Stalin's Children (31 page)

From Stockholm on 8 September he wrote, 'After our meetings in these northern towns my life has again begun to acquire a meaning. . . I think that things will never again be as bad as they were.' Mila avoided mentioning the meetings directly in her letters. She had a bad scare when she read that a Norwegian ferry had sunk in the Skagerrak, but looked at an atlas and convinced herself that Mervyn could not have been on it.

My father decided to return to his old idea of applying for a Soviet visa in another country, in the hope that one would be issued in error. On 12 December 1966 he took a night ferry from Southend to Ostend, then a train to Brussels. On the first night he stayed in a cheap but clean hotel near the Gare du Nord, which turned out to be a busy brothel. A fat African guest in the next room kept him awake with his snoring. Mervyn found an agency which did tours to Moscow - Belgatourist on the rue des Paroissiens - and booked a five-day trip. Mervyn filled out the application using a different spelling of his surname to the usual, taking advantage of the fact that 'Matthews' can be transliterated at least a dozen different ways in Cyrillic. As he had hoped, the passport and visa came back a day later; his name had gone unnoticed when the Soviet embassy checked it against the blacklists.

Two days later he was in Moscow, once again staying at the National Hotel. It was strange to be back, and deeply worrying to be around so many goons who were busy watching the foreigners at the hotel. Because my father hadn't been sure that the plan would work, he hadn't warned Mila. He called her the evening he arrived from a public phone booth on Mokhovaya Street. She was amazed to hear he was in Moscow. Because he would surely be under routine surveillance in any case, he decided not to use any subterfuge. The next morning Mila came running up Mokhovaya to greet him as he waited outside the National Hotel. They went back to Mila's room off the Arbat, which was unchanged. Then they telephoned the Palace of Weddings, and were told that Efremova, the director, would be in on Monday. The next day was Christmas, which Mila and Mervyn spent locked in Mila's room. In the afternoon they walked to the Central Telegraph to send Mervyn's mother a seasonal telegram.

On Monday they went again to see Efremova at the Palace of Weddings, who was plainly terrified to see Mervyn without official notification. She mumbled something about the 'normal procedures', and showed them out. But at least she had received them. Mervyn phoned the embassy, and the duty vice consul seemed surprisingly eager to help when the embassy opened for business the next day.

The next morning, however, as he stepped out of the National Hotel, Mervyn felt silent alarm bells ringing like a discordant note in a horror film - the goons were out in force, and keeping him under close surveillance. It was now just a question of time. That afternoon there was a message for him at the desk to contact Intourist at once. At the Intourist office he was told that his visa was being annulled and he had to leave immediately. Mila was distraught when she heard the news. 'But Mervusya, we can't do anything now,' she sobbed.

At four that afternoon Mervyn was summoned to the gloomy OVIR office once again. The deputy head was waiting, and said just one sentence, twice: 'You must leave Russia as soon as possible, today or tomorrow, on the first available plane.'

There was no option but to go. If the KGB turned nasty Mervyn could very well end up in jail along with Brooke, another useful bargaining chip to be weighed against the Krogers. For the third time in five months, Mila saw him off from Soviet soil - except this time it must truly have seemed like the last. To be caught again in Russia would mean prison for sure.

There was some press coverage of Mervyn's second expulsion. The Foreign Office had received an official note of protest at Mervyn's visit from the Soviet Foreign Ministry, but neither Mervyn nor the press knew it at the time. Des Zwar contacted Mervyn, asking for his cooperation on a big piece for the
People
on how to enter Russia illegally, which Mervyn emphatically turned down.

The press coverage did have one unexpected result. Mervyn got a phone call from Derek Deason, who had himself been expelled from the Soviet Union in October 1964, and had also left a fiancée behind. Mervyn suggested they meet at a pub near Victoria Station, the Albert - a dingy place near my school where, thirty years later, I was often to be found drinking illicitly with fellow sixth-formers. Derek was Mervyn's age, and worked as a scaleman - a checker of scales - at the Dagenham Ford motor works. He had a broad, honest face and Mervyn immediately took to him. While on holiday on the Black Sea coast in the summer of 1964 Derek had met Eleonora Ginzburg, a Russian-Jewish English-language teacher from Moscow. They had fallen in love, and he had proposed to her. The marriage date was set for October. Derek arrived in Moscow with some days to spare, and because Eleonora lived with her sister in a cramped flat he decided to go to Sochi for a few days before the wedding. In Sochi he fell in with some Russians who organized a stag night for him. Derek, unused to vodka, got drunk and obstreperous, and the police were called. They bundled him on a plane to Moscow, and then he was put on another to London without having a chance to call Eleonora. The first she heard from him was when he called, in tears, from London. Derek had applied for an entry visa nine times since, and been refused.

