Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War

9. Drinks with the KGB

Producing tedious reports on Soviet higher education at the embassy was quickly losing its appeal. The new world Vadim had opened was the Russia Mervyn had come to experience, the exciting, romantic land he had dreamed of as he diligently taught himself Russian after school and ploughed painfully through War and Peace. Russia, its warmth and expansiveness, its unpredictability and excitement, was penetrating his blood. And with it came a recklessness, and with the recklessness a kind of liberation.

An Oxford friend wrote to ask Mervyn a small favour. The friend was editing a collection of the poetry of Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago, and wanted some of the author’s early work, available only in the Lenin Library in Moscow. He asked Mervyn to copy the poems and send them to Oxford. There was one small problem. A few months before, in October 1958, Pasternak had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of Zhivago. Under pressure from the Writers’ Union, who along with the Party considered the book a pernicious celebration of pre-Revolutionary Russia, Pasternak had been forced to turn down the prize. Indeed, only Pasternak’s international fame had kept him out of the Gulag. Getting the writer’s unpublished material out of the Soviet Union was going to be dangerous, probably illegal, and certainly career-threatening. Mervyn immediately agreed.

My father spent the next two weeks snapping away with a small camera at the manuscripts in the professors’ reading room of the Lenin Library, where they were available to anyone with a reader’s ticket, as the other scholars hissed him to silence and the library attendant complained archly. He slipped two packages of the photographic prints into the embassy’s diplomatic bags on consecutive weeks to avoid their being confiscated by Soviet customs.

A week later, a summons from the head of Chancery was solemnly passed down the embassy hierarchy to Mervyn. There was no doubt that a stiff dressing-down was in the offing. Hilary King was urbane and condescending as he received my father in his magnificent office on the ground floor of the embassy. But King had found out about Mervyn’s unofficial packages from the Foreign Office in London, where the contents of diplomatic bags were scrutinized. The embassy was very vulnerable to complaints from the Soviet side, intoned King in tones of biting politeness. There would be terrible trouble if they found out about Mervyn’s secreted photographs of the works of a banned author.

I can imagine the look on my father’s face as he left the Chancery, fuming. I have seen it often, a suppressed aggression which comes out in flashes of fury, usually after simmering for a few hours or minutes under a façade of icy cordiality. Mervyn had prudently apologized to King. But the anger was there, inside, pent up, at the Foreign Office’s pandering to the Soviets’ petty administrative demands. He was being scolded for an action which to anyone outside the pygmy world of the diplomatic bureaucracy would have appeared eminently right, and that rankled, deeply. Mervyn walked away, seething, down the thickly carpeted corridor to his own tiny office in the stable block at the back of the building.

Shortly afterwards, in one of the infinitely subtle ways the embassy found to express disfavour, they moved a lowly radio operator into Mervyn’s apartment and gave Robert Longmire his own apartment. Then they cut off Mervyn’s servant allowance.

It was time to jump. An advertisement in an airmail copy of The Times seemed to be the lifeline, announcing a graduate exchange programme between the Soviet Union and Britain, the first ever. It was the opportunity Mervyn had been waiting for to swap cold smiles in Chancery for smelly student dorm corridors and freedom – perhaps – from the ever-present goons. But there was a problem. Mervyn was an accredited diplomat – albeit the very last name on the 1958 Moscow Diplomatic List – and it was unlikely that the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs would believe his sudden change of status to that of a humble academic. Mervyn’s first step was to take himself off the restricted list for sensitive documents and get rid of his security clearance. The embassy seemed only too happy to relieve him of both. The paperwork for Mervyn to apply for the graduate exchange was approved by the embassy and duly sent off to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And, duly, after proper consideration, refused.

Over kebabs and vodka in an Azerbaijani restaurant, Mervyn drowned his sorrows with Vadim. The Russian nodded his head in mute sympathy as he poured vodka, firmly and deliberately, into their glasses while Mervyn recalled his tale of the intransigence of the Ministry.

‘Don’t jump to conclusions, Mervyn,’ Vadim assured his mend. ‘I’ll find out if my uncle can help.’

