One evening Gribin invited me home for supper with his wife Irina and their daughter Yelena, known as Alyonka. It was more than six years since I had last seen the girl, in Denmark, and then she had only been ten or eleven years old. I felt that it would be a good move to take her a token present, and I selected from my bookshelves a nice little edition of the work of Konstantin Balmont, a poet, like Lermontov, of Scottish extraction, who wrote at the turn of the century, and during the Communist era was regarded as thoroughly decadent. (His poems were not available in Russia, but I had bought that copy abroad.) I was aware, of course, that Alyonka must have grown up, but even so I was hardly prepared for the sight that greeted me when I rang the bell of the Gribins’ flat. Both parents were dark — Nikolai black-haired and narrow faced, Irina half-Jewish, with a hint of the Oriental in the shape of her cheekbones — yet here stood a glorious blonde Russian beauty, with a lovely, interesting face, and generous hips well set on long legs, as if she had sprung from a traditional painting done a hundred years ago. Behind her hovered Gribin, proud and delighted that I showed such appreciation, and from that moment the evening went well, the book proving a particular success.
*
Back in London, just as Nikitenko had claimed credit for his success with Bitov, I too was keen to bring off some easy little coup, which would promote my image at the Centre without damaging the West. Almost at once, as if in answer to my prayers, just such a chance presented itself.
One day Mr Tokar — in Nikitenko’s absence the senior counter-surveillance officer — came to my office in some excitement and said that a fascinating visitor had arrived at the Embassy: none other than Svetlana Alliluyeva, otherwise Mrs Peters, Stalin’s daughter. Dressed in a headscarf and dark glasses, she had simply walked in, unrecognized by our own people or, as we found out later, by the MI5 surveillance, and said that she wanted to return to Russia, together with her daughter, Olga, who was then thirteen. Mr Tokar handed me an unsealed letter she had brought with her: ostensibly written to her son by her first marriage, but in fact addressed to the Soviet leaders, it was an outburst of rage and frustration against all the worst features of Western life.
I read it with a mixture of admiration and pity: admiration because it was well written and powerfully expressed, pity because its author was so deluded. It was the typical reaction of a Russian with Oriental blood in her veins, still influenced by her family’s traditional, patriarchal way of life, against what she saw as the pernicious freedoms of the West — pornography, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and girls starting their sex lives at thirteen. Here was a woman — I saw as I read — who had defected in the belief that the West represented freedom, democracy, light and civilization, and now, twenty years later, had come to the conclusion that Western life was nothing but corruption, dirt, immodesty and degradation. Clearly, she was appalled by the prospect facing her daughter, and terrified that in another year or so she would lose control of her: that Olga would start to defy her mother, sleep with boys, experiment with drugs and stay out all night.
The burden of Svetlana’s complaint was that she wanted to return to the more modest and dignified life of Russia. The trouble was, she had entirely forgotten what Russian life was like. In the two decades since she had defected in India, she had begun to idealize conditions in the Soviet Union, and did not know that life was worse than when she had left. In the sixties there had been fewer severe food shortages, less corruption, fewer bribes, and still a basic foundation of honesty; traditional Russian life had not been entirely destroyed then by Communism, and memories of Stalin’s Terror had tended to enforce law and order. What Svetlana did not appreciate was that by 1984 everything had become a great deal less civilized.
Against the hopes and expectations of Russians serving abroad, the situation at home had been deteriorating steadily. Elementary public services like health and education had declined; food shortages were often acute; the range of goods on sale in shops was wretched; and people found it increasingly difficult to get their cars mended or their property maintained. Corruption was rife, not least in large sections of the Party apparatus, and although the KGB were aware of this, they could do nothing to stamp it out. The technological gap between the Soviet Union and the West was widening, and economic growth had all but stopped: the small percentage officially quoted was nothing but the result of manipulating statistics. Moreover, Soviet people perceived their plight more clearly than ever before because international communications had improved so much, and censorship could no longer keep out news of the world’s progress.
Svetlana seemed blind to all this. But our task in the Embassy was to smuggle her back. First I asked a secretary to type out the letter, which was handwritten and difficult to decipher. Then, together with Tokar, I composed a telegram describing what had happened, and including part of the letter. The trouble was that Tokar — a Ukrainian from a humble background — had extremely poor written Russian, deficient in spelling, grammar and style: he spent hours laboriously compiling a draft, and then, because I did not want to compromise myself by sending a poor telegram, I had to sit down and rewrite it in longhand (typewritten telegrams being specifically forbidden on security grounds). This took me until 12.30 a.m., whereupon I handed it to the wretched cipher clerk on night duty, and waited to make sure that he could read and understand it.
Since Gribin had insisted that all important telegrams should go to him as well as to the KR Line, I addressed one copy to ‘Severov’, his code-name, and next day back came a positive answer: ‘Continue debriefing and prepare for evacuation.’ Under Chernenko — an old man, already sick — the administration was taking a reactionary, Stalinist line, and warmly welcomed the idea of Svetlana rejoining the faithful: the return of the prodigal daughter would represent one small yet definite ideological victory over the West.
