In consequence of these events the Soviet Union has occupied Kensington Palace Gardens. This was not fully achieved until after the Second World War. When Hitler ended peace, Britain and the British Commonwealth had got back on its feet after the economic tornado of the late twenties and early thirties, and in 1939, though there was a sign of weakening of the system in the presence of the Nepalese and Lithuanian Legations in the avenue, most of the houses were still occupied by millionaires. Among the Soviet Ambassador’s neighbours were the Duke of Marlborough, the Marquess of Cholmondeley, whose wife belongs to the great Indian family of Sassoon, Sir Alfred Beit, the owner of heavy holdings in South African mines, Sir Charles Seligman the banker, Sir Berkeley Sheffield, an industrialist who was among other things a leader of the paper trade, Sir Harry Oakes, the Canadian oil king who was afterwards murdered at Nassau, the Duchess of Marchena, daughter of the Spanish lady who married Sir Basil Zaharoff, Alfred Chester-Beatty, who owned mines all over the world and was a famous collector of manuscripts, Daniel Fooks, who had interests in the Far East, and G. R. Strauss, a Socialist M.P. who was a minister in the last Labour government, who had inherited his house from his father, a North Country metal broker. Today all these residents have gone except Lord Cholmondeley, the Duchess of Marchena, the widow of Mr. Fooks, and Mr. Strauss, and few of their sort have come to fill the gap. Against nineteen houses in private occupation in 1939, there were at the time of Kuznetsov’s misadventure nine. Of the rest two were bombed and three were for sale; one was still occupied by the Nepalese Legation; the premises vacated by the Lithuanian Legation were taken over by Syria, and the Lebanese Legation was next door but one; the French Ambassador had his official residence in Number 11, which belonged to the Duke of Marlborough; and the Soviet had retained Number 13 and acquired three more houses. One of these, Number 5, listed in the telephone directory as the office of the Soviet Film Agency, is among the less impressive houses outside the main avenue, round the corner in the Bayswater Road. But the other two are among the supreme manifestations of the spirit of the place. Number 18 was once the residence of the great Baron de Reuter, who with Cagliostroish, wizardly air exploited the invention of the electric telegraph by founding Reuter’s News Agency, and thus revolutionized newspaper and stock exchange practice; and it afterwards belonged to Leopold de Rothschild, the head of the English branch of the family, one of the brilliant and amusing Jews who, by charming King Edward VII, helped to get the English monarchy to set its face against anti-Semitism. Number 10 is even more splendid, and is on the east side of the avenue, with a superb terrace looking over Kensington Gardens. It was for many years owned by an exuberant financier with gold-mining interests in South Africa, named Leopold Hirsch, He added to its vastness by clapping another story on top of it, a feat which recalls the line of Milton, “Elephants endors’d with towers”; he used to disturb the calm of the district by walking about his house and gardens singing the Lieder of Schubert and Brahms in a voice as huge as his fortune and his home. It is now listed as the office of the Soviet naval attaché.
These houses have proved to be key positions. The estate is now alien territory. It might be thought that it must have been that for a long time, with all its tenants bearing such names as Marchena and Reuter, Baroda and Rothschild. But, indeed, when the place was theirs, it was as English as the Tower of London or Westminster Abbey. The parties of children which used to be seen hurrying along the avenue at the close of any afternoon, in the care of nannies or mademoiselles or Fräuleins, on the way home to tea from a dancing class or an hour spent sailing model yachts on the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, all looked like the children in Punch drawings, no matter what their names might be. But now the avenue might be outside the British island, might be part of an area whose nearest frontier was, say, in the Soviet Sector in Berlin. The tedium and complication of the Russian Security system hangs over the place, not very thickly, but as visible as ground mist. There are at all hours of the night and day bored policemen yawning up and down in front of the four Soviet mansions, and private ownership of the avenue itself is now insisted upon to a tiresome degree. The two gates at each end had in the old days always been open for traffic, now one was sometimes closed; and whereas the Crown Commission porters used to carry out their duty of checking traffic in an easygoing and sensible way, they are now forced to keep strictly to the letter of the rule. Hence there was, in this tetchy time towards the end of Stalin’s reign, constantly performed a comedy which might have been written by Gogol. The porters held up every vehicle and asked the driver which house he intended to visit. If the number given was 10 or 13 or 18, the porter asked the name of the person to whom the visit was to be paid and telephoned it to the central switchboard of the Soviet Embassy to see if the visit would be welcome. Very often, if the vehicle was a commercial van with goods to deliver, the driver’s pronunciation of the name of the Russian official which was on the invoice, and which was itself often misspelled by the clerk who filled in the invoice, was not recognized by the Russian switchboard operator when it was repeated over the telephone by the porter; and then orders were given that the van was not to be allowed to proceed. This invariably exasperated the driver, who felt, reasonably enough, that if he took his crate of electric-light fittings or his bale of blankets to the house from which they were ordered, inquiry might have led to the person who actually wanted them. He was apt to regard the porter in his Crown Commissioner’s livery as the instrument of privilege, and probably hostile to the cause of the revolution; and often altercations started during which a queue formed up behind the van, composed of visitors anxious to fulfil their engagements with the Ambassador of France, Mrs. Fooks, or Lord Cholmondeley.
