Stalin's Children

by Owen Matthews

  Mervyn was immensely cheered. Vadim, with his mysterious friends in high places with their ZiLs and dachas, would surely be able to persuade the Ministry to change its collective mind. Vadim mentioned nothing of what would be expected from Mervyn in return. They toasted Mervyn’s future as a Soviet student, and friend of the Soviet people.

  ‘So, you’re going to Moscow State University.’ The ambassador, Sir Patrick Reilly, was friendly, despite the hitches in Mervyn’s short embassy career, as his soon-to-be ex-employee came to say goodbye. ‘Most unusual. I wonder why the Ministry allowed you to do it?’

  There was a long silence. This was not the time or the place for Mervyn to reveal the story of Vadim and his uncle, their evenings on the town with his new friends, the Ministry’s inexplicable last-minute change of heart. He said nothing. Receiving no answer, the ambassador held out his hand. ‘Well. Good luck.’

  To use up the remaining few days of holiday time he had outstanding from the embassy, Mervyn took a trip to Soviet Central Asia. A woman in the Chancery, whose job was to burn sensitive documents in an iron pot, advised him that Bukhara was worth a detour from Samarkand and Tashkent. Mervyn talked over his plans excitedly with Vadim, who was unimpressed with his English friend’s enthusiasm for historical sites. Mervyn set off eastwards in a series of small but sturdy Aeroflot planes. Bukhara was to be his last stop.

  The desert city turned out to be cold and uninviting, a stretch of mud-walled houses huddled along the airport road giving way to some new but already dilapidated-looking Soviet concrete blocks closer to the centre. The taxi driver, a Bukharan Jew, chatted all the way about the brand new Intourist hotel and, when they arrived, complained about the heaviness of Mervyn’s suitcase and hiked the already exorbitant fare. The hotel was indeed new, but as he pushed through the doors Mervyn found that inside it was colder than out on the street. The receptionist had moved her desk closer to the door in order to keep warm.

  Mervyn asked if the heating would be switched on soon. ‘This is a new hotel,’ said the receptionist, offended by the foreigner’s prissiness. ‘And the lifts don’t work. You’ll have to take the stairs.’ She gave him a room on the top floor.

  Dragging his suitcase up the stairs Mervyn noticed a pair of familiar legs descending. Vadim, it seemed, was in Bukhara on official business, quite by coincidence. Even better, Vadim happened to be free that day to take Mervyn round the sights of Bukhara, with an official car, and in the evening it turned out that a Russian friend of Vadim’shad laid on a little welcoming party in his house on the outskirts. Vadim announced proudly that there would be some girls there.

  After a day touring the sites, far too perfunctorily for Mervyn’s liking, they made their way down some unpaved streets to the town’s outskirts. Vadim’s friend’s house was in an old Russian quarter of traditional log houses quite different from the native brick-built Uzbek courtyards. Volodya, their host, greeted them warmly and plied them with vodka. They ate turkey, the largest Mervyn had ever seen in Russia, and danced to old American records. One of the three girls at the little party, Nina, turned out to be staying in the same hotel as Mervyn and Vadim. They walked home together in the moonlight, and said their goodnights in the foyer.

  ‘You’ll come to my room later?’ Mervyn whispered as Vadim turned to go up the stairs. Nina squeezed his hand.

  Mervyn tipsily wove his way down the corridor towards his room. The light was on, and someone was inside. Whoever it was had heard him coming upstairs and opened the door. Backlit from the room, Mervyn didn’t see the man’s face, but demanded to know what he was doing. ‘Fixing the electricity,’ the man said calmly. ‘But we’re done now.’

  After the men had left, Mervyn sat down heavily on the bed. Even here in the middle of Central Asia, the KGB was tailing him. Mervyn noticed that on the table were two empty glasses. Secret policemen, apparently, liked to have a quick drink on the job.

  He undressed quickly, shivering, and got into bed. There was a soft knock on the door. Thinking it was Vadim, Mervyn got up and opened it. It was Nina. She pushed him inside the room, frisky. He bundled her back out. A rape scandal was the last thing Mervyn needed; he pictured Nina’s plump embrace turning into a wrestling hold, and help waiting just outside the door as she screamed for rescue. He climbed into his frigid bed alone.

  Moscow State University was the largest of Stalin’s grandiose highrises which punctuated the Moscow skyline like a ring of watchful vultures. It was also, at thirty-six storeys, the tallest building in Europe at that time. On the sweeping terrace in front of the building were gigantic statues of well-muscled male and female students looking up confidently from their hefty stone books and engineering instruments into the bright future. It was a long way from the haphazard sandstone quads of Oxford.

