Stalin's Romeo Spy

by Emil Draitser

  As he examined her leg, she asked him whether she could leave a can of real coffee in his office so that she could come from time to time to drink it there. That wasn’t an unusual request. Due to his reputation as a decent man, some prisoners used the doctor’s office as a safe place to keep certain items that would be stolen from their parcels if kept in the barracks for too long: salt pork, cigarettes, canned food. Exhausted after a daylong walk, she fell asleep as he was making the bandage. When he had finished, he discovered that the newly arrived patient had mistaken the dark liquid in a measuring cup on his desk, the mixture of ink and iodine, for her heart medicine and had drunk it. At first this made him angry: now his precious writing material was depleted. Then, looking at her “well-bred but exhausted face,” he felt sorry for her. He knew that she had walked all day long “with her belongings on her back and surrounded by bayonets and dogs.”

  It was dinnertime, so he woke her up and offered a bowl of hot soup. She began eating, her eyes still closed, but soon she came back to life. He offered to take her to a club to attend a concert organized by the Cultural-Educational department of the camp.

  As in other camps all over the Gulag system, such a department’s officially sanctioned goal was to increase prisoners’ labor productivity via propaganda-oriented artistic performances. As one directive had it, “Every performance must educate the prisoners, teaching them greater consciousness of labor.” However, in many places, prisoners used these concerts as a means of consuming some culture, as moral support, whether it was a chance to listen to some classical music or attend the performance of a play. Often, out of vanity, the camp authorities tried to outdo their colleagues in other camps with higher-quality concerts. For this purpose, when a new party of prisoners arrived, they would look for the most talented among them. The Mariinsk transit camp was especially known for the artistic activities of its prisoners. Its bosses were the first to pick talented people arriving with the convict flow. Among scientists and scholars, there were also musicians, artists, singers, actors, painters, and ballet dancers. It was easy to remove them from the crowd of other miserable people and put them in the local hospital to rest. Using their talents, the Mariinsk camp bosses organized concerts and festivals of arts.7

  Dmitri took Anna to one of these concerts. Sitting in the hall next to each other, they imagined being back in Moscow at a Bolshoi concert. To complete the illusion, he told her that some chocolate treat was needed. And he offered her something that, in the camp environment, was a no less exquisite treat—two potatoes baked in coal. He had been able to get a hold of these potatoes by bartering another small jar of lipstick he produced in his cabin for them. During the concert, Dmitri inconspicuously admired Anna’s profile. At one point, as they played a tango on an accordion, Dmitri recalled his trip to Valencia, Spain, where, late one evening, he had seen La Argentina, a famous flamenco dancer of her time, dancing right on the city embankment to the delight of sailors and hobos.8

  By winter 1943, he and Anna became a couple. “We have our meals together. There are two of us. We are not lonely. For us, loneliness has ended” was how, a few months after they met, Dmitri described the fact that he and Anna had become an item. For the always-hungry prisoners, mealtime was a holiday in the camps. And although their meal might consist merely of leaves of decaying cabbage, scraps of turnip, and rotten potatoes swimming in gray, badly smelling liquid, it was still a feast. In the morning, as Dmitri attended to his daily ritual of dispatching work brigades to different tasks, he already knew that back in his cabin Anna was bustling about the hot plate, warming up the soup and baking two slices of bread.

  Once Anna was bursting with happiness that she could treat Dmitri to a small piece of salt pork on top of a piece of black bread. They sucked on it as if it were candy. On another occasion, to impress him, she concocted a soup with onion, which she had exchanged with another prisoner for a few zwiebacks. To compliment her, he told her that it reminded him of a fish soup with sterlet they used to serve at the restaurant near the Grand Opera in Paris, run by Russian émigrés.

  He tried to reciprocate in any way he could. One day, he brought her a present of the last item remaining from home in his bag: open-worked long underwear made of silk that he had bought at an expensive store in Paris before going to the Sahara. He also gave her a food item considered a delicacy under camp conditions—a fried cat’s thigh. He wasn’t sure she would eat it, though.

