Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky

by Oleg Gordievsky

  In winter the opportunities for outdoor exercise were better. We could ski cross-country through the woods outside Moscow, and within the city there were numerous places where we could skate, among them Gorky Park, where extensive areas were covered with ice, and particularly the huge monument to the achievements of the Soviet Union’s economy, a vast, Stalinist edifice like a cluster of temples, where the flat spaces between buildings were flooded to make rinks. In the basement of the main building there were changing-rooms, and we would skate for two or three hours at a time to music blaring out over loudspeakers. Even in our own courtyard winter snow gave us endless free entertainment; one year it was so deep — maybe as much as 2.5 metres where it had been shovelled off the paths and piled against the walls — that we dug ourselves a whole system of chambers, tunnels and vertical shafts, and spent many happy hours down there, like moles.

  At home we were poor. Our flat was on the top floor, and the roof constantly leaked in spite of frequent repairs. My father wore his military uniform day in, day out, simply because he had no decent civilian clothes, even though he held the relatively senior rank of lieutenant colonel. I see him now in his mid-green tunic, with blue piping on the epaulettes and lapels. My mother owned only a couple of the most ordinary dresses, and, with three children to bring up, she had to calculate and save every kopek. This habit of economizing made her modest and self-effacing in all she did.

  For the first two years after the war food remained scarce, and we were short of many basic necessities; in summer my mother worked on a collective farm near Moscow, so that at least we had potatoes and other vegetables, and in autumn we went into the forest to pick mushrooms, holding competitions among ourselves to see who could find most, especially boletus, which we regarded as the most delicious kind.

  My father was a voracious reader, and he passed on his habit to me by reading aloud to us in the evenings. He was also a strict disciplinarian, and insisted on the highest standards of honesty: he never raised a hand against us children but when necessary gave us a severe verbal dressing-down. In later life it struck me as strange that a man who had such a clear perception of right and wrong could be so blind about the monstrous injustice of Stalin’s regime.

  Throughout all their difficulties my parents remained unquenchably optimistic, and whenever we boys complained, my mother would say, ‘Never mind! Things are getting better all the time. Soon there’s going to be a money reform, and after that rationing will be abolished. Then we’ll be able to buy white bread, and as much sugar as you want. Think of that!’

  We did think of that, all the time. ‘Mum,’ we would beg, ‘just buy us a kilo of sugar, and we’ll eat the whole lot!’ We spent hours dreaming not of luxuries such as chocolate, which we had never seen, but of something as ordinary as plain sugar.

  In 1947 the authorities did indeed bring in a money reform — a clever one, in which many people lost their savings. Soon after that rationing ended, and citizens could spend what money they had on things they wanted. On the day after the reform my mother went to the bakery and bought the most beautiful loaf of white bread; after the grey and black bread on which we had been living this seemed a miracle of deliciousness, and somehow the sugar we had craved became of lesser importance. Yet the flour shortage persisted into the 1950s. Muscovites knew that some days before every New Year a fresh consignment of flour would arrive in the shops, and immense queues would form, often of more than a thousand people. On the whole discipline was good: everyone in the queue would have a number written in ink on his or her hand — 1227 — and you could go away from time to time, without losing your place. All the same there was a certain amount of cheating: each person was supposed to get a three-kilo packet, but sometimes, having queued once, we would join the line again at the end.

  By the time I was ten I had become a fluent reader, helped by the fact that our flat was always full of newspapers, magazines and books. Out of ignorance, my mother kept me reading children’s books for too long, so that I fell behind in my knowledge of fiction. In political matters, on the other hand, I was way ahead: by the age of ten I was keenly interested in Marshal Tito’s defiance of Stalin in Yugoslavia. My father was obliged by KGB rules to subscribe to at least three political periodicals — Pravda, Bolshevik (later renamed Communist), and Pogranichnik, the organ of the Borderguard troops, so that I never had any shortage of solid reading material. While still at school I began to study the third edition of the collected works of Lenin, published between 1929 and 1933. The notes in these volumes contained fascinating information about all the characters involved, most of which was removed from the fourth edition, published after the war.

