Stalin's Romeo Spy

by Emil Draitser

  His accomplice was another ex-prisoner, one Rudov, whose life story was bizarre, like that of many ex-prisoners they both had met during their many years in the camps. As a Jew, Rudov was first imprisoned by the Nazis and marked for death in one of the concentration camps. He was kept alive on a temporary basis, from one round of executions to the next, because as a high-class tailor, he was making suits for the SS officers. Eventually, he was freed by the Red Army but soon arrested again, sentenced to twenty-five years in prison “for collaboration with the enemy,” and sent to a Siberian camp. Like Dmitri, he was freed many years later because of poor health: he suffered from severe arthritis. To get themselves tickets, Dmitri told Rudov to feign being a mute mental patient, while Dmitri posed as a doctor accompanying him.

  When at last Dmitri reached the Moscow apartment of Anna’s daughter, Magdalina, as he spent a night on the couch, the numbness of his feelings finally subsided, and he woke up in the middle of the night from euphoria. He was “finally free, free, free!”

  But the joy of being free didn’t last very long. Soon, considerations of how to find a means of existence took over. He had been freed on the basis of poor health—he hadn’t been rehabilitated, which, in the Soviet context, meant that his conviction was not officially recognized as unlawful, and therefore, his civil rights were not restored.2 He couldn’t receive a residency permit to live in Moscow or Leningrad or to obtain a professional job. He also was not eligible to receive a pension or other social benefits. He was still considered a foreign spy and a traitor. Like many political ex-prisoners, he was forbidden to live closer than one hundred kilometers from Moscow. In fact, if visiting, he could stay there no more than a day.

  Soon Anna quit her job in Tambov and reunited with him. Although there were plenty of openings for an engineer of her qualifications in Moscow, when she listed Dmitri, a political ex-prisoner, as her dependent in job applications, all doors were closed to her. In desperation, Anna took Dmitri to the KGB headquarters on Lubyanka and begged the head of the Medical Department of the Gulag, Comrade Ustinchenko, formerly a major, now a colonel, whom Dmitri knew from Suslovo camp, to help them get on their feet. But they were both denied assistance of any kind.

  In December 1954, they moved to the village of Istie, near Ryazan, where Anna found a job as head of an iron-casting shop at a local metallurgical plant. They gave her a small, half-dark room with a tiny window in a barrack. It was a severe winter, and every day to survive the cold, both suffering from dizziness and weak hearts, they laboriously used a two-person saw to supply themselves with firewood for their stove.

  Dmitri’s health remained fragile. He continued to experience poor blood circulation. He couldn’t think clearly for too long, and his speech was often hard to understand. His other mental capabilities were also still affected. Anna spent many hours at work, and Dmitri cooked for both of them, now confusing salt with sugar, now losing any sense of time.

  By the summer of 1955, his health had gradually begun to improve, and most important, his ability to think clearly was largely restored. This encouraged him to renew his efforts to push for rehabilitation and to find work using skills obtained in the West. Of course, his émigré law school diploma from Prague was worthless: in the first place, the training he’d received there was geared toward the old tsarist law. But he could make use of his medical skills. At the beginning of 1955, he wrote to KGB headquarters requesting confirmation that under one of the aliases he used abroad when working for Soviet intelligence in the 1930s, he had completed the full course of the medical faculty at Zurich University. He explained that upon his return to Moscow in December 1936, together with his passport for foreign travel, he had surrendered his medical doctor diploma to the NKVD. Since this document had apparently been lost somewhere in the NKVD archives, he asked them for a certificate stating his medical credentials. His appeal was rejected.

  Then he wrote to the camps, asking them to confirm his work as a medic during his imprisonment. This move was partially successful. He received certificates stating that he had worked at a number of camps in various capacities, as a stationary and ambulatory physician and as a prosector. But that was hardly enough to give hope that a political ex-convict would be hired to do any medical work.

