Stalin's Romeo Spy

by Emil Draitser

  But, gradually, his health began to return, and one day he was considered fully recovered. They returned him to the first floor of the prison and placed him in another dark and damp cell. Now, in the sixth half-year term of his Sukhanovka life, the term of his current punishment still not known, he was convinced that he would spend the rest of his twenty-year term in a solitary cell.

  He decided it was best for him to move around as much as possible in his tiny cell. He found a way to stomp around in small steps for as long as he could, sometimes up to sixteen hours a day. According to the prison regulations, he was always to face the peephole in the door. This made it more difficult to exercise; his neck ached by the end of the day from turning his head all the time as he moved around the cell. They took the books away, and he was afraid to resume writing in his head, for now he knew how it could damage his health.

  Soon some other health problems started: he began seeing brown rats on the floor of his cell. He diagnosed himself as having episodes of scotoma, disturbances of the visual field due to the appearance of dark spots before his eyes. He attributed these to spasms of the small blood vessels.

  After a month, these symptoms subsided, and he resumed his exercises, twice as many. But at the end of the third year of confinement, when the guards came to take him back to the Lefortovo jail, he again couldn’t figure out who had entered his cell and what was wanted of him.

  Soon after his arrival at Lefortovo, he lost consciousness because of a spasm of the blood vessels in his brain. He also had a problem with his gallbladder, which prompted an episode of acute jaundice. He was taken to the prison hospital. There he befrended another patient, a Jewish scientist (in his memoirs, mistakenly identified as academician Lev Semenovich Berg, a leading Soviet geographer and biologist who served as president of the Soviet Geographical Society between 1940 and 1950). Dmitri discovered that the man had been jailed for a ridiculous reason. When he was invited to a scientific congress in America, the Soviet authorities refused to let him go, citing the lack of state funds for foreign travel. When the Americans offered to send money for the trip, he was arrested and accused of secret collaboration with the “capitalist warmongers.” In those years of virulent anti-Semitic campaigns that took the form of the “struggle with the cosmopolites,” the fact that the venerable scientist was a Jew certainly didn’t help him. The old man was beaten during interrogations; his heart was failing.

  Finally, one day, Dmitri’s health having been restored by the intensive treatment of the prison doctors, he was ordered to gather his belongings and go back to the camps. As the train was taking him back to Siberia, he thought of his time in Sukhanovka and smiled with happiness. Now he ironically considered the hellish time spent there as “fierce proof of the steadfastness of his little Anna’s love.” Trying to understand what prompted the authorities to take him from the camps and bring him to Moscow and offer amnesty, he came up with the following scenario. In Moscow after her release, his Anna, who had sworn to get him out of prison no matter what, to raise money for a good lawyer who would help her to intervene with the authorities on his behalf, sewed dresses at night to sell them privately, a source of income some Soviets with sewing skills turned to at that time. Then the lawyer delivered on his promise: his case was retrieved from the archives and moved for reexamination. The lower-rank authorities took an interest in it and passed it to the higher-ups. Finally, his case evoked the interest of the head of the Investigation Department, Leonov, who reported to his boss, Abakumov. They apparently deemed him, Dmitri Bystrolyotov, useful for some reason and recalled him to Moscow. There, they offered to free him as a repentant criminal and to have him resume his work in foreign intelligence.

  But this scenario was hardly more than wishful thinking on his part. Judging by the high positions of the men involved in this process, most likely, he was retrieved from the camps to be used in connection with the case not only of Norman Borodin but also of his father Mikhail Borodin. For a long time (from 1941), the man had served as editor in chief of the most important government information agency (Sovinformbureau). In the course of building up a statewide anti-Semitic campaign in the postwar years, Mikhail Borodin (born Mikhail Gruzenberg) was earmarked for purging from his important position. It was expected that, in exchange for freedom and the renewal of his intelligence work abroad (or, quite likely, merely the promise of both, a carrot dangling before his eyes), Dmitri would give compromising testimony against both men.

