Dancing on Thin Ice

by Arkady Polishchuk

  Primakov rumbled leisurely, “Alik, you didn’t need to stand up.”

  I said, “None of us needs to stand up—Comrade Brezhnev wouldn’t feel offended; to my great regret, he isn’t at this table.”

  Primakov’s wife Laura let out a giggle.

  I peered at the New Year fir tree in the corner of the room and mused, “It looks so shamefully apolitical with its toys, garlands of bulbs, candles, ornaments, and candies.” Then I whispered to Laura, “Next time, let’s hang all Politburo members, I mean, their photos, on the tree.”

  She giggled again.

  After moving to a sofa, I asked her husband, in a low voice, “Why did he go on like that?”

  “To help advance his career,” was the answer.

  “But who would inform the KGB or Brezhnev of such sincere affection?”

  “Zorin believes all of us have good connections.”

  “Am I also a suspect? Doesn’t he know that you guys are pushing this Jew up this shaky ladder?”

  “For him it might mean that you have the most powerful connections,” Primakov said, chuckling. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be present at this party, wouldn’t be published in Pravda and the Izvestia, and wouldn’t be able to appear on Central TV.”

  “But the guy is half-Jewish himself!”

  “The more you talk about Jews, the more suspicious Zorin will become.”

  “Zhenya,” I said, using Primakov’s nickname, “do you suspect me of being a Zionist sympathizer?”

  “I just want you to be more objective,” he said. “You do know, I criticize you only in our narrow circle of friends. That’s a sort of a preventive measure. Stop being so emotional, I will always fight against both—anti-Semitism and Zionism.”

  Tom joined us on the couch and put his arm around me.

  “Zhenya,” I prodded, chuckling, “what if the Zionists became our best friends?”

  He burst into laughter. “I thought you were smarter.”

  “Do you remember who brought Israel into existence?” I asked.

  “I certainly do.”

  “Do you remember how Stalin and more than a dozen countries who loved him dearly, unanimously voted in the UN for the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948?”

  “So what?” Primakov asked.

  “Do you remember why we were so supportive of Zionists?”

  “Sure. Stalin wanted to make Israel a communist outpost in the Middle East.”

  “If his dream had come true, you would’ve reported today from Jerusalem about the righteous struggle of our ideological brothers in Israel for the liberation of the ancestral Israeli territories to the east of the very Jewish Jordan River.”

  Now Tom burst out laughing at this scenario.

  Primakov shook his head. “Such jokes, if overheard by unfriendly ears, can be misinterpreted,” he said. “I don’t know why my Georgian wife likes you so much. Anyway, why are you so aggressive tonight?”

  “Georgians are smart,” I stated.

  Yevgeny Primakov when he was Director of the Russian Central Intelligence Service. December 1991. (Russian International News Agency).

  Valentin Zorin receiving the Order of Alexander Nevsky from Vladimir Putin for his many years of service to Russia as a journalist and “Americanist.” May 21, 2015. (Kremlin)

  A little irritated, he continued, smiling through his teeth, “Can’t we talk of something more romantic on this beautiful New Year’s night?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Thanks to Zorin, I ruined the roses in that vase.”

  “The hell with the roses,” said Tom. “You wasted a good Italian wine, and we’re well aware that you’ve done it on behalf of the Elders of Zion.”

  At that time only Tom knew that I was thinking of ending my career. One time he said to me, “Don’t forget, you know more than a dozen spies working abroad. A dozen! If you make a stupid move, you might just drown in the Moscow River, or die in a car accident.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, laughing it off, “I hate swimming and don’t have a car.”

  I would’ve fallen off the couch with a roar if someone at that party had foretold the future of our friend and Pravda correspondent Yevgeny Primakov: in a quarter of a century—the first deputy director of the KGB; after the collapse of the Soviet Union—the head of the Russian spy agency; and later, in 1998—the prime minister of new Russia.2

  2 The latest news about Primakov came to me in early February 2018: “In Moscow, a monument to the former Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Chairman of the Government of Russia, Yevgeny Primakov, will be installed. This decision was unanimously adopted by the Moscow City Duma Commission for monumental art,” reports Interfax. “The monument will be installed in the Smolenskaya-Sennaya square in the center of the city, opposite the Foreign Ministry building.”

