by Erika Holzer
Freedom Bridge
Erika Holzer
Caught in a web of dangerous intrigue, Dr. Kiril Andreyev plans his desperate escape from Soviet tyranny to freedom in the West.
But when his friend’s escape attempt ends in flames, Kiril finds his life threatened by a ruthless KGB officer.
Kiril’s last chance rests on a visiting American heart surgeon and his journalist wife. But even as Kiril plots his escape, he finds that his life depends on his materialistic mistress, on the rivalries of Soviet and East German intelligence agents, and on accidental betrayals by those he trusts most.
The story builds to a climax in a deadly confrontation on Glienicker Bridge, linking East Germany and West Berlin.
Will Dr. Kiril Andreyev succeed in his lifelong quest for freedom—and at what cost?
Erika Holzer
FREEDOM BRIDGE
A COLD WAR THRILLER
To men and women who share this common conviction:
Freedom is a right, universal and inalienable.
Historical Note
President and Mrs. Ronald Reagan arrived in Berlin on June 12, 1987. At 2:00 P.M. the President appeared at the Brandenburg Gate behind two panes of bulletproof glass.
Roughly 45,000 people were in attendance, among them Chancellor Helmut Kohl, West Berlin mayor Eberhard Diepgen, and West German president Richard von Weizsacker.
“We welcome change and openness,” Ronald Reagan declared, “for we believe that freedom and openness go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate.”
President of the United States of America, Ronald W. Reagan, then spoke six words that ushered in the coming of a new era…
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
Preface
When the iconic prime-mover of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin, died, he left behind the political, economic, and cultural embodiment of soul-killing collectivism and the institutionalized statist force necessary to implement it.
Lenin’s philosophical and political heirs, especially Josef Stalin, would carry Marxist-Leninist principles and programs to their logical extremes, leaving in the wake of their almost 80 years of power destroyed nations, tens of millions of corpses, and the moribund but never fully discredited killer viruses of collectivism and statism.
Chapter 1
It was during the Soviet Union’s collectivist-statist hell that, in 1917, eighteen-year-old Anna Petrovsky married fellow medical student, Yuri Glazov.
The next year, inspired by hatred of the Czar, grinding poverty suffered by the lower classes and the peasants, opposition to Russia’s war with Germany, and influenced by communist-socialist propaganda slogans such as “Peace, Land, and Bread,” Yuri Glazov decided to leave medical school and join the Revolution.
That night, as he told Anna of his decision, she took a step back and looked at him with luminous eyes. He stood before her with the pride of a gladiator poised for battle, she thought, with the dignity and flair of a centurion as he flashed a smile of perfect teeth… like the sun coming out.
“I’m glad you approve of my decision,” he said, the smile reaching his eyes as he pulled her into his arms.
But by 1918, Anna had learned that her husband had become a member of the Cheka, the dreaded secret political police—later to become the GPU, the NKVD, and by 1954, the KGB.
Yuri was a rising star, Anna thought bitterly as she recalled that moment of intimacy and candor soon after their son Aleksei had been born. Yuri had encouraged her to complete her medical studies. “Become a doctor for both of us,” he told her. “I’ve lost my taste for medicine.”
What he hadn’t told her was that he’d acquired a taste for blood.
From then on, she was determined to keep her husband away from their son, Aleksei, but long hours of study and an exhausting schedule punctuated with exams left her with little time at home. She watched helplessly as her son—under his father’s sometimes patient, sometimes boisterous tutelage—changed from a timid, introverted child into a self-centered bully.
Anna had vowed never to have another child. She’d lost that battle not once, but twice. Kiril, born in 1921, was conceived on a night when her usual deftness at putting her husband off with an excuse was met with unusual force fueled by vodka. Kolya, born the next year, was conceived under the same circumstances.