  Exactly the same ploy had been used when they were building the case against Dmitri himself: the investigators jailed his former colleagues of the Union of Student Citizens of the USSR Living in Czechoslovakia to give testimonies implicating him in sabotage and espionage for the Czechs. Although Dmitri’s memoirs do not mention Mikhail Borodin by name or the offer to defame him and his son, there is a hint that this was the case: “For me, [the Sukhanovka term] was retribution for my inner steadfastness, for my refusal to accept freedom: I lost it, but one more time, I confirmed in myself my decency toward people. I saved those whom I could have ruined, and I suffered for their sake.” (As is known now, Bystrolyotov’s refusal to cooperate with Abakumov didn’t save the men he tried to protect. First, Mikhail Borodin was relieved of his post in the Sovinform-bureau, then, in February 1949, arrested, accused of spying for the United States and England, and tortured in Lefortovo prison. He died on May 29, 1951, before his trial, and his son, Norman, was exiled to Karaganda.)12

  Riding with other prisoners on the train taking him back to Siberia, Dmitri assumed that they would return him to his old camp. But he was mistaken. Despite his protests, they took him farther to the east, to a camp near the town of Taishet; in this camp the prisoners were used to build a railroad to the Angara River. Upon arrival at the camp, cut off from the outside world for three years, Dmitri discovered that, in his absence, the camp system had undergone a major overhaul: male prisoners were separated from female ones, all prisoners had to wear numbers on their clothes, and especially dangerous ones with long terms, regardless of articles of conviction, were gathered in forced labor camps with extremely strict regimes.

  Upon arrival he underwent a medical examination, was diagnosed with significant myocardial weakness, and received the status of a “working invalid.” He was ordered to sew his number onto his clothes—AD 245 (which he found to be quite prophetic: ad in Russian means “hell”). He was assigned to work as a doctor at the camp hospital and dispensary. The first day, still weak from his long and tiring journey, he nearly died of exhaustion, having served hundreds of patients.13

  As part of his duties he also had to perform autopsies. In many of these operations, he discovered something perplexing: the corpses of prisoners considered shot on attempting to escape had bullet wounds not in their backs, as would be expected, but in front. Sometimes, they had been shot point-blank. He would discover the sinister meaning of those wounds a few months later.

  Soon other, no less troubling, discoveries followed. He realized that the camp was a playground of well-organized crime aimed at material gain. Newcomers with gold crowns on their dentures were offered a lighter work assignment in exchange for letting their gold crowns be removed. Sick and dying prisoners, especially foreigners, were robbed blind. Thus, they stole the gold watch of one of the female prisoners, a secretary working in Hitler’s chancellery. In time, Dmitri would discover much more horrifying crimes committed by the camp personnel.

  For a long time, he received no letters from Anna. He wrote to a former prisoner they had both known in their earlier days to ask about her whereabouts and learned that after working in Pavlodar for a while Anna had gone to Tambov and settled there. But soon her correspondence with Anna also stopped, and the letters came back. Dmitri understood that Anna might have been rearrested. Indeed, he turned out to be right. Anna was in prison again. Dmitri already knew that a series of systematic rearrests of political prisoners had occurred all over the country. But he didn’t despair. He decided that she was str
ong enough to survive her new term, in both body and spirit. He dearly wanted to see himself reunited with her one day and firmly believed in it. To help himself, every morning and evening, he spent a few minutes thinking about her and her only. This helped him to lift himself spiritually, as a prayer would.14

  Meanwhile, Dmitri’s immediate boss, the head of the camp medical department, learned about his artistic talent and made him draw kissing or dancing pairs. She especially liked pictures of young men dressed in tuxedos, with their mustaches and parted pomaded hair, the type of Berlin gigolos of the 1930s Dmitri remembered from his time visiting the German nightclubs as part of his work. That brought back a lot of memories about “Greta” and everything that happened to him then.

