To visit the writer Chingis Aitmatov, we had to fly internal Aeroflot to the military city of Frunze in Kirghizia. Aitmatov was a power in his land, so the other passengers had to stand on the runway while the great man’s party was boarded first.
As Aitmatov’s guests, we were accommodated in Frunze’s Central Committee rest home, with a wire perimeter patrolled by uniformed KGB guards with Kalashnikovs and dogs. To protect us from the rustlers, the Tartar manager of our rest home confided in an embarrassed whisper. They come down from the hills to steal cattle.
In the Frunze rest home, vodka was not permitted under Gorbachev’s drive to wean his subjects away from alcohol, but for a few American dollars the manager supplied us with a case of it. He offered us other comforts too, and took us down to a timbered basement swimming pool built to the best Swedish specifications. It was hard to imagine anything less Soviet. Each changing cubicle was denoted by an animal. If you were a moose, you got a bathrobe with a moose embroidered on the pocket, slippers with a moose on each toe, and a moose towel. There was a sauna and a relaxing room, and that very faint smell, made of stale tobacco smoke and disinfectant, old cheap scent and vomit, that murmurs to you about a recent party that you missed.
One morning, Aitmatov arrived with a motorcade of grand Party officials and gofers. I had asked to visit villagers in the surrounding mountains. We drove for two hours and stopped to eat smoked horse-belly and drink covert vodka at the roadside. We came to a lake and were treated to a ride in a high-speed naval-interception boat. We drove again until we reached an equestrian racing track which our hosts preferred to call a people’s hippodrome. At its centre lay a grass oval, and in the centre of the oval stood a single red and gold tent with a couple of ponies cropping the grass outside it. Solemnly, we were marched to the tent, invited inside and introduced to a family of Kirghizi tribespeople in ceremonial costume. They gave us tea and invited us to admire their rugs. We did so. Here are our villagers from the surrounding mountains, said our hosts, and I thanked them for this social insight.
In Moscow I was invited to meet Kim Philby. The suggestion was made by Gendrik Borovik, a journalist and friend of Philby’s and, as rumour had it, one of his minders. Kim was ill, he explained, as if I should share his concern, and hadn’t long to live. Kim was also a fan of my work, he said – a claim I doubted, whichever of them had made it. So would I care to stop by and say hullo to him over a glass of wine? Borovik made it sound like an errand of mercy. Well, thank you, I replied, but I was attending a reception given by the British Ambassador the following evening, and I didn’t think I should sup with the Queen’s representative one night and the Queen’s traitor the next. Borovik sputtered, I sputtered. Philby was no traitor, he said; Philby was a brave Englishman who had acted according to his conscience. Fine, I said, and I hoped he felt the same about Russians who had spied for the West. Calming down, we agreed to discuss the matter further at the Embassy reception, which he too was attending. ‘But we must be careful of the microphones,’ I reminded him sotto voce, and in the traditional Muscovite gesture of warning, I pointed at the chandelier. For a moment he agreed with me – then had the grace to burst out laughing as he realised I was talking about his side’s microphones, not ours.
In Leningrad, as it still was, I met the greatest dissident of them all, the physicist Andrej Sakharov and, like all the best meetings in life, it wasn’t on any agenda, it was something that happened by chance through the good offices of an American publisher who was also a human rights activist. Sakharov was sitting with his wife Elena Bonner in the foyer of a newly opened restaurant, and as we talked an incessant troop of photographers filed by, dazzling us with their flashbulbs. At first I assumed that Sakharov’s distinction was the reason for their interest – his Nobel Prize, his reinstatement by Gorbachev, his eight years of internal exile in Gorky. But I was wrong as usual. No ordinary Russian had the smallest idea what Sakharov looked like. As a banned person, he possessed no public image. The camera flashes were part of the regular harassment to which he was subjected when he consorted with Westerners.
At the end of our conversation, Sakharov expressed a diffident curiosity about the Los Alamos atom spies – Klaus Fuchs, Allan Nunn May, Pontecorvo – but particularly Klaus Fuchs, whom he had evidently met in East Germany. How was Fuchs unmasked? he enquired politely. What had moved Fuchs to do what he did? For how long had he done it? – and so on. I told him the little I knew. He listened without comment. What was he thinking? Since I shall never know, I may answer the question for myself. He was thinking that in an open society Klaus Fuchs had chosen the path of secret betrayal; and that Sakharov, in a closed society, had suffered torture and imprisonment in order to speak out.