We therefore prepared a simple evacuation plan, while giving her advice on how to sell her house, what to do with the money, and how to create the right arrangements so that if she needed her savings she could draw them from a bank in Moscow. Over the next couple of weeks she came to the Embassy four more times, and spent hours chatting with Mr Tokar over cups of tea and little glasses of brandy. Of course I told the British service what was happening, but they saw no advantage in keeping Svetlana against her will, and were happy to let her go.
When the time came, her exit presented no problems. Since she was officially Mrs Peters, an American citizen, we simply bought her an air ticket to Sofia. The affair earned me some credit — even though it had been child’s play to set up — and in November the Centre sent a telegram commending Mr Tokar and myself.[32]
In the middle of the Svetlana negotiations a dramatic event occurred in British politics: the IRA bomb attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton, during the Conservative Party Conference. On the morning of 12 October radio and television bulletins were full of the terrorist outrage: several people had been killed, Mrs Thatcher had had a miraculous escape, and millions of television watchers were haunted by the pictures of her Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Norman Tebbit, being lifted, badly injured, out of the ruined building by firemen.
For me the question was, what should the KGB do about it? It did not seem to be any concern of ours. News of the bomb had been well reported by all the international agencies, and there seemed little more that we could say. Besides, the station was functioning well in its normal mode, and I enjoyed the feeling of being in charge. The officer responsible for technical gadgets, the cipher clerk, the man responsible for gathering reference material on restaurants and dry-cleaning routes, the operational driver: all were working efficiently, and the nucleus of the station was showing good discipline. In the morning I read the telegrams from the Centre, and answered those which needed replies. The afternoon passed smoothly, and at six o’clock I thought, Well, this has been a lovely day. Now I’m free, with no boss to detain me. I can go home and enjoy myself — play with the girls, take a drive, have a beer in the pub.
So I locked the door of my office, went downstairs, crossed to the gate and reached my car. Suddenly I was hit by a flash of lightning.
What the hell was I doing, going home without having given the Centre a single line about the great event of the day? For them, of course, it was of exceptional interest, since the bulk of the domestic KGB in the Soviet Union work on State security and anti-terrorist operations. A major terrorist attack on the British government, and not a word from the KGB in London? Had the Acting Resident no ideas on the matter? No, it was impossible.
I ran back upstairs, shouting to the cipher clerk to hold on, and sat down to write a short telegram in which I took care to rub salt into the Centre’s wounds by pointing out that the consequences of the attack would be favourable to the Conservative Party. The terrorists’ operation had outraged all normal British citizens, and would diminish whatever support the Irish nationalists might have. It would strengthen backing for the government, partly out of human sympathy for people who had suffered, and partly because Mrs Thatcher had shown outstanding courage, remaining calm and decisive throughout the nightmare. Another factor likely to increase support was the fortitude displayed by those injured, Mr Tebbit particularly.
It took me about three-quarters of an hour to draft a concise telegram expressing these ideas, and I enjoyed every minute of it, feeling that for once the Centre was getting an accurate account of public reaction in Britain. Then, once again, I locked up and left for home.
*
It was not long before we had the first official news about the up-and-coming figure in the Soviet hierarchy. Gorbachev had once been in charge of agriculture, but in May had been appointed Ideological Secretary under the ailing Chernenko — an important step up for anyone manoeuvring to become General Secretary: Andropov had taken it, and now it looked as though this new man was on his way to the top. He was coming to Britain as head of a delegation from the Supreme Soviet, that pathetic body which called itself a parliament but which had never been elected, all its members being appointed. But what was the point of this visit? His trip to Britain was regarded as his first important overseas mission, and a stream of telegrams from the Centre revealed that — as Gribin had confided to me — the KGB had a special interest in the visit. One request after another demanded information: on Britain’s position over arms-control questions, Britain’s military role in NATO, Britain’s economic and technological potential, Britain’s role in the European Community, her relations with the United States, China, Eastern Europe. The Centre was supposed to be well briefed on such matters already, but clearly they felt a need for fresh facts and ideas. At the same time, the Embassy was bombarded with similar requests from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so that the two organizations were filing on parallel channels, and a kind of competition developed.
At the end of October Nikitenko returned from holiday, confirming from talks with senior officers at the Centre that the KGB was indeed behind Gorbachev, who had a friendly understanding with it, and that the trip was designed to give him a boost in his struggle for power. The KGB was backing him because he was a new man, a man for the future, an honest man who would fight corruption and all the other negative features of Soviet society.
Now we really began to miss Yegoshin, our brilliant but drunken analyst: the rest of us were not professional report writers and, anyway, we were busy with operational work. We therefore lobbied for a temporary replacement and it was now that we were sent the middle-aged Shilov, or Shatov, who at least knew what to do, even if he lacked Yegoshin’s speed and sharpness.
It was at this stage that Gribin began to write me letters which I found disturbing. They contained no personal threat: rather, it was their peculiar brevity which gave me cause for concern. Each was short and factual, and couched in short, bald sentences, as if the author was inhibited from expressing any feeling by fear that somebody might be making up a file on him. The style was quite uncharacteristic of Gribin, and I felt that it must be a reflection of his new status: he seemed to sense that even private letters could be used against him if someone turned hostile.
