Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War

10. Love

The Moscow my father knew was a solidly rooted place, its certainties and rules as fixed as the prices in state shops and the squat Stalinist cityscape. Most Soviets of his generation spent their entire lives in the same apartment, worked in the same jobs, bought vodka for an unvarying 2 rubles 87 kopecks and waited ten years to buy a car. Time was measured from vacation to vacation, theatre season to theatre season, from the publication of one volume of a collection of Dickens novels to the next.

Forty years later, when I arrived in Moscow, the city was making up for lost time. The place was obsessed with its own thrusting modernity; it seemed to change overnight, every night. One day you’d see young men with Caesar haircuts and DKNY sweaters where previously red blazers and crew cuts had been in. Internet cafés-cum-trendy clothes shops opened in the place of old grocery stores. Gleaming new chrome and marble shopping malls sprang up with alarming speed, complete with see-through escalators and dollar-dispensing cash machines. After a while I got so used to the pace of change that it seemed normal – a restored church here, a new corporate headquarters there, like mushrooms after the rain. London seemed quaintly static in comparison. The rest of Russia may have been quietly disintegrating, but Moscow waxed fat on the spoils of the plundered empire.

Whenever I wasn’t trawling the lower depths of Moscow’s underbelly for lurid features articles, I dedicated much of my energy to going to parties. My father had found his fun in noisy Gypsy restaurants. A generation later, and sudden money and freedom had transformed the Moscow party scene into something rich and strange. At Club 13, housed in a decrepit palace just behind the Lubyanka, dwarves in miniature Santa Claus costumes would whip you with cat-o’-nine-tails as you walked up the stairs. In Titanic, the favoured haunt of wealthy criminals, the black Mercedes were parked a dozen deep outside and gangs of girls would wait at porthole-shaped tables to be chatted up by fat-necked beaux. At Chance, naked men swam in giant glass-fronted fish tanks, and at the Fire Bird casino I once spent an evening drinking in the unlikely company of Chuck Norris, the ageing action film star, and his guest Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist politician.

Sometimes I would brave a visit to a bar called the Hungry Duck. On ‘Ladies’ Nights’ only women – and a few friends of the owner, invited to tend bar – were allowed into the place between six and nine. The deal was that they would be plied with unlimited free alcohol, and as a result the place was packed with about six hundred sweaty teenage girls, all baying for booze as fast as we could pour it. The smell of Slavic pheromones hung thick, and the sight of a wall of screaming women besieging all sides of the circular bar was terrifying, like defending Rourke’s Drift against advancing Zulus. Male strippers would strut down the bar, plucking girls from the audience and stripping them naked over the beer taps. Doug Steele, the Canadian owner, his face turned a Mephistophelean green by the light of the cash register, would lean forward on his brawny arms and survey the mayhem with quiet satisfaction, like Captain Kurtz in his own private Inner Station. By the time they let the men in at nine, drunken, topless girls would be slipping off the beer-covered bar and crashing on to the floor, to be scooped up by security and dumped in a line in the foyer. Soon epic fights would break out; vicious, eye-gouging, smashed bottle affairs with flying beer glasses and broken bones, with the unconscious losers joining the drunks downstairs.

I went to a party thrown by Bogdan Titomir, Russia’s most famous rapper, at his apartment-cum-disco, where the windows rattled to the sound of the music blasting on the PA and couples sneaked out to kiss in the back of his Hummer. When I first saw Yana she was backlit by pulsing strobes as she snaked through the smoke, past the blondes draped over Bogdan’s electric blue sofas, past the entwined bodies in a half-curtained alcove, towards a table piled with cocaine. She wore a tiny miniskirt covered in printed pairs of luminous Fornasetti eyes, which matched the strange glow of her own under the ultraviolet light which hung over the table. She deftly railed out a line fat as a hangman’s rope, and snorted it. Then she threw her blonde hair back and looked me straight in the eye. And winked.

’Polezno i vkusno,’ she said, smiling – ‘healthy and tastes good’, a slogan from a TV cereal ad – and held out a rolled-up bill.

I found her, later, sitting on Bogdan’s doorstep, legs apart, wrists draped over her knees, smoking. I sat down next to her. She shot me a glance, taking a drag from her cigarette with the corner of her mouth. We began to talk.

Yana was a classic child of Moscow’s golden youth – rich, smart, privileged and completely lost. Her father was a former Soviet diplomat in Switzerland; her mother was from a long line of St Petersburg intellectuals. Half of Moscow was in love with her, and the more she spurned them the more they loved her. She had a talent for situations, which had served her well for twenty years of an erratic and unpunctual life. The ease with which she moved from one milieu to another, from one place, man, date, to another was staggering. Her flightiness and instability was truly irresistible. She was savagely elemental, temperamental, capricious, often as selfish as a tiny child. Yana always reminded me of someone constantly trying out a series of savage caricatures of herself on the world, adopting slightly new variants of her social persona. And as with many lonely people she had a burning desire to be loved, and to be fabulous, but loved from afar. And that was her paradox; the more fabulous she became, the more impossible it became for her to be loved for herself.

