Stalin's Romeo Spy

by Emil Draitser

  I had the misfortune to sin unwittingly against the last secret rule. Two years earlier, in 1971, I had published a scathing review of a vulgar and stupid play in the magazine Krokodil. The playwright turned out to be the editor in chief of a major journal on theater—that is, he was part of the nomenklatura. After my review appeared, I was attacked in the press, stripped of my journalistic credentials, and blacklisted. During that period, I couldn’t publish a single line in those very same publications that had always welcomed my submissions.

  It was only shortly before seeing Bystrolyotov that I was finally pardoned and my press card was returned to me. Only then did my writing begin to appear again in the Moscow press.

  It was hardly necessary to possess the intellect and insight of an ace spy such as Bystrolyotov to anticipate that, given the opportunity, I would want to leave the country. In September 1973, though still a risky undertaking (any applicant could be refused under a deliberate pretext thus forever ruining his professional career), Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union was already a reality. I may have seemed to him the perfect repository for his life story.

  I came to this conclusion when I recalled the story he told me at the end of our meeting. He claimed that he had heard it firsthand from people whom he had gotten to know when working under-cover abroad. Here it is as I recorded it in my notes shortly after our meeting:

  An undercover Gestapo agent named Hans came to Amsterdam to make a list of Jews who had fled Germany. He was young and good-looking. Some Jewish women recognized him as a servant they used to employ back in Berlin, when they had money. They used to admire his good looks, but nobody took him seriously. When Hitler was on the rise, Hans joined the Nazi Party and, in time, made a career in the Gestapo. Now these Jewish ladies Hans used to work for had lost all their possessions. They no longer had hired housecleaners and laundresses; here, in Amsterdam, they became housecleaners and laundresses themselves.

  When they realized that Hans was a Gestapo agent, they decided to act. First, they treated Hans to schnapps. When he got drunk, a beautiful Jewess lured him into a brothel, where he was intoxicated even more. Finally, when he fell asleep, they brought in a rabbi and circumcised him. Before throwing him out into the streets, they stamped his passport with a seal that read, “Circumcised in the Synagogue of Amsterdam,” thoroughly ruining his Nazi career.4

  Bystrolyotov delivered this story masterfully, talking in his soft baritone, wearing a sly smile. The story about an outwitted and disgraced Nazi made me feel especially good, because both of my grandfathers, my aunt, and six cousins, aged two to fifteen, perished at the hands of the Nazis soon after the Germans invaded Russia. In addition, I was a small child during World War II and had experienced the horrors of German bombardments. That perhaps explains why I retold the story to my relatives and friends over the years, without questioning its authenticity.5

  Only recently, while researching Bystrolyotov’s life, did I take another look at the story and began to doubt it. First, there are some technical inaccuracies. A rabbi himself never performs a circumcision; the act is entrusted to a man with special training. Also, it has never been part of the Judaic tradition to certify the act by stamping a passport; the act is considered sacred and personal, part of a man’s covenant with God. At the time Bystrolyotov told me the story, I didn’t pay attention to these inaccuracies: like the vast majority of Soviet-educated people, I was woefully ignorant of religious matters, as Bystrolyotov, a Soviet citizen, would have known.

  Second, it is doubtful that the Gestapo would send its agent to Holland to get a list of specifically German Jews: it is well known that the Nazis hunted down the Jews regardless of their national origin.

  Then, when I read his screenplay “Generous Hearts,” I encountered an episode that closely resembled the story Bystrolyotov had told me during our meeting. In the cover letter to the KGB censors, which accompanied his screenplay, Bystrolyotov stresses that his descriptions are taken from real life. This episode could not have been relayed to him by one of the prank’s participants soon after it took place, as he told me (and as implied in the text). He returned to the USSR at the end of 1936 and, before his arrest, he made his last short trip abroad in the summer of 1937. This makes the presence in Amsterdam of destitute German Jews running from Hitler before that time doubtful. The Nazi expropriation of Jewish property began several years later, after the infamous Kristallnacht in late 1938.6

  Since in his memoirs of his Gulag years Bystrolyotov mentions meeting some German prisoners of war in the camps, it is possible he heard this story from them, which could have taken place as late as 1940, after the German occupation of Holland.

