Much as I disliked ingratiating myself with such a creature, I steeled myself to cultivate him, knowing that he was a key figure. We began to have lunch in the canteen, and I struck up a working relationship. At the same time, I belatedly set about learning English by enrolling on a course run by the First Chief Directorate.
The teaching department there was the nicest part of the entire KGB organization. It was staffed almost entirely by women, all of whom were friendly, intelligent and dedicated to the study of English language and literature. Those who had been to England were the envy of their less fortunate colleagues but they all seemed far more human than other KGB personnel because they had absorbed some of the cultural and spiritual essence of England.
One of them — a woman in her thirties, whose wonderful green eyes redeemed her rather dumpy figure — touched me deeply by consulting me about a moral problem which was troubling her. Should she tell her daughter the truth about how life should be, she asked, in a fair, free democratic society like that of the West? Or should she avoid worrying the girl, and let her be brought up in the fog of propaganda, with all its attendant lies, that prevailed in the Soviet Union? ‘If I once tell her about real values, it will make her unhappy,’ she said miserably. ‘What am I to do?’
I found it moving that someone who did not know me well should trust me enough to ask such a question. I said, ‘Whatever the future, you should bring the child up with the proper values: tell her about justice and honesty, and give her an understanding of good and evil. Then slowly explain about the existing system.’ I could see how difficult this was for the teacher, who looked at me full of doubt, but it was the only answer I could give.
When she and her colleagues discovered that I had a background of other languages and was genuinely keen to learn, they made special efforts to help me. Yet they showed a curious lack of interest in the history of language, a subject that fascinated me. One day in a break between lessons I drew a chart on the blackboard which showed how various words had mutated from German to Danish, from Danish to Swedish and Swedish to English; my teacher seemed impressed, but I suddenly realized that it had never occurred to her to explore the historical background of her subject.
The full English course lasted eight terms, spread over four years, and for most people there was a strong incentive to pass it because any officer with a certificate of competence in a new language could claim a 10 per cent rise in salary. (The maximum increment was 20 per cent, for two languages and, as I already had German and Danish, I did not stand to gain any more.) At first I found the going hard: for homework each of us was given a tape of the BBC World Service’s morning news bulletin and told to make a full transcript. Study periods were held in the morning one week, in the evening the next, and I found it hard to fit them in with my job, but I was determined to work at an accelerated pace, and I managed to cram four years’ study into two. I am sure I was helped by all my earlier linguistic training, in German, Swedish, French (to some extent) and Danish, but I was particularly pleased that I, by far the oldest man on the course (forty-one when I began it), outpaced the younger students.
On a beautiful day in the summer of 1981 I took my final exam — and passed. This did not mean that I could speak English fluently: my knowledge was still superficial. But what a language this was! For a foreigner, English is like a huge building which one has to get to know and, as somebody remarked, the closer you come to it, the taller and more daunting it appears. (One sign of its sheer size was that my best two-volume English—Russian dictionary contained 160,000 entries, compared with only 60,000 in a French—Russian dictionary of similar scope.)
Although my speech was still faltering, I could read quite well, and I became fascinated by the short stories of Somerset Maugham, whose style I found exceptionally clear. Also, in the political section of the KGB library, I was amazed to discover all six volumes of Sir Winston Churchill’s History of the Second World War, translated into Russian and published by the Military Publications House in 1955, during the Khrushchev thaw. The edition was a handsome one, in the same hardback format as the originals, and I was riveted by the discovery of so much information about the war, especially as it was presented by a leading Western statesman. Reading away, I began to understand how the British civil service functioned, how cables were composed and sent, and so on, so that the experience became highly educational for me.
Sitting in the coach on the way home from the office every evening, I would have a volume on my lap, and whenever I came across something of special interest, I would read it aloud. My fellow officers were so bored by the familiar journey that they could hardly help but listen. One episode I gave them was the one in which, during 1942, Churchill visited Stalin in his inner Moscow dacha, styled ‘State Villa No. 7’, and described how, in the most difficult year of the war, the little wooden building was full of fresh fruit, fine French wines and servants. In the garden Churchill found ‘a large glass tank filled with many kinds of goldfish which were all so tame that they would eat out of your hand’, and he made a point of feeding them every day. He was also shown a new air-raid shelter ‘of the most luxurious type’, with lifts descending around 30 metres into the earth, and fully furnished accommodation at the bottom. ‘The lights were brilliant,’ he wrote. ‘The furniture was stylish “Utility”, sumptuous and brightly coloured. I was more attracted by the goldfish.’
‘Isn’t that marvellous?’ I cried, but my colleagues did not know what to say. No KGB officer could possibly make any positive comment about a British statesman...and eventually one mumbled, ‘What a great humanist! He liked the fish best.’ How feverishly those same people must have discussed me after my escape in 1985: ‘Remember how he was always reading those wretched books and praising Winston Churchill!’
