The Bedbug

by Peter Day

  At that time, St Petersburg was growing faster than any other in Europe as the industrial revolution began to take hold in a country still mainly populated by peasants and serfs. Peter the Great’s careful town planning was overwhelmed as factories sprung up everywhere: engineering works for railways and heavy artillery; cotton mills and factories. They produced enormous wealth and lavish spending. The Tsar subsidised the Mariinsky to the tune of two and half million gold roubles a year. The nightlife rivalled that in Paris, elegant restaurants like Donon’s, Palkin, Barel, and the Bear abounded. European fashions were brought hotfoot from the salons of Paris and London, and demand for the creations of the jeweller Peter Carl Fabergé kept 700 craftsmen busy.29

  Nadia’s friend Tamara Abelson, a merchant’s daughter growing up in the city during this period, recalls delicious cakes from the French confectioner Ballet; Einem sweets from Berlin; Druce’s, the English shop at the top of the Nevsky Prospekt, the equivalent of Harrods; and Eliseev’s great emporium where exotic groceries were imported from East and West and caviar was sold from large wooden barrels.30

  Beyond the heights of excess though, the warning signs were already present. Among the city’s population of 2.2 million, three quarters were peasants and many of them were starving. Revolution was in the air long before the military follies of the Russian generals in the early years of the First World War left the mass of the population still more deprived. Nadia Benois and Tamara Abelson were witness to the terrors of 1917. Yet so oblivious were the privileged to their imminent fate that on the night before the Revolution started, in February 1917, with the army starved of munitions and the people starved of bread, a theatre critic emerging from a particularly lavish production could talk of going to a restaurant ‘to eat nightingales’ tongues and let the hungry bastards howl’.31

  Faced with a wave of workers’ strikes and demonstrations, Tsar Nicholas II signed a telegram on 25 February 1917 instructing his military commanders to restore order but their efforts quickly collapsed in the face of mutiny and, at the beginning of March, Nicholas abdicated. Tamara Abelson recalled how bands of trigger-happy youths burst into wealthy homes ostensibly searching for arms and enemies of the people. No one dared refuse them admission:

  In our house they passed from one room to another, opening cupboards and drawers, removing anything they fancied while commenting loudly and disparagingly on what they saw, glorifying in their power … Regardless of these and similar outrages, a feeling of hope, of faith in the future, of a rebirth, pervaded the capital.32

  During the summer months the Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky struggled to assert some kind of authority. But with much of the army and navy joining the workers in looting indiscriminately in the stores, palaces and townhouses, fuelled by alcohol from the best private cellars, life began to fall apart. In October, with troops refusing to obey orders and sailors bringing the cruiser Aurora up the River Neva to train its guns on the on the Winter Palace, the Bolsheviks gained the upper hand.

  Novelist Aleksey Tolstoy described what happened next:

  The icy wind sent its icy breath into the darkened windows of the houses and blew through the deserted porches, sweeping out the ghosts of past luxury … It was terrible, incomprehensible, inconceivable. Everything was being abolished. … God, private property and the very right to live as one pleased.33

  For many of the well-to-do, the first instinct was to flee the horror they now beheld. In the next four years almost 2 million departed, usually believing their exile would be brief and the old order would be restored. They were the White Russians, monarchists and social democrats; business leaders, scientists and increasingly those from the world of arts who discovered that the new regime did not welcome freedom of expression. The stark choice was penury at home or penury in exile. They were permitted to withdraw only a few hundred roubles from their bank accounts, and expected to contribute their wealth and belongings to the welfare of the proletariat. Gold and other precious metals and jewels were liable to confiscation, a black market in art works flourished. Hyperinflation made the paper rouble worthless and the economy reverted to barter.

