IT WAS NOT ONLY my father who was delighted when Andropov came to power, but also the whole of the KGB. And as soon as he had power, the old spy pursued a two-pronged policy. He ruthlessly put down dissent, including punishing people who committed economic crimes, and simultaneously he set about loosening the same reins a little by allowing a small, KGB-controlled experiment in free trade.
This was hugely significant in terms of how Russia has developed. A few carefully chosen so-called
What Andropov and his cronies failed to see–or, more probably, exploited-was that the only people who could take advantage of these little windows of opportunity were the criminal elements, the mafia, the men who had conducted business throughout the history of the Soviet Union. They were the only people who knew what to do.
And so the mafia were the first to benefit from perestroika when it finally arrived under Gorbachev in 1985. They were already in pole position, the only ones with money. By the nineties they had completely entrenched their power. And with them were their allies in the KGB who watched over them and shared in the spoils. Thus the secret state and the mafia state were married in a devil’s pact.
‘It was the KGB itself who managed perestroika right from the beginning,’ Finn said. ‘Perestroika was an invention of the KGB’s.’
But from inside the KGB I couldn’t see it.
For my final exams, I wrote a short story, which won me a prize at school. It was a fictional tale about the last man to be executed in the Soviet Union for possession of more than ten thousand dollars; holding more than ten thousand dollars was still a capital offence under Gorbachev.
The story was called, ‘Not a Great Start to the Day’, a tongue-in-cheek title that echoed the thoughts of the condemned man as he looked out of his cell window on to the execution yard on his final morning on earth, and saw that it was snowing. My father was furious that I appeared to see injustice in the man’s execution.
After my parents returned to Moscow, all the years I’d spent with Nana in the capital and at the dacha in Barvikha, with only brief visits from them, hadn’t prepared me for the fact that my father evidently felt he still had complete power over my future.
Like our leaders, my father always looked angry. Sometimes his crossness spilled into rage and that always terrified me, until I learned to suppress my fear. My mother, however, never seemed to lose her nerve.
‘He has a very stressful job,’ she’d say. ‘He has to think about everything.’
I couldn’t understand, if his life was so bad, why he didn’t simply change it, get another job-retire, even. Fearful now of the change in my relationship with him, as he demanded I accompany him to functions, I didn’t fully understand that he endured a constricting fear that killed his self-expression. He lived in fear from the past, too; a fear that would eventually infect me.
What I also didn’t know, until much later, was that he worked in the most secret department of the SVR that dealt with
But to me he was just a dangerous, lonely, angry man, who had, therefore, to be manipulated carefully. I remember one terrible night, when, after a state function, we had returned to one of the several apartments in Moscow that seemed to be at his disposal. He was drunker than usual, and began to manhandle me, though I couldn’t say for certain that it was molestation. I gave him more and more vodka until eventually he fell asleep. When I confronted him the next day, he said I had imagined the whole thing.
Twice he tried to marry me off to the sons of colleagues, including Vladimir, the older boy from school Number 47 whom I’d been instructed to befriend and with whom I’d maintained a distant friendship throughout our schooldays. Vladimir even asked me to marry him when I was seventeen and my father went into a fury when I refused. I didn’t want to end up like my mother, a necessary addition to a husband’s career. I didn’t want to be a woman whose job was to ‘understand’ her husband.
In avoiding that trap, I ended up in another.
Perhaps it was compensation for my refusal to marry Vladimir or any of my father’s choices that led me, subconsciously, to try to please him in other ways. And that was
My application pleased my father. I did it without thinking, through a compulsion that was stronger than my base instincts. All the years of Nana’s sharp but gentle influence were swept away by obedience to the powerful hold I allowed my father to exert on me. If anything, the years of absence from my parents increased my desire to please him.
Nana never said a word when I told her-and that told me all I needed to know. Nana couldn’t have passed a KGB exam to save her life, but she despised the organisation. She used to tell me jokes about the KGB, in the woods, with a carelessness that old people so magnificently grow into. Nana and Genghiz saw eye to eye on the subject of our intelligence services. While Genghiz mocked their guard dogs, Nana mocked them.
But Nana made one far-sighted remark, an illustration of the visionary or psychic power behind her watery grey eyes. And even though I didn’t understand her at the time, I see it now.
‘Something good will come of it,’ was all she said.
As I drifted almost in a dream state into the arms of our security services, I wondered how anything good could come from joining the KGB. And yet that was how I would meet Finn, my one true love.
5
THE KRASNOZNAMENNIY INSTITUTE, or KI, was where women trained for the KGB. I studied there for three years, and then went on to put my training into practice at Balashiha-2, in the forest to the east of Moscow. There I trained foreign female subversives, the
During this time, I also lectured to the male KGB students in Vishka, or the Tower, as it was called.
Balashiha-2 is both the strongroom of the Kremlin and its arsenal and training ground for covert and subversive operations, hidden in the vast forest fifteen miles east of Moscow. To keep the capital’s population obedient it hosts the notorious Dzerzhinskaya army division, but Balashiha’s real usefulness lies in its highly secret training camp for KGB units involved in foreign operations. They call this the Centre of Special Purposes. It is where the paramilitary
To all of us the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, was called the Forest. The Forest then and today is the centre of Russia’s subversive operations abroad.
My admission to the Forest was not as easy as my impeccable background would suggest. Though my father had friends there, they could only facilitate interviews, not help me through them. I was interviewed intensely for weeks and what caused me most trouble was the short story I’d written at school, ‘Not a Great Start to the Day’.
Was I sympathetic to the condemned man in his cell awaiting execution, as my father had accused me? Did I believe in American free-market activities, which the condemned man was guilty of pursuing? Was I critical of the law and the arm of the law that executed the guilty criminal?
The interview when the subject of the short story was raised took place early one morning, out at Balashiha. One of my three interrogators asked me: ‘Why do you sympathise with the guilty man in your story?’
‘I make him seem convincing,’ I answered. ‘That isn’t the same thing as sympathising.’
‘But he should not seem convincing!’ he demanded.
The man had thick lips, and eyes like shale.