  Both at school and at home, various factors pushed me in the direction of the German language. My brother began to learn it, and started to take a German newspaper, which I tried to puzzle out. Then in my third year of school, when I was ten, I started to study German. In a cupboard at home I found a number of children’s books in German, published before the war in the Republic of the Volga (the most prosperous administrative territory in the Soviet Union until 1941 when Stalin destroyed it by sending its inhabitants to Siberia). One day at school my teacher saw me trying to write in Gothic Schrift: she was amused, and asked me to write my homework in it. Only then did I realize that she could read it, and I asked her how she had learnt. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it was my job during the war. Like many people who spoke German, I spent months sitting in camps for prisoners-of-war, and it was my task to read through their letters home.’

  The school library was poor, but when I was eleven or twelve my father managed to get me accepted as a student member of the Central House of the Soviet Army, even though he was a KGB officer rather than a regular soldier. There I found an excellent library, and started to read more widely. The centre also organized conferences, at which boys and girls would talk about books they had read, and a writer of children’s stories would give talks. In my time the most popular speaker was Lev Kassil, a leading author of the day, who always attracted big audiences.

  There was also a small element of speech and drama, and I much enjoyed taking part in two plays, once in Gogol’s The Government Inspector, and once in a sketch which we put together out of Chekhov’s short story The Transgressor. In this an interrogator is questioning a peasant who has been caught unscrewing a bolt from the railway line to act as a weight for his fishing tackle. ‘Don’t you realize?’ the interrogator asks. ‘You could have weakened the track and caused an accident. You might have killed somebody.’ But the peasant is so simpleminded, so utterly incapable of abstract thought, that he cannot grasp the chain of events presented to him. This seemed to me hilarious — so much so that I got the giggles, and was reprimanded.

  Our school holidays were unevenly spaced: we got twelve days off over the New Year, three months in the summer and, apart from two-day breaks between terms, that was all. Our four terms were arbitrarily divided up. One ran from 1 September to 6 November, the next from 9 November to 29 December. Then came our winter holiday, from 30 December to 12 January, followed by a term which ran until early April, with the fourth succeeding it after a couple of days.

  Christmas, which had been abolished in the 1930s after a series of artificially staged demonstrations and rallies against religion, did not feature in our lives. Even so, I was aware that the subject had caused problems among the Party theorists. Until the revolution Russians had celebrated Christ’s birth exactly as people do in the West, with decorated trees, Nativity plays, special church services and so on. Then came the Stalinist ban; but later one of the Communist hierarchy suggested that everything to do with the festival should be reintroduced, bar Christ and all religious connotations. So trees and decorations were allowed again, but the paraphernalia of the European Christmas were transferred to the New Year, which was always the occasion for a great feast.

  Presents would be bought, and stocks of favourite food laid in — cold meats, smoked salmon, home-made fish and meat jellie
s with plenty of garlic and, above all, sturgeon, cold-smoked, hot-smoked or fresh and poached. Some people might buy a goose, and cold chicken might feature as part of the zakuska, or hors d’oeuvre, but on the whole birds played little part in the festival. Dinner would start about 9 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, the food being washed down with vodka, beer and wine. Most families had relatives in the Urals, Central Asia or Siberia, so there was always the excuse to drink their New Year in as well, an hour or two ahead of Moscow time. Thus there might be one round of toasts at 10 p.m. and another at 11 p.m., before the real moment came at midnight. Then we would say goodbye to the old year: generally somebody had a radio on (or later television), and there would be a short speech from one of the political leaders. Most people hated this: what they wanted to hear were the chimes of the big clock on the Spassky Tower of the Kremlin. Nobody was quite sure which chime signalled the New Year — the first or last stroke of twelve. No matter: they would drink a toast in cheap, sweet Soviet champagne, and then go back to vodka or brandy (which, being twice the price of vodka, was regarded as a sign of prosperity).