Mervyn was immensely cheered. Vadim, with his mysterious friends in high places with their ZiLs and dachas, would surely be able to persuade the Ministry to change its collective mind. Vadim mentioned nothing of what would be expected from Mervyn in return. They toasted Mervyn’s future as a Soviet student, and friend of the Soviet people.

‘So, you’re going to Moscow State University.’ The ambassador, Sir Patrick Reilly, was friendly, despite the hitches in Mervyn’s short embassy career, as his soon-to-be ex-employee came to say goodbye. ‘Most unusual. I wonder why the Ministry allowed you to do it?’

There was a long silence. This was not the time or the place for Mervyn to reveal the story of Vadim and his uncle, their evenings on the town with his new friends, the Ministry’s inexplicable last-minute change of heart. He said nothing. Receiving no answer, the ambassador held out his hand. ‘Well. Good luck.’

To use up the remaining few days of holiday time he had outstanding from the embassy, Mervyn took a trip to Soviet Central Asia. A woman in the Chancery, whose job was to burn sensitive documents in an iron pot, advised him that Bukhara was worth a detour from Samarkand and Tashkent. Mervyn talked over his plans excitedly with Vadim, who was unimpressed with his English friend’s enthusiasm for historical sites. Mervyn set off eastwards in a series of small but sturdy Aeroflot planes. Bukhara was to be his last stop.

The desert city turned out to be cold and uninviting, a stretch of mud-walled houses huddled along the airport road giving way to some new but already dilapidated-looking Soviet concrete blocks closer to the centre. The taxi driver, a Bukharan Jew, chatted all the way about the brand new Intourist hotel and, when they arrived, complained about the heaviness of Mervyn’s suitcase and hiked the already exorbitant fare. The hotel was indeed new, but as he pushed through the doors Mervyn found that inside it was colder than out on the street. The receptionist had moved her desk closer to the door in order to keep warm.

Mervyn asked if the heating would be switched on soon. ‘This is a new hotel,’ said the receptionist, offended by the foreigner’s prissiness. ‘And the lifts don’t work. You’ll have to take the stairs.’ She gave him a room on the top floor.

Dragging his suitcase up the stairs Mervyn noticed a pair of familiar legs descending. Vadim, it seemed, was in Bukhara on official business, quite by coincidence. Even better, Vadim happened to be free that day to take Mervyn round the sights of Bukhara, with an official car, and in the evening it turned out that a Russian friend of Vadim’shad laid on a little welcoming party in his house on the outskirts. Vadim announced proudly that there would be some girls there.

After a day touring the sites, far too perfunctorily for Mervyn’s liking, they made their way down some unpaved streets to the town’s outskirts. Vadim’s friend’s house was in an old Russian quarter of traditional log houses quite different from the native brick-built Uzbek courtyards. Volodya, their host, greeted them warmly and plied them with vodka. They ate turkey, the largest Mervyn had ever seen in Russia, and danced to old American records. One of the three girls at the little party, Nina, turned out to be staying in the same hotel as Mervyn and Vadim. They walked home together in the moonlight, and said their goodnights in the foyer.

‘You’ll come to my room later?’ Mervyn whispered as Vadim turned to go up the stairs. Nina squeezed his hand.

Mervyn tipsily wove his way down the corridor towards his room. The light was on, and someone was inside. Whoever it was had heard him coming upstairs and opened the door. Backlit from the room, Mervyn didn’t see the man’s face, but demanded to know what he was doing. ‘Fixing the electricity,’ the man said calmly. ‘But we’re done now.’

After the men had left, Mervyn sat down heavily on the bed. Even here in the middle of Central Asia, the KGB was tailing him. Mervyn noticed that on the table were two empty glasses. Secret policemen, apparently, liked to have a quick drink on the job.

He undressed quickly, shivering, and got into bed. There was a soft knock on the door. Thinking it was Vadim, Mervyn got up and opened it. It was Nina. She pushed him inside the room, frisky. He bundled her back out. A rape scandal was the last thing Mervyn needed; he pictured Nina’s plump embrace turning into a wrestling hold, and help waiting just outside the door as she screamed for rescue. He climbed into his frigid bed alone.

