Red to Black

by Alex Dryden

  ‘But the British, they…you’d already got something out of him, hadn’t you?’ I say. ‘You knew the secrets the Germans wanted to find?’

  ‘He told us only a little of what he told the Germans,’ Finn corrects me. ‘It was plenty, believe me, and they knew we knew. We waited for them to act on it, but they didn’t. It was too costly for them, of course. Schmidtke was starting to unravel thirty years of KGB successes in West Germany right up to the highest level, so they put the lid on everything he told them and eventually they didn’t want to hear any more.’

  ‘Did the British tell the Germans everything Schmidtke told them?’ I ask.

  ‘We share all our intelligence,’ Finn replies straight-faced.

  I laugh. ‘But not in this case.’

  ‘No. Not in this case,’ Finn says and smiles. ‘Or not as far as I know.’

  He finally unrolls himself from the sofa and throws the two remaining logs from the basket on to the fire. He begins to put on a coat and hat, and the white felt boots Nana had brought back for him from a tourist trip she’d made to Nizhny Novgorod. Then he picks up the log basket. He looks at me and I get up from the rug to get dressed for the cold too.

  We walk into the forest far away from where we keep the logs at the back of the dacha. It’s pitch dark, the first hour of the New Year, the new century, the new millennium. The snow is falling weakly inside the wood, like the last of the seed dribbling from the bottom of a packet, but when we emerge into the clearings beside the pond, it is robust, the big flakes driving down unimpeded with an apparent urgency to bury everything deeply and for ever.

  Finn chats nervously. He tells me about a Vietnamese refugee he and some friends had sponsored when they were at university. The boy had arrived at a military airbase in Scotland in mid-winter and three days after he’d arrived he’d woken up to see the landscape white with snow. He’d called Finn in a panic, believing there’d been a nuclear attack.

  ‘Perception is sometimes a traitor,’ Finn says to me after he’s finished this story. ‘And sometimes it’s the truth. How do you distinguish when it’s one or the other?’

  ‘Instinct maybe,’ I reply. ‘That’s all we have, isn’t it?’

  ‘But we’re afraid to use it most of the time. For most of us, truth is merely facts. That’s where we feel safest.’

  We walk further into the forest and stand by a pond which is seamlessly coated with snow so that it has become one with the surrounding land.

  ‘What do your instincts tell you now?’ he asks me.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About where we’re going, you and I. Us.’

  ‘I don’t think about it. I don’t think about you much when we’re not together,’ I say, and it’s true. ‘I have my survival to think about.’

  He holds my hand through our thick gloves.

  ‘And what if you did think about us, Rabbit, about where we both want to go?’

  ‘I can’t think about it,’ I say.

  ‘Or won’t,’ he says.

  I am silent.

  ‘Let me tell you, then. My instincts say we should get out of all this. Retire, if you like. Remove the obstacles, our work, these forces around us, everything that conspires and will continue to conspire against our future. Let go of everything that restricts us from being true together. My instinct says we should reduce us to just you, me and the spirit that joins us.’

  I consider what he’s saying. I fear the treason he’s suggesting. His to me, or mine to my country? I don’t know. And if Finn is true, what might it do to me, this treason? And I have other fears too. But these fears are of the wrong things; they are fears of a change in my life so massive I can barely imagine it. My fear is of leaving everything familiar to me, everything in my life up to this point, in exchange for Finn and uncertainty. It is a base and useless fear. I know that what I should be afraid of is the opposite. I should be afraid of not leaving everything familiar to me. I should fear not changing.

  We walk around the trees now, there’s no path, and step over broken branches with a coating of snow that bulges over them like baggy trousers and dwarfs the things it settles on.

  ‘It’s the flexibility of snow that pleases me most,’ Finn says. ‘The way it joins the most uneven surfaces together in beautiful, soft curves. It unites the whole landscape. It seems to heal the earth.’

  But I’m not really listening. I coldly assess the thought that Finn has put into my head, the thought of him and me, with nothing to disturb us. Then I look for the familiar and bring us cruelly back to the present.

