Stalin's Children (21 page)

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Soon after Georges' engagement party, Vadim invited Mervyn to dinner at the Praga restaurant to celebrate Vadim's newly won MA degree in oriental studies. The other guests were mostly elderly academics, Vadim's supervisors and department heads. But opposite Mervyn sat an elegantly dressed man, about five years his senior, with a distinctive grey streak in his combed-back hair. Vadim whispered to Mervyn that the man's name was Alexei, a 'research assistant' to his mysterious uncle. But he didn't introduce them, and they did not speak. Alexei made a long, witty toast. Mervyn made conversation with his stony-faced neighbours and drank too much.

A few days later Vadim called to pass on a message from Alexei: he wanted to invite Mervyn and Vadim to join him for an evening at the Bolshoi ballet. Mervyn was surprised, and flattered. Though they hadn't spoken at dinner, Alexei was probably interested to meet a foreigner, Mervyn reasoned. He accepted the invitation.

Alexei was poised and confident, a true member of the post-war Moscow
nomenklatura,
or official élite. He wore foreign-made clothes and had travelled; his wife, Inna Vadimovna, was tall and slim, and, Mervyn noticed when they met at the Bolshoi, wore an expensive gold bracelet with a watch set in it. Alexei remarked proudly that his wife was 'a typical Soviet woman'. Mervyn thought of his cleaner, Anna Pavlovna, panting to the bus stop with her string bags full of eggs from the university canteen. She seemed to Mervyn to be a more typical Soviet woman.

The evening was a success. Alexei loved ballet, and he and Mervyn had a friendly conversation during the interval, as the more philistine Vadim hovered around the buffet, looking at girls. Alexei began calling Mervyn regularly, inviting him out to dinner at the Aragvi, at the Baku, the Metropole Hotel, the National Hotel- the finest restaurants Moscow could offer. Alexei had money, and he had some mysterious special relationship with the mâitres d'hðtel of the city, booking at short notice, always welcomed with an obsequious smile and shown to a good table or private room.

Alexei was more forward than Vadim in conversation, more overtly political, less chummy. He never spoke of women, and drank in moderation. Alexei expressed interest in Mervyn's childhood, his background, but Mervyn found from his trite responses that he could not conceive of poverty, or class, beyond Marxist-Leninist platitudes. An irony: Alexei, the Soviet champion of the international working class, himself from a privileged élite, and Mervyn, a naïve but sincere British patriot, profoundly anti-Communist, yet in Marxist terms a natural revolutionary.

Over one of their ever more frequent dinners, Mervyn and Alexei got on to the subject of the strict visa regime, surveillance and spies. They were at the National Hotel, a favourite watering hole of the capital's beau monde for the best part of the century. Alexei remarked that the Soviet Union had to be very careful of foreign spies. Mervyn, perhaps to prove that he wasn't one of 'them', to neutralize the implicit suspicion, jokingly told Alexei that it was a regular source of amusement at the embassy that there was a goons' booth under the Bolshoi Kamenny Bridge, just round the corner from the embassy, where KGB men would play dominoes while waiting to be called out.

Alexei listened with interest, suddenly even more serious, carefully questioning Mervyn on where the booth was. After dinner he insisted that they drive under the bridge to take a look. Perhaps sensing Mervyn's discomfort, Alexei made a disparaging remark about the work of MI5 and MI6, as though to suggest that if Mervyn were on the payroll he would know about it. Mervyn didn't argue with him.

When Mervyn drove past the bridge a few days later he noticed that the booth and the goons were gone.

Vadim arranged another evening at his uncle's dacha. As before, they went in a ZiL, but this time Vadim had brought along a ski instructor friend and three plump but lively girls. They went cross-country skiing at night among the pines, ungainly Mervyn falling frequently into snow banks as the girls giggled. They warmed up with vodka in front of the fireplace, and then retired upstairs with their respective girls. Mervyn's girl was large and, he thought, on the old side. But she seemed willing enough to play the role of his bed mate for the night, and it would have been rude to refuse.

