by Henry Landau
I found Krassin, with whom I negotiated, a charming man; he spoke perfect English, and having been the Soviet representative in London before Rakovsky, he was thoroughly acquainted with trade conditions in England. He had also been employed as an engineer before the war by Siemens-Schuckert in Berlin; it was obviously his experience there which had qualified him so pre-eminently for the post of Trade Commissar which he now occupied.
He quickly agreed to accord me the same terms which he said had been granted the Germans in their concessions: namely, a company was to be formed with sufficient capital for working purposes – in our case, £100,000; half the shares of the company were to be given to the Soviet government; there was to be equal representation on the board of directors, and the chairman, with the casting vote, was to be a Soviet member; the headquarters of the company was to be in Moscow, and the board meetings were to take place there; the working capital of the company was to be deposited in the Russian state bank; the profits were not to be exported.
These terms may have satisfied the Germans, and there was an obvious advantage in having a government partner, who would guarantee to buy and sell to the concessionaire, but I knew my friends would be disappointed; they would never agree to putting their heads in the Soviet mouth in this fashion. As for me, who had had visions of myself as an executive in a large London office handling a flood of Soviet trade, my hopes vanished into thin air.
I smiled somewhat grimly to myself. There I was in Moscow, paying out goodness knows how many chervonetz a day, waiting for the official seal and signature to a concession which I was almost certain my friends would reject. However, there was nothing to do but to remain on for a few more days; I might as well take back the piece of paper which I had travelled so far to get. At least I was making history, for it was the first trade concession that had ever been granted by the Soviets to a purely British company.
During the period of waiting in Moscow I met two people whom, perhaps, I might not mention, had I not noticed their names of late in a situation which seemed a sardonic echo of my own wasted weeks in Russia. Both were figures in the recent Monkhouse trial, in which several British engineers and employees working for Metropolitan Vickers were tried for sabotage of the machinery in some of the water-power stations which were in the course of construction in Russia. One whom I had known was Anna Sergievna K. I do not deny that a slight chill ran over me when I recalled that she had acted as my secretary while I was in Russia. She was a quiet, reserved, capable woman, an accomplished linguist, and a creature of unlimited energy. I had felt rather absurdly that she was my Soviet chaperon, for she had been recommended to me by one of the staff at the Savoy Hotel, an obvious GPU agent, before whom I had made a careful parade of having nothing to hide. I asked this recommendation as an instance of good faith on my part, and I assumed that my discreet secretary was not without instructions. Yet here she was involved in a situation of more than threatening character. These reversals of fortune have been common in the new Russia from the first; I had no reason to be surprised at all – no reason, that is to say, except the human tendency to regard our own affairs and those of our acquaintances as exempt from dangers which, however regretfully, we accept as probable or inevitable for the rest of mankind.
My other acquaintance in Moscow has suffered the same reversal, but as a foreigner he has been more desperately placed, and his story is marked by a strong ironic quality which makes the remembrance of my conversations with him infinitely pathetic. This was Saunders, an English engineer, to whom I took a letter of introduction from his brother in England. He interested me immensely, for he was one of the few Englishmen who had lived in Russia continuously since before the war. He had been connected with some English Works in Moscow, and had remained through the years of war and revolution to look after their interests, though when I saw him, he was without a job. When I asked him why he did not return to England, I found him possessed with the idea that he was the only Englishman on the spot available for commercial work, and that someday this would infallibly bring him a rich return.
Saunders took me out to his home in the country, about an hour’s journey by train. Here living was cheaper, he informed me, and it was much healthier for his children. Also he had a cottage, whereas in Moscow he would only have been permitted a single room. He was so concerned about his family that I am sure he would never have jeopardised their future by engaging in acts of sabotage; on the contrary, he seemed at the time I saw him painfully anxious not to displease the Bolsheviki, and was obviously afraid to discuss Soviet conditions. I confined myself, therefore, to giving him news of his brother, and to telling him what conditions were like in England, while in my mind there took root the assurance that Soviet Russia opened no future for any Englishman. Ten years and the Monkhouse affair have not altered that conviction.
After two weeks had elapsed, I was glad to get a note from Greenfield, Krassin’s secretary, asking me to call at his office. Without comment, he handed me the concession containing all the terms agreed upon, with the Soviet seal affixed. I accepted it without enthusiasm. Even when one is ‘making history’, as I was doing in gaining this document, one is not always personally exalted. I should have been even less enthusiastic had I realised that even this official, so highly and securely placed, was to be ploughed under by caprices of Soviet fortune. He was a bit of a mystery, however, this Greenfield. Where he got his English name, I do not know; he was probably Grünefeld once, in New York or London. He spoke perfect English. I wished to draw him out on the few occasions I met him, but without success; he knew the value of silence and discretion. It was years afterwards in Paris, when I met a Russian who was well up in Soviet affairs, that I learned his fate through a passing allusion to his name. ‘He was condemned to Siberia,’ was the laconic comment that closed his history. Many a Soviet official has met the same end; even the highest ones were not safe from the eyes and ears of the GPU.
