Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky

by Oleg Gordievsky

  The man gave me an odd look, as if not sure what I was up to: like everyone else in frontier areas he was on his guard, but he stopped and opened the doors. Once on the road, I crouched with my head held low as if throwing up, and then walked a few steps backward, in case he decided to wait. After a moment he revved up his engine irritably and moved off, leaving me alone.

  Silence descended on the forest. Tall conifers were mixed with smaller, scrubby trees like birch and aspen. On the edges of the road and in the glades rank grass grew to a height of almost two metres. With water lying in pools among the undergrowth, the humidity was unbelievable — and so were the mosquitoes, which came whining at me in dozens when I stood still for a few seconds.

  I began walking round the loop-road, and soon found a huge rock, which I took to be the rendezvous point. Yet it was still only 11 a.m., and my friends were not due to arrive until 2.30. What was I to do? Wait there for three and a half hours? I felt taut with nervous excitement, but also disorientated and irresolute. All the time I was thinking: if the KGB come after me and try to trace my route, who will remember me? The girl guard on the train, for one, and now the bus driver. My best course was to keep out of sight, to curl up in the undergrowth and wait for time to pass; yet the mosquitoes made the idea intolerable, and I decided to go on into Viborg where I could get something to eat.

  Out on the main road again, I fell in with some sort of a tramp: a friendly fellow, courteous and well-spoken, wearing an ancient jacket full of holes, who reminded me of the alcoholic old beggars who frequent Waterloo Station. What he was doing out there, ambling through the forest, I did not ask, but I liked him instinctively, and because I was so excited, got into conversation. For a while we walked together, that harmless crank and I; then I heard a car coming up from behind, hailed it, and got a lift, leaving him alone on the road.

  The car was a Lada, private and well-kept, and the driver looked an interesting character: young, obviously successful, probably an official of the KGB or the Ministry of the Interior. Luckily for me he did not feel like talking, but kept one of his many cassettes of Western pop music playing loudly. That suited me fine — but he was not too rich or too proud to accept the three roubles I gave him when he set me down in the southern outskirts of Viborg.

  The town looked a typical Soviet settlement, faceless and colourless with a barracks and badly built blocks of flats. But there was also a plastic-and-glass cafeteria, which was just what I wanted, so I went in and bought myself lunch — chicken again. I also got two bottles of beer, one to drink with my meal, and one to take with me.

  As I was finishing, in came a group of three young men who immediately struck me as sinister. In my overwrought state I assumed they were KGB surveillance, on the look-out for potential defectors — as teams constantly were in border areas. There they sat in their smart jackets, not buying anything, scanning round — and soon their attention settled on me, the alien.

  Leaving the café without a backward glance, I began to walk southwards, in the direction of Leningrad. Only after four hundred metres or so did I allow myself to look round. The road was empty. On I went, pouring with sweat, partly from the heat, partly from anxiety. Already it was after 1 p.m. Instead of having too much time, I began to fear being late. I had nearly twenty kilometres to go. The traffic seemed to have died away in the noonday heat, as if everybody was having a long lunch or a Saturday siesta. Then, at last, as I was becoming desperate, I heard an engine behind me, and saw a lorry approaching.

  The driver had a pleasant, open Russian face, friendly and attractive. ‘What do you want to go there for?’ he asked, when I named the bus stop. ‘There’s nothing within kilometres of that.’

  ‘Ah!’ I said craftily. ‘You don’t know. There are some dachas deep in the woods there, and I’ve got a nice lady waiting for me in one of them.’

  ‘That’s different, then!’ he cried enthusiastically. ‘In you get.’

  My heart went out to that driver: a really nice man, ordinary, relaxed, not obsessed by the proximity of the border, he was simply enjoying his job. After all the sinister people in Moscow, and the hostile youngsters in the train, it was a glorious relief to be with somebody normal. I was so glad to be back on schedule, with food and drink inside me, and another bottle of beer to look forward to, that when he put me out at the bus stop I offered him four roubles.

  ‘Bratik,’ he said, ‘Little Brother, it’s too much. Three’s more than enough.’ So I gave him three and said goodbye.

  Back in the undergrowth by the marker stone, I found my nervousness building up again, and I conceived the idea that I had too many things in my bag. One object which I certainly did not need any more was the atlas, so I took it out and threw it away under the stone. A few seconds later I realized what an idiotic move that was: if the KGB found the map, it would give everything away. So I nipped across, recovered it, and put it back in my luggage.

  Mosquitoes tormented me, whining round my head in a continuous swarm: I swatted and cursed them, and one by one the minutes ticked away. Then, just before 2 p.m., I heard the sound of an engine. Peering out through the tall grass, desperately hoping to see a car, I found that the vehicle was a bus, evidently carrying wives to the military base. When I glimpsed their faces in the windows, I knew that, from their vantage point, they could see down into the grass, so I hurled myself flat on the marshy ground until the vehicle had gone.

  The second bottle of beer tasted wonderfully refreshing. I enjoyed every drop, then threw the bottle away — only to realize that, for the second time, I might be presenting the KGB with giveaway evidence. The bottle must have my fingerprints on it. Quickly retrieving it, I smeared it all over with mud, and then jettisoned it once more.

