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

Part Six The Last of George 2005

Saturday, 7 May

Getting up at half past seven was far too early, but that had always been the case when setting out on a journey. I was looking forward to seeing Moscow again, and in the intervals of our work for the British Council hoped to meet up with George Andjaparidze. My novel Moggerhanger was going the rounds to find a publisher, so a break from the hard slog was welcome.

The hire car came on time at ten, and standing at the door I noticed a strong west wind, which meant our plane would have a well-assisted take off into it, and a good push at the tail on turning east.

The couple of hours’ wait in the departure lounge could have been better spent in bed, for the plane wasn’t scheduled until 13.20. Ruth read the paper, while I went to the smoking area, noting a fine day beyond the sealed windows, and hoping we’d have similar weather in Moscow.

We boarded the plane at the set time, but were still on the perimeter track forty minutes later (with apologies for the delay) till the captain saw a green light from the control tower, or however it was done these days, and rocketed his full bus above the clouds. The familiar conurbation was soon out of sight and, after a tolerable British Airways lunch, I dozed, for there was nothing to see but sky.

Three and a half hours later the plane descended to Domodedovo airport, and after the routine of police and customs — quicker than in Soviet times — we were met by Margarita from the British Council, who had a car waiting.

The thiry-kilometre drive through rain to the city seemed endless and depressing. Among blocks of flats well off the road was much new development, something of a change from years ago.

The newish Novotel compared well with places stayed at before. Though not so close to the city centre it was comfortable, and modern in the Western style, with bathrobes, bed slippers and other such items in the room. I supposed it cost quite an amount, which was fair because we were receiving no fees for our appearances. It was, on the other hand, a privilege to be in Moscow, and would turn out doubly so if we could meet George again.

Sunday, 8 May

I didn’t sleep more than a couple of hours due to glasses of black tea foolishly drunk very late, though the difference in longitude may have had something to do with it. I was up by eight local time, and we met our guardian angel Margarita who came with a car.

Having a free day (the same old sabbath) we went to the new Tetryakov Gallery and spent some hours at a special exhibition called The Jack of Diamonds, a recreation of one held just before the First World War, with paintings and exhibits of the period, avant garde then, and still of much interest now.

We had planned an excursion to the Sparrow Hills (asterisked in Baedeker) which would have given a historic view of the city, but we’d already had enough driving in Moscow traffic, so voted with our wheels and asked Margarita to take us back to the hotel. This was just as well, since it was niagaring with rain and we wouldn’t have seen anything of the famous panorama. Back in our room I had a ninety-minute sleep.

We went to have supper with Marina Boroditskaya at her flat in one of those vast plain blocks of which there must be hundreds in this megalopolis. We took to this lively, dark-haired and good-looking woman immediately. Although it was our first meeting, Marina and Ruth had been in contact by e-mail for the past few years in connection with the anthology of contemporary Russian women poets, edited by Valentina Polukhina, and published by Daniel Weissbort in Modern Poetry in Translation, the periodical he and Ted Hughes started in the 1960s. Although Ruth does not read or speak Russian, the editors persuaded her to work from literals they would supply.

One of her three allocated poets was Marina. A distinguished translator of English poetry, including Chaucer, Donne and Kipling, she was able to send Ruth versions of her own poems which needed little alteration. The two of them became good friends by correspondence. Later, Ruth translated other poems by Marina, some of which were published in English magazines, and Marina’s translations of Ruth’s two long poem sequences Sugar-Paper Blue and Sheba and Solomon appeared in the important literary journal Foreign Literature Magazine and in Novaya Yunost. During our visit the two of them read the poems in both languages.

Having been told I liked vodka with my food Marina generously provided it. We talked about Russian culture, civilisation and history, and social conditions of the present. Many advantages, such as education and health care, affordable housing and transport available to ordinary people in Soviet times had been lost, she said, yet there had been some gains. Maybe the shark-like winners of the battles in the new era of capitalism would eventually settle down, and bring even a fraction of their blatant prosperity to those who needed it far more.

