We found Mrs Petrov an intelligent, ambitious woman, WITH NOWHERE TO GO.
She was trained by one of the greatest political machines on earth to think, act, talk and absorb.
But what is there ahead? Only the humble existence of looking after her husband.
From what we learned of their story from 1954 the Petrovs have had little peace of mind because of what might have happened to their relatives in Russia.
But what is the alternative? Go back to Russia?
Mrs Petrov has lost weight. Her figure is slim and petite. She looks younger, healthier than she appeared during the commission hearings.
Petrov has become greyer. The years have dealt more hardly with his appearance than with his wife’s.
‘His nerves are very bad,’ Mrs Petrov told us. ‘He has suffered too much already because of the publicity.’
As she told her story we could see that she had suffered—it was the tragedy of the frail human being caught in the meshes of mankind’s political caperings.
When we first approached Mrs Petrov this week, she stood frozen with fear.
‘Can you not leave us alone, we have had enough, we cannot bear any more,’ she said.
She looked like any other housewife.
Trying To Go On
She was simply dressed in a tasteful cotton frock no one would look at, except perhaps to say, ‘What an attractive little woman.’
‘Can you imagine what a hell on earth we have been through?’ she asked.
‘We do not want anything. We are trying to go on but it is incredibly hard.’
With an intolerably sad look in her beautiful china blue eyes, she said: ‘No one could imagine what it has been like, no one!’
We assured Mrs Petrov we would never reveal the locality to which we had traced her.
Then Petrov, the man who was once world headlines, joined us.
A stocky grey-haired man in sports clothes and dark glasses, he came in saying, ‘What is going on here, what is it?’
He looked pale and nervous.
‘I will manage this,’ Mrs Petrov said, springing like a tiger cat protecting her young.
When we tried to halt the retreating Petrov, his wife cried out piteously, ‘Oh, leave him alone—he has suffered enough.’
There Is No Future
She added: ‘Nobody knows us here, but there are some who might not be sympathetic.’
Gloomily, she spoke of an exile’s life.
‘It is very hard for us,’ she said.
‘There is no future. There is nothing to live for. I try to live the life of an ordinary housewife. I do the shopping, go to work and look after my husband.’
Were the Petrovs happy in the work they were doing?
Mrs Petrov said that it had taken a long time to find suitable work. Both were now in jobs they liked, but there was always the fear of their identities being discovered. They might have to leave their workplaces if the management knew who they really were.
Had they formed many Australian friendships?
‘We have few friends,’ Mrs Petrov said. ‘It is not easy for us to make friends. For one thing, Australians do not like foreigners or New Australians very much.’
Mrs Petrov continued: ‘I feel Australians think only of themselves. New Australians feel they are too often left on their own—in shops, at work, in the streets . . . in fact, everywhere.
‘Some people in this country even laugh at migrants. ’
‘I have many regrets’, BUT THIS IS THE ONLY WAY
Mrs Petrov said: ‘Some Australians laugh at foreign accents. They do not help these people to become assimilated. They are thoughtless.’
Were the Petrovs lonely?
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Petrov, ‘we lead fairly lonely lives. We have few pleasures or interests.’
‘Do you go to see Russian films?’ we asked.
‘No, never,’ said Mrs Petrov, ‘but we watch a lot of TV.’
Three times since the Petrovs won political asylum here Mrs Petrov has undergone serious operations.
‘I would gladly have died,’ she said, ‘but I lived.’
‘So I must go on. There is nothing else to do.’
Just a Couple in a Car, Maybe Your Neighbours
Maybe you passed this car out driving last weekend. A grey-haired, burly man at the wheel, his wife beside him. Two frightened people trying to forget.
(Car-sick? No fear—I take KWELLS. Kwells prevents all forms of travel sickness. Completely safe for all the family.3/9 at Chemists.)
Here are some other questions we put to the Petrovs, and the replies given by Mrs Petrov.
Have you contacted your relatives in the Soviet since the Royal Commission, Mrs Petrov?
‘No. What is the use? They are dead.’