Moscow State University was the largest of Stalin’s grandiose highrises which punctuated the Moscow skyline like a ring of watchful vultures. It was also, at thirty-six storeys, the tallest building in Europe at that time. On the sweeping terrace in front of the building were gigantic statues of well-muscled male and female students looking up confidently from their hefty stone books and engineering instruments into the bright future. It was a long way from the haphazard sandstone quads of Oxford.

The university put Mervyn up in the ‘hotel’ wing, in fact identical to the rest of the university’s five thousand-odd rooms except that, unlike ordinary students and professors, guests were provided with the luxury of a cleaning woman. The room was small, furnished with a sofa-bed, a deal desk and a built-in cupboard. The oversized window, dictated by the monumentalism of the façade, was completely out of proportion to the size of the room.

Nevertheless, Mervyn was delighted to be there. The university was the antithesis of his closeted diplomatic life; it was earthy and profoundly Soviet. Above all, Mervyn was significantly more free than when he was at the embassy. True, KGB radio cars stood outside, ready to put tails on foreigners as they left the building, but the surveillance was mercifully sporadic, and his fellow students, though still wary, were freer in associating with Mervyn than any Russians, apart from Vadim, had been before.

Mervyn had made a point, while at the embassy, of eating whenever he could at stolovayas – cheap public canteens – and riding on public transport wherever possible. Now at the university Mervyn ate in the canteen every day, with its papery meatballs, thin soup and watery potato puree. He had no choice but to pile on to trolleybuses, packed with the heavily padded narod, or people, and the smell of sweat and pickle-breath. He loved it.

Georges Nivat, a young Frenchman who was one of Mervyn’s fellow students and a friend from St Anthony’s and the festival, shared his love for immersing himself in Soviet life. Georges lived on a floor of the university which he shared with some Vietnamese graduates. The smell of their cooking, peppery chicken feet and garlicky cabbage soups, wafted down the corridors, much to Georges’ distress. ‘It is ruining my life!’ he would complain with Gallic élan when he came to Mervyn’s room for solace, tea and biscuits, gesticulating fatalistically. ‘Ruining my Iife!’

Georges’ fascination with Russian literature had brought him to Moscow. Soon after he arrived at the university he began frequenting one of Moscow’s great literary salons, the apartment of Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya on Potapovsky Pereulok. Ivinskaya had been the typist and collaborator of Boris Pasternak since 1946. She was also the beleaguered poet’s mistress, and was the inspiration for Lara, the heroine of Doctor Zhivago. She had paid heavily for her association with Pasternak. In 1949, after refusing to denounce her lover as a British spy, Ivinskaya was imprisoned for five years. She was pregnant by Pasternak at the time but lost the child in prison. She returned to Potapovsky Pereulok only after Stalin’s death in 1953, and they recommenced their affair. But all her life, Ivinskaya was tortured by Pasternak’s refusal to abandon his wife and children. The two families lived in a curious ménage, with the poet lunching and spending the afternoons with Olga before bowing politely to his mistress’s guests and leaving to join his wife for dinner.

Irina Ivinskaya was Olga’s daughter by a previous marriage to a scientist who committed suicide rather than face arrest in the Purge of 1938. But despite the tragedy which dogged her mother’s life, Irina was charming, happy and passionate about books and ballet. Georges fell utterly in love. Within months, he proposed. Pasternak toasted the young couple at a crowded tea party at his dacha in Peredelkino. Mervyn was invited to go and meet the author, but says he was too shy. ‘I would have nothing to say to Pasternak,’ he told me.

