Stalin's Children (28 page)
Authors: Owen Matthews
'I so want to tell you my feelings, about my unending, deep, warm and eternally sad love for you,' my mother wrote. 'My letters seem dry because it's impossible to say in words what is happening - something wonderful and terrible at the same time. It's light and beautiful but burningly painful.'
Winter dosed in on Moscow, and, later and with less vehemence, on Oxford. Mervyn continued to write to whomever he thought might be of some help. But it was becoming clear that there would not be a swift resolution. He and Mila continued to speak by telephone for ten minutes once a fortnight, at ruinous cost. They agreed to alternate the calls - Mila would pay 1 ruble 40 per minute after filling in a complex system of forms and bank slips to book the call at the Central Telegraph on Gorky Street. Each call cost 15 rubles 70, a considerable chunk of her salary of eighty rubles per month. Yet to Mila it was worth every kopeck She prepared herself for her twice monthly telephone 'date' with Mervyn at the Central Telegraph as meticulously as if he'd really be there, instead of being a distant voice on the crackling line. She made sure not to wear shoes that Mervyn didn't like. She would ask her cousin Nadia to do her hair in a beehive, and she'd put on her new raincoat and take her new handbag. It is this vision of my mother that comes back to me most powerfully when I think about the letters: a small, limping figure in her handmade best outfit and carefully coiffed hair, walking alone to the trolleybus stop on Gogol Boulevard, proud that she is on her way to a date with a beautiful man of her very own.
In between campaigning, Mervyn had been putting the finishing touches to his first book, a sociological work on Soviet youth. He'd been working on it, on and off, since 1958, and now it was in galleys, ready for final correction. The work, Mervyn hoped, would give his sagging academic career a boost, and prove to be his passport to the permanent college fellowship he had coveted all his adult life. But now, as the battle lines were being drawn for a war of attrition, he had qualms. Could the book, mild stuff though it was, possibly offend the Soviets and harm his chances of getting Mila out?
After weeks of agonizing, he decided not to risk it. Mervyn called the publisher, Oxford University Press, and asked to withdraw the book from its list. There was much consternation at the press, and at St Anthony's. It was a fantastic sacrifice to make, and Mervyn probably knew at the time that he was doing his chances of academic success irreparable harm. 'From one point of view this is good,' he wrote to Mila, telling her of his decision. 'But so much effort, so much nervous energy, all for nothing . . .' As I sit, finishing my own book after five years of effort, my father's sacrifice seems unimaginably vast. For weeks afterwards, Mervyn could hardly bring himself to believe what he had done.
On 26 April 1965 Gerald Brooke, a young lecturer who Mervyn had known while they were both exchange students at Moscow State University, was arrested by the KGB. He was picked up at the Moscow apartment of an agent of the Popular Labour Union, or NTS, a small and hapless CIA-funded anti-Soviet organization. The organization was so hopelessly compromised, it later emerged, that there were almost as many Soviet informers as real, misguided agitators. Brooke was caught delivering propaganda leaflets to a pair of unfortunate NTS agents who had themselves been arrested a few days before. When Brooke arrived at their apartment, the KGB were waiting.
The NTS had once tried to recruit Mervyn at Oxford. Georgy Miller, an elderly Russian émigré, tried to persuade my father to deliver a package of papers to a contact in Moscow. My father had wisely refused; Miller, it seems, had had more success persuading Brooke. But it had been a close call. There, thought Mervyn as he read the news of Brooke's arrest, but for the Grace of God go I.
Brooke was put on trial for anti-Soviet agitation and sentenced to five years' imprisonment. The Soviet press used the case to launch an anti-Western campaign. Mervyn's old Moscow University friend Martin Dewhirst had also been accused of anti-Soviet activity during Brooke's trial, as was Peter Reddaway, another friend of Mervyn's who had also been expelled from the Soviet Union. But, mercifully, Mervyn's name was not mentioned at the trial or in the press. Why, he never found out.
