Don't Trust, Don't Fear, Don't Beg: The Extraordinary Story of the Arctic 30

NINE

Many a man thinks he’s shifted the course of human history from an English public house, but Maxim Litvinov actually did.

The year was 1907 and the place was a dockers’ pub in the East End of London. The Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party – one of whose leaders was Vladimir Lenin – was being held in a nearby church. Also there was Lev Bronshtein, who’d arrived in England after escaping from a Siberian prison and travelling 400 miles across frozen tundra on a sleigh pulled by reindeer. He was known to his comrades as Trotsky.

Maxim Litvinov was staying in a sixpence-a-night dosshouse with his friend, the Georgian revolutionary Josef Dzhugashvili. By day they attended the Congress together, listening to speeches and debating the party’s strategy for overthrowing the Russian tsar and instigating a communist dictatorship in their homeland. By night they drank.

Dzhugashvili had a reputation for thinking with his fists. One evening they stumbled into a pub frequented by London’s notoriously belligerent dock workers and soon the Georgian was embroiled in an argument with the locals. It soon escalated, Dzhugashvili was surrounded, and although the details of that moment are lost to history, one can imagine his life flashing before his eyes. That was when Litvinov waded in and dragged his hot-tempered friend from the pub. They escaped down a side street.[10]

Maxim Litvinov was Dima’s great-grandfather. Josef Dzhugashvili survived that night to become one of history’s greatest mass murderers. He is known to the world as Stalin.

Dzhugashvili was largely unknown to his comrades in London, but Litvinov was already a notorious revolutionary. He’d been arrested by the Okhrana – the tsar’s secret police – and jailed in Lukyanovskaya prison, from where he escaped, taking ten inmates with him.[11] He slipped over one border after another until he reached Switzerland. Later he became an arms dealer for the Bolshevik wing of the party, procuring rifles and smuggling them into Russia through Finland.[12]

A year after dragging his friend from that London pub, Litvinov was arrested[13] in France carrying a pocketful of 500-rouble notes that had been stolen in a notorious bank robbery masterminded by Stalin.[14] He was deported, returned to London and married an English woman, Ivy Low. Litvinov was still in England when Lenin and Trotsky seized power in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. He was arrested by the London government in 1918 but freed in exchange for a British diplomat who was accused of complicity in an assassination attempt on Lenin.[15] Litvinov returned to Russia and began a career as a senior Soviet diplomat.

In 1930 his old friend Stalin – by now supreme leader of the Soviet Union – appointed him Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Litvinov – real name Meir Wallach-Finkelstein[16] – worked to normalise relations with Britain and France, and persuaded America’s President Roosevelt to officially recognise the Communist government in Moscow. And all the time he was a senior figure in a regime that was purging, starving and shooting millions of its own people.

In April 1933 Litvinov’s face graced the front cover of Time magazine.[17] The Nazi government in Germany derided his Jewish ancestry, with Berlin radio referring to him contemptuously as ‘Finkelstein-Litvinov’.[18] When Stalin resolved to sign a pact with Hitler to invade and divide Poland, Litvinov’s Jewish roots presented an awkward impediment. His office was surrounded by troops from the NKVD[19] – the secret police organisation that succeeded the tsar’s Okhrana. A delegation led by Vyacheslav Molotov told Litvinov he was fired.[20] Four months later Molotov signed the pact with Hitler, Poland was invaded and the world went to war. Hitler later said, ‘Litvinov’s replacement was decisive.’[21] Asked why he had been replaced by Molotov, Litvinov said, ‘Do you really think that I was the right person to sign a treaty with Hitler?’[22]

When, two years later, Germany turned on the Soviet Union, Litvinov was rehabilitated and appointed ambassador to the United States. On New Year’s Eve 1951 he died of a heart attack, aged seventy-five.[23] Molotov later said Litvinov was ‘utterly hostile to us… He deserved the highest measure of punishment at the hands of the proletariat. Every punishment.’ He said Dima’s great-grandfather ‘remained among the living only by chance’.[24] Decades after his death, Litvinov’s daughter claimed Stalin once told Maxim he was only spared because, ‘I haven’t forgotten that time in London.’[25]

Lev Kopelev was also a Bolshevik. In the 1930s he worked as a journalist, witnessing the horrors of the Ukrainian famine caused by the forced grain requisitioning ordered by the government of which Maxim Litvinov was a part.[26] When the Germans invaded in 1941, Kopelev volunteered for the Red Army, serving as a propaganda officer.[27] He was one of millions of Soviet soldiers who rolled into Germany near the war’s end. And it was here, in East Prussia, that he witnessed atrocities committed by his nation against the defeated German civilian population.