  As children we were never allowed spirits, only a glass or two of wine, and now, looking back, I remember how abstemious my father was. He certainly liked his food, but he drank very little: he used to pour a bottle of vodka into a decanter, add some slices of lemon peel, and stand the mixture on the sideboard. It would remain there for weeks, with the level scarcely going down, because he would have a tot only now and then, on special occasions. Other people, of course, drank much more, but nothing like they did in the 1970s and 1980s, the era of stagnation, when religion and ideals alike were lost, the future was obscure, and people consoled themselves so heavily that alcoholism became a national catastrophe.

  *

  From 1946, when I was nearly eight, we began going out of Moscow for summer holidays. I do not think my parents ever had a holiday together before the war: my father had gone once or twice to some sanatorium in the Crimea, but always on his own. (In about 1950 the KGB reached its zenith, with a strength of more than a million, and it was proud of the six sanatoriums it maintained on the Black Sea coast: three in Sochi, one in Batumi, one near Yalta and one at Odessa.) With the children growing fast, my father started to rent modest dachas in the countryside near the city. In 1946 we went to the village where my mother was working on the communal farm, and the next year my father took a room for a month in a wooden cottage some thirty kilometres north of Moscow. In those days the landscape still consisted entirely of woods and lakes, fields and streams, with the Moscow-Volga canal striking past. Life was slow and simple: we drew our water from a well, and swam in the lakes and streams. If we wanted to wash more thoroughly, we would heat up water and pour it over ourselves standing in the middle of the wooden floor, secure in the knowledge that it would drain straight through.

  Later we went further north, and for a couple of summers we hired a room at almost exactly the point where the invading German army crossed the Moscow-Volga canal on the ice as they moved to encircle Moscow in the winter of 1941. To children the canal seemed enormous — it was wide enough for two barges to pass each other — and sometimes when a tug came past, pulling a long raft of timber, Vasilko would swim out, scramble up on to the logs, and take a ride before diving off again. One year, going for a walk along the tow-path, I noticed something strange: along the banks were numerous small, oblong humps in the ground, many with young trees growing by them. Belatedly I realized that they were the graves of people who had died building the canal: thousands of peasants and political prisoners had expired from cold and starvation during the construction of the waterway.

  During our holidays my father would come out to join us every weekend but, because of the long hours he had to work, his visits were short. The lives of everyone in the KGB were dominated by the crazy schedule which Stalin maintained: a night owl, he preferred to work during the hours of darkness, and the senior bosses of the KGB were obliged to stay on in their offices until two or three in the morning, in case a call came from on high. Lower down the scale, at my father’s level, people worked until about 10 p.m., and then slept late in the morning.[5]

  On Saturdays my father was privileged enough to go off duty at 6 p.m. whereupon he would take a train and arrive at the dacha on foot, carrying bags full of food, at about 8 p.m. Then, in a form of ritual, he would immediately go for a swim: he would strip off and wade straight into the water with his thumbs in his ears and his hands stuck out, palms forward, on either side of his head. After the sticky heat of Moscow offices, those evening swims were clearly a wonderful release. He had two particular fads about his health, both harmless: one, that a vigorous rub-down after a swim or a shower was good for him, and the other that he ought to eat a lot of raw onions.

  Some years we travelled further afield, once to Georgia, to visit an Ossetian woman who owned one of the dachas in which we stayed near Moscow. Having taken the train to Tbilisi, we went on to stay in an Ossetian village, where I had one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. The local people were Orthodox Christians, and on their saint’s day they all came in from the surrounding villages, processing through the mountains. We joined in the throng, with people singing all round us, and walked for several hours to a chapel deep in the forest. The pilgrims went inside to pray, and afterwards held a huge picnic: they had all brought food and drink with them, and tucked into bread and salty white goat’s cheese, washed down by fresh, dry white wine. It was a time of relaxation for the Church, as a result of Stalin softening his opposition to religion, and the local authority, far from seeking to spoil or suppress the celebrations, sent up a number of lorries loaded with more food and wine so that anyone who ran short could buy extra supplies. As for me, even though I had no religious feeling, I developed deep respect for those people who so obviously did, and sang so splendidly in honour of their God. I found the whole ceremony full of meaning and beauty.

