Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky

by Oleg Gordievsky

  At some date in the 1920s he got married for the first time — but to whom, I never knew, for he concealed the details from us. Uncertainty about this key event tantalized my elder brother Vasilko and me for years: once, just after I had joined the KGB, I was thrilled by the chance discovery of another Gordievksy, who seemed the right age to be my half-brother. Suddenly coming on his file, I whipped it open in the hope that I had stumbled on a long-lost relation — but no, he was Anatoli Georgiyevich, a Far Eastern specialist born in Vladivostok, whose patronymic showed that he had no connection with us. Whether or not my father had a child by that first marriage we never discovered; no doubt he concealed these details of his past so as not to upset his second family.

  Obviously he did well at his job in the food sector, for in 1931 he was sent as deputy leader of an expedition to Georgia, which was then relatively unknown in Moscow. The aim of the team — part scientific, part practical — was to assess the agricultural potential of an area recognized as a valuable source of citrus fruit, but also producing other fruit, tea and cotton. The expedition was led by a prominent Polish Communist who had been gaoled in his own country for subversive activities, and then swapped for Polish Catholic priests held prisoner in Russia: a Jew, he was an able man, and he got on well with my father, who generally liked Jews, finding them warm, intelligent people whose lack of political rights in Russia gave them a leaning towards the Bolsheviks.[2]

  Not that the 1931 expedition was taxing for its leaders. They must have made various research trips to the interior of Georgia, but they also spent several summer months based at Gagra, a lovely resort on the Black Sea coast, with a fine beach, luxuriant vegetation and mountains rising steeply behind the little town. In those romantic surroundings my father fell in love with one of the junior members of his team, Olga Nikolayevna Gornova.

  My mother also had far-flung antecedents. In the second half of the nineteenth century her family lived in the Cossack-dominated territory near Rostov, south of the Don; but there the Cossacks were the elite, difficult and arrogant, and my grandparents belonged to the second tier of relative newcomers, who were not readily admitted to the higher echelons of society. This they found uncomfortable — so when, in the 1890s, they heard that the Tsarist government was offering free land to Russians prepared to settle as colonists in Central Asia, they seized the chance, piled all their possessions into a cart, and trekked eastwards for several months into the wilds of what was then called Turkestan (it is now Kazakhstan). There they were allocated some land near Chimkent. My grandmother always, and my mother often, spoke of Turkestan rather than Central Asia.

  For a while they worked their new patch, but then my grandfather made some kind of a deal, as a result of which he became manager of a stud farm on the outskirts of the city. The owner of the establishment, a retired army officer, was known as the pomeshtchik, or landlord, and it may be that my grandfather allowed him to use some of our land in return for being appointed manager of the stud. He and my grandmother both loved horses: even the smell of manure was wonderful to them, for horses were their life. Some of the stud’s output was sold to the Russian army, but every now and then my father would take the latest batch and herd them across the steppes to Urumchi, in Sinkiang, where they sold at a good price. (At that time Russia had close ties with Sinkiang, but the Chinese government were not much interested in their remote western province.)

  The pomeshtchik, being a good-natured man, paid for several of my grandparents’ seven children to go to school. First came Anna, Aleksandr and Yevgenia, with my mother, Olga, fourth, in the middle, and then Konstantin, Valentina and Faina. Anna and Aleksandr were born early enough to receive a full education; Yevgenia got all but one year, but my mother had been at school for only two years when the revolution swept away the entire system of private education. After an interval she began again at the United Soviet School in Chimkent.

  In Kazakhstan, as elsewhere, the Bolshevik uprising threw everything into chaos. The stud farm was destroyed and my grandfather lost his job. When the civil war began in 1919, boys who had been good friends at school rushed off aged eighteen or nineteen to fight on opposite sides. Most of the students from the Gymnasium turned out for the Whites, fighting for Admiral Kolchak, partly because they were naturally patriotic, and partly because they sensed a tyrannical tendency among the Bolsheviks; but, according to my grandmother, the situation became so confused that it was often difficult to remember who was on which side.

