Stalin's Romeo Spy

by Emil Draitser

  It took over a month and a half to reach Moscow. He managed not to die en route from either hunger, or cold, or beatings, or nervous overexertion, as many prisoners had.2 When he finally arrived in Moscow, he was considerably weakened by the series of pneumonias he had suffered in Mariinsk: he could neither stand on his own nor move without help. They brought him to Lubyanka and gave him time to recuperate.

  Finally, they called him in to be interrogated about the activities of Colonel Norman Borodin.3 In March 1930, about the same time as Dmitri, Borodin had become an undercover operative of Soviet Foreign Intelligence, working first in Norway, then in Germany. After Hitler’s ascent to power, Borodin was transferred to the Paris illegal rezidentura, where, although Dmitri doesn’t say it explicitly, their paths crossed. (During the interrogations, Dmitri assumed that Norman had already been arrested, but as is known today, they had just been collecting compromising material in preparation for his arrest, which followed in March 1949.)4

  Dmitri confirmed his previous, totally unessential, testimony regarding Borodin’s days as a spy back in Paris. He wondered why they couldn’t take his testimony in the camp, either in Suslovo or in Mariinsk, and had dragged him all the way to Moscow. By now, he knew the system in whose hands he had been for almost ten years too well to expect anything good from it and braced himself for further developments.

  After a while, they took him from his cell, bathed him in a bath-house, shaved him, and dressed him in a brand-new civilian suit. His heart skipped a beat in a premonition of trouble. Then two guards took him under the arms and brought him into a spacious office with two men sitting behind a table. One of them was Major General Viktor Semenovich Abakumov, who, during the war with Germany, had been the head of GURK (Chief Counterintelligence Directorate), better known as SMERSH (the Russian abbreviation of “death to spies”). He had a reputation as a notoriously brutal official who was known to torture prisoners with his own hands. At the time of the meeting, he was Minister of State Security (MGB). The man sitting next to him was head of the investigation department in charge of especially important cases, Colonel A. G. Leonov.5

  Abakumov ordered the guards to position Dmitri facing the window. “Do you recognize it?” When Dmitri gave the right answer (Lubyanka Square), he was asked another question: “And what’s the name of the boulevard that starts to the left of the Grand Opera in Paris?” Dmitri replied correctly. “Good, very good.”

  Suddenly Abakumov said, “In a half hour you might turn up over there, near the subway station. And in a month, in Paris! Do you hear? Answer!”

  Since Dmitri stood silent, Abakumov added, “Well, it’s understandable that you’re bewildered. I’ll explain. I decided to get you through the amnesty campaign. You’re a useful person. Already today you can dine in the Metropol Restaurant [in Moscow] and, in a couple of weeks, at the Hotel Ritz in Paris. They’ll talk about your work over there later. Do you hear me? Do you?”

  Here, Dmitri gathered all his strength and said, “My crimes are invented. There’s no proof of any wrongdoing on my part. I’m a suspect whom you can’t amnesty. You can only reexamine my case and set me free. Then we can begin talking about work.”

  The general laughed harshly. He tapped on a window glass. “Do you see the multitude of people on this square? These are ordinary citizens, and all of them are suspects who remain on the other side of the walls of this building so far. On this side, there are no suspects—only convicts. You’re arrested, therefore, you’re convicted. If it’s expedient, we’re ready to grant amnesty to you.”6

  Then Abakumov said, “Listen, Dmitri Aleksandrovich, what would you do if you walked out onto the streets right now? On such a sunny day? Tell us, don’t be afraid.”

  Dmitri knew that this was his last chance. His heart beating fast, he replied, “I would come to the very first store window and knock it out.”

  “Why, Dmitri Aleksandrovich?” The men in the room exchanged knowing glances: the convict’s lost his marbles.

  “So that I’d be returned to prison as soon as possible,” Dmitri replied.