Though her pregnancies had been unwanted, Kiril and Kolya filled Anna’s life with optimism. It was impossible not to feel that way in the presence of two such wholesome beings with their boundless energy and playful inquisitiveness. They had also inherited some of her Petrovsky genes—miniature mirrors of her face and each other’s. Prominent cheek bones. Hair so thick and glossy she could never resist running her fingers through it, which caused them to erupt with giggles. Their eyes were the same dark brown as their hair, and she could tell that both boys would grow up to be tall and angular like her and her father before her.
Then one night in 1925, everyone’s life changed. Anna had been working late at the hospital. When she returned to the spacious GPU-provided apartment she shared with Yuri, she opened the front door, heard him mutter something from the bedroom, and then a thunderous crash. Her drunken husband had fallen out of bed—again. Dropping her medical bag, she rushed into the bedroom to attend to the besotted man, not realizing her bag had popped open.
Understandably, the two young boys had been drawn to some of the items that spilled from her medical bag, but it was four-year-old Kolya who grabbed hold of a pair of scissors.
Would she ever forget that scream? It had pierced her own heart even as Kolya punctured his chest with the scissors.
As soon as Anna had slowed the bleeding, she closed Kiril inside the boys’ bedroom, out of the reach of his father, and rushed Kolya to the hospital for x-rays. What they revealed was a mixed blessing.
The point of the scissors had lightly touched Kolya’s heart, but had not pierced it. The only way his heart could be examined for further damage was by sawing through his sternum, and if Kolya’s heart did need repair, Anna knew—as did her colleagues—that no one in the Soviet Union had the skills to perform such a difficult procedure. She would have to leave the country or Kolya would die.
When she returned home and confronted Yuri, he was hesitant—torn between GPU disapproval and remorse that his drunkenness had as good as pushed those scissors into his child’s heart. With steely resolve and a mercilessness she hadn’t known she possessed, Anna cut through her husband’s indecision by using his own interrogation techniques against him. She played on his guilt until he capitulated.
Yuri Glazov had called in every favor owed him by his secret police colleagues, swearing on his life that Anna and the child would return to the Soviet Union.
When the time came for her to leave, Anna’s “goodbye” was painfully brief. Aleksei was out somewhere with friends, so to see her off, there was only seven-year-old Kiril and Anna’s younger sister, Marissa, who promised to care for Kiril until Anna returned. As Anna bent down to embrace Kiril, her gold charm bracelet jangled. Dangling from it were a half-dozen miniature medical instruments. The child frantically tugged at one of them, not wanting his mother to leave, and it broke off and fell to the floor. Anna picked it up and pressed it into Kiril’s hand. “It’s called a scalpel, little one. Doctors use real ones,” she said softly. “Grandfather Petrovsky was a doctor too. He had all these tiny instruments put on my bracelet the year I entered medical
school. Will you do me a favor, Kiril? Will you keep the scalpel with you always? Until I get back?” she corrected herself as tears streamed down her face. “Take care of him until I return, Marissa,” she pleaded as Kiril began to cry. “Promise me you’ll protect him from his father.”
* * *
When the German doctors opened the four-year-old’s chest in April, they were shocked to see that although the scissors had not punctured Kolya’s heart, he suffered from a malfunction in his mitral valve which needed repair. As experienced as the German surgeons were, they were reluctant to attempt the operation. In 1923, Dr. Elliott Cutler of the Department of Surgery at Harvard Medical School had performed the world’s first successful heart valve surgery on a 12-year-old girl with rheumatic mitral stenosis, but they knew the procedure had a ninety percent mortality rate. As Kolya lay on the operating table with his chest open and his little heart beating, Anna told the surgeons to go ahead. It was when Kolya was recuperating from the successful operation that Anna first considered not returning to the Soviet Union.
While waiting for Kolya to recover, Anna had come to recognize the nature of the regime to which she would be sentencing her youngest son if she returned to the Soviet Union. Lenin and his Bolsheviks had done their work too well. Central planning, antithetical to the prosperity generated by a market economy, had become the means by which the state made all economic decisions. An agrarian country inhabited mainly by peasants was to become a nation of heavy industry, necessitating countless tons of coal, iron, and other natural resources to be torn from the earth by millions of slave laborers. Agriculture was to be collectivized, with private land ownership a relic of the past. Strict censorship prevailed. Police and intelligence agencies had unbridled power. There was no rule of law. And the Gulag—or worse—awaited enemies, and even friends, of the regime.
