Kolchak's Gold

by Brian Garfield

  I eased him toward the war and General Tyulenev and he followed my lead without resistance. Speaking slowly, selecting the dry phrases with care, he discussed the Caucasian, Ukrainian and Crimean campaigns from a semi-scholarly viewpoint more characteristic of a strategist than of an orderly. He spoke excellent Russian with a neutral Moscow accent; his vocabulary was formal. He said he came originally from Smolensk. I have said his reminiscences were on a grand strategic scale but they were enriched by many dramatic, if impersonal, details.

  Thus, in the late summer of 1942 the Germans had been massed for an armored attack toward Grozny, and Tyulenev had learned through his intelligence branch that the German assault was to be determined and massive: the Wehrmacht had orders to break all the way through the Caucasus, on into the Middle East and on down all the way to Egypt to link up with Rommel. Tyulenev’s job was to halt that blitz in its tracks, and to accomplish that purpose he mobilized nearly one hundred thousand civilians onto twenty-four-hour-a-day shifts to build antitank ditches and fortifications across the line of German advance ahead of Grozny.

  Because he didn’t use his own troops for these construction jobs, Tyulenev was able to muster a big enough fighting army to stop the Germans cold at their Mozdok bridgehead. They never went farther; winter came, and after that the Germans were on the defensive.

  I had known all this before but Bukov gave me a number of details I hadn’t seen. For instance the tank traps were devised by Tyulenev himself and were far more effective than the ones prescribed by regulations that dated back to the First War. They consisted of trenches dug across the roads and then covered with plywood or thin sheet metal and a thin layer of gravel. The bottoms of the trenches were mined. The Germans found it much harder to avoid a concealed trench than to maneuver through an ordinary field of pit-type tank traps; they lost hundreds of tanks in Tyulenev’s mined trenches.

  Bukov had quite a bit of that sort of thing. It was interesting but it didn’t provide the personal glances I preferred. Nevertheless I did my best to pump him and we were still at it three hours after my arrival.

  In the meantime Bukov had been a good host. He had been an officer’s gentleman; he kept a neat home and served us little tea snacks cut into exact squares—bread and caviar and cheese—and he kept our glasses filled with beer. He kept the fire roaring and smoked a strong pipe of Russian tobacco; I thought it was the heat and smoke and the beer that put poor Timoshenko to sleep. He spent a while politely trying to smile and pay attention but he kept nodding and presently he dropped off, sliding to one side in his chair. He hung there with his head lolling, supported on the arm of the chair, the fingertips of his right hand trailing the floor. Bukov smiled briefly in his direction and went right ahead with whatever he had been saying.

  It had begun to drizzle in the middle of the afternoon but that didn’t deter Bukov from rising to his feet and suggesting we go outside for a stroll and a breath of air. I needed a reprieve from the smoky stale heat of the room and I got up to go with him but I do recall making some remark about the rain; Bukov said it didn’t matter. He had an umbrella and we walked through the town square under it, and along the pavement beside the railway track. Bukov kept talking steadily, a stream of wartime reminiscence; I stopped to make an occasional note and he waited patiently, his umbrella shielding my notebook from the rain.

  Then we were past the edge of the village with the last house behind us and Bukov said abruptly, “Are you. carrying a listening device?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? Do you mind if we look?”

  I stiffened but he waggled his free hand impatiently. “I have some things to say to you that shouldn’t be overheard. Shall we make sure?”

  “Do you mean to search me?”

  His cool eyes appraised me. I wasn’t afraid; it was more indignation.

  Then he said, “Suppose I mention the name Nikki.”

  “How did you …?”

  “Let’s be sure of our privacy first, shall we?” He nodded toward my clothing and now curiosity had replaced my indignation and I turned my pockets out for him. He didn’t rifle anything, he just glanced at my possessions and then he moved up close to me and asked me to hold the umbrella while he had a look at the buttons on my various garments. “Sometimes they sew a button on your coat when you don’t know about it.”

