Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky

by Oleg Gordievsky

  In our flotilla of boats we had no radio, so for days on end we were cut off from any news. Then one morning we came to a village where we could buy a newspaper, and all over the front page we saw the headline ANTI-PARTY CLIQUE UNMASKED IN LEADERSHIP OF CPSU. We found that the old Stalinists — Kaganovich, Malenkov and Molotov among them — had tried but failed to topple Khrushchev. The news thrilled me. Being such a militant anti-Stalinist, I welcomed Khrushchev’s victory, almost dancing with delight, and called out, ‘Li, how wonderful! Progress at last! All those old Stalinists have been sent packing into the wilderness.’

  Li, however, looked anything but happy. ‘Comrade Molotov expelled?’ he said in a voice of doom. ‘Practically a co-founder of the Soviet State, and they’ve got rid of him? I don’t like it.’

  His seriousness brought home to me that some people really did support old ideas and structures. Li was not paying lip-service to Communist ideals: he believed in them fervently. I saw that the Soviet Union would have to keep a close eye on China: if the ruling class were as fanatical as he was, things could become very dangerous.

  Li was learning Persian, and if I challenged him as to the usefulness of the language — at a time when China had been ostracized by almost every country in the world as a result of American pressure — he would say, ‘You’ll see, Oleg, the time will come. China will be recognized as a great power all over the world. We’ll have embassies everywhere. That’s why we’re learning diplomacy and languages.’

  Once again he proved right — in the long term. But in 1959 relations between China and the Soviet Union deteriorated, and a year later all Chinese students were recalled from Moscow. I often wondered what happened to Li, especially at the time of the Cultural Revolution.

  *

  During my fourth year both my German and my knowledge of the West took a big step forward when I began to work as an interpreter for visiting German delegations. Most were East Germans, but after only twelve years of Communism, and before the Wall went up, they were still close to the West, both geographically and in spirit, and I found it refreshing to have contact with them. West Germans and West Berliners came as well, either as tourists or as part of official groups.

  For students the best-paid jobs were those we did for the Ministry of Health: the delegations they invited seemed small, and they went to more interesting places. I travelled with several of them, but my most fantastic trip was one devoted to what the Germans called Kurortologie, or the study of how to treat patients in health spas and sanatoria. Our destination was Georgia, where people were then exceedingly hospitable, not spoilt by too many delegations. In Tbilisi, Gagra, Borzhumi and Sochi we were lodged in the best hotels, driven about in fast cars, and plied with every kind of food and drink. So high did we live, on wine, champagne and Georgian brandy, that by the time we reached Sochi some of the visitors’ constitutions were feeling the strain. One morning, as we walked along the main avenue, we came to a souvenir shop and bought a few things. The people in the shop, seeing that their customers were foreigners, took the trouble to wrap up the purchases in paper and tied the parcels with string.

  A few minutes later one of the Germans suddenly had to answer an urgent call of nature; luckily there was a public toilet close by, and soon he emerged looking much relieved, but with his souvenir no longer wrapped. ‘You know the problem round here?’ he said. ‘No paper in the lavatory. But luckily I had my parcel!’ A few minutes later we all boarded a trolley bus, and each put two kopeks through the slot into the money box (there being no conductor). Among the party was a doctor, and as he shoved his fare through the slot, the extra coin tipped a balance inside, so that a mass of change fell down with a crash into the bottom of the box. The doctor burst into roars of laughter, and the man who had been taken short remarked mock-sourly, ‘What’s so funny about that? It reminds me of my experience a few minutes ago.’

  Besides improving my German, these tours gave me some polish, and also offered me a glimpse of how we, the Russians, appeared to people outside, especially to visitors from the West. Once at the end of a trip to Moscow and Leningrad a West Berliner said in a heavy, sarcastic voice: Now we know what the Russian national costume is.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. He replied: ‘It’s military uniform.’

  The remark annoyed me and brought out all my patriotism. ‘What makes you think that?’ I demanded.

  ‘Because the streets of Moscow and Leningrad are full of soldiers and officers, all in uniform.’

  The German saw this as an expression of militarism and imperialism — and later, when I began travelling to the West and saw trains full of servicemen, and soldiers on the frontier, on the platforms, in restaurants, everywhere, I thought, Yes, it’s true. This is a heavily armed, militaristic empire. Yet at the time I took the German’s remark as a deliberate insult, and thought bitterly of how my father, who gave his salary to my mother to keep the household and the family, wore uniform all the time because he had no civilian suit. What the German did not know was that many of the uniforms he saw were the product not of any desire to show off or demonstrate aggression, but of poverty, and of the way in which the Communist system ran the country.

  There was one way in which we could get our own back on Germans, and that was by taking them to the museum of the siege of Leningrad, which showed in graphic detail how people had lived and died while the Nazi forces surrounded the city from 1941 to 1943. During each visit we ran a tough, moving film. It only had a Russian soundtrack, so the guide sat at the back and translated simultaneously through headphones. One morning after I had done this, putting as much feeling as I could into it, some members of my group came up and protested, ‘Oleg, you’re being very hard on us today.’