Have you had any definite word that they are dead?
‘No, but I know it. The Russian government would not allow them to live.’
Debt Paid
The pitiful personal dilemma of the Petrovs can be solved only if the Federal Government in particular and the Australian public in general are willing to help.
Consider their case. Up to 1954 Vladimir Petrov was engaged in spying for Russia. He was detected.
From then on events overwhelmed this second-rate spy. Caught in the maelstrom of international power politics, he was faced with this choice:
Go home to his native land and face the punishment; or
Confess all to the country on which he was preying and in return be granted asylum.
The Petrovs chose freedom and stayed in Australia as not very willing and not very welcome guests. The past six years have been, in Mrs Petrov’s own words, ‘Hell’.
Let those six years be their punishment both for spying on the land they must now regard as their own and for betraying their native Russia.
Let the Federal Government now treat them as ordinary citizens and drop the security mask.
Let the people of this country accept them, not as semi-fugitives living lonely, fearful lives, but as Mr and Mrs Petrov, the couple who once made a mistake and now want to live full, useful lives in the community.
26
1963. She walked home from where she worked, walked through the Melbourne suburb where they lived, walked along the street where they had their house, and saw two men in long coats getting out of a car. The first she didn’t recognise. The second was the writer, B2.
‘Hello, Evdokia,’ the man said, smiling.
She invited them into the house. They took seats at the kitchen table while her terrier barked from the backyard. The younger man’s name, she was informed, was Roy. They looked about the room. Just an ordinary kitchen, she wanted to say.
Roy watched her intently as she boiled the kettle, peering at her as if she might constitute a clue to an important question of some kind.
‘How are things?’ B2 asked. ‘Are you having any trouble?’
‘Only the journalists,’ she explained. They drove Volodya to madness, sitting in cars on the street like the KGB.
It was usually Colonel Spry who visited for these types of conversations. She hadn’t seen B2 in at least two years, despite the fact that he had written their book for them; eighteen months spent interviewing, reading and editing in the safe houses.
‘Evdokia,’ the man said eventually, ‘the reason we’ve come today is to present something to you. I want us to be cautious, however. I think whatever approach we take must be considered. We shouldn’t act rashly.’
What was he talking about?
‘Received yesterday morning,’ he commented, producing a document, placing it between them on the table.
She read:
Dear Sirs,
At the request of woman citizen Tamara Alexeyevna KARTSEVA, we are trying to trace her relatives—sister, PETROVA née KARTSEVA Evdokia Alexeyevna, born 1914 in the village of Lipki, Oblast of Ryazan, and her husband PETROV Vladimir Mikhailovich, who used to live in the city of Canberra, Australia.
&nbs
p; The last letter from the persons sought was received at the end of 1953, and there has been no news from them since.
We should be most grateful if you could ascertain, and let us know of, the whereabouts of the persons sought.
Thanking you in anticipation,
Yours faithfully,
A. Titov
Head of Tracing Bureau
Executive Committee of the Alliance of Red Cross and
Red Crescent, Moscow
Tamara Alexeyevna Kartseva. The words sat on the page with the other words but they might as well have come alone. She picked up the letter from the table. It was typed in English. It took her several minutes to extract the intended meaning.
‘The Tracing Bureau?’ she said aloud.
Nine years’ silence. Tamara not gone, not dead, but twenty-five years old, existing somewhere, searching for her elder sister.
She agreed with B2 to keep her reply short. She agreed that everything should go through ASIO and afterwards the Red Cross.
Dear Tamara Alexeyevna,
We can hardly believe this letter! Can you confirm that it is indeed you who has made this enquiry in Moscow? Please tell what news there is of Mother and Father—I fear greatly for both of them, such a long time has passed. Have you married?Do you have children? Please write without delay. Please send photographs of everybody. I have none.
E. Kartseva
B2 promised to bring any reply to her the moment it came. Each night at dusk or just before, she rounded the corner of her street, willing an ASIO car to be there. Two months passed. It was a Thursday and raining when the telephone finally rang. B2 arrived twenty minutes later.