  FIVE

  My Good Friends in the KGB

  MY MEMORY ONLY ALLOWS me to mention by name three KGB correspondents who benefited the magazine more than others—the charming Constantine Geyvandov, the brilliant Vladimir Savelyev, and Cyril Karpovich who became our Nigerian correspondent after Constantine turned into a Pravda correspondent, first in Lebanon and later, in Canada.

  Following the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author of The Gulag Archipelago, the outraged Cyril Karpovich said, “I would’ve hung up this enemy with my own hands!”

  Everyone in our editorial room understood how dangerous Karpovich was, so we said nothing. Once, Polyakov, our deputy editor, asked him if he has seen a Pravda article about Americans spying in Nigeria. Karpovich glanced at a Pravda copy in Polyakov’s hand, “Yes, I read the original piece in a Nigerian newspaper. The country is full of American spies.”

  “Are you familiar with the author?” I asked.

  “Yes, he’s a Marxist,” he said. “We met in Lagos.” I asked Karpovich to book this Nigerian for a larger article on the same topic of American espionage in Africa. It was obvious that the author would not be able to elaborate on the subject, but Polyakov swallowed the bait and said, “Yes, Cyril, that would be very useful to return to this subject again with a more detailed article.”

  Asia and Africa Today as guests of Monino Military Academy near Moscow. 1963. This institution was always particularly important. The future commanders from two dozen communist and Arab countries studied in it, and the Academy worked in close contact with the nearby Star City, where the future Russian cosmonauts were trained.

  left to right: Constantine Geyvandov, our KGB correspondent in Nigeria; Simon Verbitsky, the head of the information department; Vlad “S.,” the head of our book reviews department, and me.

  In the room also sat our freelancer, an Arabist by training and a seasoned journalist. During our conversation a smile wandered over his face. After the deputy editor left the room, he said, “Arkady, let’s go to the canteen for a cup of tea. I want to discuss with you some problems in my troublesome life.”

  Cyril smiled understandingly. A minute later the Arabist and I were sitting alone at a table.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “I wrote that article,” he said, “and didn’t want to say it in Cyril’s presence, since his father is the head of the APN’s personnel department.”

  The bloody war in Angola. My buddy and Pravda correspondent in Africa, Tom Kolesnichenko, posing as a tired Communist rebel next to the real one. What a good joke for his friends in Moscow!

  “The Novosti Press Agency should be proud of you,” I said solemnly.

  “The son of this KGB general could decide that I was divulging state secrets.”

  In accordance with its charter, the news agency APN intended to “spread abroad the truth.” Sixty newspapers and magazines were doing this difficult job in forty-five languages in more than one hundred and twenty countries. That is why, after many failures, the KGB’s successor, the post-Soviet Federal Security Service (FSB), allowed the Russian Wikipedia to make this delicate understatement: “In Soviet times, using t
he status of a journalist, intelligence officers sometimes worked at this news agency.” That was unique openness. Such candor can be compared only with that shown in one of the post-Soviet interviews with Yevgeny Primakov. The nostalgic Yevgeny allowed himself to share with humanity a touching fact of his younger life—that he and our buddy Constantine Geyvandov drank cheap wine as students at the Institute of Oriental Studies. This bold revelation reminded me of the gigantic bottle of whiskey, nearly impossible to lift from the floor, that Primakov brought home from a long foreign assignment. To see such a vessel for the first time was a discovery of immense proportions equal to seeing a genie in a bottle.