  ‘Me?’ I said. ‘Hard? All I did was read you the script.’ But because they had been listening to my voice, they assumed the ideas it expressed were mine.

  In my fourth year my enthusiasm for interpreting gave me a fantastic summer at Artek, on the coast of the Crimea. Every citizen of the Soviet Union knew Artek — a Tatar name — for it was the site of the best and most luxurious holiday camp ever built for the Young Pioneers. That year the authorities had arranged an international athletics competition between schools from the East European countries, and a high standard was guaranteed because every team taking part had already won national competitions. I was appointed guide-interpreter to the team from Leipzig, and asked to stay for twenty-five days.

  Artek turned out to be more a village than a camp, with wooden cottages housing a dozen visitors apiece, all fully equipped with running water, showers and proper lavatories. The camp was beautifully laid out with facilities for all kinds of sports, games, films and other entertainments, not to mention easy access to the beach. The organizers also laid on excursions, on one of which I made my first visit to Sevastopol, a place of high interest to me because of its role in the Crimean and Second World Wars.

  When I saw the team from Leipzig, I was amazed. The boys were more or less still boys, but the girls, aged fourteen or fifteen, were stunningly attractive with beautifully developed bodies. Of course, they won every event with one hand tied behind them, but I found it almost impossible to treat them as children, so adult did they look. They were supposed to be chaperoned by their teacher, but he had fallen ill and had been replaced at short notice by the sports correspondent of the Young Pioneer newspaper in East Germany, a former paratrooper who had fought in the war. A man of enormous energy, he was given to describing his experiences in the present tense: ‘We are dropping over Greece! The earth is coming up to meet us! We spray everything in sight with our Schmeissers! What a day we are having!’ There was also a Hungarian teacher, the oldest person present, who lusted mightily after the girls, and chased them round the camp after dark. They would provoke him deliberately, lurking in the shadows until he almost caught them, then running off with shrieks of laughter. The presence of those young Germans raised the temperature at Artek to fever pitch.


  *

  In Moscow I became aware that two representatives of the KGB spent much of their time in the Institute building: they had a little office, and kept out of sight, slipping in and out through the ground floor while the students were upstairs. For a long time I didn’t really know what they were doing, but it gradually dawned on me that they were looking for potential recruits — and that the man representing the First Chief Directorate had his eye on me.

  What was I to do? I liked the idea of making my career with the KGB, partly because I would be following in my father’s footsteps, but also because it offered a good chance of serving and living abroad, one of the principal aims of almost every student in the Institute. We all knew that the Soviet Union was a prison, and that the only way to escape from it for any length of time was to join one of the organizations that worked in other countries — the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, journalistic agencies such as TASS and APN, or the KGB. (To join the GRU, the military equivalent of the KGB, one had to be a member of the armed forces.)

  Ordinary Soviet citizens had no chance of going abroad for nobody was allowed to leave the country without special permission from the government, and every individual application had to be passed by the Cadres Abroad department of the Central Committee. Foreign travel was an impossible dream for almost everybody — and this made the lure of working in the KGB especially strong. Besides, in our eyes the organization had many uniquely glamorous and attractive advantages: the secrecy, the paraphernalia of espionage, the peculiar methods used and the specialist knowledge needed. A further incentive was that pay in the KGB was slightly better than in most other spheres. What none of us thought about much were the drawbacks: we brushed aside the many restrictions on our personal freedom, much checking-up on our backgrounds, and stricter discipline than in most other forms of service. We preferred not to think about what would happen if one of us were expelled from a foreign country; we ignored the fact that it was almost impossible to move from the KGB to any other organization — the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for instance, would never take on former KGB men.

  In making up my mind what to do, I had one advantage over my fellow students: I could discuss things with my brother, who was already training to be a nelegal, or illegal. Through Vasilko I knew a good deal about how the illegals operated: how they assumed a foreign identity and went to ground in the country to which they were assigned, living as nationals of that state. My German was already good — better than his — and I liked the idea of life in some Western country. I asked Vasilko to send a tip about me to Petr Grigoriyevich, who represented Directorate S (which controlled illegals) in the Institute, and one day early in 1961 he invited me to his little office for a talk. When he asked me if I was interested in his department’s work, and I said, ‘Yes’, he told me I would be invited to an interview in the building known as the Pass Office, in Kuznetzky Most, a little old street near the KGB headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square.

  There, a more senior officer spoke to me about my academic progress, my plans, my German; and a couple of weeks later I was interviewed in German by a nice-looking woman in her fifties, who spoke the language so impeccably, and looked so like a typical German Tante (auntie) that I assumed she must be German. When I asked, she turned out to be Russian, but she seemed impressed by my German, and gave me the highest possible recommendation. I became a definite candidate for Directorate S, and from that moment no other KGB department was allowed to approach me.

  *

  By far the most formative period of my time at college was my stay in East Berlin, which began in August 1961, between my fifth and sixth years. It was the generous habit of the college and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to send students abroad for six months, to gain practical experience — something which no other educational establishment in the Soviet Union did at the time. In my year there were thirty foreign slots for sixty students: this meant that half would go abroad, and the rest would join either the Ministry or some journalistic agency such as TASS, and do their practical work there.

