Stalin's Children

by Owen Matthews

  Summer came, and Mila invited Mervyn to the Vasins’ dacha at Vnukovo, an hour’s drive from the centre of Moscow but already firmly in the Russian hinterland of infinite skies, endless fields, earth privies and water brought in buckets from a well. In the sunshine, Mervyn helped Sasha dig the garden and plant potatoes and cucumbers. In the afternoons they would feed twigs and birch bark into the samovar and drink smoky tea and eat blackcurrant jam as the light faded. Mila and Mervyn would go for long walks in the birch woods, he in a short-sleeved shirt, she in a long cotton print baby-doll dress, pinched at the waist, copied from a picture in a magazine.

  I visited the dacha myself, when I was eight, on a trip to Moscow with my mother and baby sister. I was deeply excited at living in the little wooden house, with its creaking floorboards, filled with the smell of earth and pickles and with dust swirling in beams of summer sunshine. The northern summer days seemed to stretch for ever, the sky cloudless and vast. But however hot the day was, the wheat fields were always damp and filled with frogs and snails. There was a small pond full of miniature perch, one of which I once caught in a jam jar and brought home. My little fish died overnight, and I was so guiltstricken that I buried it ceremoniously in the garden, digging the thick earth with my fingers.

  The garden ran riot, despite the efforts of my uncle Sasha to tend it. Lenina used to say scornfully that he’d planted three sacks of potatoes and harvested two. This may have had something to do with the fact that we boys – oddly enough I remember no awkward period of shy integration with the other village boys, we were immediately a gang – would surreptitiously dig them up in the afternoons while the grown-ups were having their naps, replace the potato plant carefully in the ground and repair with our haul to the woods, where we’d bake the potatoes in the ash of our camp fire.

  In the late afternoons we would sometimes go into the forest to collect berries and mushrooms. This ancient habit seemed part of the Russian psyche; everyone in the village did it obsessively. After the breezy summer heat in the fields and dusty lanes the forest was dark, still and musty. It was a classic Russian birch forest, endless and disorientating and silent. I was always afraid of clearing away the dead leaves to expose the mushrooms at the foot of the trees after a huge millipede ran on to my hand. The Russian spirit was here, it smelled of Russia. Out of sight of the path it seemed primeval, full of shadows and whispers, unlike any English wood.

  The old samovar was there from my father’s day, and I would collect dry pine cones to stoke the fire, which never quite seemed to boil the water as it was supposed to. As we drank warm tea and ate homemade jam, I would ask Sasha about the war, and his tank. He was a good-natured man, and answered my questions patiently. An old local woman known as Babka Simka, who helped my aunt about the house, chastised me for my awful ignorance of the history of the Great Patriotic War, but I persisted. Later, my village friends and I would play at Civil War, Reds versus Whites. The greatest honour would be to pull a wooden model of a Vickers machine gun made by one of the village boys’ grandfathers on its little trolley. As we trundled it down the rutted main street past my aunt’s dacha, Sasha would sometimes shout, ‘Peace to the land of the Soviets!’ in encouragement as we passed.

  Back in Moscow, on the evening of 27 March 1964, Mervyn was having dinner with Mila in her room. He was a methodical man, and had resolved to wait for a while before proposing to her. But as they went into the kitchen to put the dirty dishes into the sink, he suddenly blurted out, ‘Let’s get registered!’

  ‘Oh Mervusya,’ said Mila, using the diminutive of his name she had invented. They embraced in the greasy warmth of the kitchen. But she didn’t say yes. Instead, she said Mervyn should think about it, in case he wanted to change his mind. They kissed goodbye in the corridor, and Mervyn walked to the Metro.

  The next day Mervyn stopped by, and Mila accepted. Immediately, they went to the mansion on Griboyedov Street which housed the Central Palace of Weddings, the only place foreigners were allowed to marry. In the secular Soviet Union, couples were married not in the name of God but in the name of the State, presided over by busts of Lenin and accompanied by a taped burst of Prokofiev from a machine manned by a scowling old woman. Mervyn and Mila waited in line outside the director’s office during the busy lunch hour to put their names down for a wedding date. They were told that the earliest slot was nearly three months away, on 9 June, and they took it. They left with an invitation form certifying their marriage date, and were duly issued with vouchers for champagne which they could redeem in special shops. On the street they parted, my father taking the trolleybus to the Lenin Library and my mother going back to work.