  Meanwhile, the highly principled Anna couldn’t adjust to the work environment at her plant, where bribery and toadyism were part and parcel of the system. They returned to Moscow. The shortage of living quarters, the curse of the Soviet system for its whole duration, was especially acute in the first two decades after World War II. Anna found a taxing job as foreman of a galvanizing shop at a Moscow radio plant. She rented a room from her daughter’s mother-in-law. Since Dmitri had to live at least one hundred kilometers outside Moscow, the couple had to part for the time being. Dmitri settled in the small provincial town of Alexandrov, which had a historically interesting past. In the thirteenth century, it was the place of the estate of Alexander Nevsky, the grand prince of Novgorod and Vladimir; in fact, the town had been named after him. Three centuries later, Ivan the Terrible locked himself in the local Kremlin and lived there nearly twenty-five years, guarded by his “death squads,” called oprichniki. Here, too, there was no place to live. Dmitri rented a bed in a room occupied by a family of three.3

  He slowly regained his strength and felt the need to do something to lessen Anna’s burden of supporting him. As the first step, by law an ex-prisoner had to register at the local police precinct. Looking over his papers, duly instructed in how to deal with released political prisoners, the police ordered him to see the local KGB executive right away.

  While the current successor of the KGB would have uninformed people believe that the mistake of prosecuting Bystrolyotov was repaid in the abundance of care he received upon release, his own record of that period testifies to quite the opposite: his denigration and humiliation continued at every step of his existence for many years after his release. For starters, on that first encounter with the KGB upon regaining his freedom, the KGB executive of the town forced him to wait for an hour and a half. As Dmitri entered the premises of the organization, his horrifying memories of pain and suffering overwhelmed him. He was on the verge of fainting. His head splitting with pain, Dmitri realized he was doomed: “The past without fading a bit hung over me like a poisonous fog, and for the first time since leaving the Omsk camp, I suddenly felt I would never ever tear myself away from it, that no matter where I was or what I did, this poisonous fog would be with me to the very last day of my life.”

  Although he tried talking himself into keeping his chin up and acting assured and calm, he failed. To the KGB officer, who exuded tremendous contempt and coldness, he was just some severely crippled old man. When Dmitri tried to take a seat in front of the desk, the officer stopped him and motioned to a chair at the other end of the offi ce. Then, giving him no opportunity to say anything, he cautioned Dmitri that now he was under his watch and threatened to send him back to the camps if he got involved in any suspicious activity.

  Dmitri settled for leading a quiet life, concentrating all his efforts on restoring his health. Soon something happened that gave him a huge burst of hope. The ability so important to him that he had been deprived of for such a long time—the ability to read—slowly but surely began returning to him. The discovery made him so excited that he felt dizzy, and his heart started beating violently. He began learning to read and write anew, using whatever paper he could find, even if it was a piece of wrapping paper.

  Now his hope of finding some work was renewed. At the risk of being arrested for violating the prohibition against political ex-prisoners staying in the capital, he made occasional trips to Moscow. There he visited a few local schools, asking for an opportunity to teach any foreign language, whether French, English, or German. But the directors turned him down because his papers indicated that he had served a long prison term as a foreign spy and terrorist. He couldn’t even get a job as night guard of a street kiosk.

 
But he lived to see his luck turn around. On February 25, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev addressed the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, in the course of which he publicly admitted for the first time Stalin’s part in terror and crimes against humanity. Although it had begun before on a smaller scale, a campaign of rehabilitation of innocent victims of Stalin’s terror was announced. This changed the climate in the country as a whole, and in Alexandrov in particular. One night, Dmitri was awakened by a messenger from the very same KGB official who had treated him with disdain not so long ago. Now he asked Dmitri whether he would mind giving foreign-language lessons to his young son.

  On April 6, 1956, Dmitri received a telegram informing him of his official rehabilitation. But it would be wrong to assume that his troubles were over once and for all. In his own assessment, the next year, 1957, was one of “strenuous efforts, alarms, humiliations, and tormenting disappointments.” To survive, he had to summon all of the qualities that had made him an outstanding intelligence operative in his past life—ingenuity, persistence, and doggedness. But if he had previously used all those qualities to fight real (and imaginary) enemies of his country, now he had another enemy to conquer—Soviet bureaucracy and red tape; the indifference and arrogance of the very same organization he had served selflessly.

