Eastern Approaches (3 page)

A spirit of contradiction has always, to some extent, guided my behaviour. This well-meant advice made up my mind. I was now determined to go to Russia as soon as possible. In the Private Secretaries at the Foreign Office I found surprised but ready allies, for I was the first member of the Service who had ever asked to go to such a notoriously unpleasant post, and the necessary dispositions were made with alacrity. And so, on that cold, rather dreary evening in February 1937, I found myself comfortably installed in a centrally heated first-class sleeper, travelling eastwards.

A
LL
next day we rattled across Europe. First, across northern Germany with its flat, well-ordered fields and tidy villages. On the platforms, comfortable-looking women with flaxen-haired children; the grey green of the Reichswehr uniforms; trolleys with beer and sausages. At the frontier I presented the
laissez-passer
which I had been given by Count Welczek, the German Ambassador in Paris. ‘Heil Hitler!’ it said. ‘Heil Hitler!’ barked the green-uniformed frontier police, saluting with outstretched arm as they handed it back to me. By the time we reached Poland it was dark, and Warsaw passed unseen in a swirl of lights.

A little before midnight, leaving the last Polish station behind us, we plunged again into the dark pine forests. The snow was piled high on either side of the track and stretched away dimly under the trees. Suddenly, as I looked out of the window, I saw that we were coming to a high barbed-wire fence, floodlit, and broken at intervals by watch-towers from which machine guns protruded. The train slowed down and then passed through a high wooden arch with over it a large five-pointed red star. We were in Russia.

Soldiers, their bright green-peaked caps adorned with red star, hammer and sickle and their long grey greatcoats reaching almost to the heels of their soft top boots, boarded the train, and a few moments later we steamed into the frontier station of Negoreloye.

Here we were to change trains. Outside, on the platform, the intense cold took one’s breath away. Then we were herded into the overpowering warmth of the Customs’ building. This was a fine big, bright room, decorated with murals depicting scenes from Soviet life. Across its walls streamed a procession of preternaturally happy and healthy soldiers, peasants, workers, old men, women and children, getting in the harvest, driving tractors, building houses and manipulating large and complicated machines. All round the room, in
half a dozen languages, golden letters a foot high invited the workers of the world to unite. In the corners stood pots, wrapped in crinkly pink paper, in which grew aspidistras.

It was then that I first noticed the smell, the smell which, for the next two and a half years, was to form an inescapable background to my life. It was not quite like anything that I had ever smelt before, a composite aroma compounded of various ingredient odours inextricably mingled one with another. There was always, so travellers in Imperial Russia tell me, an old Russian smell made up from the scent of black bread and sheepskin and vodka and unwashed humanity. Now to these were added the more modern smells of petrol and disinfectant and the clinging, cloying odour of Soviet soap. The resulting, slightly musty flavour pervades the whole country, penetrating every nook and cranny, from the Kremlin to the remotest hovel in Siberia. Since leaving Russia, I have smelt it once or twice again, for Russians in sufficiently large numbers seem to carry it with them abroad, and each time with that special power of evocation which smells possess, it has brought back with startling vividness the memories of those years.

I had a
laissez-passer
and the Customs formalities did not take long. Tentatively, I tried the Russian I had learnt in the Paris night clubs on the Customs officer who inspected my luggage, and found that he could understand it. Better still, I could understand what he said in reply, though some of his expressions, Soviet official jargon for the most part, were new to me. Two or three more Customs officials and frontier guards clustered round to observe the phenomenon of a foreigner who spoke even a few words of Russian. They were quite young, with tow-coloured hair and the high cheekbones and slightly flattened features of the Slav. Soon we were all laughing and joking as if we had known each other for years. An hour passed, during which nothing in particular happened; then another, during which the luggage was transferred bit by bit to the Moscow train. Looking at the clock, I saw that it was still midnight, or, rather, had become midnight once more. For we had gained (or was it lost?) two hours on crossing the frontier.

At last we boarded the train. I had been given a sleeping-compartment to myself. It was not unlike an ordinary European
wagon-lit
, but
higher and larger and more ornate, with a kind of Edwardian magnificence. On a brass plate I found the date of its construction: 1903. The conductor too, an old man with yellow parchment skin and long drooping moustaches, was of pre-revolutionary vintage and told me that he had held his present appointment since Tsarist days. With shaking hands he brought me clean sheets, and half a tumbler of vodka, and a saucer of caviare and some black bread and a glass of sweet weak tea with lemon in it. Presently the engine gave a long, wolf-like howl and we moved off at a steady fifteen miles an hour across the flat snow-covered plain in the direction of Minsk and Moscow. In a few minutes I was in bed and asleep.