  The magic pick-up moment came and went: 2.30, 2.35, 2.40. At 2.45 my impatience reached breaking point. Crazy as it was, I decided I must go to meet my rescuers, so that they could sweep me up a few seconds earlier. I came out of the grass, walked quickly round the loop-road, and set off along the highway in the direction of Leningrad. Yet I had gone only a few yards when, thank God, my brain started to function again. I saw that what I was doing was an act of real madness: almost certainly my rescuers would have a KGB tail. If they spotted me waiting by the road, all would be lost.

  It was as if I had woken from a nightmare. Running back, I dived into the grass and said out loud, ‘Control yourself!’ I resolved to wait indefinitely: after all, I had no alternative.

  At last I heard the sound of engines. Peering out, I saw two cars pull up right opposite. Two men got out, one of them the fellow who had passed me munching at the signal site in Moscow. To my surprise, I saw that two women had come as well.

  To me, in my frenzy to get going, they all seemed extraordinarily lethargic, moving slowly and jerkily, as though they, too, were in the middle of a nightmare. In fact they were almost as tense as I was, but their nervousness expressed itself in a different way. The man I recognized stared at me, not certain that this unshaven creature with blood on his temple was really their target. But in a few seconds my sense of urgency got through to them.

  ‘Keep these separate, please,’ I said, handing him my shoes. ‘They may have radioactive dust on them.’ He put them into a plastic bag, and opened the boot of the second car, for me to climb in. Then he closed the lid, and I was imprisoned in stifling darkness. At once the car began to roll, and loud pop music burst out over the stereo system. Normally I hate that kind of noise, but the British had accurately divined that in these extraordinary circumstances loud, obvious rhythms would have a soothing effect and prevent my mind becoming too active.

  I knew from my instructions that I would have been furnished with sedative pills, a flask of cold water, a container into which I could urinate if need be, and an aluminium space-blanket, to pull over me when we reached the frontier, in case any of the guards turned an infra-red heat-detector on the car. Feeling round, I found all these items, and immediately took one of the sedative pills. I als
o began trying to remove my jacket; but, pinned down as I was on my right side in that constricted space, I had a dire struggle.

  While I was thus engaged, the convoy survived a minor crisis. As I expected, the cars indeed had a surveillance vehicle on their tail; but by clever timing they had gradually increased speed and pulled away from it over the last few kilometres before the pick-up point until they had a lead of some ninety seconds, so that when they pulled off on to the loop road, they were out of sight, concealed by the dense undergrowth of the forest and by the bulk of the marker stone. The KGB team went on ahead until they reached the next GAI (traffic police) checkpoint. There they asked if two other cars had been past, and were disconcerted when the answer was ‘No’; but just as they were trying to work out what had happened, along came the convoy after all. After such a short time-lapse, the KGB concluded that the party must have popped into the forest to answer calls of nature.

  Inside the boot I was battling against claustrophobia. I had at last succeeded in divesting myself of my jacket, but the battle had left me hotter than ever. Then the first of the sedatives began to take effect, and I settled down as best I could. I knew when we were passing through Viborg from the unevenness of the road-surface and the sound of other traffic, and I took advantage of the noise to clear my throat a few times — something I knew I would not be able to do when we reached the border.[1]

  To cut short a saga of desperate uncertainty, we went through five frontier barriers in less than half an hour. At the first, I pulled the space-blanket into position over me and lay like a baking corpse while negotiations proceeded outside. The pop music was still playing, and after only three or four minutes we went forward once more. At the penultimate stop the engine was switched off, and the music died with it. In the silence I began to hear women’s voices speaking in Russian, and deduced that, having passed safely through the KGB border controls, we were now with the customs. Both Englishmen spoke some Russian, and I heard them chatting to the officials about the problems incurred by the youth festival. The customs women were complaining about how exhausted they were at dealing with the huge influx of Finns, many of them drunk. Then I heard the whining and snuffling of dogs, too close for comfort. Little did I know that one of my rescuers’ wives was carefully feeding the Alsatians with potato crisps to divert their attention from the car.

  All the time I was thinking, What happens if someone opens the boot? The British, I knew, would have to disown me. They would feign amazement and cry, ‘By God, a provocation!’, claiming that they had no idea who I was. They would say they knew nothing about me, and that I must have been secretly foisted on them while they were having breakfast in a Leningrad hotel. If that happened, they themselves might well be thrown into gaol. As for myself, I had no plan but to surrender.

  Six or seven minutes seemed like an hour. My clothes were sodden with sweat. Breathing had become a labour. I had to concentrate all my resources on keeping still. Then, to my inexpressible relief, I felt the car rock as people climbed back into it: the engine started, the music blasted on again, and we began to roll once more. At least I could shift my cramped limbs...but already we were slowing down again. One more brief halt, and we were off, accelerating hard. Abruptly the pop music stopped, and in its place there burst out the brooding grandeur of Sibelius’s Finlandia. I recognized the piece at once, and knew it was a signal: we were through and into Finland.

