Stalin's Children

by Owen Matthews

  Though Mervyn reported his first, official meeting with Vadim to discuss Soviet higher education policy, he did not, as embassy regulations required, report the many drunken dinners which followed. He didn’t dare. If some fool in Chancery found out they would probably have banned Mervyn from seeing his one Russian chum, his sole window on to a Moscow his embassy colleagues never saw.

  By day, Mervyn toiled in the high-ceilinged, bourgeois splendour of the embassy, housed in the former Kharitonenko mansion, a hideous miniature stately home situated directly across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. By night he would spend hours chatting with his flatmate over cups of Ovaltine, or giving his KGB goons a good night-time exercise as he wandered up and down Tsvetnoi Boulevard and Petrovka Street. On the blessed evenings that Vadim invited him out, he would sneak away from Sad-Sam to a forbidden but fascinating night of bad food, terrible music and real, true-to-life Russians on raucous Gypsy restaurant-barges on the Moscow River. He was as happy as he’d ever been.

  Winter in Moscow comes down like a hammer, crushing out light and colour, beating the life out of the city. It closes overhead like a pair of musty wings, enveloping Moscow in a cocoon, cutting it off from the world. The city begins to look like a black-and-white dreamscape, disorientating and subtly disquieting. On the streets streams of huddled figures hurry through pools of dirty yellow light before disappearing into doorways or the Metro. Everything becomes monochrome, the people in black leather and black fur, the city swathed in black shadows. In the underpasses or in shops, the only places one sees people in bright light, faces are pale and strained and everything is pervaded with the wet-dog smell of damp wool. The skies are dirty grey, low and oppressive.

  Every winter I spent in Moscow I had a sense that the world was closing in on itself, shrinking into a state of siege behind double-glazed windows, taking shelter in the fug of state- provided steam heating, and that we were powerless in the face of this overwhelming force of nature, fragile, unable to do anything but accept our lot.

  As the first frosts of December 1958 began to bite, Mervyn’s dinners with Vadim were becoming more regular. They would arrange the date and time of meetings before they parted; both, for unspoken but obvious reasons, preferred not to call each other on the telephone.

  One evening, Mervyn set out for Manezh Square by trolleybus, expecting to go to Aragvi, one of their favourite Georgian restaurants, or perhaps the National Hotel. But to his surprise, and slight alarm, he saw Vadim standing near the trolleybus stop next to a purring official ZiL limousine. Vadim greeted him warmly, and explained offhandedly that the car belonged to his uncle, who’d loaned it for the night to take them to his dacha, where dinner was waiting. Vadim held the door open expectantly. Mervyn wavered, turning over the possible consequences of breaking the rules imposed by the Soviet government banning foreigners from making unauthorized trips beyond the city limits. Then he climbed into the ZiL and drove with Vadim to the dacha, far beyond the city’s edge and deep into the wintry countryside, and into a new stage of his life, strange and dangerous.

  The dinner was excellent. Mervyn and Vadim ate caviar, herrings, vodka, smoked sturgeon and steaming boiled potatoes served by an elderly cook. They sat by the dacha’s log fire discussing women, and drunkenly attempted to play billiards. The cutlery was of heavy Victorian silver, the fireside armchairs were overstuffed and of pre-revolutionary vintage. A friend of Vadim’s was there, a fat and jovial gynaecologist who cracked jokes about his research work, which consisted of inflating the wombs of female rabbits. Vadim reminisced about his latest conquests. Politics were not mentioned. Mervyn relaxed, fuzzy with the vodka, for which he always had a weak head. When he praised the house, with its vast dark oil paintings and sweeping staircase, Vadim muttered casually that his uncle was quite the bolshaya shishka, literally, the ‘big pine cone’, slang for big boss.

  At one in the morning the cook came up to tell them that their ZiL was waiting. They drove to Moscow in silence, sated, drunk and happy. Back on familiar territory as the huge car eased around the turn on to the Garden Ring at Mayakovsky Square, a rational thought struggled through the vodka haze. Mervyn ordered the driver to stop a couple of hundred yards short of Sad-Sam. He got out in a flurry of thanks and goodbyes, and walked the rest of the distance home. A young British diplomat arriving outside a foreigners’ compound in a Soviet official limousine in the small hours of the morning might have been misunderstood if any of his cocoa-sipping colleagues had happened to notice. This would be my father’s little secret, a secret life with the Russian friends he had discovered which no one at the embassy could take away from him.