We reached Moscow early next afternoon. It was bleak and bitterly cold. Underfoot the snow had been trampled into hard grey ice. Dan Lascelles, the First Secretary, met me at the station. He had been in Russia for eighteen months and said that he found it deeply depressing.

On the way from the station we passed through streets of high modern buildings, noisy with the clang of trams. Looking down side streets, I could see cobbles and mud and tumble-down wooden shacks. Everywhere there were houses and blocks of flats in varying stages of construction and demolition, some half built, some half pulled down. Jostling crowds thronged the pavements. Their faces were for the most part pale and their clothes drab. Half the women seemed pregnant.

Suddenly we were crossing the vast expanse of the Red Square. Snow was falling. A flag, floodlit in the failing light, flapped blood-red above the Kremlin. Under the high red wall stood Lenin’s massive mausoleum of dark red granite, with two sentries, motionless as statues standing on guard. A long straggling queue shuffled across the snow towards the entrance: townsfolk in dark, dingy clothes, peasant-women with handkerchiefs round their heads, peasants in felt boots and Asiatics in vast fur hats, turbans and brightly striped robes.

We stopped the car and got out. Immediately, as foreigners, we were hustled up to the head of the queue. Then, carried forward by the crowd, we swept past the guards with their fixed bayonets, through the low archway and down the steps. Inside, the subdued light of hidden electric bulbs was reflected from polished red basalt and heavy bronze. At the bottom of the steps we passed through a doorway into
the inner chamber. Lenin lay in a glass case, mummified, his head on a little flat pillow, the lower part of his body shrouded in a tattered flag; from the roof above hung other flags, the battle honours of the Revolution; round the glass case more soldiers stood on guard. There were more lights. As we moved on towards the body, we were forced into single file. For a moment we looked down on it: yellowish skin tightly drawn across the high cheekbones and domed forehead; the broad nose; the pointed, closely trimmed beard tilted upwards; an expression of faint, inscrutable amusement. ‘Move along,’ said the guards, shepherding the devout, docile crowd, and we were swept onwards and upwards into the daylight and the open air.

Facing us at the far end of the square rose the Cathedral of Saint Basil, a cluster of brightly coloured, fantastically twisted, onion-shaped domes, now an anti-God Museum. We got back into the car and, crossing the frozen Moscow River, a few moments later we drove through the gates of the Embassy, formerly the house of a sugar millionaire, a large ornate building of a pale yellow colour.

Across the river, spread out before us, lay the Kremlin, a city within a city. High fortress walls of faded rose-coloured brick, broken by watch-towers, encircled the whole. From within these rose the spires and domes and pinnacles of churches and palaces, their pale walls and golden cupolas gleaming against the leaden background of the darkening sky, heavy with the threat of more snow. As we watched, a flock of grey hooded crows, startled by some noise, rose from the roof of one of the palaces, flapped ponderously round, and then settled again. In between, the river lay white and frozen. Nearby a factory siren shrieked and from down the river came the hiss and thud of a pile-driver. The smell of Russia, wafted across from the city beyond the river, was stronger than ever. Later I was to see Leningrad, Peter the Great’s ‘window on Europe’, with its sad classical beauty and its symmetrical rows of shabby baroque palaces reflected in the still, green waters of the canals. That had a look of the West. But this, this strange barbaric conglomeration of shapes and styles and colours, this, surely, was already more than half way to Asia.

Next day I started work in the Chancery, reading back files, studying
the Annual Reports and, with my gradually increasing knowledge of Russian, ploughing laboriously through the turgid columns of the Soviet press.

In Paris much of our information on the political situation had come to us from our social contacts with the people directly concerned, French politicians, journalists, civil servants and other public figures. As a Secretary of the Embassy, it had been one of my duties to keep in touch with all sorts and conditions of people, from the extreme Right to the extreme Left. Like all Frenchmen, nothing pleased them better than to be given an opportunity of expounding their views on the political situation. The only difficulty was to decide which views were worth listening to.