  ‘Who is Vladimir Putin?’ I ask. ‘I want to know what you think.’

  Finn looks at me, to give me the opportunity to reconsider, perhaps.

  ‘That’s the question,’ he replies at last, and a shadow crosses his face; a shadow of grief, maybe, that a moment devoted to us and us alone has lost a rare opportunity.

  He picks up a stick and dusts off the snow to reveal fungi still clinging to its rottenness.

  ‘History is a broken toy,’ he says, carefully handling the stick. ‘It breaks and gets fixed and breaks again. Bits fall off and are replaced. It breaks over and over again and everything is replaced and everything remains the same. History is like the axe that has its handle replaced over and over. Is it still the same axe? It functions in the same way. History is just a toy in the sense that people want it to function in the same way, and it does. It still breaks and is still mended in just the same ways.

  ‘What happened with KoKo in 1961 in East Germany sowed the seeds of a plan and the Plan grew and grew in ambition but it was always interrupted, thwarted by events and forces. When the Wall came down in 1989, we in the West thought it was all over. The Cold War was won. That’s how it seemed. The end of history, some idiot called it. But like so much in history our thoughts were coloured by our hopes- and our ill-conceived perceptions. You see, the past wouldn’t go away. The Plan only lay dormant. Yeltsin, he was the real hope. But he himself and events around him conspired against a truly new Russia. In the nineties, you know this, Anna, Yeltsin could have got rid of the KGB for good, stuck a knife through its heart. But there was so much turmoil in the country that he didn’t quite make it. He didn’t have the time, or the will to make the final push. Perhaps he didn’t dare. Whatever. And now? Well, now the KGB is back and it will be stronger than it’s ever been. Putin’s Russia will be the KGB’s Russia, just as it’s been for the past seventy years. But it will be so with a major difference. This time, economic chaos will be replaced by economic abundance. The KGB will be richer than any organisation on earth, richer than the CIA. And the Plan will rise from its bed, nourished by the new men of power.’

  ‘What plan?’ I ask him.

  ‘You don’t know?’ he says, looking hard at me, and I feel for one moment that all he wants me for is this. And I don’t know the answer he wants.

  He looks away, apparently relieved that I don’t know what he’s talking about, and beyond that, he doesn’t expand, however hard I press him.

  Even for him this monologue is rather melodramatic and portentous, yet there’s something so powerful emanating from him as he speaks that my initial urge to laugh is quietened. He stands there in the dark forest, with the snow falling around us, like some kind of shaman possessed by a supernatural force. I wonder what I’m doing even considering trusting this man.

  Yet I know we have missed a chance for us, an opportunity, and it was me who rejected it. This time there will be other chances, but one day we will run out of chances to save ourselves.

  I realise that, despite the inevitable searching somewhere out there in the darkness. Finn has chosen to absent us from the microphones for this moment.

  I wonder what General Kerchenko and my two case officers will think of Finn’s theatrical eloquence when I submit my report later. This Plan he talks about…Will they think it fiction? Bathos? Madness? To my surprise, they thought it was none of them. They ignored it.

  9

/>   IN THE SPRING of the year 2000 Vladimir Putin moved into the Kremlin and began to cement his seat of power.

  At the British embassy across the River Moskva from the Kremlin, Finn slowly undermined whatever power he possessed. He told me he’d argued with his station head about the direction in which Putin was taking Russia. He was uncharacteristically truculent and morose.

  One afternoon the two of us took a trip out to New Jerusalem, the seventeenth-century Orthodox monastery on the River Istra west of Moscow, and afterwards we had supper with friends of mine who lived nearby. Finn usually drove when we went anywhere, but this time he asked me to bring my car. He was in a foul mood.

  ‘I’ve been given a formal warning,’ he grumbled. ‘Accept my government’s policy, work with the status quo, or get out.’

  ‘That seems reasonable,’ I said. Then we both laughed that it was I who was telling him to be loyal to his country. The rest of the trip revived his spirits and he seemed like his usual self.

  But he told me as we walked around the huge monastery later that behind the scenes they were going to get him out anyway.