  My first Moscow apartment was a dingy little place just round the corner from Sad-Sam; from my windows I could see the same intersection, clad in a pall of grey exhaust. In the evenings I would walk down Tsvetnoi Boulevard, alone. No goons followed me.

  My place of work in Moscow was on Ulitsa Pravdy, literally the Street of Truth. Every morning I would hail a passing car, briefly haggle with the driver over the two-dollar fare and be driven to work. Some days polished black government Audis with tinted windows would stop for me, sometimes ambulances and, on one occasion, an army truck full of soldiers. In any case, whatever the vehicle, I trundled or bounced past Sadovaya-Samotechnaya, turning north up Leningradsky Prospekt. The old Pravda building, where the Moscow Times leased half a floor, was a grimy constructivist hulk crouching among backstreets lined with sagging warehouses. I would be at work within fifteen minutes and would run up the stairs to the cavernous newsroom.

  The paper was run by bright young expatriates, mostly Americans. It was owned by a diminutive Dutch former Maoist who also published the Russian editions of Cosmopolitan and Playboy. Most of my new colleagues were welleducated Russian majors, all bright, friendly and enthusiastic. My own brief at the paper was a simple one. While my more serious-minded colleagues toiled over Kremlin intrigues and the state of the economy, I was cut loose with an open brief to hunt and gather quirky feature stories in the human jungles of the city. It was, for someone of twenty-four, with exactly two years of rather diffident journalistic experience under his belt, a small, but remarkable, professional miracle. Quite unexpectedly, I found that I had the whole screaming, teeming, outrageous, lurid underside of Moscow more or less to myself.

  Moscow in the mid-I 990s was vulgar, venal and violent. It was manic, obscene, uproarious and Mammon-obsessed. But above all, I found almost everything about it hilariously, savagely funny. Everything, from the way thuggish New Russians would leave the ‘IN Protected’ stickers on their sunglasses to their habit of stealing oil companies from each other, the way they placed TNT under cars and staged shoot-outs in public places, was comic. By the time you had soaked up enough of the country’s penetrating cynicism, even the tragedy was, on some level, darkly amusing. Soldiers blew themselves up hammering open the warheads of surface-to-air missiles, trying to steal gold circuit boards. Ambulance drivers spent their working day moonlighting as taxis. Policemen ran prostitution rackets and delivered the girls to their clients in squad cars.

  Russia’s president cavorted on a band stage in Berlin drunkenly conducting an orchestra. Russia’s cosmonauts fixed their spacecraft with a monkey wrench and duct tape in between filming ads for Israeli milk and pretzels and drinking cans of vodka labelled ‘Psychological Support Materials’. Girls who went home with you after fifteen minutes’ drunken conversation in a nightclub would be mortally offended when you didn’t bring flowers to a second date. Gogol captured Russia’s sordid craziness best – the nightmarish mood of dislocation, the mad, scheming little people, the petty vanities, the swinish drunkenness, the slobbering sycophancy, the thieving, incompetent, churlish peasantry.

  Like my father must have done, I found Russia not just another country, but a different reality. The outward trappings of the city were familiar enough – the white faces, the Western-style shop fronts, the neoclassical architecture. But this European crust only sharpened the sense o
f otherness. Instead of reassuring, the distortion of the familiar was even more disturbing. Moscow felt as surreal as a colonial outpost on which some distant master had tried to transplant grimly imperial architecture and European fashions. Underneath all the affectations the city’s heart was wild and Asiatic.

  One of my first assignments was to cover Moscow’s First Annual Tattoo Convention. The convention was conservatively billed as a kulturny festival in the bemused Moscow press. It was, in fact, a clan gathering of the capital’s alternative society, an exuberant, pagan orgy of nonconformity. A thick wall of body odour welled out of the dark entrance of the Hermitage club, propelled by high-decibel punk rock. Inside, the two main rooms were wreathed in the rancid smoke of cheap Soviet cigarettes and filled with the heaving forms of dimly lit, half-naked bodies, mostly male. Moscow’s punks, skinheads, bikers and a few culturally confused hippies were milling in one giant, pungent, heaving mass, intensifying into a frenzied rhythmic pogoing in front of the stage, where four punks, their Mohican haircuts plastered to their heads with sweat, were pounding out bad Sex Pistols covers.

