Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky

by Oleg Gordievsky

  On the evening of the day he died, back at home, I was fiddling as usual with my primitive radio, a Baltika, when suddenly through the roar of jamming I heard a voice saying in Russian, ‘He was the worst tyrant in the history of mankind, the greatest criminal and executioner the world has ever known...His victims number millions.’ Incredible statements! I listened spellbound. Never in my life had I heard anything like this — it was so different, so dramatic, so sensational.[6] And yet, I had a vague feeling that such ideas were not entirely new. Instinctively I felt I knew the truth of them already, even if I had never dared to articulate it. I started to remember the discussions between my father and mother, all those years ago, about Enemies of the People, neighbours disappearing, my own uncle sitting for ten years in a labour camp, without reason. Now I recalled how a couple of Father’s acquaintances had come to supper, and how in their conversation they had dropped hints that the camps were full of perfectly ordinary people — not thugs or criminals, but political prisoners. Suddenly everything made sense.

  The death of Stalin was thus a great eye-opener for me, and I began to look for confirmation that my ideas were right. But my mother was careful, and too scared to answer the questions that burned within me: the dictator might be dead, but the system still existed. However, within a few days we heard on the radio that the case of the doctors had been reviewed: the accusations had been found to be unsubstantiated; proceedings had been stopped, and all the detainees released. The author of the denunciation was stripped of her decoration, and the anti-Semitic campaign eased off. Yet the Jews who had lost their jobs never got them back, and official policy remained not to employ Jews in government organizations.

  If the death of Stalin was like an earthquake, powerful aftershocks soon followed it. That summer in the village near Zaparozhye where I fell in love, my mother received a letter from my father which made her gasp. When we asked what the trouble was, she read out the sentence, ‘There are rumours that our boss has been demoted and is under arrest.’

  ‘Who’s “our boss”?’ I asked.

  ‘He must mean Beria,’ she said.

  Beria! We were astounded. After Nikita Khrushchev, he was the second most powerful man in the Soviet Union. How could he have been demoted and arrested? It seemed impossible — and yet it proved true, for Beria became a victim in the power struggle that followed Stalin’s death. Not long afterwards, my father told us, a strange letter went out to Party organizations: it was supposed to be read aloud, in closed sessions, and sought to discredit Beria by claiming that he had had links with the British and Turkish intelligence services, that he had become morally corrupt, kept mistresses and had taken to seducing young girls beneath the age of consent. All this was nonsense, of course, but what we could not know at the time was that Khrushchev and his cronies were trying to finish off Beria, whom they regarded as a major threat. (Later they executed him.)

  To teenagers like myself, every pronouncement that came from the Kremlin was of consuming interest, for, politically and ideologically, we were highly aware. We knew the names and records of every important member of the Politburo, and we recognized their faces, either from photographs in the newspapers, or increasingly from seeing them on television, or from their appearances on Lenin’s red marble mausoleum during the parades in Red Square.

  These, unintentionally, were a perfect paradigm of Soviet Communism in that they were a gigantic fraud, a deliberately misleading façade. For boys, they were genuinely exciting occasions — as any large parade with thousands of people, music, bands and high spirits must be — but behind the apparently spontaneous enthusiasm lay a high degree of planning and manipulation.

  In Stalin’s lifetime the military parade always began at 10 a.m. exactly, and lasted for fifty minutes. Then came a parade of sportsmen, lasting twenty minutes, and finally the immense civilian parade, with people pouring past the mausoleum in endless columns, flooding Red Square, and shouting patriotic slogans. To anyone listening on the radio, it seemed that the noise and enthusiasm of the crowd were colossal, that everybody present was roaring out the slogans; but this was an illusion, produced by skilful use of pre-recorded tapes.

  Somewhere out of sight, probably in one of the windows of GUM department store, on the side of the square, lurked an official with a microphone whose duty it was to produce the right noises at the right time, like a town crier. As the head of each column approached, he would call out, ‘Long live the vanguard of the Soviet people, the Communist Party! URRAH!’ Then his operator would press a button, and a terrific ‘URRAH!’ would burst from every loudspeaker, followed by rousing music. (For the military and sporting parades, an orchestra had played live, but now all the music was recorded.) As each column reached the middle of the square, he would call, ‘Glory to the victorious armed forces of the Soviet Union — URRAH!’ and again a colossal, answering, electronic ‘URRAH!’ would erupt from the loudspeakers. As the front of the column drew near St Basil’s, he would proclaim, ‘Long live the unbreakable friendship of the peoples of the Soviet Union!’, whereupon the massed ‘URRAH!’ would blare out once more. Of course, some of the young people in the columns would also yell, ‘URRAH!’, often derisively, to let off steam, particularly if they had had a few vodkas beforehand, but the millions listening in from all over the Soviet Union had no idea of how phoney the performance was.