  Of course, while he courted Anna, other women vied for the chance to form a relationship with the doctor, considering his many privileges. One of these women walked into his cabin and asked that he see her as a patient. When she undressed beyond what was required for the medical examination, he asked her to put her clothes back on: he had already set his heart on Anna.

  Under camp conditions, he and Anna, like all prisoner couples, suffered an acute shortage of privacy. In summertime, well knowing the camp routines, they found short breaks of time to sneak into the thickness of tall weeds close to the “firing zone,” a place where it was less likely anyone would approach for fear of being shot at. There, half-buried in the ground, were a few basketlike arrangements woven by prisoners from bush twigs, creating a kind of cocoon big enough to accommodate a couple. They crawled in there to make love and talk of the most intimate things. It was bliss to them, their love behind the barbed wire. “In the vast majority of cases,” Dmitri recalls, “under camp conditions where a prisoner experienced degradation at every step, a couple’s relationship was reduced to a minimum, to a physical act without spiritual closeness. But we [he and Anna] felt lucky that we had found soul mates in each other.”

  Bit by bit, during their dates, he learned about Anna. She was born on December 26, 1902, in a southern provincial town of Kherson gubernia. She came from a gentry background. Her grandfather was a landlord and army officer. Her father was a “kind man, a fop, and a talented lazybones.” Spoiled by his father’s wealth, he behaved irresponsibly, and nobody took him seriously. At one time he even supported the local underground revolutionaries by offering them his apartment as a meeting place. Anna grew up a daredevil. She learned to ride a horse in a man’s way, and once out of sheer mischief, she even contemplated blowing up their house, using her grandfather’s hunting cartridges.

  When World War I broke out, followed by the revolution of February 1917, and then, with the October 1917 Bolshevik takeover of power and the ensuing civil war, Anna’s whole family fell apart. When the Red partisans passed through their town, she recognized one of them as a man she had known as a girl. He convinced her to join the Reds. She did and soon became a reconnaissance scout. At one point, she was captured by the Whites and, together with other prisoners, was shot. But she survived the shooting with only a wound. Then she joined the famed First Red Cavalry Army, where she met and married a revolutionary army fighter, Vassily Rybalcheko. She gave birth to their daughter Magdalina.

  When the civil war ended, Anna entered a university and graduated as an engineer. Soon afterward, she met another man, Sergei Ivanov, fell in love with him, and left the husband she didn’t love. The couple moved to Moscow, where she found work at a military aviation plant as a quality control inspector, signing off new planes into operation.

  She was arrested on June 11, 1942, and accused of treason. Quite in the spirit of the time, the arrest was the result of her being denounced to the secret police by one of the girls who worked in the lab she managed. The girl reported that Anna planned to fly away to Persia with a test pilot. She did it out of jealousy: she had a crush on the pilot, who paid her no attention and, though not encouraged, romantically pursued Anna. During the simultaneous questioning of the witness and the defendant, the girl repented and took back her accusation. Nevertheless, Anna was convicted for anti-Soviet propaganda and sentenced to five years in the labor camps.

  After she told him her story, Anna reproached him for being tight-lipped. While she had revealed so much about herself, he hadn’t reciprocated. Dmitri re
plied, “I feel uneasy about many things from my past.” “Working for the OGPU?” she asked. “After all, you worked abroad, there’s none of our blood on you.”

  “Ah, isn’t it all the same whose blood it was? Blood is blood, little Anya,” he replied.

  He told her the truth about the circumstances of his birth and that, from his mother’s side, he had “bad heredity,” that is, he was the great-grandson of an “erratic woman,” as he put it. “Without knowing this,” he added, “it’s difficult to understand me and my life,” which he characterized as “confused, full of mistakes, yet outstanding.” He also told her about his work abroad in general terms, skipping details that might reveal any state secrets related to his operations. Even in the camps he felt bound by allegiance to his oath of secrecy.