  Another evening found me in Dolls, a flashy and fashionable strip bar where teenage acrobats danced naked on the tables. Paul Tatum, a prominent American businessman, was there, sitting alone at one of the luncheonette-style stools at the edge of the stage, nursing a drink. Tatum was something of a local celebrity for his prolonged business dispute with a group of Chechens over ownership of the business centre of the Radisson-Slavyanskaya Hotel. I greeted him as we came in, but he seemed distracted, his usual bullishness strained. We chatted for a while about the ‘freedom bonds’ he had issued to raise funds for his legal battle with the Chechens and sold to his friends.

  We were joined by Joseph Glotser, the club’s owner, who complained, half-joking, in a thick Brooklyn Russian accent about how hard it was to ‘make honest living in zis town’. Tatum seemed keen to get back to his bird-watching, so I wished him luck and rejoined my mends.

  A month later Tatum was dead. Someone put eleven AK47 rounds in his neck and upper back as he entered the pedestrian underpass outside the Radisson. Tatum hadn’t been wearing his customary bulletproof vest that evening, but even if he had it wouldn’t have done him any good because the assassin had fired from above, straight down through his clavicle and upper vertebrae. Tatum’s two bodyguards were unharmed. It was a classic Moscow hit. The shooter dropped the Kalashnikov and walked calmly away, and a couple of hours later the police issued the standard statement, that they believed that ‘the killing was connected with the professional activities of the victim’.

  Soon the only person left alive who remembered our brief conversation that night at Dolls was me. Joseph Glotser bought it too, a couple of months after Tatum, a single sniper round to the side of the head from across the street as he emerged from Dolls. The marksman was so sure of his shot he didn’t even bother with a follow-up.

  Soon after, for a feature on Moscow’s death industry, I interviewed a mortician who specialized in patching up the corpses of Mafia victims for presentation in open coffins. The man wore a Hawaiian shirt under his stained lab coat, and spoke of contract hits as a ballet connoisseur might talk of his favourite performances. The Glotser hit, he said, with deep appreciation, was one of the ‘finest, cleanest assassinations’ he’d ever seen. The cheery mortician was a true hero of the times, wearing his cynicism lightly, making a joke of the awfulness around him so that it wouldn’t get inside. My Moscow Times colleagues and I, it occurred to me, were morticians too, with lab coats over our Hawaiian shirts, all feigning a detached connoisseurship of Moscow’s gothic wickedness.

  Spring began one night in late April, a few weeks after my arrival. The evening before a wintry chill had lurked in the night air, although the last, tenacious remnants of filthy snow had finally melted the previous week. The lawns were bare and scrubby and the earth smelt bitter and dead. But when I woke the next morning the sky was a vibrant blue, the tentative buds which had begun to emerge days before had all suddenly burst out and the boulevard exhaled an unmistakable tang of life. By that evening spring was firmly established across the city.

  Like emerging butterflies, the girls in the streets shed their winter coats and emerged in high heels and miniskirts. On Sundays I would walk down the gravel paths of Tsvetnoi Boulevard to the Garden Ring. At Sad-Sam, I’d turn towards Mayakovsky Square, and head to the American Bar and Grill. There, a gaggle of Moscow Times staffers were usually hunched, gossiping, under a pall of cigarette smoke and half-hidden behind crumpled newspapers, trailing in the remains of eggs Benedict. Here it was at last, I told myself, the life of a foreign correspondent: the glamour, the girls, the hard-drinking, bootson-the-brass-rail colleagues, the camaraderie of young men far from home in a strange and wonderful city. In truth, I was acutely aware, even at the time, that I was living the headiest and most adventurous days of my life. Though in the company of my new colleagues, of course, I was careful to conceal my joy under a cultivated veneer of world-weary flippancy.