By early December we had put over a mass of information to the Centre, but suddenly a request came that floored us: the Centre wanted specific facts on the miners’ strike, which had been running since March. What benefits were the miners getting? What were they living on? Were they getting anything from the State? What were their prospects? Strikes and unemployment benefits were unknown in the Soviet Union: clearly, this bright new Mr Gorbachev had read something about the strike and had asked for basic information, which we were asked to supply before the end of the day.
Our trouble was that we could not find it. None of our normal journalistic or political contacts had any answers, and in the end I was obliged to ring Sally, a well-known Communist sympathizer who taught English in the basement of the Consular Department, the only English person allowed on Embassy territory.
A slim, good-looking woman in her mid-thirties, Sally worked in the offices of Novosti, the press-agency-cum-propaganda bureau, and over the past couple of years I had got to know her well. I was keen to improve my English and had gone as often as possible to the classes she gave. Many times, because no one else had come along, we had spent ninety minutes just chatting to each other. During one of these sessions she had suddenly said, in an offhand voice, ‘I believe it’s now fashionable for a woman of my age to acquire a lover.’ Obviously it was some kind of invitation, but at the time I was so happily married, and so preoccupied with my double life, that I made no move to take it up; and when, on a couple of occasions, I asked her out to lunch, purely to extract information from her about the British Communist Party, she was clearly disappointed that I kept off personal matters.
Anyway, now that we urgently needed information about the miners, our relationship stood me in good stead. Because it was my instinct, as a KGB officer, not to reveal to any low-level member of staff that I was using a special source, I went out to a call-box and telephoned her from there. She was glad to give us the information we needed, and we were able to concoct a telegram that evening.
The Centre responded by asking both the Embassy and the KGB, separately, whether it should send money to the miners. After long debate the Embassy said ‘No’, on the grounds that the strike was being orchestrated by left-wingers, the Labour Party was uneasy about it, and a contribution from Moscow might damage the Labour leadership. The KGB also decided that it was not in Moscow’s interest to support extreme radical movements in British politics. But the militant element in the Central Committee overruled both these recommendations, called us cowards, and allocated a million currency roubles (about nine hundred thousand pounds) to the miners. The question then was how to pass the money, and it was never clear to me whether or not the funds reached their intended destination.
*
Gorbachev’s tour began on 15 December. By the time his car pulled up outside the Embassy gate in the middle of the day, the entire staff had gathered on the drive, together with their wives, to greet him. He shook hands with everyone individually, but when a group photograph was taken, I had a curious feeling that I should conceal myself behind someone else and not appear in the picture, for fear that one of my colleagues might later be branded with having had a traitor at his shoulder. The feeling was not well defined, but it made me uneasy.
First impressions of our distinguished visitor were not favourable. I know that people in the West found his face attractive: they considered his expression open and lively. For us, however, it was spoilt by obvious Turkic or Mongolian features. Many Russians have a slightly racialist suspicion of Asians, believing them to be corrupt and dishonest; and my colleagues, when they saw the Oriental features of Mr Gorbachev, felt instinctive distrust.
We got a better chance to form an opinion that evening, when he returned to the Embassy to speak to the diplomats and intelligence officers in one of the main reception halls. Again he shook hands with each of us — without any introductions bei
ng made — and then began to speak. We had understood that he would be in a hurry, as the time was already 7.30 p.m., and he had to change before being driven to a formal dinner, which was due to begin at 8.45. We expected the normal, five-minute pep-talk: ‘Greetings to you from the Leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. You diplomats are in the leading ranks of the foreign policy front...’ and so on. That was not what we got at all. Instead, Gorbachev held forth for forty minutes, clearly carried away by the sound of his own voice.
This, too, was a grave disappointment. His accent and vocabulary were those of a man from the south of Russia, the North Caucasus, an area whose speech had been heavily influenced by the arrival of Ukrainians during the nineteenth century. The argot was no longer Ukrainian, but merely South Russian, regarded in Moscow and St Petersburg as unpleasant and ugly, particularly displeasing as regards the letter G, which came out almost as H, so that Gogol, for instance, emerged as ‘Hohol’. Brezhnev had spoken like that, and Gorbachev was the same. Also, with some words, he persistently put the stress on the wrong syllable: instead of nachát, he always said náchat — an awful solecism.
Not only that: his speech was neither polished nor grammatical, and contained enough elementary mistakes to annoy educated Russians. He also displayed a dismaying lack of self-awareness, going on for far longer than the occasion warranted. He made one or two interesting points — among them that American foreign policy was not shaped by some secret, imperialist, capitalist force which was somehow driving the government (as Soviet leaders and analysts had always believed), but was the product of several power-houses competing with one another, the White House, Congress, the State Department, the National Security Council, the CIA, the Defense Department and academic centres. This, at least was realistic and refreshing. But on the home front he was disappointing: he made no revelations, and gave no hint of glasnost (openness) or increased democracy, but spoke at length of the terrible winter which was damaging railways and powerlines in Siberia.
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