  He was led out of the room. It appears that, as had happened many times in his life, always looking for a father figure and role model, at this fateful moment of his life, Dmitri was emulating the behavior of the former Suslovo camp chief Sidorenko. He openly admired the man for his humanity and dedicated many pages of his memoirs to him. Sidorenko was one of those few camp chiefs who exercised restraint in their power and, at times, saved the lives of prisoners under their watch. On the eve of Dmitri’s departure for Moscow, wrongly accused by his superiors and given a prison term himself, he had done exactly this—when offered amnesty, he stated his innocence before the law and refused to accept amnesty and demanded a full acquittal.7

  Dmitri’s thoughts went along the same lines. “To release me with a brand on my forehead so that, first, they would use me again, say, in the capacity of provocateur, and then, when I stop being useful, they would bring me back to prison but now with no right to ever claim my innocence . . . No, some time ago I was able to carry out their orders, enthusiastically and voluntarily, but now I must not be a flourishing slave.”8

  As soon as Dmitri returned to his cell, he asked for paper and wrote a letter to Abakumov reiterating what he had said during their meeting—that he refused amnesty and demanded a new investigation of his “crimes,” a new trial, and full rehabilitation of his civil rights. He added (rather naively) that what had happened to him “would be unthinkable in any cultured country.”9

  Dmitri received a response to his demands not in words but in deeds. At night, he was told to gather his belongings, and after two hours in a waiting room in the Lubyanka basement, they placed him in a Black Maria and drove across the city for a long time. Finally, they brought him to a prison called a “special object” (spetsob’ekt), Sukhanovka. Established by the NKVD in 1938, for “especially dangerous enemies of the people,” it was organized on the grounds of the old Ekaterinskaia Pustyn’, a monastery built in the time of Catherine the Great, in the village of Vidnoe, outside of Moscow. As Solzhenitsyn notes, the Sukhanovka prison had a reputation as the “most terrible prison” of the Ministry for State Security (MGB). The very threat of being sent there was often used as a way to intimidate prisoners during interrogation. Many Sukhanovka prisoners couldn’t survive there, often losing their sanity. After being relieved of his post and subsequently arrested, NKVD head Nikolai Yezhov was imprisoned there on April 10, 1939.10

  The prison consisted of two buildings, one with a row of cells in which prisoners served their terms and the other with sixty-eight monastic cells, where they were interrogated. For starters, they put Dmitri in a special punishment cell designed to break a prisoner’s resistance. Its cement walls dark from filth and dampness, the tiny cell (no more than five by six and a half feet) was barely lit by a small bulb under the entrance door. There was also a small frozen window under the low ceiling. The collapsible berth was locked onto the wall. Beside a minuscule table made of iron, a rail that stuck out from the floor served as a support for the berth at night. It was so cold, his breath produced vapor.

  Dmitri was convinced he was living the last day of his life. Then, in full silence, they gave him a cup of tea with sugar and bread and quickly retrieved the cup from him. There was no place to sit and no room to move around. After an hour of shifting from foot to foot in front of the door, he became tired and sat down on the rail, which was first uncomfortable, then even painful. After ten minutes, his back began to ache, and he had to stand up without resting. For variety, he began shifting from foot to foot on the other side of the rail. He lasted only a half an hour, after which he sat down but couldn’t remain seated for longer than five minutes.

  After two more hours, he found himself incapable of either moving or sitting on the rail. He had no idea how long this torture would continue.

  There was mortal silence around him. Unlike in regular prisons where wardens at least shouted “Breakfast!”
or “Dinner!” or “Get out for a walk!” here in Sukhanovka not a word was spoken. And there was no walking in the yard, and there were no books to read.

  Before nightfall, they entered his cell and unlocked and lowered his berth. But come early morning everything went the same way.

  The regime was so unusual that Dmitri decided he was marked for execution for his refusal to accept amnesty. He pondered why they were dragging things out instead of shooting him right away. It would be the end of all his misery. He thought that Anna must be somewhere nearby in Moscow. But it didn’t matter now, when they were about to kill him.