We would meet at Tram, a nouveau riche hangout near Pushkin Square with steel tubular chairs and matt black tables, where, after a light but cripplingly expensive dinner, she would drag me to various parties. One was at a set in the MosFilm studios built for The Three Musketeers, a labyrinth of plywood seventeenth-century balconies, archways and spiral staircases. Girls in feather jackets and hot pants danced on a horse-drawn coach while fit young men in Boss jeans and slicked hair looked on. Another was in the Theatre of the Red Army, an absurd star-shaped Stalinist building surrounded by neoclassical columns. Instead of a Victory Day balalaika extravaganza, the place had been transformed into a Day-Glo rave bacchanal populated by long-legged girls with steel bras and shaven-headed men in green fur coats. I have a vision of Yana, in a pair of wraparound shades she’d borrowed from someone, dancing maniacally on the edge of the revolving stage. She pumped her fist in the air as she cruised past me at a stately three miles an hour, screaming ‘Davai, Davai!’ – an untranslatable expression of exuberance – as she went.

For all Moscow’s sleaziness, I loved the energy of this bonfire of vanities. I believed that I had stumbled on some- thing dark, vibrant and absolutely compelling. The money, the sin, the beautiful people – it was doomed, apocalyptic, transiently beautiful as a Javanese fire sculpture. The incandescent energy of the pretty, deluded party kids who frequented these places could have lit up this blighted country for a century if channelled into anything other than selfdestruction and oblivion.

Yana and I saw each other regularly for about six months. Her fabulous presence transformed me, I thought, into someone better and bolder. I felt constant disbelief that this extraordinary creature was by my side. This cannot be true, I told myself. I was not even jealous as she kissed and flirted her way around parties. I waited in line with the rest for the searchlight of her charm to fall upon me, and it was enough. Every time she ignored all the rich boys and came back home with me seemed a small miracle.

There were a few rare moments when she shed the heavy burden of her persona and became meek and vulnerable, a younger and less complex version of herself. This is the Yana which endures for me now – not the fabulous Yana of Bogdan’s, but the make-up-less Yana in a Russian Navy pea coat I gave her and silk combat pants stomping through Moscow in big boots, mercifully incognito.

Then, as I had always expected, she seemed to lose interest, and I didn’t press it. I rationalized it by telling myself that I was better off confining my sexual energies to earth dwellers, rather than heavenly creatures like Yana.

But after Yana and I stopped seeing each other I brooded; lumpen, sagging, armchair depression. She’d make a perfect first wife, I would joke to my best mend and fellow Moscow Times reporter Matt Taibbi, I found my old apartment too redolent of my pre-Yana life, too grounded in adolescence. So I borrowed a mend’s place for a few days while he was away, and spent days sitting on his deformed old sofa, smoking cigarettes. I felt I needed to mark the moment with some act of masochism, so I asked Matt to bring his electric hair clippers round. By the apartment’s tenth-floor picture window looking on to the Kremlin, he shaved my head clean of its schoolboy locks, which fell thickly on the spread newspapers strewn around the chair.

The pain of my decision to let Yana go without a fight – to choose Later rather than Now – ran deeper than I knew. I had been unable to twist free from the straitjacket of common sense when Yana and her world of extravagant folly called, and that knowledge burned hot on my cheeks like shame. It seemed to age me – all the more so because I also knew that with time the wound would heal almost without trace, and I would go on as before. I was bitter because my teenage bohemianism had been so brutally exposed as a brittle sham, and I was humiliated because I felt acutely that the real reason that I had lost Yana was that I was not man enough to keep her. The realization was brutal, and I fled from it by returning to the more sordid habits of my old life with a vengeance, trying to obliterate the pain with sex and negate the humiliation with bragging. It worked, for a while.

After half a year or so, the intensity of my feelings for her faded into a faint pang every time I saw her photo in Ptyuch or some other trendy magazine devoted to the antics of the city’s club kids. I was a new friend who was destined never to become an old friend – too little time, so many people and parties. But I liked to think that among a thousand discarded people, impressions, parties, somewhere in that fabulous kaleidoscope of her butterfly brain, my image was lodged.

Yana was too beautiful, too surreally perfect to live, so I was strangely unsurprised when a mutual acquaintance called late one night, in the autumn of 1996, and told me that she had been found raped and murdered at a remote Metro stop somewhere in Moscow’s grey suburban hinterland. No one -least of all the police – had any idea of who would want to kill her.