In Moscow things were very different. Apart from routine dealings of the strictest formality with one or two frightened officials of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, whose attitude made it clear that they wished to have as little to do with us as possible, we had practically no contacts with Russians. Indeed, it was notoriously dangerous for Soviet citizens, even in the course of their official duties, to have any kind of dealings with foreigners, for by so doing, they were bound sooner or later to attract the attention of that ubiquitous organization, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or N.K.V.D.

At first some exception was made for members of the theatrical profession, actors, actresses and ballerinas, a few of whom the Authorities allowed or possibly, for reasons of their own, even encouraged to cultivate foreign diplomats, and during the first weeks after my arrival I attended a number of parties, arranged by the younger, unattached members of the diplomatic corps, and attended by some of the lesser lights of the stage and ballet. But inevitably something of a blight was cast on these proceedings by the knowledge that the charming young lady with whom one was conversing so amicably would in an hour or two be sitting down to draft a report of everything one had said to her, or, if she was unlucky, might have been arrested and be already on her way to Siberia.

Sometimes, with typical Russian hospitality and disregard for the consequences, our guests asked us to their homes, stuffy little bedrooms, which, owing to the housing shortage, they generally shared
with their entire families and one or two complete strangers thrown in. On these occasions, the most elaborate precautions were taken. Any preliminary telephoning was done from public call boxes; a day was chosen when our host’s less reliable room-mates were likely to be out; the car was left two or three blocks away. It was probable, indeed certain, that the authorities knew all about it, but it was not advisable to draw unnecessary attention to what was going on and thus invite attention from a horde of amateur spies and informers.

But, once the party had started and the vodka was circulating, all these troubles were soon forgotten; songs were sung, tears shed, healths drunk, glasses emptied and flung against the wall, more and more friends called in from neighbouring rooms to join in the fun, and all the paraphernalia of Slav charm and conviviality was brought into play. It was certainly not from any lack of inclination that the average Russian avoided contacts with foreigners. Indeed, if they had had their way, life would have been one long carousal. But soon even these rare excursions into Soviet society came to an end. Events took a turn which caused even the few Russians whom we knew to shun us like the plague.

Two or three months after my arrival, an official at the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs rang up one morning to give me the seemingly harmless message that there had been a last-minute change in the composition of the Soviet Delegation which was to attend the coronation of King George VI. Marshal Tukachevski, Chief of the Soviet General Staff and Deputy Commissar for Defence had, it appeared, a severe cold, and would be unable to go to England.

We thought no more of it until a day or two later, when we read in the papers that the Marshal had been transferred from his position as Deputy People’s Commissar for Defence to a relatively unimportant command. His cold was evidently having a damaging effect on his military career.

After that, things happened quickly. First, a brief communiqué was published announcing that Tukachevski and six or seven other Marshals or Generals of the Red Army had been charged with high treason and were on trial for their life. A second communiqué announced that they
had made a full confession of their guilt and been sentenced to death. A third brought the news of their execution. Even by the Soviet public, hardened to such shocks, the news was received with consternation. Up to a few days before these men had been held up as heroes, as examples of every military and civic virtue. Their portraits, larger than life size, were still to be seen publicly exhibited all over Moscow, side by side with those of Stalin and the members of the Politbureau. Now these had to be removed hastily and surreptitiously.

There was nothing new in the ‘liquidation’, as it was called, of public figures. For some years past numerous politicians and others had met with this fate, variously branded as ‘Trotskists’, ‘wreckers’, ‘Fascist spies’, ‘diversionists’ and so on; some after public trial, others as a result of what was known as an administrative measure.

But now the tempo of the ‘purge’, as it was called, changed. The sudden execution as traitors, without any warning, of a large part of the Soviet High Command proved the signal for mass liquidations on an unprecedented scale, for a reign of terror which had no parallel since the Revolution. Gaining momentum as it went, the purge swept like a whirlwind through the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Government, the Civil Service, the intelligentsia, industry, even through the ranks of the dreaded Secret Police itself. No one was safe. The highest and the lowest alike were dragged from their beds at three in the morning to vanish for ever. Nor was the round-up confined to Moscow alone. Throughout the country, in every Republic of the Union, men who were well known to have fought and worked all their lives for the Party and the Revolution disappeared, either never to be heard of again or else to appear again in due course in court and confess that they were spies or wreckers or the agents of a foreign power. Every day in the papers there were long lists of prominent public figures who had been ‘unmasked’ as traitors, while yet other liquidations could be deduced from the announcements that new men had been appointed to important posts without any indication of what had happened to their predecessors.