  The university put Mervyn up in the ‘hotel’ wing, in fact identical to the rest of the university’s five thousand-odd rooms except that, unlike ordinary students and professors, guests were provided with the luxury of a cleaning woman. The room was small, furnished with a sofa-bed, a deal desk and a built-in cupboard. The oversized window, dictated by the monumentalism of the façade, was completely out of proportion to the size of the room.

  Nevertheless, Mervyn was delighted to be there. The university was the antithesis of his closeted diplomatic life; it was earthy and profoundly Soviet. Above all, Mervyn was significantly more free than when he was at the embassy. True, KGB radio cars stood outside, ready to put tails on foreigners as they left the building, but the surveillance was mercifully sporadic, and his fellow students, though still wary, were freer in associating with Mervyn than any Russians, apart from Vadim, had been before.

  Mervyn had made a point, while at the embassy, of eating whenever he could at stolovayas – cheap public canteens – and riding on public transport wherever possible. Now at the university Mervyn ate in the canteen every day, with its papery meatballs, thin soup and watery potato puree. He had no choice but to pile on to trolleybuses, packed with the heavily padded narod, or people, and the smell of sweat and pickle-breath. He loved it.

  Georges Nivat, a young Frenchman who was one of Mervyn’s fellow students and a friend from St Anthony’s and the festival, shared his love for immersing himself in Soviet life. Georges lived on a floor of the university which he shared with some Vietnamese graduates. The smell of their cooking, peppery chicken feet and garlicky cabbage soups, wafted down the corridors, much to Georges’ distress. ‘It is ruining my life!’ he would complain with Gallic élan when he came to Mervyn’s room for solace, tea and biscuits, gesticulating fatalistically. ‘Ruining my Iife!’

  Georges’ fascination with Russian literature had brought him to Moscow. Soon after he arrived at the university he began frequenting one of Moscow’s great literary salons, the apartment of Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya on Potapovsky Pereulok. Ivinskaya had been the typist and collaborator of Boris Pasternak since 1946. She was also the beleaguered poet’s mistress, and was the inspiration for Lara, the heroine of Doctor Zhivago. She had paid heavily for her association with Pasternak. In 1949, after refusing to denounce her lover as a British spy, Ivinskaya was imprisoned for five years. She was pregnant by Pasternak at the time but lost the child in prison. She returned to Potapovsky Pereulok only after Stalin’s death in 1953, and they recommenced their affair. But all her life, Ivinskaya was tortured by Pasternak’s refusal to abandon his wife and children. The two families lived in a curious ménage, with the poet lunching and spending the afternoons with Olga before bowing politely to his mistress’s guests and leaving to join his wife for dinner.

  Irina Ivinskaya was Olga’s daughter by a previous marriage to a scientist who committed suicide rather than face arrest in the Purge of 1938. But despite the tragedy which dogged her mother’s life, Irina was charming, happy and passionate about books and ballet. Georges fell utterly in love. Within months, he proposed. Pasternak toasted the young couple at a crowded tea party at his dacha in Peredelkino. Mervyn was invited to go an
d meet the author, but says he was too shy. ‘I would have nothing to say to Pasternak,’ he told me.

  I have often thought about this strange refusal, because it sits so ill with my father’s apparent love of risk and danger at that time in his life. Perhaps it was because he only felt at ease with his friends and social equals and couldn’t stand formal functions – a dislike which continues to this day. He has always struck me as a very private man, cocooned in a protective world he weaves around himself to keep the outside world at bay. His study in London, the various austere academic apartments he occupied during visiting professorships, these were all fashioned into small masculine nests where he could escape into his piled papers, his pots of tea and his Bach. At social events he usually wears his frayed two-pound charity shop shirts and sagging tweed jackets, and hangs in a corner with a forced smile, waiting until it’s time to leave. In a fit of shyness, he even left my wedding dinner early. I said goodbye to him on the steps of the old Splendid Hotel on the island of Buyukada, near Istanbul, as he stood in his antique dinner suit and a beige mackintosh. He thanked me warmly for a good party, as the music of a raucous band of young Gypsy delinquents belted from the dining room. ‘I don’t really like these big gatherings,’ he explained, and turned to walk back alone to our house through the light evening drizzle.