  But one day followed another, and the torturous treatment of keeping him in a cell, unable to move and in full silence, continued. He felt they had buried him alive, without even telling him why they had changed his punishment. He was at a loss to know why they had jailed him without telling him his term or giving any reason for substituting his camp regime with the regime of a strict prison.

  After a month of passivity, he decided to fight his silent jailers with the only weapon a prisoner has in jail—a hunger strike. During morning check, he announced to the chief of guards that he demanded to be told why he was confined in a solitary cell and what the term of this confinement was. The officer shrugged, indicating that he had no inkling about it himself. Dmitri then asked for a piece of paper and a pencil, so he could write a letter to Colonel Leonov, the chief of the investigation department. When he was refused again, the next time they brought him food, he didn’t touch it. Soon he heard a loud whisper behind the door of his cell and tramping of guards running in the corridor: a hunger strike in a jail was considered an emergency situation.

  Now his silent treatment was broken: his jailers began ordering him to eat. He refused, and from that moment on, he was placed under constant surveillance: the peephole of his cell door remained open at all times.

  After the first five days, his sense of hunger subsided. On the sixth day, a gray-haired colonel, head of the Special Object, came in. But neither his threats nor requests changed the prisoner’s mind, and Dmitri continued refusing to eat.

  In the evening, a warden on duty stepped into his cell, lowered the berth, and pointed at it. Not understanding what he wanted from him, Dmitri sat down on the berth. Immediately, several guards burst into the cell and subdued him, and with the help of a medical assistant, the warden pushed a tube down his nose and force-fed him.

  Thus, his hunger strike didn’t bring him any results: he received neither a piece of paper nor a pencil. After a while, he resumed his strike, which again failed. He used his hunger strike two more times, demanding books and courtyard walks, which he considered the unalienable right of a prisoner. But he got nothing.

  In the autumn of 1948, a half year after they had brought him to Sukhanovka, they moved him into another cell, dry and better lit. He was about to rejoice about this fortunate turn in his life, but as he listened to the sounds around him, he realized he was in the part of the corridor where they placed prisoners who had gone mad. From the cell next to his, some young man shouted one and the same phrase endlessly, day and night: “Mama, tell my little Valya that I’m still alive!”

  Finally, the shouting took a toll on Dmitri, and he felt that he was also losing his mind. Desperate, he went on another hunger strike, demanding to be transferred somewhere else.

  This time he was successful. They moved him to yet another cell, in a remote corner on the second floor, a cell with a window facing the yard. It was warm, and the room seemed like a hotel lounge to him. These new circumstances changed his mood. He decided that all was not lost yet and that he should be patient. He even composed a short hymn to himself, with the refrain, “I shall fight to the end!”

  But the days passed one after the other, and he found that the hardest aspect of his imprisonment was the absence of books and the lack of opportunity to write. He was afraid of losing his mind unless he found a way to occupy it.

  The most grueling fact was that he still had no idea how long they would keep him in there. If he knew that he had three years to wait until his release, he would hope to survive the term. But, if they intended to keep him there for another ten years or more, he would do his best to end his life himself. Yet if he did it without knowing the term, while there was a chance that the term was shorter, it would mean that he would pass away prematurely, thus rendering his suicide an act of cowardice.

  In despair, he came up with an idea for giving some meaning to his life: he would write a book mentally. The idea of composing a novel without paper and pen came to his mind when he thought of a well-known poet, novelist, and playwright, Bruno Jasieski. Like Dmitri, the writer had also been imprisoned in an NKVD prison. Severely beaten, in order not to go mad, he began writing a new novel in his head.11 To compensate for the boredom and emptiness of his existence in the cell, Dmitri turned to the period of his life that was most exciting and full of colorful impressions, the time of his travels to Africa. Pressing his back against the wall of his cell, Dmitri began mentally outlining his future book. He decided to base the protagonist of his novel on the biography of Henri Pieck (code-named COOPER), with whom he had worked in Holland and Switzerland on various assignments. He recalled Pieck telling him how, before his own trip to Africa, he had lived with no interest in politics, but observing first-hand the horrors of colonial reality, he decided to fight for justice in the world and joined the Soviet undercover intelligence.