  Before the good news could sink in, there came one final scare. The car slowed, stopped and began to reverse. My spirits dived. I felt sure we were being summoned back to the frontier. In fact the driver had overshot a side-road. In a few seconds I felt the vehicle turn, and then it began to bump along the uneven surface of a track. When at last it stopped, I heard voices call out in English.

  When someone opened the boot, I saw blue sky, white clouds and pine trees above me. Best of all, in the middle of that glorious view was the face of Joan, the architect of my escape plan, the wonderful friend who had been my case officer in England. Seeing her, I knew that my troubles were over. Thanks to the courage and ingenuity of my British friends, I had outwitted the entire might of the KGB. I was out! I was safe! I was free!

  Chapter Two – Origins

  My origins were as humble as could be.

  I never met my paternal grandparents, but I know that they lived at Razyezd Yeral, a tiny siding where a few houses stood beside the railway linking the Volga and the southern Urals. My grandfather, Lavrentiy Gordievsky, worked as a ganger on the line, and was responsible for coupling and uncoupling the trains. Family legend recalled that he was once severely injured when he was crushed between buffers, and the accident may have led to his premature retirement. What I find fascinating about him is that he, an ordinary working man far out in the wilds of Tsarist Russia, sent his son Anton Lavrentiyevich, my father, to a college for teachers. No doubt it was a modest establishment, but it was a college of sorts, and it put my father on the road to a successful career.

  He was born at Razyezd Yeral in 1896; all round were enclaves of Bashkirs and Tartars, both of Turkic origin, but that particular district was Russian-speaking, and he grew up with a good command of the language. He must have gone to school locally, and then, when he was eighteen or so, to the college, which I assume was in Chelyabinsk, the nearest large town. There he obtained a sound general education, read widely, and developed an interest in Russian literature. Returning home at the age of twenty-one in 1917, not long before the Bolshevik revolution, he became headmaster of a country school, where he taught all subjects in company with only one other teacher. At that time in the depths of the provinces 80 per cent of the population were peasants, most of them illiterate and without education, so the school must have been fairly basic. All the same, I imagine that my father taught well, since he had a good delivery and a gift for addressing audiences. He was also, I was amazed to discover many years afterwards, leader of the church choir, and later in life, when he had long since rejected all religious beliefs, his early training would surface when, with a good supper and a few glasses of vodka inside him, he would sing traditional hymns in his fine baritone.

  The revolution of October 1917 changed the course of his life. He became an ardent, committed Communist, and remained one till the end of his days. Exactly what part he played in the events of 1917 and 1918 I have never been able to discover, but I believe that he joined the Socialist Revolutionaries, the biggest left-wing party which was particularly strong in the countryside. The SRs were not merely socialist, but also agrarian: their leaders did not agree with the Marxist principle that the industrial proletariat must be in the vanguard of the revolutionary movement. On the contrary, they proclaimed that it was the Russian peasants in the country who mattered most, which made them strong in rural towns. During 1917 the party split into left and right wings, and it was the left wing that joined the Communist Party. From the end of 1917 until the middle of 1918 Lenin’s government was a coalition of Bolsheviks and left-wing SRs (many of whose extremist radicals were members of the Cheka, forerunner of the KGB). For those few months the SRs were an acceptable party in their own right, but after complications in the summer of 1918, the Bolsheviks dissolved them.

  My father never gave any clear account of his role in these events but he told me that he joined the Communist Party as a candidate member in 1919, and then as a full member in 1920. (If, in official eyes, he had remained a member of the proletariat, which he was, he would have been entitled to full membership straight away; that he had become a teacher made him bourgeois and he had to take up candidate membership first.)

  In 1920 he was sent to Ohrenburg, in Kazakhstan, to organize the expropriation of food from the peasants. Because this was a brutal operation, often carried out violently, he never cared to speak about it in detail, but essentially it consisted of the forcible seizure of grain, which was needed to feed the army and the population of the big cities where the Bolsheviks were strongest. Later, he said only that he had taken part
in the food-collecting operation. Certainly for years afterwards he remained a functionary in the food sector — the central collection of grain, and the sale of it to the West — but he was never an economist or agricultural specialist. Rather, he was an exceptionally conscientious member of the Party, ideologically strong, with a gift for public speaking, who happened to be drafted into food.

  Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, almost everyone in State service became a member of the Communist Party, which at its zenith claimed 20 million members. People signed up not out of ideological conviction but simply because it was impossible to make any worthwhile career without joining; but to my father as a young man Communism was a religion, and the Party was like God. Just as for Roman Catholics the Church is always right, so for Soviet Communists in the 1920s the Party was supreme — a man’s father, mother and god all rolled into one. To doubt its authority or wisdom was to go against every notion of duty, honour and commitment, and my father dedicated himself to an ideal in which he believed passionately.

  For us, his children, much of his early life remained cloaked in mystery. Just as he preferred not to talk about the food-gathering, so he said little about his own family. My mother once mentioned that he had a brother and a sister, but by the time I was born they had disappeared, and I never met this phantom uncle and aunt. The same was true of his parents, who seem to have vanished in the mighty upheavals that followed the revolution and the civil war.