Anna knew her son Aleksei, completely under the sway of his father, was already lost to her. If she defected, Kiril would be cared for by an Enemy of the People, her sister Marissa. But if she went back, she would be sentencing Kolya to life in Lenin’s hell. For the first time, she realized with a kind of quiet horror that she wouldn’t only have to choose between family and freedom; she would be choosing between brothers. There were moments when she felt ready to die rather than make that choice—a choice no mother should have to make. It was one Anna would remember making every waking moment of her life, and often in her dreams.
What finally pushed her in one direction rather than the other was the knowledge that whatever she could do for Kiril if she did go back was infinitely less than what she could do for Kolya if she didn’t.
The waiting had been hard. First in Berlin, when the Nazi Party had marched into Nuremberg. Then more waiting for her fears to diminish, to be replaced by a growing conviction that she was safe from the long arm of Soviet retribution.
Gradually, she felt free to accept the attentions of a young American physician—one of the surgeons who’d assisted in the operation that had saved Kolya’s life. She waited with eagerness for him to complete the last days of a two-year fellowship program under the best heart surgeon in Germany. She waited with impatience for papers to come through which “proved” that she was a native-born German. For more papers that “documented” the American surgeon was the father of her German-born son. And finally, for American passports that permitted the three of them to set sail in November of 1927 from Bremen to the United States.
En route, the captain had married Anna “Petrovsky” to Dr. Max Brenner, giving her child a father and Anna a husband. It also gave her son a new name and the opportunity to live his life to the fullest in the freest country on earth.
Chapter 2
For the first three weeks of Anna and Kolya’s departure, Yuri Glazov had been able to placate his Cheka colleagues despite their insistent questions about when his wife and son would return—a task made more difficult by Anna’s unwillingness to communicate with him. Glazov’s excuses were plausible. The child’s heart surgery was more complicated than originally diagnosed. Tests were needed. Finding the best surgeon took time. The doctor’s operating schedule was overbooked. An operating theater had to be available. A judge’s order was necessary for such a major operation. Financial arrangements had to be made. Serious cardiac complications had arisen. But as three weeks turned into two months, his excuses became more transparent, and he knew it.
He also knew that during the past two months, GPU agents in Berlin had kept their Moscow superiors abreast of the developments. So when he was informed, along with his superiors, that the operation had been performed but that recovery time for repairing Kolya’s heart valve repair was lengthy, he celebrated by drinking himself into an alcoholic stupor and prevailed upon his widowed sister, Sofia Andreyev, to care for Aleksei.
Three more months passed, after which reports from the GPU agents in Berlin ceased. Yuri Glazov’s drinking continued unabated, his mental and physical condition deteriorating so rapidly that Sofia took over the care, not only of Aleksei, but—despite the pleas of Marissa Petrovsky—of seven-year-old Kiril as well.
Glazov’s GPU superior, Oleg Reznikov, had run out of patience, and Yuri Glazov’s descent into physical and mental oblivion was the least of his problems. He issued orders to his GPU agents in Berlin to find out exactly what had happened to Yuri’s wife and son.
The agents’ inquiries, having taken a back seat to more pressing intelligence assignments, took another two months. Finally, fearing for their lives, they reported to Reznikov in December that Anna Glazov and her child, together with one of the boy’s physicians, had the month before departed from Bremen for the United States—and that they had been married by the captain of the passenger ship S.S. Stuttgart.
Reznikov was apoplectic. Two citizens of the Soviet Union had defected to the United States despite the promises of a fellow GPU operative who had sworn on his life that his wife and child would return!
On his life.