The Soviet Embassy carries the enormous staff of one hundred and eighty employees (as against the staff of thirty-two which the British employ at their Embassy in Moscow), and there are over seventy Russian officials working at various agencies whose lives centre in the Embassy. Many of these have their families with them, so there are not infrequently to be seen strolling in the avenue groups of dark and thick-set men and women with their children, all, even to the tiniest boys and girls, clad in the stiff, rectangular type of tailoring by which Soviet citizens can always be picked out against a Western background. These people are instantly likeable, because of the manifest warmth of the affection they bear one another, and because of the humour which plays about their eyes and lips. They have also (which makes them neither more nor less likeable, for it is something which may alight on any nation when its turn comes round) the air of conquerors treading conquered ground. They walk with the same slow complacent lurch as the occupation troops in Germany; and they too stare at the passers-by, not insolently, not even unkindly, but as if the passers-by were blind and could not see them stare. The Russians know, of course, that according to the book of the rules there ought to be a military victory to seal such a conquest, but their kindliness and their pride lead them to nourish a hope that that necessity has in this instance been obviated. For surely they would not have been permitted to pitch their camp in this stronghold of capitalism were not the system about to crumble into ruins, were not their enemies even now so far confounded that they could not think it worth while to muster their forces for what must inevitably be defeat.
This view is illusory. The decay of Kensington Palace Gardens means simply that there have been two wars lately, and that the community has altered its way of spending its wealth in the last few decades. If these houses are no longer private homes, it is largely because servants’ wages and the cost of fuel—which means miners’ wages—have risen enormously; and if the duty of keeping these houses in the state of repair required by the Crown has become a burden that can be borne by few, it is because builders’ wages also have risen and because the labour and material available for constructional purposes are now being diverted to other forms of building, such as prefabs and the London County Council apartment houses which surround the park at Wandsworth where
Marshall and Kuznetsov were arrested. Nor would it be safe to deduce from the state of the avenue that the plutocracy of the West had carried within their loins the seeds of their own destruction, and that the families who had sold their houses had let their property fall from hands palsied by degeneracy. The Harringtons still do their duty as agriculturalists in the North of England, and the son of the South African millionaire to whom they sold their house now farms and directs various corporations in South Africa. In no wise do they resemble the men of Nineveh and Babylon, of Tyre and Sidon.
Indeed, the Soviet government had done no more by its choice of quarters than take four white elephants off the real-estate market. But the myth of its significance is strong among the Russians, and it must have profoundly affected Kuznetsov during the weeks he passed in Harrington House before his departure from England. Whatever interpretation he placed on the story of his meetings with Marshall, he must have spent those weeks in a state of apprehension. If the superficial interpretation be correct, and he was simply an unfortunate man who had had too much luck and had managed to rise very high in the MVD in spite of his unusual lack of talent for police work, and he had not intended the Special Branch to discover his meetings with Marshall, then there was good ground for the popular belief that his return to Russia would take him to some extreme form of punishment. But if the right interpretation be that which comes up through facts when they are stared at for any length of time, and Mr. Kuznetsov was not stupid but obedient and conscientious, and a model police officer in every way, and the Special Branch had been intended to detect his relationship with Marshall and arrest him as a spy, then he still had reason to fear the worst. He could not be as sickeningly sure of his ultimate end as he would have been if the superficial interpretation was correct. But he may well have felt sick with uncertainty.
For there could be only one reason why Soviet Intelligence should have wished to seduce the awkward and inept child William Martin Marshall: to put him on a salver and serve him up to British Intelligence, to divert its attention from another and more valuable agent, possibly not British at all, who was working on so nearly the same field as Marshall that the British and American Intelligence authorities would think, having arrested Marshall, that they had stopped the leak which had been troubling them and could relax their vigilance. So far so good for Kuznetsov. He could not have trussed Marshall up more competently had he been a professional poulterer and the lad a Christmas goose. Kuznetsov had even put in some fancy touches on which he was able to congratulate himself; prodigious cantrips on his way to his appointments which looked the very thing a not-too-clever spy would do if he were trying to throw detectives off his trail. But the other agent, the agent who was not Marshall, must be very valuable. He must indeed be enormously valuable if to cover him Soviet Intelligence deemed it worth while to stage this prolonged and elaborate farce, which involved the withdrawal from his duties of such a responsible official as Kuznetsov, even though that might be only for a time. But whether it would only be for a time must have been one of the questions which worried Kuznetsov during those weeks. The ways of Intelligence being what they are, there would be British and American observers in Soviet
Russia who would have their eyes on Kuznetsov. If he was to be visible, at liberty and in good condition, then these observers would say, “What, is that not Kuznetsov? Why is he walking about at his ease after he made that catastrophic blunder? Can it be that the Marshall case, after all, was not what it seemed?” There would be no simpler way for the Soviet government to convince them that the Marshall case was exactly what it seemed on the surface than by punishing Kuznetsov severely, by punishing him for a long time, by finding, if it were possible, a form of punishment which would lull foreign suspicions for ever. It is to be noted that when the Soviet government accuses persons of conspiring against it, such as Rajk, the witnesses who testify that they conspired with them are afterwards treated as if that evidence were true, however patently false it may be, and are punished accordingly.
