Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky

by Oleg Gordievsky

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Outside our flat.’

  I set off at once, full of apprehension, and found her standing on the pavement in the drizzle, obviously distressed, on the point of tears.

  ‘Something’s happened!’ she gasped. ‘And now I’ve got to tell you the truth.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Can you imagine? My name’s Natasha Afanasyeva yet I’m not Russian.’

  ‘What are you, then?’

  ‘I’m German.’

  ‘German!’

  ‘Yes, I’m perfectly German.’

  In a torrent of staccato sentences she revealed that her father was a leading German Communist who had come to Moscow in the 1930s, bringing his wife and five children ‘to help build socialism’. Life had proved harder than he expected but he had persevered, got a good job, and done well for a couple of years. Then came 1937 and the purges, and he was declared a German spy.

  ‘At least he wasn’t shot,’ Natasha rushed on, ‘but he got ten years’ concentration camp in the north. We were put into an orphanage. Then we were distributed among different Russian families, and I happened to land with the Afanasyevs. I grew up with them for ten years. I like them because they’ve been very kind to me, but they were never as loving as my parents would have been.’

  Eventually, she said, her father had been released, but — just like my uncle — he had been kept in exile, and had taken up with another woman. Natasha’s mother, who had remained loyal to him, was bitterly upset, and would not have him back, so he went to live in Rezun, in Central Russia, where he had become the city’s chief architect.

  As I listened, I felt that I was watching a film: that it was someone else, not me, standing there in the rain and hearing all this. But the story was far from over.

  ‘The worst thing is that ever since I was first at school a boy called Aleks has been in love with me. I’ve always regarded him as a friend. I found it impossible to see him as lover and husband. But he’s remained my loyal knight, always at my side, waiting for his chance. The other night I had a terrible row with my adoptive parents — so bad I had to get out. I had nowhere to go except to Aleks — and he was there waiting, so I went to his parents’ flat. In the morning his mother made a solemn scene in the kitchen. “Natalya,” she said, “you slept with him. You slept in the same room. There’s only one thing for you to do and that’s to get married — ”’ She broke off and gave me a stricken look, then cried, ‘For me, there’s no other way. I’ll have to go with him.’

  With that she burst into tears. I took her into my arms and kissed her, for the first and last time. Then she said, ‘Goodbye,’ and was gone. I felt stunned. There was nothing I could say or do, it was all so sudden, so sad. I kept her photograph for ages, the only memory I had left.

  My brother Vasilko had grown thoroughly cynical and when I told him the story a month later, his reaction was characteristic. ‘You don’t realize how lucky you are,’ he told me. ‘You would have ruined your life. First, she’s the daughter of an Enemy of the People.’

  ‘Rehabilitated!’ I protested.

  ‘That makes no difference. The stigma will remain. Second, her father’s a German, a foreigner.’

  ‘Not a foreigner!’ I cried. ‘He’s a Soviet citizen.’

  ‘All the same, he’ll be a foreigner for ever. And third, she’s Jewish. A total disaster.’

  *

  The academic standards of the Institute varied from high in languages to rock-bottom in Marxist philosophy, which was utter nonsense. The level of language tuition would have been impressive in any country, and its spread was enormous: besides French, German and other European languages, students were learning Mongolian, Korean, Swahili, Bengali and other Indian languages, Greek, Hebrew, Serbo-Croat, and so on. In our first year we German specialists had sixteen hour-long periods a week, and were taught by first-class teachers, who were knowledgeable, enthusiastic and highly professional.

  Languages apart, our main subjects were geography, law, military affairs and history. The geography was quite straightforward, covering the whole world and including economic geography but concentrating (for my group) on West Germany. Law was less satisfactory — because there had never been any real law, as such, in the Soviet Union — but we were given some idea of the subject, including international law, and international economic relations: how contracts are signed and how foreign trade is carried out. This last we found very difficult, as we were all weak on economics.