Marina was divorced from her husband, the poet and translator Grigory Kruzhov, and shared the flat with Sergei, their twenty-year-old son, whose older brother drove us back to the hotel at midnight.

Monday, 9 May

I woke at eight-thirty after a good sleep, showered and made tea. While waiting for Marina in the lobby after breakfast I watched the march past in Red Square on television, comemmorating the Soviet victory in Berlin at the end of the Second World War.

Soldiers in Red Army uniforms of the time marched by the plinth with Thomson machine guns sloped across the chest, some carrying banners and insignia of various military units. There were T-34 tank men wearing black uniforms and padded headsets. Utility-style lorries laden with standing veterans waved red carnations at President Bush, Chirac, and other heads of state — Blair not among them.

After a wet morning the weather turned fine because, it was said, aeroplanes of the air force had been sent up to seed the clouds around Moscow, and now it was beginning to work.

We walked along the traffic-free Arbat Street where fit old gentlemen with medals and decorations promenaded in sober festival best after their appearance in the Red Square parade, one-time soldiers of the campaigns that had put an end to German Nazism. The Soviet people had suffered more than those of any other Allied nation.

Now and again someone would ask permission to photograph one of the resplendent men, requests agreed to with modesty and dignity, yet without a smile, as if fully aware of the importance of what they had once done, and knowing that such reminders might never come again. Some of the veterans had boys and girls with them — though rarely hand in hand — who looked on grandfather with admiration and wonder, perhaps not having realised before what heroes they had been in the war. The children carried the flowers which passers-by gave to show their appreciation.

An elderly woman who had also seen active service (there were many of them as well) had a large bosom plastered with decorations. When asked to pose for a photograph she did so with a musical laugh, while making sure that her hair was in place, as a platoon of smart young soldiers in modern uniform marched past behind a band, people following and bystanders applauding.

We lunched at a nearby cafeteria, one of a chain called Moo-Moo, convenient and good to eat at. They were also, Marina said, very democratic, in that people of all sorts went to them. Back on the Arbat we bought souvenirs for our grandchildren, including a hammer-and-sickle hat for one of the boys.

That evening we went to an anniversary concert at the Tchaikovsky Auditorium. Shostakovich’s ‘Leningrad’ Symphony, No. 7 was the star item in a programme of celebration, such a sublime and moving performance that I knew I would never hear it played so heart-rendingly again. After the first movement everyone in the crowded theatre stood for a minute’s silence, in remembrance of the so many million dead — and so much misery. Others as well as myself had tears on their cheeks before the music resumed. At the finale the applause went on and on, as if the following silence would be too much to bear.

After such a moving experience it was hard to take any more, so we left the concert hall and stood in the square outside for what could be seen of fireworks from the Kremlin. Hundreds of people cheered at each technicolor shellburst of blues, greens, and spectacular floral reds.

Tuesday, 10 May

‘Again in the Metro with Marina’ seemed like the refrain of a song, though from what era I couldn’t say. This time she took us on a tour of the most interesting stations, many built during the worst years of the 1930s. Construction went on even in the Second World War, when the Germans were within thirty miles of Moscow. Stops were further apart than in London, but each underground hall was decorated by examples of Soviet art and sculpture. One like a vast ballroom was lit from chandeliers, no spot of dust visible in their soothing light.

At the Tetryakov station we were met by the poet Glyeb Shulypriakov, a friend of Marina’s, whom Ruth had talked to in London a year ago at the launch of the anthology of Russian women poets. He led us on a walk through the old Merchants’ Quarter, now a residential and business area but with many of the original buildings and churches preserved. He had a flat in one of the houses, where we had tea and discussed poetry — what else?

Later, on our way back to the hotel, a man on the packed Metro offered me his seat. He was so generously persistent that I sat down, although I felt no need to. When people flowed out at the next station he took the place by me, saying he had been to Liverpool as a sailor. There was much he wanted to add but couldn’t, and I knew how he felt. His face was a portrait of frustrated intention to speak. Neither was my Russian good enough, except to say how beautiful Moscow was. He searched one pocket after another to find something he could give me as a memento of our meeting. Perhaps he imagined I was one of the veterans from England (I hoped not) but he found a small wrapped sweet and, his face shining with happiness, presented it to me. We shook hands several times and I got a bear hug — as if we’d had a vodka or two — before he went out.