An early chance to practise my English came in the task of translating reports by Kim Philby. To my disappointment I never met him, but Svetanko had established a routine of sending four or five young English-speaking officers to seminars which he conducted in a safe flat, a spacious apartment in Gorky Street. There, once a year, Philby would address the young hopefuls on various aspects of British life, explaining how different types of people would speak to each other. Then he would create little scenarios: ‘Imagine I’m your contact, and I’m a lawyer. Let’s have a conversation, and you ask the questions.’ Then he would act as businessman, journalist, intelligence officer, and afterwards he would write secret reports on his pupils’ performance.
One day Svetanko asked me to translate a batch of reports —and a tough task I found it. Philby had written them in elaborate, complicated English. There was a certain irony in this, for in spite of his lifelong profession of admiration for Soviet Communism, his spoken Russian remained poor, and he never learnt to write a word of the language. Why had he used such stylized English for his reports? Was he trying to impress someone? Or was he sending out a signal of contempt, challenging us poor simpletons to understand him?
Whatever the reason, I rose to the task and worked my hardest to render his long, convoluted sentences into Russian, including all their nuances. Since I have always loved translating difficult texts, I found it an enjoyable exercise, and in the course of it I saw that, for all his pretension, Philby was a shrewd judge of character, with a perceptive understanding of other people.
A naturally idle man, he did not want much work, so he conducted these seminars between October and December but every year Albert Kozlov, the link between him and our department, bought him a birthday present to keep him happy. Occasionally Kozlov asked me to help him find something suitable, and, since there was nothing of quality in any normal shop, we always went to one of the antique shops (of which there were then four in the whole of Moscow). One year we had a particular triumph when we found an elaborate writing-set, dating from the turn of the century, which fitted the bill exactly. On another occasion I asked Kozlov to take Philby a book about him written by a Dane, so that he could sign it for me. Back it came
a few days later bearing the inscription, ‘To My Good Friend Oleg — Don’t believe anything you see in print! Kim Philby.’
The first book in English that I read straight through from start to finish, understanding everything, was Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, brought to me by Kozlov one evening when I was detained for a few days in the KGB medical centre, suffering from some bronchial infection. While there I also read the whole of Fielding’s huge novel Tom Jones, although this was in Russian.
*
On the domestic front I had to make a completely fresh start. While in Denmark I had acquired a new flat in Moscow by putting down a 40 per cent deposit, out of a total cost of fourteen thousand roubles — although the law on property was so poorly defined that I was never sure what my rights of ownership were. I paid the money to a group of KGB officers who had organized themselves into a co-operative: each of us put down a deposit, and the group raised the rest by borrowing from banks. As far as I could tell, I had bought the freehold of the apartment, and would be able to occupy it in perpetuity, or until the block fell down.
Yelena and I decided that, once we were divorced, I would live in this new flat, and she would retain our old one. She did well out of the arrangement, keeping not only all the new clothes she had bought in Denmark but also our china and a good deal of the furniture, including the wall units which I had so painstakingly put up for my books. In Copenhagen she had continued to work for the KGB, so that she held her seniority and returned to Moscow as a captain, earning a good salary. She resumed her old listening job, and continued to earn substantial amounts. (When I discussed our affairs with the head of the Partcom, he said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t mention Yelena’s money.’)
For the time being she camped in the new flat and I stayed in the old, which temporary set-up led to considerable irritation. I did not mind that Yelena broke open the packing case of my own possessions, which had arrived from Copenhagen, and began to use them. That was hardly important. But one day when I happened to be free in the morning and went to the new flat to collect some things I needed urgently, to my consternation, I could not open the door. The lock seemed to have jammed, and I was forced to go down to a call-box at ground level and telephone Yelena in her office.
‘What on earth have you done to the locks?’ I demanded. ‘I need some stuff urgently.’
‘Oh...ah!’ She sounded unusually flustered. Then she said, ‘I’ll see to it. Wait a few minutes and try again.’
I hung around outside the building, and a couple of minutes later out scuttled a man in his thirties, who disappeared rapidly round the corner. I did not feel jealous, exactly: there was nothing like that left between us. But I could not help feeling annoyed that she had invited a man into my flat and left him there with all my nice new things from abroad.
Our divorce, presided over in court by a female judge, was brutally straightforward. Yelena displeased this powerful lady by chewing gum (a sign of nerves). ‘Stop doing that!’ said the judge sharply. ‘You’re in court. Now, your husband is divorcing you because you don’t want to have children, and he does. Is that right?’
‘Not at all!’ said Yelena. ‘He fell in love with a pretty girl. Nothing else.’
In a way I admired her for being so cynical and honest; but the judge did not find her convincing. ‘I accept the husband’s reasons, and grant a divorce,’ she said. ‘But he, the plaintiff, will have to pay the legal costs.’ During her preliminary discussions she had warned me that costs might amount to four hundred roubles, but in the event she made me pay only a hundred and fifty. I felt I was lucky to have a female judge, because she discerned that Yelena was self-centred and egoistic, and saw how little she cared about husband or family.