  Another distant destination was Akhaltsikhe, an Armenian town near the Turkish border, but administratively part of Georgia. There, too, I witnessed a religious ceremony, as we happened to be present on a day when local people were honouring their dead. Our host’s brother suggested that we should join everyone else and go along to the event. In an extensive cemetery on the outskirts of the town we found hundreds of people sitting on the graves of their loved ones and lighting candles for them. After spending some time in silent remembrance, they opened baskets of food and wine, and began to enjoy picnics there on the tombstones. As dusk came on, they started to sing, low, sad, haunting songs, which rose and fell from the various groups as candle flames flickered in the twilight.

  The following year, 1953, we went to Zaporozhye, in the Ukraine, and there I caught a fish with my bare hands — a young shchuka or pike, which was delicious, if rather bony. But I myself was also hooked, falling in love for the first time. I was fourteen, and she was only twelve, a local girl who was rather simple, not well developed either mentally or physically. Her family still treated her as a child — I remember her climbing trees wearing nothing but shorts — but I thought she was wonderful, and told her so. Infatuated as I was, I decided I must buy her a present, and, being a bookworm, I could think of nothing to give her but a book. In the village where we were staying the only books on sale were in Ukrainian; after a hunt I found one that looked interesting, but when I gave it to her, all she said, in an off-hand voice, was, ‘Oh, you know very well that I prefer books in Russian!’ With that we parted, and my innocent little romance came to an end.

  *

  My political awareness, already precocious, was much heightened by an event that took place in the autumn of 1952, when I was not quite fourteen. Several prominent doctors were arrested together in Moscow, accused of the murder of Zhdanov, Sherbakov and other leading Communists. Everyone suspected that the case was a sham for of the fifteen or so general practitioners seized, all but one were Jewish, and the operation was obviously an anti-Jewish plot hatched by Stalin. T
he woman who wrote the denunciation, Lydia Timashuk, was ostentatiously decorated, and other Jews started to lose their jobs.

  I followed all this with close interest but then, suddenly, the anti-Semitic operations of the government came closer to home. In a flat across the landing from ours lived a Jewish family, father, mother and child. The father was a lieutenant colonel in the KGB, deputy head of the medical centre, and the mother was a major, head of the Party organization. Both had joined the Party in the 1920s and served it loyally, two among thousands of Jews who hoped that the Communists would win political rights for their race and open up real possibilities for them. Unlike many Russians, who merely paid lip-service to Communism, these two strongly believed in the system — and now lost their jobs simply because they were Jews. The same thing happened to another family on the ground floor of our block. The father, a major, had a boy about Marina’s age — they were the first people in our block to own a television set, and they kindly let me watch it for an hour or so in the evenings. That man also lost his job for no reason: he went to Kiev, where he hoped life would be easier, and I never saw him again. Young as I was, I could not help being struck by the stupidity and injustice of these dismissals. The people involved were clever, dedicated and serious, specialists who had lost their livelihoods because of their racial origins. I began to feel critical of a system which could treat innocent citizens so badly.

  Then, early in 1953, came a shattering event which gave me another firm push down the road to freedom: the death of Stalin. Towards the end of February, official radio and television bulletins began to carry disquieting reports on the great leader’s health, and it became clear to everyone that the end was near. Sure enough, on 5 March he died, and the nation was temporarily stunned. That day, when my mother took me along Gorky Street, in the centre of the city, to do some shopping, everything seemed completely normal: people were going about their business as if nothing had happened, and it struck me as odd that the death of such a mighty statesman had had so little impact. In fact, the citizens were in shock, and within days they had begun killing each other in their frenzy to gain access to the House of Unions, in which Stalin’s body lay in state. Unlike thousands of fellow Muscovites, I had no wish to see his corpse. Neither did I feel — as countless people did — that Stalin had been so wise, so great, that no other political leader could manage the affairs of the Soviet Union. Such had been the strength of his personality cult that everyone began saying plaintively, ‘We are all orphans, abandoned. How can we live without him? Who will lead us?’