We took a whole week more or less out of Marina’s busy life, but she was indefatigable on our behalf. At five that afternoon she came to the hotel so that she and Ruth could go over the poems they would present at the Bookberry, a large bookshop well known for poetry readings. I sat in the lobby for a smoke, waiting for the British Council car to take us to the event. Until it began I walked the well stocked and laid out shelves, with many foreign titles in Russian, and some in the original languages. But pop music wailing throughout made contemplation and browsing difficult.

Ruth and Marina had such a large audience that a search had to be made for extra chairs. Sugar-Paper Blue, with its theme of Akhmatova in Leningrad, went down well.

We were then driven to the place for my performance. I couldn’t fix exactly where it was in relation to anywhere else in the city, in spite of having a modern and accurate street plan. I had never, as a passenger, been able to look at a map without feeling car-sick.

When a man on guard at the door asked if I would like some vodka I said yes, certainly. Taking an unlabelled bottle from under his table he bubbled two good measures into paper cups.

I opened the talk by saying that the writer is essentially a communicator, between himself and whatever readers he might be lucky enough to have. Then I gave an example of communications in one of my jobs before I had thought of becoming a writer, as a wireless telegraphist, sending and receiving messages between myself and aircraft flying from Darwin to London. To break the ice — it nearly always does — I brought out my Morse key and oscillator, and tapped a short telegram of goodwill to the audience, saying beforehand that if an amateur radio operator or ex-Marconi man among them could transcribe what was sent, I would give him (or her) a signed copy of my latest novel. No one won the prize. The only time anyone had was in Rostock some years ago, when an ex-ship’s officer deciphered the words correctly

I read a condensed part of my novel The German Numbers Woman, with a resumé from Marina; then, after a few poems, talked more about life as a writer. The session ended with questions at ten o’clock. We went on to a Ukrainian restaurant with Anna Genina, the charming director of the Moscow British Council office.

Wednesday, 11 May

We were expected at the studio of Radio Kultura for interviews at ten, and got there well on time, but the dragon of a woman guarding the door of the building said we didn’t have proper identification. She was only persuaded to let us in after a stern call from upstairs.

The round table discussion of our life and work was skilfully guided by the young presenter, and went on for almost two hours, before our ‘business lunch’ at a place called Pal Joey’s.

With barely time to change at the hotel we were motored to a conference at Foreign Literature Magazine. Their offices weren’t as opulent as in Soviet times, when every issue sold millions of copies. Even so it had a circulation of several hundred thousand.

The editor in chief, Alexei Slovesny, and a dozen members of the editorial staff, asked us about the state of fiction and poetry in England, and whether we could recommend anything that might be suitable for their readers. Ruth mentioned the names of several poets which were new to them. They seemed well enough informed about contemporary English fiction, knowing the titles and authors of many recent novels. They hadn’t however heard of John King’s books such as England Away and The Football Factory, so I explained briefly what they were about.

The discussion, with tea and biscuits, lasted until half past four, when we were ferried to the British Council offices. We had tea again, and walked from there to the Library of Foreign Literature, where a good-sized audience awaited us for another reading.

Then I spotted George, sitting slightly apart by the wall. I had asked about him several times already, and Marina dialled his old telephone number, but no one had answered to the name of Andjaparidze. This didn’t surprise me, for his mother and aunt with whom he had lived must have been long dead. My only hope was that news of our visit would get around, and he would turn up at one of the venues.

Now he had. He could hardly stand, tried, but I asked him not to persist. He held up his two sticks saying he could only walk properly with them. He was in pain, and looked older than his sixty-three years. His daughter, who accompanied him, told us he mustn’t stay out late, because he was quite ill. George said she was religious in the Orthodox way, and always made sure he was all right when he went out — being a dutiful (and beautiful) daughter. Because of the crush, and the uncertainty of what would happen afterwards, we arranged to meet the following night. He said we would have much to discuss.

