Stalin's Children

by Owen Matthews

  Mervyn was indeed planning some ‘funny business’, which involved slipping into Czechoslovakia unnoticed on the day the conference ended, to send a confidential letter which he hoped would transform his fortunes. Though at that time no visa was required and the train ride to Prague was only three hours, Mervyn spent a sleepless night before his departure, fearing that he might be snatched like Gerald Brooke. But the journey was without incident; the border guards scowled at his passport but stamped it.

  Mervyn arrived in Prague on 6 September 1965 and checked into the run-down Hotel Slovan. He found Prague livelier than Moscow, and even discovered a dingy nightclub where he had a solitary glass of wine. That night he sat down to write a long, frank letter to Alexei. Mervyn spelled out the propaganda advantages of letting Mila out, and offered a ‘substantial’ sum of money if this were to happen. He cited cases of Poles and East Germans buying their way out, unofficially but legally. He would be helping Russia, and though he was not rich he could find benefactors. The money could go to ‘charitable causes’ in the Soviet Union. ‘We are about the same age, Alexei, and we can talk seriously and honestly. Please help!’ Mervyn pleaded.

  Unlike Mila, Mervyn seemed still to harbour illusions about the fundamental decency of the KGB, or at least of Alexei personally. What he did not include was an offer to cooperate – but by this stage such an offer probably wouldn’t have been accepted in any case. He sent the letter by registered post in the morning from the Central Post Office just off Wenceslas Square. He never received an answer.

  Perhaps my parents found something in their separation which resonated with an emotional barrenness they each carried with them from childhood. But there came a point, quite early in their epistolary relationship, when they began to put so much of their lives into their letters that the recording of the experience overtook the experience itself, the material became too huge, the process of turning it into history began to rob them of their present.

  In Moscow, Mila was settled into the private rituals of her long-distance love affair. As she left for work she would kiss Mervyn’s photo. On her way home she shopped for records for Mervyn, so he and his friends could listen to Russian music together. She consulted her doctor about Mervyn’s minor ailments. In almost every letter she refers to Mervyn’s diet, her obsession with food a hangover from her childhood.

  ‘Do you listen to your Mila? Please Mervyn, don’t eat too much pepper, vinegar and other spices. Do you drink your milk? I drink half a litre every night. Eat properly, as I taught you, eat fresh things.’ When Mervyn tried to object that he was partial to a curry from time to time, Mila would have none of it. ‘I respect your tastes, but I fear some of them hurt your health – I mean what I mentioned to you in Moscow, your passion for Eastern, Caucasian and Indian food. It’s too spicy for you, you are a person from a maritime climate. This is food for people with strong stomachs, but you are a delicate northern flower, you need to eat delicately.’

  Mila asked for clothes, which Mervyn would buy in London [jokingly grumbling in his letters at the expense) and send to Moscow through Dinnerman’s, the only authorized parcel handler to the Soviet Union. Mila would buy books and send them to Mervyn in London in brown paper parcels tied with rough string. Soon there were hundreds on his shelves.

  Mila’s virtual relationship with Mervyn was spiralling into a full-fledged obsession; she was plunging deep into an imagined world of her own creation. ‘It is as though I live entirely in a complex mechanism called Mervyn, I see all his bolts and wheels all around me,’ she wrote. ‘You are the point, the aim of my life… Soon I will begin practising a new religion, Mervusism, and I will make everyone believe in my God of joy and warmth.’

  In many ways, it seemed to her that the life represented by the stream of letters was more real than her interactions with the live people around her. ‘I have no present, only a past and a future if I can believe in it,’ she wrote. ‘Everything around me is dead, I wander through the ruins, onwards towards some goal, towards you.’ She lived for Mervyn’s letters; ‘everything else, I invent just to fill in the time.’

  Mila describes sitting in the courtyard at Starokonushenny Pereulok in the warm drizzle, laughing out loud as she reads Mervyn’s latest letters while a hatchet-faced old babushka peers out from a cellar window. ‘It was as though wings had sprouted from my back,’ she wrote. ‘All your soul, in the form of paper and ink, poured into me like a clear stream and filled my body and soul with strength. This is the best medicine I could have. Your letters are getting better and better, soon I will cry not from sorrow but from joy.’