  “I doubt they’d bother in my case. I’m not a spy.”

  “They don’t know that.” He did a thorough job before he was satisfied. Then he indicated we should resume our stroll.

  It occurred to me that Timoshenko’s falling asleep had been very convenient to Bukov’s purposes. I asked him if he had drugged Timoshenko and he admitted he had. “A sleeping powder in his beer. But he won’t be aware of it. It will keep him out for a few hours. By the time he wakes up he’ll find us just as we were when he dropped off.” He tipped the umbrella back slightly to squint at the sky. “I apologize for this. But we needed to be out of earshot of whatever transmitters may be hidden on your friend.”

  “You mentioned a name just now.”

  “Nicole Eisen. Yes.” He held up a hand to postpone my questions. “You had written her that you were coming here. She asked me to make contact with you.”

  “Why?”

  “To introduce myself. It’s possible you may have—let’s call it inconvenience. With the authorities here.”

  “Why should I? Everything’s gone quite smoothly. I’ve done nothing to annoy them.”

  “Sometimes it takes very little to annoy them,” he said, very drily. “You know who I am and where you can find me. If you need my assistance at any time, I’m at your service.”

  “What sort of assistance?”

  “Any kind. I hope the need won’t come up. But if it does …”

  “I think you’ve got something in mind. Something specific.”

  He said, “Naturally they’re watching you very closely.”

  I knew that but I wasn’t sure how much to trust him; it was even possible he was not at all what he pretended to be. I had written too many books about spies and double agents; for all I knew he was a Soviet agent putting on this little charade to find out if I had indulged in any clandestine activities which would cause me to be nervous enough to ask him for the assistance he so glibly offered. It could have been a trap; so I said nothing about having discovered for myself that I was under constant surveillance. I only said, “If they are they’re wasting their time. I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  “This regime is infected by an epidemic of suspicion and distrust. You’re a very sensitive issue. There were people high-up who didn’t want to give you your clearances to come here. They were overruled in the supreme councils but they’re men who don’t like to be overruled—they’re watching you closely for a single misstep. That’s all it will take.”

  “By ‘they’ I take it you mean the KGB?”*

  “Yes. Specifically Andrei Bizenkev, the man who heads it now. He’s an old-fashioned conservative Bolshevik. He wanted no part of this ‘cultural exchange’ you represent. He’d very much like to see you make a mistake. And it’s possible if you don’t do it for him he’ll manufacture a mistake for you.”

  A frame-up. It sounded far-fetched to me. They hadn’t harassed me at all up to now.

  “I won’t belabor it,” Bukov went on. “Bear it in mind—act cautiously at all times and remember my offer of assistance if you require it. As I said, I hope you won’t. My work has risks enough.”

  I assumed I knew the nature of his “work”; I further assumed he was fairly high in the fifth-column organization—partly because of his manner and partly because he could not otherwise be expected to know what the personal views and intentions of the chief of the KGB were.

  I said, “Are you a Jew, Bukov?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Then I’m not sure I understand your position.”

  “One does not need to be a Jew to be a man of conscience.”

  We we
nt up the wooden steps onto the platform of the railway station; we had made a brief circuit along the road beyond town and had returned. The waiting room was empty—evidently no more trains were scheduled that day. Bukov collapsed his umbrella and we sat on a bench. The room was dim and unheated and we kept our coats on. He took out his pipe and tobacco pouch. “We must return to the flat within an hour or so. Do you find it uncomfortable here?”

  “No.” It was a lie. I minded the chill; I was a soft American accustomed to central heating. But Bukov wanted to talk and I was curious to hear it; I was curious about him as well. “Conscience” was too broad and too vague a term to explain why a man of obvious ability and taste should take the deliberate and mortal risk of acting as a subversive agent in his own homeland. I’d seen the way he lived and he wasn’t doing it for money (he had a legitimate office in the town, roughly equivalent to that of postmaster, and the salary for that would be more than enough to pay for his rent and his phonograph records). Possibly he did it out of impulses toward idealism and adventure—but these again were emotional abstractions that explained very little.