Ruth and I read, with Marina translating, more or less a replay of the previous evening. From there we went to a party at the flat of James and Kim, of the British Council, where we were so entertained I gave them a signed copy of the book that hadn’t been claimed at the Morse competition the night before.

Thursday, 12 May

While waiting for Marina to come at eleven I sat in the lobby and wrote to the English-language Moscow Times saying how much I had enjoyed being in the city for the recent celebrations. My only surprise — and disappointment — was that Tony Blair had missed the most important date in European history of the last sixty years. Bush, Chirac, and fifty-seven other heads of state had been present. Putin said in a speech that Russia, the United States and France were the Allies of the century, a significant slur on the British prime minister for his absence. Blair had sent Prescott instead, but he had been pushed a little behind the others on the podium in Red Square, as a hint of general displeasure. We left for home before knowing whether or not the Moscow Times had published my letter.

It rained most of the time we were in Moscow, so it was good that the Metro was only a hundred yards beyond the hotel entrance. From Polyarkov station we splashed through puddles with Marina for half a mile or so to the factory outlet of a shop which sold the equivalent of Ordnance Survey maps of most parts of the former Soviet Union.

I had always thought that one of the first signs of democracy was when ordinary people, and foreigners as well, could buy detailed topographical maps of their country. Now, for the first time since tsarist days, it was possible in Russia. Such maps had been top secret documents in Soviet colleges and I was told by a former geology student that when issued for instruction and research he had been threatened with Siberia if he lost them.

A middle-aged woman eyed me from behind a long desk as I looked at displays on the walls and went through racks of interesting items. High-quality maps showed spot heights and contours, towns and villages in their real shapes and locations, and gave details even of cabins in forests reached only by footpath. Large-scale maps of Kamchatka and the Volga delta were available, as well as road atlases of various provinces in European Russia and Siberia. All names were in Cyrillic, but such lettering had been familiar since first learning that alphabet in my teens.

The saleswoman was livelier while totting up a thousand roubles on her calculator. I would have bought a sample of everything in the shop but space in our cases was not unlimited. I fitted the bundles into two plastic bags so that they wouldn’t saturate on our walk back to the Metro.

There was a long queue at the Moo-Moo cafeteria, but some kindly person invited us into line more than halfway to the serving counters, and nobody seemed to mind.

At five — it was still raining — we were chauffered with Marina to a gallery near the British Council where there was an excellent exhibition of photographs, Britain in World War Two, pictures of smouldering bomb damage after air raids, women working in armaments factories or cheerily walking towards them on the street, line-of-battleships, and a Land Army girl between two enormous dray horses. A mythologised era, perhaps, but evidence all the same that Britain too had done everything of which it was capable in the common struggle.

Being asked to open the exhibition with a short speech was an honour not to be refused. After we had finished our stint at a press conference I talked for about twenty minute on life in England at that time, taking the opportunity to apologise for Blair’s absence at the recent celebrations, and saying with tongue in cheek that he should be opening the show not me, though I was very glad to be taking his place — which went down well with the mainly Russian audience.

I mentioned my work as a capstain lathe operator making parts of Merlin engines for Lancaster bombers in a factory run by women and youths like me, with a couple of tool setters held back from the army to supervise. The war was still on, but ended soon afterwards, though I had already enlisted into the Fleet Air Arm. Little could I have realised, on 8 May 1945, that I would be in Moscow sixty years later for the anniversary of the great event.

I remembered that we were given the day off in the factory to celebrate. In the crowded White Horse pub that evening, with my parents and a girlfriend, we saw a hefty woman munitions worker in heavy dark spectacles doing a can-can on one of the tables, flashing her Union Jack bloomers with every high step.

In conclusion I duplicated a press report taken in Morse from our short wave receiver of the time telling the world that Hitler was dead. In those days I could read it fast enough because we had been tutored in the Air Training Corps by an ex-police wireless operator.