  Despite their bourgeois lifestyles, with wealth and privilege that marked them out as targets for the revenge of the proletariat, Alexandre and Leontij Benois stayed and survived. As Alexandre later pointed out, they had not a drop of Russian blood in their veins yet they were Russian, by citizenship, language and way of life.34

  Alexandre remained, as curator of Old Masters at the Hermitage, until 1926 when he joined the procession of Russian exiles that gravitated to Paris. Leontij, after a period of turmoil, was able to retain his professorship and continue teaching until his death in 1928. That is not to say that life continued as normal: the capacious apartments on Vasilievsky Island were requisitioned and had to be shared with a host of revolutionaries who were billeted on them. Leontij grieved over the loss of his summer house in Peterhof, communal living with strangers in his once cosy apartment and most of all the parting with three of his children who fled Russia altogether to escape hunger and other dangers.35

  In December 1919, the writer Maxim Gorky took over what had been the magnificent Eliseev emporium, on the corner of Nevsky Prospekt and the Moika River embankment, and turned it into a haven for writers, artists and musicians. Their gilded life was gone for ever but they could still live it up a little at the House of Arts, as it was officially known. Fine costumes and caviar were not on offer but alcohol was still available and on Friday nights the ragged aesthetes could forget the hard times as Albert Benois played Strauss waltzes on the piano. The building, when lit up at night, resembled the prow of an ocean liner and soon acquired the nickname ‘the Crazy Ship’.36 Nadia Benois went there from home some days to fetch a pail of thin tasteless soup which was the best that the epicurean Benois family could now find to put on the table. It was a long walk but infinitely preferable to travelling on the overcrowded trams with the attendant risk of contracting typhoid in the epidemic which swept the city. On one such visit fate provided her with an escape route. Fifty years later, she remembered that day clearly. It was 1 June 1920:

  It was a beautiful warm morning. I was walking leisurely and feasting my eyes on the grandiose view of the river … I was in a happy hazy mood.

  At the House of Arts my tin can was filled with some unsavoury smelling soup and I was given a sack of potatoes. At that time of famine even unsavoury soups were acceptable. At home one added something to them, either an onion or a little butter and they became quite eatable.

  I started on my return journey, one hand holding the sack of potatoes slung on to my back and the other the tin can with the soup. Walking was no pleasure now that I was so heavily laden, and the sun was getting hotter too. When I reached the Fourth Line, and I was just passing the house where my school-friend Valeria worked, I thought how nice it would be to sit down in a cool place and have a smoke.37

  Valeria Poleschauk worked as a secretary for the former naval officer Nikolai Nikolaeovitch Schreiber. She had already told Nadia about the strange visitor who was living there, whom she mistakenly thought was a Dutchman. While Nadia sat on a window seat and smoked her cigarette, the Dutchman appeared. He wore high-laced leather boots, knee breeches, a white shirt and navy-blue, polka-dot tie and altogether cut a rather comic figure, she thought. But he was funny, entertaining her with jokes and double entendres. On a whim she invited him to join her at a fairground that evening and in so doing boarded the gaudy carousel of Klop Ustinov’s life.38 It was Nadia who gave him the nickname Klop soon after they first met.

  Shortly before she first set eyes on Klop, Nadia and Valeria had been discussing the prospects of finding a man who would help them flee the country to start a new life. Russians needed an exit permit; girls who married foreigners stood more chance of being allowed to leave. Nadia had already had one such offer, from a neighbour she hardly knew, and was well aware of the pitfalls and potential humiliation that lay ahead for girls wh
o gambled their future happiness on a chance encounter with a stranger. Despite their shared Russian heritage Nadia and Klop did not have a lot in common. Klop had been raised in Palestine, matured in Germany and Switzerland but was not in tune with Russian culture and, although he was fluent in several languages, Russian was not one of them. Yet it took only a fortnight for Nadia to convince herself that marrying him was a risk she was willing to take. Many, many years later, after Klop’s death, Nadia would confess to a close friend that he represented a passport to escape the rigours of existence after the Revolution and that was a factor in her decision.39

  The romance began inauspiciously. The amusement park they had planned to visit was closed and, as Klop confessed to her later, he had hoped the switchback ride would provide the opportunity for greater intimacy than would normally be permitted on a first date. But he continued to amuse and entertain. It was the time of the festival of White Nights, when the sun hardly sets and couples strolled along the banks of the Neva until the early hours of the morning and fell in love. Klop met Nadia’s various uncles and aunts, but not her parents, and visited The Hermitage to view the Benois da Vinci. With typical bravado, he took her to church and introduced her to his previous girlfriend. They went dancing at the Crazy Ship.