  As Dmitri engrossed himself in outlining all the details of his future book, he needed company, someone to talk to about his exciting new way of life. To his joy, he found he was sharing his residence with two spiders. Trying to individualize them, he christened one of them with a Russian surname, Ivanov, and the other with a Jewish one, Tsyperovich. Moreover, he made Ivanov a non-Party member and Tsy perovich a Communist. Ivanov was a lazy bum and couldn’t catch enough gnats. Tsyperovich was a “shock-worker,” one who overfulfilled his own plans, but the quality of his webs was poor, and gnats easily freed themselves from them. (In defining the characters of the spiders, Dmitri foreshadowed his future critique of the Soviet system.)

  He befriended the insects, talked to them all day long, and sometimes, even saw them in his dreams. Now, he began each day in joyful anticipation of creative labor. As soon as he closed his eyes, he would mentally take himself now to the jungles of Congo, now to the dunes of the Sahara, now to the rain forest where the Pygmies lived . . .

  It took him two months to learn to do it with his eyes opened. After six months of mental juggling day in and day out, he developed a severe headache, which began upon awakening and lasted the whole day, receding only at night. Another month or two passed, and his life became a hell. Even in his sleep, he stayed in the realm of his recollections. His brain took over, and after months and months of being locked in the past, it refused to work in the present. He immersed himself in the past to such a degree that he could barely function in the present, and that happened only after he was prompted by the guards to do something. Sometimes, he found himself trying to put his pants over his head or forgetting which way his shoes should be put on. One day when the warden ordered him to get ready to go to the restroom, he couldn’t understand right away what was expected of him. At one point, he had to force himself to recognize simple items in front of him. He had to tell himself: “A spoon. A spoon, a spoon, spoon, spoon, spoon . . . kasha, kasha, kasha. Here I’m holding the spoon . . .”

  There were more health troubles to come, however. One day, he couldn’t recognize the warden or understand what the warden wanted from him. Soon, these episodes of agnosia, loss of the ability to recognize things, became regular.

  Next he lost the ability to orient himself in space. Mosquitoes coming from the window flew directly at him, and he couldn’t find a way to move his hand to catch them midair.

  After another six months, he lost any ability to think in concepts and abstracts; he had to visualize whatever he was thinking of at the moment. His brain
went out of control, wound up stuck in endlessly going over his African impressions, and refused to get back to the reality at hand.

  In yet another six months, after another cell rotation, they brought him to a new cell, but he was oblivious to his surroundings. He had lost the ability to live in the present.

  In the spring of 1951, in the third year of solitary confinement, as a result of his brain working nonstop in full swing, one day he found himself in a doctor’s office. His eyes ached; he couldn’t see much beyond some brown spots floating in front of his eyes. He developed glaucoma, and he could potentially lose both of his eyes by surgery. But the moment the threat of losing his vision came to his consciousness, it served as an emotional whip that brought him out of his lethargy. He knew that a blind prisoner wouldn’t survive in the camps for too long. “They’ll trample me to death . . . They’ll peck me to death. In prison, helplessness is worse than death,” he thought at that time.

  He began wiping himself down twice a day with cold water and exercising up to ten times a day. When they finally gave him a package of books, he almost kissed them all over. Though with his eyes still aching, he wasn’t able to read them, the very sight of them excited him. As he had in Lefortovo after the end of his interrogation, now Dmitri took stock of his state of health. Based on sensations in his body, he presumed that his blood pressure was very high, far above 200. This was likely the cause of his headaches and unstable walking. It also, in part, explained his glaucoma. Not every patient with high blood pressure developed it, but in his case, three additional factors contributed to the illness: the head trauma inflicted on him during his 1938 interrogation, his ten years of imprisonment, and the over-taxing of his brain with his attempts to write mentally.