I have often thought about this strange refusal, because it sits so ill with my father’s apparent love of risk and danger at that time in his life. Perhaps it was because he only felt at ease with his friends and social equals and couldn’t stand formal functions – a dislike which continues to this day. He has always struck me as a very private man, cocooned in a protective world he weaves around himself to keep the outside world at bay. His study in London, the various austere academic apartments he occupied during visiting professorships, these were all fashioned into small masculine nests where he could escape into his piled papers, his pots of tea and his Bach. At social events he usually wears his frayed two-pound charity shop shirts and sagging tweed jackets, and hangs in a corner with a forced smile, waiting until it’s time to leave. In a fit of shyness, he even left my wedding dinner early. I said goodbye to him on the steps of the old Splendid Hotel on the island of Buyukada, near Istanbul, as he stood in his antique dinner suit and a beige mackintosh. He thanked me warmly for a good party, as the music of a raucous band of young Gypsy delinquents belted from the dining room. ‘I don’t really like these big gatherings,’ he explained, and turned to walk back alone to our house through the light evening drizzle.

Soon after Georges’ engagement party, Vadim invited Mervyn to dinner at the Praga restaurant to celebrate Vadim’s newly won MA degree in oriental studies. The other guests were mostly elderly academics, Vadim’s supervisors and department heads. But opposite Mervyn sat an elegantly dressed man, about five years his senior, with a distinctive grey streak in his combed-back hair. Vadim whispered to Mervyn that the man’s name was Alexei, a ‘research assistant’ to his mysterious uncle. But he didn’t introduce them, and they did not speak. Alexei made a long, witty toast. Mervyn made conversation with his stony-faced neighbours and drank too much.

A few days later Vadim called to pass on a message from Alexei: he wanted to invite Mervyn and Vadim to join him for an evening at the Bolshoi ballet. Mervyn was surprised, and flattered. Though they hadn’t spoken at dinner, Alexei was probably interested to meet a foreigner, Mervyn reasoned. He accepted the invitation.

Alexei was poised and confident, a true member of the post-war Moscow nomenklatura, or official élite. He wore foreign-made clothes and had travelled; his wife, Inna Vadimovna, was tall and slim, and, Mervyn noticed when they met at the Bolshoi, wore an expensive gold bracelet with a watch set in it. Alexei remarked proudly that his wife was ‘a typical Soviet woman’. Mervyn thought of his cleaner, Anna Pavlovna, panting to the bus stop with her string bags full of eggs from the university canteen. She seemed to Mervyn to be a more typical Soviet woman.

The evening was a success. Alexei loved ballet, and he and Mervyn had a friendly conversation during the interval, as the more philistine Vadim hovered around the buffet, looking at girls. Alexei began calling Mervyn regularly, inviting him out to dinner at the Aragvi, at the Baku, the Metropole Hotel, the National Hotel- the finest restaurants Moscow could offer. Alexei had money, and he had some mysterious special relationship with the mâitres d’hðtel of the city, booking at short notice, always welcomed with an obsequious smile and shown to a good table or private room.

Alexei was more forward than Vadim in conversation, more overtly political, less chummy. He never spoke of women, and drank in moderation. Alexei expressed interest in Mervyn’s childhood, his background, but Mervyn found from his trite responses that he could not conceive of poverty, or class, beyond Marxist-Leninist platitudes. An irony: Alexei, the Soviet champion of the international working class, himself from a privileged élite, and Mervyn, a naïve but sincere British patriot, profoundly anti-Communist, yet in Marxist terms a natural revolutionary.

Over one of their ever more frequent dinners, Mervyn and Alexei got on to the subject of the strict visa regime, surveillance and spies. They were at the National Hotel, a favourite watering hole of the capital’s beau monde for the best part of the century. Alexei remarked that the Soviet Union had to be very careful of foreign spies. Mervyn, perhaps to prove that he wasn’t one of ‘them’, to neutralize the implicit suspicion, jokingly told Alexei that it was a regular source of amusement at the embassy that there was a goons’ booth under the Bolshoi Kamenny Bridge, just round the corner from the embassy, where KGB men would play dominoes while waiting to be called out.

Alexei listened with interest, suddenly even more serious, carefully questioning Mervyn on where the booth was. After dinner he insisted that they drive under the bridge to take a look. Perhaps sensing Mervyn’s discomfort, Alexei made a disparaging remark about the work of MI5 and MI6, as though to suggest that if Mervyn were on the payroll he would know about it. Mervyn didn’t argue with him.

When Mervyn drove past the bridge a few days later he noticed that the booth and the goons were gone.