  He knew it was only a matter of time before the authorities began to suspect that he was a spy and his proposal, when it came, was pragmatic and prosaic, anything but romantic: ‘Listen, we could be married here and when we are abroad I’d give you a divorce.’ Nadia good-naturedly fobbed him off: ‘This is of course very charming and simple but there are other matters to be taken into consideration.’

  Klop, by now quite accustomed to getting his own way with women, devoted some time to describing the delightful life she might lead with him if she fled from her family and homeland. She in turn, seeing an opportunity about to slip from her grasp, found herself falling in love and praying for guidance. She made an ultimatum. Klop must do the honourable thing and marry her in church, in front of her family. Klop, professing that had always been his true intention, produced an engagement ring of thick silver with a black stone, bearing a carving of an Egyptian princess, which had come from his father’s collection of Middle Eastern antiquities.

  Klop won doubtful acceptance from Nadia’s parents, who were naturally suspicious of a visitor from a country with whom they had so recently been at war. The wedding was fixed for 3 p.m. on Saturday 17 July at St Catherine’s Lutheran Church on Bolshoi Avenue, Vasilievsky Island, traditionally the place of worship for the German community in St Petersburg.

  Nadia wore a dress of opaque white batiste linen made from an old nightdress of her grandmother’s, and borrowed white shoes that were too big for her, a veil decorated with orange blossom and a Fabergé gold bracelet which had been her mother’s and was one of the few pieces of jewellery to escape the looters, having been buried in the grounds of their summer retreat at Peterhof. Valeria, who had made the first introductions, accompanied Nadia as she made her way on foot to the church. Klop, whose own wardrobe was limited, wore a borrowed pair of white tennis trousers and greeted her with a bouquet of blue hydrangea. They exchanged rings that had been handed down through their respective families. The reception was enlivened with homemade mocha cake and a couple of bottles of wine that had been hidden under the floorboards.

  CHAPTER 4: BOLSHEVIKS

  Even before the wedding, Klop had been increasingly nervous about the authorities. A well-wisher in the Soviet Foreign Office warned them that the Cheka – the Communist secret police – were investigating Klop’s credentials. He had told them, fairly unconvincingly, that he was a greengrocer’s assistant from Amsterdam. He could hardly admit to being a journalist and any suggestion that he was gathering secret intelligence for the German government would have been fatal. He had also begun dealing in black market art, hoping to make a small fortune to start married life in the West.

  Nadia, who only seems to have learned that his visit was not solely for the purpose of finding his family after they escaped, was surely being disingenuous years later when she wrote: ‘Maltzan asked Klop to keep his eyes open should he succeed in getting into Russia. He did not mean spying of course, only wanting him to report on the whole atmosphere and conditions inside Russia.’40

  In such a time of turmoil and mutual suspicion, espionage was exactly what Ago von Maltzan had in mind and the preparations could have left Klop in no doubt. He had travelled on a boat taking Russian soldiers and prisoners of war home. Friedrich Rosen obtained a passport for him, in the name of Oustinoff rather than the Germanic ‘von Ustinow’. It is not clear what nationality Klop assumed or whether this was an early example of the Nansen passport, introduced by the Norwegian explorer, diplomat and commissioner for refugees Fridjof Nansen for use as travel authority for the many stateless displaced people milling around the continent. Klop passed himself off either as a returning Russian – difficult when his command of the language was less than perfect – or a Dutch trader. He travelled light, a solitary bag with few clothes and gifts of tinned meat and chocolate that might smooth away some of the minor obstructions to his progress. For negotiating the major obstacles he had gold coins sewn into the lining of his coat. The ship dropped them at Hungerborg near Narva, on the Estonian border, where they began a tediously slow train journey. The full extent of the famine that was gripping the Russian countryside quickly became apparent as starving peasants lined the tracks begging the passengers for scraps of food. A rumour rippled through the train to the effect that able-bodied men would not be allowed to disembark until they got to Moscow, where they would immediately be pressed into military service. As the train slowed outside St Petersburg, Klop leapt down to the tracks and completed the journey on foot.