Soon rumours began to circulate that the Soviet authorities were offering to swap Brooke for Peter and Helen Kroger, a pair of American Communists who had worked as Soviet spies, first as couriers to the Manhattan Project spy ring in the United States in the 1940s and then in lesser roles in the UK. The Krogers were serving twenty-year sentences for espionage in England after having been caught running a spy ring at Portland, Britain's nuclear submarine facility. Brooke, a mere graduate student, was by no means in the same league as the Krogers, and Mervyn and others suspected that he was simply a pawn in a larger game. The Krogers themselves confirmed this in a BBC interview in 1990. Brooke had been arrested specifically for use as a trading card to get the Krogers back, they confirmed, after intense lobbying in Moscow by their KGB controller in London, Konon Melody, a.k.a. Gordon Lonsdale, who had escaped arrest and made it home when the spy ring was rolled up but dedicated himself to securing the release of his old agents.
Mervyn hatched the idea that Mila could be included in any possible spy swap. 'There is already talk of a Brooke-Kroger exchange,' Mervyn wrote to Frederick Cumber, a businessman with good relations with the Soviet embassy. 'Which means two Ksfor one B. I personally think there are a number of excellent arguments for getting Mila tagged on to this. The Russians would regard it as a negligible concession, and they are certainly anxious to get the Krogers out. The months of separation are weighing very heavily on both of us, and not a day goes by without my giving a great deal of thought to the problem in hand. We live, so to speak, by letter. I have now received some 430 from Mila, and sent her about the same number (not to mention postcards).'
The glimmer of hope of a deal, however, soon dwindled after the British government announced that they would not countenance such an exchange: the Cabinet flatly refused to yield to Soviet blackmail.
In Moscow, Mila would pass her days listening to English language learning records. She repeated the simple stories about Nora and Harry and their lost dog, who was returned by the butcher along with a bill for the sausages the dog had eaten. Some of Mervyn's letters were posted in error in her neighbour Yevdokia's box, and Lyudmila picked the lock with knitting needles and a pair of scissors to retrieve them. Prey to growing paranoia, she asked Mervyn to send a list of his letters, suspecting her neighbours of stealing them. 'They are sharpening their knives,' Mila feared. She slept badly, plagued by nightmares of separation shot through with long-suppressed memories of her own childhood.
'Last night I dreamt a horrible dream. I screamed and cried and my sister thought I was ill. I can't believe the dream wasn't real, it was so vivid. So now everyone is asleep and I am still crying. My sister says the dream is a very bad omen. It seems I was born to this unhappiness . . . such burning pain, such perverse sophisticated torture. All my strength and thoughts are put into our love. There is no way back for me.'
The Foreign Office were now taking no pains to conceal their irritation at Mervyn's harangues. Howard Smith, the head of the 'Northern Department' which handled Russia, seemed to consider Mervyn, at best, a troublesome ne'er-do-well, and took his calls with increasing exasperation, bordering on rudeness.
'Dr Matthews' case is one with . . . which we are very familiar,' wrote Michael Stewart, the Foreign Secretary, to Laurie Pavitt, MP, who had written on Mervyn's behalf. 'He has been told repeatedly in correspondence and interviews with officials and Foreign Office ministers alike the reasons why we do not consider it right to single out his case for official representations. In view of the past history of the case there is really no possibility of a favourable reaction to official intervention. '
The low point in Matthews-Foreign Office relations came when Howard Smith came to dinner at St Antony's. Mervyn asked Fred, the College Steward, to ask Smith to come up to his rooms after dinner. When Smith appeared in the doorway, Mervyn lost control of himself and, as he put it later, 'expressed an earthy view of his person'.
'Smith came back into the Common Room visibly shaken,' Mervyn's friend Harry Willets told him later. 'He told everyone in hearing that you had been sprawled in an armchair and called him "the shit of Smiths" when he opened your door. His cigar had gone out.' Mervyn's recollection is that he only called Smith 'a fart'. Perhaps he called him both.
It was the last nail in the coffin of Mervyn's Oxford career. His research had ground to a halt and his book had been withdrawn, he'd been on the front page of the
Daily Mail,
and now this. Deakin summoned Mervyn to his house for an admonitory glass of sherry. 'Rude and totally unacceptable,' said Deakin in clipped tones. 'And he was a guest of the college, too. We cannot possibly put up with that sort of thing. Have you heard anything more about the job going at Glasgow? Perhaps it would be better for you to go up north and get away from things.'
Oxford, my father's most cherished dream after Lyudmila herself, was over. Harry Willets confirmed that Mervyn's research fellowship was being terminated over a pint in the Lamb and Flag on St Giles' Street. Being thrown out of Oxford was a fall from grace which was to scar Mervyn more profoundly than anything else in his life; it was a blow which was to poison his every subsequent achievement.