Vadim arranged another evening at his uncle’s dacha. As before, they went in a ZiL, but this time Vadim had brought along a ski instructor friend and three plump but lively girls. They went cross-country skiing at night among the pines, ungainly Mervyn falling frequently into snow banks as the girls giggled. They warmed up with vodka in front of the fireplace, and then retired upstairs with their respective girls. Mervyn’s girl was large and, he thought, on the old side. But she seemed willing enough to play the role of his bed mate for the night, and it would have been rude to refuse.

Mervyn and Alexei sat in a private room at the Aragvi, well into the Tsinandali wine. On the table in front of them were the ruins of a gigantic meal of lamb kebabs, green bean lobio and khatchapuri cheese bread. Alexei was, for once, in an expansive mood, striking the avuncular tone he sometimes used with Mervyn. He had decided to take a more active interest in Mervyn’s career, he announced. Would Mervyn like to do some travelling? If so, where? Mervyn, delighted, unthinkingly said Mongolia. Not possible, said Alexei. How about somewhere in the Soviet Union? Mervyn suggested Siberia. Alexei was enthusiastic. The great Bratsk Dam, perhaps? Lake Baikal? Mervyn was thrilled and agreed immediately. They drank a toast to seal the bargain.

At what point did Mervyn realize that he was getting in too deep? He may have been naïve, but surely not that naive. Alexei’s KGB connections were becoming increasingly obvious – the disparaging remarks about British intelligence, the mysterious and prompt disappearance of the domino-playing ‘goons’ under the bridge, the leading questions about Mervyn’s politics. It was surely blindingly obvious to Mervyn that he was being recruited.

I think the truth is that they never really understood each other. Alexei’s dogma prevented him from seeing the deeprooted patriotism of Mervyn’s class and generation, who considered it the height of bad taste to leave a cinema before ‘God Save the King’ was over. And Mervyn’s vanity got in the way of ever seriously questioning why it was that Alexei was courting him, an obscure research student, so assiduously, spending so much money and time. I am quite sure that Mervyn knew he was flirting with the KGB. What he didn’t know was just what a dangerous game that could prove to be. Even as he agreed to the Siberia trip, he must have strongly suspected that some time, sooner or later, he would be asked to pay the bill. But adventurousness – again, that now longburied adventurousness – won out. Whatever happened, it would be exciting. And wasn’t excitement exactly what he had come to Russia to find?

Flying over Siberia at night, in winter, there is an eerie sense of having flown off the edge of the world. The dreamscape of snow-covered forests below seems to stretch black and unbroken not just to the horizon but beyond, for ever. When I visited Baikal in 1995, en route to Mongolia – which my father never did get to see – I flew in a tiny Soviet aeroplane, a vintage An-24 which must have begun its long career in my father’s day. It lurched in the slipstream, the roar of the propellers drowning out conversation as we flew on into the night, the light dying behind us in the west.

Solzhenitsyn named the network of prison camps which stretched across the Soviet Union the Gulag Archipelago. But in truth all of Russia is an archipelago, a string of isolated islands of warmth and light strung out in a hostile sea of emptiness. Somewhere in this very vastness of Russia lies one key to the Russian experience. The vagueness and fatalism born of living in a land which once took half a year to cross; a chronic resignation before the whims of authority born of the historic impossibility of communicating with the outposts of such an ungovernably huge empire. When I read of Peter the Great’s famous ukaz (decree) angrily ordering his citizens to obey all previous ukazy, I pictured him as a mad radio operator sending indignant messages into space, and receiving only faint cosmic echoes in reply.

Phone lines, satellite TV and Aeroflot appear to have brought Russia closer together, but in some ways electronic communications only serve to deepen the sense of uncrossable distance. Russia remains the largest country in the world; even after the loss of 17 per cent of its territory after the fall of the Soviet Union, it still spans eleven time zones. A former State TV cameraman once told me that the television signal of Vremya, the Soviet nightly news program me, had to be repeatedly bounced off the stratosphere to compensate for the seventy-degree curvature of the earth between Moscow and the far-eastern extremity of the country at Chukotka. By the mid-1990s one could easily direct-dial the Pacific coastal regions of Kamchatka or Magadan, but the time difference was almost the same as to New York. The final section of highway linking European Russia to the Far East was completed only in 2002 – before that hundreds of miles of makeshift road ran upon the ice of the frozen Amur River, and were passable only in winter.