She recognised the handwriting. Dear Sister. This was Tamara. There could be no question.
Her sister was sorry for not writing earlier. They still lived at the old address. Their father had died of cancer in February 1959 and their mother was aging poorly but had been ‘restored to life’ by Evdokia’s letter.
Tamara explained she was an engineer—a senior industrial engineer, university educated. She asked where Evdokia and Vladimir were living and wanted to know when they were returning home.
I want to visit you on a holiday, she wrote, and Mother would like to visit too.
There were photographs. Evdokia sat on the couch and held them. Her mother looked ancient, smiling from a chair, her hands clasped in front. Her sister looked thirty years old.
She knew there was an oddness to the letter. A gap. Was it possible that, when she and Volodya defected, her family was simply never told? Years of inexplicable silence from your daughter in Australia—was that the punishment Moscow had decided to inflict?
Before I can officially visit you, Tamara wrote, I must complete a request at the local militia office, and it is necessary for you to complete a questionnaire at the Soviet embassy in Canberra.
Further letters came. The first was from her mother. It was long and joyful. From what Evdokia could glean it seemed there had been no prison, no arrest. Only long-held, heartrending fears about what had happened to her daughter. There was a request again for their home address. The letter’s pages were numbered and pages seven and nine were missing.
In reply, Evdokia sent photographs of herself with her dog—photographs vetted by B2 to ensure that nothing hinted at their location. She sent warm clothes: two woollen jumpers and a coat.
Tamara’s next letter expressed doubt that she could visit. It was the problem of being an able worker—it would be difficult to gain permission. But their mother still intended to come, as long as the Australian authorities gave their blessing. Evdokia wrote, telling Tamara not to give up hope. Why not apply anyway, she said, whether or not you have a chance.
Tamara’s letter said two photographs had been enclosed within the envelope. Had they fallen out in the post?
The next letters were simply news: talk of the Russian winter, snow falling on rooftops and icy streets. No mention of the holiday. Photographs were again said to be included but only one arrived.
Evdokia sent a Moscow flight schedule from a Sydney travel agent. You should consider booking early, she wrote, so there will be ample time to prepare.
She pictured them vividly, three women walking through the Brighton Beach Gardens, along the esplanade, a slight breeze playing off the waves and along the sand. Her life in this country exhibited; a recompense, countering any resentments her family might hold, demonstrating that what was received was a world less than what was given up.
In her mother’s next letter, she questioned whether things weren’t best left as they were. Her health had deteriorated and she didn’t believe she could manage such a long trip alone.
Evdokia pleaded. The flight was only thirty-eight hours; there was always someone aboard who spoke Russian; the cost of the ticket could be wired straightaway.
B2 was in the habit of placing the stem of a biro across his lips when deep in thought. He caught himself doing it now— tapping a biro against his mouth while sitting here at his desk. In front of him, in the typewriter, was the half-completed draft of a Cabinet submission.
His fingers on the keys. Mrs Petrov is convinced that the letters from her mother and sister are genuine. The letters have aroused in her a keen desire to be re-united with her family. Mr Petrov, while sympathising with his wife, feels that she is not being realistic in her appreciation of the situation and is failing to see the possibility of a KGB plot behind the correspondence.
The typewriter’s ribbon needed to be changed. B2 ignored this and wrote several paragraphs cataloguing the good evidence for Petrov’s suspicion: the belated nature of the Kartsevas’ contact; the Kartsevas’ persistent enquiries about the Petrovs’ whereabouts and wellbeing; the absence of any adverse note concerning the Petrovs’ defection; the apparent censorship of photographs; the suggestion of a visit by Mrs Petrov’s sister (then dropped), followed by the suggestion of a visit by Mrs Petrov’s mother (now in doubt), followed by the suggestion that Mrs Petrov may have to be content with correspondence contact only—a sequence likely to provoke a strong emotional reaction.