  * * *

  Soon after Georges’ engagement party, Vadim invited Mervyn to dinner at the Praga restaurant to celebrate Vadim’s newly won MA degree in oriental studies. The other guests were mostly elderly academics, Vadim’s supervisors and department heads. But opposite Mervyn sat an elegantly dressed man, about five years his senior, with a distinctive grey streak in his combed-back hair. Vadim whispered to Mervyn that the man’s name was Alexei, a ‘research assistant’ to his mysterious uncle. But he didn’t introduce them, and they did not speak. Alexei made a long, witty toast. Mervyn made conversation with his stony-faced neighbours and drank too much.

  A few days later Vadim called to pass on a message from Alexei: he wanted to invite Mervyn and Vadim to join him for an evening at the Bolshoi ballet. Mervyn was surprised, and flattered. Though they hadn’t spoken at dinner, Alexei was probably interested to meet a foreigner, Mervyn reasoned. He accepted the invitation.

  Alexei was poised and confident, a true member of the post-war Moscow nomenklatura, or official élite. He wore foreign-made clothes and had travelled; his wife, Inna Vadimovna, was tall and slim, and, Mervyn noticed when they met at the Bolshoi, wore an expensive gold bracelet with a watch set in it. Alexei remarked proudly that his wife was ‘a typical Soviet woman’. Mervyn thought of his cleaner, Anna Pavlovna, panting to the bus stop with her string bags full of eggs from the university canteen. She seemed to Mervyn to be a more typical Soviet woman.

  The evening was a success. Alexei loved ballet, and he and Mervyn had a friendly conversation during the interval, as the more philistine Vadim hovered around the buffet, looking at girls. Alexei began calling Mervyn regularly, inviting him out to dinner at the Aragvi, at the Baku, the Metropole Hotel, the National Hotel- the finest restaurants Moscow could offer. Alexei had money, and he had some mysterious special relationship with the mâitres d’hðtel of the city, booking at short notice, always welcomed with an obsequious smile and shown to a good table or private room.

  Alexei was more forward than Vadim in conversation, more overtly political, less chummy. He never spoke of women, and drank in moderation. Alexei expressed interest in Mervyn’s childhood, his background, but Mervyn found from his trite responses that he could not conceive of poverty, or class, beyond Marxist-Leninist platitudes. An irony: Alexei, the Soviet champion of the international working class, himself from a privileged élite, and Mervyn, a naïve but sincere British patriot, profoundly anti-Communist, yet in Marxist terms a natural revolutionary.

  Over one of their ever more frequent dinners, Mervyn and Alexei got on to the subject of the strict visa regime, surveillance and spies. They were at the National Hotel, a favourite watering hole of the capital’s beau monde for the best part of the century. Alexei remarked that the Soviet Union had to be very careful of foreign spies. Mervyn, perhaps to prove that he wasn’t one of ‘them’, to neutralize the implicit suspicion, jokingly told Alexei that it was a regular source of amusement at the embassy that there was a goons’ booth under the Bolshoi Kamenny Bridge, just round the corner from the embassy, where KGB men would play dominoes while waiting to be called out.

  Alexei listened with interest, suddenly even more serious, carefully questioning Mervyn on where the booth was. After dinner he insisted that they drive under the bridge to take a look. Perhaps sensing Mervyn’s discomfort, Alexei made a disparaging remark about the work of MI5 and MI6, as though to suggest that if Mervyn were on the payroll he would know about it. Mervyn didn’t argue with him.

  When Mervyn drove past the bridge a few days later he noticed that the booth and the goons were gone.

  Vadim arranged another evening at his uncle’s dacha. As before, they went in a ZiL, but this time Vadim had brought along a ski instructor friend and three plump but lively girls. They went cross-country skiing at night among the pines, ungainly Mervyn falling frequently into snow banks as the girls giggled. They warmed up with vodka in front of the fireplace, and then retired upstairs with their respective girls. Mervyn’s girl was large and, he thought, on the old side. But she seemed willing enough to play the role of his bed mate for the night, and it would have been rude to refuse.

  Mervyn and Alexei sat in a private room at the Aragvi, well into the Tsinandali wine. On the table in front of them were the ruins of a gigantic meal of lamb kebabs, green bean lobio and khatchapuri cheese bread. Alexei was, for once, in an expansive mood, striking the avuncular tone he sometimes used with Mervyn. He had decided to take a more active interest in Mervyn’s career, he announced. Would Mervyn like to do some travelling? If so, where? Mervyn, delighted, unthinkingly said Mongolia. Not possible, said Alexei. How about somewhere in the Soviet Union? Mervyn suggested Siberia. Alexei was enthusiastic. The great Bratsk Dam, perhaps? Lake Baikal? Mervyn was thrilled and agreed immediately. They drank a toast to seal the bargain.