  In the postwar camps with male and female prisoners now detained separately, Dmitri felt a longing for women. Sometimes he wished one of them would faint in the baths, so he would be called to see her. One day, he was ordered to see a woman in the female zone. Excited, he doused himself with an enormous amount of cologne only to find out that the patient was an old lady suffering from incontinence. He laughed at fate’s snub of his erotic imagination.

  One day, for refusal to snitch on one of his fellow imprisoned medics, he was sent to the taiga to work in a small, remote point, lagpunkt 07, located eleven miles from the town of Novo-Chunka; he spent nine months there, from March to December 1952. Dmitri’s first concern was to ensure that the camp oper (state security officer) wouldn’t be able to recruit him as a stool pigeon. Well aware that it would spread around the camp quickly, he told one prisoner that before his arrest he had been an intelligence operative. That disqualified him from being recruited by the camp security authorities under pressure as their secret informer, because no prisoner would trust him.

  But he ran into trouble here, too. One winter day, when he told the camp chief that since the temperature was minus forty degrees Celsius, which meant, according to the rules, the prisoners couldn’t be sent to work outdoors, they threw him into a cold solitary cell.

  When summer came to the taiga, swarms of bloodsucking gnats attacked prisoners who worked in the forest, making their lives unbearable. Dmitri tried to determine why the vast majority of men were attacked by the insects, while a handful were mysteriously spared. Rubbing his hand against their bodies, he established that it had something to do with a scent emanating from these people that only insects were capable to discern; their scent served as a powerful repellent. He thought in despair that, if he had the requisite lab equipment at hand, he would be able to come up with a remedy to preserve many prisoners from the merciless insects.

  But another, psychological “gnat” eventually brought Dmitri down. Back in Norilsk, one day he and other prisoners had pleaded with the guards not to shoot at a mentally ill patient who had walked into the “firing zone.” But the guards shot and killed the man anyway. Dmitri had always wondered why they acted in that manner. Now in Taishet, doing autopsies of bodies of the prisoners who were documented as having been shot down while attempting to escape, he pondered what made the guards so trigger-happy. It turned out that the guards had a very high incentive for shooting dead an escapee: the reward was a bonus of two hundred rubles plus two weeks’ vacation. He concluded that the killing took place so easily because the shooters had absorbed the moral climate of lawlessness prevalent in the country at that time. The young eighteen-year-old peasant lads employed as guards were oblivious to one of the most fundamental tenets of morality: “Thou shall not kill.” Human life had no value for them, unless they received the authorities’ direct instructions regarding the matter.

  On one occasion he witnessed the murder of a prisoner for profit. As a doctor attached to a group of prisoners working in the forest, he saw a guard order a prisoner to bring a bunch of branches to kindle a bonfire. When the prisoner approached the guard with the load in his arms, the guard ordered him to turn around and shot him in the back. According to standard procedure, the work zone was demarcated by a chain of little red flags. Unconcerned about doing it in front of other prisoners, the guard calmly pulled up the chain of flags and relocated it in such a way that the body of the man he had shot was now positioned outside the work zone: the position of the prisoner’s body made him appear to be an unsuccessful escapee.

  The scene shook Dmitri. His psychosomatic reaction to the cold-blooded murder committed right before his eyes overstrained his nervous system, and he found he could barely move his right hand and right leg. It’s clear that, to prevent the fatal consequences of his wish to strike the guard (if he would even attempt it, he would undoubtedly be shot on the spot), his self-preservation reflex immobilized his dominant, striking, right hand.

  He diagnosed himself as having paresis, a weak form of paralysis. They transferred him to a position as a yard caretaker (dvornik). Forcing himself to do physical exercises, Dmitri gradually regained function on the right side of his body.

  After a while, he returned to his position as lagpunkt senior doctor. But he knew that his health was declining. While shocked by the abuses of the guards, as a doctor, he fought in vain with another killer that took more lives than the mindless shooters did—hypertension. The main cause of high blood pressure was the lack of vitamin C in the prisoners’ diet. Dmitri found that many deaths resulted from the lack of elementary medical equipment and the arbitrary rulings of camp authorities.