  The long Moscow winter was drawing to its end. Mervyn would sit at Mila’s tiny table, making notes from his books in a pool of lamplight, while Mila sat on the bed and knitted. She bought Mervyn records and books on her way home from work, where all the girls were curious and envious of her tall, shy fiancé. Most nights he would take the last Metro home to his room in the university, but sometimes he would stay, the two of them squeezed on to the tiny bed like teenagers, and Mervyn would tiptoe out before the neighbours rose. They had both, at last, achieved happiness.

  * * *

  Their idyll was bitterly short. In May, after a tedious meeting with his supervisor at Moscow State University, Mervyn noticed an unusually heavy KGB team had been assigned to follow him. He had an appointment with a university friend, Igor Vail, that afternoon, but because of the goons Mervyn called and suggested they meet another time because, Mervyn explained in unmistakable euphemism, ‘I don’t like to come round under certain circumstances.’

  Mervyn was nervous because Vail had bought a red sweater from him a few weeks before. Mervyn was due to collect the money, which Igor hadn’t been able to pay him straight away. Mervyn had also given Igor an old brown suit to give in to the kommisionka, or second-hand shop, which only a Soviet citizen could do. Technically, both actions were illegal, as was all private commerce in the Soviet Union. Igor had taken the suit, saying he could get a better price from an African student at the university. Igor sounded unnaturally tense when Mervyn telephoned, but insisted that he come round anyway.

  Vail shared a room in a communal apartment on Kropotkinskaya Street with his mother. He greeted Mervyn overwarmly at the door. His mother was not there, but two middle-aged men in suits sat on the divan. ‘My two friends,’ blurted Igor, ‘are interested in buying that brown suit that you wanted to sell, remember?’

  ‘Yes, we are interested in anything you want to sell,’ said one of the men stiffly.

  There was a silence. Mervyn turned to leave. This was obviously a hideously amateurish set up, and with rising panic he realized who must have organized it, and why. Igor continued to smile, desperately. The man who had spoken got up from the sofa and produced a red police identity card. Mervyn, he said, was under arrest for the crime of economic speculation.

  The detectives drove Igor and Mervyn in silence to the nearest police station, the Sixtieth Militia Precinct on Maly Mogiltsevsky Pereulok, just behind Smolenskaya Square. After a short wait Mervyn was shown in to the office of the duty investigator, a Captain Mirzuyev, who painstakingly composed a long account of the incident, dwelling on Mervyn’s crimes as a corrupter of Soviet youth and a capitalist speculator. But the accused refused to sign, and asked the militiaman to show him to a telephone. Mervyn knew perfectly well who was behind the whole incident and could, at least, feel a little superior at the fact that the calibre of his persecutors was higher than that of a mere police captain.

  ‘I need to call the KGB,’ he told Mirzuyev, who took him immediately to the front desk phone.

  Mervyn called a number Alexei had given to him years before, which he had in his notebook. An unknown woman answered, who seemed unperturbed by the news that Mervyn was calling from a police station. She took his details and told him to wait.

  Half an hour later, Alexei walked into the interview room in a sharp suit, dapper as ever.
They had not seen each other for nearly three years. He eyed Mervyn disapprovingly and went through the pretence of asking what had happened. Mervyn, deciding it best to play Alexei’s game, told him the details of what had happened. ‘You realize it’s a very serious charge, Mervyn,’ Alexei said coldly. ‘Very serious.’

  There were few formalities. Alexei simply led Mervyn out of the police station and into a waiting car, a ZiL. Alexei has come up in the world, thought Mervyn as they drove up into the Lenin Hills and back to the university. Alexei tried to make small talk, politely asking about Mervyn’s mother. Mervyn replied that she was ill, but would be a lot worse if she knew what trouble her son was in. ‘Oh yes, Mervyn,’ said Alexei. ‘You are in trouble.’

