Gadfly in Russia : A Story of Travel, History, People, and Places

Part Four Kuznetsov 1969

Saturday, 26 July

A tape recorder on my table, the speaker turned up full (probably driving the rest of the house mad, but I didn’t care) played Handel’s Messiah or grand choruses from Israel in Egypt, over and over. Inspiring sounds sent the pen across blank paper, its pile decreasing day by day.

The themes of music and novel could not have been more different, for the latter was about the ‘start in life’ of a predatory young man from Nottingham ‘on the make’ in London. What began as a long short story (an oxymoron, if ever there was one) spun itself out into 500 pages. Constant invention made it untrustworthily easy to write, but it was to sell nearly 200,000 copies in all forms and languages.

Working on the second draft, the telephone morsed the usual letter M into my ear. I didn’t wonder who was calling. It could have been anyone. Though my number was in the book, people thinking it wasn’t often went by circuitous routes to find it, but I had always said that those whom the gods wished to drive mad they first made ex-directory.

‘Alan, this is George Andjaparidze, from the Soviet Union. Remember me?’

‘I certainly do. Where are you?’

‘In London.’

A lifetime’s wish had come true for him when the Aeroflot wheels kissed the tarmac at Heathrow. His note of triumph was unmistakable, but tempered I thought by the shock of good fortune, as if some malign dagger of fate, or hitch in the Soviet bureaucracy, might at any time put the kibosh on his prospect of walking in the city of his dreams. He was vulnerable to superstition, Soviet upbringing nothwithstanding, or perhaps because of it, which was a mark in his favour.

Delighted at hearing his familiar voice, I invited him to come right away for lunch, and thinking he might have a problem finding the house, I drove to the Apollo Hotel in Kensington where he was staying.

Standing on the pavement to open the passenger door and let him in — doing the chauffeur act, as he called it — he smiled on recognising the same old Peter Peugeot Estate that had taken us on a happy trip through Russia two years before.

Over lunch he told us he had been chosen, out of many who coveted the appointment, to be the minder, interpreter, and general assistant to Anatoly Kuznetsov, the author known for his novel Babi Yar. Oksana Krugerskaya had suggested him for the job, but the casting vote had been Valentina Ivasheva’s, who always helped personable young men — and what woman wasn’t able to look with favour on George?

We talked about Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev, where the Germans and their Ukrainian helpers had, in 1941, massacred 100,000 Jewish men women and children. A survivor gave details of the atrocity to Kuznetsov (though the broad outline was no secret) and he based his novel on the event. It was also the subject of a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who with Victor Nekrasov and others frequently petitioned the Soviet authorities to put up a monument to the specifically Jewish victims. Such pleas were rejected on the grounds that only Ukrainian citizens had been murdered, and so Babi Yar remained a locality of desolate waste ground. Kuznetsov had been compelled to abbreviate or exclude parts of his book before it could be published.

He had applied to come to London (not his first time abroad) to research Lenin’s stay before the First World War. He needed to see the houses he had lived in, and to describe the walks he must have taken. The centenary of Lenin’s birth was approaching, and a novel by the popular Kuznetsov would be a great help with the celebrations, so he had no trouble receiving permission to leave Russia for a couple of weeks.

George and Kuznetsov were in London as guests of the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR, and had dinner with some of its members on the evening of their arrival. The following morning they went to the Karl Marx Library, where Kuznetsov presumably did some work. Back at the hotel he said to George that he wanted to trawl the strip clubs of Soho, though both had signed a paper in Moscow saying they would do no such thing. Still, George said to us, everyone who came from the Soviet Union wanted to see what it was all about, and invariably did. He himself had found Soho squalid and unexciting, but Kuznetsov enjoyed himself so much he seemed determined to go there again.

Another part of their instructions — which I learned much later — was that George had to prevent Kuznetsov from making any contact with people who had left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution — or at any other time. He was also advised not to let him wander about on his own, though George wondered how they could expect him, a young man in his early twenties, to stop someone of forty odd and a person of great experience, from doing so now and again.

George had hoped to bring the great writer to meet us. ‘I offered him the privilege, but after such a full programme in the last couple of days he wanted to spend the afternoon by himself, though I wouldn’t be surprised if he isn’t off to the strip clubs. Anyway, I said he should be all right on his own, but I marked the hotel on a map so that he would have no trouble finding it again. He told me to go and have a good time with you, though to give his fraternal greetings. I did point out to him that he had a blank evening next Friday, and that we could come and see you then. He thought this a good idea.’