  Neither could they know that the columns and crowds had been thickly planted with KGB, whose task was to prevent terrorism and stamp on any trouble before it grew out of hand. Even I, when I joined the KGB, had no idea for a long time of the extent to which the occasion was planned in advance. Then one year I was required to be present at the security rehearsal, a couple of evenings before the parade itself — and an amazing spectacle it was. The run-through took place at 8 p.m., after dark, and when I arrived at Red Square I found the entire area sealed off by KGB. A duty-ticket got me through the cordon, and on the square more KGB were dotted about, many of them on the stands. Loudspeakers had begun to blast out the traditional slogans, and the recorded crowd-roars of ‘URRAH!’ Then something extraordinary happened.

  All along the side of GUM, basement doors burst open, and out sprinted hundreds of soldiers armed with sub-machine-guns. They appeared to race in all directions, but they were highly trained and, in a few seconds, had taken up predetermined positions so as to divide the open area up into a grid of human lines, each little square about ten metres along the sides, with one man facing outwards, the next inwards, and so on. Even as it was happening I thought of the chaos and injury that would have ensued if the manoeuvre had ever been executed in earnest — for the soldiers would have fought and kicked and beaten their way through the massed crowd. At another signal the men broke ranks and jogged back to their starting places, only to repeat the procedure a few minutes later. Clearly the Soviet leaders lived in fear that a major disturbance, even a rebellion, might start in the middle of the parade. At last I saw the significance of all the lines painted on the tarmac in the square.[7]

  One inescapable element in every Soviet child’s upbringing was the Young Pioneer Organization, of which every boy and girl had to be a member from nine or ten until fourteen. In the third year of school there was a ceremony in which all were expected to join. Each of us stood up and pronounced the solemn oath: ‘I, a Young Pioneer of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, hereby give my promise that I will remain loyal to the cause of the Communist Party and to the cause of Lenin and Stalin.’ Then a red scarf was tied round every neck, and we had to wear it until we came of age at fourteen or fifteen. Every class was called a Unit of the Young Pioneers; someone was supposed to be chairman, and to arrange occasional meetings.

  In the early 1920s, when the Pioneer Organization was formed out of the Scout movement, some life survived in it because it still behaved in the way the Scouts always had: members went out into the woods on proper excursions, built huts, lived in tents and sang songs round camp-fires. Later, however, it became like
everything else in Soviet ideology, an empty ritual. Summer camps were still held, and worthwhile activities went on there — excursions, swimming and so on. I remember being cold, sleeping in a tent, but enjoying the fresh smell of pine trees. Yet in school the Pioneers were no more than a hollow front in which children were expected to act out a charade, to please those who thought it necessary. Pioneer activities were intensely boring and pointless, but we had to go through with them because we were told that if we didn’t we would never achieve any success in life.

  It was through the Pioneers that we received much of our early political education. Politics was taught in primitive, black and white terms. Countries were either socialist or capitalist, and much was made of the cult of personality: we were supposed to know the names of the leaders of the Communist Party in every country — Wilhelm Pieck in East Germany, Klement Gottwald in Czechoslovakia, Harry Pollitt in England...To poorly educated Russian children, the most insignificant Communist parties were presented as powerful and important. We had no idea how weak they were.

  The history of Russia had been rewritten so that the main story was one of ‘productive’ or ‘progressive’ forces — whatever forces were ‘progressive’ in a particular period, and led on to the next. Thus we were taught how slavery developed into feudalism, and feudalism into capitalism. All the movements or uprisings which led to more progressive social forms were given much space in our textbooks: all major strikes and revolutions which led to the establishment of the socialist order were, of course, thoroughly progressive, and had to be very well known. The superiority of the Marxist approach and the Socialist-Communist order was emphasized: the only true form of social science was Marxism, all other approaches were wrong, and their objective was simply to conceal the depth of the divide between classes in capitalist countries.

  All this dogma was spiced by a virulent surge of chauvinism, deliberately whipped up by Stalin soon after the Second World War. For a while the Soviet leaders continued to pay tribute to the role of the Western Allies during the conflict with Germany, but gradually their tune changed. By 1947 they had begun to claim that it was the gallant Red Army and Air Force alone who had defeated the Nazis. The implication was that the war in North Africa had been insignificant compared with the struggle on the Eastern front. The opening of a second front in 1944, through the Normandy landings, came too late to make any difference since Germany was already shattered and the victory as good as won. As for the Pacific, that was a sideshow in which only small forces were involved. That Hitler’s and Stalin’s representatives had signed a non-aggression pact in August 1939, and that Britain had fought the Nazis on her own for more than eighteen months, from September 1939 to June 1941, were barely mentioned.

  At fourteen we had to transfer to the Komsomol, or Young Communist League. This was more or less the same as the Pioneers but worse, because every unit had to elect a bureau, the bureau would elect a chairman, and the chairman was supposed to issue a protocol or report of every monthly meeting, one of the unit and one of the bureau. The whole thing was bureaucracy, as unnecessary as it was tedious, and served no purpose whatever.