  Somehow my grandparents survived, and in the early 1920s when Lenin launched his New Economic Policy, which aimed to restore agriculture and get some small private industries going again, my grandfather was one of the many people who took the initiative seriously. Having long dreamed of owning a water-mill, which would grind corn for the farmers of the district, he now put all his savings into just such an enterprise. For a year or two it flourished, but then, in 1928, the government seized it from him, and he was classified as a kulak, or rich peasant. He died in 1931, a broken man.

  My mother, meanwhile, had gone to Moscow, probably in 1927 when she was twenty, to train at the Moscow Economic Institute, with the aim of becoming a statistician. For a girl brought up in the provinces, this must have been a drastic change; but she persevered with her studies, and was in the fourth year of her course when, as a trainee, she gained a place on the expedition to the Caucasus. At the age of twenty-four she had fine black hair and handsome dark eyes — in photographs I see resemblances to my own daughter Anna — and when she met Anton Lavrentiyevich Gordievsky, they quickly fell in love.

  Not that they got married: it was regarded as bad manners for a Communist to go through any form of wedding ceremony. The fashionable leftist ideology then prevalent held that it was both unnecessary and undesirable for a man to marry: if he loved a woman, and she bore his children, it was purely a matter of honour that he should stay with her and support her. There was no need for any such foolish and archaic ceremony as a marriage service. So in 1932 my parents began to live together in a flat in Moscow, and my brother was born in 1933. (They did eventually get married in 1945, after Stalin had issued a new set of laws in an attempt to restore family life and increase the number of children being born. By then they had three children, and had been together thirteen years. Because both their surnames began with G — Gordievsky and Gornova — I believed for years that only men and women with the same initials married each other.)

  Until 1932 my father had continued working in food production, distribution and trade, always more as a member of the Party than as an economist. He used to recall, with some sadness, that in the 1920s he had been considered as a candidate to be sent on a Soviet trade mission to Hamburg, and if he had gone, he might well have remained in the Ministry of Foreign Trade for the rest of his career. Yet it was probably fortunate for him that he did not go since, during the Great Terror of the 1930s, officials of that ministry suffered badly from Stalin’s repressions, and he could easily have been liquidated.

  Instead, he was called up into the OGPU, forerunner of the NKVD, which itself was the forerunner of the KGB. For ease of reference, I shall describe him, henceforth, as a member of the NKVD or KGB, which was already a huge organization, and growing fast, an independent department with influence and power as great as that of the Red Army — in effect an empire within the State. At that date the Party was sending its best sons to strengthen the Soviet armed forces, and my father became an officer of the Polit Directorate of the Borderguard Troops, his job being to act as the eyes and ears of the Party among the soldiers, lecture members of the armed forces on the political situation, and carry out political indoctrination. I imagine he cut rather an academic figure, for he wore steel-rimmed pince-nez and followed the German custom of keeping his head completely shaved — perhaps to conceal that he had lost most of his hair in early middle age.

  Membership of the NKVD brought valuable privileges, not the least of which was a place to live. Like everything in Moscow, accom
modation was short: before the revolution the city had had a population of about 800,000, but after rapid social, economic and industrial development it grew to 8 million in the 1970s. During the 1920s and 1930s there was no mass-building programme, no answer to the population explosion: the only new blocks being built contained flats for senior officials and officers, and most people were crammed into the big old apartments from which the bourgeois inhabitants had been evicted. A normal flat, which before the revolution had had four bedrooms, a sitting room, dining room and servants’ room, now had a different family living in each room and sharing common facilities. My parents were lucky enough to be in a flat shared with only two other families.