  However, there are two seemingly insignificant differences between the variant of the story Bystrolyotov told me and the way he renders it in the screenplay that he wrote before our meeting: in the screenplay, the name of the Nazi officer who fell victim to the Jewish prank is not Hans, but Stormführer Siegfried Lulke, and there is no mention of his good looks.7

  As I went over my notes, again and again, about the story as Bystrolyotov had told it to me, these two small discrepancies made me think that, most likely without realizing it, as happens with storytellers, he had unconsciously woven strands of his own life into it. To begin with, both the victim in the story and Bystrolyotov himself have certain things in common: “Hans” was one of Bystrolyotov’s code names. Both the Hans of the story and the Hans of the storyteller served in the state secret police, its intelligence branch. Moreover, Bystrolyotov’s memoirs show that, by the end of his life, he realized that he had worked for a criminal regime, one that in many respects was not unlike the Nazi regime that Hans served in the story.

  And the whole course of the story resembles that of Bystrolyotov’s life as he saw it: A gifted and good-looking young man is slighted by virtue of his birth, but by dint of hard work and siding with the dominant power of his country makes a name for himself, overcoming his feeling of inferiority. When he finally rises in rank and proves himself worthy of more respect than he received in his youth, he is betrayed by his conniving masters and subjected to physical pain and disgrace.

  Of course, that is not why Bystrolyotov told me the story of Hans. He had a different purpose. He had me over for tea and told the story to win me over. In telling it, he played “the Jewish card.” A tale of a Nazi officer’s disgrace at the hands of the persecuted Jews could not possibly fail to please me.

  Bystrolyotov was a man of clear vision, whose years spent in the Gulag opened his eyes to many things of which he had previously been oblivious. Let us recall that, in his memoirs, written back in 1965, he predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, an event that took place a quarter of a century later.

  But apparently he foresaw even further. From today’s perspective, it looks as if, back in the fall of 1973 when he talked to me, he knew what is crystal clear today: in his own country, the full truth about his life, something he tried desperately to tell while still alive, might not be revealed even after the collapse of the USSR. And today, I’m struck by how accurate his premonitions have turned out to be.

  Although brought about by a different set of circumstances, so many years later, Bystrolyotov’s calculations proved to be right after all.

  This book is the first biography of Bystrolyotov that has not been doctored by the infamous agency and its current successor. Though extraordinarily dramatic, it is, nevertheless, representative of the fate of the whole first generation of Russians (and non-Russians) who believed in the proclaimed ideals of the Bolshevik revolution and sacrificed everything they had on its altar.

  To set the record straight on Bystrolyotov’s life is to counter the new dangerous tendency on the rise in Russia—to rewrite Stalin’s bloody history by whitewashing the KGB’s role in it as his willing executioners. The Bystrolyotov myth being spread in today’s Russia is one of the neo-KGB’s means to control its own past. Since, as Orwell observed, “who controls the past controls the future,” telling
the truth about that past is one way to interfere with the comeback of those horrors.

  NOTES

  Prologue. Tea with a Master Spy

  1. The following account of Bystrolyotov’s career is reconstructed here from my notes taken immediately after the meeting, September 11, 1973.

  2. Recently published sources indicate that Lev Manevich was a Soviet intelligence officer who worked undercover in the West before World War II and was captured in Italy. He later spent some time in German camps. There is no mention of Spain. See http://www.hrono.info/biograf/manevich.html (accessed July 2, 2008).

  3. See Snegirev, “Drugaia zhizn’ Dmitriia Bystroletova.”

  4. Corson and Crowley, New KGB.

  5. Milashov, in preface to Bystrolyotov, Puteshestvie na krai nochi.

  6. See CSApol.

  7. On comparative analysis of Stalin’s and Putin’s systems, see Olga Pavlova, “Plan Putina” [Putin’s Plan], http://www.grani.ru/Politics/Russia/m.126299.html.

