Stalin's Romeo Spy

by Emil Draitser

  They brought him into a large room where a KGB colonel arose from his seat to greet him, and his heart sank. Arrest!

  But the colonel exuded cordiality and asked about his health.

  Scanning the room, Dmitri immediately recognized at least two people sitting there. Their portraits were ubiquitous in the country at the time, for they had occupied high offices. One was Nikolai Mikhailovich Shvernik, who, in the last seven years of Stalin’s rule, had held (nominally, of course) the highest post in the country, that of chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (or president of the USSR).

  The other man was Georgy Maksimilianovich Malenkov, the prime minister of the USSR for the first two years after Stalin’s death. In February 1955, he was forced to resign after coming under attack for his close association with Lavrenty Beria (who was executed as a traitor in December 1953). But he remained a member of the Politburo’s successor, the Presidium. Also present were two KGB generals and a half dozen old women—old Bolsheviks judging by their demeanor and turn-of-the-century clothes.

  As they sat Dmitri down on a sofa, Shvernik stood up and announced the opening of the meeting of the Party Control Committee of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR. One of the committee members reported that he had recently been charged with investigating a claim made by KGB Colonel Shukshin that at one of the most secret military research and development plants the most valuable workers were, in fact, nothing but American agents. When the accused refused to admit their guilt, Colonel Shukshin tied them to their chairs and began kicking their wives, whom he had arrested for that purpose only.

  Now Dmitri saw a hefty middle-aged man with graying hair in whom he barely recognized the young, thin intern of the time of his arrest and interrogation. Shukshin!

  Meanwhile, the man calmly denied his personal responsibility in the case described. He hadn’t kicked anyone, and he asked them to believe that he had always been an honest worker, observing Soviet law when dealing with persons under investigation, from the very first one to the very last. When asked whether he remembered the first one, he shrugged defiantly: he couldn’t possibly remember them all. One of the KGB generals ordered him to look around the room to see whether he could recognize the man. Anticipating that he was in much deeper trouble than he had thought, with great difficulty, Shukshin finally spotted Dmitri and cried out, “I don’t know this old man! I’ve never seen him!”

  Dmitri couldn’t keep his emotions bottled up any longer. He jumped from the sofa toward Shukshin and pulled up his own shirt: “And do you recognize my intestines that bulged under my skin when you kicked me with the heels of your boots? And do you recall two ribs hammered into my lungs with a steel cable? What about my skull? During the interrogation, you banged on it with a hammer, you reptile, you motherf . . .”

  Dmitri grabbed at Shukshin’s throat, but other men put their arms around Dmitri and pulled him back to the sofa. Others gave him water. It took him a while to come back to his senses.

  Bystrolyotov gives conflicting information on what happened to Shukshin later on. In one place in his memoirs, he writes that the man was arrested and died in prison of heart failure soon after; in another place he writes that he was shot. However, it looks like Dmitri was misled by the KGB, who fed him that information. As is known now, an attempt was made to bring Colonel Fyodor Shukshin to stand trial for “violation of Socialist law” in many other cases as well. In 1951, he arrested a group of Moscow University students (K. P. Bogatyrev, V. D. Latkin, and others) and exhausted the prisoners with all-night interrogations, using threats and blackmail. Besides Bystrolyotov, he also took part in torturing other prisoners, for example, S. M. Matveev and N. Ia. Spivak. Nevertheless, despite Dmitri’s testimony to the contrary, the Party Control Committee found that “the verification materials had not established Shukshin’s personal participation in beatings of prisoners” and that it was possible to “retain him in the Party with a strict reprimand and a warning for violating the law in his investigative work.” Later, Leonid Brezhnev, then a secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, after familiarizing himself with Shukshin’s case, recommended his expulsion from the Party. At the time, Brezhnev wasn’t yet secretary general of the Party, so no further action was taken on the paper with his resolution, and it was later written off and filed in the archives. Many other KGB cadres who violated the law retained their privileged positions, some until the present day.9

  After that memorable encounter at the Party headquarters, his former employer threw a token perk to Dmitri in the form of a short-term pass to the KGB-run rest home, where he could at least eat well and breathe some fresh air in the adjacent forest. During dinner, looking at Dmitri’s emaciated face and infirm body, some colonel guessed he had been a former Gulag prisoner. The man “chewed on a pork cutlet with appetite, then he wiped off his lips with a blindingly white napkin, and from the corner of his mouth, murmured as if into space: ‘I can imagine how you hate all of us.’ ” Although the colonel had guessed right about him, many years of living on the edge, both as an intelligence operative and a Gulag prisoner, made Dmitri do the right thing—he abstained from any response. He doubted the colonel’s sincerity and suspected that it was a provocation. The wrong response could get him in trouble again.