Ruth and I agreed, and I wrote the appointment — 1 August — in my diary.

We ate, drank, smoked, and recalled good times till late in the afternoon, when I drove him back to the hotel, where he had the smallest of rooms, with a toilet and bath along the corridor. ‘But since I’m in the beautiful and enchanting city of London,’ he said, ‘it isn’t to be sniffed at.’

A couple of days later, in the late afternoon, work on A Start in Life had to be put aside so that we could go to Wittersham in Kent, to find out how the decorators were getting on in a house we had recently bought. Traffic was thick on the South Circular, and we had the radio going to help away the miles. I didn’t normally listen in while driving in case it disturbed concentration on the road, but for some reason we stayed tuned to hear the news at seven.

On turning right from the M2, on to the arterial lane for Tenterden, we heard the startling news that Kuznetsov, instead of making a salacious perambulation of Soho, had gone into the offices of the Daily Telegraph and told whoever was in the conspiracy that he had no intention of returning to the Soviet Union. He asked for help with a ‘safe house’ until the hue and cry of his defection had faded. Among his few possessions was a microfilmed unexpurgated copy of Babi Yar.

Television later that night showed George escorted to an Aeroflot plane by two stalwart mackintoshed KGB men. Then came photographs of Graham Greene and myself, with the information that on searching Kuznetsov’s flat in Moscow the KGB had found a quantity of letters from us, clear evidence that we had lured George from his duty fully knowing Kuznetsov would make his bid for freedom. Perhaps it was logical for them to think so in my case, since they would have known that George had been with us while Kuznetsov went for a walk planning what he had to do, though I couldn’t see why they had cooked up such untruths about letters which I never wrote.

Knowing the difficulties writers faced in the Soviet Union, I sympathised with Kuznetsov’s bid to get away from it all, and had to ask myself whether I would have helped him had I been approached. I was not put to the test, but knew for sure that I wouldn’t have done anything to get a friend like George into trouble. We could only feel sorry for him, on the grounds that whatever else happened he wouldn’t be allowed out of Russia again.

He told me his side of the story many years later in Moscow, beginning from when I dropped him off at his hotel on 26 July. After our convivial meal he took to his bed for a much needed nap. In the evening he and Kuznetsov had supper with the novelist Basil Davidson, and his wife, who were old friends of Ivasheva’s. They later took their guests out in the car to see the sights of London.

Next morning Kuznetsov told George he wanted to visit Madame Tussaud’s. If a secret assignation had been set up it was the perfect place, in view of what was to happen. One can imagine hilarious dodgings among the dummies so that George wouldn’t see or hear, but if someone had set up a meeting he hadn’t known that the exhibits were to be moved that day, and temporarily installed elsewhere. George made an effort to find out the location, but no one could tell him. His attempt went on for some time until Kuznetsov, who had a weak heart, said he was exhausted. The search was called off, and they went to the embassy for lunch, and then to the hotel for a rest.

On the 28th they were expected to dine at Jack Lindsay’s, another writer. In the morning George worked on translating a play about Lenin for the BBC, which they too hoped to use for the centenary. Kuznetsov went out for a walk. When he seemed to have been away for a long time George thought he’d called on a man named Feifer whom he claimed to know. George found out later in Moscow that he was a ‘Sovietologist’ and none too friendly towards the USSR.

The morning of the 29th was very wet, and Kuznetsov hadn’t come back to the hotel. George feared he might have had a heart attack on the street, or gone again to Soho and been mugged. He should have telephoned the embassy and explained the situation, but hesitated because he didn’t want to get Kuznetsov into trouble. If he suddenly appeared for lunch and found out that his lapse was known about he would be angry at whoever had snitched on him. Kuznetsov had all along made a point of getting on close terms with George, well before their trip to London had been confirmed, and had even entertained him in his Tula flat.

At eleven o’clock he took a call from a reporter on the Daily Telegraph, who asked if he knew where Kuznetsov was. Smelling a very big rat even on the telephone, George responded that as far as he knew he had gone out walking. ‘And in this rain as well,’ for it was streaming down the window.

No sooner had the reporter hung up than George telephoned the embassy, telling them that Kuznetsov had not slept in his bed last night. He was advised to go and see them right away, but when he got there the diplomats did not seem worried. One of the secretaries gave him tea, saying that Kuznetsov was no doubt having a fine old time somewhere and would turn up sooner or later. How could he not? He was a famous and well-respected author whose books were widely bought and read. As a wealthy man he lived the good life, with a datcha in the country, a flat in Tula and one in Moscow.