  Detractors suspected Primakov of trying to cover up his Jewish origins with Georgian hospitality and a heavy Georgian accent. They ignored the simple fact that he had grown up in Georgia. I knew his Jewish mother. He never knew his father, but, judging by the very fact that in 1949, the year of virulent official anti-Semitism, this nineteen-year-old youth was accepted by the Institute of Oriental Studies, it must have been that the most important line of his internal passport (Line #5) identified him as an ethnic Russian. Had he been born twenty years later, it would not have protected his career from being ruined and he might still be living in Tbilisi speaking with a Georgian accent. Destiny plays with mortals. When a quarter of a century after Hitler’s suicide in his bunker, Primakov’s son Sasha (Alexander) was taking the entrance exams at the Institute of International Relations, the applicants had to fill out a form indicating the ethnic backgrounds of both parents. Fortunately, Primakov’s wife Laura was a Georgian in good standing.

  OUR CORRESPONDENT in East Africa, Vladimir Savelyev and I liked to walk together in the long hallway of our historic building. When I told him about Karpovich’s burning desire to hang the author of The Gulag Archipelago, he frowned, but did not say a word.

  “In some institutions,” I said, “Stalin is still the idol of the crowd.”

  “Somehow it helps to build a career. But after Khrushchev’s speech in 1956 about the ‘cult of personality’ some Stalinists lost their jobs.”

  “They can be counted on the fingers of one hand,” I said. “I know three such beauties; two of them you know as well. It’s our Ghafurov and Polyakov.”

  “Interesting. And the third?”

  “A former KGB lieutenant-general. He was in command of hard labor camps throughout the Far East and North East. His son told me that when his dad rode a white thoroughbred by a column of prisoners, they had to go down on their knees—in the mud and snow.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Sorry, it’s not a secret, but I don’t feel comfortable giving it to you without his son’s permission. We were eighth graders and goofed around together, and then all of a sudden he was gone. Many years later when he entered Tom Kolesnichenko’s office at Pravda, we instantly recognized each other.”

  “You are a loyal friend,” Vladimir said.

  “What else do we have in this life?”

  “What do you think of Kolesnichenko?”

  “I love him.”

  He repeated, “You are a loyal friend.”

  The corridors of the Institute of the Peoples of Asia were a very special place. There could be seen Turks, among them, the great poet Nazim Hikmet; Egyptians, Syrians, Iraqis, numerous Palestinians, and Kurds. One of them, a charming and cultivated man who wrote well in Russian, told me that he had recently been elected president of the Kurdish Academy of Sciences in exile and was going to live closer to home, in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan.

  “What country do you consider as yours?” I asked.

  “We’re like the Jews,” he said. “Our country was taken from us and divided among our neighbors. We are therefore hated by everyone who took our land. My family fled to Europe from Iraq, and I got my education in Holland and France.”

  “Then you are a French communist.”

  “And a Kurdish nationalist.”

  I told Vladimir Savelyev about this conversation and asked him not to share it with his colleagues.

  “This is what we call a national liberation movement,” he said. “Sometimes our agendas differ with these communists from the Middle East.”

  “I simply cannot imagine this decent person manipulated by anyone,” I said.

  After reading a couple of my book reviews in Foreign Literature, he asked why I wrote so seldom.

  “There’s less politics in those African novels,” I said.

  “It’s good that Karpovich did not hear your answer,” he said with a smirk.

  During another one of our corridor walks, I nodded at an unusually broad-shouldered man with the sad eyes of an intelligent saint.

  “It’s an Iranian general,” I said, “one of the officers—conspirators who escaped execution by the Shah. They’re all communists from the Tudeh party.”

  “I marvel,” Vladimir said, “what these Marxist-Leninists think now of the Soviet Union.”

  At that moment a carefully dressed man quickly walked past us.

  “This one I love the most,” I said.

  “Azerbaijani?” asked Vladimir.

  “And a very religious one. He has just made a pilgrimage to Mecca. I didn’t know that a Soviet citizen could perform the Hajj.”

  “Quite young,” said Vladimir thoughtfully.