  Klop arrived on 7 May and set about ingratiating himself with officials of the Cheka and the Foreign Office in the course of searching for his family. At the Cheka his contact was an official named Rougaev who impressed Klop with his bevy of secretaries. They obeyed his every word and appeared not to object to sitting on his lap or being slapped on the backside. Klop was amused to be offered fish and potato soup by his host, who served it by hand, disguising the smell of fish with liberal application of Houbigant’s Quelque Fleurs perfume that he kept in his desk; Klop’s memory for fine detail demonstrating a skill valuable to storytellers and spies alike. That he should strike up such fellow-feeling in an official of the Cheka was fortunate. He had discovered on arrival in St Petersburg that his family had been living on the ‘Fifth Line’ of Vassilievsky Island, the once fashionable suburb now overrun by Bolshevik squatters. To his distress, he soon discovered that his father had died of dysentery a year earlier and his mother and sister had moved to Pskov, about four to six hours rail journey south west of St Petersburg near the border with Estonia. He needed a Cheka 24-hour travel permit to visit them and the family reunion was necessarily brief though long enough for Klop to promise to make the arrangements to get the two women out of the country. Typically, his abiding memory years later was of the pretty, freckled peasant girls, their hair tied back by a kerchief, whom he saw on the train. The kerchief became a small fetish that he liked to try out on later girlfriends.41

  Despite the great risks involved, Klop decided to leave Russia briefly and make contact with Maltzan from the Estonian capital of Reval. There is a record in German Foreign Office archives, dated 13 July, simply stating that the Württemberg citizen Ustinoff was returning to Russia and requesting that Gustav Hilger should be informed by radio. It added that he would not be travelling on a German passport. If Klop filed a fuller report at that stage it has not survived in the records. But it is significant that he was already working with Gustav Hilger, Maltzan’s other secret emissary to the Soviet Union. Hilger was born in Moscow in 1886 and brought up there. He studied engineering in Germany but returned to Moscow in 1910 to work for his father-in-law’s crane company, travelling all over Russia. He was interned during the First World War and on his rele
ase worked for the main commission for aid to German prisoners of war in Russia assisting their evacuation with only limited and reluctant help from the Soviet authorities. He was briefly expelled when relations between the Russia and Germany were broken off but returned in June 1920, and was witness to the starvation, misery, and desperation, of the population.42

  On his return to St Petersburg, Klop had found lodgings with Nikolai Nikolaevitch Schreiber. He was an inventor who had lived in the next street when Klop’s parents had an apartment in St Petersburg and had been courting Klop’s sister, Tabitha. He was a suspiciously fortuitous landlord for a man who was gathering intelligence for Germany. Schreiber had been a Rear Admiral of the old Imperial Russian Navy, a specialist in torpedoes and mines. During the First World War he had been in charge of planning the minefields in the Baltic and Black Sea intended to keep the German fleet at bay. He had worked in close contact with the British Admiralty, including the development of a British invention, the paravane, a mine clearance device.

  Klop’s quest for travel permits for his mother and sister took him from the Cheka to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Here again he managed to charm his way into their good books. According to his son, Peter, his best contact there was Ivan Maisky, which would be yet another extraordinarily lucky break. Maisky had been in London prior to the First World War, at the same time as Klop. His circle of friends included the radical writers George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and Beatrice Webb. From 1932 to 1943 he was Soviet ambassador in London, a man of enormous influence and importance in the Allied relationship against Germany. There is no doubt the two knew each other at that time, but it is less clear how they could have met in 1920. Maisky was then a local government official in Samara, near the Kazakhstan border. It is not impossible, with his literary interests, that he visited Gorky’s House of Arts club in St Petersburg, which was frequented by Klop and Nadia, but less likely that he was in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In any event, Klop’s mother Magdalena and sister Tabitha were in due course able to escape via the Crimea and Istanbul. They spent some time in Germany but eventually settled back in the Middle East.43 Klop’s difficulties with the authorities were compounded by his new relationship with the Benois family, some of whom were not entirely above suspicion. They had potentially damning British connections at a time when Britain had been supporting the monarchist side in the civil war with arms, money and men. British secret agents were up to their necks in plots to assassinate Lenin and bring down the Bolshevik regime.