If he were to save his own skin, Reznikov knew, he had to act quickly. He arranged for poison to be slipped into Glazov’s vodka, followed by a bad fall that broke the poor fellow’s neck. Since it was a way of life with Yuri—the drinking, the falls—Reznikov was confident an autopsy would be ruled out. It was.
As for the Glazov children—Aleksei, age eight and Kiril, three years younger—Reznikov came up with the perfect solution. The children would be raised by Yuri Glazov’s widowed sister, Sofia, reliable long-term member of the Communist Party.
Nor did the red-haired Marissa Petrovsky present a problem. Tainted by her sister’s traitorous conduct, she would only need to be reminded that the State was omnipotent. That the Gulag awaited.
Oleg Reznikov was not without a sense of humor. In Anna Glazov’s haste to defect with her German surgeon, she’d had no opportunity to divorce her husband. By arranging for Yuri’s death, he thought drily, he had done Anna the great service of obliterating the stigma of bigamy.
His sister, Sofia Andreyev lived in Novogorod, an important historic city in the Soviet Union that lay between Moscow and St. Petersburg. Using a stubby finger to push his wire-rimmed glasses up his nose, Reznikov decided that henceforth the surname of both children would be Andreyev. They would be told their mother and brother had deserted them and their father, Yuri Glazov, had died in the service of his country.
Reznikov burned the Glazov file and flushed the ashes down the toilet.
* * *
Asserting her Party status, the widow Andreyev immediately enrolled eight-year-old Aleksei in a nine-year school—the highest level of general educational institutions. Five-year-old Kiril would be enrolled in three years as soon as he turned eight.
As each boy turned ten, Sofia enrolled him in the Young Pioneers—a mass youth organization designed to turn young children into staunch Communists from an early age. The main trappings were the red banner flag and a red neck-scarf. There were salutes, parades, rallies, flag-raising events, camping, bonfires, festivals, and jamborees
. Membership was roughly from primary school through adolescence.
Sometime between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, each boy would be moved up into the Young Communist League. But it was the Young Pioneers experience that drove a wedge between Aleksei and Kiril.
Before moving in with his Aunt Sofia, Aleksei had doted on his father. Yuri Glazov had taught him to be regimented, obedient, distrustful, cagey, dishonest, cruel—a fearsome bully.
Kiril, three years younger, had never had much contact with his father when he was sober, which wasn’t often. Nor did he care for his aunt. For one thing, she took him away from his gentle and loving Aunt Marissa. For another, Aunt Sofia had thick legs and walked like a man—sometimes even wearing long pants! Her hair was black and very short. He often found himself staring at her stubby fingernails whenever she gripped his arm to drag him off someplace.
While Aleksei prospered in the junior communist organizations, becoming feared rather than liked, Kiril rebelled as best he could by disobeying orders, breaking discipline, and refusing to participate in overtly patriotic conduct.
When Sofia had had enough of Kiril’s disobedience, she decided to teach her young charge a lesson. Reminding him he was the son of an Enemy of the People, and that the state could do what it wished with him— from sending him to a Gulag camp to deporting him to some remote place in the Soviet Union, or even dumping him in some state-run orphanage—she took him to such an orphanage to underscore her point.
It was late November. The first thing Kiril saw was children without shoes, their bare feet frostbitten. Sofia described how starvation and malnutrition were the norm and child-inmates were left to forage through rubbish. She pointed out acute shortages of everything from shoes and clothing to blankets, and then took him to see four lucky children who shared a filthy lice-ridden mattress without blankets while the unlucky ones slept on the floor. Reliable heat was non-existent, as were washing facilities. Trips to the bathhouse were, at best, every other month. The absence of toilets forced the children to relieve themselves anywhere—yards, hallways, even where they slept—which, of course, led to disease. Typhus, dysentery, malaria, scurvy, and rickets were rampant. Corpses lay where they died until someone with a face-mask got around to removing them. The mortality rate in some orphanages—particularly in the Ukraine—was one-hundred percent, she told him. Beatings by older children and staff were common. So were sexual attacks.