  Military matters were more clear cut. During our first four years we had to go through military training as part of our main academic course and this relieved us from active service in the armed forces, which otherwise would have been compulsory. We began with general theory, tactics and strategy, and progressed to practical exercises, firing live ammunition on ranges outside Moscow. One day, as we blasted off with rifles and automatic weapons, supervised by the head of the military department at the Institute, who held the rank of general, a sergeant sitting on a little hill cried: ‘My God! When we shoot, we have a sergeant in command — and here comes this lot with a bloody general!’ Since we wore no uniforms but went to the ranges in our everyday clothes, we must have looked a real rabble.

  Nevertheless during our third and fourth years we became, in a way, professionals, because our subject was military translation and interpreting. In this we grew expert, learning hundreds of advanced technical terms in German. Soon we could translate the most complicated military texts, and expressions like eine Zwanzigstezentimeterdoppelschnellfeuerflugabwehrkannone[11] became second nature to us. When we received a document stating that we were accomplished military translators and interpreters, it was not an exaggeration: we could have gone to work immediately in the event of war, or if called up by the army, and performed well.

  History, however, was regarded as our main subject, first the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, then of the rest of the world, starting with Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, progressing to medieval Europe and slowly up to modern times. Of course, everything was presented with a Marxist slant. In dealing with Ancient Greece, for instance, our teachers had none of the wide-eyed admiration that flourishes in the West: instead of worshipping Athens and Rome as the cradles of democracy and European civilization, they emphasized class aspects and ‘progressive elements’. Spartacus, the Roman gladiator who led a slave revolt, was, of course, tremendously progressive. The democracy championed by Pericles was no more than a front — and anyway, was it not quickly succeeded by the Greek Empire? The classical Greek experience was just a phase of society and not the great ideal which became so important to Pushkin and his friends early in the nineteenth century at the lycée of Tsarskoe Selo, near St Petersburg.

  For several years we studied the history of international relations of Russia and the Soviet Union, that is, a history of diplomacy with Russia at the centre. Treaties and wars featured strongly, especially those concerning the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, Greece, Napoleonic France, the Treaty of Vienna, Metternich and into the twentieth century. Also, inevitably, we were crammed with huge doses of Marxism/Leninism. After two years of the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which meant an account of all progressive social movements from early in this century, we went on to a tedious, heavily doctored and wildly inaccurate account of the Party since the revolution. Even the revelations of the Twentieth Party Congress were not enough to change the attitude of the teachers, who continued to use traditional distortions, with right- and left-wing threats inflated by Stalin to discredit his enemies. According to this unrevised version of events, Trotsky was still a demon.

  Along with history proper, we worked on the history of ideas. An introductory course on world philosophy was excellent, and after it we spent six months on the philosophers of Greece and Rome. But Marxist philosophy was patent rubbish, and nothing could disguise that Lenin was a hopeless philosopher: his only book, Marxism and Imperial Criticism, was poor an
d derivative, and its importance was grossly inflated.

  By our third or fourth year we had the measure of Soviet life. We knew the rules and how we had to behave; but for me the great challenge, while showing dutiful interest in my studies, was to discover what really had happened. My parents’ flat was full of political books published in the 1920s and 1930s, and as I read them I began to see how false and worthless the official accounts were.

  With my German improving fast, I also started reading books by former officers of the Wehrmacht who had been taken prisoner during the war and had spent years in the Soviet Union between 1943 and 1947. That proved another eye-opener — as did my chance to read West German newspapers. This was a unique period in the Soviet Union in that students at the Institute were free to read Western newspapers and magazines. Later such publications were banned, but I was lucky enough to hit the open period, and I seized on everything with insatiable appetite — one of the few people in the Soviet Union able to do so.

