Red to Black

by Alex Dryden

  For two weeks my mother and I and Genghiz had to stay in our house on the compound, with the windows and blinds shut in the stifling heat, while KGB officers raked over everything and guarded all the entrances, in case the cello made a dash for it, or had the power to make us all defect too. Suspicion and fear ruled the house. My mother went grey, my father’s anger revealed the fear behind it more than usual. But I found it comical that a cello could cause so much panic.

  After the incident with my tutor, my parents realised they’d be happier without me unhappy in Damascus and allowed me–as if it were solely for my benefit–to stay in Russia during the summer holidays.

  ‘It’s better for her education,’ I heard my father say from behind their bedroom door. My mother complied, though I knew she didn’t want me to go. For many years- and despite the fact that I was overjoyed to spend my summers with Nana at Barvikha- I blamed her for giving in to his will. He felt judged by me, perhaps, by my silent looks that questioned his behaviour, and wanted me out of the house. But she was too weak to stand up for me, or for herself. I vowed I would never be weak like her.

  After that, all my holidays were spent at Barvikha with Nana and Genghiz and I only saw my mother and father two or three times a year when they came on leave to Moscow or I spent a few unwilling days over Christmas with them in Damascus.

  From then on, I devoted myself to my studies, determined to become a workhorse of the state, instead of a ‘weak woman’. I was top or near the top in my class and I learned to speak fluent English. I read everything I could, including the banned foreign books my mother’s family had access to. I wrote poetry and short stories and dreamed of travel to foreign countries and I passed my exams with flying colours. As the Soviet empire began to totter in the middle of the eighties, I was a young trainee in the KGB.

  From a thin, gangly, sulky schoolgirl, I grew into a woman. I let my black hair grow long, down to my waist, and it accentuated my height. Slavic cheekbones appeared out of the puppy fat on my face. And my green eyes, Vladimir told me, could be seen from across the street. I became, Vladimir said, a classic Russian beauty and, in response to this flattery of Vladimir’s, I chose not him but my fencing trainer as my first real lover. Occasionally I would be approached at a party to play some Soviet heroine at the Mosfilm studios outside Moscow. Of course, I could never accept these offers.

  By the time my parents returned to Moscow on long leave, they’d become estranged from each other. My father stayed in a separate apartment, although careful to maintain the fiction of their marriage. To my father’s disgust, when Gorbachev came to power in the middle of the decade, my mother began to work for the Sakharov human rights organisation.

  My parents’ false marriage affected me in unexpected ways. My father began to take me out to official functions in place of my mother. I knew it was because my youth and beauty reflected well on him. And I hated him for it.

  By the beginning of the eighties the Soviet Union was nearing the end of its irreversible decline, and then the genial Ronald Reagan raised the stakes still further by placing a new missile system in Western Europe. This decline had been going on for a long time, of course, but nobody really understood it except the SVR- our agents abroad- who could see the outside world most clearly. The truth had become so devalued that it had effectively ceased to exist. Even the Politburo had to be told by the KGB, who learned from the SVR, that things weren’t what they wanted them to be. Like anyone else, the complacent Communist Party bosses in their closed enclave of the Politburo chose to believe their own illusions.

  In 1982, mainly for this reason-a a final recognition that decline was irreversible without change, and that the intelligence services were our country’s only hope of survival- the Politburo appointed the KGB boss Yuri Andropov as leader, and our first KGB president. Where before the KGB had been a servant of the Party, this fateful move was the beginning of a reversal of that hierarchy. My father was very pleased.

  ‘At last we’ve got someone who knows how to run the country,’ he said angrily. ‘A real professional, not some politician.’

  Years later when I told Finn of my father’s remark, he said it almost exactly mirrored what was said in Britain when someone with a life outside politics became a minister in the British Government.

  ‘But at least in England it’s always someone from the business world, not a spy chief,’ Finn said. ‘Spies in England work for Her Majesty’s Government.’

  For some reason I’m always amused by this expression.

  But the phrase ‘At last we’ve got someone who knows how to run the country’ became a running joke for Finn and me whenever someone in a foreign country came to power. At the diplomatic parties we attended together in Moscow, an official would say, ‘I see that chap Berlusconi has got in in Italy’, and Finn or I, or worse still, both of us together, would say, ‘At last they’ve got someone who knows how to run the country.’ And then both of us would burst out laughing at our private joke. It was a child’s game and we upset a lot of pompous old diplomatic bores that way.

  And that was one of the first things I noticed Finn did for me. He lifted me out of my hitherto serious, even repressed, behaviour. He eroded my solemn and determined ambition to be a workhorse of the state with his gleeful, carefree frivolity. I found it–the recklessness of his behaviour-new and exciting.

  ‘You know, Rabbit,’ he told me, ‘your seriousness exposes the disguise of my frivolity, and my frivolity exposes the disguise of your seriousness.’

  And so we played with and reacted to each other’s character opposites–in this and other ways–like two dissonant musical instruments which, combined, made sweet music. We slowly lured each other out of our inner hiding places. We dropped the emotional barbed wire that we’d both used to protect ourselves. And we fell in love with the differences we saw revealed in each other. I looked in the mirror of Finn and he looked in mine, and we began to see who we could be, who we really were.

