Whatever his postscript may suggest, the fact is that Dmitri took a revenge of sorts: he tricked the KGB. Writing what was expected of him in this memo, he knew that classified as “top secret,” it would be read only by a handful of KGB officers with the highest clearance.
If the KGB officials possessed more refined literary sensibilities, they may have paid attention to the unusual style of Dmitri’s writing in his memo. Instead of the dry reports typical of such documents, his style was novelistic, complete with dialogues and minute details. In fact, many passages of the memo are verbatim reproductions of his memoirs, already completed by that time, the memoirs he hoped would someday be read by the widest public possible. In them, he had made his true thoughts about his life crystal clear. Besides numerous ruminations about the senselessness of the self-sacrifices he had made during his spy career, which are scattered throughout his voluminous writings, he asks himself the same rhetorical question many times: “Am I a hero or a fool?” By that time, he already came to realize that what he had earlier considered heroic deeds for the benefit of the Motherland turned out to be nothing but “blind diligence” (slepoe ispolnitel’stvo). He states very clearly that what pushed him into spy work was his “youth and beautiful illusions,” which were “dragged through the mud on the night of September 18, 1937,” the night of his arrest.14 His memoirs clearly show his conscious attempts to understand himself and his own motives in spying, his painful search to find an answer to what circumstances of his life, including that of his birth, made him susceptible to recruitment into spy work. And he makes it absolutely clear that, his life coming to a close, he considers it totally wasted. He sums it up in the concluding part of his memoirs:
At night, I wake up from burning grief and shame and think: for what had we [Soviet spies abroad] endured so much torment and committed so many crimes? . . . At the time, we appeased ourselves with thoughts of sacrifice for the benefit of our Motherland. Morally speaking, it was a dubious explanation . . . Now I burn from shame after realizing how we were fooled. Our belief in the Party and love for the Motherland have been dragged through the mud. Everything is fouled. As your life comes to a close, it’s frightful to be left with zilch [ostat’sia u razbitogo koryta].15
But what the KGB didn’t know didn’t hurt it. Dmitri was given the green light to produce a screenplay based on his spy exploits. He went to work and, by the end of the year, had prepared a script for a film titled “Shchedrye serdtsem” (“Generous Hearts”). To prove that nothing in the script was a product of his fantasy (in fact, his main task was to preserve from total oblivion his life as an intelligence officer, a life he already qualified in many places in his memoirs as totally wasted), he attached to the script a two-page letter marked “confidential,” in which he disclosed the real names of all those involved in the action.
The KGB censors found the screenplay unacceptable for production and rejected it. Indeed, no matter how hard Bystrolyotov tried to scatter Soviet propaganda clichés and obligatory optimism here and there in the script, he couldn’t help but violate the canons of Socialist realism, the artistic method proscribed to all Soviet writers: to depict life not as it is but as it should be. The stereotypical Chekist was not only a tireless and self-sacrificing fighter for the cause of Socialism but also one who knew no doubts and operated with “clean hands” only. That is, he never resorted to the seduction, bribery, or blackmail of prospective agents.
Dmitri decided to make at least some of his life known, even if it meant bending his personal standards. After all, something was better than nothing. He went back to work, and by cutting out pieces of the old script, he produced the ideologically acceptable script Chelovek v shtatskom (The Plainclothesman). This time the screenplay was approved and went into production at the Mosfilm Studios. Although the KGB provided the studios with their own consultants, knowing that they knew next to nothing about the times and mores of his operations, Dmitri visited the set and, an artist in his own right, gradually took over many functions of the production, including the roles of the consultants, the set and costume designers, and at times, even the director. Naturally, he was excited: his life story, which he had thought would fall into oblivion, was making a comeback before his eyes, at least to some degree.
