To their consternation, I stood up and drained my glass of water. Then I looked him in the eye.
‘The guilty are never convincing, Comrade. Were you convinced?’
I found that manipulation came effortlessly. I convinced them that the story was the opposite of what I knew it to be, that it was in fact highly unsympathetic to the condemned man. They were pleased. I realised then that great manipulators are themselves susceptible to manipulation.
Some of the assessment was absurd, like something out of a KGB manual from Stalin’s time–which, in some cases, it was. Despite my impeccable linguistic qualifications, they tested my English language from a schoolbook written in 1941. The first three lines were, ‘Long Live International Youth Day! Long Live the Communist Party! Long Live Comrade Stalin!’–conversational gambits that I’ve never found particularly useful.
The book was a story concerning two schoolchildren, Sasha and Misha. My favourite chapter in it was called ‘Two Little Patriots’, in which Sasha and Misha go for a walk in the woods near the border and see something behind a tree, which turns out to be a man. He is wearing white clothes and is carrying a white bag, and is all but invisible against the snow. The boys realise he is a spy. They alert the border guards and the man is arrested. ‘He is a spy!’ the KGB officer, who dashes to the scene, proclaims. ‘Well done, boys!’
‘Well done, boys!’ later became another coded phrase between myself and Finn. We uttered it whenever we wished to indicate a disastrous decision by our respective leaders.
My time at Krasnoznamenniy taught me to speak English like a native, to handle weapons, to make IEDs–or improvised explosive devices-and most of the arts of self-defence. And my time at the Forest put this training into action as I then trained others.
I also endured the increasingly unconvincing political ‘education’, which nobody seemed to take seriously any more. Few people really believed what they were told about the West. Once, it had been necessary to induce a fear of the West so great that it overshadowed the fear ordinary people, at any rate, had of our own system. But not any more, not by the late eighties. By 1989, we didn’t even use the title ‘KGB’ among ourselves, so discredited had the organisation become.
As Gorbachev dismantled the Soviet Union, morale in the organisation was lower than ever and it reached rock bottom under Boris Yeltsin’s presidency. Our training went on, just as before, but without the ideological underpinning.
But the Forest had its entertaining aspects, if, like me, you were given to silent mockery. I particularly enjoyed the company of Dato and Zviad, a Georgian and an Armenian. They were in a special division of mainly Georgian and Armenian men who were training to be homosexual honey traps. Finn loved my stories about this division and he used to glow with the gleeful enjoyment of joking about homosexual honey traps when he was at Moscow’s diplomatic parties even when, once again, he was warned to stop by the British embassy.
‘Practising being a practising homosexual,’ Finn called it.
In 1991, just as I was finishing my training, Gorbachev was put under house arrest at his villa in Sochi on the Black Sea. I came back to Moscow that August, just before the coup took place. I saw the Dzerzhinskaya division enter the city in the early hours of the coup and watched with foreboding as the new and short-lived ‘President’ Yanayev visibly trembled as he promised us Russians that Gorbachev’s reforms would continue.
Yanayev and the KGB general at the head of the coup, Kryuchkov, were clearly way out of their depth and received little support, even from the special forces. The coup leaders had seized power in a haze of nostalgia for the ‘good old days’, which they were perhaps too drunk to realise had never gone away.
This inept coup set back plans that, unknown to all but very few in the KGB, were well under way. These plans had been drawn up to manage the transition from Communist Party rule to a new Russia. Instead, however, Boris Yeltsin filled the vacuum left by the bumbling coup leaders. Yeltsin became the hero. He stood on a battle tank and won over the people and the army. The coup was crushed and three days later I watched from the Lubyanka as crowds advanced on our old KGB headquarters. At the last minute, as we held our breath before wreaking death on the streets, the mob turned away and toppled the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of our secret police.
I was twenty-three years old and it was the oddest time to be starting a career in the KGB. Freedom, real freedom, at last seemed within reach of us Russians for the first time in our history.
By the time I met Finn seven years later my career path had accelerated me to the rank of colonel. He had been Second Secretary of Trade and Investment at the British embassy for those eight years, under surveillance by us and confidently marked down as SIS, MI6, a British spy.
My father, remote, claustrophobic and sinister, was pleased with my swift rise and the good reports of my progress, which he read avidly. My mother didn’t seem to care. Nana just laughed and called me ‘Colonel’ when she wanted to annoy me.
When I met Finn I had grown out of my affair with my fencing trainer, because-I’m ashamed to admit- he was too nice. I was having an affair with a ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ called Alex. A hard man, forty-eight years old and from the Vympel
‘The Russians always choose the most inconvenient times to do their evil deeds,’ Finn always said.
Alex had lost his leg during the Afghan campaign afterwards, but the presidential raid was highly successful, with several key murders accomplished. It plunged Afghanistan into the chaos that plagues it to the present day.
Alex was twenty years older than me. Finn was only twelve years older. Nana said I had a father complex, ‘but at least you are showing signs of improvement,’ she said.
6
DEAR RUSSIANS, very little time remains to a momentous date in our history. The year 2000 is upon us, a new century, a new millennium. We have all measured this date against ourselves, working out —first in childhood, then after we grew up—how old we would be in the year 2000, how old our mothers would be, and our children.’
Boris Yeltsin’s wandering voice faded and rose from our new television screen, like that of a man talking in the wind.
‘Back then,’ the President continued, ‘it seemed such a long way off to this extraordinary New Year. So now the day has come.’
Finn shifts on the sofa. ‘It’s certainly a miracle he’s made it,’ he says facetiously, as we watch Yeltsin’s face on the screen, a face with all the mobility of botched plastic surgery.
Finn and Nana and I have just finished a late supper and are curled up in front of the fire to watch the New Year speech Yeltsin has made a habit of delivering. Finn is drinking brandy on the sofa, munching peanuts, and stroking Genghiz. He is over-engaged as so often. I am lying with my head on his stomach. Nana, who rarely sits down because of her arthritis, is sliding on her slippers across the dacha’s parquet floors like a robotic vacuum cleaner.
‘This is like being back home,’ Finn says. ‘Watching the Queen making her speech on Christmas Day. Except with Yeltsin you have the added excitement that he’s going to die in mid-speech. You never get that with the Queen,’ he says with mock disappointment.
Outside the windows, a snowstorm is raging; it is wild weather, and Finn insists we keep the curtains open so he can watch the wind and snow in the light of the porch lamp. Eight years in Russia hasn’t diminished his fondness for snow.
After a year of knowing Finn, Nana and I are used to his remarks. He always enjoys providing a running commentary to whatever is on television. There is a part of Finn, I think, that secretly yearns to be an entertainer and the television is the perfect instrument to heckle without the risk of any comeback.
Yeltsin’s voice emerges from his old Russian face, puffy and sick from heart problems and alcohol. The tricks of the television studio don’t really do it justice. Make-up conceals much of the problem but still the ailing president gives the impression of being propped up on a Kremlin film set, with our new Russian flag displayed regally behind him. In this respect, he looks like so many of our past leaders from Soviet times, cardboard cut-outs propped up on platforms to watch troops and tanks and missiles file past through Red Square. Unlike them, however, I’ve always
