The Soul of Viktor Tronko (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by David Quammen

  In the winter of 1953, before finishing his last year at the Institute, Tronko was sent off to Prague for a six-month internship at the Soviet Embassy there. This is standard practice, says Sparrow. The Institute is chiefly a breeding farm for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the best of its graduates destined for embassy slots eventually, and so the school administration places them out for these little tours of foreign duty before the final coat of shellac is applied. They spend six months in a socialist fleshpot like Warsaw or Hanoi or Yemen. Nothing in the West; it is the first trip out beyond Soviet borders in almost every case, and the idea evidently is that the experience should be instructive, tantalizing but not overwhelming, and above all, closely supervised. Tronko was fortunate to get Prague, says Sparrow. And of course his own cunning foresight back at the Institute was also helpful: he had made a point, quietly but firmly, of not letting them teach him Arabic. No flyblown desert outpost for Viktor Semyonovich. His Czech was just serviceable.

  And this is where he first came in contact with Trofim Filippovich Rybakov, says Sparrow.

  “Rybakov was on KGB assignment in Prague?”

  “No. Rybakov wasn’t there at all. He was in Berlin at that time,” says Sparrow. “Let’s say it was Rybakov’s daughter. She was in Prague. Let’s say Tronko met her.”

  At this point Tronko wasn’t yet married. That event took place soon after he got back from Czechoslovakia. His wife was a decorative and vacant young woman of good Moscow family, like his own, whom he had met a year earlier at a certain raw party thrown by one of his Institute classmates in the dacha of the classmate’s father, a Politburo member. Her name was Tanya. She worked as a clerk-receptionist at the Mariinsky ballet school, having tried and failed several years previously to get into the school as a dancer herself. Though Tanya had a wonderful long ballet body, she lacked something, drive perhaps, or self-confidence. Possibly talent. Kessler is still waiting to hear more about Rybakov’s daughter but it’s evidently not going to happen, at least not just now. Tanya loved the ballet hopelessly, she loved the very idea of dance and the image of a woman as dancer—herself preferably or failing that just any woman, provided the body was right and the movement was pure, thoughtless, seemingly effortless, light as eiderdown. Yet despite her own vacuousness, or perhaps because of it, she never became bitter. She liked her clerk’s job, relatively. She liked watching girls come and go in tights and warmers while she sat at a desk. Better that than sit at a desk in the Ministry of Water Conservation. She was a good simple soul, Tanya, even if she did happen to be beautiful and stupid. Tronko always said that he loved her. Even over here, even after the defection, after he had left her to some variant of the retribution that Rybakov faced, even then he claimed he loved her. Present tense: he still loved her. He didn’t volunteer it but that was what he answered under questioning, says Sparrow. They were married in June of 1953. No very gala celebration, says Sparrow: the country was supposedly still in mourning for Stalin. A good joke in itself. For the first year they lived with Tronko’s parents, who fortunately had that luxurious three-room apartment.

  In December, Tronko was called to the cloth.

  Taken aside by the personnel director of the Institute, who was himself known to be a KGB officer, Viktor Semyonovich was handed a piece of paper and told to telephone the number written there. He did. A voice on the line instructed him to appear the next morning at an office on Neglinnaya Street, not far from the Lubyanka, and present himself to a certain comrade, identified to Tronko only by first name and patronymic, both probably false. Still no explanations were offered, but none were necessary; this wasn’t catching Tronko entirely by surprise. Next morning he reported. He was received by a man claiming the two names. His career at the Institute had been followed with interest, he was told. His record there had been an outstanding one, he was told, and the other man kept a straight face, though this fellow must have known as well as Viktor Semyonovich did that it was laughably untrue. Outstanding, no, anything but that. The recruiting officer wore a brown suit of East German or Polish cut, not quite so coarse as the Soviet gabardines, and near his elbow rested a glass ashtray that was empty but hadn’t lately been washed. The office had no windows. The air was bad, though during their hour’s talk the recruiting officer didn’t smoke. He sat hunched forward with his hands folded and his brow near the desk lamp, this man, and frowned as he said flattering things but there seemed little conviction in it either way. He looked old to Viktor Semyonovich that morning. Old and lifeless, like the vapor-sealed corpse of Lenin. But more lumpy and comic than Lenin. In retrospect, Tronko put the man’s age at about fifty. This was not the first KGB officer Tronko had met, far from it, so Viktor Semyonovich allowed himself not to be unduly cowed. He was self-assured yet respectful, answering with forced gratitude the man’s forced flatteries. It was all ritual. Undoubtedly Tronko’s record of unblemished mediocrity at the Institute had less to do with yesterday’s summons and today’s interview than did whatever few words Trofim Filippovich Rybakov had spoken to someone over the telephone. Viktor Semyonovich was “invited” to become an officer of the Organs—as the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti was more familiarly known. He was free to ponder the matter overnight but it would be still better if he could decide now. Viktor Semyonovich was pleased to accept. He signed an oath. He never saw the recruiting officer again. He might have remembered the name and patronymic, Tronko claimed years later, if he had not been so positive that they were utterly bogus.