Mervyn and Alexei sat in a private room at the Aragvi, well into the Tsinandali wine. On the table in front of them were the ruins of a gigantic meal of lamb kebabs, green bean
lobio
and
khatchapuri
cheese bread. Alexei was, for once, in an expansive mood, striking the avuncular tone he sometimes used with Mervyn. He had decided to take a more active interest in Mervyn's career, he announced. Would Mervyn like to do some travelling? If so, where? Mervyn, delighted, unthinkingly said Mongolia. Not possible, said Alexei. How about somewhere in the Soviet Union? Mervyn suggested Siberia. Alexei was enthusiastic. The great Bratsk Dam, perhaps? Lake Baikal? Mervyn was thrilled and agreed immediately. They drank a toast to seal the bargain.

At what point did Mervyn realize that he was getting in too deep? He may have been naïve, but surely not that naive. Alexei's KGB connections were becoming increasingly obvious - the disparaging remarks about British intelligence, the mysterious and prompt disappearance of the domino-playing 'goons' under the bridge, the leading questions about Mervyn's politics. It was surely blindingly obvious to Mervyn that he was being recruited.

I think the truth is that they never really understood each other. Alexei's dogma prevented him from seeing the deeprooted patriotism of Mervyn's class and generation, who considered it the height of bad taste to leave a cinema before 'God Save the King' was over. And Mervyn's vanity got in the way of ever seriously questioning why it was that Alexei was courting him, an obscure research student, so assiduously, spending so much money and time. I am quite sure that Mervyn knew he was flirting with the KGB. What he didn't know was just what a dangerous game that could prove to be. Even as he agreed to the Siberia trip, he must have strongly suspected that some time, sooner or later, he would be asked to pay the bill. But adventurousness - again, that now longburied adventurousness - won out. Whatever happened, it would be exciting. And wasn't excitement exactly what he had come to Russia to find?

Flying over Siberia at night, in winter, there is an eerie sense of having flown off the edge of the world. The dreamscape of snow-covered forests below seems to stretch black and unbroken not just to the horizon but beyond, for ever. When I visited Baikal in 1995, en route to Mongolia - which my father never did get to see - I flew in a tiny Soviet aeroplane, a vintage An-24 which must have begun its long career in my father's day. It lurched in the slipstream, the roar of the propellers drowning out conversation as we flew on into the night, the light dying behind us in the west.

Solzhenitsyn named the network of prison camps which stretched across the Soviet Union the Gulag Archipelago. But in truth all of Russia is an archipelago, a string of isolated islands of warmth and light strung out in a hostile sea of emptiness. Somewhere in this very vastness of Russia lies one key to the Russian experience. The vagueness and fatalism born of living in a land which once took half a year to cross; a chronic resignation before the whims of authority born of the historic impossibility of communicating with the outposts of such an ungovernably huge empire. When I read of Peter the Great's famous
ukaz
(decree) angrily ordering his citizens to obey all previous
ukazy,
I pictured him as a mad radio operator sending indignant messages into space, and receiving only faint cosmic echoes in reply.

Phone lines, satellite TV and Aeroflot appear to have brought Russia closer together, but in some ways electronic communications only serve to deepen the sense of uncrossable distance. Russia remains the largest country in the world; even after the loss of 17 per cent of its territory after the fall of the Soviet Union, it still spans eleven time zones. A former State TV cameraman once told me that the television signal of
Vremya,
the Soviet nightly news program me, had to be repeatedly bounced off the stratosphere to compensate for the seventy-degree curvature of the earth between Moscow and the far-eastern extremity of the country at Chukotka. By the mid-1990s one could easily direct-dial the Pacific coastal regions of Kamchatka or Magadan, but the time difference was almost the same as to New York. The final section of highway linking European Russia to the Far East was completed only in 2002 - before that hundreds of miles of makeshift road ran upon the ice of the frozen Amur River, and were passable only in winter.

No wonder, then, that most of those born to life in these great, empty spaces grow up with an instinctive sense of helplessness in the face of the impossible physical realities which define their lives. These physical limitations seem to make the constraints of human making all the easier to accept. 'God is high up and the Tsar is far,' goes the old Russian saying, and it could be no coincidence that one of the central teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church was of
smireniye,
or submission to the burden the Lord has given believers to bear. The combined hostility of distance and climate seems to conspire to wither the spirit and humble the ambition of all but the strongest. Anton Chekhov caught this ennui in his
Three Sisters,
a study of three young women crushed by provincial isolation, their youthful hopes and spirit slowly but inexorably extinguished by Russia's infinite inertia. Even life in Moscow, where the sophisticated élite is cocooned from the isolation and medieval darkness of the village, seems defined in a powerful but intangible way by the greatness of the land that surrounds it, just as life on board ship is pervaded by a knowledge of the deep, cold sea all around.

