A day or two later I went to a service in the Tomaskirche, with which Bach had close connections. The church was packed, but I found a place at the back and had just sat down quietly when a deacon wearing a cassock came up and offered me a prayer-book.
‘I’m a foreigner, you know,’ I said.
‘That doesn’t matter,’ he replied. ‘You speak German. You can read it.’
So he gave me a book, and I took part in the service, which I very much enjoyed. The fusion of German national behaviour with the European spirit struck me as incredibly strong, and stirringly different from anything in the Soviet Union. The experience helped me realize that Communist Russia was a spiritual desert, and it made me want, all the more, to join the European world.
If the KGB had discovered that I had attended a church service, they would have taken a poor view; but already I was becoming crafty, and ready with my explanations. ‘Oh,’ I would have said, ‘I went to the Tomaskirche purely to extend my cultural education. The church is a monument connected with the composer Johann Sebastian Bach, and I thought I ought to know about it.’
Moving around Leipzig, listening to conversations in trams, I began to feel upset on behalf of the German people. I saw that, having long been unhappy about Communism, they were now filled with hatred of it. I felt pity for them, and shame at being a Soviet citizen. I was ashamed that we, who were culturally so far behind, should keep such people down. At least in the old Russia there had been a fine élite, the aristocracy of intellectuals and artists. Now we had little compared with Europe. How could we lecture Europeans and tell them how to live? In spite of our manifold and obvious deficiencies, we were forcing our terrible system on them.
The boorishness of ordinary Soviet citizens was rammed home one day in Erfurt, which the Embassy had arranged for me to visit. One evening I was walking with a friend when we saw some people, obviously Soviet tourists, coming along the street. From their dowdy appearance it was clear that they were provincials, but they were our countrymen so we advanced towards them and merrily called, ‘Hello!’ The reaction was pathetic: after staring at us for a moment with fear and horror, they ran away. They had been so heavily indoctrinated and intimidated by their Party bosses, so filled with idiotic warnings, that when two young men approached them in the dusk and spoke in Russian, those provincial simpletons immediately assumed that this was a provocation and took to their heels.
Not that they were entirely wrong in supposing that underground activity was in progress everywhere. In Leipzig I met my brother again, and one morning, walking through the concourse of the main railway station, I suddenly saw another man I recognized: it was Leonid Kozlov, who had gone through the Institute in Moscow two years ahead of me with a high profile, always leading in political matters, a vociferous Party activist. In due course he had left, and I had not seen him again, but now here he was, striding along, looking every inch a German bureaucrat in a German overcoat, and carrying a typically German briefcase. I opened my mouth to greet him, but he, obviously recognizing me, quickly averted his face and kept walking. As I stared after him, it dawned on me that, like Vasilko, he must be training as an illegal. (He did become one but was exposed, and after some difficulty was swapped for another prisoner.)
More surreptitious activity was needed for the third of the tasks the KGB had set for me: to find somebody whom I could recommend as a potential special agent. There was one obvious candidate — a tall, blond, handsome East German called Erik, who had been a member of our Track and Field Club at the Institute, but had had to return home prematurely because of family problems. I found him in a pretty little town south of Leipzig, and he, not knowing that I was cultivating him as a potential recruit rather than just as a friend, asked me to spend Christmas with him and his parents.
The first time Erik spoke of his family, he told me that the Russians had made his father suffer after the war, but that his involvement in the conflict had been entirely innocent. He was, Erik said, only an accountant, a financial clerk, who had been called up and put into the Waffen SS. The Russians had thrown him into Buchenwald concentration camp and kept him there for five years; many inmates died, and he came out emaciated and ill.
That was Erik’s first version of his story, but a week or two later, after a couple of drinks, he let fall that his father was a Hero of the Defence of Frankfurt-am-Oder, the last fortress before Berlin. Some accountant! When I went to the family house just before Christmas, sure enough, there opening the door for me was a man who personified the SS: square jaw, close-cropped head, thick-framed glasses, with an Alsatian at his heel. Yet in spite of his appearance he was kind, and we had a most enjoyable German Christmas, with presents round the tree, an elaborate cold meal on Christmas Eve, and traditional carp on Christmas Day.
The KGB seemed pleased with my discovery of a candidate, but later, when Erik visited me in Moscow, still not knowing that I belonged to the organization, he complained bitterly that the Russians had been playing spy tricks on him. Evidently things had reached the stage at which they wanted to recruit him but he was not keen and sent them packing, without ever realizing that I had been involved.
In Leipzig, apart from my other commitments, I caught up with some of the young people whom I had looked after in Artek eighteen months earlier. Having brought some addresses with me, I made contact with Hans, one of the more intelligent boys, who invited me to dinner with his parents and one of the girls who had been at the camp. The evening proved fascinating: it was fun to see the children again and hear about their progress at school, and I had a good talk with the parents about the state of Germany. Even to see a flat that had been built in the 1930s was an experience because the standard of construction was much higher than anything I had come across in Russia.