The concession settled, I turned my attention to my other mission, and applied for a return visa, allowing me to proceed via Leningrad. This delayed me another day, in which my nervous tension may be imagined. I was cross-examined for nearly an hour by a GPU official as to why I wanted to go by this route, instead of choosing the shorter one through Riga. It was in some ways a comic experience. Here was I, who had spent hours in my time examining spies, traitors, purveyors of information of all sorts – sitting meekly in the character of a suspect; I actually began to feel guilty of some crime or other, as people say they do at the sight of a policeman. My positive conviction that the Russian police knew all there was to know of my work in espionage made me even more self-conscious. However, I took a leaf from the book in which both spy and thief are so well versed – the art of innocence – and relied upon blank simplicity to shield my movements and my purpose. Both the address of Prince M.’s father and the necessary password existed in my memory only; nothing in my papers or bags could give me away.
I was therefore, and I repeated it ad nauseam, a simple English man of business, who wished to see the sights – no more. My answer did not seem to please my examiner, but eventually he told me that permission would be granted, and that my passport, duly stamped, would be sent to me at my hotel. He dismissed me with an abruptness which I fancied I understood: he had determined to have me watched on the way to Leningrad.
The journey took about twenty hours, but the instant I settled myself in my compartment I realised – with inward chuckles – that it would not be monotonous or dull. The watcher I had expected was cheerfully installed and awaiting me. Most comic of all, from Anglo-Saxon standards of privacy in compartment travel – it was a woman. She was a good-looking brunette of about thirty-five, who opened up conversation with me immediately. She began in excellent German; I found out afterwards that she spoke English and French equally well. Somewhat too carefully, she explained that she had been employed in the Soviet embassy in Berlin, and was on her way to visit friends in Leningrad.
In spite of
my amusement, I was on the alert to observe that she plied me with innumerable questions about my trip to Leningrad, and seemed especially interested in the Berlin White Russian colony. Many of my acquaintances she mentioned by name. I parried with amiable but empty gossip, pretended a vastly greater ignorance than I had, and with every appearance of candour turned my share of the conversation into petitions for information on Russian life, sights, and manners. Apparently my sight-seeing role satisfied her, for after a while she confined herself to telling me the places of interest to visit in Leningrad.
I enjoyed her company; she was both attractive and intelligent, and mistress of a solid fund of interesting information. I smiled as I said goodbye to her. Our roles had been reversed, for it was to her, my quondam examiner, that I am indebted for much that I know of Soviet Russia.
As the train pulled into the city, my first impulse was to make immediately for the address Prince M. had given me, but on reflection I realised that the surveillance over me might be continued; so I decided to find rooms and pretend a preliminary round of sightseeing. The Europaiski Hotel, where I stopped, famous in pre-revolutionary days, was a distinct improvement on the Savoy. The room I occupied had been well kept up, and compared favourably with the best hotels in Europe. The same high prices as in Moscow prevailed, however. As I took my key at the desk, I spied a box of Corona cigars. I had not been able to smoke the insipid Soviet cigarettes, and I was dying for a smoke. ‘How much?’ I asked the desk clerk. ‘A chervonetz [£1] apiece,’ he replied. I succumbed; I had already grown accustomed to the prices. But I smiled ruefully as the cigar crumbled to dust in my hands. It was at least seven years old.
In the roof-garden of the hotel, palms, fountains, gipsy entertainers, red-coated waiters darting between tables crowded with uniformed officers and lovely élégantes, were gone. I found nothing but half a dozen billiard tables installed; some Soviet youths, who looked like students, were crowded around the tables, all intent on those huge white Russian billiard balls, each at least four times the size of those used in other countries.
The only activity throughout Leningrad, in fact, seemed to be that of the university, where crowds of students were seen. The Soviets were doing their best to foster higher learning, and I was told that the laboratories of the university were splendidly equipped. Otherwise, Leningrad had all the appearance of a derelict city, a sorry sight with its buildings in disrepair, and with falling plaster and bricks scattered over the sidewalk.
As I drove down the Nevski Prospekt, now the Prospect of 25 October, in honour of the revolution, there was hardly a person in sight. In many places the wooden paving of the streets was caved in, leaving holes big enough to engulf cab and horse; and at night, in the darkness, the drive would have been made at the risk of one’s life. The dozens of deserted factories at the edge of the town bore out what I had learned in Moscow – that hundreds of works had been allowed to go to ruin during the earlier stages of the revolution, and that later many a costly plant which was beyond repair had been pulled down to furnish scrap for the Soviet Steel Works. In the distance the Winter Palace and St Isaac’s Cathedral stood out in regal majesty. Like the Kremlin, they defied the ravages of time and of the Soviets.
In the afternoon I dismissed my cab at a point discreetly distant from the hotel, and set out for my goal by a devious route on foot. In the course of it I got lost several times, not daring to ask for any information, but at length I made my way to the dwelling of Prince M.’s father, which I found to be an apartment house. In response to my knock, the door was furtively opened by a person I could not distinctly see, but who, as soon as he learned I was from abroad, let me in quickly, as if he feared someone would see me on the staircase. I found myself facing a tall well-built man with white hair and a large moustache, whose sad and kindly eyes attracted me immediately. From the way he carried himself, and from his general air of good breeding and culture, I knew that I was in the presence of the father.