No wonder, then, that most of those born to life in these great, empty spaces grow up with an instinctive sense of helplessness in the face of the impossible physical realities which define their lives. These physical limitations seem to make the constraints of human making all the easier to accept. ‘God is high up and the Tsar is far,’ goes the old Russian saying, and it could be no coincidence that one of the central teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church was of smireniye, or submission to the burden the Lord has given believers to bear. The combined hostility of distance and climate seems to conspire to wither the spirit and humble the ambition of all but the strongest. Anton Chekhov caught this ennui in his Three Sisters, a study of three young women crushed by provincial isolation, their youthful hopes and spirit slowly but inexorably extinguished by Russia’s infinite inertia. Even life in Moscow, where the sophisticated élite is cocooned from the isolation and medieval darkness of the village, seems defined in a powerful but intangible way by the greatness of the land that surrounds it, just as life on board ship is pervaded by a knowledge of the deep, cold sea all around.

Alexei and Mervyn flew to Siberia in April 1960, as Mervyn’s first term at Moscow State University drew to an end. They travelled across the white vastness of Russia in a series of tiny An-24 planes. Their first stop was Novosibirsk, a new, grey industrial sprawl built around a low-rise Tsarist frontier town, all tumbledown log huts and sagging merchants’ houses in the centre and wide boulevards lined with identical apartment blocks on the outskirts. Mervyn found it depressing and soulless, despite Alexei’s apparently genuine enthusiasm.

They moved on to Bratsk, little more than a shantytown then. Beyond Bratsk lay a great frozen river, and a vast, half-melted lake. A great Socialist lake, Alexei explained, created by the will of the people and the labour of a million workers. In front of the lake stood a great concrete and steel hydroelectric dam, taming nature for the greater good of the workers’ paradise.

They checked into a makeshift Intourist hotel, a jerry-built construction among the muddy streets, put up to accommodate visiting dignitaries who were brought to be impressed by the great hydroelectric wonder. They visited the dam the next morning. The spring floodwater roared through the turbines, the concrete curved balletically into the distance. Mervyn agreed with Alexei that it was marvellous, quite marvellous. Alexei nodded silently in approval. Young Mervyn was coming along nicely. ‘Was there no end to the exciting surprises in the wonderland which was Russia?’ my father wrote later in his memoirs – with irony, or in an echo of his young enthusiasm, I cannot decide.

The last leg of Alexei’s grand Siberian tour, planned as a tourist expedition but which had become, unaccountably, a sort of official progress through the wonders of Socialism, was Irkutsk and Baikal. Forest, again endless forest, a horizon so vast it seemed to belong in the landscape of a dream. Lake Baikal, the biggest lake in the world, was flat and blinding white, a gigantic prairie of ice over an expanse of cold, black water 5,000 feet deep.

‘In Baikal there are over 300 species of fish,’ enthused the plump collective farm director who had mysteriously got wind of Alexei’s arrival with his distinguished foreign visitor. The three men stood in silence on the creaking ice of the lake, shivering in the cold, fresh wind. Alexei, his usual composure ruffled by a night in a rude peasant hut, gazed irritably at the shore. Mervyn looked dubiously at the thin spring ice below his feet, which sagged noticeably as they walked.

‘It’s not the ice, it’s what’s underneath that’s frightening,’ remarked Alexei, seeing Mervyn’s discomfort.

‘Let’s go out a bit further,’ said the director.

Alexei finally made his offer over a lunch of pelmeni dumplings, Siberian fish soup and vodka at Irkutsk Airport, just before they set off back to Moscow. Mervyn had been halfexpecting the question, but it was still a shock when it came. Was Mervyn prepared to work for ‘the cause of international peace’?