  Gradually I began to see that the West was another world. Everything there was different. The political, social and moral systems were quite unlike ours. The open approach to the mass media and to the democratic process made the West another planet. At the age of twenty I started to feel that I was penetrating this different, exciting territory. All through my childhood and growing-up the non-stop refrain of Soviet propaganda had told us that ours was the only correct society. The Soviet Union was doing everything right. The capitalist world, with all its imperialist bourgeois circles, was a world of exploitation, of violence, of aggression. The capitalists had evolved a sophisticated system for exploiting the working class. Democracy was no more than a façade designed to conceal the real forces at work behind it.

  Now a feeling began to steal over me that all this was lies, that things were the other way round. The propaganda insisted, ‘We are the world of sanity, they of insanity,’ but as I read the West German papers it dawned on me that exactly the opposite was true. The discovery was immensely exciting but so dangerous that, for the moment, I dared not speak to anyone else about it. What I could do, though, was to bolster my slender knowledge of the West by listening to foreign broadcasts: Radio Liberty was heavily jammed by a loud roaring noise, broadcast from towers all round Moscow, but I could sometimes pick up the Voice of America and the BBC World Service. Radios were not very efficient then, and those produced in the Soviet Union deliberately ended on the 25-metre wavelength, so that broadcasts on 21, 19 and 16 metres, used frequently by European stations, were unavailable. Other wavelengths were accessible, among them 49, 41 and 25, but the jammers concentrated on these, and often made it impossible to pick them up. With practice, however, I discovered that the transmitting stations would surreptitiously ease off one wavelength and on to another so that unless the KGB operators were constantly alert they would be left jamming thin air, while the signal came through and could be heard slightly further round the dial.

  Why more of my contemporaries did not respond to this first faint scent of the truth, of reality, I do not know. I can only think that I was uniquely fortunate in having learnt German, which gave me the chance to read Western newspapers, magazines and books.

  *

  At the end of our second year an announcement went up on the noticeboard: ‘Please put in your requests for your second foreign language.’ At that time I had a great fear of English. My apprehension was entirely irrational, and due to lack of understanding, but I felt that the language was so complicated that I would never master it. The spelling looked difficult, and all the constructions seemed different from German, which I was enjoying so much. However, I put in for English, which I felt I must start to learn sooner or later.

  A couple of weeks later, a clerk told me that dozens of people had applied for English, and that places on the course were being allocated by the administrators on a basis which only they understood. ‘You, Gordievsky,’ the man said, ‘can choose between Czech and Swedish.’ Because I had Czech and Slovak friends, my immediate reaction was to go for Czech, especially as I had already made some progress teaching myself from a textbook.

  My brother had other ideas. At that stage he was just beginning his training for the KGB, but he had enough knowledge of the world to give me some sensible advice. ‘Don’t be an idiot!’ he said fiercely. ‘If you take Czech, you’ll spend the rest of your life sitting in the pathetic consular departments of the Soviet embassies in Prague and Bratislava, and you’ll never see any more of the world than that. Go for Swedish! There’s no option. For one thing, Sweden’s a nice country, and for another it’s the doorway to the rest of Scandinavia. From there you can go anywhere in Europe.’

  Vasilko was always more cynical and materialistic than I was. Being that much older, he had grown up among boys brutalized by war, and was completely career-minded, whereas many of my companions were more idealistic, and had some spiritual values. Yet with those words he changed the course of my life. I took Swedish — and the consequences which flowed from the decision were incalculable. Not that I much enjoyed learning my second foreign language for, unlike Norwegian in which the instructor was first-class, it was poorly taught. Not enough hours were allocated to it, yet the instruction was dreadfully serious. The result was that although I was keen to master Swedish, I never did.

  Much more congenial was a half-year course on Western European literature, which included some study of English and also an introduction to the economic geography of European countries. One book to which this course introduced me, and which made a strong impression, was Gulliver’s Travels. I found the text so fascinating and witty that I read parts of it aloud to friends and to my mother. Later, in England, having read it three times in Russian, I bought an English edition, to see how the Russian translation compared with the original. Swift’s earthy sense of humour appealed to me strongly, not least in the story of the blind academic who is teaching apprentices how to identify colours by the senses of smell and taste. I also enjoyed the account of the man who tried to reproduce the original substances — corn and vegetables — out of human excrement, and the reaction of the narrator to his greeting: ‘When I was presented to him, he gave me a very close embrace (a compliment I could well have excused).’

