by Alex Dryden
As Gorbachev dismantled the Soviet Union, morale in the organisation was lower than ever and it reached rock bottom under Boris Yeltsin’s presidency. Our training went on, just as before, but without the ideological underpinning.
But the Forest had its entertaining aspects, if, like me, you were given to silent mockery. I particularly enjoyed the company of Dato and Zviad, a Georgian and an Armenian. They were in a special division of mainly Georgian and Armenian men who were training to be homosexual honey traps. Finn loved my stories about this division and he used to glow with the gleeful enjoyment of joking about homosexual honey traps when he was at Moscow’s diplomatic parties even when, once again, he was warned to stop by the British embassy.
‘Practising being a practising homosexual,’ Finn called it.
In 1991, just as I was finishing my training, Gorbachev was put under house arrest at his villa in Sochi on the Black Sea. I came back to Moscow that August, just before the coup took place. I saw the Dzerzhinskaya division enter the city in the early hours of the coup and watched with foreboding as the new and short-lived ‘President’ Yanayev visibly trembled as he promised us Russians that Gorbachev’s reforms would continue.
Yanayev and the KGB general at the head of the coup, Kryuchkov, were clearly way out of their depth and received little support, even from the special forces. The coup leaders had seized power in a haze of nostalgia for the ‘good old days’, which they were perhaps too drunk to realise had never gone away.
This inept coup set back plans that, unknown to all but very few in the KGB, were well under way. These plans had been drawn up to manage the transition from Communist Party rule to a new Russia. Instead, however, Boris Yeltsin filled the vacuum left by the bumbling coup leaders. Yeltsin became the hero. He stood on a battle tank and won over the people and the army. The coup was crushed and three days later I watched from the Lubyanka as crowds advanced on our old KGB headquarters. At the last minute, as we held our breath before wreaking death on the streets, the mob turned away and toppled the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of our secret police.
I was twenty-three years old and it was the oddest time to be starting a career in the KGB. Freedom, real freedom, at last seemed within reach of us Russians for the first time in our history.
By the time I met Finn seven years later my career path had accelerated me to the rank of colonel. He had been Second Secretary of Trade and Investment at the British embassy for those eight years, under surveillance by us and confidently marked down as SIS, MI6, a British spy.
My father, remote, claustrophobic and sinister, was pleased with my swift rise and the good reports of my progress, which he read avidly. My mother didn’t seem to care. Nana just laughed and called me ‘Colonel’ when she wanted to annoy me.
When I met Finn I had grown out of my affair with my fencing trainer, because-I’m ashamed to admit- he was too nice. I was having an affair with a ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ called Alex. A hard man, forty-eight years old and from the Vympel spetsnaz group, Alex was one of the small team that had entered the presidential palace in Kabul on Christmas Eve in 1979 when the USSR overthrew the regime in Afghanistan.
‘The Russians always choose the most inconvenient times to do their evil deeds,’ Finn always said.
Alex had lost his leg during the Afghan campaign afterwards, but the presidential raid was highly successful, with several key murders accomplished. It plunged Afghanistan into the chaos that plagues it to the present day.
Alex was twenty years older than me. Finn was only twelve years older. Nana said I had a father complex, ‘but at least you are showing signs of improvement,’ she said.
6
DEAR RUSSIANS, very little time remains to a momentous date in our history. The year 2000 is upon us, a new century, a new millennium. We have all measured this date against ourselves, working out—first in childhood, then after we grew up—how old we would be in the year 2000, how old our mothers would be, and our children.’
Boris Yeltsin’s wandering voice faded and rose from our new television screen, like that of a man talking in the wind.
‘Back then,’ the President continued, ‘it seemed such a long way off to this extraordinary New Year. So now the day has come.’
Finn shifts on the sofa. ‘It’s certainly a miracle he’s made it,’ he says facetiously, as we watch Yeltsin’s face on the screen, a face with all the mobility of botched plastic surgery.