He made every effort to ensure that the director would cast actors who resembled as closely as possible his former comrades-inarms—Boris Bazarov, Nikolai Samsonov, Theodor Mally, and Abram Slutsky. He also insisted that the actor playing the part of the British agent Ernest Oldham (in the film, his character is a German agent) would resemble the Brit, a blond drunkard. Bystrolyotov even made a cameo appearance in the film, playing the rector of a Western university handing a diploma to a younger self played by handsome Soviet actor Yuozas Budraitis. The only thing he wasn’t able to influence was the choice of actress for the part of Doris, the disfigured SS officer he had seduced to gain access to Hitler’s plans for the rearmament of Germany. For this role, a star of Soviet film, the beautiful Lyudmila Khityaeva, was chosen, which, of course, did not convey to viewers his self-sacrifice in this episode of his career.
The film premiered in December 1973 to cool critical reception. However, the following year it met financial success when the film drew more than twenty-six million viewers.16
The film opened the doors for publication of some of his work. At the beginning of 1974, the journal Nash sovremennik (Our Contemporary) published in installments his novel Para Bellum, which, among other details, reveals his operations in procuring the names of Hitler sympathizers in pre–World War II France to the public for the first (and last) time.
It seemed everything was going well for him at last. But the long years in the camps caused him always to be on guard, attuned to any movement of the outside world that could turn dangerous, even when that danger was only imagined. Toward the end of 1974, he received another call from the dreaded organization that had brought so much grief and destruction in his life—the KGB. The first deputy of the KGB chairman, Semyon K. Tsvigun, met with Dmitri and, apparently having in mind his own ambition to get into the movie business (which he accomplished a few years later), asked him many questions about the basics of filmmaking that Dmitri had acquired on the production set of The Plainclothesman.
It is likely that’s all Tsvigun was interested in—but distrustful of the KGB, expecting nothing but trouble from any of its functionaries, Dmitri became alarmed. He found the timing of the meeting ominous. The initial green light given to Solzhenitsyn’s writing had changed to red. Though approved by the Union of Soviet Writers, Solzhenitsyn’s novel The Cancer Ward was banned from publication, and soon afterward his other works ceased being printed. As a writer, he became a nonperson, and by 1965, the KGB had seized the manuscript of another of his novels set in the Gulag, The First Circle. The KGB also learned he was working on his most subversive book, the now-famous Gulag Archipelago. In 1970, when Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, he was venomously attacked in the Soviet press. The writer went into hiding in the homes of his friends. In February 1974, he was deported from the Soviet Union to West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. Writers and other cultural figures, such as poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and renowned cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, were subjected to reprisals for their support of Solzhenitsyn.17
Dmitri decided to take precautionary measures. Despite his occasional attempts to sweeten up his writings about the camps, the overall depiction of Gulag and post-Gulag life in his memoirs was unequivocally damning from a political point of view, especially in his last book, “Trudnyi put’ v bessmertie” (“The Hard Road to Immortality”), unmistakably anti-Soviet in its analysis of the sources of evil to which he had been both witness and victim. Only a few people, a small circle of friends who read them, knew about the existence of his memoirs. But he knew all too well that the ubiquitous KGB informers would eventually get their hands on his writings and that those who read his work could also get in trouble. Dmitri decided to out
smart the KGB by staging his own destruction of the manuscripts. He called all of his friends and his stepgrandson, Sergei Milashov, and asked them to return whatever copies of his manuscripts they had. Then, with only his stepgrandson as a future potential witness who would confirm the fact, he threw his papers into the bathtub and set them on fire. (Of course, an experienced spy in his past, he made sure that at least one copy of his voluminous labor was safely hidden away.)
In April 1975, his health took a turn for the worse; the effects of his last stroke reappeared. He lost the ability to read or to speak. He tried to overcome the loss by sheer force of will. One day, when Milashov came to visit, he found his stepgrandfather sitting in front of a mirror, reading a newspaper, and watching whether he was able to move his lips. He uttered words with difficulty.18
On May 3, 1975, while trying to move a sofa in his apartment, his heart failed, and he collapsed. He died as he wanted—on his feet, as the ancient Romans did. Anna survived him by eight years, passing away in December 1983.
Dmitri’s body was taken to Khovansky Cemetery in Moscow. Besides his close kin, the ceremony was attended by some of the KGB brass and his colleagues at the Institute of Medical Information, where he had worked for the last ten years of his life. After the ceremony was over, one of these colleagues whispered into another’s ear, nodding toward the KGB brass: “If you only knew how much he hated them all!”