I have gone mad with love.
Mila to Mervyn, 14 December 1964
MOSCOW, I found, seemed to attract people who were ferociously smart, but often hungry and damaged, fleeing failure or trying to prove something to the world. Like a traumatic love affair, it could change people for ever. And like a love affair, or a drug, it would be exhilarating at first, but then as it wore on it reclaimed the buzz it had given, with interest. 'What, you thought all that was for free?' my
Moscow Times
colleague Jonas Bernstein would cackle whenever I showed up for work complaining of a hangover or nursing strange bruises. I suppose the answer was yes, we all did.
Moscow reached the apogee of its self-congratulatory hubris in late summer of 1997. The city's mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, decided that Moscow's 850th anniversary should be turned into a celebration of the capital's wealth and success, decreeing a massive public celebration. On the day, Luzhkov rode in triumph past the old Central Telegraph in a motorized Grecian wine bowl as five million revellers packed the centre of Moscow. Luciano Pavarotti sang on Red Square and Jean Michel Jarre performed a
son-et-lumière
on the Lenin Hills, projecting his lasers on the soaring bulk of Moscow State University. I have a memory of staggering among a pile of debris behind a row of vodka kiosks near Park Kultury looking for a place to pee, and discovering a couple copulating among the discarded beer bottles and crisp packets. It was a night of misrule; as Jarre's lasers blossomed over the city, crowds of youths rode on the roofs of packed trolleybuses and let off firecrackers in the crowd.
Yet at the same time Moscow had a filthy underbelly which people like Mayor Luzhkov wished didn't exist. I spent two days at Kursky Station, below the platforms in a warren of dingy cubby holes inhabited by homeless people who had fallen as far as it was possible to fall. As the evening rush hour died down, the station's secret dwellers would cautiously emerge from their underground world below the underpasses and reclaim the station as their own. Clambering down on to the railway tracks, I found families of tramps who lived in nests of cardboard and litter beneath the platforms. I shared beers with a gang of teenage pickpockets who handed half their takings to the police as protection money. A thirteen-year-old prostitute with a face that was plastered with white make-up and dirty hair held up with a shiny plastic clip tried to chat me up. I bought her a can of gin and tonic, and she explained that she had run away from a remote village where her alcoholic parents had beat her. 'But now I'm here in the big city,' she said, brightening, surveying her concrete world of litter and neon. 'I've always dreamed of living here.'
I found other runaways hiding in a maze of underground heating ducts on the outskirts of the city. These kids scratched a living by picking pockets, fetching and carrying for the local market traders, all to fuel their habit of sniffing a cheap brand of glue called Moment. They were scruffy and emaciated but irrepressibly friendly and cocky, even though under constant threat from marauding homosexuals who tried to rape them, the police who periodically rounded them up, and American missionaries who brought them food and made them pray to Jesus. They were cunning and cynical as rats, but they lived like a family, helping the youngest ones who were just eight or nine, feeding and instructing them in the hard ways of their little world. They invited me into their den with great pride and asked me shyly to buy them hot dogs, the greatest treat they could imagine.
In August of that year, I moved into a new apartment on Petrovka Street. My landlady on Starokonushenny Pereulok, caught up in the frenzy of the economic boom, tried to hike my rent by 50 per cent with two days' notice. I promised to pay, then did a late-night runner.
My new flatmate was a delightful Canadian flower-child turned stockbroker called Patti. Patti, like the thousands of expatriates who crowded into Moscow at that time, was riding high on the back of a giant boom which had followed Boris Yeltsin's re-election the year before. Good times were rolling, for those who positioned themselves to take advantage of the sale of the century.
Moscow's rich young foreigners were the conquistadors of capitalism, living in vast apartments once occupied by Stalin's ministers, throwing epic parties in what had been the Politburo's most luxurious dachas, scooting off for weekends in Ibiza, taking their pick of the conquered land's womenfolk and generally reaping the fruits of a hundred billion dollars' worth of Cold War NATO military spending which allowed them to be there. By day they would trade stocks, buy companies and peddle FMCGs - Fast Moving Consumer Goods - to the Russian masses, making fortunes selling Tampax, Marlboros and deodorant. By night they cruised around Moscow in polished black SUV s, guzzling cocaine and accumulating an entourage of astonishingly beautiful girlfriends.