  His experience in fighting the indifference and red tape of the cumbersome KGB bureaucracy came in handy a few years later, when, in July 1961, his former shipmate and friend Zhenya Kavetsky, with whom he had sailed on board the St. Trotsky and shared other adventures, found Dmitri and paid him a visit. Dmitri had involved him in working for Soviet foreign intelligence back in the 1930s. Like Dmitri, he worked selflessly. Yet, under the pretext of receiving an award, he was recalled to Moscow, arrested, maimed during his torture, and subsequently, served two terms. After spending five years in the camps, in the spring of 1951, he was rearrested as a German spy and exiled to the Krasnoyarsk region.10

  According to Bystrolyotov, Kavetsky was arrested when one of the most distinguished “Great Illegals,” Theodor Mally, in an attempt to survive, decided to give his semiliterate interrogator testimonies that could serve as a basis for future appeal. He said that he had recruited Kavetsky to work for a Fascist spy ring while traveling on a steamship from Geneva to Lyon. One look at a map of Europe would be enough to see that this could never have happened.

  Like many other Gulag prisoners, including Dmitri himself, Kavetsky was broken not only physically but also mentally. Kavetsky also feared rearrest at any moment, which in his case turned into paranoia. He visited when Dmitri wasn’t at home, and when Anna stepped out to the kitchen to boil some water for tea, he jumped up from his chair and attempted to flee. He thought Anna was about to call the police.

  Kavetsky didn’t have enough strength to fight for his rehabilitation. Dmitri intervened on his behalf. He found Mally’s wife, Lidia, and asked her to write what she knew about Kavetsky’s service to the country. Securing Lidia’s testimony and supplying his own, he took his friend to the KGB reception room, whose bureaucratic tricks he knew all too well by now, and helped him to get at least some pension.

  Dmitri also learned about the fate of his friend Kotya Yurevich, whom he had seen in the Butyrka prison for the last time. He was sentenced to eight years in hard labor camps. He survived, was later rehabilitated, and worked as an engineer in his native Odessa. Fate took a different turn for his steadfast assistants in many operations, Erica Weinstein and Joseph Leppin. In 1937, upon recall to the USSR, Erica was arrested, and, though she was pregnant, severely tortured; she died in prison. By some miracle, Leppin was spared. Upon return to the USSR, first he worked as a translator for Dmitri at the Chamber of Commerce (after his transfer there from the NKVD), then he taught languages at a university. He had begun work on his dissertation when the war broke out. He volunteered to go to the front line. A machine gunner, he perished on the battlefield, squashed by a German tank.11

  In September 1956, Anna’s high bloo
d pressure reached a critical mark. Bedridden, she made a will for Dmitri’s benefit, at least in terms of freeing him from moral responsibility toward her. In her will, she asked him to forget about her as soon as possible and find himself a “better mate.” Dmitri made desperate attempts to find some employment. Since he couldn’t be hired as either a doctor or a language teacher, he looked for a place where he could use both his medical knowledge and his language skills. He searched and searched until he found one place of potential freelance work, the Moscow Medical Synopsis Bureau. For starters, his hands trembling, he took a few German journals to make abstracts of its articles. The first one was about narrowing of the male urethra. Highly excited about finally finding an opportunity to use his brain and earn some money, he exclaimed to himself, “May you be blessed, dear urethra!” Overcome with dizziness, almost falling from the chair, he began his work.

  In January 1957, he found a true “gold mine,” as he calls it, in the form of Zhurnal nauchnoi i tekhnicheskoi informatsii (Journal of Scientific and Technical Information). (In ten years, the journal served as the impetus for the establishment of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information.) Here, as he had in his intelligence work, Dmitri benefited from his acquaintance with many languages. He charged headlong into the sudden opportunity. He chose biology and geography as his fields of specialization and took on translation from all of the languages in his command. The list is quite impressive, both in sheer numbers and linguistic variety. Besides English, German, and French, he also translated from Danish, Dutch, Flemish, Norwegian, Afrikaans, Swedish, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, French, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, and Polish. As he began working, he also learned Japanese and Chinese to the extent necessary and refreshed his knowledge of Turkish, to which he had first been exposed by his Turkish nanny during his early years in Anapa and later learned during his émigré life in Constantinople.

  Because of the country’s long isolation from the civilized world, there was an acute shortage of translators, especially for rare languages, and he had practically no competition. The only problem was that at times his memory gave out on him. Sometimes, the word he needed would come back to him at night as he slept. In November of that year, he was offered the position of chief language editor.

  Still taking reserpine, at the time the most advanced medicine for control of hypertension, he worked without pause, resting only during vacations. Among other works, he translated an article from English on Chinese medicine at the time of the Ming dynasty and two books from Czech, both dedicated to the physiology of puberty, male and female. His name became known in the field of medical translation, and he was offered work writing in-house reviews for the State Medical Publishers. In March 1958, after living nearly four years under somebody else’s roof, he finally obtained a room for himself and Anna in a communal apartment. He experienced a sense of pride in having a room of his own, rejoicing that from then on, nobody could burst into his quarters shouting, “Get up, you Fascist mug!” as had happened when he was renting a bed in someone else’s home in Alexandrov.