Alexei, hunched forward at the table with a look of utmost seriousness in his eyes, was at his most persuasive. His extolling of the virtues of the just Soviet society were familiar: Mervyn was from a poor family, he had seen at first hand the fairness of Soviet life. Now, the time had come to offer Mervyn an opportunity to do something about the injustice of the world. Though Alexei didn’t say the word, it was clear to both of them that this meant working for the KGB.

Mervyn, confounding Alexei’s theories of class warfare, refused. He couldn’t betray his country, he said. The lunch ended with accusations and petulance. For the first time since Mervyn had known him, Alexei’s icy charm cracked and he harangued Mervyn for being spoiled, hypocritical, and ungrateful. Mervyn sat embarrassed and silent.

Back in Moscow, after a long, tense flight, the plane bumped to a halt on the rain-washed tarmac of Vnukovo Airport. As they stood, side by side, waiting for their luggage to be unloaded, Alexei apologized, retreating. ‘Let’s forget it. I was wrong. It was the wrong time. I would like to see you again in Moscow. Let’s just be friends and forget this.’ They parted awkwardly, Mervyn embarrassed more than scared by this not entirely unexpected outcome.

Nina from Bukhara called Mervyn at his university dorm. She was in town, she said, on an official trip, and would love to see Mervyn. Right now she was going out to buy a blouse in GUM, the state department store on Red Square, and then she would be free. They made a date for the evening.

As Mervyn put down the phone, he paused. How had Nina found his number? He made a mental note to ask her, but never did.

Mervyn was playing games. He had no inkling of the ruthlessness of the organization he was dealing with. For Mervyn, the KGB was personified in the urbane Alexei and his flattery, and the silent goons who had followed him around Moscow at a respectful distance during his embassy days.

Georges Nivat was under no such illusions. Georges and Irina’s idyll quickly soured after Pasternak died of a heart attack at his dacha on 31 May 1960. With Pasternak and his international reputation gone, the Ivinskys lost their famous protector. The KGB had been itching to get them for years; they were notorious for consorting with Westerners and accepting their presents. To cap it all they were the inheritors of the international royalties from Pasternak’s poisonous anti- Soviet book. Now, Olga and her foreigner-loving daughter were to be dealt with.

Shortly after Pasternak’s death, Mervyn and Georges, along with all the students in their year, were given a routine smallpox vaccination at the university clinic. Mervyn’s inoculation passed without incident, but Georges soon developed a mysterious skin infection. The infection got so bad that he was bedridden in hospital on his would-be wedding day. A second wedding date was set, in July, but a guardian nurse was posted by his bedside in the small hours of the morning, frustrating Irina’s plan to smuggle Georges out of hospital. Then Irina herself fell ill with the same horrible skin disease.

At first neither Georges nor Irina – nor even her mother, a veteran of the NKVD torture cells – suspected that they had been infected by the KGB in order to prevent the marriage. But it became increasingly obvious that this was the most likely explanation for their mysterious, virulent rashes. Georges was profoundly shocked by the thought; as was his prospective mother-in-law, despite all that she had seen. Georges’ student visa was due to expire at the end of July, and despite his desperate pleas the authorities refused to extend it. Irina was too ill to see Georges off when he left for Paris. Mervyn drove a weeping Georges to the airport, along with Irina’s mother. The old woman seemed to have shrunk, a husk of her old, vivacious self, as they saw Georges off. Both he and Irina quickly recovered, but they were not to see each other again until half a lifetime later.

Mervyn decided to take a short holiday with Vadim. They flew to Gagry, the resort on the Black Sea coast where Boris Bibikov had been arrested twenty-five years before. It was a welcome escape from the stuffiness of Moscow’s brief but scorching summer, and the distress of Georges and Irina’s seemingly incurable illnesses and forced separation. Down south the air was warm and fragrant, unaffected by the drabness and depression of Soviet life, and the locals were hospitable and garrulous rather than cocooned against a hostile world by shells of rudeness.