  Now with his name finally cleared of ignominy—sixteen years after “stepping up on my native scaffold”—he began his fight to receive assistance from the state he had served as an intelligence operative abroad. The welfare office informed him that he was not eligible to receive a pension because of his age (he was a few years short of the required age of sixty), and to qualify for a pension based on disability, he would have to submit medical papers certifying this, together with his employment record.

  For that, he had to go back to the KGB. In the reception offi ce at 24 Kuznetsky Most, he was met with nothing but coldness, mistrust, and disdain.

  “Bystro . . . who? How are you going to prove that you worked for our intelligence? Do you have any documents?”

  “No. But there are people and documents at the INO, the Foreign Intelligence Department, that . . .”

  “We don’t have time to find things out. It’s your business to prove that you worked for us.”

  Overcome with recurring dizziness, fatigue, and heart problems, he dragged himself from one KGB office to another asking for the needed papers. The problem of his official status as intelligence operative was that he was never given an officer rank.4 His work record showed only his initial employment with the INO as a translator. As mentioned already, in 1937, after his return to the USSR, his boss, Slutsky, had received Yezhov’s permission to start moving the documentation that would have given him the rank of senior lieutenant. But then he was arrested. Now, he had to plead with them that while the paperwork declaring him a cadre worker was missing, for thirteen years, he had nevertheless carried out high-level state orders and risked his life many times for the sake of his Motherland.

  Endless red tape ensued as he tried to get a pension from the KGB. To prove that he had worked for the INO, Dmitri had to deal with numerous KGB officials, which proved to be an utterly denigrating and painfully humiliating experience. Their telephones were always busy, and when he arrived for an appointment, he would hear over and over again that his papers weren’t ready and that he should come back in yet another two weeks: “It was like spooling my nerves—no, to be exact, my empty intestines—onto the drum of the bureaucratic machine.” First, it took months of dragging himself on semiparalyzed legs all over Moscow from one little bureaucratic offi ce window to another to get his papers in order. Then when he applied for a pension, he was advised to call them in a month and a half. Then in two. Then they said that the question was still under examination, and he should wait some more. “They knew how to fight a sick and old man—to stall things for as long as possible.” But he didn’t want to give up: he was a fighter, and they were his new enemies.5

  Finally, after two years of fruitless struggle with the KGB officials, a new law on pensions came out, making Dmitri eligible for a pension as a former employee of the Chamber of Commerce. Only then did the KGB phone him and offer their pension. The sum they offered was nearly half of the one he was to receive from the Chamber of Commerce. He hung up in silence. (Now his official biography states that he refused the KGB pension, making it seem as if it were an act of generosity on his part toward the state, while in fact, he felt disgusted by their offer, seeing it as a gesture of insult and ingratitude.)

  He also had to fight the KGB tooth and nail to get at least some living space for himself and his ailing wife. At that time, overworked and in poor health, Anna became incapacitated because of high blood pressure. In his memoirs, Dmitri includes a few samples of his correspondence, asking the reader to bear in mind that before and after sending each letter he had to make dozens of phone calls and then go to numerous appointments, where he spent dozens of hours waiting on lines in reception rooms. Dmitri cautions the reader that, even taking all this into consideration, he would hardly be able to fully assess the whole experience of his “technique of breaking with his damaged head the bureaucratic stone wall of Socialism at the stage of its transition to Communism.”

  Here is a sample from his numerous letters to General Ivan Serov, head of the KGB between 1954 and 1958. “I’m an invalid of the first degree. Until October 1956, I spent nights on a stool in the kitchen of my acquaintances and days sitting [in the rooms of ] the Museum of LENIN. [He capitalized Lenin’s name, apparently, to shame the minister.] Please inform the head of the Housing Department [of the KGB] about the disastrous situation of your former employee.”

