastimes, he thought at the time, and recalling that episode, he told himself again, “No, I haven’t had enough! Not yet!”
The beatings continued. He was reaching the point where he felt he could stand it no longer. His racing heartbeat indicated that his heart, not too healthy to begin with, had started to give way.
One night, Solovyov said he was running out of time and his bosses had given him permission to finish Dmitri off if he kept refusing to sign the papers. To prove that he meant business, Solovyov raised the level of violence, now using an “instrumental approach” (Dmitri’s euphemism). He took a hammer out of his briefcase, wrapped the head of it with cotton, and secured it with a bandage.
“That’s for your stubborn noggin,” he said. “I’ll knock all the foolishness out of it once and for all.” He also took out a three-foot length of steel rope with a ball bearing attached to its end with wire. “This is for your back,” he said. “I’ll whip you to death with it.” The security guards stripped Dmitri to the waist. Hammer in hand, Solovyov came around the desk and hit him on top of the head. Dmitri collapsed onto his face. The young intern Shukshin sat on his neck, the guards sat at the other end on his legs, and Solovyov began flogging Dmitri’s back with the steel rope. From time to time, he turned the prisoner over on his back to kick him in the stomach with the heels of his boots.10
The bearing eventually broke during the beating, and the two balls lodged inside his rib cage (he would never be able to remove them). They also broke two of his ribs and destroyed several nerves. This caused paralysis of his limbs, and for a while he couldn’t urinate. (During our meeting, when Bystrolyotov related that episode of his life to me, he pointed to the short black felt boots on his feet, the kind of boots that, in my Soviet life, old Russians wore in the streets when it was wet and cold outside: “As a result of that beating, my circulation’s still poor. I have to wear these things even at home. My feet freeze.”)11
At this point, for the first time Dmitri felt that he might die soon, and death would make it impossible for him to prove his innocence. He began thinking that resistance could also be flexible: not only “do or die” but also “he who laughs last laughs best.” He decided not to let them murder him. At the break of dawn, he gathered what remained of his strength and whispered to Solovyov’s assistant, Shukshin, that he was ready to give his testimony.12
After that, he was taken to the hospital. He spent a few days there and, when he had somewhat recuperated, was returned to his cell, where he was given a week’s rest before he was to begin working on his file with the investigator.
The day came for this meeting with Solovyov, whom Dmitri found in good spirits, ready to write down whatever Dmitri cared to tell him. Solovyov even offered him sweetened tea with sandwiches. Since Dmitri had decided to survive, at least for the time being, it made sense to take every possible opportunity to restore his strength. He ate the sandwiches and drank the tea, while telling Solovyov whatever he thought was expected of him. Prompted by Solovyov, he soon admitted that, during his Prague years back in the 1920s, he had belonged to the Union of Student Citizens of the USSR Living in Czechoslovakia. This was easy to admit, because it was true. What wasn’t true was that, as Solovyov claimed, this student group had served as a cover for a counterrevolutionary organization set up by the Czech police; in fact, the union was the brainchild of Soviet intelligence.
But this wasn’t going to be good enough. Solovyov searched for other, more damning, accusations. Looking through Dmitri’s papers, he found a photo of Dmitri’s mother in the company of her old friend, General Baratov, a commander of the Cossack “Wild Division.” The investigator suggested that Dmitri admit to being the general’s son, and since it was known that Baratov had hanged Bolsheviks during the civil war, he, Dmitri, had to confess to taking part in those executions.
Eventually, when all other possibilities were exhausted, Dmitri was formally accused of belonging to the Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) party and recruiting other Soviet students living in Czechoslovakia to join it. Organized in 1901, the SR party had gained much support among Russian peasants, playing an active role in both the 1905 and 1917 Russian revolutions. One party member, Alexander Kerensky, eventually became head of the Russian Provisional Government, which was abolished by the Bolshevik takeover in October 1917. In 1918, the SR party tried to revolt. Its defeat led to the arrests and mass persecution of its leaders and regular members. In response, some of them again resorted to violence: on August 30, 1918, a former SR member, Fanya Kaplan, made an attempt on Lenin’s life. Many SR party members fought for the Whites and Greens in the Russian civil war. When it ended, some SR party members joined the Communist Party. Others left the country and created several opposition centers abroad. Dmitri Bystrolyotov was accused of spying for one of these organizations in Czechoslovakia.