  They had little else to say to each other as they sat side by side on the ZiL’s wide back seat.

  * * *

  Later, alone at night in his room at the university looking over the lights of the city, Mervyn thought hard about what to do. He assumed that Alexei would soon renew his old offer to work ‘for the people of the Soviet Union’. There were six weeks to go before his planned wedding day, and the Soviets could very easily expel him or imprison him for up to two years if he played his cards wrong. He was on borrowed time.

  Mervyn told Mila the next day that the KGB had staged a ‘provocation’ against him. Mila, who could be so unreasonable over trivialities, was calm in crisis. She poured Mervyn a cup of tea. ‘Well that’s life in Moscow,’ she said, and served him some of her jam on a saucer to eat with a spoon. Somehow, Mervyn hoped that he could continue stalling the KGB long enough to marry Lyudmila and carry her away to England for ever.

  Unfortunately, the KGB had other plans. There were a series of tense meetings in the Metropole Hotel with his old antagonists, Alexei and his boss, Alexander Fyodorovich Sokolov. Mervyn tried to prevaricate, telling them of his great love and sympathy for the cause of international peace and understanding of peoples. The KGB men were getting impatient and pressed hard for a straight answer. Sokolov, for one, had been brought up in an era when such caprices were customarily dealt with by the simple application of brutality. He cut acidly through Mervyn’s floundering – would he work for the KGB or not? He became aggressive, banging the table, infuriated by my father’s increasingly desperate evasions. At the end of what was to be their last meeting, it was very clear that the KGB’s patience was fast running out, if it had not done so already.

  For as long as I have known of it, my father’s defiance of the KGB has struck me as a noble and principled act. But on another level I also find it incomprehensible. It has occurred to me, as I write this, that if I had been forced to choose between being separated from the woman I loved and signing a paper saying I would work for the KGB, I would have unhesitatingly signed on the dotted line. Whatever my private feelings for the KGB, I would have considered the cause of my personal happiness supreme above all others. I cannot decide if this is a difference between my and my father’s generation, or one of temperament between us personally.

  My father was born into a generation whose fathers had walked in good order into withering machine-gun fire for King and Country. He grew up in a conformist age, and though much in his life was remarkably individualistic, the idea of betraying his country and capitulating to the blandishments of the KGB, never mind how delicately phrased, was something he could not countenance. But his refusal wasn’t a question of choosing conformity over the extravagant folly of treachery. His deeply held sense of personal honour simply would not let him do it; despite a lifelong cynicism about politics, he never had doubts about his love for his country. He was to pay a heavy price for his principles.

  A note arrived, on thin official notepaper, announcing that my parents’ wedding date had been cancelled because ‘a criminal case has been opened’ against Mervyn – which wasn’t actually true, as the police case was still at the investigation stage. The KGB had also called Valery Golovitser in for a long series of interrogations, on condition of strict secrecy, but he nevertheless let Mervyn know through mutual friends that the hammer had fallen on him. My father, by now thoroughly scared of what the KGB’s next move would be, realized that the consequences of his stand were beginning to be felt by his friends.

  One way, Mervyn thought, to stop this spiral of revenge might be to buttonhole the Labour leader Harold Wilson, at that time still leader of the Opposition. Wilson was in Moscow for a meeting with the Soviets, who took a keen interest in Labour’s chances at the next election. Mervyn took a trolleybus to the National Hotel on the evening Wilson arrived, and used his foreignness as a talisman to brush past the hotel security and find his way to Wilson’s room. Wilson himself answered Mervyn’s knock, but when he began to explain his predicament and to ask him to intervene personally with Khrushchev, Wilson, smelling trouble, politely but firmly refused. A visit two days later to Wilson’s shadow foreign secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker, was even more firmly rebuffed. Walker advised my father, fatuously, to contact the embassy.

  Mervyn and Lyudmila decided to show up at the Palace of Weddings on Griboyedov Street on their allocated date, regardless of the cancellation. Mila wore a linen wedding dress embroidered with pearls, and Mervyn carried a heavy red gold wedding ring he had bought for the occasion in his jacket pocket.