  At one point he managed to arrange an appointment with the head of the Department of Foreign Intelligence. The man was dressed in civilian clothes, well groomed, and as Dmitri remarks sarcastically, during their conversation, he played with his fingernails, which had been done by a manicurist. “Looking carelessly at their shine, the lord in a splendid suit preached some truisms to me from the height of his somewhat elevated desk and chair: ‘All you talk about is money, Comrade Bystrolyotov. We, the Soviet people, should think not about money but about Communism and our Motherland. You served well, and you should be proud of it and satisfied with it.’ The lord treated me to a sermon but refused to help.”6

  Living on the verge of starvation, he tried to recover the valuables taken from him when he was arrested. By selling them, he hoped to sustain himself while fighting the red tape of the KGB bureaucratic machine. But he immediately discovered that, besides being confirmed bureaucrats, those “fearless and irreproachable knights” (rytsari bez strakha i upreka), as the KGB men portrayed themselves to the country, were, in fact, nothing but thieves and robbers. For his five suits, each of them custom cut by the best tailors of Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin, he was remunerated with just a few rubles. When he protested, they showed him the list of his belongings confiscated at the time of his arrest: the suits were described as “work robes,” as if they were some auto mechanic’s overalls. When he reasoned with them that, working for foreign intelligence undercover as a high society gentleman, he couldn’t possibly have worn “work robes,” he was brushed off with, “We have no time to go into details. Sign here, take your money, and run.”

  He also tried to recover the accessories he had bought to fit his image as a Hungarian count or British lord: a gold family ring with a crown and monogram on it, a gold cigarette case with an enamel plate depicting the count’s coat of arms, a small pair of gilded scissors to cut cigars. But to his astonishment, the KGB documents listed all those accessories as made of copper. “Next!”7

  Dmitri tried to address the issue of the gold belongings confiscated during his arrest to the higher-ups: he wrote to the KGB minister himself. It took them three months to reply that an eyewitness testimony was needed. When Dmitri finally secured it, the minister’s office took another three months to respond that, actually, they wanted not one but three testimonies. When
Dmitri obtained them, they took another four months to inform him that only the testimonies of former INO employees were valid in his case. Dmitri worked on it and sent the papers to the minister, who replied that the papers should not come from just any INO employees but only from those who were currently employed. Dmitri went back to work, but his appeal was rejected again. This time, they let him know that the only INO employees that could testify on his behalf were those who were present in the room at the time of his arrest and saw with their own eyes that the gold accessories were truly taken from him. Dmitri’s patience collapsed, and he gave up.

  At that lowest moment of extreme poverty, help came from totally unexpected quarters. Iolanta’s sister, Bozhena, found him and wrote to him from Prague. Now she was Bozhena Synkova: she had married eventually, she had a son, and now she was a widow. She had an occasion to send Dmitri some of his and her deceased sister’s belongings that had been left behind in Prague: Iolanta’s gold watches and astrakhan fur coat and Dmitri’s Swiss watches. Later on, Ivanek, Bozhena’s son, also helped now with money, now with clothes, and even with a package of Prague hot dogs, a delicacy for any Soviet citizen at that time.

  In the middle of his uphill battle with the KGB bureaucracy, with his nerves already stretched to the limit, his emotions received a tremendous jolt. On June 16, 1956, a telephone call from the Central Committee of the Communist Party summoned him to appear the next day at the Party headquarters on Staraya Square, at 10:00 A.M. sharp. As he arrived at the building in a glistening black car with a silent driver, he was full of premonitions that his fate would turn for the worse again. In a desperate move, he tried to reason with the official on duty in the hall of the building that there was some misunderstanding, for he, Dmitri, wasn’t even a Party member. But without any discussion, a guardsman walked him along endless corridors. Dmitri’s old mental tapes began running, and he anticipated with horror that his dreaded camp past was about to make a comeback any second now. In a fit of paranoia, he imagined that he was about to be arrested again, and that’s why he had been lured into the high office. What, what had he done wrong again? (For the rest of his life, he would not be able to shake off his fear of rearrest, and he was hardly unique in that respect.)8