  Finn used to list the things he loved about me, in a sort of league table of characteristics that changed positions according to his whims. But I remember one true and beautiful thing he said, from early in our relationship, which stuck in my mind more than others.

  We were in a corner suite at the Marco Polo Hotel, north of Pushkinskaya and our room looked down on to the ice park.

  ‘I forget how to pretend when I’m with you,’ Finn said to me.

  And I felt the same way about being with him. I’d fallen like a stone, but what I said was: ‘You think you’re good at pretending?’

  ‘Are you?’ he said, smiling.

  ‘Yes. Better than you by a million miles.’

  ‘Pretend this, then,’ he said, and he kissed me.

  But Finn’s reckless frivolity got him into trouble with others, particularly his masters at the British embassy, on more than one occasion.

  ‘It is symptomatic of your behaviour,’ was the way Finn’s head of station put it. ‘You don’t seem to take anything seriously any more.’

  But he was wrong on both counts. First, Finn hardly ever took anything seriously.

  ‘There’s hardly anything worth taking seriously,’ he would say.

  And, second, when he did take something seriously, he took it more seriously than anyone, his head of station included, could possibly have imagined.

  4

  IT WAS NOT ONLY my father who was delighted when Andropov came to power, but also the whole of the KGB. And as soon as he had power, the old spy pursued a two-pronged policy. He ruthlessly put down dissent, including punishing people who committed economic crimes, and simultaneously he set about loosening the same reins a little by allowing a small, KGB-controlled experiment in free trade.

  This was hugely significant in terms of how Russia has developed. A few carefully chosen so-called buzinessmen- traders with their own semi-legal tzekhs, or workshops- were allowed to conduct business while at the same time being closely monitored by the security services.


  What Andropov and his cronies failed to see–or, more probably, exploited-was that the only people who could take advantage of these little windows of opportunity were the criminal elements, the mafia, the men who had conducted business throughout the history of the Soviet Union. They were the only people who knew what to do.

  And so the mafia were the first to benefit from perestroika when it finally arrived under Gorbachev in 1985. They were already in pole position, the only ones with money. By the nineties they had completely entrenched their power. And with them were their allies in the KGB who watched over them and shared in the spoils. Thus the secret state and the mafia state were married in a devil’s pact.

  ‘It was the KGB itself who managed perestroika right from the beginning,’ Finn said. ‘Perestroika was an invention of the KGB’s.’

  But from inside the KGB I couldn’t see it.

  For my final exams, I wrote a short story, which won me a prize at school. It was a fictional tale about the last man to be executed in the Soviet Union for possession of more than ten thousand dollars; holding more than ten thousand dollars was still a capital offence under Gorbachev.

  The story was called, ‘Not a Great Start to the Day’, a tongue-in-cheek title that echoed the thoughts of the condemned man as he looked out of his cell window on to the execution yard on his final morning on earth, and saw that it was snowing. My father was furious that I appeared to see injustice in the man’s execution.

  After my parents returned to Moscow, all the years I’d spent with Nana in the capital and at the dacha in Barvikha, with only brief visits from them, hadn’t prepared me for the fact that my father evidently felt he still had complete power over my future.

  Like our leaders, my father always looked angry. Sometimes his crossness spilled into rage and that always terrified me, until I learned to suppress my fear. My mother, however, never seemed to lose her nerve.

  ‘He has a very stressful job,’ she’d say. ‘He has to think about everything.’

  I couldn’t understand, if his life was so bad, why he didn’t simply change it, get another job-retire, even. Fearful now of the change in my relationship with him, as he demanded I accompany him to functions, I didn’t fully understand that he endured a constricting fear that killed his self-expression. He lived in fear from the past, too; a fear that would eventually infect me.

  What I also didn’t know, until much later, was that he worked in the most secret department of the SVR that dealt with nelegali, illegals. These were foreign nationals who had come to train in Russia in order to strike against their own countries. This department was called Department S. My father was a major recruiter of citizens of Syria and neighbouring countries and ran a vitally important network in the Middle East. He was a personal friend of Yasser Arafat.

  But to me he was just a dangerous, lonely, angry man, who had, therefore, to be manipulated carefully. I remember one terrible night, when, after a state function, we had returned to one of the several apartments in Moscow that seemed to be at his disposal. He was drunker than usual, and began to manhandle me, though I couldn’t say for certain that it was molestation. I gave him more and more vodka until eventually he fell asleep. When I confronted him the next day, he said I had imagined the whole thing.

  Twice he tried to marry me off to the sons of colleagues, including Vladimir, the older boy from school Number 47 whom I’d been instructed to befriend and with whom I’d maintained a distant friendship throughout our schooldays. Vladimir even asked me to marry him when I was seventeen and my father went into a fury when I refused. I didn’t want to end up like my mother, a necessary addition to a husband’s career. I didn’t want to be a woman whose job was to ‘understand’ her husband.

  In avoiding that trap, I ended up in another.