That same evening — it was still raining — George went to the novelist Walter Allen’s for dinner, knowing that Kuznetsov was expected as well, but he passed his absence off as a joke, saying that his charge must have got lost somewhere on his interminable walks in the footsteps of Lenin.

After eating supper they heard on the television news that Kuznetsov had been in touch with the Home Office, and requested political asylum. The kindly and sympathetic Allens advised shocked George not to go back to the hotel but to spend the night with them, since there would be crowds of reporters waiting for him, and he ought to think about what he would sooner or later have to say to such people.

George telephoned the night porter, with whom he had become friendly — they had smoked some of his Russian cigarettes together — and was told that the press were indeed waiting for him.

He went back on the Underground in a very depressed mood. It was as if a grenade had exploded under his feet. Disbelief, sensations of failure, incompetence, and above all guilt took him over. He felt bitter at Kuznetsov’s betrayal of trust, not only of him but of his country as well which, in George’s view, had done so much for them both.

Apart from that, how could such a terrible event have come about, on his first trip out of the USSR? Disaster was too mild a word. He would need every moral resource to face whatever might come. Above all he steeled himself into accepting full responsibility for Kuznetsov’s action. Any consequences would be his, and he would endure them with the dignity of a Georgian prince which, he once told me, had been inherited from his ancestors. But he was utterly downhearted for the rest of his stay (and long afterwards) though he fought bravely not to let it show. Nevertheless, he said, they were the worst days of his life. ‘I just couldn’t understand why Kuznetsov had taken such a rash and fatal step.’

He was met a little way up the street by the hotel manager who, on George telling him he didn’t care to meet the press at that moment, avoided the score of reporters by leading him to another entrance, and by some back stairs to his room.

At one o’clock in the morning two police officers announced themselves at George’s door. They told him that Kuznetsov was now officially listed as ‘missing’ so they wanted details of his appearance, which George gave, saying also that he had a weak heart, and could speak no English. Polite and even friendly, they smoked George’s Moscow cigarettes. ‘People disappear in London all the time,’ the inspector said on leaving, ‘and are never found.’

Next morning, Wednesday, Secretary Chikvaidze came and took George to the embassy. George expected stormy accusations for his neglect, but the people there showed sympathy, Chikvaidze’s wife comforting him as best she could. The KGB in Moscow were already demanding they get hold of Kuznetsov ‘by any means’, and pack him off back to Moscow, a clearly impossible task since he was well hidden by now.

Later they went to Feifer’s address, hoping for clues, only to be told by a porter that he had gone to America a month ago. Back at the embassy a score of pressmen were waiting, and after discussions with the diplomatic staff it was agreed that George would face them at the hotel in the afternoon. He knew he would be taking a risk in doing this, and that every word would be weighed in the balance against his future prospects if anything anti-Soviet appeared in the papers that he was supposed to have said, but resolved that he would keep as much savoir-faire as could be mustered, confident by now that he could pull it off, while never losing a sense of dread.

He treated them at first with distaste, demanding to know why they were behaving so rudely in pushing microphones into his face, but gradually they became more amiable, and so did George, who answered their questions politely and at times with some humour. He talked to them for an hour and a half, and the session hadn’t been as intolerable as he expected.

In the afternoon a reporter from the Daily Telegraph, who had stayed behind when all the others had left, got into George’s room by claiming to be a traffic clerk from Aeroflot. It was impossible to get rid of him, so they went out, and talked in a bar on the Cromwell Road. At the end of their conversation the reporter said with a smile: ‘There’s not much more for you to do, Mr Andjaparidze, now that you’re in such trouble, than join Mr Kuznetsov and also defect. Think of what will happen to you when you get back to Russia.’

Perhaps Kuznetsov had told him that anyone would jump at the opportunity to get away from the Soviet Union, and hoped George could be persuaded into doing so. If the reporter, with his malicious advice, was successful in suborning George, then Kuznetsov might feel less guilty at having broken trust with someone certain to be held responsible.

George explained to the reporter, as coolly as possible on receiving such infamous advice — which made him more angry than he would ever be willing to show, and feeling more patriotism to the USSR than at any other time in his life: ‘I love my country. I’ve served it, and it has served me, and I’ll accept whatever it decides to do with me, because I’m not the sort of scoundrel who would run away from trouble. But let me tell you what you have done to Kuznetsov by providing him with the means to desert. You have murdered him as a writer, and I suppose you’re happy at having done so. Now will you kindly leave me alone?’

