Red to Black (4 page)

T
HE 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
nelegali,
whose eventual role was to return to their own countries and undermine them with terrorist activities.

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
spetsnaz
are based, or special forces units like Vympel, the Alfa Group and the
nelegali
in the ‘Foreigners’ Area’.

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.

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. De
spite 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
spetsnaz
group, Alex was one of the small team that had entered the presidential palace in Kabul on Christmas Eve in 1979 when the USSR overthrew the regime in Afghanistan.

‘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.

D
EAR 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 thought Yeltsin’s face was essentially kind, not angry.

We are at Barvikha–me, Nana and Finn. It is the last day of the millennium. By this time in the evening the sky has darkened behind thick winter clouds. A wind ruffles the trees and the end of a hanging branch scratches back and forth on the wood-tiled roof of the dacha.

By now I have begun to know Finn personally, intimately. Of
course I knew everything about him as a target of intelligence long before. I’ve read his KGB file many times while sitting in the sealed anteroom of General Kerchenko’s office. Kerchenko was the old KGB hardliner from Brezhnev’s day, who was my case officer on Finn. I would sit in this heavily disinfected room at the Forest–I never knew why so much disinfectant was necessary–and pore over the photographs of Finn on his own or with a string of women in Moscow’s nightclubs, many of whom were our own honey traps. I read the transcripts of his conversations and looked for hours into his strange eyes, trying to see the mind behind them. In these photographs, he seemed constantly amused, carefree, knowing. I’d got to know the muscles in his face and tried to fit the transcripts of his conversations to its changing expressions.

I got to know his mannerisms and his accent and his conversational tics, his habits, and his likes and dislikes. I knew his history, or that part of it we had been able to piece together in order, we hoped, to use it against him. I had been briefed endlessly on the subject of Finn, and I’d read his file a hundred times, so that when we finally met it was like meeting a character from a favourite book.

‘Dear friends, my dears,’ Yeltsin stumbles on–not at all like the Queen, Finn says–today I am wishing you New Year greetings for the last time. But that is not all. Today I am addressing you for the last time as Russian President. I have made a decision. I have contemplated this long and hard. Today, on the last day of the outgoing century, I am retiring.’

Finn puts his glass down on the small cherry-wood table next to the sofa and Nana stops her shoe shuffle. She and I look at the screen in shock. I can’t see Finn’s face from where I’m lying. I had no idea beforehand of the contents of Yeltsin’s speech but this was not what any of us had imagined.

‘Many times I have heard it said,’ the President continues, ‘“Yeltsin will try to hold on to power by any means, he won’t hand it over to anyone.” That is all lies. That is not the case. I have always said that I would not take a single step away from the constitution, that the Duma elections should take place within the constitutional timescale. This has happened.

‘And, likewise, I would have liked the presidential elections to have taken place on schedule in June 2000. That was very important for Russia-we were creating a vital precedent of a civilised, voluntary handover of power from one president of Russia to another, newly elected one.’

Not sure now what we’re watching, all three of us are suddenly enthralled. Even Finn is silenced. I see his hand stop stroking Genghiz and now it weighs down heavy and immobile on the cat’s stomach until Genghiz struggles free from it and walks off in a huff, shaking his flattened fur.

I lift my head from Finn’s lap and sit up and look at the screen at that electrifying moment. My long black hair is tousled where I’ve been lying on it and Nana distractedly untangles it from behind the sofa, as she’s always done since I was a little girl.

‘This is great,’ Finn says. ‘Yeltsin always knows how to grip an audience. It’s just like eight years ago, when he stood on the tank outside the White House.’

‘Turn it up a bit,’ Nana says, and Finn reaches for the remote control.

Yeltsin talks on, about the surprise of his decision, its unscheduled nature, and says that Russia should enter the new millennium with younger men at the helm. He says that he has done his job and that, now the worst is over, Russia will always be moving forward, never returning to the past.

‘The past is already here, that’s why,’ Finn says. ‘The past is dictating the present.’

Finn is right. The past that haunts Russia in all its terrible iden
tities, and that haunts Russians, is standing behind Yeltsin’s veiled words like the shadow of Death.

‘Why hold on to power for another six months,’ Yeltsin continues, ‘when the country has a strong person, fit to be president, with whom practically all Russians link their hopes for the future today? Why should I stand in his way?’

‘Oh God,’ Finn murmurs. ‘Oh no.’ I look at him, but his face is fixed to the screen.

Yeltsin rambles now, about his desire to be forgiven for not fulfilling some of the hopes of the Russian people; of the huge difficulties he’d faced in taking the leap from a grey, stagnating, totalitarian past into a bright, rich and civilised future in one go.

‘Today it is important for me to tell you the following,’ he says. ‘I also experienced the pain which each of you experienced. I experienced it in my heart, with sleepless nights, agonising over what needed to be done to ensure that people lived more easily and better, if only a little.’

Dimly, from outside the dacha, the muffled sound of a car starting its engine filters through the falling snow and the forest’s trees. And then another follows, and another, one by one and slowly, like the staggered start to a long cross-country race.

‘Everyone now goes to Moscow,’ Nana remarks. ‘To pay homage to Yeltsin’s heir.’

Finn pours himself another brandy.

‘So,’ Finn says, ‘that’s it, then. A civilised, voluntary handover of power from one president of Russia to another,’ he echoes Yeltsin’s words. ‘In other words, Putin gets to be president if he gives Yeltsin immunity from prosecution.’

We look at the sick man on television like awestruck children.

‘I am leaving,’ Yeltsin continues. ‘I have done everything I can. I am not leaving because of my health, but because of all the problems taken together. A new generation is taking my place, a generation of those who can do more, and do it better. In accordance with the
constitution, as I go into retirement, I have signed a decree entrusting the duties of President of Russia to Prime Minister Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

‘For the next three months, again in accordance with the constitution, he will be head of state. Presidential elections will be held in three months. I have always had confidence in the amazing wisdom of Russian citizens. Therefore, I have no doubt what choice you will make at the end of March 2000.’

This bitter flattery of Yeltsin’s to deceive the Russian people, this endorsement of the man who has, as Finn predicts, given him immunity from prosecution, is the real beginning of the new era when Yeltsin’s attempts to lead Russia to democracy are finally abandoned.

‘In saying farewell, I wish to say to each of you the following,’ Yeltsin continues. ‘Be happy. You deserve happiness. You deserve happiness and peace. Happy New Year, happy new century, my dear people.’

Before the national anthem has finished there is the sound of more official cars crunching across the snow towards the main road to Moscow.

And that is how, on New Year’s Eve in 2000, we Russians learned we had a new president. Vladimir Putin, only the second KGB boss after Yuri Andropov to achieve this, slips quietly into power. But this time, unlike back then, it takes place in our bright, new, democratic Russia.