  “He visited Mecca with a fake beard,” I said, chuckling. “Let’s go to the canteen, we might see him consuming his favorite food.”

  When we entered the canteen, our Hajji was wolfing down a pork chop.

  “Poor man,” I said, chuckling, “he missed it badly in Mecca.”

  “He has a very important job,” Vladimir said. “Just imagine that someday some Muslim dictator will make an atomic bomb.”

  He was surprised that I had a Russian-language Koran and wanted to read it. It was published by our publishing house, and my copy had its limited edition number. The Party’s Central Committee allowed it to be translated, but before publishing the revelations of Allah to Muhammad, it approved a list of highly qualified recipients of divine truth; no Muslims were on that list, only some Party officials, scholars, and journalists. In strict accordance with this roll call, the exact number of copies was issued. I was among the chosen.

  Vladimir liked my remark. “That was a bold decision of our Party,” he said. “I hope that soon they decide to publish the Bible.”

  One time I returned from Polyakov’s office and Nickolas Laane, another correspondent with whom I had friendly relations, asked, “Are you okay? You look sick.”

  “I’ve just been asked to participate in writing the denunciation of an innocent fool,” I said.

  “Big deal!” said our slightly tipsy Party Secretary Vlad S. “This is still a popular literary genre. People make a good career. Just do it.”

  “I managed to avoid this disaster.”

  “How?” asked Nickolas.

  “I don’t want to draw our chaste correspondents into our dirty affairs,” I said.

  “Well, really, tell me!” pleaded Nickolas Laane. “I won’t sell you out.”

  I gave it up. “Polyakov wanted to accuse someone of bourgeois nationalism and I, without batting an eye, told the jerk that it would be dangerous because the Tatar was to take a job at the Party’s Central Committee.”

  To my delight, our correspondent laughed until he started hiccupping.

  What happened was that I had speared an article by this Tatar, and to entertain my colleagues, was reading aloud a couple of illiterate sentences from it when Polyakov entered the room. He learned who the author was, and with his fierce face expressing delight, he took the manuscript and told me to drop by. In an hour he said, “We are obliged to inform the Party about this ideologically harmful article written by a spiteful nationalist.”

  The episode seemed to have awakened Polyakov’s sweet memories of his power in the fight against nationalism in the Soviet republics. He told me that when Latvia joined the USSR, the Party had appointed him chief editor of
the Latvian republican newspaper and that its managing editor, a Jew, helped him expose Latvian nationalists in every single issue of the paper. And here I was—another Jew, another managing editor. But Polyakov was more secretive than even our foreign correspondents. Not wanting to upset this naturally taciturn man, I did not even ask my boss whether his exposés occurred during the short period of Soviet occupation before the war or immediately afterward. Most certainly the next step after exposing nationalists was arresting and sending them to the Gulag.

  “Perhaps it was dangerous,” I suggested. “After all, you could’ve been killed in the street.”

  “Times were hard, but we did a good job,” he confessed. “To tell you the truth, between us, I was given a pistol.”

  After the collapse of the Soviet Union, I found Polyakov’s name in the documents and articles about the plans to deport all Soviet Jews to the Far East. According to these materials, he had been the executive secretary of the committee created by Stalin to prepare this deportation. The very existence of such committee has been disputed. An anonymous author even claimed that he interviewed N.N. Polyakov about these plans shortly before his death. It was hard to believe that such an interview had indeed taken place. The former senior staff member of the Central Committee N.N. Polyakov who I knew was not capable of remorse and lived in complete harmony with his conscience.

  I keep asking myself questions to which I have no clear answers. Did he think that his “openness” could help to cover up his participation in Stalin’s plan to kill all of us? A dozen years later, did he want to show that he had had friends among Jews? And again, I vividly recall that late night of October 1952 and my father’s trembling hand pushing away a plate of untouched food. He told us about the eviction of one hundred Jewish families from suburban Davidkovo where Stalin’s favorite villa was located. He had just visited his friends there. His voice broke, “It could be merely a trial balloon.”