  At the weekend she went to the dacha. Olga read Chekhov while Mila knitted; a late summer hailstorm rattled on the house’s iron roof. When the storm cleared, Mila went for a long walk through cornfields, calling out Mervyn’s name. The burden of grief was taking its toll on her. ‘Mervyn, sorrow is sucking the life out of her… surely she’s suffered enough in her life. I am truly worried for her,’ Lenina wrote. ‘Probably because she never felt or saw the love of parents she suffers twice as much now. Our house is in mourning, literally… She has stopped smiling, laughing, she has tears in her eyes all the time. I ask you to write more often, she lives for you.’

  Mila’s periods had stopped from worry, but her doctor told her not to be concerned. ‘In wartime women didn’t have them for years,’ she told Mila. Nevertheless she prescribed daily injections ‘for your nerves’, as well as a course of ‘magnetic therapy’ – evidently some kind of pseudo-scientific quackery of the kind beloved by the hypochondriac Soviets.

  For a few months in 1965, Mila seems to have become preoccupied with the fear that her good-looking fiancé might be stolen from her. It even pervaded her sleep. Mila dreamt that she was at the Bolshoi with Valery and caught sight of Mervyn down in the stalls with another woman. She called and shouted, and was seized by an uncontrollable desire to throw herself over the balcony down to him.

  The pain of separation had shaken loose all Mila’s deepest fears – of abandonment, most profoundly, but also lesser insecurities about her appearance. Mila felt acutely that she was no beauty. ‘This is the most painful question for me, and I never speak of it to anyone – but I am terribly sorry that I will not please your friends and acquaintances in this respect,’ Mila wrote. ‘I am so afraid of that, I worry about it. Though I do have one comfort – all my life I have had lots of friends, including pretty ones, and they all loved me and were attracted to me. I know that you like beautiful women, like any man. I love beauty too. I hope very much that you will see beyond this and see what others do not see. We will look at beautiful women together. I am not so insecure that I cannot acknowledge the beauty of other women if they are not bitches or fools. All my life I had very few photos taken of me – you know why, but if something comes out I’ll send it to you. I feel shy when you show my photographs to people.’

  At work, Mila would show Mervyn’s letters around. She had a man, which in turn made her fully a woman. ‘I want someone to love me – I want people to know that I am not such an unfortunate.’ But the pain, and perhaps an obscure sense of shame and guilt at having lost her lover, kept her behind late at work so that she would not have to see other girls being met by their husbands and boyfriends.

  In late September 1965, Mervyn saw a hopeful story in the Sun. Secret talks on swapping Brooke for the Krogers had got further than Mervyn had suspected. Wolfgang Vogel, a mysterious East German lawyer, represented the Soviet side. Vogel had a good track record – he had brokered the 1962 spy swap of the American U2 pilot Gary Powers for the veteran Soviet spy ‘Rudolph Abel’. Abel, whose real name was William Fischer, had, ironically enough, been the Krogers’ controller when they worked in the US in the 1940s, running messages for Moscow’s atomic spies in the Manhattan Project. Vogel was also rumoured to have arranged the ‘purchase’ of East Germans by their relatives in the West.

  ‘The British government has bitterly rejected all suggestions of a swap, now or in the f
uture,’ said the Sun on 22 September 1965. ‘They consider Gerald Brooke, jailed in Moscow for subversion, is being held to ransom. But this reaction has not apparently deterred Herr Vogel… On Monday night his green and cream Opel was waved through Checkpoint Charlie without the usual close scrutiny of papers for a meeting with Mr Christopher Lush at the British HQ in West Berlin.’

  Four days later Mervyn was on a train trundling eastwards through Germany. The heating in the carriage had been switched off, and he passed the guard towers and barbed wire around West Berlin at dawn, shivering cold. He stayed, as usual, in the cheapest hotel he could find, the Pension Aleron in Lietzenburgerstrasse. Mervyn telephoned Jiirgen Stange, Vogel’s West German lawyer contact, and made an appointment for the next day. He spent the rest of the day in East Berlin sightseeing. Wartime ruins were everywhere, and the place was tense and drab. Later in the afternoon he visited the Zoo and watched the monkeys staring at him gloomily from their cages.