In October Leila came back from Copenhagen on holiday. She was staying with me in the old flat when, one morning, the doorbell rang: it was my brother-in-law, Valentin, Marina’s husband, calling to announce, ‘Anton Lavrentiyevich died in the night.’ My father was eighty-two, and, although he smoked excessively, had been in reasonable health. I am glad to say that he and I were on good terms during his old age. To the end of his life he remained what he had always been, a dedicated Communist, but we had long since ceased to have ideological arguments. He knew that I was working in foreign intelligence but was too professional to ask questions about what I was doing. Many of his friends and contemporaries had already died, so that few people came along three days later when we said goodbye to him at the crematorium. For the wake, more than thirty relations crowded into my parents’ tiny flat, and I made what I think was the speech of my life, extolling the high ability of this son of a railway ganger, who had established himself as a leading first-generation member of the intelligentsia, and then had brought up his children to do equally well in the second generation. To some extent his death was a liberation for my mother, who was eleven years younger and still active, and had been irritated at having to spend so much of her time looking after a man of his advanced age.
*
Yelena and I duly switched flats, but that winter of 1978-79 proved one of the coldest in living memory. From December to January the temperature remained incredibly low, even by Moscow standards (-28°C by day, and down to -36°C at night), and my new apartment, which still had no curtains or proper lights, was far from homely. In the middle of the cold spell I went down with influenza, and felt so ill that I called a doctor. The young woman who answered my call prescribed some antibiotics, and then, looking round at the chaos, said severely, ‘Really! You should look after yourself better. Why doesn’t your wife take better care of you?’ To which I replied, ‘I’m not married.’ The doctor glared at me and said, ‘By your age, you’re supposed to be married,’ with which she swept out.
In January Leila returned from Denmark for good, and we were married in a simple ceremony. I felt that at my age it would not be appropriate to make a great occasion of it, so we went to a register office, and invited only my sister Marina, and Leila’s brother Arif and his wife Katya, an exceptionally nice couple, who became good friends. Afterwards we all went to Leila’s parents for dinner.
That she was eleven years younger had worried us both at first, but by now we had grown used to it. I reassured myself by thinking that this was exactly the age gap between my parents, so that I was merely repeating a family pattern. Also, I consoled myself with the thought that my father, too, had been married twice. Thinking back, I remembered how my grandmother had once let slip in my presence, ‘Anton’s first wife...’ but how she had stopped short, looked at me in fear and added quickly, ‘You didn’t hear me say that. If your father finds out, he’ll kill me.’ Other generations, I reflected, had their problems, just as we did.
Setting up our flat was enormous fun. Our relationship was warm and close, everything I had always longed for, and we enjoyed launching ourselves into the battle of getting things done in Moscow. We had some beautiful modern furniture from Denmark — lovely chairs, a leather-covered sofa and a marble-topped coffee table, all chosen by Leila — but I wanted extensive bookshelves once again, and for these we went to a local firm that made furnishings to order. Dealing with this company was an experience in itself, and a revelation of how Moscow really functioned. The firm was half public, half private, and its craftsmen, though skilled, were grossly overworked. Our two carpenters would arrive with shelves which they had already roughed-out in their workshops, but they would begin to drink at 11 a.m., and were so dependent on alcohol that they kept making pathetic appeals to be topped up. ‘We need a shot of dope,’ they would say shamelessly, knowing that I would pour out tumblers of neat vodka. ‘Time for a shot.’ By the afternoon, they had had so many shots that they hardly knew where they were or what they were doing. Because they had an official job, I paid a fee to their firm, but I also paid them privately, and in the end they succeeded in covering two walls with good-looking shelves.
Leila also wanted wall units for the kitchen, and when she heard that a large furniture sto
re was about to take delivery of some, she joined an all-night queue. That proved a fascinating sociological experience, and in the morning she was immensely proud of having achieved her objective. ‘Western people don’t know what real happiness is!’ she cried in triumph. ‘Real happiness is to queue all night, and then get what you want.’
Once the flat was fully furnished, running it was cheap since most things were heavily subsidized by the State. Our central heating cost the equivalent of six pounds a month, electricity about eight pounds, and the telephone about four pounds. (The heating was ferociously powerful, and since our radiators had no thermostats, the only way we could cool the flat was by opening the windows, even when the outside temperature was -30°C.)
Our only problem was that we could not find Leila a good job. For the moment, though, this did not matter, since we wanted to start a family, and she soon became pregnant: our first daughter, Maria, was born in April 1980, followed by Anna in September 1981. Both births took place in maternity homes, and these I can only describe as torture factories in which the most brutal methods were used and anaesthetics were unknown. The idea of a father being present at the birth of his child was unheard of: no visitors were allowed, and it would not have occurred to the authorities to admit anyone except professional medical staff.
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