  In the spring of 1945, the war with Germany in its final stages, the food situation improved, and now for breakfast they had bread that didn’t have crushed wormwood mixed into the flour. One day Anna was even able to cook kasha out of wheat, boiled in sweetened water. Assigned to work outside of the camp at a cheese factory, she smuggled a piece of cheese into the camp one morning and offered it to Dmitri. He bit off a piece and began sucking on it as if it were a sweet dessert. It immediately reminded him of the aged Brie he used to order in the Parisian café Royal and the Stilton cheese he had eaten at Stimson’s on the Strand in London in the company of Sir Ernest (i.e., his British agent Oldham) and the amber bits of Parmesan cheese he used to eat, washing them down with sips of Chianti when living in Florence.

  Dmitri and Anna’s union was anything but trouble-free. One bookkeeper, fat and wide shouldered, a middle-aged man with access to extra food, hinted to Anna that he was in a position to improve her food situation. She ignored his overtures toward her, and one day he grabbed her and attempted to molest her. She told Dmitri about the episode, and the next morning he rushed to the headquarters’ accounting department and beat up the man. Dmitri was punished with ten days in solitary confinement.

  He later regretted acting without thinking of the consequences. The episode gave his female boss—who was also a prisoner but because of her background as the wife of a regional party committee secretary was put in charge of the dispensary—reason to spoil things for him and Anna. She formerly had a camp lover, another prisoner, whom she forced to cohabit with her, but he made a daring escape effort and was caught and shot dead on the spot. Then she turned to Dmitri one morning and told him point-blank: “Shave off your beard, and I’m yours.” When he turned her down, out of sheer jealousy because her subordinate Dmitri preferred Anna, she used her ties to the operchast’ (operational security unit) to make sure that the couple was separated and recommended that each be dispatched to different camp units. That almost killed Anna. At the other lagpunkt, she was grossly mis-treated by the camp unit chief. They gave her a sleeping place with no bedding on a frozen floor near the barrack entrance. She quickly developed pneumonia. She would have died, but another woman, head of the Suslovo medical unit, saved her by hospitalizing her, thus giving her an opportunity to rest and regain her health.

  Other good-hearted people also rescued the camp love of Dmitri and Anna. One Dr. Nosova, a former prisoner herself, who continued working in the same place after serving her term, many times struck Dmitri’s and Anna’s names from the list of prisoners to be transported to other camps, which would separate them forever. They would lose track of each other: prisoners didn’t have the right to correspond with other prisoners; letters with camp addresses were not accepted for delivery.

  But their camp life remained full of unpleasant surprises. One day Dmitri received orders to move his medical office into a disciplinary barrack (in Russian, BUR, barak usilennogo rezhima) with hard-core criminals and to stay there around the clock. It was a dangerous place to be, for it was hard to control violence between prisoners in that barrack. After a few tension-filled days had passed, he spotted Anna in a new group of prisoners coming into the barrack: she had snuck into the group just to pay him a short visit. He was both very happy to see her and, at the same time, horrified at the very thought of what could happen to her in such a barrack. Dmitri remembered what a group of hard-core criminals in Norilsk had done to a female doctor who entered their barrack unescorted by guards: they gang-raped her savagely (in camp slang, “passed her under a streetcar”) until she died, her body torn into pieces.9

  Soon after Anna left, Dmitri was himself attacked by a group of hard-core criminals in the barrack. He survived the onslaught by barricading the door of his office with furniture and holding out until the guards, usually oblivious to fights between prisoners, mistook the commotion in the barrack for an attempted escape and intervened in time.

  One day, Anna told Dmitri she had received a letter from her husband, Sergei, informing her he had set her free of their marriage ties. He was at another camp working as a chief mechanic and cohabiting with an imprisoned nurse; they lived as husband and wife. Besides, they wouldn’t see each other anyway, for he was dying slowly of a serious stomach illness. After hearing the news about Sergei, Dmitri considered himself married to Anna.