Mervyn found Derek a spirited and intelligent companion in arms, and they met regularly in the Albert and another quiet pub called the Audley to plan their campaign. Unlike Mervyn, Derek had no history of confrontation with the Soviet authorities, and he had more to lose by associating with Mervyn than vice versa. Still, for both of them, having at least one ally was a great comfort. They exchanged Mila and Eleonora's addresses so the two could meet in Moscow.

Return to the Soviet Union was now too risky; even Mervyn realized that he could not push his luck any further. But the Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin was due for a state visit to London, and would be a perfect target for Mervyn's by now well-practised lobbying. Mervyn decided to hand him a letter, in time-honoured tradition. He wrote to the Queen, who was to receive Kosygin, beforehand to ask her to raise the matter, but received only a formal reply saying that his letter had been noted by Her Majesty. He contacted the Special Branch to try and arrange a time and place to hand Kosygin his letter without causing embarrassment. The officer he saw was noncommittal, and Mervyn found, to his grim amusement more than anything else, that he was being followed by the Special Branch on the streets of London. He went to Downing Street and waited opposite Number 10, but KGB goons guarding Kosygin warned him to stay away. At the Houses of Parliament he joined a crowd and told a plain-clothes police inspector that he was planning to hand over a letter.

'You can't do that,' the policeman told him.

'But I'm not breaking any law.'

'If you step out from the crowd,' said the inspector, shattering Mervyn's lifelong trust in the British police, 'we'll take you to the station and pin something on you.'

The third and last attempt to get to Kosygin was at the Victoria &Albert Museum, where he and Harold Wilson were visiting an exhibition devoted to Anglo-Soviet cooperation. Again, he could get nowhere near Kosygin. But as the Soviet Premier was driven away Wilson was left standing for a few moments at the curb, waiting for his own car to pull up. Mervyn pushed forward, and said, 'What about our fiancées, Mr Wilson?' Wilson turned, a flash of recognition in his eyes.

'I know you!' said the Prime Minister, and got into his car. The letter stayed in Mervyn's pocket, undelivered.

Mervyn came up with a new idea. Perhaps he could get his hands on something valuable to the Soviets which he could barter for Mila's freedom? Perhaps some undiscovered manuscripts by Vladimir Lenin - known in the trade as Leniniana of the sort Mila's colleagues at the Institute of Marxism and Leninism had spent much of their working lives translating and acquiring? The Russians had an insatiable appetite for Lenin's writings from the periods he'd spent in western Europe from 1907 to 1917, fomenting revolution and bickering peevishly with his fellow Communists. Maybe, for once in Mila's life, dead papers could become a life-giving thing.

Mervyn, his imagination fired, rushed to the British Library to get some samples of Lenin's handwriting. He ordered up Lenin's application for a reader's ticket, in the name of 'Jacob Richter', and studied the formation of the Latin letters, taking notes for future reference in case he ever got hold of any Leniniana which might be for sale. As he returned the papers to the Library desk he reflected that he could be holding the keys to Mila's freedom in his hands.

Mervyn trawled his émigré contacts for possible undiscovered archives. In Paris he tracked down Grigory Aleksinsky, who had been a socialist deputy for St Petersburg in the Second Duma of spring 1907. He had known Lenin and corresponded with the Russian Marxist economist Georgy Plekhanov. Aleksinsky's son, also Grigory, or Grégoire, was affable enough, in his mid-forties, and worked as some kind of plain-clothes functionary of the French police or security services. Mervyn took him out to dinner.

'First we drank an aperitif together,' Mervyn wrote to Mila, without telling her the real purpose of the meeting. 'Then we went to have a meal at a "cheap" restaurant, (but the
bill
for the two of us was nearly three poundsl] That was with wine, which made my head spin. After that he took me to his home, where his wife was waiting with tea and gateaux. Their apartment was luxurious, and they had three magnificent samovars. There was lively conversation but my host kept switching from Russian to French in each sentence, so in the end I did not know which language I was supposed to be speaking!'

