Tired after the long journey, we had supper and went to bed early. But then an entirely Russian event occurred. A few minutes after we had settled down, there was a sudden shout and we all leapt out of bed, rushing for the light switches. A shocking sight was revealed: both bedrooms were alive with bed-bugs, attacking us from all directions. Where they had come from it was impossible to say, but now they were everywhere, on beds, floor, walls, ceiling. Scratching and slapping at bites, we snatched the sheets off the beds and tipped the live cargo of each into the bath, flushing it down the plughole. For the next couple of hours we fought the invaders, catching and killing hundreds. Then, exhausted and determined to get some proper sleep, we took one bed from each bedroom and stationed it in the sitting room, with plenty of space round it, and pulled the remaining beds away from the walls. In the kitchen we mustered sixteen containers — saucepans, bowls, dishes — and deployed them so that every bed-leg was standing in water. Thus protected, we gradually settled down again and went to sleep. In the morning we complained bitterly to the administrator, who called in a German fumigation squad — and they must have done a truly Teutonic job, for when we returned to the flat in the evening, we found a slight smell of disinfectant but every bug had gone.
On our first morning in Berlin we began to get our bearings. Our base was the Soviet Embassy in Unter den Linden, the main thoroughfare which had been the heart of the capital before the war; the Embassy was a huge building put up by German prisoners, only a couple of hundred metres from the Brandenburg Gate. There our mentor was Vladimir Lomyeko, then personal assistant to the head of the Bloc Department, the instrument of the Central Committee which ran the East European countries. I knew Lomyeko already from the Institute, where he had been a couple of years ahead of me, so now I met him again as an old friend: tall, confident, energetic and immediately impressive, he obviously had great ability, and was determined to carve out a successful career for himself (later he held many senior posts, and became the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ representative at UNESCO). Another high-flyer in the making was Yuli Kvitsinsky, who was working as personal secretary to the Ambassador.
At that time, however, these two found themselves caught up, like everyone else, in a mighty historical event. From the way that people were gossiping urgently, in low voices, it was clear that we had arrived at a fraught moment; and hardly had Lomyeko briefed us about what we would be doing when he confided that something terrible was happening outside. ‘In the last couple of weeks, and the last few days in particular, the citizens of the German Democratic Republic have been fleeing westwards by the thousand,’ he told us. ‘They’ve been going all the time, but for some reason the movement’s suddenly accelerated. If you asked me for my impression of East Germany at the moment, I could put it very simply. It’s as if the whole of the GDR is sitting on its suitcases.’
That phrase seized my imagination and has haunted me ever since. Within minutes its accuracy was confirmed by another of the Embassy officials, a choleric first secretary, who popped into the room and said in a conspiratorial voice: ‘Chaps, something incredible’s about to take place. I can’t tell you what it is, but it’s my duty to warn you. The important thing is that you should be on your guard tonight and tomorrow night. Don’t go out anywhere. Don’t go for walks. Don’t stay in the city centre. When the office closes, go back to Karlshorst and remain in your quarters. Watch television, listen to the radio — but don’t whatever you do go out. Then in the morning come to the office, like everyone else.’
Of course, that left us boiling with curiosity but we did as we were told, and remained unenlightened by various evening broadcasts. Next morning we found the city in a frenzy, with soldiers on guard everywhere, people and vehicles rushing in all directions. All along the line between the Soviet sector and the West barbed-wire barricades were going up: Berlin was being divided in half by the first version of the Wall.
In the Embassy the staff were so busy reporting events to Moscow that we were left to ourselves, and we spent the day glued to television sets, watching with incredulity and horror the shots of people desperately clambering over barricades and jumping out of windows into canals in their efforts to escape. Even with all this first-hand evidence, it was hard to believe what was happening but, whenever we ventured out into the street, reality was still closer. Within a few hundred metres of us Unter den Linden itself had been severed by barricades of wire blocking the Brandenburg Gate. One of the city’s main arteries was cut off.
The building of the Wall created an electric atmosphere but somehow we had to settle down. After a while the people in the Embassy decided that no room could be spared for us so we were given desks on the fourth floor, in the corridor that led to the splendid great hall used for conferences and speeches. Since the corridor was wide there was plenty of space, but it was guarded by a dragon of a secretary, a smartly dressed woman who sat outside the door of an office, and much resented our arrival since we undermined her privacy and the luxury of her position. Soon we learnt that she worked for Colonel Slavin, head of the KGB section stationed in the Embassy. The main force of KGB was at Karlshorst, where more than five hundred officers were based. A couple of dozen worked from the Embassy under the guise of diplomats.
Before I left Moscow, I had been set various small tasks by my contact in Directorate S, and the first of these was to make contact with my brother. He was living in Leipzig but he came to Berlin to meet me one evening during my first week and, although we both much enjoyed our reunion, it landed me in deeper water than I had bargained for. Vasilko was in excellent spirits: to celebrate my arrival he took me to several late-night bars in East Berlin and bought me one or two German liqueurs, with the result that I did not arrive back at our flat in Karlshorst until nearly midnight. By then our minder had become worried about my safety: evidently he smelt alcohol on my breath, for he gestured to my companions that I had been drinking and angrily asked where I had been. Since I was already imbued with one of the KGB’s fundamental principles that you must never reveal what you have been doing, I told him I had been to the cinema. ‘Oh, yes?’ he said nastily. ‘And what did you see?’ When I gave him the name of a film that I knew was on, he said, ‘All right, we’ll discuss it in the morning. Now go to bed.’