When the press and television publicity appeared, those at the embassy declared that George had handled the interviews far better than anyone could have expected, an opinion that preceded him home.

Shortly after he was marched on to the plane for Moscow I wrote saying how we had enjoyed his company in London. As much as we deplored the unlucky occurrence between him and Kuznetsov, we knew that it could not have been his fault: ‘so don’t see how you can be regarded as guilty of anything, and hope the event won’t at all spoil your chances of advancement in the Soviet academic world.’

This would of course be read by the KGB, who might then know that George was not without sympathisers in his plight. The letter was intercepted somewhere along the way, because he never received it.

On his arrival in Moscow he went through a few uncomfortable hours being debriefed. He was then told to go home and write a detailed report on all that had happened, from when he left Moscow with Kuznetsov to when he was taken back on the plane. Perhaps the example of his diplomatic prose is still in the KGB archives and will one day turn up.

After handing in his account he was reproached, and probably sworn at, for having shown too much interest in strip clubs, because in leaving nothing out of his narrative he admitted that he and Kuznetsov had been to such places. The officer went on to say: ‘You should have looked after that villain more carefully, and stayed with him every minute. What else do you think we sent you for?’

Towards the end of the session, his by now genial interrogator said, to George’s amazement: ‘Perhaps it would have been better for you if you had taken the opportunity and stayed in England as well. You’d have done better for yourself if you had.’ George didn’t quite know how to take it, but was relieved that they laughed together at the idea.

An ex-KGB general, Vasily Tikhonov, assistant head of the Department of Foreign Travel, later took George out to tea. He was friendly, and remarked on how competently he had handled the press interviews in London. ‘You did well, young man. I really don’t see how you could have done any better.’

George thanked him for the compliment, and said: ‘The only thing is that I’m really having trouble with people at the university, and the Writers’ Union. Some of them are treating me like shit, and making all kinds of remarks about what happened to me in London. I can’t really think why, because I’m sure none of them would have done any better.’

‘It’s very wrong of them to be like that,’ Tikhonov said. ‘But you know what that sort are like. They’re all afraid of losing their jobs and pensions.’ He told George however, that because of Kuznetsov’s defection, he might not be allowed to go abroad again for at least ten years.

Tikhonov made a few telephone calls which stopped the spiteful behaviour at the university and other places, but slanderous rumours of George’s relationship with Kuznetsov followed him around for some time. Everyone knew of the celebrated event, and in the enclosed academic world of Moscow there were speculations as to whether or not George had helped Kuznetsov in planning his escape, or done his best not to hinder him. George stood by his view that it had been impossible to divert a man from exercising his free will. Even had he followed him to the doors of the Daily Telegraph, and pinned him to the pavement to prevent him going in, he would have been arrested for assault, and the situation would have turned into a farce. Whoever in London had been aware of Kuznetsov’s intention beforehand must have been well satisfied at having helped to bring off such a coup.

My concern was that George might believe the KGB’s theory that I had played some part in the scheme by inviting him to lunch. It was chance and nothing more, and to protest my innocence in the letter to George shortly after his departure (knowing it would be read by the KGB) wouldn’t have done him any good.

His prophecy concerning the errant author’s future came true. I was told he lived somewhere in north London, and did work now and again for Radio Liberty. He often changed his address in case the KGB decided to have him murdered. The fact that no such attempt was made must have lowered his sense of self-importance. And considering the eruption of publicity if he had been assassinated, I can’t think it was ever seriously contemplated.

Nevertheless, Kuznetsov was always careful about revealing his whereabouts, even to people who would never pose any risk, though they also could unknowingly lead those to his lair who had reason to harm him.

Someone asked a few years later if I would like to meet him, and I replied that it might be interesting to do so. I was given the telephone number, and a woman answered when I dialled. He would see me if I called again at a certain date and time. I would be informed of the address on the actual day. I put the appointment in my diary: ‘Vronskaya — Kuznetsov, 17.30 hours,’ but the meeting was cancelled at the last moment, and I didn’t care to pursue the matter after that.

As George had surmised, he never wrote anything again. I wondered whether, as an unhappy man, he produced an account of his break for so-called freedom, though if he did, and it was published, I never heard of it. Word went around that he was disconsolate most of the time, and was drinking far too much. He died of a heart attack in 1979, ten years after he bolted.