AFTERWORD
As my research of Bystrolyotov’s life progressed, his official image underwent a gradual change as well. The FSB, the successor to the KGB, chose him to play the part of one of its heroes, a man they could be proud of, a “poster boy” whose exemplary life would inspire a new generation of Russian spies. In January 2001, at the former KGB headquarters in the Lubyanka building, a public celebration took place commemorating the centennial of Bys trolyotov’s birth. His picture was displayed in the KGB/FSB Hall of Fame at the SVR headquarters in Yasenevo, among other portraits of the leading heroes of foreign intelligence. Within a few years, they transformed a complex and flawed man—an indisputable hero in terms of his accomplishments and bravery, but by the end of his life, a man tormented with self-loathing and remorse for his actions as a spy—into a saint who didn’t even mind the devastation of his life that was caused by his employer’s actions. In fact, neither of the books written by the ex-KGB officers Evgeni Primakov and Oleg Tsarev (the latter in coauthorship with Nigel West) mention the gruesome torture Bystrolyotov endured at the hands of their agency.
First, his former masters sanitized his memoirs, disencumbering them of the most damning descriptions of the atrocities he had witnessed and experienced. Of eleven volumes he had written, they published only a small portion of them posthumously.
In recent years, Bystrolyotov was chosen as the subject of numerous journalistic articles, a novel based on his life and dedicated to his memory, and three documentary films. The central hero of a new television serial titled Rodina zhdet (The Motherland Is Waiting), a Russian intelligence officer, now fighting against terrorists, not only carries Bystrolyotov’s surname but also possesses several of his personal qualities: good looks, charisma, proficiency in many languages, courage, and of course, sex appeal.1
To reshape the real Bystrolyotov into a mythological figure that meets the political demands of the day, five years after the centennial of Bystrolyotov’s birth was celebrated in 2001, his biography has been superseded by the new one—ten times longer(!). Surely, his legend has skyrocketed in importance: even poet Alexander Pushkin, the highest Russian cultural deity, has never been feted so frequently, in five-year increments.2
I wish that this excessive posthumous generosity toward the memory of one of their own were a way of assuaging the pangs of conscience, to make amends to the hero, horrifically mistreated when he was alive. Alas, this overwhelming veneration of Bystrolyotov has a different reason. The more I read of the last official biography (though hierography would be a more appropriate term for it) of the man I had met back in my Moscow days, the more I had an eerie feeling that the system Bystrolyotov and I had dreaded was coming back to life, if it had ever actually died. I was astonished at the unabashed crudeness with which the facts of Bystrolyotov’s life are sanitized. Every one of them is airbrushed to remove the pain, embarrassment, and denigration he had endured, not at the hands of his country’s enemies, but at those of the one he loved selflessly and in whose name he had sacrificed everything dear to him—at the hands of his Motherland.
As in Stalin-era history books, in the official biography of Bystrolyotov, outright lies are mixed with half-truths; deliberate omissions also abound. To make it seem that the man occupies the desirable political stand of today, the biography tries hard to disassociate him from the Soviet regime. Thus, it claims that he “never received state awards.” Contrary to the legend in the West that the KGB/FSB is an impeccably functioning spy machine, sloppiness in covering its tracks is still one of the agency’s shortcomings. On the same SVR Web site where the most recent Bystrolyotov biography is posted, it is enough to click on the “Personalities” link, and another write-up about him, commemorating the centennial of his birth, duly states that, in 1932, the OGPU granted him a much-prized award—a personalized handgun bearing the inscription: “For merciless struggle with the counterrevolution.” And, at a later time, he was also recommended for a much-sought-after award, the “Honorary Chekist Badge.”3
To fit the political sensibilities of today, the new biography also claims that Bystrolyotov “didn’t take part in actions against the White Army and Russian monarchists,” a laughable statement for anyone familiar with the history of Soviet clandestine operations in the West in the 1920s and 1930s, the height of Bystrolyotov’s career as a spy. It’s enough to recall his Prague period—his fistfights with White Guards men and his penetration of Inostrantsev’s school for spies.