  Mervyn explained his case in detail to Stange, who promised to arrange a meeting with Vogel the next night. Their rendezvous was the Baronen Bar, a small and expensive place frequented by businessmen where Vogel often stopped for a drink before returning east from his regular trips. As Mervyn waited he noticed that the tall barman wore extravagant cufflinks, intended, Mervyn supposed, to inveigle the customers into giving him larger tips.

  Vogel was round-faced, bespectacled and friendly. Mervyn’s German was poor, and Vogel had no English; Stange had explained that his knowledge of foreign languages was confined to Latin and Greek. But Vogel was upbeat, and made a lot of optimistic noises about improving relations. He suggested that maybe Mila and perhaps one other person could be exchanged for one of the Krogers, something that Mervyn thought highly unlikely. But he was heartened by the German lawyer’s enthusiastic tone.

  As Vogel stood to leave, Mervyn sprang to his feet and offered to carry a small suitcase Vogel had brought with him into the bar. The case was impossibly heavy, and Mervyn could barely lift it. He staggered after Vogel and heaved the suitcase into his Opel, and waved as he drove off in an easterly direction. Mervyn never found out what was in the case, and never dared ask.

  The next day Mervyn met Christopher Lush of the British Foreign Office at Western Allied Headquarters, and asked him to contact London for an official response to the idea of an exchange. Lush was dismissive. ‘We don’t want to become a channel for this sort of thing,’ he told my father. ‘We don’t want everyone coming here.’

  Vogel never contacted Mervyn. It was another blind alley.

  Soon after he returned from Berlin, Mervyn heaved his Oxford trunks into his battered Ford and drove north to his new academic quarters at Long Eaton, near Nottingham, doubtless sitting up straight at the wheel after Mila’s admonitions not to ‘slouch as though you are carrying buckets’.

  Mervyn found Long Eaton a place of profound dreariness, a grimy industrial town which reminded him powerfully of the miseries of his childhood in South Wales. Nottingham University’s lecturers were accommodated in very much less style than he had been used to in Oxford. Mervyn did not like drinking in pubs, which left sitting at the laundromat watching the clothes whirl around as the only alternative local entertainment. After Moscow and Oxford, Nottingham was a fall from grace indeed, but at least he now had the time to devote to his campaign. Despite having an epileptic fit in the station cafeteria at King’s Cross – the first he had ever suffered – Mervyn resolved to stay optimistic.

  ‘From that day on, regardless of the news from Russia, I always made a point of going into the classroom with a cheery smile on my face,’ he told Mila. ‘I’m not in the least bit worried about the cancellation of my book.’ A photograph from that autumn shows Mervyn at his desk at the university, a tinny radio I remember him still using in the mid-1970s in front of him, books piled on sagging bookshelves behind. The room is small and poky, and he is earnestly reading a letter. He looks strangely childish and dislocated, among the unruly piles of his possessions, but quite content.

  Mervyn’s mother, during one of his rare visits to Swansea, harangued him about giving up his self-destructive obsession with his Russian girl. ‘This morning my mother tiger showed her claws – leopards, to change the metaphor, don’t change their spots,’ wrote Mervyn as he sat in his Ford in the car park of Nottingham University sports club, where he took his daily swim. ‘She says I’m home so rarely and make her suffer so much – she said that the recent events in Russia nearly killed her. “And when I think of what’s happened to your career I am filled with horror,” she said. “Shut up,” I said, “or I’ll leave the house – the car’s just outside,” so she went quiet.’

  Mervyn considered other options. One was for Mila to apply to visit another socialist country, meet him there, and somehow escape. The problem was that Mila would have to get a reference from her employers to travel, even to a friendly state, and no one at the library would dare risk giving her such an endorsement. She could also arrange a fictitious marriage to an African student, who could then take her abroad – but that idea, as well as being distasteful, was impractical since it required KGB permission, and would cast a shadow on their campaign if it failed.

  He thought of bribery. A new car for a bent embassy official, perhaps? But again, with the case so politicized it was unworkable. He even explored forgery, spending days leafing through his heavily stamped passport studying the details, collecting printing sets and experimenting with producing false Soviet official stamps. Two of Mervyn’s friends, middle-aged ladies of the utmost probity, agreed to give him their passports. One applied for one even though she had no intention of going abroad, the other claimed to have lost hers. But after a few days the dangers of forgery began to dampen Mervyn’s enthusiasm. There was the problem of getting a one-way ticket out of Moscow, and Mila would have to risk years of imprisonment if passport control discovered that the exit visa Mervyn intended to manufacture was forged. He abandoned the idea.