  9. Drinks with the KGB

  It’s not the ice, it’s what’s underneath that’s frightening.

  Alexei Suntsov to Mervyn, 1961

  Producing tedious reports on Soviet higher education at the embassy was quickly losing its appeal. The new world Vadim had opened was the Russia Mervyn had come to experience, the exciting, romantic land he had dreamed of as he diligently taught himself Russian after school and ploughed painfully through War and Peace. Russia, its warmth and expansiveness, its unpredictability and excitement, was penetrating his blood. And with it came a recklessness, and with the recklessness a kind of liberation.

  An Oxford friend wrote to ask Mervyn a small favour. The friend was editing a collection of the poetry of Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago, and wanted some of the author’s early work, available only in the Lenin Library in Moscow. He asked Mervyn to copy the poems and send them to Oxford. There was one small problem. A few months before, in October 1958, Pasternak had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of Zhivago. Under pressure from the Writers’ Union, who along with the Party considered the book a pernicious celebration of pre-Revolutionary Russia, Pasternak had been forced to turn down the prize. Indeed, only Pasternak’s international fame had kept him out of the Gulag. Getting the writer’s unpublished material out of the Soviet Union was going to be dangerous, probably illegal, and certainly career-threatening. Mervyn immediately agreed.

  My father spent the next two weeks snapping away with a small camera at the manuscripts in the professors’ reading room of the Lenin Library, where they were available to anyone with a reader’s ticket, as the other scholars hissed him to silence and the library attendant complained archly. He slipped two packages of the photographic prints into the embassy’s diplomatic bags on consecutive weeks to avoid their being confiscated by Soviet customs.

  A week later, a summons from the head of Chancery was solemnly passed down the embassy hierarchy to Mervyn. There was no doubt that a stiff dressing-down was in the offing. Hilary King was urbane and condescending as he received my father in his magnificent office on the ground floor of the embassy. But King had found out about Mervyn’s unofficial packages from the Foreign Office in London, where the contents of diplomatic bags were scrutinized. The embassy was very vulnerable to complaints from the Soviet side, intoned King in tones of biting politeness. There would be terrible trouble if they found out about Mervyn’s secreted photographs of the works of a banned author.

  I can imagine the look on my father’s face as he left the Chancery, fuming. I have seen it often, a suppressed aggression which comes out in flashes of fury, usually after simmering for a few hours or minutes under a façade of icy cordiality. Mervyn had prudently apologized to King. But the anger was there, inside, pent up, at the Foreign Office’s pandering to the Soviets’ petty administrative demands. He was being scolded for an action which to anyone outside the pygmy world of the diplomatic bureaucracy would have
appeared eminently right, and that rankled, deeply. Mervyn walked away, seething, down the thickly carpeted corridor to his own tiny office in the stable block at the back of the building.

  Shortly afterwards, in one of the infinitely subtle ways the embassy found to express disfavour, they moved a lowly radio operator into Mervyn’s apartment and gave Robert Longmire his own apartment. Then they cut off Mervyn’s servant allowance.

  It was time to jump. An advertisement in an airmail copy of The Times seemed to be the lifeline, announcing a graduate exchange programme between the Soviet Union and Britain, the first ever. It was the opportunity Mervyn had been waiting for to swap cold smiles in Chancery for smelly student dorm corridors and freedom – perhaps – from the ever-present goons. But there was a problem. Mervyn was an accredited diplomat – albeit the very last name on the 1958 Moscow Diplomatic List – and it was unlikely that the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs would believe his sudden change of status to that of a humble academic. Mervyn’s first step was to take himself off the restricted list for sensitive documents and get rid of his security clearance. The embassy seemed only too happy to relieve him of both. The paperwork for Mervyn to apply for the graduate exchange was approved by the embassy and duly sent off to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And, duly, after proper consideration, refused.

  Over kebabs and vodka in an Azerbaijani restaurant, Mervyn drowned his sorrows with Vadim. The Russian nodded his head in mute sympathy as he poured vodka, firmly and deliberately, into their glasses while Mervyn recalled his tale of the intransigence of the Ministry.

  ‘Don’t jump to conclusions, Mervyn,’ Vadim assured his mend. ‘I’ll find out if my uncle can help.’