While in the 1999 book KGB v Anglii, Bystrolyotov’s controversial claim of being a descendant of the Tolstoy line is characterized as his fantasy, the new biography states it as an immutable fact. Moreover, he is made to look the direct heir of the intelligence service of the Russian Empire, going back to the time of Peter the Great.
Much is also made about his modesty in serving his Motherland as a “plainclothesman” who “never joined the Bolshevik party” and “even had no military rank.” However, the official biographers have goofed again. In the very same text, a few pages before this statement, they carelessly mention that he was about to get the rank of senior lieutenant and become a bona fide Party member, but his arrest and subsequent persecution made it impossible. In his new biography, you also won’t find much about the horrific treatment of the hero after his release from the camps. Swallowing his pride, the man had to beg his former employer to recognize his service to his country and give him a decent means of existence, as he describes it in his unpublished memoirs.
And all these attempts at misinformation only scratch the surface . . .
With the current Russian Security Service’s choice of Bystrolyotov as one of their role models, by extension he serves as a foil to many KGB brass that now constitute the upper echelons of power in the country, preeminent president-cum-prime minister Vladimir Putin included. But the real Bystrolyotov would hardly suit their political philosophy of relying on autocratic methods of governing the country. The biggest and most devastating personal discovery that the famed Russian spy made at the end of his life was that all of the numerous sacrifices he had made as a spy to serve his country’s good amounted to practically nothing. A country ruled by the whim of one person (during his spy career, it was Stalin) is bound to waste the efforts of even its most devout citizens, which Bystrolyotov undoubtedly was. In the long run, any governing system that relies exclusively on the judgment of its supreme leader is bound to hurt the most vital interests of the country. The current Russian politicians prefer to turn a deaf ear to this, perhaps, most important lesson of Bystrolyotov’s life.
Today, as I rea
d the official biography of Bystrolyotov and think back on my meeting with him, I begin to suspect that he might have had another, prescient reason for inviting me to his home. As I know it now, the one he gave me—that he needed help with his writing—made no sense. By the time of our meeting, he already had considerable literary experience, of which I had no inkling. He had written (but not yet published) two novels, Para Bellum and V staroi Afrike (In Old Africa), two screenplays (while one of them, “Generous Hearts,” already existed in manuscript form, the film based on the other one, Chelovek v shtatskom [The Plainclothesman], was already in the final production stages), and his voluminous memoirs. The latter, mostly dealing with his Gulag experience, hardly had a chance of being published in his lifetime. Khrushchev’s “thaw” had passed, Brezhnev was in power, and prison literature was out. Few could imagine that the Soviet Union would collapse in less than two decades.
So perhaps Bystrolyotov, desperate to make the truth of his life known, wanted to get it out in the world by other means. As an experienced intelligence operative, always looking ahead of events, he might have anticipated something that I myself didn’t know at the time—that I would soon be leaving the country. Talking to my father-in-law, he might have found out that I wasn’t particularly happy with my life. Although I was published widely, I could write only as a free lancer and only under the Russian-sounding pen name: in the judgment of my editors, my own name was too Jewish-sounding for Russian ears. Bystrolyotov could also have learned that no matter how hard I tried, I wouldn’t get a staff position on any of the Moscow newspapers, the very same that were happy to publish me incognito.
He might also have learned from my talkative father-in-law—what tailor doesn’t chat with his customer during a fitting session?—that, by the time of our meeting, I was already deeply disillusioned with the Soviet system and not just because of racial discrimination. As a writer and journalist, I’d experienced the system’s profound hypocrisy. Not only did the Party ideologists secretly make a mockery of the proclaimed “equality of all Soviet nationalities,” but they lied about many other matters as well, especially those that affected my writing. On one hand, they called for “objective criticism” of any official (they termed it nevziraia na litsa, “without regard for rank”), which they claimed was designed to help the system perfect itself. On the other hand, it was silently assumed that those who belonged to the nomenklatura, the high-ranking appointees of the Party, couldn’t be publicly criticized.
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