  At what point did Mervyn realize that he was getting in too deep? He may have been naïve, but surely not that naive. Alexei’s KGB connections were becoming increasingly obvious – the disparaging remarks about British intelligence, the mysterious and prompt disappearance of the domino-playing ‘goons’ under the bridge, the leading questions about Mervyn’s politics. It was surely blindingly obvious to Mervyn that he was being recruited.

  I think the truth is that they never really understood each other. Alexei’s dogma prevented him from seeing the deeprooted patriotism of Mervyn’s class and generation, who considered it the height of bad taste to leave a cinema before ‘God Save the King’ was over. And Mervyn’s vanity got in the way of ever seriously questioning why it was that Alexei was courting him, an obscure research student, so assiduously, spending so much money and time. I am quite sure that Mervyn knew he was flirting with the KGB. What he didn’t know was just what a dangerous game that could prove to be. Even as he agreed to the Siberia trip, he must have strongly suspected that some time, sooner or later, he would be asked to pay the bill. But adventurousness – again, that now longburied adventurousness – won out. Whatever happened, it would be exciting. And wasn’t excitement exactly what he had come to Russia to find?

  Flying over Siberia at night, in winter, there is an eerie sense of having flown off the edge of the world. The dreamscape of snow-covered forests below seems to stretch black and unbroken not just to the horizon but beyond, for ever. When I visited Baikal in 1995, en route to Mongolia – which my father never did get to see – I flew in a tiny Soviet aeroplane, a vintage An-24 which must have begun its long career in my father’s day. It lurched in the slipstream, the roar of the propellers drowning out conversation as we flew on into the night, the light dying behind us in the west.

  Solzhenitsyn named the netw
ork of prison camps which stretched across the Soviet Union the Gulag Archipelago. But in truth all of Russia is an archipelago, a string of isolated islands of warmth and light strung out in a hostile sea of emptiness. Somewhere in this very vastness of Russia lies one key to the Russian experience. The vagueness and fatalism born of living in a land which once took half a year to cross; a chronic resignation before the whims of authority born of the historic impossibility of communicating with the outposts of such an ungovernably huge empire. When I read of Peter the Great’s famous ukaz (decree) angrily ordering his citizens to obey all previous ukazy, I pictured him as a mad radio operator sending indignant messages into space, and receiving only faint cosmic echoes in reply.

  Phone lines, satellite TV and Aeroflot appear to have brought Russia closer together, but in some ways electronic communications only serve to deepen the sense of uncrossable distance. Russia remains the largest country in the world; even after the loss of 17 per cent of its territory after the fall of the Soviet Union, it still spans eleven time zones. A former State TV cameraman once told me that the television signal of Vremya, the Soviet nightly news program me, had to be repeatedly bounced off the stratosphere to compensate for the seventy-degree curvature of the earth between Moscow and the far-eastern extremity of the country at Chukotka. By the mid-1990s one could easily direct-dial the Pacific coastal regions of Kamchatka or Magadan, but the time difference was almost the same as to New York. The final section of highway linking European Russia to the Far East was completed only in 2002 – before that hundreds of miles of makeshift road ran upon the ice of the frozen Amur River, and were passable only in winter.

  No wonder, then, that most of those born to life in these great, empty spaces grow up with an instinctive sense of helplessness in the face of the impossible physical realities which define their lives. These physical limitations seem to make the constraints of human making all the easier to accept. ‘God is high up and the Tsar is far,’ goes the old Russian saying, and it could be no coincidence that one of the central teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church was of smireniye, or submission to the burden the Lord has given believers to bear. The combined hostility of distance and climate seems to conspire to wither the spirit and humble the ambition of all but the strongest. Anton Chekhov caught this ennui in his Three Sisters, a study of three young women crushed by provincial isolation, their youthful hopes and spirit slowly but inexorably extinguished by Russia’s infinite inertia. Even life in Moscow, where the sophisticated élite is cocooned from the isolation and medieval darkness of the village, seems defined in a powerful but intangible way by the greatness of the land that surrounds it, just as life on board ship is pervaded by a knowledge of the deep, cold sea all around.