Finn and Nana and I have just finished a late supper and are curled up in front of the fire to watch the New Year speech Yeltsin has made a habit of delivering. Finn is drinking brandy on the sofa, munching peanuts, and stroking Genghiz. He is over-engaged as so often. I am lying with my head on his stomach. Nana, who rarely sits down because of her arthritis, is sliding on her slippers across the dacha’s parquet floors like a robotic vacuum cleaner.
‘This is like being back home,’ Finn says. ‘Watching the Queen making her speech on Christmas Day. Except with Yeltsin you have the added excitement that he’s going to die in mid-speech. You never get that with the Queen,’ he says with mock disappointment.
Outside the windows, a snowstorm is raging; it is wild weather, and Finn insists we keep the curtains open so he can watch the wind and snow in the light of the porch lamp. Eight years in Russia hasn’t diminished his fondness for snow.
After a year of knowing Finn, Nana and I are used to his remarks. He always enjoys providing a running commentary to whatever is on television. There is a part of Finn, I think, that secretly yearns to be an entertainer and the television is the perfect instrument to heckle without the risk of any comeback.
Yeltsin’s voice emerges from his old Russian face, puffy and sick from heart problems and alcohol. The tricks of the television studio don’t really do it justice. Make-up conceals much of the problem but still the ailing president gives the impression of being propped up on a Kremlin film set, with our new Russian flag displayed regally behind him. In this respect, he looks like so many of our past leaders from Soviet times, cardboard cut-outs propped up on platforms to watch troops and tanks and missiles file past through Red Square. Unlike them, however, I’ve always thought Yeltsin’s face was essentially kind, not angry.
We are at Barvikha–me, Nana and Finn. It is the last day of the millennium. By this time in the evening the sky has darkened behind thick winter clouds. A wind ruffles the trees and the end of a hanging branch scratches back and forth on the wood-tiled roof of the dacha.
By now I have begun to know Finn personally, intimately. Of course I knew everything about him as a target of intelligence long before. I’ve read his KGB file many times while sitting in the sealed anteroom of General Kerchenko’s office. Kerchenko was the old KGB hardliner from Brezhnev’s day, who was my case officer on Finn. I would sit in this heavily disinfected room at the Forest–I never knew why so much disinfectant was necessary–and pore over the photographs of Finn on his own or with a string of women in Moscow’s nightclubs, many of whom were our own honey traps. I read the transcripts of his conversations and looked for hours into his strange eyes, trying to see the mind behind them. In these photographs, he seemed constantly amused, carefree, knowing. I’d got to know the muscles in his face and tried to fit the transcripts of his conversations to its changing expressions.
I got to know his mannerisms and his accent and his conversational tics, his habits, and his likes and dislikes. I knew his history, or that part of it we had been able to piece together in order, we hoped, to use it against him. I had been briefed endlessly on the subject of Finn, and I’d read his file a hundred times, so that when we finally met it was like meeting a character from a favourite book.
‘Dear friends, my dears,’ Yeltsin stumbles on–not at all like the Queen, Finn says–today I am wishing you New Year greetings for the last time. But that is not all. Today I am addressing you for the last time as Russian President. I have made a decision. I have contemplated this long and hard. Today, on the last d
ay of the outgoing century, I am retiring.’
Finn puts his glass down on the small cherry-wood table next to the sofa and Nana stops her shoe shuffle. She and I look at the screen in shock. I can’t see Finn’s face from where I’m lying. I had no idea beforehand of the contents of Yeltsin’s speech but this was not what any of us had imagined.
‘Many times I have heard it said,’ the President continues, ‘“Yeltsin will try to hold on to power by any means, he won’t hand it over to anyone.” That is all lies. That is not the case. I have always said that I would not take a single step away from the constitution, that the Duma elections should take place within the constitutional timescale. This has happened.