  ‘I’m finished with Moscow,’ he said finally, and we lit a candle to us.

  He held my hand.

  ‘And I don’t want us to be separated,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘So if it’s going to be one thing or the other,’ he said, ‘us together, or you staying in Russia without me, which is it to be?’

  I didn’t reply. And after the night by the pond, this was my second denial, a second opportunity lost.

  In the weeks after our trip out to New Jerusalem, Putin first gathered round him the trusted members of his St Petersburg KGB clan, people who had worked with him when he was deputy mayor of the city, and from earlier when he was stationed in East Germany before the Berlin Wall fell.

  Simultaneously he summoned the men who had been the real rulers of Russia in the shadows behind Yeltsin’s presidency.

  I heard from a colleague based at the Kremlin that they came to him one by one. These shadow rulers were known to us Russians and to the world as the oligarchs. In the words of Boris Berezovsky, the oil, metals and media billionaire, they were the ‘seven bankers who ruled Russia’. These immensely powerful men had formed an uneasy alliance between themselves- one that transcended the clash of their own business interests–in order to put their support behind Putin to win the presidential elections. First, they had persuaded Yeltsin as the millennium approached to hand his crown over to the younger man and now they supported Putin to ensure that he won the contested election. They were backing him with their huge resources as the best candidate to protect their own interests.

  One night Finn and I went to see American Beauty at the cinema in Tverskaya. Finn fidgeted throughout the film and when I tried to talk about it afterwards he appeared not to have seen it at all.

  ‘They’re afraid for their prospects if Evgeni Primakov wins the presidency,’ Finn said.

  ‘Who?’ I asked him, thinking about Kevin Spacey’s dead-looking face in the movie.

  ‘The oligarchs! They’re so afraid of Primakov that they’re going to jump straight into the fire and support Putin!’

  Primakov was my chief, the boss of the SVR, who was running against Putin in the elections.

  ‘Are there really people like that in America?’ I asked, thinking still about Spacey’s character. But Finn was obsessed. For once it was me trying to introduce some levity, not him.

  ‘It’s just the same as it was five years ago,’ Finn went on. ‘Then it was the Communists they were afraid of. They thought the Communists would turn back the clock and deprive them of their wealth. So they formed an alliance between themselves for as long as it took to see off that threat and make sure Yeltsin was re-elected.’

  ‘Are we going to get something to eat?’ I suggested. ‘Or are you going to rave on out here? I’m freezing.’

  So we went into Yolki-Palki on the other side of the Bolshoi from Tverskaya. Finn always liked it there. The restaurant was dressed up in peasant decor with straw bales and wooden farm animals and checked tablecloths. Finn stopped talking about the elections for a moment.

  ‘This place has never been the same since the city banned the real animals,’ Finn said.

  Back in the early nineties, when it first opened, the restaurant had real chickens and ducks that wandered about inside.

  But then Finn was off again before we’d even ordered.

  ‘Putin is essentially the oligarchs’ choice,’ he said. ‘He’s reassured them somehow. Why do they believe him?’

  ‘Because it’s what they want to believe.’

  Later we walked in the freezing night to the Kremlin and watched the black Mercedes and four-wheel-drive Porsches enter and leave the Kremlin with their windows blacked out, and I told him, one by one, which rich Russian baron had come to pay his respects to Putin.

  ‘They come like boyars to a medieval tsar,’ Finn said. ‘They pay their respects and hope to exert their influence.’

  And in the course of those weeks up to Putin’s election victory in March, they all came: the oligarchs, the richest, most powerful men in Russia. Preceded, some said, by lavish gifts or suitcases of cash, they came to ensure that their choice for the elections was an ally. They were confident, powerful and richer than the rest of Russia put together.

  But once he’d got their money and once their media outlets had ensured his victory, Putin was not the man they thought they’d voted for. To their dismay, having funded his rise to power, what they found was a president unlike the weakened, pliant Yeltsin.