He brought me into a room where he introduced me to the rest of the family: the Princess his wife, still so lovely that I could believe the legend of his having killed his brother, her first husband, in a duel for her favour; his daughter, a very plain, masculine-looking woman, a marked contrast to her handsome brother, but also with a Scottish accent; and, finally, the daughter’s two sons, boys of about sixteen and fourteen years old. I was immediately plied with a battery of questions. For nearly an hour I was cross-examined by each of the family in turn. I had to repeat over and over again exactly how Dima, Prince M., looked, and I had to tell in detail everything I knew about him.
Finally, I called the father aside and asked to be allowed to speak with him privately. When the others had left the room, I told him about the mission from his son, and gave him the password. He uttered a sigh of relief. ‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘when I saw you, whether you were the person we had been expecting. We knew Dima would find someone.’
Without further ado, he took down from the wall an icon of the Virgin Mary, removed a small piece of wood from the frame, and from a hole bored in it, poured out twenty-three huge emeralds and diamonds. I could not keep my eyes from them. They were flawless, and worth a fortune; no wonder the Bolsheviki had tried to find out what had happened to them. I smiled at the icon; it was certainly not the best spot for a hiding place. The Bolsheviki, with their avowed anti-religious policy, might have destroyed it; but the father, a typical superstitious Russian, evidently looked for divine protection through it.
‘How are you going to hide them?’ he anxiously inquired. I indicated the lining of the heavy travelling ulster with which I had come prepared. Goodness knows it was very inadequate; it would be the very first place I would have examined, if I myself had to conduct such a search, but it was the best and simplest carrier I had at my disposal. Audacity and the obvious are sometimes their own protection. The Prince called his wife in, and then while we anxiously looked on giving suggestions, she quieted her shaking fingers and sewed the stones into various parts of the coat – first securely stitching each stone into a separate piece of strong black linen, and then sewing these casings in the hems, under the turned over sleeves, and under the collar. After the last careful stitches were set in, and the father had given me various verbal messages for his son, chiefly about the disposal of the stones, we rejoined the rest of the family.
They pressed me to a supper of those small Neva fish which Russians know so well. They were excellently prepared, but humble fare for this old man, who had been in the old days equerry to the Tsar, and one of the richest men in Russia. It was sad to see him in a small three-room apartment, piled high with all his worldly belongings; but he was lucky, for in Moscow the whole family would have had to put up with a single room. He told me, among other details, how once a week in this community building, which contained about twenty families, he had to take his turn at carrying garbage into the street for all the people.
They were living on the small sum which the Bolsheviki permitted Prince M. to send the family monthly. Before they had pressed their loyal governess to return to England and safety she had insisted on providing the household with sums from her savings, which, British fashion, she had put away in British banks; the cordial gifts of the family’s better days made her under the new regime far better off than they. Now the welfare of the family depended on the sale of the jewels, and hence – uneasy thought – on their safety with me. What worried the old nobleman most, however, was the education of his daughter’s two boys. ‘We have got to teach them at home,’ he said. ‘They won’t allow our sons to enter the university, and, of course, they cannot go abroad. A whole generation of families such as ours is lost to the civilisation we believe in.’ He thanked God, however, that he was still alive after his experience in prison; like most of the aristocracy who had remained in Russia, he had spent many months in prison without any charge being brought against him.
The next evening I left for Reval, glad to be on my way out of Russia, and in
the early hours of the morning I reached the frontier. A GPU agent entered my compartment. Here was the ordeal I had mentally gone through a thousand times during my three weeks’ stay in Russia. After examining my papers, he carefully went through my bags. Impassively I watched him, having – oh so casually! – tossed my ulster into a corner of the seat to be out of his way. He looked at me closely, as if weighing whether or not he should search my clothes. I was afraid he could hear the thumping of my heart. But evidently my face belied the turmoil of my mind, for he turned away with a sour grin, apparently satisfied that he had done enough. The train started, and within a few minutes I was in Esthonia. I don’t think I have ever in my life experienced such a relief.
In Reval, the seaboard capital of Esthonia, I found myself once again among people in individual clothes and with separate personalities; I saw smiling faces again, energetic movements of persons with some point to their existence, bands of active children on their way to school. The robot population of the USSR was behind me. Whether it was by contrast or not, I do not know, but the town seemed to breathe prosperity. The marketplace was crowded; people were buying and selling; money was changing hands. Most of the people were of German origin, and I found German spoken everywhere. I made for the first restaurant, and was happy to sit down to a good meal at a reasonable price. Shortly after, I ensconced myself in a comfortable wagon lit en route for London, via Riga and Berlin, feeling, I think, much as a man would feel who had safely returned from Mars.
Filled with this sense of lightness or ease or life resumed – whatever one wishes to call it – I set about the final discharge of my two Russian missions; the more personally pressing fortunately could come first, since I could dismiss it on the way to London.