‘And, likewise, I would have liked the presidential elections to have taken place on schedule in June 2000. That was very important for Russia-we were creating a vital precedent of a civilised, voluntary handover of power from one president of Russia to another, newly elected one.’
Not sure now what we’re watching, all three of us are suddenly enthralled. Even Finn is silenced. I see his hand stop stroking Genghiz and now it weighs down heavy and immobile on the cat’s stomach until Genghiz struggles free from it and walks off in a huff, shaking his flattened fur.
I lift my head from Finn’s lap and sit up and look at the screen at that electrifying moment. My long black hair is tousled where I’ve been lying on it and Nana distractedly untangles it from behind the sofa, as she’s always done since I was a little girl.
‘This is great,’ Finn says. ‘Yeltsin always knows how to grip an audience. It’s just like eight years ago, when he stood on the tank outside the White House.’
‘Turn it up a bit,’ Nana says, and Finn reaches for the remote control.
Yeltsin talks on, about the surprise of his decision, its unscheduled nature, and says that Russia should enter the new millennium with younger men at the helm. He says that he has done his job and that, now the worst is over, Russia will always be moving forward, never returning to the past.
‘The past is already here, that’s why,’ Finn says. ‘The past is dictating the present.’
Finn is right. The past that haunts Russia in all its terrible identities, and that haunts Russians, is standing behind Yeltsin’s veiled words like the shadow of Death.
‘Why hold on to power for another six months,’ Yeltsin continues, ‘when the country has a strong person, fit to be president, with whom practically all Russians link their hopes for the future today? Why should I stand in his way?’
‘Oh God,’ Finn murmurs. ‘Oh no.’ I look at him, but his face is fixed to the screen.
Yeltsin rambles now, about his desire to be forgiven for not fulfilling some of the hopes of the Russian people; of the huge difficulties he’d faced in taking the leap from a grey, stagnating, totalitarian past into a bright, rich and civilised future in one go.
‘Today it is important for me to tell you the following,’ he says. ‘I also experienced the pain which each of you experienced. I experienced it in my heart, with sleepless nights, agonising over what needed to be done to ensure that people lived more easily and better, if only a little.’
Dimly, from outside the dacha, the muffled sound of a car starting its engine filters through the falling snow and the forest’s trees. And then another follows, and another, one by one and slowly, like the staggered start to a long cross-country race.
‘Everyone now goes to Moscow,’ Nana remarks. ‘To pay homage to Yeltsin’s heir.’
Finn pours himself another brandy.
‘So,’ Finn says, ‘that’s it, then. A civilised, voluntary handover of power from one president of Russia to another,’ he echoes Yeltsin’s words. ‘In other words, Putin gets to be president if he gives Yeltsin immunity from prosecution.’
We look at the sick man on television like awestruck children.
‘I am leaving,’ Yeltsin continues. ‘I have done everything I can. I am not leaving because of my health, but because of all the problems taken together. A new generation is taking my place, a generation of those who can do more, and do it better. In accordance with the constitution, as I go into retirement, I have signed a decree entrusting the duties of President of Russia to Prime Minister Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
‘For the next three months, again in accordance with the constitution, he will be head of state. Presidential elections will be held in three months. I have always had confidence in the amazing wisdom of Russian citizens. Therefore, I have no doubt what choice you will make at the end of March 2000.’
This bitter flattery of Yeltsin’s to deceive the Russian people, this endorsement of the man who has, as Finn predicts, given him immunity from prosecution, is the real beginning of the new era when Yeltsin’s attempts to lead Russia to democracy are finally abandoned.
‘In saying farewell, I wish to say to each of you the following,’ Yeltsin continues. ‘Be happy. You deserve happiness. You deserve happiness and peace. Happy New Year, happy new century, my dear people.’
Before the national anthem has finished there is the sound of more official cars crunching across the snow towards the main road to Moscow.