Often Kuznetsov must have lifted his head from his work and sent his thoughts along the avenue to the gates where the porters in the Crown Commissioners’ livery turned back or let pass the incoming traffic. For him the hinges of the trap worked the other way. He had been allowed to go back to his flat once to pack up his luggage, but only once. Not possibly could he get out of Kensington Palace Gardens again until his colleagues took him down to the docks. In ordinary circumstances a foreign diplomat can walk out of his Embassy and seek asylum with the British authorities. But as it would have been very natural that he should want to do this, and as nothing was more certain than that the British authorities would have refused to receive him unless he approached them in the candid spirit of another Gouzenko, he would have been unwise if he had betrayed any desire for fresh air and exercise. He was suffering a form of imprisonment oddly crude for such an elegant residential area, but, of course, that incongruity may have counted for him as a consolation. Such Russians as he, able and resourceful and disciplined, place themselves at the disposal of the great organization which has taken over their country because it claims to be able to compel success, and they belong to the breed of the successful. It is well known that success depends on efficiency; and efficient management cuts its losses, sacrifices the smaller profit to the larger, scraps without hesitation the equipment which has had its day. Now that Kuznetsov found himself relegated to the category of the cut loss, the smaller profit, the obsolete equipment, he could comfort himself by reflecting that the management which was jettisoning him had the justification that it was in fact efficient; it had penetrated into the stronghold of British capitalism, it could be assumed that it had achieved its object and that the West was dying. If, as his mind ranged along the avenue, he thought of the men in the buildings occupied by the Embassies of other countries, who were certainly not in a state of detention and fear like himself, he probably despised them as children of a less glorious race, who would be spared great misfortunes only because nothing great of any sort would ever meet them on their road.
Often, during those days of high summer, he may well have had less heroic hours of consolation, have fallen into drowsiness, forgotten that he must soon start on a journey, and abandoned himself to the pleasantness of the place, pretending, perhaps, he was going to be able to stay there as long as he liked. The rooms in the Soviet Embassy buildings are quiet and cool, and there is no reason to fear the ghost of the fifth Earl of Harrington at Number 13, for he must surely have fled his old home for ever during the Second World War, for there was only one cause as dear to his later years as prohibition, and that was Polish Independence. Un-haunted, these rooms would exercise the spell which is cast by the whole avenue. All these houses were built in the age when it was thought that there was enough of everything to go round, and the illusion in the architects’ minds controlled their hands and still influences our eyes. It is impossible to remain for long among these serene masses of masonry without beginning to believe that all is well and will continually grow better. A conniving myth is told by the view from the windows, which blends the scattered treetops of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park into a woodland where there might revel a company of beings in the dress of another age, dancing and speaking to one another always in verse. Kuznetsov must have often thought that Kensington Palace Gardens would have been a very agreeable spot indeed, if only people had not kept on coming to it.
He might have finished his career in peace if there had never come to this door the gangling boy, William Martin Marshall, twitching and pouting as if the old system were a harsh wind blowing on purpose to spite him, swaying and languishing as if he were courted by the new system. And in these later hours Kuznetsov might have been able to forget him had not the boy’s father also availed himself of the damnable accessibility of Kensington Palace Gardens. For the intrepid bus driver, who believed so fervently in the power of speech, who was of the opinion that if one spoke of things happening a certain way one c
ould make them happen that way, did all he could to have his wish and talk it out with the man who could have saved his son from jail. He made the journey from Wandsworth with his wife, in his pocket a letter he had written to Kuznetsov, urging him to make a statement which would make it clear that he received no information from his son. He took it to Number 13, leaving his wife to wait outside. They both struck those who saw them as having aged by years since the trial. The letter was taken from him, and he was put into a small room. After an hour the letter was returned to him, and he was told that he could not see Mr. Kuznetsov, and was sent away. His appeal must have struck any Soviet official as light-minded and naïve, like a hysterical proposal to raise a sunken submarine by some device which ignored the mathematics of aquatic pressure.
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