  The next twelve months he spent at a KGB training school in Novosibirsk, Siberia, separated from Tanya by two thousand miles and experiencing an austere dormitory existence for the first time in his life. He was part of a class of twenty-eight trainees, every one male. Early rising, long hours of class and study, strict discipline, no carousing during the week. It wasn’t all that bad but, given a choice, Tronko would choose other. Sparrow states this in the present conditional—“Tronko would choose other”—as though he had it just recently on Viktor Semyonovich’s personal assurance. In all frankness, Claude, I would choose other. Kessler wonders fleetingly about the circumstances under which that mild antipathy to the spartan regime was originally voiced. Viktor Tronko locked in a concrete room, maybe, beginning his third year of American incarceration? It was pure vocational training at Novosibirsk, methods and tactics, with only passing attention to such tangentially related subjects as scientific Marxism and the Soviet criminal code. Much of the learning was rote. They also attended seminars in which analytical problems were set and discussed. They took roles and acted out agent-recruitment attempts before their instructors. They were drilled in the finer techniques of subornation and traducement. They practiced shoe-leather surveillance on each other through the streets of Novosibirsk, sometimes with droll results—though the local militiamen knew better than to fool with them. Counterintelligence measures received heavy emphasis; but then counterintelligence meant nine different things, all nine important to the Organs. The school itself was in a hulky four-story building that loomed in isolation at its end of Krasny Prospekt and for a year Viktor Semyonovich scarcely left it. In evenings he played cards with the others. On payday he got drunk with the others. On the weekends, when the others prowled Novosibirsk for compliant women, he wrote letters to Tanya and read books, I suppose, says Sparrow, about Felix Dzerzhinsky. Do you believe this? says Sparrow.

  “Should I?” says Kessler.

  “Wait.”

  It was only a year, fortunately. He scored well on the passing-out exams. Intellectually it had been not nearly so demanding as the Institute, aside from the difficulty of focusing one’s attention for so long on such dreary stuff. Then he was back in Moscow, where he and Tanya received as if by a miracle their own apartment—still just a tiny place, hardly more than a furnished room with rights to a communal kitchen shared also by two other couples, but it allowed them their first newlywed privacy away from his parents. Tanya was thrilled. She was flus
hed with love and admiration for her clever, well-connected husband, and she expressed it in the most genuine way she could: with her body. Tronko had a satisfying home life and good career prospects. His first assignment was to the Ninth Department of the Second CD, that arm responsible for surveillance and recruitment of foreign students at Soviet universities, not a glorious part of the KGB but not a stinking backwater either, and thought of as a place for promising young officers to be allowed to prove their reliability. Tronko became deputy admissions director of Moscow State University, a cover job extracted on his behalf from the legitimate university administration; his overt duties involved housing, medical care, and living stipends for non-Soviet students while his real chore was to spot and befriend those few, especially from Third World countries, who might be recruited to return home as agents. Another officer made the actual recruitment attempts, Viktor Semyonovich merely supplying him names. It was an easy, pleasant assignment that chiefly entailed drinking vast quantities of tea with nice young Africans. An assignment at which Tronko could not possibly fail and could also not possibly distinguish himself. It might have been a comfortable trap that held him for years, while his youth leaked away, but for Viktor Tronko it wasn’t. After just one year, a minimal probation, he was whisked out of the Ninth Department and reassigned to the Eleventh. The ostensible reason for this transfer was his fluency in Czech and German. The real reason, he guessed, was Rybakov.