And that is how, on New Year’s Eve in 2000, we Russians learned we had a new president. Vladimir Putin, only the second KGB boss after Yuri Andropov to achieve this, slips quietly into power. But this time, unlike back then, it takes place in our bright, new, democratic Russia.
7
FINN GETS UP, walks over to the window, stretches, and looks out.
‘So they’re all leaving for the city,’ he says. ‘I suppose I should hurry along to the embassy like a good boy too. They’ll want to code a special British welcome to the new chief.’
He pauses by the window and carries on looking out at the heavy snow falling in the pitch darkness and lit only by the porch light. The track from the dacha is always kept clear and the road out to the motorway into Moscow is open even in extreme conditions. I watch him watching the red tail-lights streaming towards the motorway.
‘Why would anyone want to leave a little wooden house in the forest, with a warm fire blazing inside, to go to the city on New Year’s Eve?’ Nana asks him. She approaches Finn to put a hand on his arm.
‘Typical bloody Russians,’ Finn says to her and forces a smile. ‘Why do you always choose our holidays to change the world? Why don’t you use your own bloody holidays?’
‘Telephone them at the embassy,’ Nana urges him. ‘Say you’re sick. Say you’ve been poisoned,’ she giggles.
We are always joking about poisoning Finn, Nana and I, ever since he’d told us he’d been warned by the embassy to be on his guard against it. Now, it seems like a bad joke. But back then, there was still some light in the East, as Finn put it. I had taught Nana the English words, ‘Doing him in’, and she would go around the dacha when Finn was staying, muttering about ‘doing him in’ to his face, and cackling loudly.
But the idea of Finn being poisoned seemed to have lodged itself in the mind of Finn’s station head at the embassy.
‘I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t see this girl Anna,’ Tom, Finn’s station head, had told him.
‘OK, Tom.’
‘In fact, it might be useful if you do. If we can learn something from it. We’re trying to get a profile on her for you. She’s new, she’s young, no record, but she’s straight out of the Forest, we know that much.’
Tom thought for a moment.
‘Only thing is, what if they grab you, Finn, when you’re in Barvikha? Poison you, and you spill out all our lovely secrets?’
‘I’ll eat only off Anna’s plate,’ Finn told him.
‘We’ll have a watch on you, of course, but we can’t follow you in there.’
‘I’ll wave from the end of the road every hour.’
‘Just remember, Finn. You’re supposed to be tapping her, not the other way round.’
‘Oh, don’t worry. I’ll tap her all right,’ Finn said, but this rare crude allusion was lost on his b
oss.
In retrospect, Finn and I saw the window that had briefly opened for us to be together in the year leading up to the millennium as one of those fleeting moments in history when two opposing sides seem temporarily to be struck with amnesia about why they are fighting.
The British would never have allowed Finn to come on to KGB territory, either before that brief historical moment at the end of Yeltsin’s presidency or after it. The end of the Yeltsin era, the final years of the 1990s, opened the window to our relationship for a camera-flash instant, before it was slammed shut again under Putin. At any other time, we would have seized Finn immediately to suck out the marrow of his professional life, before handing him back–empty, soul-destroyed, useless–in exchange for some similar unfortunate from our side whom the British possessed.
Our luck–Finn’s and mine–was to benefit from that moment when history paused, like the crest of a wave, before gathering its force to move on again.
‘It’s a moment,’ Finn once said, ‘like the one in the First World War when British and German troops stopped killing each other for a day and played football instead.’
Finn and I took advantage of the moment given to us.
One of our early meetings was at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow where Finn was particularly fascinated by Petrov-Vodkin’s painting, ‘The Bathing of a Red Horse’.
We walked around the gallery together until we stopped at this painting. Both Finn and I noticed the man in a black fur hat and black coat and the woman wearing a rabbit-skin hat and a thick Scandinavian herringbone coat. They were behind us, apparently looking at other works on the walls, but not really seeing what they were looking at.