The performance went down well enough for me to be asked if I would repeat the message on my key in front of the television camera, and give a short interview. Chatting later with the British Ambassador, I wondered whether he’d disliked the reference to Blair in my speech.

From then on I sat with George who, in spite of the discomfort, looked dashing and confident in his suit and bow tie. He was invited with our British Council friends to a nearby restaurant, where I split from the main group at the long table so that we could go on with our talk.

He said that the change to capitalism from Soviet power meant untold billions of roubles being sucked out of the economy, to the detriment of the country and its poor. There were many things he liked about the new life, but more than enough that he didn’t. The rape of the nation by the so-called new oligarchs was something he could never forgive.

‘You must remember that besides having such rapacious people around, Russia had been exhausted for nearly a century by every conceivable disaster. Even though Stalin died over fifty years ago, and the worst seemed to be over, it was impossible for us to recover because of the Cold War. When the alteration came Russia was ripe for a free for all.’

Nearly forty years had gone by since Kuznetsov had done a runner, so I knew there were many questions I could now ask, especially about what happened in London after the discovery that he was missing. George was happy enough to give details already mentioned, and allow me to take notes on his further observations as well.

We talked a long time, and at the end he told me that he lived in a more modest way than formerly, but was content with his life. He did look with some trepidation on the fact that in a week or so he would be going into hospital for a major operation. On asking what, specifically, was wrong with him he replied: ‘Just about everything,’ implying that it was so serious he occasionally thought he might not come out of the anaesthetic. ‘I’m sure that won’t be true,’ I said, ‘but if you don’t the world will never be the same again.’

He assured me — a touch of the old sybarite — that he didn’t really care, for he was still enjoying himself. In fact his love life was so well arranged that a girlfriend called on him at least once a week. As a matter of fact, he boasted with a wink, she had been at his flat that afternoon, and they had spent a few libidinous hours together during which he’d managed to make love twice.

When he was taken off in the car at midnight by his daughter I had a strong feeling that I would never see him again.

Friday, 13 May

Up at seven I felt almost too done in to face the final day, wanting to stay in bed till it was time for the plane to leave, but Margarita met us at half past nine with a British Council car, to show us around the Kremlin which we hadn’t been inside before.

Long queues at the gate soon dissolved, and rain stopped for a while. We joined straggling bands of tourists by the Great Cannon manufactured in 1595, but never fired. Maybe it would have blown itself and too many bystanders to pieces. Half a dozen cathedrals came next but after the third it was hard to remember what I had already seen, so smothered were their walls with icons. The next interesting place was the Archbishops’ Palace, with numerous glass cases of silver and gold artefacts.

A couple of hours to see so many wonders could only be a reconnaissance. One needed a week, maybe more, and I was too tired to take in the overwhelming detail. The eyes shivered back into their sockets at such dazzling objects. Outside, between the cathedrals, a score or so of children stood in a tight colourful circle that, from a helicopter, would have looked like a picturesque football supporter’s rosette.

The drive to the airport was slow, due to traffic and poor visibility in rain and sleet. Margarita told us she had spent four years in Quito, where her father had been a diplomat. She had married a man from Ecuador who still lived there because of difficulties getting permission to be with her in Russia, but in a few weeks she would be going back to Quito to try and sort matters out. We wished her luck, and kissed her goodbye.

At the airport a militiaman by the anti-terrorist checkpoint noticed that we didn’t have the obligatory labels on our hand luggage. They should have been stuck on at the BA checking-in desk, so we backtracked through the system to get it done. We took off our shoes to pass between the Scylla and Charybdis of the radar beams. Warning blips usually sounded for the Morse key and oscillator but, strangely this time, they didn’t register as potentially suspect.

Sadly, the last thing I read in The Moscow Times was an item about a fire which almost gutted a synagogue on the outskirts of the city. The cause of the conflagration was not immediately clear. Firefighters had rushed to the blaze but were unable to prevent severe damage to the interior and the roof.