  A post in the Eleventh Department represented almost the best thing that Tronko could hope for at that early stage of his career. Certainly it was the best to be found anywhere within the Second (as opposed to the First, which bore the more interesting burden of foreign intelligence) Chief Directorate. One simple fact made the Eleventh Department desirable: regulating and monitoring all foreign travel by any Soviet citizens so lucky as to get out, it gave its officers too the chance for travel abroad.

  Most often, true enough, those officers of the Eleventh spent their time in Moscow or some other Soviet city conducting the routine investigations of would-be travelers on the basis of which exit visas would routinely be denied. But occasionally a few citizens were actually granted permission to go, usually diplomats or scientists or Party officials in a group, and when that happened a man from the Eleventh went with them. Any officer in the department could look forward to one foreign trip a year—Belgrade, Geneva, either half of Berlin, Paris or Stockholm if he were especially favored. It was a jealously treasured privilege yet it was also risky; he would be responsible for keeping those other miserable bastards in line, and if one of them fooled him somehow, God forbid if one of them defected, he would be called to account. This explained why there was a single nervous Doberman in every busload of junketing Soviet borzois. At the age of twenty-six, in 1957, Viktor Tronko joined the Dobermans.

  He was already a senior lieutenant, and the following year they made him a captain, says Sparrow. Rank is taken seriously in the KGB, says Sparrow, none of this GS-14 sort of silliness, you need to keep that in mind. It was a good age to make captain, twenty-seven.

  Life wore a smiling face. Upward mobility for him and Tanya. They were given a larger apartment, a two-room place on Maksim Gorky Embankment, not even sharing a kitchen. As though to fill the new space, they had a child. A boy. In reward for the competent performance of his duties, and also of course for political reliability, Tronko was meanwhile receiving the standard allotment of working junkets. At the end of his first year in the department he had accompanied a delegation of ceramics engineers on a three-week visit to Prague, a logical assignment considering his familiarity with the city and the fact that he could be shown on the trip manifest as a translator. The second year he got to Cairo and Alexandria with a group of linguists from the Ministry of Culture, plus a side trip to Aswan in a spirit of unabashed tourism. The third year they let him see London, in company with five aerospace scientists who were delivering a carefully distorted and disinformational model of Sputnik to an international exhibition there; the London assignment announced eloquently that Tronko was well trusted at home. From each of these journeys he returned laden with (besides decent tweed suits and oxfords and good linen shirts for himself) the whole panoply of exotic gifts that, as he had learned, it was both the privilege and the unwritten duty of a foreign-going comrade to bring back to those less lucky souls stuck in dreary Moscow: silk underwear for Tanya, clever windup toys for the boy, ballpoints and razor blades by the bagful to be dispensed to his departmental colleagues, hardwood carvings and crystal for his parents’ apartment, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker for his one remaining close friend from the Institute, more pairs of shoes for whomever among his in-laws they might fit, ten-year-old scotch for his immediate boss and rather expensive silver jewelry for the boss’s wife, a German stereo and an antique jade bowl for the boss’s home, brightly colored sweatshirts for the boss’s children—it was not possible to be too generous or too transparently sycophantish in this last regard. For his mentor Rybakov he brought, from London, a fine leather-bound edition of David Copperfield. From Cairo, for Rybakov, a high-quality Italian watch—and on that occasion Viktor Semyonovich was gently reprimanded for his extravagance. From Prague, the earliest of these trips, he had brought only an account of his visit to a grave. Each of those three gifts was delivered personally in Rybakov’s private office.

  Meanwhile a pair of important developments had laid their magic touch upon the course of Viktor Semyonovich’s career.