  My father, in a gamble which ultimately was to do nothing but hasten the end, invited an entourage of foreign correspondents to cover his attempt to marry. Victor Louis of the Evening News, a mysterious character of Russian birth who was the doyen of the foreign press in Moscow, was present, as well as at least a dozen KGB goons. In the event, the wedding palace’s director wisely chose to stay away from the building all day. Her stubborn deputy refused to marry the couple, saying that their reservation had been cancelled on orders from ‘the administration’. Louis battled bravely on their behalf, pressing the deputy for a ‘valid legal reason’ for refusing to marry the couple. The bureaucrats retreated behind the old Soviet tactic of doing nothing for hours on end, and eventually their supplicants’ energy dissolved into despair, and as evening fell everyone went home.

  My father sensed that the inevitable reprisal after his failed publicity stunt was not far away, and went to ground in Lyudmila’s flat. The foreign press, finding him missing from his room at the university, reported that he had disappeared. For two days, Mila and Mervyn clung to the illusion that a miracle might happen, trying to keep the terrible rip-tides of the world at bay outside the flimsy door of her room. Mila called in sick to work, and the two of them spent the days walking on the Arbat arm in arm, or locked in their little room reading and talking. But the shared telephone of the kommunalka ruined their desperate attempt to suspend time. Mervyn was urgently wanted at the British embassy.

  One diplomat and one of the embassy’s resident spooks stood waiting for him at the entrance to the Chancery, and took him down to the ‘bubble’, a supposedly surveillanceproof little booth where they could talk without being overheard. The reason for this cloak-and-dagger business was to inform Mervyn that the Foreign Office ‘had reason to believe that Mila was a KGB plant’ . No evidence for this assertion was offered. In what Mervyn later recalled as one of the proudest moments of his life, prouder even than his refusal to work for Alexei, he stood up in disgust and walked out of the room, and out of the embassy, without saying another word.

  But though his disgust was genuine enough, the bravado was forced. Now truly desperate, his natural shyness overcome by panic and the rising sense of imminent catastrophe, my father took the trolleybus back to his little refuge on Starokonushenny Pereulok to await the inevitable. The next day, 20 June, two British embassy officials called at the apartment to deliver a letter. The presence of so many foreigners caused a sensation among Mila’s whispering neighbours.

  The letter informed my father that the embassy had received an official letter from the Soviet Foreign Ministry to the effect that one William Haydn Mervyn Matthews, graduate student, was now considered persona non grata in the
Soviet Union and was to leave immediately. Minutes later, a uniformed militiaman and a druzhinnile, or civilian helper, rang the door bell. Mervyn had been living at the apartment without registration, the militiaman said, and he must come with them. He had little choice.

  They drove quickly through central Moscow – the streets were still almost empty of traffic then – skirting Lubyanka Square, which for a nasty moment Mervyn thought might be their final destination, and instead heading up Chernyshevsky Street to OVIR, the passport and registration office. There, Mervyn was served with formal notice that his visa had expired and that he should leave immediately. A British embassy staffer present volunteered to help to find a place on an otherwise terribly crowded plane to London the next day, 21 June 1964. Mervyn was so disgusted that he refused to say a word in English, forcing the embassy man to have every word of his conversation with the officials laboriously translated.

  They spent their last night together at Mila’s flat. Mervyn didn’t bother to return to the university to pack his things. Both he and Mila were almost dumb with grief. In the morning she accompanied Mervyn in a taxi to Vnukovo Airport, grey-faced and in shock. They embraced. As Mervyn went through the barrier to passport control and out of her life, probably for ever, Mila was overwhelmed with grief no less bitter than that she had felt when her parents had been taken away from her.

  ‘God, what terrible minutes I spent there at the airport. I stood alone in the corner, watching your plane, overflowing with tears,’ Mila wrote to Mervyn a few days later. ‘The taxi drivers were trying to help, asking what the matter was; they said they’d take me for free if I didn’t have the money. I couldn’t leave for a long time, I hung around there, hoping a miracle would happen and you would return.’