That evening, however, was tame compared with one that soon followed. I had been put to live in a building containing workshops, attached to a school for Soviet children. On the top floor was a huge dormitory, full of beds, but luckily I was the only person using it. One day there was a knock on the street door: the elderly couple who looked after the building did not hear it, so I went down myself — and who should I find but Olga, the most glorious of all the girls in the athletics group, looking even more sexy than I remembered her.
‘Oleg!’ she cried. ‘I heard you were in town, and got the address. I just had to see you!’
Without ceremony she led the way upstairs and sat on the edge of my bed, brimming with confidence and vitality. It was perfectly clear that she had come with one object only — that of going to bed for the evening. So brazen was she that, under pretext of sewing a button on to her trousers, she took them off, and sat there with her fantastic legs swinging. I felt as if I was in a dream, for here was easily the most attractive girl I had ever seen sitting half-naked on my bed. Why did I not take advantage of her overtures?
All I had to do was run a hand up one of her thighs and that would have lit the fire. Instead, I did nothing but talk and talk, until in the end I suggested that we should go for a walk. We walked miles through the icy streets until we reached the block in which she lived, and there, outside the door, we kissed — but that was all. Ever since, I have cursed myself for being so timid, so backward. Partly I was put off by the knowledge that I was not supposed to associate with foreigners, but really it was my own inhibitions that held me back. When I saw Hans again, and mentioned that I had caught a glimpse of Olga, he gave me a sly look and said, ‘Ah! She’s become very naughty, you know. She goes out with Russian soldiers.’ That made me feel slightly better — but, all the same, I bitterly regretted missing such an opportunity.
Stirred up by it, I wrote to another German girl, Charlotte, who lived somewhere near Leipzig, suggesting that we should get together. We had met in Moscow, when she had come as a tourist and I was acting as interpreter-guide: we had gone for walks in the evenings, and embraced passionately in dark courtyards, and she had been keen to start a full relationship. Now, though, she wrote ba
ck saying, ‘Oleg, you’re too late. I’m married, and to a Russian officer.’
We set out for home on 20 January 1962, leaving Berlin a few days before our full six months were up. I could happily have stayed longer. We had all learnt an immense amount, and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, for life in East Germany was more interesting and more comfortable than in Russia. Yet we had to return for our last term at the Institute lay ahead with final exams at the end of it, and also we had to write our theses. We were supposed to have collected enough material to dash off the papers quickly — and, indeed, I had assembled a good deal. My problem was that I still had no authorization to do the subject I wanted. In the end I simply started to write about relations between Church and State in the DDR, without anyone giving me the go-ahead.
With my natural interest sharpened by my own first-hand experiences in Leipzig, I had plenty to say. I collected material from newspapers and magazines on both sides of the German border, and picked up ideas during my travels. Also, in the Embassy, I had read the secret reports sent in by the research departments of the puppet political parties, which furnished good material.
In East Germany the Church was the only element of society openly opposing the State: diplomacy, intrigue and negotiation went on non-stop. The picture was complicated because four different units were involved: East Germany, West Germany, East Berlin and West Berlin. In each the structure of religious life was quite different: in West Germany, for instance, Protestants and Catholics were evenly balanced, with half the population belonging to each, but in the East 90 per cent of the people were Protestant. Strong regional differences had also to be taken into account. In Thuringia, for instance, things seemed to be much the same as in the days of Hitler: people in the Church were much more eager to support the regime than those anywhere else. East German students had no idea how important a force the Church was in their country: they told me that to write about it was a waste of time, as there were so few believers left. But they were wrong — as was made clear when the DDR finally crumbled, and it emerged that the Church had played a vital part in the collapse.
I wrote the thesis by hand, had it typed and, at over a hundred pages, it came out one of the longest papers of my year. Each of us was supposed to have a tutor, who in theory supervised our theses; still without anyone, I approached Mr Rozonov, one of the liveliest lecturers who always drew full audiences. He, however, declined to help, because when he had suggested I should study under him as a postgraduate student, I had declined his offer on the grounds that the KGB had already offered me a job when I finished my student course, and I wanted to start work as soon as possible.
Becoming more and more worried, I went to the history department one day, and outside the office of the department’s head, I saw the boss himself. I must have looked harassed, because he asked, ‘What’s the matter? What’s up?’ I explained that I needed someone’s name to put on my thesis as my tutor.
‘What’s the paper about?’ he asked, and when I told him, he immediately said, ‘OK, put my name on it. But I tell you what, let’s not stick our necks out. Change the title. Call it something like “History of Religious Organizations in the DDR”.’
That was the only stipulation he made. I felt enormously relieved. I knew that as head of the department he needed a number of names to justify his claim that he was supervising students, and also that he got extra money for every paper he sponsored. It did not worry me that he was making a double gain: I had my mentor, and that was all that mattered.
Then he said, ‘As your tutor, I’m supposed to produce a review of your paper. But look’ — he riffled through my pages —’you’ve written a whole book! Do me a favour and draft the review for me.’ So I did that too: I wrote a 1000-word summary, which he signed, and that was the end of it.
Our final exams in June were tough. Everyone became nervous, especially about international law, which was the hardest, a real discipline, which had to be learnt properly and in which we had had relatively little instruction. The other subjects were the history of international relations and Marxism and Leninism: the whole month was devoted to the exams, with eight days of preparation building up to each one.