He wrote the heading ‘Assassination’. He wrote that the KGB’s interest was either this, or to discredit the Petrovs by compelling their return to Russia where they would be made to renounce what they had done. The letters could achieve this by creating a determination in Mrs Petrov to visit her family either in Russia or in a second country from which she could be kidnapped. The KGB might also send a professional operator to Australia posing as Tamara. This operator would threaten Mrs Petrov with her family’s persecution, forcing her to return to the USSR.
The biro was in his mouth again. He hadn’t even realised he’d picked it up.
In consideration, he wrote, I have concluded that Mrs Petrov should on no account leave Australia. However, I recommend that the Australian Government furnish Mrs Petrov with permission for her mother and sister to visit her on the condition that the arrangements for such a visit remain in the hands of ASIO, with any visit to take place at a specially selected house occupied for the occasion.
Even as he dragged this page from the typewriter, he knew that the described visit would never occur. Was the KGB going to allow any member of a defector’s immediate family to set foot outside the USSR?
Not in a million years.
Correspondence contact only. Little glimpses of a life. Tamara meeting a man in Kiev while working on a building there, a university man, a lecturer, well spoken, a voice that could be listened to. Tamara getting married. Tamara having a son, living in a room in Moscow, baby pictures sent in the post and seated carefully on the mantel. Tamara worrying for her husband, his drinking, his inability to find work. Tamara alone with her son in the room.
Her mother’s handwriting became weaker, her letters drastically shorter, arriving wrapped inside Tamara’s. Evdokia understood that she was bedridden, even if both she and Tamara did not say.
She died in the Russian summer, on a date in July. Evdokia called in
sick to the company where she worked and—for perhaps the third time in her life—went to a church, needing a quiet place, needing a place to be with her mother, who, despite everything the revolution had to teach, had never given up her religion.
Ten days later, America put two men on the moon. Evdokia watched the moment of the landing but didn’t applaud.
Life went on.
They began a series of dinners with defectors. Oysters in a South Melbourne restaurant with Anatoliy Golitsyn. Pasta in Carlton with Igor Gouzenko. Colonel Spry called it Defectors On Tour. Their talk was always of Russia, its weather, the people and places they’d known.
Volodya’s drinking intensified. He took fishing trips, which she knew were drinking trips, a man and his dog and his bottle, alone. Coughing fits. Cold sweats and off-coloured urine. She told him in a tone that was caring that he was a chronic drunk. There were periods in hospital; weeks recovering from an illness that wasn’t diagnosed. He remained convinced he would be murdered. He inspected the nurses’ identification before he took the medicines they were giving.
Evdokia kept carefully within her circle of friends, the women from the company where she worked. The beach, the cinema, the city shows. Everybody addressed her by her new name. Newcomers took years to realise who she actually was.
Tamara’s son in his school clothes. Tamara’s son in the Pioneers. The boy looked like their brother at that age, thin-jawed and skinny-legged.
Her sister applied to the militia every two years for her holiday. Each time, the answer was Request Denied.
Evdokia suspected it was a life. She had her work and her things to do. She had her dog and she watched TV. At a certain distance, she even made a return to following the bigger events: East and West Germany, America, Britain, the USSR. It was selfish to ask what else there might be.
Spry came occasionally with questions: did you ever hear of such and such a project; do you remember so and so? The director was always lively, arriving with jokes prepared, and the visits rarely failed to cheer her. Sometimes he came for no reason and she supposed they were friends.
Habitually, she walked in the gardens and on the beach, walking the dog at dawn. Neat little waves. Everything flat: the bay, the suburb behind. She stood watching the dog as he sped across the sand. Sometimes it all felt so tremendously unexpected. The sun sparkling on the water, the cold sand underfoot and the dog running. She recalled summer camps with the Pioneer Youth. Tents by the sea. Days of naive thought where the world was a few hectares of coastline, the colour of your scarf, the gloss on your pin. She thought about the promises and potential, the possibilities entertained. The things that were the future then but that would not be. She thought about her work, her friends, the running dog, the bay and her TV. The slight waves broke so close to the sand. She knew that what was left was what had happened. What had happened, and what little remained below the flame.
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