  One. Sowing the Wind

  1. The fateful meeting with Artur Artuzov is described in KGB2, 128–29. When writing it, Bystrolyotov re-created by memory the text he had written three years earlier in his memoirs; see Bystrolyotov, “Pir bessmertnykh,” 3:368–69 (hereafter in the notes, this work cited as “Pir”). On Artuzov’s career, see “Memorial” International Historical, Educational, and Civil Rights Society, “Rukovodiashchie kadry NKVD” [Senior Cadres of the NKVD], http://www.memo.ru/history/NKVD/kto/biogr/index.htm; go to “Artuzov.” See also Mlechin Istoriia vneshnei razvedki, 29–50. In his book Tragedii sovetskoi razvedki [Tragedies of Soviet Intelligence] (Moscow: Tsentropoligraf, 2000), Vitaly Pavlov erroneously identifies Artuzov as head of the Foreign Intelligence Department of the OGPU at the time of his first meeting with Bystrolyotov (111); the same mistake is repeated in the Russian-language electronic Encyclopedic Dictionary of Russian Special Services (http://rusrazvedka.narod.ru/base/htm/bystr.html [accessed February 11, 2009]). For the text of Dmitri’s address to the Congress, see “Privet ot zarubezhnogo studenchestva” (Greetings from Foreign Students), Pravda, April 18, 1925, 3. For Artuzov’s photo, see http://www.lubyanka.org/personalii/a/artuzov_artur_hristianovich/.

  2. KGB2, 128; “Pir,” 3:368.

  3. On the profound effect of a child’s separation from a caregiver during the first years of life, see Jerold J. Kreisman, M.D., and Hal Straus, I Hate You—Don’t Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality (New York: Avon Books, 1989), 160.

  4. Although the date and place of Bystrolyotov’s birth in published sources, and even on his official birth certificate, vary greatly, in this book I follow his handwritten autobiography from his private archive; it was submitted to the exit visa office to seek clearance for foreign travel in 1965. Unless otherwise noted, Bystrolyotov’s experiences and quotes from his writings in this chapter refer to “Pir,” 2:234–43, 277–92.

  5. Andrew and Mitrokhin consider Bystrolyotov’s claim of belonging to the Tolstoy line to be his “fantasy” (The Sword and the Shield, 44).

  6. On the lack of any evidence of Tolstoy’s paternity of Dmitri Bystrolyotov, see Razumov, “Rukopis’ D. Bystrolyotova ‘Pir Bessmertnykh,’ ” 109. There is no evidence to the claim that his father was “General-Governor of St. Petersburg,” as the Russian-language electronic Encyclopedic Dictionary of Russian Special Services does (http://rusrazvedka.narod.ru/base/htm/bystr.html [accessed February 11, 2009]).

  7. Milashov, in discussion with the author, July 2003.

  8. Milashov, in discussion with the author, July 2003.

  9. Milashov, “Kommentarii k glavam 1–3,” 1.

  10. Apparently, Bystrolyotov misspelled the author’s name. It should read “Chelpanov” instead of “Chelpakov.” The book he refers to is Chelpanov, Vvedenie v filosofiiu.

  11. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 284–85.

  12. Ibid., 284; “Pir,” 1:436–37.

  13. These insights into Bystrolyotov’s personality are suggested by psychiatrist K. P. S. Kamath, M.D., in discussion with the author, March 2008.

  14. Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia, “Dmitri Bystrolyotov—Razvedchik v shtatskom” (Dmitri Bystrolyotov: A Plainclothes Intelligence Operative), Novosti razvedki i kontrrazvedki (Moscow), January 30, 2006, http://svr.gov.ru/smi/2006/novrkr20060130.htm.

  15. “Pir,” 2:339.

  16. Milashov, in discussion with the author, July 2003.

  17. Most likely, by leaving the country, Bystrolyotov also escaped being drafted into the advancing Red Army. That’s why, in his book Chekisty rasskazyvaiut, published in Soviet times, Listov attributes Bystrolyotov’s first flight abroad, to Turkey, with such a vague motivation as that of the young man being “carried away by a chance impulse” (216).

  Two. A Leaf Torn from a Branch

  1. Unless otherwise noted, Bystrolyotov’s experience and quotes from his writings in this chapter refer to “Pir,” 2:279–80, 291–95, and 303–24.

  2. Ibid., 293.

  3. This version is also given in Listov, Chekisty rasskazyvaiut, 216. Listov mentions that, in the course of a few days, Bystrolyotov was given instructions. Since both my conversation with Bystrolyotov and the publication of Listov’s book occurred in the Soviet era, it may well be that Bystrolyotov used this version when talking to journalists, such as Listov and me, as it was less politically embarrassing for the Cheka, in comparison with the self-serving behavior of the Red commissars during the trip to Bulgaria, which he had already recorded in his memoirs and which couldn’t be published at that time.