I was glad I had refused to shake Kim Philby by the hand.
John le Carré
Cornwall, March 2001
I wish very much that, twenty-three years after this novel was published, I could claim that the optimism implicit in its last pages had been justified. The bald truth as we know it is that Russia today, for all its supposed liberation from Communism, is scarcely more liberated from itself than it was then, even if the prison bars are of a different manufacture.
In Russia, oppression has a way of re-presenting itself in different guises. After the white Czars of the Russian Imperium came the red Czars of the Soviet Imperium. And after the red Czars came the grey Czars of Putin’s Imperium, a régime scarcely more transparent than its red predecessors, even if its crude aims are equally manifest.
Instead of the democracy we vainly and perhaps naively hoped for, a crass kleptocracy is underpinned by a criminalised secret police force from which the ruler himself sleekly emerged. Putin’s régime offers little more social justice to its citizens than did its predecessors. Its purpose is to harvest wealth and resources on a scale so gigantic that, even without the trappings of formal political power, its leaders will continue to own the country.
Truth, as before, remains the enemy of the rulers’ power: witness the repeated killings of brave journalists and the hounding of political opponents; witness the trumped-up charges to keep Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the one oligarch who dared oppose Putin, in solitary confinement in Siberia. Under Putin, corruption on an unparalleled scale paralyses Russia’s development. Even the once pristine Lake Baikal is soon to be turned into yet another industrial cesspit, and those who protest will pay the going price: beatings, trumped-up charges and exclusion.
Taking a leaf from George Bush’s book, Putin has nimbly converted the just claims of Chechnya to independence into a sideshow of the American-driven War on Terror. In doing so, he has invented exactly the Enemy Within that he needs in order to keep his people scared and submissive while he pillages Chechnya’s resources.
So what’s the good news? Was my optimism of twenty-three years ago really so misplaced? Was I really as simple as sceptical heads said of me at the time? Answer, after much cogitation: I hope not. To be in Russia among Russians is to believe in miracles. The greatest of them is Russia herself. Love of Mother Russia, though she fails her children at every turn, is for Russians an absolute. They revile her, laugh at her, fear her. But above all, they love her, they love her culture, her vastness, her suffering, and her Russian soul. In return, she lies to them, persecutes them, conspires against them, imprisons and exiles them. Yet a couple of weeks of separation from her are enough to induce chronic homesickness in all but the hardiest few.
And alongside love of country, thank Heaven, goes an equally unswerving love of personal courage and individual conscience, and therein lies our hope for tomorrow. Outwardly, Putin has the support of the great majority of Russians, whose fear of chaos he plays on like a harp. Outwardly, Russians admire the tough guy with the karate black belt who bares himself to the waist at the drop of a hat. Like Berlusconi, Sarkozy and Tony Blair, Putin wants us to know that everything below the waist is pretty amazing too. Not surprising then if, according to an article in today’s Guardian (7 October 2010)
, twelve pretty female students from Moscow State University – one suspects with a little help from Putin’s spin doctors – also decided to take off most of their clothes for the camera, and present their beloved Prime Minister with a Pirelli-style calendar for his fifty-eighth birthday. Their near uncontainable desire for him was manifested by speech bubbles of sexual insinuation issuing from their parted lips, such as ‘Can I be your co-pilot?’ and – dreaming that their sex-idol may run again for President – ‘How about a third go?’
However, their gesture did not go unanswered. The next day, six other young female students from the same university struck back with photographs that were even more revealing. Unlike their twelve colleagues, they were fully, even sternly dressed. They weren’t smiling, but scowling. Their lips, far from pouting, were sealed with yellow masking tape. What they couldn’t say, the print beside their muted faces said for them: Who killed Anna Politkovskaya? When will Khodorkovsky be freed?
Let’s just say my optimism of twenty-three years ago was premature. And, like the Russians themselves, let’s keep hoping through thick and thin. And let’s invest a little more of our hope in those six courageous young women, and a little less in the crooks in suits who are stuffing their pockets with Mother Russia’s fast-depleting family silver.
John le Carré
October 2010
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First published in Great Britain by Hodder & Stoughton 1989
Published in Penguin Classics 2011
Copyright © David Cornwell, 1989, 2011
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ISBN: 978-0-14-196743-1
The Russia House Page 41