  In a newspaper article he found a reference to the story of a Russian who had decided to walk to China before the war, but had (seriously) misjudged the direction and ended up in Afghanistan. Mervyn began looking at maps of the southern USSR; perhaps there were areas where there was no border guard? In December 1965 he read of another young Russian, Vladimir Kirsanov, who had walked over the Soviet border into Finland. Could Mila do the same? Mervyn tracked Kirsanov down and went to see him in Frankfurt am Main in March 1966. But after listening to Kirsanov’s story for a few minutes Meryvn realized it was hopeless. Kirsanov was young and fit, and an experienced hiker and climber. Mila, with her disabled hip, could never hope to trudge through bogs and climb over barbed wire fences. Again, the idea was abandoned.

  Two years had passed, and the separation gnawed. Nottingham was depressing Mervyn even more than he’d feared. By the summer of 1966 he decided that he had to be nearer to London in order to continue his campaign. He took a post at Battersea Polytechnic, which had just received a charter as the University of Surrey, and was then housed in a disused warehouse in Clapham. He bought a small flat in Pimlico, turning down other job offers because the Battersea job gave him a lot of free time to harass the Soviet embassy, the Foreign Office and Fleet Street. He never had anything other than contempt for the University of Surrey, its students and its academic standards, and he would criticize the institution where he ultimately spent most of his career with a kind of bitter self-loathing.

  Mila, too, was sliding into morbid depression. She was losing weight, her ribs standing out on her chest ‘like a tubercular babushka’, and grey hairs appeared on her head. ‘Without you my life has stopped, hardened to stone – this is not just a first impression but a totally serious conclusion, irreversible,’ Mila wrote. ‘Why don’t we just build a hut for ourselves at the end of the world far from all the evil and cruelty and hatred? I could never be bored if you were there. Oh God, oh God, oh God, surely our sufferings aren’t in vain? I see what a short and fleeting thing life is,
and how stupid, how perverse it is to lose these days.’ Mila paraphrased Konstantin Simonov’s classic wartime poem, ‘Wait’, which had so poignantly caught the fate of millions of Soviet women, condemned to wait for years with no news of their loved ones. ‘Wait for me, but only wait very hard, wait until the snows have gone, wait until everyone else has stopped waiting, wait…’

  During a chance conversation with a friend in London, Mervyn learned that it might be possible to visit the Soviet Baltic states for a one-day trip without a visa. On further investigation at the Finnish tourism bureau on the Haymarket he was told that a Helsinki tourist agency called Haleva ran one-day tours to Tallinn, Estonia, and short trips to Leningrad, which also did not require a visa. They were meant for Finns, the girl at the counter told him, but she didn’t think there would be any problem if an Englishman were to buy a ticket. Estonia was part of the Soviet Union, and Mila would be able to travel there without difficulty.

  Mervyn located an 1892 map of Revel (modern Tallinn) at the British Library and a pre-war German guidebook. He picked the town’s highest spire, St Olaf’s church, Oleviste Kirik, because it was the obvious place to meet, and not too far from the docks. In a series of letters in early August he dropped hints to Mila – did she plan on taking a holiday in the Baltic? Tallinn was very nice, he’d heard. Maybe Mervyn would have to be in Scandinavia on the 26th or 29th. Had Mila heard of St Olaf’s church? Mila took the hint and indicated that she would be there.

  The plan was risky. Before Mervyn set off to Finland on 22 August, he left a letter to be delivered to the Foreign Office in case he did not return.

  ‘At the end of the month I am going to make one or two attempts to return to the USSR, in order to see my fiancée,’ he wrote. ‘I shall almost certainly try to go over to Tallinn. There is some chance that I may end up in a Soviet prison… I wish to make it clear that if I am seized by the Soviets I do not wish to have any assistance from any FO employees in the USSR, and I must tell you categorically that none of your people are to make any attempt to contact my fiancée. I hope that statement leaves no uncertainties in your mind… I regret having had any dealing with your office, and want no more.’