  4. Milashov, in discussion with the author, July 2003.

  5. Slobodskoi, Sredi emigratsii, 65.

  6. “Pir,” 2:317–18.

  7. Slobodskoi, Sredi emigratsii, 112–13.

  8. Georgiev’s name appears among the list of other gymnasium students graduated in 1921; see Svetozarov, Russkaia gimnaziia v Moravskoi Trzhebove, 38.

  9. Ibid., 7–9.

  10. For the list of gymnasium graduates, see ibid., 38; for Bystrolyotov’s Prague Law Faculty personal file, see GARF. His claim that he was accepted into the graduating class of an American college is also doubtful for he had only a high school (Anapa gymnasium) diploma to his credit. It is no wonder that, aside from his proficiency in foreign languages, he doesn’t mention having studied any other subjects at that college or the specialization of the “American bachelor degree” he had allegedly earned. The only connection to America the Russian gymnasium in Constantinople had was the patronage of the American Red Cross. The KGB memo of December 18, 1968, also confirms that Bystrolyotov studied in a Russian gymnasium in Turkey, without mentioning that it was run by Russian émigrés (cited in Snegirev, “Drugaia zhizn’ Dmitriia Bystroletova,” 61).

  11. “Pir,” 1:395.

  12. Ibid.

  13. On the Russian émigré plight at that time, see Pivovar et al., Russkaia emigratsiia v Turtsii, 51.

  14. For secret instructions to Soviet Trade Missions on subversive actions abroad, see CSAinst.

  15. Svetozarov, Russkaia gimnaziia v Moravskoi Trzhebove, 7–9.

  Three. In the Grips of Holy Wrath

  1. L. Petrusheva, ed., Deti russkoi emigratsii [Children of Russian Emigration] (Moscow: Terra, 1997), 14; see also GARF.

  2. Postnikov, Russkie v Prage, 83; “II sessiia Soveta Soiuza russkikh akademicheskikh organizatsii za granitsei (4–7 oktiabria 1923 g. v Prage)” [The Second Ses sion of the Council of the Union of Russian Academic Organizations Abroad (October 4–7, 1923 in Prague)], Studencheskie gody, nos. 6–7 (Oct.–Nov. 1923): 31.

  3. KGB2 [136]; quoted in Tsarev and West, KGB v Anglii, 113.

  4. “Pir,” 2:330.

  5. Ibid.; Tsarev and West give the location of the filtration camp (KGB v Anglii, 114).

  6. “Pir,” 2:331.

  7. KGB2, quoted in Tsarev and West, KGB v Anglii, 114–15.

  8. “Pir,” 2:332.

  9. Ibid., 1:67.

&
nbsp; 10. Ibid.

  11. Bystrolyotov, in conversation with the author, September 11, 1973, Moscow.

  12. “Pir,” 2:333.

  13. Ibid.

  14. See CSAinst.

  15. Ibid.

  16. See CSAmil.

  17. KGB2, quoted in Tsarev and West, KGB v Anglii, 115.

  18. Ibid., 116.

  19. Ibid., 119.

  20. “Pir,” 1:395.

  21. Ibid., 393, 395.

  22. Pivovar et al., Russkaia emigratsiia v Turtsii, 51.

  23. “Pir,” 1:391, 394.

  24. Ibid., 392.

  25. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 114.

  26. N. An-ov, “Prazhskoe zhitie” [Life in Prague], Studentcheskie gody, no. 28 (1928): 7; “Pir,” 1:411; Tsarev and West, KGB v Anglii, 116.

  27. See CSAinst.

  28. KGB2, 126–27; “Pir,” 1:395–96; Tsarev and West, KGB v Anglii, 116.

  29. See CSApol.

  30. “Pir,” 1:396.

  31. On Mikhail Gorb’s career, see Abramov, Evrei v KGB, 163–64.

  32. “Pir,” 3:369; for an entry on Bystrolyotov’s hiring, see his official work record (trudovaia knizhka) (Milashov’s private collection).