I went to my room feeling depressed. I did not want to let down the KGB by revealing my connection with them, but neither did I want to go back to the Institute with a bad report. I knew that in the morning our minder would start asking questions about the film I claimed to have seen...and the more I thought about my predicament, the clearer it became that there was only one solution. At dead of night I got dressed, crept out of the house and walked back into the city centre — a distance of at least three kilometres, which took three-quarters of an hour — to find the cinema at which my film was showing. There, on the pavement, I picked up not only a programme which gave a full synopsis of the plot but also a discarded ticket, and trudged wearily back. Only a young man would have gone to such lengths. My dogged endeavour paid off, for when I produced the programme and the ticket the minder swallowed my story. Later, when I mentioned the episode to the KGB, they were delighted: I had cleverly covered my tracks, had not mentioned my brother, and instead had carried out a minor operation to gain material support for my fiction. All this struck them as a major coup. I had shown that I possessed ‘operational skills’. I had demonstrated ‘spontaneous operational reaction’. ‘We’ve found a good candidate!’ they said to each other. ‘The lad’s doing well.’
The second task the KGB had set me proved less simple. They had given me the name of a woman with whom, they said, they wanted to renew contact. I was to approach her and find out her feelings about the Soviet Union — whether or not she was prepared to work for the KGB again. At first everything seemed very difficult but, after nerving myself to the task, I went to a police station and invented some pretext for getting her address. Armed with the details and some flowers, I went straight round without te
lephoning, in case I put her off. When I knocked at the door, taut with nerves, out came a good-looking woman in her forties. I blurted out some story about a friend in Moscow asking me to call on her, and she invited me in, apparently not at all surprised. It seemed to me that we had a useful conversation: obviously she had spent some time in the Soviet Union during the war, and she spoke about those years with warmth, remarking sadly that people were no longer as idealistic as they had been in the 1930s and 1940s. When I asked if she would like to resume contact, she gave me carefully to understand that she would not mind.
All this I wrote in a report, and at the time I thought I had done well. Later I realized that the whole thing must have been a try-on: that she must have been an active agent, and that it was I, rather than she, who was being tested. The KGB wanted to find out if I seemed presentable, if I had an easy manner when approaching strangers, whether I asked good questions. If they had wanted to resuscitate a useful contact, they would not have sent a naïve twenty-year-old to do the job. All the same, it was exciting to have an early taste of the kind of work I might do if I joined the KGB.
As the days went by, it turned out that we students had little to do, apart from sporadic translating. Our main task, we were told, was to work on our theses, which we would have to hand in when we returned to Moscow and finished our courses at the Institute. The man appointed to act as an academic tutor wanted me to write about the collectivization of agriculture in the DDR (East Germany); but I found the idea exceptionally boring and, while pretending to work at it, I pressed on with a subject which fascinated me: relations between Church and State in East Germany.
Our leisurely life left plenty of time for reading — and we read voraciously, not only West German newspapers, which were freely available to us, but also the secret reports compiled by the various political parties about morale among the East German population (the DDR retained puppet parties, but they were only sub-departments of the SED, or Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland, the official body). Most reports began with a rush of platitudes — ‘The population of the DDR greeted the decisions of the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland with great enthusiasm’ — but once the claptrap was out of the way, much of the truth would come out in a torrent of bitter and cynical complaints, which showed how angry and frustrated people were. The rumours in circulation, political jokes, comments about the Soviet Union, new nicknames for leading personalities — everything was here, along with the latest satirical rhymes:
Keine Butter, keine Sahne,
Aber hoch die rote Fahne![12]
In the flat we took it in turns to cook simple meals for supper — macaroni, potatoes with butter or sunflower oil, and plenty of vegetables. Then one evening Starikov introduced a new custom. Returning from the shops, he produced a neat little bottle embellished with the word ‘Korn’. As he poured out the clear liquid into four glasses, he said, ‘After all, we should mix business with pleasure now and then!’ Drinking the smooth spirit down, we voted it much the same as vodka but better, and soon it became a regular habit.
Another day, when I was on my own in the apartment, I decided to give the others a surprise. Ever since our arrival I had been worried by the lavatory-bowl, which had become encrusted with scale through lack of thorough cleaning, and I was determined to do something about it. I could find no better instrument than an ordinary table-knife, but for two solid hours I scraped away, using the back of the knife to dislodge the scale flake by flake. In the end the bowl was snowy white and good as new. When the others returned, they admired it very much, so I said, Now keep it clean, and we’ll be all right.’ But, in the middle of supper, Starikov suddenly asked how I had managed the transformation.
‘It was tough going,’ I said. ‘I had to use the back of a knife.’
‘What?’ Starikov jumped to his feet. ‘One of the knives we’re eating with? How disgusting!’ With that he threw all the cutlery on the floor, seriously upset.