  All our academic disciplines were permeated by Marxist ideology. At school our knowledge of the history of the Soviet Union had been sketchy; now we learnt more and more about the revolution and the history of the Communist Party, including what was known as its pre-history — the development of the first Marxist organizations in Europe and Russia. We still did not know the full truth about the purges: I had read Khrushchev’s secret speech, of course, but its text was not yet officially available for the rewriting of history books, which had been only partially recast. Even so, reading about the 1920s and 1930s, we saw how Lenin’s supporters and colleagues, the best and cleverest revolutionaries, had disappeared one after another. One perennially fascinating topic was the Seventeenth Party Congress of 1934, when the Central Committee was elected for the first time. Legend — still not confirmed to this day — claimed that in the secret ballot Sergei Kirov had received more votes than Stalin because the majority of delegates hated Stalin and wanted to get rid of him. Kirov was assassinated in December that year, on Stalin’s orders, and by the end of 1938 more than 70 per cent of those who had taken part in the congress were dead. Stalin never knew who had voted for whom, but he liquidated two-thirds of them just the same.

  Such facts and legends we discussed at length, but at that stage my mind was not developed enough to reject Communism outright. Rather, I wanted to believe that there had been something good and noble in the movement at the beginning, but that it had gone wrong in a welter of brutality and terror. The collectivization of agriculture should have been a social improvement, but it had ended in catastrophe. My understanding of what had happened was limited: I was still within the system, but my feelings of disillusionment were growing by the day.

  *

  Among
my friends in the Track and Field Club, none was more interesting than Li, a tiny Chinese athlete, who ran well but was clearly suffering from chronic undernourishment. Behind his spectacles his eyes were friendly and intelligent, and he had a strong sense of humour; yet he was a fanatical Communist and, although we became good friends, we had phenomenal political arguments. I used to tease him by saying, ‘Now you’ve got a cult of personality in China. You’ve got Mao just as we had Stalin until four years ago. Don’t you realize that when Mao dies you’ll have a de-Maoization campaign?’

  Li did not like such remarks. ‘You don’t seem to understand what Mao has done for the nation,’ he would say furiously. ‘We owe him a tremendous debt.’

  ‘That’s exactly what everyone said about Stalin,’ I would retort. ‘He was a great leader. We owed everything to him.’

  In an attempt to build Li up a bit, I used to take him home for meals, and at the flat he got into endless arguments with my father. At that time — 1957 — unpleasant border incidents were flaring up between India and China, and Li attributed these to capitalist provocation. My father told him he was talking nonsense — and so they wrangled on.

  In spite of Li’s intransigence, I could not help liking him — and the curious thing about him was that, although he seemed bigoted, he often proved right. This happened once when we found ourselves together at a holiday camp in Karelia, on the Finnish border, a glorious area of mountains, lakes and rivers, and islands covered with pine trees and huge volcanic boulders. In these idyllic surroundings I had one of the best holidays of my life.

  After five days’ training, we set off in small boats for a ten-day voyage through the lakes, camping on islands where we pitched tents and lit fires to cook supper. Li often criticized Russian food as being unimaginative, and lamented the lack of spices. Then one evening, to his great excitement, he spotted that the bottom of a crystal-clear lake was covered with freshwater mussels. ‘Look!’ he cried. ‘Delicatessen right under our feet!’ In a flash he got several of us to fill buckets with mussels, which he then boiled, having already concocted a brew of onions, salt, pepper and vinegar to go with them. None of us had ever eaten such shellfish before, and several people refused to try them, but those who did were rewarded with a feast of rare deliciousness.