The Trap

I’ve been reading a curious account by Australian ex-diplomat Gregory Clark of his years at the Australian Embassy in Moscow during the early 1960s. The memoirs are strange – and in some ways almost surrealistic - because while on the one hand Clark repeatedly professes his admiration for the Soviet system and the Soviet Union in general, the personal experiences he describes reveal so many of the defects of the system and the society it created that it’s hard to give credence to his enthusiasm. Two extracts may illustrate what I mean. Here’s Clark discussing his view of the Soviet Union, and its leaders:

I often tell people that the two years in Moscow were the best two years of my life.

KGB attentions aside, there was something curiously comforting about living in a society where you did not have to be constantly on your guard against the exploitative tricks and scams of our capitalist world.

I liked some of the Soviet leaders I met – Khruschev and Kosygin for example - and their genuine efforts to improve things. I even got to like Groymko, for whom I once had to make a labored dinner speech interpretation. He is sometimes written off as hardline. But to understand the mind, and integrity, of a very conservative Soviet leader I strongly recommend reading his biography.

Apart from anything else it could make our own hardliners realise just how their own rampantly bad behavior over the years has contributed to the growth of hardline attitudes on the other side. (I also suggest readers should look at a very moving account of how a very ordinary Russian I once met had also reacted to that misbehavior – see Quadrant magazine letter on my website entitled former Western brutality in Russia.)

I also developed a deep sympathy for the wartime sufferings of the Russian people, and disgust for the way we in the West had managed almost completely to ignore not just those sufferings but also Moscow’s desire for a foreign policy that made sure they never happened again.

If the Khruschev liberalisation had been allowed to continue, it is likely Russia would have evolved within a generation into a reasonably free society practicing Scandinavian-style socialism. But as we know, the hawks on both sides made sure that did not happen.

Here, on the other hand, is Clark describing at first hand the nature of “KGB attentions

Few outsiders can appreciate the strain involved once the KGB types decide to turn the screws on you. It is as if the entire population in tightly-controlled society has conspired to trap you. You have no escape. Everything you do is monitored. Meanwhile you have to carry on as if everything around you was normal.

Finally, it all came to a head. On a freezingly dark night of December 1964, in the grubby industrial town of Podolsk on the outskirts of Moscow, the trap had been set. My good friend, Volodya Nikitin, was the bait .

The Trap

I had met Volodya a year or so earlier, on one of my student restaurant excursions. He and his charming wife, Yelena, were sitting at one of the tables I had been made to share. From the start it was obvious he could not be a KGB plant. Apart from anything else the KGB had no idea that I was even dining out that night, let alone the restaurant I would visit.

Volodya had an attractively direct and proletarian kind of openness. Yelena was classy but warm. We took an immediate liking to each other..

Like most of the students I met, they were reasonably patriotic. But they were happy also to talk about faults in the system, and their hopes that things would get better. After the usual rounds of vodka toasts, we agreed to meet again. He was studying metallurgy. She was studying politics.

At the next dinner party, I followed Embassy regulations and made sure I was accompanied. I took J, a rather demure English girl working as a nanny for the Australian embassy ambassador and who had come to Moscow to improve her Russian. . She shared my liking for the Russian people and we had already had become close friends. For well over a year the four of us would meet occasionally for dinner and conversation. We enjoyed each others’ company, very much.

I once quizzed him on 1956 Hungarian events. "Those swine (svolochii),’ he said. It turned out that a friend of his had had his eyes gouged out by Hungarian revolutionaries.

How often in our Cold War disputes do we fret over abuses by the other side without even bothering to ask how and why the other side might have been provoked into such abusive behavior? Volodya was as situation insensitive as the rest of us.

I realised the KGB would not be ignoring our dinner parties. I even discussed it with Volodya. But since it was obvious we were simply people who liked to eat and drink with each other, and that neither he or his wife had any access to anything that even looked like a secret, we assumed we would all be safe.

True, with the fall of Khruschev in October 1964 we knew that the hawks and their KGB friends were back in control (courtesy of the US hawks who had done everything — Bay of Pigs, Cuban crises, U 2 flights etc - to derail Khruschev’s honest efforts to gain détente with the West and to end the Cold War). But by this time I had also discovered that Yelena was the daughter of a highly placed general in the Ukraine. That would be a kind of insurance against arbitrary KGB stunts, or so I thought.

Some time around the end of 1964 Volodya began acting strangely. He rang, wanting urgently to meet me over dinner. He knew that J. had gone back to England. We met, and this time Yelena was not with him.

But I had gone out of my way to take a woman I knew at the British Embassy with me so that I would be covered. It was clear Volodya was rather disconcerted by the unexpected presence of the woman, and after some talk about the problems he was having finding a job after graduating from university, we parted. There was something very unnatural about the meeting. I suspected already that the KGB had put him up to it.

Later the British woman pestered me with demands from her Embassy to find out who Volodya was. I knew the Brits were highly security conscious; they were up to their necks in a host of other anti-Soviet plots, including Penkovsky. But I did not like the implication that I might be trying to lead the woman into a trap.

Soon after I had another call from Volodya. This time he wanted to meet me in Podolsk where some friends were having a party. And this time his voice sounded even more unnatural than usual. I was certain that something was afoot.

I faced a dilemma. If I went I would be leaving myself open to KGB attentions. But if Volodya was acting under KGB pressure and I did not go, he would be blamed. His future career would be jeopardized, and it would be through my fault rather than his since it was I who initially had put him in this situation of danger.

I decided I would go to the station, hear what he had to say, and return promptly to Moscow, taking every anti-KGB precaution. That way he would be covered, since he would have delivered the goods even if they had not been seized. And hopefully I would see an end to KGB attentions.

The moment I met Volodya at the station it was clear that something was indeed afoot. With unnatural enthusiasm and in a high voice he urged me to go with him to the party. But first, he said, we should go to the station toilet. Then in a low voice, he suddenly turned on me — tyi moi vrag, you are my enemy. He was trying to warn me of a KGB trap.

What to do? I had assumed that the KGB plan was to wait till I got to the party before moving in on us. But already I had sensed we were being closely watched by thugs planted around the station premises. If I about-turned and tried to catch a train back to Moscow, it was very possible the thugs would move in on both of us, and push secret documents into his hands - a favorite KGB trick. They would then claim that I had come to this unlikely place to receive the documents.

As well, they would suspect that Volodya had done something to warn me, and he would still be in trouble. So I decided to pretend to accept an invitation to leave the station with him, and at some point enroute to the alleged party find an excuse to do a sudden about-turn, leaving the thugs too disorganised for a simultaneous move in on both of us and allowing Volodya to walk off into the darkness.

The strategy worked. But on the train back to Moscow I was shaking badly.

(via Marius)