  Water dripped from his umbrella and made a little pool on the wooden floor. Bukov said, “Perhaps you’re acquainted with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations.”

  It was more or less a question but he didn’t wait for an answer. “Article Thirteen, Paragraph Two. ‘Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.’ Do you know what it’s like to be a Jew who wants to leave the Soviet Union, Mr. Bristow?”

  “There’s been a lot in our press. I have an idea, yes.” I stirred; I was remembering what Evan MacIver had said.

  Bukov went on. “Persecuting Jews is nothing new in the world. It’s been going on in Russia for centuries. The pogrom massacres of eighteen eighty-one and the Civil War here, the purge of Jews in the nineteen thirties. In nineteen thirty-eight, after the pogroms, all the Jewish schools and institutions were closed in the Soviet Union. Not one has reopened. There are only some fifty synagogues left in the entire country—our Jewish population is around three million, you know—and I doubt there are ten ordained rabbis allowed to function in Russia today. Have you any idea what it must be like to be a Jew in this country, trying to accept the idea that your children will never read a Jewish book, see a Jewish play, attend a Jewish school to learn Jewish history and speak his own tongue?”

  His cadaverous cheeks were sucked in. He was watching me sternly. “Jews have always been treated as foreigners here. Worse than immigrants. On a Jew’s identity card it says Yevreika and on his internal passport under ‘nationality’ it says Ivrei.* You meet people everywhere who voice their regret that Hitler did not finish off the zhidi and Abrashki.† Today all organized Jewish activity is considered Zionist plotting or anti-Soviet treason. If a Jew is too outspoken he is accused of deviationist crimes and he is shipped to Siberia for ‘re-education,’ or he is forcibly confined in a mental hospital. Just last month in Sebastopol a young Jewish girl—I think she was nineteen—went on trial for sedition and anti-Soviet agitation. It was a summary half-day trial and they sentenced her to seven years in prison and five in exile. Now she was not particularly guilty of slandering the Soviet Union. She was guilty only of wanting to emigrate to Israel.”

  Bukov sat staring at a fixed point on the wall. His words were as formal as ever but passion had crept into his voice. “You know the name Maxim Tippelskirch, I think.”

  I stiffened. Haim’s brother. I said, “He died in the war.”

  “Yes. One of his children survived. He was an infant. His name is Izrail.”

  “He’s still alive?”

  “I think so. He was taken into the home of a farmer who lived near the shtetl where Maxim Tippelskirch had his farm. This farmer was not a Jew. In point of fact he was an uncle of mine. Last year in the Ukraine they arrested Izrail Tippelskirch. He is twenty-one years old. They charged him under the Ukrainian Criminal Article One Eighty-seven with promulgating seditious slanders against the State. He was tried in Kiev on October the fifth.”

  Bukov stirred; he sat with his elbows on his knees, face hunching toward his hands; he began to rub his forehead fiercely as if to expunge the thought of the injustices he described.

  “They sentenced him to twelve years in a forced labor camp.”

  I winced at his bitterness. He sat up then and reached for the handle of his umbrella; his hand grasped it as though it were a bludgeon. “Technically there is no single Soviet law which applies solely to Jews—anti-Semitism is more clever, more subtle than that in our People’s Republics. But there’s no end to their old tribal barbarities. The lip service changes but the hate is still there. People need to look for a hidden hand behind their own failures—and they always seem to find the Jews there. Thus, you know, the Protocols.* And do not believe the Protocols are dead. If you read the official press you will see that the Zionist cartel is an imperialist tool—Zionism is the new Nazism, it is a Hitlerite global threat. They believe this. It is incredible but they believe this,” he said at the weakening end of a breath.