At the duty free we bought two bottles of Standart vodka, having been advised it was the best. After a long wait we boarded the large Boeing and set off for London. With the time change we arrived at six-thirty local time and, once out of the customs, spotted the pre-booked taxi driver.

A week or so later we heard with much sorrow that George Andjaparidze had died during the operation. He had been born in a German air raid, to the sound of falling bombs, and bursting shells from thousands of anti-aircraft guns defending the people of Moscow. Under the loving care of his mother and his aunt he was a fat and bonny baby, so well fed in times of terrible shortages — he never knew how they had managed it, because many other children had died — that he was nicknamed by them ‘Our Little Bomb’. The two devoted women spoiled him, and perhaps partly for that reason he grew up to be amiable and tolerant, always ready and able to enjoy himself.

I’d had the privilege of knowing him as a friend, and several times saw how popular he could be with others, such traits lasting all his life. He implied, on our last evening together in Moscow, that it had been easy for Kuznetsov to turn him into an acquaintance who would stand by him.

He went on talking about Kuznetsov even after I had put my notebook down. ‘The step he took was senseless, and I’ll never stop thinking so. He must have realised that his money would soon run out, and who would employ someone who knew no English? Russian was the language in his blood, so who indeed would even remember him after a few years? Yet I had up to then seen him as a man with a head on his shoulders, sober and perhaps even calculating, but there are still so many puzzles in the affair that no matter how much I go over every little detail of the case I can’t, even now, understand why he did such a thing, though a few clues and some information have come to me since.

‘I was often asked,’ he went on, ‘why I didn’t stay in England when I so easily could have done. I liked England very much, and still do. It’s a wonderful country. Just imagine, I would have become a professor of Russian literature, and had a well-paid post in some university. I would have had it made, as you say.

‘Yet thank God I didn’t stay, because if I had I would have felt guilty and miserable for ever, which in a way means I’d have been ruined too. And I didn’t stay because I loved my beautiful unfortunate nation more. It would have been a betrayal of trust, and I was never a treacherous person. My relations with the KGB afterwards were good because I kept absolutely nothing at all back of my experiences in London. I was never afraid of the KGB, though on one level after coming home it took a long time to become my normal self again. I was shellshocked, as you can imagine.

‘In the end, though, I still can’t understand why Kuznetsov did as he did. A question that still nags me is why, on his defection, he didn’t go straightaway on the radio and television and say why he had done it. Instead, a whole fortnight went by before he went on the radio to denounce his country. Perhaps he did want to do so immediately, but was either advised not to, or was prevented.

‘More mysterious was the fact that I was due to leave for Moscow a full three days before him, because I had important appointments to keep. I received permission to go, which would have given Kuznetsov three days in which to wander on his own. So why didn’t he wait till then and defect, which would have been more certain and sensible? He wouldn’t have betrayed my trust, though I realise now that might not have weighed very heavily with him, unless he had been told to do it when he did because those who helped him wanted to draw me as well into the net of defection.

‘Another thing I remembered in my report was that not long after we had arrived in London he went into a booth and made a telephone call, which must have been to someone who spoke Russian and who he’d already been in contact with. Now, the mechanism of making such a call in London is different to what you do in Moscow, so who taught him how to do it? Or trained him?

‘I didn’t think anything of it while making the report, but about ten years ago someone who went through the archives found out that Kuznetsov had been a KGB agent. That explains the telegram which came to the embassy demanding that they get him back “at any cost”. To have a writer run away was one thing, and I don’t suppose all that unusual, but an agent is a much bigger fish, and no doubt he had much to inform the Foreign Office about in London.

‘Such a fact only brings up more questions, which I suppose will never be answered, unless one day someone in your democratic country is given the liberty to go through the archives of MI5 or whatever it’s called. I would dearly like to know.

‘In spite of all that happened to me as a result of that affair,’ he said finally, ‘I’ve been a happy man. My only bitterness is that the trouble I was in had such a terrible effect on my mother that she died much sooner than she should have done. It did, literally, drive her to the grave, because she knew that in Stalinist times, which she had lived through, I would have been shot — no question. Now let’s have a last drink together.’