Kopelev was deeply troubled and felt unable to remain silent. He spoke out publicly, denouncing the conduct of the Soviet armies in Germany. He was promptly arrested[28] and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for the ‘propagation of bourgeois humanism, sympathy with the enemy and undermining the troops’ political–ethical morale.’[29] In the gulag he met and befriended Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. When Solzhenitsyn came to write his novel The First Circle, he based the character Rubin on Kopelev.[30] When Kopelev was released, he approached Russia’s leading literary journal and urged it to publish Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.[31] It was a seminal moment in the Soviet dissident movement.

Lev Kopelev was Dima’s grandfather.

In 1968 Lev was expelled from the Communist Party[32] for lending his voice to protests against the persecution of other dissidents. He also spoke out against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.[33] It was a cause for which Pavel Litvinov – Kopelev’s son-in-law, Maxim’s grandson – was also prepared to pay a heavy price.

As a high school student, and even during his early years at university, Pavel was a devoted member of the Young Communist League. But by the end of his time as a student his commitment to Marxism had collapsed. Ideology had clashed with reality and he viewed Soviet society with ‘cynical indifference’.[34]

Pavel became a physics teacher. He befriended a group of intellectual anti-Soviet writers and worked for the release of political prisoners, hungrily consuming samizdat literature – banned publications which now included the works of Solzhenitsyn.[35] In 1967 he was pulled into KGB headquarters and warned he was risking arrest and imprisonment for supporting dissidents, but Pavel made a verbatim record of the interrogation.[36] It was published in the International Herald Tribune and four months later he received a telegram from ‘a group of friends representing no organisation’ who ‘support your statement, admire your courage, think of you and will help in any way possible’. The letter was signed by Yehudi Menuhin, W.H. Auden, Henry Moore, Bertrand Russell, J.B. Priestley, Paul Scofield, Sonia Brownell (who signed as ‘Mrs George Orwell’), Cecil Day-Lewis and the legendary Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.[37]

‘They transmitted the letter on the BBC in Russian,’ says Pavel. ‘And the BBC called who they could and asked them why they signed this telegram. So they called Stravinsky, and Stravinsky was already a very old man. And he said, “We have to support Litvinov because my teacher, the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, also suffered from Russian censorship.” And I started to cry. It was so touching. Rimsky-Korsakov was history from one hundred years earlier, he was played on every radio station in Russia, and suddenly through Stravinsky I connected with Rimsky-Korsakov.’

The following spring Pavel married Lev Kopelev’s daughter Maya. The old man was an inspiration to Pavel, an example of how someone could live outside the system, in his heart at least.

On 21 August 1968, Soviet tanks entered Prague to suppress a nascent move by its reformist government, led by Alexander Dubček, to implement ‘socialism with a human face’ – at that time, by definition, a break with the Soviet Union. Demonstrations broke out across the world, tens of thousands took to the streets to protest the invasion, in Prague itself many demonstrators were shot by Soviet troops. But it was inconceivable that there would be protests in the USSR itself.

Until Pavel Litvinov and seven of his friends resolved to act.

On the evening of the twenty-fourth they went to the Kopelevs’ apartment for a party, fully aware it would be their last night of freedom. ‘We knew we were going to prison for years,’ Pavel remembers. ‘To a labour camp.’ The following day they would certainly be jailed, but they were ready. The famed singer Aleksandr Galich was at the party, and at one point he began to sing a protest song that was popular decades earlier among opponents of Tsar Nicholas I.

Pavel listened silently, but inside he felt the baton of resistance being passed. He almost announced what would happen the next day, but he remained silent, not because he feared betrayal but because some of the older dissidents gathered in the flat might insist on joining him. He doubted they could survive the retribution of the Soviet state.[38]

The next morning, a Sunday, Pavel and the others walked towards Red Square. They were being followed, and they knew it. When they reached the Lobnoye Mesto – the Place of Skulls – they sat down and unfurled a Czechoslovak flag. Officers from the KGB descended on the group. The protesters had no more than a moment to lift their hand-painted banners.