  Perhaps it was compensation for my refusal to marry Vladimir or any of my father’s choices that led me, subconsciously, to try to please him in other ways. And that was my weakness, believing I could still have a proper relationship with a man like him at all. But it was for this reason that I applied to study at the secret KGB training establishment at Yasenovo- the Forest–to the south of Moscow.

  My application pleased my father. I did it without thinking, through a compulsion that was stronger than my base instincts. All the years of Nana’s sharp but gentle influence were swept away by obedience to the powerful hold I allowed my father to exert on me. If anything, the years of absence from my parents increased my desire to please him.

  Nana never said a word when I told her-and that told me all I needed to know. Nana couldn’t have passed a KGB exam to save her life, but she despised the organisation. She used to tell me jokes about the KGB, in the woods, with a carelessness that old people so magnificently grow into. Nana and Genghiz saw eye to eye on the subject of our intelligence services. While Genghiz mocked their guard dogs, Nana mocked them.

  But Nana made one far-sighted remark, an illustration of the visionary or psychic power behind her watery grey eyes. And even though I didn’t understand her at the time, I see it now.

  ‘Something good will come of it,’ was all she said.

  As I drifted almost in a dream state into the arms of our security services, I wondered how anything good could come from joining the KGB. And yet that was how I would meet Finn, my one true love.

  5

  THE KRASNOZNAMENNIY INSTITUTE, or KI, was where women trained for the KGB. I studied there for three years, and then went on to put my training into practice at Balashiha-2, in the forest to the east of Moscow. There I trained foreign female subversives, the nelegali, whose eventual role was to return to their own countries and undermine them with terrorist activities.

  During this time, I also lectured to the male KGB students in Vishka, or the Tower, as it was called.

  Balashiha-2 is both the strongroom of the Kremlin and its arsenal and training ground for covert and subversive operations, hidden in the vast forest fifteen miles east of Moscow. To keep the capital’s population obedient it hosts the notorious Dzerzhinskaya army division, but Balashiha’s real usefulness lies in its highly secret training camp for KGB units involved in foreign operations. They call this the Centre of Special Purposes. It is where the paramilitary spetsnaz are based, or special forces units like Vympel, the Alfa Group and the nelegali in the ‘Foreigners’ Area’.

  To all of us the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, was called the Forest. The Forest then and today is the centre of Russia’s subversive operations abroad.

  My admission to the Forest was not as easy as my impeccable background would suggest. Though my father had friends there, they could only facilitate interviews, not help me through them. I was interviewed intensely for weeks and what caused me most trouble was the short story I’d written at school, ‘Not a Great Start to the Day’.

  Was I sympathetic to the condemned man in his cell awaiting execution, as my father had accused me? Did I believe in American free-market activities, which the condemned man was guilty of pursuing? Was I critical of the law and the arm of the law that executed the guilty criminal?

  The interview when the subject of the short story was raised took place early one morning, out at Balashiha. One of my three interrogators asked me: ‘Why do you sympathise with the guilty man in your story?’

  ‘I make him seem convincing,’ I answered. ‘That isn’t the same thing as sympathising.’

  ‘But he should not seem convincing!’ he demanded.

  The man had thick lips, and eyes like shale.

  To their consternation, I stood up and drained my glass of water. Then I looked him in the eye.

  ‘The guilty are never convincing, Comrade. Were you convinced?’

  I found that manipulation came effortlessly. I convinced them that the story was the opposite of what I knew it to be, that it was in fact highly unsympathetic to the condemned man. They were pleased. I realised then that great manipulators are themselves susceptible to manipulation.

  Some of th
e assessment was absurd, like something out of a KGB manual from Stalin’s time–which, in some cases, it was. Despite my impeccable linguistic qualifications, they tested my English language from a schoolbook written in 1941. The first three lines were, ‘Long Live International Youth Day! Long Live the Communist Party! Long Live Comrade Stalin!’–conversational gambits that I’ve never found particularly useful.

  The book was a story concerning two schoolchildren, Sasha and Misha. My favourite chapter in it was called ‘Two Little Patriots’, in which Sasha and Misha go for a walk in the woods near the border and see something behind a tree, which turns out to be a man. He is wearing white clothes and is carrying a white bag, and is all but invisible against the snow. The boys realise he is a spy. They alert the border guards and the man is arrested. ‘He is a spy!’ the KGB officer, who dashes to the scene, proclaims. ‘Well done, boys!’

  ‘Well done, boys!’ later became another coded phrase between myself and Finn. We uttered it whenever we wished to indicate a disastrous decision by our respective leaders.

  My time at Krasnoznamenniy taught me to speak English like a native, to handle weapons, to make IEDs–or improvised explosive devices-and most of the arts of self-defence. And my time at the Forest put this training into action as I then trained others.

  I also endured the increasingly unconvincing political ‘education’, which nobody seemed to take seriously any more. Few people really believed what they were told about the West. Once, it had been necessary to induce a fear of the West so great that it overshadowed the fear ordinary people, at any rate, had of our own system. But not any more, not by the late eighties. By 1989, we didn’t even use the title ‘KGB’ among ourselves, so discredited had the organisation become.