  All the same, their life in the 1930s was a dire struggle. In the famine of 1933-34 food ran out: people arriving in Moscow from the Ukraine and the centre of Russia told appalling stories of death from hunger. The Ukrainians, in particular, felt that the starvation was deliberate, that Stalin was punishing their nation. Certainly troops were sent out to the villages to exact the norm of grain and other produce from every oblast (province) and rayon (district); most of the soldiers were NKVD, well fed, with their own weapons and uniforms, and commanded by brutal, ideologically dedicated officers. Yet so awful were the scenes of devastation — mothers dying with babies in their arms, people resorting to cannibalism — that even some of these officers committed suicide or had mental breakdowns after directing raids.

  All this, of course, was deeply repugnant to my father: he tried to believe that most of the stories were not true, and that those which were true were somehow inevitable. From later conversations with my mother, I know that he was reluctant to discuss the famine with her, but she, being a more practical and down-to-earth person, talked about it a good deal, especially with her own mother, my grandmother, Lukeria Grigoriyevna.

  In Moscow all food was rationed, and ration cards were issued for basic commodities, including soap and flour. The system was particularly tough on old people such as my grandmother, for they were simply left out, and received no cards or rations. Our own family life was made easier with my father being a member of the armed forces. Besides their normal rations, NKVD officers were entitled to something called payok, a share of food available in special shops closed to outsiders. There they could buy small quantities of basic supplies such as eggs, butter, sugar and meat. In spite of this, I often wondered whether my brother, who was born in 1933 and grew up in the worst of the shortages, may have suffered from malnutrition for he was never robust, and even as a young man tired easily.

  Still more difficult for my father to stomach than rationing were Stalin’s political purges, which reached their nadir in the second half of the 1930s. The first show trial took place in Moscow in 1936, another in 1937, and that of Stalin’s old rival Mikhail Bukharin in 1938. The dreaded new phrase ‘Enemy of the People’ was on everyone’s lips, and victims began to disappear at a terrifying rate as the NKVD conceived the notion of ‘concrete results’. Years later, when I was an officer in the KGB, a concrete result was the recruitment of a foreign citizen as a spy for the Soviet Union. In the 1930s the term was the equivalent of vyshka, literally a tower or jumping-off point, but figuratively capital punishment: from on high came the highest penalty, vyshka. NKVD officers were assessed according to the amount of capital punishment they were able to bring about: the number of people shot as a result of their investigations.

  For my father, the worst period came when not merely outsiders but men from within the NKVD itself began to disappear, and the arrests seemed random. The process gathered a momentum of its own as prisoners made wild confessions to escape further torture. When interrogators kept demanding, ‘Who was in the conspiracy?’ men gave any names they could think of, even of people in no way involved, and each new list would feed the flames. You could never tell who might betray you: someone with whom you had had a trivial argument, years before, might denounce you as an Enemy of the People, a terrorist, a spy, an anti-Soviet, a secret Trotskyist — the NKVD had any number of categories of traitor. One of the victims closest to my parents was the Pole who had led the 1931 expedition to the Caucasus. Like most of the Polish Communist Party, who were in exile in the Soviet Union, he was arrested and executed as a foreign spy.[3]

  My father never talked to me about that time, but my mother and grandmother often told me how terrified they were, not least at night when they lay awake listening for the tramp of boots as arrest parties stormed up the communal staircase of the building in which they lived. Of the twenty-eight flats in the block, a quarter were raided. Usually the team took away the man first, and returned for the rest of the family later. In the worst period of all, from the spring of 1937 to the autumn of 1938, there were at least fifteen visits by secret police and their henchmen, torturers and butchers, coming to seize people in the middle of the night. The victims were led out and driven away in black cars known as voronki, or little black ravens, a scene memorably caught by the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko with the line:

  I remember that little van with the slogan BREAD written on it.