The KGB rained blows down on their heads, shouting, ‘These are all dirty Jews!’ and ‘Beat the anti-Soviets!’[39]

‘They hit Viktor Fainberg,’ Pavel remembers. ‘He was sitting next to me and broke four of his teeth. They beat me with a bag. It felt like it was full of bricks but I think it was books. The adrenaline was so high that I didn’t notice much, but they beat me very hard. Later I touched the top of my head and it hurt like hell.’

The group was bundled into unmarked cars. Before they could be driven away to the nearby KGB headquarters a policeman’s whistle blew, and from the Kremlin’s Spassky Gate there came a line of black cars that drove right past Pavel and his friends. Later they would learn that Alexander Dubček was inside one of those cars. The leader of the Czechoslovak rebels was now himself a prisoner.[40]

Pavel was charged and jailed, his trial set for six weeks’ time. It was said that the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and his KGB chief Yuri Andropov were incandescent that such a protest had occurred at the very centre of Soviet power,[41] in front of the captured Dubček no less, and it was widely known that the verdict and sentences in the coming trial had been decided long before the proceedings even began. In his book Lenin’s Tomb – a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the fall of the Soviet empire – the journalist David Remnick would later write that the protest in Red Square ‘struck one of the first blows against the regime’.

The trial came and Pavel was convicted. But he wasn’t jailed. Instead he was sentenced to exile in Siberia. The regime had decided they didn’t need another martyred dissident, especially one with a famous name. Pavel packed a suitcase and left Moscow with Maya and his six-year-old son, Dima.

For five years the Litvinov family lived in exile in Usugli, a village lost in the vast Siberian taiga, where the forests go on for hundreds of miles. If you walked away from that village and got lost, you’d die. That’s what Dima remembers of his childhood in exile. Nature was all around them, and it was so much more powerful. It was in control.

In December 1973 the family was back in Moscow. The KGB pulled Pavel in again and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Either leave the USSR permanently or be sent to the gulag – a Soviet labour camp.

Pavel feared that if the family stayed in the USSR, Dima himself would eventually be jailed. ‘My wife Maya and me were thinking something will happen to Dima because it was clear that if I didn’t emigrate then I would be arrested again. And it was clear that a teenager in a dissident family at that time cannot help but become rebellious and probably will go to prison. In a way it sounds strange but the Soviet state in my time under Brezhnev tried to respect the law. Not human rights but the law, more than it does now. It’s much more arbitrary now. The Soviet regime in my time was kind of more stable, they knew what they were doing, they were prepared, they were moving away from Stalin and his regime, they tried to demonstrate that everything was legal. Putin’s regime is more improvising. That’s why it is more scary.’

Three months later Pavel Litvinov left Moscow on a train to Vienna with his wife, his son Dima and their infant daughter Lara.

The family moved to the United States. Dima was twelve years old. He went to high school then studied anthropology at college. For his thesis he moved to Ecuador to live with highland tribes, and there he met a Swedish woman, Anitta. They married in Guatemala. When a son was born, they named him Lev.

Dima’s grandfather Lev Kopelev was always one of the most important people in his life, so Dima saw his son’s birth as a continuation of the line. It was having kids that brought him into Greenpeace. He was reading Newsweek at home with his boy, holding this baby in his arms, reading about climate change and environmental destruction. And Dima thought, it’s not enough to just know about it, you have to do something.

Now, forty-five years after his father’s arrest and imprisonment by the KGB, sixty-eight years after his grandfather’s imprisonment by the NKVD, and 112 years after his great-grandfather’s imprisonment by the Okhrana, Dima Litvinov is in the reception yard of a Russian prison, the fourth generation of his family to be jailed by the Russian secret police for his political beliefs. Only now they call it the FSB.

‘When Dima was with me in exile there was no reason to worry about him,’ says Pavel. ‘It was just our life, his mother and me, and later our daughter Lara when she was born. There was no reason specifically to worry. I was the only one technically punished. We had a hard life and it was tough. It was extremely cold. I almost died from a bad case of pneumonia when I was working in the mines. There was a doctor who became my friend; he worried about me and they sent me to hospital. They didn’t want me to die on their watch. It would be bad publicity. But that was only happening to me, so there was no fear at all. But here I was, already a pretty aged man living in comfortable America. And suddenly my son gets sucked back into that life.’