To a Westerner, the exam procedure would have seemed very odd. Everything was done orally, each student appearing for about twenty minutes before a panel of three teachers. Called into the room one at a time, we were issued with a piece of paper bearing a number and three questions. We would then sit at a desk equipped with pencil and paper, and have about an hour to prepare our answers, while other candidates were grilled ahead of us. It was highly distracting to have the sound of voices rising and falling at the front of the room: students were supposed to speak for seven minutes on each question, but if someone started to give exceptionally good answers, the examiners often hurried him on to his next subject so that he might be finished altogether in eight or ten minutes.
Clever students would try to take advantage of this practice by starting with the cream of their knowledge, in the hope that they would be stopped. There was a great deal of cheating: people brought in cribs which they consulted under their desks once they had seen the questions. A few were so brazen that they brought in textbooks concealed beneath their jackets, and others went to incredible lengths to manufacture long, narrow concertinas of paper, densely covered in notes, which could be folded down to nothing and then brought privily out of a pocket.
One teacher, Professor Epstein, who taught medieval history, was both so kind and so wise — an unusual combination — that he managed to outwit the cheats. He dressed in the shabbiest old clothes but was so deeply in love with the Germany of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that when he spoke of it he went into a trance-like state. When it came to exams, he ignored the surreptitious importation of textbooks and gently spread his questions on to a wider front — ‘What do you consider were the wider effects of the Thirty Years’ War?’ — so that mere parrot knowledge of dates was useless.
Yet it was not only students who cheated. Besides the exams, we also had a kind of check called zachyot and ni zachyot — accepted or not accepted — in which we had to answer a couple of quick questions, and the teacher would say, ‘All right, you’re through,’ or ‘I’m sorry. That’s not satisfactory. Please come again.’ One day Slava Makarov, who was among the ablest students, went in to what should have been a formality for his questions on states law, only to emerge crimson and humiliated with an expression of shock on his face. The tutor, Sidorov, had political ambitions, and Slava’s second question had been about the legal status of the Berlin Wall. We all knew that subject backwards, but when Slava gave what he thought was a perfectly adequate answer, Sidorov merely asked if he had read issue no. 9 of the magazine States Law. Slava said, ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t’, and was told he had failed. Indignant on his behalf, we all went round to the library, and at once everything was plain: there, in issue no. 9, was an article on the Wall by none other than Sidorov.
In spite of such hazards, everything turned out well for me: I had a job to go to, which gave me a feeling of stability and stopped me being nervous, with the result that my marks were satisfactory. I received a handsome diploma, enclosing a certificate which listed all the subjects I had taken during my six years at the Institute, together with the marks I had scored — a welcome souvenir of my time in college. Then came another interview with a KGB officer, who told us that we new recruits would become members of the organization from 1 August, but that we could count the month as a paid holiday and report for duty on the 31st, when we would be driven to School 101. In the meantime our monthly grant would go up from 450 roubles a month to 1500 — a handy increase.
Knowing that the Institute had acquired a holiday camp on the coast of the Black Sea, not far from Artek, I managed to get a place there, and travelled south to find an enchanted spot, with tents pitched beneath pine trees and a fantastic view out over the sea. My happiness was compounded because Standa Kaplan was also there. Rather than g
o straight home to Czechoslovakia when the term ended, he arranged to stay on for another month, and during that idyllic August our friendship, already strong, became even closer.
Every day we ran though the hilly woods, up and down paths of earth as red as that in Australia. We sunbathed and swam in the sea, diving off the rocks. We ate our meals outdoors under the pines, the food being passed out through the open window of a ruined villa, which had been covered with tarpaulins to make a temporary kitchen. With his European good looks, Standa had always enjoyed great success with women, and now he had a mistress somewhere near Yalta, a few kilometres down the coast. In the evenings he would talk about her, and we chatted for hours about life in general. He, too, was liberal-minded, and held strongly sceptical views about Communism, which he was not afraid to express when in the right company.[14]
As for me, my drawback with girls was that I was not only timid but choosy. At the camp there was a girl who often ran with me, and was obviously in search of an affair. She was lovely, long-legged, slim and attractive, yet somehow I thought she was not my type, and did not fancy her. So although we ran and talked together, and I was kind to her, there was no more to it than that.
I returned to Moscow in the autumn of 1962 with a healthy tan. I was slightly less green about the world, but I still had a great deal to learn about the KGB and its peculiar methods.
Chapter Five – KGB Pupil
On 1 August 1962, 120 young men, almost all strangers to each other, reported to an office in central Moscow. There we were put straight on to coaches and driven out to School 101, in the woods fifty kilometres north of the city. Sixty of us were on a one-year course, and sixty were beginning a two-year programme. With the same number left over from the year before, the total strength of the school was nearly two hundred. My presence in the draft was largely due to the advice of my brother, who had insisted that I should go through the school. A classical institutional KGB training, he said, would earn me a certificate entitling me to work in any part of the organization, whereas if I failed to get a certificate, and something then went wrong, my future would be uncertain.
Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky Page 12