  My mother was far too sensible to accept propaganda at face value. Not being brainwashed by going to an office or sitting through interminable speeches at Party meetings and seminars, she retained her sense of proportion and realized that there could not possibly be as many genuine Enemies of the People as the authorities were claiming: criminals and traitors simply could not exist in such numbers. Yet when she protested to my father, he brushed her worries aside and sometimes became indignant. He would quote the slogan, ‘The NKVD is always right!’, and claimed that there must be some good reason behind every arrest. Much later, when I asked him about the techniques of the NKVD in those days, he would say, ‘Oh, I understand the main method was recruiting agents, or secret informers.’ That was true, as far as it went, for in the 1930s the network of contacts became immense, and it was rumoured that the NKVD’s ambition was to turn every third adult into an informer. All the same, I believe my father’s faith in Communism must have been severely tried by the savagery of Stalin’s campaign.

  Even though our immediate family remained intact, retribution fell on my uncle Aleksandr (my mother’s eldest brother), an agronomist, who was arrested in 1938, declared an Enemy of the People, and sentenced to ten years at a prison camp in eastern Siberia — somebody must have denounced him for making critical remarks about the collectivization of agriculture. He managed, however, to turn his ill luck to advantage, for, being a skilled gardener, he began to grow vegetables and became one of the most influential inmates of the camp, producing fresh vegetables for the tables of the KGB bosses. In 1948, when his time was up, he was in theory a free man; but he was not allowed to return home and in effect was an exile. No matter: he became head of an enterprise growing vegetables in greenhouses, and made himself, by Soviet standards, a wealthy man. Then, after Stalin’s death in 1953, he was allowed to come to Moscow, and I saw him for the first time — a lively, amusing and energetic man, looking forward to whatever was left to him. He told me how he had always loved beer but how, during his ten years in the camp, he had never had a drop of alcohol. The prison town was so far from civilization, cut off without roads or railways, that to import beer (which is 95 per cent water) or even vodka (60 per cent water) would have been prohibitively expensive: the only liquor available was spirt, 96 per cent alcohol brought in from Khabarovsk, or sometimes purloined from hospitals and airforce bases. In spite (or perhaps because) of his long deprivation, Aleksandr became a connoisseur of beer, and when he came to Moscow, he made a point of seeking out every variety he could find.

  Alas, after only two years he died of a heart attack, his health undermined by life in the camp. After his arrest in 1938, his wife had been left behind in Samarkand; in due course he heard that she had disassociated herself from him, so he took up with a woman who had also been a prisoner, and began to live with her. She survived him, and became more or less a member of our family, a friendly and kind woman
who visited us often.

  After his death my grandmother decided to fight for his rehabilitation so we could clear his name and recover any confiscated property that might remain. Inevitably the process was slow, because the authorities — in any case bureaucratic and unsympathetic — were besieged by thousands of similar claims; but Lukeria Grigoriyevna pursued the case indefatigably, writing letters, filling in forms and visiting government offices. By then her back was severely bent with arthritis, and she walked leaning forward almost horizontally, with her hands folded on the base of her spine — an attitude which made people ask us why we did not get her some treatment. We had tried but nothing could be done, and I am afraid she must have suffered great pain; but her will was indomitable, and in the end she secured Aleksandr’s certificate of exoneration. By the time I was fifteen I knew his whole story, which I found illustrative and educational.

  Another strong influence was my uncle Konstantin, my mother’s younger brother, a humble, modest man, but one of earthy common sense, who became a veterinary practitioner. At the time when the charlatan biologist Trofim Lysenko was all the rage, with his quack theories that genes did not exist in plants, Konstantin would come to us saying, ‘This is nonsense! It’s incredible. How can anyone listen to him? Of course genes exist. We knew about them before the war.’ Listening to such obvious good sense, I began moving towards the rejection of a society which could habitually commit crimes like persecuting scientists because they told the truth.[4]

  *

  I was born in Moscow on 10 October 1938, just as the blackest period was ending, but my first faint memory dates from the autumn of 1941 when I was nearly three. By then the Germans were bombing Moscow, and together with my brother I was taken down into an unfinished Metro station, which was being used as a shelter. The escalators were not working, so we had to walk down a long flight of steps to a tunnel packed with people.