  The years 1946 and 1947 were bad ones for Dmitri. As is typical of war veterans, while stress and the survival instinct kept him going during the most trying years of wartime food shortages, when the war was over and camp life tension was relatively less, a series of health setbacks followed. He suffered from three cases of pneumonia, one after another. Soon, tuberculosis began in his larynx. If not for Anna’s care, he would surely have perished. In the summer of 1946, her term to end in a year, Anna received the status of nonescorted prisoner and was transferred to work at the camp headquarters in Suslovo. But she was allowed to travel between camp units. Working as a dishwasher at a diner for the military commanders, she now and then managed to smuggle some food under her skirt for Dmitri. Each time, she risked an additional term if she were caught.10

  On July 11, 1947, her term ended, and she was freed. She put Dmitri’s notebooks under her summer dress. It was risky: she could be rearrested, get a new, ten-year term, be sent on a punitive transport, and then to a punitive camp. But she insisted that it must be done. Before they parted, she swore she would pull him out of the camps for good.

  As he learned later, the whole group of women ex-prisoners was stopped en route and searched. But she was lucky: at the last moment, the officer decided not to search her. Together with other freed women, they were placed into a train car transporting quicklime. But that didn’t trouble her much: she was free at last.

  From the day they parted, Dmitri was tormented with doubts about whether Anna would wait for him as she had sworn she would. She wrote to him, but not too frequently, and her letters were short and businesslike. She wrote that she had arrived in Moscow and received a job assignment at a plant in Siberia, but she didn’t say exactly where, as if she didn’t want to be found. It seemed to him both strange and suspicious. Under the influence of many prisoner stories about similar relationships that had started in the camps but were quickly forgotten by the other party once freed, Dmitri calmed down and began cohabiting with the camp doctor, Mukhina. He found it reasonable, for as the camp proverb goes, “A free person and a prisoner are not a couple.” And he didn’t write to Anna out of pride: he couldn’t bring himself to remind her about himself obtrusively.

  Sometime later, he learned that Anna was working at a military plant in Slavgorod in Altai Region as an engineer. Then, one day, a letter came from her informing him that soon he should expect to be recalled to Moscow for reexamination of his case and released.

  While he wanted to believe it, he couldn’t. Parting with Anna was a major blow. By that time, his camp experience had already shifted his world outlook further in the direction of a more realistic one. He no longer believed that his arrest and imprisonment were just honest mistakes of the system he had served so selflessly. During the first years, he had duly petitioned for reexamination of his case but was turned down routinely. Later, his na
me was twice stricken from the list of prisoners to be freed before the end of their terms. In the eyes of those who had put him behind barbed wire he remained an “enemy of the people.” As humiliating as it was to one who had given everything he had to the Soviet system, on all major Soviet holidays, May 1, and the day of the anniversary of the October revolution (November 7), as an especially dangerous political criminal, he was habitually shut behind the door of the camp solitary cell.

  Now he was deeply convinced that the camp system was a totally corrupt institution that left no room for justice. He saw that, with rare exceptions, the camp chiefs were “cold and calculating” people who “cared above all about their position in the Party that fed them”; it was as impossible to appeal to them as it was “for a sheep to appeal for justice to a wolf that is tearing its body into pieces.”

  He didn’t believe he’d come out alive. One prisoner about to be freed came to say good-bye to him, asking how much of his term was left to be served and when it would be his turn to get out. Dmitri answered, “A lot is left. I’ll be here till I die.” He began losing faith in his future. One day, working in a children’s toy shop and charged with drawing an elephant, he despaired that he forgot what the animal looked like, he who had seen hordes of them during his African trips.

  But in November 1947, his fate suddenly took an unexpected turn. He was called to the headquarters in Mariinsk: a special escort consisting of an officer and soldiers came for him.

  EIGHTEEN

  The High Price of Decency

  Suppose you succeed in breaking the wall with your head. And what, then, will you do in the next cell?

  —STANISLAW JERZY LEC

  When he was suddenly summoned to Moscow, the news made Dmitri wary. What was it for? During the war, they had twice turned down his appeal for reexamination of his case. In prisoners’ slang, he had been given the “full spool” (na vsiu katushku)—the maximum term for the crimes of which he was convicted. Did they want to review his case and add more years of imprisonment to the initial term, as was often the practice, or had they now thought of bringing him before a firing squad? For almost ten years of imprisonment, especially harsh during the wartime, his near-starvation existence had weakened him to such a state that he often felt indifferent to whatever would happen to him.1