Mervyn relaxed. The whole KGB business would blow over, he hoped, and Alexei had apparently let the matter drop. He’d been careful never to mention anything to Vadim – still believing, in all apparent sincerity, that Vadim had nothing to do with his attempted recruitment. They lay around on the beaches of Gagry, Mervyn’s pale skin burned red by the southern sun, or strolled the promenades. Mervyn asked a friendly, round-faced girl student to come back to his room, and she did so without demur.

But a few days into the holiday Mervyn was summoned to the telephone. It was Alexei, who announced that he was in Gagry. He arranged a rendezvous by the champagne kiosk near the round pond of a nearby park at dusk. Their meeting, among the patterned shadows and the croaking frogs, was short but dramatic. Alexei was elegant and unhurried as ever, and greeted Mervyn courteously. Was Mervyn free that evening? Good. Another rendezvous had been arranged for nine o’clock, in a room at the hotel. Alexei turned and crunched away down the gravel path with his steady step.

Mervyn was not expecting the meeting to be a pleasant one, and it was not. Alexei introduced Mervyn to his ‘boss’, Alexander Fyodorovich Sokolov. He was an older, heavily built man who wore a bad Soviet suit and cheap sandals. Sokolov was clearly an old-school NKVD bruiser, whose demeanour exuded contempt for his younger, foppish colleague and the spoiled young foreigner who stood before him.

Alexei launched the proceedings with great solemnity. He spoke of Mervyn’s ‘career’ and his ‘intentions’, about how the Soviet Union was ‘the only free and fair society in the world’ . Sokolov, quoting from Mervyn’s KGB file, grimly noted that his father had been so poor that he never drank wine. Surely it was time for Mervyn to strike a blow against the system which had so oppressed his parent? Evidently, thought Mervyn, the gallons of beer and cases of whisky downed by his old man had not been recorded by the KGB.

After two hours, the threats came. ‘We know,’ said Alexei gravely, ‘that you have been guilty of immoral acts.’

‘If the Komsomol were to find out,’ growled Sokolov, ‘there would be a big scandal in the newspapers, and you would be shamefully expelled from the university and the country.’ Now that, Mervyn knew, was nonsense. In fact, there had been all too few ‘immoral acts’ – a single visit to a brothel in Moscow with Vadim, Nina from Bukhara, the girl at Vadim’s uncle’s dacha, a girl who lived in a curious, circular building near the Ministry of Foreign Trade, the student in Gagry. It was a pretty modest total, certainly compared to Valery Shein or even Vadim himself.

‘The time has come to say finally, yes or no.’ Alexei and Alexander Fyodorovich looked at Mervyn expectantly.

‘Then the answer must be no,’ said my father. ‘Nothing will persuade me to work against my country.’

That night, sitting on his bed and turning over the possible consequences of his defiance, Mervyn realized that there could be no more stalling. He wasn’t afraid of their threat to cause a scandal, but the KGB could get at his friends. There were sinister stories circulating about trumped-up charges, accidents, arrests for hooliganism, cancellation of residence permits. He decided to pack his bags, take the first plane back to Moscow and leave the Soviet Union, probably for ever.

Yet it wasn’t that simple. Days after Mervyn returned to Moscow, Alexei made a conciliatory phone call. A decision had been taken at the highest levels, Alexei assured my father, that no further action would be taken. Alexei even insisted that they have another little dinner. He had a piece of news for Mervyn.

‘That woman you mentioned, Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya,’ Alexei said casually as they tucked into what would be their last cosy meal together. ‘She’s just been arrested. On contraband charges. She was involved in smuggling foreign currency, and other matters. She was morally corrupt.’

Alexei continued to eat as Mervyn stared at his plate, his appetite gone.

‘I told you that they were a bad family,’ Alexei went on. ‘If I were you I’d keep fifteen kilometres away from them.’

Mervyn watched as Alexei sipped more wine. Alexei’s face was blank, expressionless. Two weeks after her mother’s arrest, Irina herself was taken from her hospital bed and driven to the Lubyanka for questioning. Shortly afterwards Irina, the ballet lover and aesthete, followed her mother into the unimaginably brutal world of the labour camps. Mervyn heard nothing more of them. This was not a game, it finally dawned on Mervyn. This was not a game at all. He made hurried arrangements to return to Oxford.