  Luckily I was one of the thirty destined for other countries; less fortunately, I was not well enough connected, and had not managed to ingratiate myself with the right people, to be sent to one of the prime destinations — the rich, capitalist countries alleged to exploit their workers so cruelly. Perhaps because my father was already a pensioner, I was allocated to a Communist country, but at least East Germany was a frontier state — and, as things turned out, there could then have been no more interesting place in which to be posted.

  It was pure chance that we set out from Moscow on 10 August 1961, a little group of four trainee diplomats, all rather nervous, but proud and excited to hold green diplomatic passports, which few Soviet students possessed. One of my companions, Nikolai Starikov, was eight or nine years older than me, and already in his thirties. The other two members of the group, Stanislav Makarov and Vladimir Shcherbakov, were my age, but all of us were going abroad for the first time, so everything was new.

  Sharing a four-berth compartment on the train, we left Moscow in the afternoon and rumbled comfortably westwards through the night. Like all Russians, we enjoyed eating on trains and I munched my way through a cold boiled chicken my mother had cooked for me. The others, too, had picnics, and we washed our food down with beer sold in corridors by vendors who came along from the restaurant car.

  At 11 o’clock next morning we reached the frontier town of Brest-Litovsk. Innocents that we were, we thought that the ritual of going through the border was quite normal, something that happened between all countries. Only later, looking back, did it occur to me how sinister the whole performance was.

  First teams of Borderguard officers and men in bright-green uniforms hurried aboard the train and took up position to seal off all the carriages simultaneously. No one was allowed to leave or move along the train as they inspected our documents. Next the soldiers lifted the bench-seats to make sure there were no stowaways in the luggage spaces beneath, and undid the ceiling panels with screwdrivers to check the roof space. Then they hung about, preventing any movement of the passengers, while customs officials in grey uniforms checked everyone except those, like us, with green passports. Most people, we noticed, had blue passports, indicating that they were on State business. Naïve as I was, I thought it odd that a totalitarian regime, which paid no attention to human rights, should allow some of its citizens this special privilege of exemption from customs searches. (In theory the privilege was for foreigners only, but Soviet diplomats enjoyed it for years until, after my own escape, it was suddenly withdrawn.)

  After a while the customs men went, but the Borderguards remained. The train moved off a short distance and stopped under the roof of a huge factory-like building, where the wheels were changed, from wide gauge to narrow. It was a slick operation, in which the replacement wheels, hanging on chains, were swung down and fitted into place, the whole train being completed in less than an hour. Then we rolled back into Brest station, but to a different platform, with a three-metre chain-link fence sealing us off. The area was heavily patrolled. There we waited, as soldiers stood guard outside. At last we started towards the West, and in only a kilometre or so we crossed the frontier. On either side, at right-angles to the track, parallel fences struck off into the distance, separated from each other by wide cleared zones, with watch-towers rising at intervals above them.

  On the Polish side of the border, things became a little less grim. Once again army officers and customs officials boarded the train, but the soldiers, though Communists, had a lighter, more elegant look, and wore more stylish uniforms. The customs officers were an even greater improvement, since many were girls in tight-fitting uniforms, and all they did was glance round smiling. Then, at the East German border, it was like plunging back into Russia, only worse, for the military, in their grey uniforms, looked Prussian and serious, and uncomfortably reminiscent of the Nazis. So strongly did they resemble what we had seen in war films that we all got quite
a shock.

  Late in the evening of 11 August, we reached Berlin, a thrilling moment for a young man who had read about Germany since childhood. The imperial capital; the First World War; the artistic glories of Berlin in the 1920s; the adventures of the German Young Pioneers helping the Communist Party in its underground resistance against the Nazis in the 1930s; the burning of the Reichstag parliament building in 1933; the Nazi Olympics of 1936. All these were familiar to me from books, and now here was Berlin for real.

  Immediately I was fascinated by the complexity of the city. Russia was huge, but it was all empty spaces and steppes. Here everything was far more concentrated — a highly developed infrastructure, with tracks crossing each other over bridges and in tunnels as the S-Bahn suburban railway wound between buildings. The traditional German architecture looked strikingly different from anything I had seen before. However, the closer we came to the centre of the city, the more the evidence of war-damage stood out — open spaces, gaps in rows of houses, blank side-walls.

  At the Ostbahnhof we were met by a car and driven to Karlshorst, the suburb in which the KGB maintained a large enclave, like a military base, surrounded by a security fence with a guard on the gate. Inside, everything belonged to the Soviet Union, and we found we had been allocated a flat in a small block only three storeys high. The place was plain but adequate for four young men: a good kitchen, a sitting-room, two bedrooms, a bathroom. Yet what seized our attention was the television set and, within minutes of our arrival, we were greedily switching from one channel to the next, mesmerized by five being available simultaneously, and delighted to find that natural, everyday German — rather than the German of tapes and teachers — was perfectly comprehensible.