Even before her death I couldn’t think of her as anything but a child of her time, vibrating to the deep, doomed rhythms of a specific moment. I could never place her anywhere else but Moscow, or imagine her old, or bored, or cynical, or fat, or married. So that’s why it seemed right, somehow, that Russia swallowed her in the end.

She had been so perversely bright and optimistic while everything about her lied and died. But reality finally reached up to pluck her out of her cloud, like Icarus, and pulled her down, down deep into its dark underbelly. She died broken, raped and terrified near a remote Metro station, strangled by someone – a stranger, a lover? Who knows? If she’d been a character in my novel I would have killed her off, too.

Mervyn returned to the Soviet Union at the end of the summer of 1963, three years after he had left. Through St Antony’s, he had managed to arrange another graduate exchange with Moscow State University. The fact that the authorities had allowed him back was proof enough, he surmised with relief, that bygones were bygones with the KGB. Back in Moscow, Mervyn quickly picked up his old friendships – with the exception, that is, of Alexei and Vadim.

Mervyn had had enough of the high life he’d pursued in his earlier incarnations. He was thirty-one years old, and ready to settle down. Valery Golovitser told Mervyn that he knew a delightful girl who’d be just right for him. Golovitser, it seems, was a more astute student of his fellow men than his friend and cousin Valery Shein, who tried to persuade Mervyn to go out with the brassy, fashionable and pretty girls of his fast circle.

No, the girl Valery had in mind for Mervyn was as intellectual and romantic as he was himself, but brave and spirited with it. Mervyn was interested, but thought the idea of a blind date crass. He asked if he could see Valery’s friend Lyudmila before they were formally introduced.

Valery suggested that Mervyn wait for them outside the portico of the Bolshoi after the end of a performance; that way he could catch a glimpse of his prospective new girlfriend. It was an arrangement that only someone from an absolutely innocent age could have contemplated, more like something out of a Moliere play than the start of a realworld romance. Nevertheless, Mervyn duly waited in the driving sleet of an October evening, and indeed caught a glimpse of a diminutive young woman with a slight limp, chatting animatedly with Valery as they emerged from the theatre.

A small tea party was arranged in Golovitser’s little room. Mervyn was introduced as an Estonian, to ease the exoticism and awkwardness that the presence of a bona fide Englishman would have caused. Mila remembers what she noticed most of all was the shy ‘Estonian’s’ beautiful long back. Mervyn noticed Mila’s kind grey-blue eyes. In an occasional diary Mervyn kept, written in clumsy Welsh to render it incomprehensible to the KGB in case he lost the notebook, he noted on 28 October 1963 that he’d met a girl ‘of very strong character, but utterly charming, intelligent’. They arranged to see each other again. They went on long walks together and chatted for hours. Before long, my father had become a regular visitor to my mother’s tiny room on Starokonushenny Pereulok.

My mother and I went to see the old place, once, thirty-odd years after she left it, during one of my mother’s annual visits to Moscow. The house stood back from the street, through two archways filled with uncollected rubbish. It was in an ugly, turn-of-the-century building, squat and institutional, with thick walls and barred windows on the ground floor. The hallway smelled of sodden cardboard and mould, and the ground-floor doorway to the communal apartment was covered in flaking layers of brown institutional paint. It still had its old row of doorbells, one for every room of the kommunalka. I pressed the button, the same one my father pressed for the first time in 1963, hesitantly, bearing carnations, and again, for the last time, in 1969 when he came to take her away with him to England. A young woman opened the door, listened as we explained that my mother had once lived there, and let us in with a shy smile. She and her husband and the old woman with whom they shared the kommunalka were moving out soon, she said. The building was due to be gutted and sold off by the Moscow City Government for conversion into luxury flats.

It was not much of an apartment. There was a wide corridor lined with curling linoleum, gaping layers of wallpaper, and separate locks on each door. At the end of the passage was a squalid kitchen, its ceiling peeling from the weight of years of grease, disconnected gas pipes from defunct cookers sticking out of the wall.

My mother’s room, little more than a storeroom, really, was now a nursery for a sleeping two-year-old. My mother looked round unsentimentally, peering up and down as if looking for something that remained of her. Finding nothing, she turned and we left. She seemed unmoved, and we went shopping.