Aleksinsky senior was produced, a frail old man who mumbled his greetings. They showed Mervyn the archive, in boxes, but didn't allow him to open any. The Soviets had shown considerable interest, but the old man was passionately anti-Soviet, and refused to sell. But to Mervyn, they might be prepared to sell the archive for just 50,000 francs - 3,700 pounds, or about a year and a half of Mervyn's salary.

Despite the huge cost, Mervyn was excited. He wrote to Mila's old boss at the Institute of Marxism and Leninism, Pyotr Nikolayevich Pospelov, without mentioning the reason for his interest in Leniniana.

'I know that Soviet historians make great efforts to seek out manuscripts of Lenin in western Europe and return them to the homeland of the Great Leader of the Great October Revolution,' wrote Mervyn in his best Marxistese. 'I have recently discovered that the valuable archives of Grigory A. Aleksinsky, a member of the State Duma and close acquaintance of Lenin, are in Paris. At the present time Mr Aleksinsky's son, whom I know well, is giving me the opportunity to buy his father's archives. I personally consider that Moscow is the proper place for Lenin's documents, and I would like to assist in passing them to Soviet historians.'

The Soviets were enthusiastic. Pospelov's successor, Pyotr Fedoseyev, asked for more information. It was a ray of hope.

* * *

Mila took a holiday trip to Mikhailovskoye, Pushkin's estate, and wandered through it looking admiringly at the English furniture. The air was cold and snowy, and she bought Antonovka apples by Pushkin's grave in Sviatogorsk. She walked alone around the estate's famous park. 'Need I say how passionately I wanted to have you near?' she wrote. 'I asked the old trees, the forest and the birds and the air to grant this wish, then I began talking out loud with you, very, very gently I recited Pushkin's poems. Mervyn, my dear, so much love and tenderness has accumulated within me, how can I give it to you? I love you more and more every day.'

On her return to Moscow, she spoke to Mervyn at the Central Telegraph. Not wanting to raise false hope, he said nothing of his plans. Still, she must have felt some optimism in his voice; walking home from her 'phone call of life' Mila sang, 'Sweetheart, remember when days are forlorn; It is always darkest before the dawn.'

'We are two pendulums swinging at the same rhythm,' she wrote that night. 'I kiss the dear end of your pendulum.' She drew two stick figures with giant hearts on the letter.

Mervyn began writing to friends and acquaintances for money. Isaiah Berlin replied that he knew no one in Oxford 'with a large bank account and a generous heart'. Rauf Khahil, an old Oxford friend whose family owned so much of Egypt that Raufwould claim that he 'couldn't bear to think about it', had inconveniently dropped dead at his lectern a few years before while lecturing in Africa. Another friend, Priscilla Johnson at Harvard, was persuaded to ask Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva, who had defected to the West in 1967, to part with some of her handsome book royalties in the cause of Mila's liberation, but to no avail. Lord Thompson of Fleet, the press baron, with whom Mervyn had managed to wangle a two-minute meeting, gave no money, but offered good advice. Ask the sellers to give you an option, Thompson said as he gave Mervyn a lift in his big grey Rolls-Royce, 'it won't cost much and it'll leave your hands free'.

But without money, Mervyn's plan could get nowhere. Worse, when Mervyn went to the Maurice Thorez Institute of Marxism in Paris to see their Lenin expert, M. Lejeune, he firmly pronounced the notes in the Aleksinsky archive not to be Lenin's writing.

Autumn fell in London, and the great paper chase seemed to be fizzling out. Mervyn's meetings with Derek grew more despondent. The Finns had stopped their trips to the Baltics, and visits to Russia were out of the question. The Lenin papers had proved a flop, and his bridges were well and truly burned with the KGB. He had no money, and the end of the five years that my father had given himself to get Mila out of the Soviet Union loomed. The sharp desperation of their early love letters had worn down to a dull ache; Mervyn's optimism became more and more forced. Truly, it seemed as though the end of the affair was near.

There was another lead - and though my father refused to admit it to himself, it was a last-ditch effort. A friend put him in touch with Pavel Ivanovich Veselov, a Stockholm-based Russian émigré who called himself a 'juridical consultant'. He specialized in getting people out of the Soviet Union and had had eleven successes so far. His methods were unspectacularcareful documentation, campaigns in the Swedish press, string-pulling, much the same as Mervyn was doing already. It was a faint hope, but Mervyn had few other options.