  The first of that pair was far beyond his control, played out in the highest reaches of Party power. Large shapes and momentous forces began moving, rumbling distantly, shifting across the horizon like summer storm clouds—and in consequence there was suddenly a new chairman of the KGB Organs. A man named Serov was out, summarily fired and probably much worse, says Sparrow, for lapses of vigilance and of foresight severely damaging to the People’s State, as the official announcement would have had it. A bad leak had been discovered about that time, true enough. We had had an agent there in Moscow, says Sparrow, a significant penetration. Not right at the Lubyanka itself, alas, no, but in one of the tangential military committees, and this fellow had been feeding us some very juicy stuff. They caught the poor man and squashed him. Chairman Serov wasn’t directly to blame, he was merely the logical ultimate goat, so he suffered. He fell. As they all eventually do. Also Serov had been a Malenkov man; so it was really only a matter of time, a matter of finding an adequate pretext. Serov out, and a character named Shelepin was suddenly in. No KGB experience whatsoever, and only forty-one years old, yet the Politburo in their infinite wisdom discerned that Aleksandr Nikolaevich Shelepin would make a fine chairman of the Organs. He had worked his way into favor through two decades of brilliantly loyal service as a Komsomol administrator. Brilliantly loyal, yes, says Sparrow, I choose my words advisedly: a uniquely Soviet category of excellence. And by no coincidence, says Sparrow, Comrade Shelepin was a Khrushchev man.

  “Whose grave?” Kessler says sharply.

  “What?”

  “An account of a visit to a grave, you said. Brought back from Prague. A gift.”

  “Rybakov’s daughter,” says Sparrow.

  Along with him, upon elevation, Shelepin of course brought his own network of cronies, says Sparrow, and in that he was acting no different from how any sensible bureaucrat does, anywhere. Hard Tennessee heel print on the word “anywhere.” You build breastworks around yourself with the stacked bodies of faithful, unthreatening toadies, isn’t that so? asks Sparrow, and the bite in his voice causes Kessler to wonder which particular sensible bureaucrat he has most immediately in mind. Not hard to guess. Jed McAtee becomes Director of Central Intelligence, December of 1972. Soviet Bloc triumphant. Counterintelligence decidedly out of favor. We win, you lose. And then, as in the case of the Malenkovian loyalist Comrade Serov, perhaps it was so also with Claude Sparrow: merely a matter of those who had triumphed waiting, hoping, for a pretext to drop the blade. So Shele
pin brought in his Komsomol clique, filling the higher positions with his own creatures, people he knew and people those people knew if he didn’t, putting them all around to protect his flanks and keep his boots licked to a nice sheen, and don’t be fooled for a minute to imagine that because these men were all Komsomoletchiki the KGB had become some sort of haven for aging scoutmasters, Sparrow says. Not at all. Shelepin was unlike any scoutmaster you will ever meet, Sparrow says. He was often called, though not to his face, “Iron Aleks.” He was ambitious and willful. He was cynical, like all the successful comrades. Maybe more so than most. The youth work, the zealotry for shaping fresh young minds to the mold of glorious ideological orthodoxy, the entire Komsomol apparatus of which he had become supreme leader—that was all merely incidental, the base from which to launch a career, Sparrow says. It might equally well have been industrial procurement, or the political commissariat of the army, or maybe metallurgy, like with Brezhnev. But it wasn’t. It was Komsomol. At the Lubyanka, in consequence, a record of Komsomol activity became the new form of holy grace. Latest in a long series.

  Career prospects rose and fell accordingly, within a month of Shelepin’s accession. Over in the Tourist Department of the Second CD, Trofim Filippovich Rybakov was not and never had been part of this Komsomol gang but he was enough of a wary professional, an experienced wire-walker, to survive in place. Young Viktor Tronko, on the other hand, possessed in his own personnel file an almost grotesquely flattering letter of recommendation from the man who had been Komsomol secretary at the Institute of International Relations, and who now happened to be a protégé of Aleksandr Shelepin’s own chief deputy. It was a letter that had cost Tronko no more than a series of evenings endured in tedious meetings, and a thoughtful gift of some excellent imported coffee, two kilos of it, brought back by Tronko’s father from a trade unions conference in Nairobi with precisely that purpose in mind. Two kilos of coffee invested presciently for a son’s future. Better than savings bonds or a blue-chip trust. The Tronko family knew how to play this game, you see, says Sparrow.