* It is obvious that the Soviets regarded Bristow as a test case. This explains why he was kept under such close supervision and surveillance. Spy fiction to the contrary, most visitors to the USSR are not shadowed and tailed twenty-four hours a day. Not even the KGB has that much manpower.-Ed.
* A battle that took place in 1855 during the Crimean War. Mention “Sebastopol” today to a university history class and it is still that nineteenth-century siege that comes to mind, even though it was insignificant by comparison with that of World War II. It was partly to rectify this imbalance of geo-historical perspective that Bristow was writing his book on the 1942–1943 Crimean campaign and the siege which literally destroyed the city of Sebastopol.-Ed.
10
Timoshenko had very kindly offered to make regular visits to the offices of the two Sebastopol newspapers to see if my notices in them had brought in any responses. After my first ten days in the city I had accumulated a little stack of letters-seven or eight, of which about half had come from addresses in the city and the others from outlying villages.
On Friday evening* Timoshenko drove me to my first meeting and we talked for several hours with a sixty- eight-year-old retired Red Army major who had participated in the final weeks of the decisive Russian counteroffensive that had driven the Germans out of the Crimea. His anecdotes were useful, he had a good wry sense of humor, and he gave me the names and addresses of three fellow veterans in the Sebastopol area. I counted it a well spent evening.
Saturday we went quickly from one interview to a second to a third; and a telephone call at lunchtime established a fourth meeting for me, after dinner, with one of the retired captains whose name I had obtained only the previous day.
It was a full day and I gained a good deal of information, particularly from one factory foreman who had driven a tank in the war. He was one of those people who had a fascinating memory for the kind of detail a writer is avid to have.
I had arranged by telegraph two Sunday meetings with correspondents from nearby towns. Timoshenko collected me very early in the chill morning and we drove out of the city at an hour when it was still necessary to use headlights.
Timoshenko participated in all those interviews-mostly as a silent observer; now and then he would offer a question and sometimes it was a question that made sense. I’m sure he had orders not to let me out of his sight. But he was a genial companion. So far as I know, he wasn’t armed; and I’m quite certain his masters had not told him to eavesdrop on my interviews for purposes of censoring them. He didn’t have the sensitivity for that-although I suppose it is possible he had some sort of miniature transmitting device or recorder hidden away somewhere in his bulky clothing.
In any case I wasn’t inhibited by his presence. In those interviews I had no secrets; I’d resolved to play the game by the host country’s rules.
Anyhow I expected no information on the subject of the gold to come out of these interviews. These people were all Russians; presumably the Russians had known nothing at all about the gold episode or the German attempt to spirit the treasure out of the country.
My first Sunday interview was something of a washout. He was an old man who ran a dairy farm about fifteen miles from the edge of the city. He had served seven years in the army-most of them as a cook in a regimental field mess. He was proud to be a veteran and, although he didn’t seem overly indoctrinated with Communist notions, he was nevertheless a flag-waver at heart and his rambling reminiscences were all designed to laud the heroism of Russian soldiers and the glory of the motherland. He lacked the anecdotal spirit and a sense of detail; he told me far more than I wanted to know about the operation of a field kitchen; his recounting of his only real battle experiences-emergencies when every warm body available had been pressed into rifle service against German attacks-was so subjective it was useless, and had the unmistakable flavor of habitual repetition and embellishment.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t have been disappointed. You expect bad interviews and bad interview subjects. You listen to them, you thank them kindly and you go home. Maybe you use one or two lines of the material they gave you. It’s all part of the job and I’d been prepared for a much poorer average than I’d obtained thus far; one dud out of six is much better than usual. But I couldn’t help chafing because my time was so limited and I couldn’t afford to waste it on fruitless trips and courtesies.
We left as soon as possible but not before the old farmer had insisted on feeding us a hearty lunch heavily lubricated with dark ale. Timoshenko must have consumed at least half a gallon of it and his driving was noticeably less precise when we started down the road toward our second rendezvous. Once he almost ran into a farm cart that was wobbling down the road on enormous solid wooden wheels.
We only had twenty miles to go but Timoshenko interrupted the journey twice to get out and relieve himself by the side of the road.
He was in boisterous high spirits but I clung to the handholds inside the car and winced in terror at his misjudgment of curves and his lead-footed recklessness.
By the mercy of his Slavic gods he delivered us intact into the village of Bykovskiy, not too many miles above Yalta. My appointment was with a man called Vassily Bukov whose letter to me in care of
I had made the appointment by telegram and it had been confirmed the same way; I had suggested the time and Bukov’s reply had named the place-his flat in a communal boardinghouse on the square opposite the railway station in Bykovskiy.
We had no trouble finding the place although when he attempted to park the car Timoshenko bumped right up onto the curb and threw a scare into two small boys who were playing there.
Bukov had been watching for our arrival. He greeted us at the main entrance-introduced himself, shook hands and led us upstairs to his bed-sitting room. He looked about forty-five but he must have been at least fifty to have served in the army beginning in 1941, as he said he had. A spare man, ascetic features, short grey hair shaped into a widow’s peak. He wore a high-neck sweater and a pair of slacks that seemed much better tailored than most Russian clothes. He would not have been out of place in the same costume on the Riviera: he had the appearance of self-confidence and self-assuredness that you would expect of a tycoon or an aristocrat. My expectations began to drop the moment I set eyes on him. He looked the type who would stick to formal history and refuse to reveal any personal touches about the general whom he had served.
Bukov waved us to chairs. His room was archaically spacious, a Czarist anachronism of heavy carved moldings and a stone hearth on which a wood fire blazed. The furniture was old, steady, simple; with its row of windows and its high ceiling the room seemed underfurnished. He had no carpet and there was only one table which evidently he used for dining; it was near the back corner where there was a small stove and sink. An old desk with many scars squatted beside the corner window opposite. The panes allowed a good view of the rolling farm country that began immediately behind the boardinghouse.
The first hour was desultory; the conversation was the ordinary thing-he asked me about myself and my work, he gave a shorthand sort of self-summation (lifelong bachelor, son of a tailor, not much of a reader but a great lover of music-he had a Gramophone and a surprising collection of recordings and his radio looked first-rate and expensive) and he asked me how I was enjoying my visit to the Crimea. The only remarkable thing I noticed was that he did not ask me very many questions about America.
I eased him toward the war and General Tyulenev and he followed my lead without resistance. Speaking slowly, selecting the dry phrases with care, he discussed the Caucasian, Ukrainian and Crimean campaigns from a semi-scholarly viewpoint more characteristic of a strategist than of an orderly. He spoke excellent Russian with a