  While Putin had the decor of Yeltsin’s Kremlin bathroom changed from whimsical trompes l’oeil of twittering birds and fluffy clouds to a formal burgundy, ‘like dried blood’ as one of the oligarchs put it, he also changed other, more important, matters. From now on, he told them firmly, only if they stayed out of politics could they run their businesses and continue to enjoy the wealth they’d seized. It was not what they wanted to hear and many of them, to their cost, didn’t actually believe it.

  When Boris Berezovsky confidently went off to his French château on the Côte d’Azur in the summer of 2000 to rest and recuperate after the successful but gruelling spring election campaign, he left his protégé Stepanovich with a list of names to give to the newly elected Vladimir Putin of those he wanted to see in positions of power around the President. The list was Berezovsky’s hold on power.

  But at the Forest, I watched my bosses and they laughed at the names on it. The Kingmaker had made a serious error.

  By the end of the summer, Berezovsky’s television stations were confiscated by Putin and he, with Gusinsky, fled into exile-Berezovsky to London, Gusinsky to Tel Aviv.

  ‘I told you, didn’t I, Rabbit?’ Finn said triumphantly.

  I don’t know what role Stepanovich had in the fall of Berezovsky, if he had a role at all. But we all saw that from then on he was very close to Putin and, later, Berezovsky cursed his protégé’s betrayal. Stepanovich, who only a few years before served the drinks on Berezovsky’s private jet, had made a separate peace.

  ‘Watch what happens now,’ Finn said. ‘Berezovsky and Gusinsky are examples pour encourager les autres. Just watch.’

  It was true. With Berezovsky’s fall, the others quickly saw which way the wind now blew from the Kremlin and they bent their knees to the new chief and his KGB entourage.

  Only the richest of them all, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, took a stand against Putin. He lasted until 2004, when his private jet was stormed by masked special forces on a Siberian runway. Tried in a kangaroo court, he was put away to rot in a Siberian uranium mine that still serves as a prison camp in our new democratic Russia. For disobeying the President’s instruction to stay out of politics, he received eight brutal years in Russia’s old gulag, with the promise of more to come.

  Between Putin’s appointment to the presidency on New Year’s Eve and the March elections, on the other side of
the Moskva River from the Kremlin, the British embassy prepared for a visit to Moscow by Tony Blair in February 2000, to endorse Putin as candidate.

  ‘Blair’s come smiling to Moscow,’ Finn said. ‘He’s been strolling in the grounds of Putin’s dacha, describing Putin to the lapdog press as a reformer, a man we can do business with. The little creep wants to be Margaret Thatcher and casts Putin as his Gorbachev.’

  To return this endorsement of him, Putin graced Blair with the rich reward of making London the venue for his first official foreign visit after he was elected. In London, Putin was given the red-carpet treatment and dined with the Queen. The massacres of Chechens in Putin’s war there were brushed aside by Downing Street. Putin promised the hopeful world a ‘dictatorship of the law’.

  But whose law, we asked ourselves in Russia, if not the law of the KGB?

  During this time, Finn and I often met at the Baltschug Hotel on the river, a few doors away from the British embassy, and we enjoyed its fine view of the Kremlin over lunch or a drink or in bed. Despite me telling him archly that the Forest would gladly pay for our room, Finn somehow obtained these rooms at what he called ‘diplomatic rates’, and said he didn’t want our lovemaking being listened to.

  ‘I’m supposed to persuade you,’ I said.

  ‘Then you’ve failed.’

  ‘Thank God for that.’

  We could never trust Finn’s apartment, nor mine, and to the irritation of Kerchenko, visiting random hotel rooms was the only way to keep our most private moments to ourselves.

  At the Forest, General Kerchenko and my other case officers on Finn, Yuri and Sasha, ignored Finn’s talk about a plan which I had written up in my reports. They just seemed fixated by Finn’s disaffection with MI6 and the ridiculous notion that Finn was ready to come over to our side. But how could he defect, I tried to tell them, when there was no apparent ideological difference between the two sides?

  I remember now that Finn had bought and then framed a collection of stamps which had been issued under Gorbachev and which featured the British spy and traitor, Kim Philby. It amused him enormously that Philby should be celebrated even in Gorbachev’s Russia, at the time when both sides in the Cold War were laying down their differences.