  Eventually, he was able to earn enough to support Anna, whose high blood pressure made it very hard for her to work. She stayed home and took care of the domestic chores. Dmitri was delighted to return the favor, for he was immensely grateful to her for pulling him from the depths on the eve of his release from the camps. Their marriage was a happy one. They merged into one as a genuine couple. “Each of us feels like a cutoff half that seems to lack something,” he writes. “But together we are a whole.” They understood each other with half a word, and many people even thought they bore a close physical resemblance to each other. He often marveled at the irony of fate: that he had found his personal happiness behind barbed wire.12

  Early mornings before going to work, Dmitri made the rounds of all the stores, bought what was needed for the day, and brought it home to his still sleeping “little Anya” (Anechka), as he lovingly calls her throughout his memoirs.13 He was happy that despite signs of aging—wrinkles and excess weight—“time hadn’t stolen” what he valued the most: “the imprint of high breeding,” that is, her gentry origin. Dmitri felt deeply satisfied that even among his cultured and highly educated friends—some old ones, former Gulag political prisoners like himself, whom he had befriended in the camps, some newly acquired while working for the publishing house—Anna stood out with “her regular facial features, the whiteness of her skin, her good gait, and unforced cheerfulness.” He liked it that, unlike the vast majority of Soviet people, who, in his judgment, were “accustomed to humiliation,” she was “sure of herself and wouldn’t allow anyone to offend her.”14

  Now Dmitri earned enough to afford a vacation in the Caucasus and even to travel abroad—to Prague. Understandably, this reminded him of many emotional tribulations during the time he had lived there.

  He devoted most of his waking hours to his translations, and whatever time he could steal from his regular hours in the office, he spent writing. In 1960, a number of African states gained independence from colonial rule, and without slowing down his translation work, Dmitri decided to write his African novel, the one he had already outlined in his mind and tried to compose in his head during solitary confinement at the Sukhanovka prison. At the time, it had almost driven him insane. Now he could finally write it down. He saw it as an exercise for his writing muscles, which he wanted to put into full use for writing his Gulag memoirs, his ultimate goal.

  It took him a year and a half to finish it. A typescript of his novel in hand, he set out to find a publisher. Apparently, even the camps had failed to give him a full sense of what a totalitarian country was all about. After wandering unsuccessfully from one publishing house to another, he came to the sobering conclusion that, essentially, there was only one publisher in the USSR—the department of literature at the Central Committee: the ultimate censor that decided what the country was going to read. Although his African novel was politically timely, and his description of cruelty toward the indigenous people of Congo was in line with Soviet propaganda of the time, it wasn’t deemed suitable for publication for other reasons. Dmitri was obviously unaware of the prudishness of Soviet literature. What was permissible in the camps for prisoners’ personal consumption was off-limits when it came to the general public. Not even a hint of sexuality was allowed to appear on the pages of Soviet books. His naiveté about this raised the eyebrows of more than one editor: “You write, ‘Her breasts touched my chest.’ How can you write things like that?” He tried to reason that native-born women in the Congo forests always walked around naked. The editor shrugged: “Can’t you put some bra on her or something else?”15

  (However, as Dmitri hoped, the editor missed that the author encoded his own life story into the novel by giving its protagonist, a Dutch artist traveling along the African continent, the name of “van Egmont.” Dmitri found his own fate quite akin to that of the real-life sixteenth century Flemish warrior Count Egmont, the hero of Goethe’s tragedy. Like Egmont, he, Dmitri, also under threat of arrest, refused to run away and give up his ideals of liberty for all mankind, was also imprisoned and, in practical terms of Siberian camps, sentenced to death. Unlike Egmont, he survived by miracle.)

  His African novel rejected time and again, Dmitri gave up, deciding that now he had developed the literary skills he needed to undertake the most important writing project of his life—his camp memoirs. He reminded himself that he had promised the dead a thousand times that if he survived the ordeal, he would write about it. He began to spur himself on: “I’m approaching seventy. I mustn’t even dare to die without giving my eyewitness testimony to the Soviet people.”

  He held down only his full-time job at the institute and quit doing all the freelance work that brought him extra income and provided him with little luxuries, of course, in Soviet terms. Now he felt that his reviews of medical books and his painting (which he resumed after reconnecting with the Union of Soviet Artists), all of this, w
as a betrayal of the dead. He must describe everything that had happened in the camps, not so much for the sake of his own record, but as a moral obligation he felt toward the countless other victims of the Gulag he had met along the way.

  He knew that writing his memoirs and getting them in print would be the last major battle of his life. But it was his most important battle now, and he swore to himself that he would spare no effort in fighting it to the end.

  TWENTY

  Fighting to the End, Now a Different Enemy

  You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories.

  —STANISLAW JERZY LEC

  What is written with a pen cannot be cut out with an axe.

  —RUSSIAN PROVERB

  Dmitri made an outline of his work. He estimated that he had to write about twenty-five hundred pages broken down into twelve volumes. He planned to finish them by the end of 1965. It was an enormous task for an aged man in failing health. As he wrote his memoirs, he kept asking himself whether he would be able to pull it off: “I’m infirm. My vision is poor. And I’m old. Will I manage? Will I have time?” During a routine checkup, his doctor noted some growths on his body that had to be checked for cancer. For lack of time, he refused to pursue the tests as he had sworn to himself to finish the most important business left for him in life—writing his memoirs: “I must. I must manage!”1