  This sham democracy was carried on in the annual Komsomol conferences, to which each organization was supposed to send a number of delegates. I was regarded as an active element, and took part several times in these meetings, which were held in a beautiful theatre. A great show of goodwill was made, with every member receiving a pad of paper and a nice new ballpoint pen, but all we did was sit and listen to excruciatingly dull speeches, and anyone with the slightest intelligence could see that this alleged democracy was not democracy at all, since everything was set up in advance, with the lists of people to be elected made out beforehand. The same thing happened at the annual Congress of the Young Communist League: candidates were supposed to be elected by secret ballot but, in fact, the representatives were appointed in advance.

  A more sinister facet of the organization was its work in the Lenin mausoleum. We learnt from delegates at Party conferences that at any one time a hundred and fifty members of the Komsomol were detailed for duties concerned with the preservation of Lenin’s mummified body. If a hundred and fifty young people were on the staff of the mausoleum, how many adults did the place employ? My guess was two hundred and fifty. Maybe four hundred people were servicing that one corpse. Some of the work went on underground, around and beneath the mausoleum itself, and some was done in a secret laboratory, where scientists were endlessly trying to devise ways of preserving Lenin for posterity.

  My early experience in the Young Pioneers and the Komsomol opened my eyes to the way in which the Communist Party worked. I learnt that it was an authoritarian organization run entirely by the leadership, a body in which no ordinary member had any say. I saw that in the Soviet Union there was no democracy, no free elections, and no chance of anything unpredictable happening in the political field. Nobody was allowed to suggest a different candidate; nobody could start up a faction; nobody could propose alternative ideas. Anyone who tried to do so would be quickly suppressed and destroyed. With all its protocols and secret ballots, Soviet political life was a series of dead rituals. And yet, extraordinarily, throughout all seventy-odd years of the Soviet era, the authorities managed to preserve a façade of democracy.

  My contemporaries and I discerned this clearly by the time we were sixteen or seventeen, but most people accepted it as part of their lives, and decided to play by Soviet rules. I could not, because I considered the game insufferable. At sixteen I had absolutely no knowledge of the West, but I saw that the Soviet system was neither sincere nor honest. More and more I wondered how people could behave in the way they did.

  Doing my homework, at least, seemed a worthwhile exercise: I was learning, and my teachers gave me marks according to merit. Work was something real. Similarly, men and women employed in factories were producing things and that was real, too. But all the proceedings of the Komsomol were utterly unreal, an empty show in which everyone was obliged to take part.

  *

  The next milestone in my development came in March 1956, when, in secret session at the Twentieth Party Congress, Khrushchev delivered his epoch-making denunciation of Stalin. My father, as a senior Party official, was given a copy of the speech and allowed to bring it home for the night. He arrived lit up by the excitement of events, but although he lent me the twenty-five-page text to read, he never discussed his feelings about Khrushchev’s revelations. He must have found the speech exceedingly disconcerting, for it went a long way towards destroying the ideological and philosophical foundation of his life. Yet he must have felt relief, for he now saw that many of the friends and colleagues who had disappeared in the 1930s had been not criminals but victims of the State.

  As for me, I read the secret text three times that night, and felt wildly excited. Khrushchev’s words backed up everything I had heard on the Radio Liberty broadcast three years earlier, and from that night I became a conscious, active anti-Stalinist. For the time being, however, I remained pro-Communist, believing, as the Czechs did in 1968, that it was possible to build socialism with a human face. I knew no better, being still profoundly ignorant about the West and believing much of the propaganda with which we had been force-fed at school.

  *

  At the start of my second-last year in school, girls appeared for the first time in our ranks, the authorities having decided that segregation of the sexes was a bad thing after all. The change was entirely beneficial: until then there had been a lot of bad behaviour — even outright hooliganism — but the arrival of the girls had a civilizing effect, and the boys calmed down.

  No prizes were given for merit in school, but we worked on a system of marks: one was the bottom, and hardly ever awarded, except to show that a pupil’s work was so bad that he or she had better not be at school at all; two was the worst that most people could normally get; three was satisfactory; four good, and five excellent. The best pupils, like Alfred, Viktor and myself, were alw
ays fighting for fives, and we usually managed to secure them. But real competition started only when we reached level nine, and some features of the pre-revolutionary curriculum were revived, including the award of gold and silver medals. These not only offered an incentive and reward: they also brought an important privilege for the future, in that those who won a gold medal — by scoring the top mark in all ten disciplines — automatically gained free admission to any college or university. Those who won silver enjoyed relatively simple access to higher education, having to sit only one long exam and one interview. Those who failed to win a medal had to sit five exams, all quite tough, and score high marks — 23 out of 25 — to make any further progress.

  So the best three or four in each class started to compete for medals and, of course, the teachers, being secretly interested in winning a good medal-count, used various harmless tricks to help their favourites. History, literature and languages had always come easily to me, and in these I was pretty well guaranteed straight fives. Geography also posed no problem. In physics and chemistry I also scraped fives, thanks to a little massaging of the papers by my teacher (which made me feel guilty). My weakness lay in maths, which I disliked intensely, and I managed only fours in trigonometry, algebra and geometry. Thus I had to be content with a silver medal.