‘Don’t be silly,’ I told him. ‘I boiled it for half an hour in a saucepan of water. It’s cleaner than it’s ever been in its life.’ It was days before Starikov could face using any of the knives, for fear he got the one I had contaminated. Even though he came from the humblest background of any of us he was by far the most finicky.
In a personal sense, the building of the Wall was a bitter blow to me as it meant that I could not visit the Western half of Berlin or see any of the sights on which I had set my heart: Charlottenburg, the Kurfürstendamm, the Tiergarten, the Olympic stadium. At weekends, though, we were allowed to take a commuter train and travel out to any destination within half an hour of the city centre among the lovely lakes and woods to the east and south.
The Wall had a far more profound effect on me than that of restricting physical movement: it stimulated another leap in my mental development. At first hand I saw how repugnant Communism was to ordinary people. I saw that only a physical barrier, reinforced by armed guards in watch-towers, could keep the East Germans in their socialist paradise and stop them fleeing to the West. For the first time I saw what the Soviet Union was doing to Eastern Europe.
Why, after witnessing all this, did I go ahead and join the KGB only a few months later? Dozens of people have put the question to me, and I do not find it easy to answer. I can only say that at the age of twenty-three my ideas were still confused, and I had not fully made up my mind about what was right or wrong. At the time my best policy seemed to be to remain an internal rebel: to keep my dissent to myself. Every day I was thinking: All right. I see how the system works, and it stinks. But what can I do against it? The only sensible way to behave is to remain an opponent in my mind. Later, of course, I realized that this attitude was dishonest and weak. Unlike most of the citizens of the Soviet Union, I had been lucky enough to go abroad and be in the right place at the right time to see the truth — and yet I did nothing about it.
It was no consolation that thousands of intellectuals and officials had also chosen to remain kitchen rebels, to sit in their kitchens condemning the system to family and friends while they drank their wine or vodka. In Russia there is a gesture which denotes that you are expressing contempt but keeping it in your pocket: the showing of the thumb between the knuckles of the first and second fingers (a cousin of the Western V-sign). Countless people were giving that signal, and they went on doing so for another thirty years, till the very end of the Soviet regime — only to discover, with dismay, that they could not then prove to anybody that they had always held strong anti-Communist views. At least, after a while, I took action. But in 1961 I was in no position to do so.
*
The longer we stayed in Berlin the more we felt we were men of the world. Now that we had learnt something about the KGB, we knew what had to be taken seriously, and what could be joked about for, in spite of the general greyness of life, we enjoyed some amusing interludes. One such occurred when Anastas Mikoyan, then number three in the Politburo, came on a State visit, a grand tour on which I was asked to act as interpreter for the two Soviet cameramen making an official record of the trip. I joined the entourage, and we travelled all over the country, going to the opera (where we saw Fidelio) and eating lavish meals in the best hotels and restaurants. For the cameramen, the climax of the operation was an invitation to a Soviet military base where they became excited, hoping to film all kinds of modern weapons. Alas, when the long line of cars drove on to the base, there was not a gun or tank in sight as everything had been hidden away in hangars. The Germans joked that the only weapon on display was the ceremonial dagger worn by the officer in charge of the guard of honour.
Things improved when we repaired to the canteen to find that a magnificent lunch had been laid out: red caviar, excellent soup, many kinds of cold meat — everything a Russian could wish for. The food and vodka brought out all that was coarse and bohemian in the cameramen, whose jokes demonstrated the typically irresponsible, flippant attitude of Russians to the co
nventions of European life. ‘You know how we clean our shoes while travelling?’ one of them asked. ‘On the curtains, of course!’ Then he said, ‘You must have heard one of our favourite rhymes:
‘“Tolko pokoynik
Ne ssit v rukomoynik.”’[13]
In December, towards the end of our stay, we four students were dispersed to four different consulates. Everyone wanted to go to Leipzig, the second most interesting city in the country, but luckily my special secret pleading, that my brother was already there, won the day for me, and to my delight I found myself in Leipzig in time for Christmas.
Until then my interest in religion had been intellectual; no doubt it had been planted by my grandmother, and I had rarely had a chance to witness or feel religious faith for myself. Now I got one — and a thrilling experience it was. The atmosphere in Leipzig was particularly intense. The end of the war had left people shattered and depressed, but at least they had been able to travel wherever they wanted, to visit their families and friends at important festivals. Now, suddenly, they were cut off, with no definite prospect of ever again being able to hold a family reunion. Under Communism, life had become dark and poor and primitive — and all this, I felt, had intensified their religious feelings. With little to buy in the shops, and not much light, everything depended on the fervour with which they sang in church and played brass instruments from the church balconies.
It was in this intense atmosphere that I heard Bach’s Christmas Oratorio given in one of the concert halls. It was the first time I had heard Bach live — few of his works were ever played in the Soviet Union, and none with religious connotations — and it was a revelation to be in an audience of Germans, who listened with such awe and emotion. I was intensely moved, and have tried to listen to the Christmas Oratorio every year since, if not at a live performance at least on radio or television.
Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky Page 11