Alexei and Mervyn flew to Siberia in April 1960, as Mervyn's first term at Moscow State University drew to an end. They travelled across the white vastness of Russia in a series of tiny An-24 planes. Their first stop was Novosibirsk, a new, grey industrial sprawl built around a low-rise Tsarist frontier town, all tumbledown log huts and sagging merchants' houses in the centre and wide boulevards lined with identical apartment blocks on the outskirts. Mervyn found it depressing and soulless, despite Alexei's apparently genuine enthusiasm.

They moved on to Bratsk, little more than a shantytown then. Beyond Bratsk lay a great frozen river, and a vast, half-melted lake. A great Socialist lake, Alexei explained, created by the will of the people and the labour of a million workers. In front of the lake stood a great concrete and steel hydroelectric dam, taming nature for the greater good of the workers' paradise.

They checked into a makeshift Intourist hotel, a jerry-built construction among the muddy streets, put up to accommodate visiting dignitaries who were brought to be impressed by the great hydroelectric wonder. They visited the dam the next morning. The spring floodwater roared through the turbines, the concrete curved balletically into the distance. Mervyn agreed with Alexei that it was marvellous, quite marvellous. Alexei nodded silently in approval. Young Mervyn was coming along nicely. 'Was there no end to the exciting surprises in the wonderland which was Russia?' my father wrote later in his memoirs - with irony, or in an echo of his young enthusiasm, I cannot decide.

The last leg of Alexei's grand Siberian tour, planned as a tourist expedition but which had become, unaccountably, a sort of official progress through the wonders of Socialism, was Irkutsk and Baikal. Forest, again endless forest, a horizon so vast it seemed to belong in the landscape of a dream. Lake Baikal, the biggest lake in the world, was flat and blinding white, a gigantic prairie of ice over an expanse of cold, black water 5,000 feet deep.

'In Baikal there are over 300 species of fish,' enthused the plump collective farm director who had mysteriously got wind of Alexei's arrival with his distinguished foreign visitor. The three men stood in silence on the creaking ice of the lake, shivering in the cold, fresh wind. Alexei, his usual composure ruffled by a night in a rude peasant hut, gazed irritably at the shore. Mervyn looked dubiously at the thin spring ice below his feet, which sagged noticeably as they walked.

'It's not the ice, it's what's underneath that's frightening,' remarked Alexei, seeing Mervyn's discomfort.

'Let's go out a bit further,' said the director.

Alexei finally made his offer over a lunch of
pelmeni
dumplings, Siberian fish soup and vodka at Irkutsk Airport, just before they set off back to Moscow. Mervyn had been halfexpecting the question, but it was still a shock when it came. Was Mervyn prepared to work for 'the cause of international peace'?

Alexei, hunched forward at the table with a look of utmost seriousness in his eyes, was at his most persuasive. His extolling of the virtues of the just Soviet society were familiar: Mervyn was from a poor family, he had seen at first hand the fairness of Soviet life. Now, the time had come to offer Mervyn an opportunity to do something about the injustice of the world. Though Alexei didn't say the word, it was clear to both of them that this meant working for the KGB.

Mervyn, confounding Alexei's theories of class warfare, refused. He couldn't betray his country, he said. The lunch ended with accusations and petulance. For the first time since Mervyn had known him, Alexei's icy charm cracked and he harangued Mervyn for being spoiled, hypocritical, and ungrateful. Mervyn sat embarrassed and silent.

Back in Moscow, after a long, tense flight, the plane bumped to a halt on the rain-washed tarmac of Vnukovo Airport. As they stood, side by side, waiting for their luggage to be unloaded, Alexei apologized, retreating. 'Let's forget it. I was wrong. It was the wrong time. I would like to see you again in Moscow. Let's just be friends and forget this.' They parted awkwardly, Mervyn embarrassed more than scared by this not entirely unexpected outcome.