  Then he put away the umbrella and clasped his hands and said dispiritedly, “In your country I think you are getting tired of hearing about it. Perhaps you believe the propaganda that the Kremlin is so sensitive to your charges that Jews find it much easier to emigrate than they did before.”

  I said, “It’s true, isn’t it, that it’s actually easier for a Jew to emigrate than for some of the other minorities—the Lithuanians, for example, or the Volga Germans?”

  “These minorities aren’t persecuted, are they?” he murmured dispiritedly. “I agree they should be allowed to go where they wish—everyone should. But the propaganda is wrong. The truth is that the Kremlin has tightened its internal security, not loosened it. It has done this to offset the internal effects of its policy of relaxing tensions with the West. The KGB has been cracking down very hard on what it thinks are dissident groups—especially Jews. Let me tell you about a recent case. I’m very familiar with the details—I was involved in it.”

  I waited while he drew breath and composed his thoughts.

  “The man’s name is Levit. He’s a chemist, not an important one. He was working in a plastics factory near the city here.* Now in order to leave Russia, a Jew must first have a relative abroad. You understand?”

  “A vicious circle,” I said.

  “Exactly. So we have this function in our organization—we manufacture ‘relatives’ in Israel.”

  “I see.”

  “Levit was sent to me by someone who knows me. I took care of this for him. I told him what he had to do, I gave him a little pamphlet which outlines the steps you must take. He wrote a letter to Post Office Box Ninety-two in Jerusalem—the Jewish Agency—asking them to locate his ‘relative’ in Israel, a first cousin whom we had manufactured for him. A real person, of course, but not actually related to Levit.

  “Now in a few weeks Levit received a note from the Jewish Agency giving him the address of this cousin. Then Levit had to write to the cousin, asking him to send Levit a vyzov, which is an affidavit of the relationship, and an invitation to join him, and a promise to support him. This document has to be notarized, after which the Israeli cousin has to take it to the Finnish Embassy in Tel Aviv. The Finns handle these arrangements because of course the Soviet Union has no embassy in Israel.

  “The vyzov has already been notarized but now it must be certified again at the Finnish Embassy, after which the cousin mails it to Levit. If Levit had been lucky he would have received it, but he did not, and we had to make the request again. In point of fact we had to go through this four times, much to the inconvenience of the ‘cousin’ in Israel who did not live anywhere near Tel Aviv.”

  “You mean the Soviet censors were confiscating Levit’s incoming mail?”

  “Of course. It is standard, this sort of harassment. All right, finally Levit received his vyzov. That much had taken nearly thr
ee months’ time.

  “He took the document to the local OVIR and they gave him a form to fill out. For this form one must provide a stack of authenticating documents: a karakterstika from his place of employment, signed not only by his director but also by the Communist Party representative there and also by his trade union representative.

  “No law forces these functionaries to sign such documents. They may call you a traitor, they may demote you, they may even dismiss you.

  “In the meantime you are questioned by KGB agents. Your home is searched, your parents and relations and friends are interrogated. They are pressured by the KGB and if any of them weakens he will probably end up by testifying to your anti-Soviet activities so that the State can send you to prison on charges of treason or spreading Zionist racist propaganda or belonging to an imperialist Zionist ideological front.”

  He was speaking in a monotone now, repressing all emotion. “Levit was also required to get a paper from his landlord, and one from his children’s teachers, and one from his wife’s employer—she had to go through the same idiocy he went through.

  “In the meantime we had sent our own people to talk with his friends and relations before the KGB could reach them, so that they’d know what to say when they were questioned. We had also exercised a little quiet pressure from various sources against both the Levits’ factory supervisors. If we hadn’t done so, the chances are the supervisors wouldn’t have signed their karakterstiki. The supervisors weren’t Jews, you see.

  “All right, Levit got all these papers filled out and signed. I went over them with him to make sure there had been no mistakes in them. Then he took it all back to OVIR in Sebastopol and paid a forty-ruble filing fee. After that he had to wait five months.