  He now saw the camps as an integral part of the Soviet system in which his disappointment was growing day by day. One day, a “volunteer-compulsory” campaign to raise funds for the state by signing up for state bonds began in the camp. All prisoners were forced to give up a sizable portion of their miserly earnings. Dmitri felt disgusted at the cynicism of the authorities who robbed blind those who weren’t in a position to resist them: “I didn’t begrudge the sixty rubles [his monthly salary as a doctor], but I . . . was ashamed of my country and the Party, the party in which, some time ago, I had sincerely believed.”

  One day, out of the blue, he received a parcel from Anna. Her note revealed what had happened to her since the time of their last contact. After working at a military plant in Pavlodar, she returned to the European part of Russia and settled in Tambov. There she was arrested on some trumped-up charges, released, and then rearrested. Realizing that she had to come up with something that would give the authorities a reason to jail her, she “confessed” to stealing a bottle of industrial spirits. She received a sentence of a few years for a common criminal offense and was sent to the construction site of the Volga-Don Canal. Later, as an outstanding worker, she was freed before completing her term and appointed, now as a hired employee, to head an industrial lab. Soon, again thanks to her outstanding work, her criminal record was erased from her personal file.

  Looking at the items packed by “dear hands with such love and thoroughness,” he couldn’t help but feel his eyes well up with tears: “Unseen by anyone, light and warm sun suddenly peeked into the little window of the camp barrack, and I felt that under its rays I wouldn’t perish. I had obtained a reason to exist; to perish now would be senseless.”

  Anna sent him parcel after parcel with items he especially needed: garlic and dry dill to spice up the camp soups, which he found nauseating, as well as paper, pencils, and paints, medical handbooks, and even desserts.

  On January 13, 1953, Pravda published the infamous article announcing the arrest of Jewish doctors accused of subversive activities directed at Soviet leaders. Dmitri was outraged. He referred to the paper as “having the insolence to call itself Pravda [Truth]” and saw the announcement as a “manifestation of the baseness of the anthropomorphous beasts of Stalin’s circle, who, with the help of such false accusations published in their court organ, signaled to the country and the whole world the beginning of a new wave of mass destruction of people and the direction in which it planned to snatch its victims. This time, on Hitler’s model, a knife was raised over Soviet people of Jewish ethnicity, specifically, over its most educated elite.”<
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  At this point in his life, Dmitri still believed in the ideals of the Lenin-led revolution and understood the witch hunt unleashed in the Kremlin as a new provocation that the system created by Stalin needed. He saw that, in so acting, the dictator was trying to follow as a “faithful pupil” in Hitler’s footsteps: “It doesn’t matter whether it’s Russian blood or Jewish; it’s all the same. It’s important that it’s needed as fuel for Stalin’s machine: if there is no blood, the machine would stop, and millions of fooled people would rest and come to their senses . . . And they would bring the executioners to justice. I’m sorry not only for the Jews but for the Party of which I wasn’t a member but with which I felt solidarity . . . I had been shoving my head into a noose for that Party, and now it’s acutely painful to me that I did it.”

  His disillusionment with the Soviet system reached an all-time high. At the beginning of his prison life in Norilsk, he had pushed himself to work hard, believing that any labor in the camps benefited his beloved Motherland, but now he found the very name of “corrective labor camps” to be nothing more than a lie: “For seventeen years of Soviet imprisonment, I saw thousands of people exhausted to death by unbearable toil, saw morgues packed with corpses of hard workers (rabotiagi), saw deep quarries filled with corpses that resembled skeletons upholstered with skin, but nowhere and never had I seen even a single camp prisoner corrected by labor. And I had never heard of such a case.”

  The reason for this finally became clear to him: camp labor was nothing but slave labor. “How can you love labor while guard dogs are barking?” he asked himself a reasonable question. “Such a supposition is monstrous in itself!”