Now, nothing remained to be done but to await sentencing. Long days stretched out, one after another. From time to time, Solovyov called for him. To make the case look solid, he tried to beef it up by adding some new details.
An episode that took place during one of these meetings stuck in Dmitri’s memory. He would go back to it time and again for the rest of his life. In his memoirs, the echo of that episode is heard every time he asks himself the key question about his life: Had he done the right thing in coming back to Russia at the end of his spy work in the West? One day, fearing that his captors might change their minds and charge him with espionage that would call for capital punishment, Dmitri decided to slip the investigator another, more benign, self-incrimination. He began saying he had been a regular embezzler of state funds, of moneys sent to him for their underground spy-ring operations in the West. He claimed that he had stolen three million French francs from the funds given him by his former boss, Theodor Mally.
At first, Solovyov brushed off this testimony as total nonsense. He didn’t believe Dmitri’s words, for he knew damn well that Dmitri was an honest man and a good intelligence officer. The higher-ups’ decision to persecute him had nothing to do with embezzlement. Then, as he listened to Dmitri repeating his made-up story again and again, Solovyov finally asked whether he’d heard right: “You had a foreign passport and enough money to slip away to some distant corner of the world and live there as you please for the rest of your life? And still you came back here?”
“Yes, I did. I came back even though I could surely have expected what has happened to me. The foreign press reported the mass arrests taking place in the USSR, and we, all of us operatives working abroad, were well informed.”
“Why did you return then?”
“Because Russia is my Motherland.”
“Moron!” the investigator cried out. “What a fool you are! To exchange hard currency for a Soviet bullet! You had everything—money and a passport—and yet you dragged yourself here? What a reptile! You have neither a soul nor a brain. ‘Motherland!’ Oh, what a jackass! What a fool! Well, stay in prison then, you insensible animal!”
This exchange with his investigator would haunt and torment Dmitri for a long time. Indeed, what had caused him to make that fateful decision? Why had he come back, facing almost certain ruin? What had led him to choose his earlier life as a spy in the first place? The answer would gradually come to him after years of going over the events of his dramatic life and writing his memoirs.
FIFTEEN
Sentencing and Entering the Gulag
When our country orders us to be a hero,
Any one of us becomes a hero.
—FROM A POPULAR SOVIET SONG OF THE 1930S
Happy that he had finally broken the stubborn prisoner’s resistance, the investigator Solovyov gave Dmitri his file to examine and sign. Besides his own testimony, the fi
le contained two others, both incriminating him as a double agent serving the OGPU as well as the Social-Revolutionary (SR) Center in Prague. One of these was the testimony of Igor Kedrov, who had worked at the INO department of the OGPU since 1931, someone Dmitri had never met. Kedrov’s testimony is absent in Bystrolyotov’s current court case, indicating that it was most likely fabricated to intimidate him and discarded later, after serving its purpose. In February 1939, Kedrov himself (along with another OGPU official) wrote to the Central Committee of the Communist Party regarding the NKVD’s “violations of Socialist law and unacceptable methods” of investigation. Characteristically for that time, he was arrested, accused of espionage, and shot.1
The other testimony was that of the former acting head of the INO, Sergei Shpigelglas. A seasoned Soviet spy in his own right, he had acted as an illegal operative around the globe—in China, Germany, and Spain. His most daring operation took place in 1930s France. Running a fish shop near Montmartre in Paris as his cover, he directed the kidnapping of Russian émigré general E. K. Miller from the streets of Paris and delivered him to Moscow. Later, Shpigelglas coordinated the exfiltration from France to Spain of another émigré general, N. B. Skoblin, who had served as the OGPU agent in the Russian émigré community in Paris. Under the code name DOUGLAS, Shpigelglas personally directed the smuggling of top secret military documents, including those from German General Headquarters that revealed the German military doctrine regarding the USSR. Shpigelglas’s testimony against Dmitri was likely written under pressure: he was arrested six weeks after Bystrolyotov and also accused of high treason, conspiracy, and espionage. He was shot on January 29, 1940.2
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