At the time, I was living on Starokonushenny Pereulok myself. The house was an early thirties constructivist building, and the long, narrow rooms of the apartment had walls and windows at strange angles. It was 300 yards from my mother’s old apartment near the corner of the Arbat. In the evenings I would wander the deserted backstreets, up to Ryleev Street, where Valery Golovitser used to live and where my parents first met. I’d walk down Gogolevsky Boulevard, where they had walked, arm in arm, to the Kropotkinskaya Metro, and up Sivtsev Vrazhek Street, where my mother used to walk to Gastronom Number One for her shopping. They were streets freighted with memory for my parents, but not yet for me. I had not yet read their letters, nor taken much of an interest in their early lives; I did not, then, feel any connection between their Moscow and mine. ‘Mervyn, do you imagine how I walk through the puddles of night-time Moscow to our home on the Arbat?’ my mother wrote to my father, late in 1964. He did. Now I do, too.

In her little lightless room with its single narrow window, Mila made something that she’d never had before – a home. Then, when Mervyn appeared in her life, she made a family.

‘In the autumn of 1963 I saw you for the first time,’ Mila wrote a year later. ‘I felt some kind of inner impulse, some kind of momentary, searing certitude that you were precisely the one person with whom I would finally, really fall in love. It was as though a piece of my heart detached itself and began living independently within you. I was not mistaken. In a very short time I understood you and came as close to you as if I had been your shadow since your first steps in this world. All the barriers collapsed – political, geographic, national, sexual. The whole world was divided for me into two halves – one, us (you and me), and the other – the rest.’

The minutiae of the nine months my parents spent together in Moscow survive because over six years of forced separation their conversations were all relived, in great detail, in their later letters. Almost every minute and day of their few months together was revisited and turned over, lovingly, like a keepsake. Every little tiff and conversation and lovemaking and walk was played out in Mila’s mind, replayed and discussed, words, sentences remembered and analyzed, produced like living proof that it was not all just a dream, that for a while they really had a home, had each other. ‘Literally every detail of our lives together goes through my mind,’ Mila wrote. ‘I live for the memory of those times.’

In the winter evenings, on his way back to the university from the Lenin Library, Mervyn would stop by Valery Golovitser’s place to chat and pick up some new records, duck into an archway to try and shake off his KGB goons, and appear at Mila’s front door. He would install himself on her divan and read while she fried sturgeon, Mervyn’s favourite fish, in the kitchen. After dinner they would go for long walks along the boulevards and the backstreets, and sit up into the night talking. He loved her homemade jam, served on prerevolutionary Gardner plates she’d bought in an antique shop and which she took with her to London. Later, Mila’s room with its divan bed, little table and wardrobe became a lovers’ everywhere for them, while the neighbours in the next room held rowdy parties and played the accordion.

Their romance was a homecoming for them both – two lonely, bookish, loveless people finding in each other what they had lacked all their dislocated lives. Mila was twenty-nine and raised on the romantic fantasies of Soviet films and literature. Most of her friends and her sister had married in their teens. Mila, though she’d had affairs and was popular with men despite her twisted hip, had never found someone who lived up to her exacting standards.

But now, suddenly, as though by an act of God, came the long-backed foreigner, the dreamy, shy Russophile with his long fingers and careful vowels, so earnest and innocent (despite those tumbles into sin in the company of Vadim and Shein), so lost, so in love with Russia but with no home there. She would become the embodiment of all he loved in Russia, its passion and fire.

Mervyn was the exact shape of the gap in Mila’s life. He made sense of her existence, he was what she had been missing to make her complete, to patch over the horror of her childhood and the loneliness of her adulthood. She became the intelligent mother he never had. He became the son, the child to nurture as she was never nurtured, as if by healing him she could heal herself, make everything all right for both of them. After a lifetime of deprivation, Mervyn was Mila’s redemption.

‘Life can’t be so cruel and unfair if it gave me you,’ Mila wrote to him, later, when they were living on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain. ‘For some reason I have moved into you, and nothing will chase me out of such a warm habitation. There’s so little warmth and love in the world that you can’t afford to lose even a crumb of it that you’ve found.’

Mervyn was truly Mila’s first love, and it had all the moral purity and absolute, dreamlike clarity of adolescence. Mila had all too few human reference points for her emotional life, but many literary ones. The language of love, for her, was melodramatic, naïve and slightly childish, but underpinned with a welling passion which was all her own. It was not an erotic passion, but a passion fuelled by a terrible fear of abandonment, of losing this one chance to redeem her unhappy life and cancel out all its suffering with one bold stroke.

For Mervyn it was a little different. His good looks meant that Russian women liked him, flirted with him, went to bed with him. But he never had Shein’s fervour or hunger for women. Women made him shy, and he couldn’t summon the cavalier charm of his Russian friends, their swagger, or their ladykilling confidence. Now, here was Mila, the woman with a crippled body but a beautiful soul, devoted, unthreatening, intellectually independent, an ally and friend first and a woman second, yet with an apparently endless supply of love to pour out to him. ‘I want to make a good, healthy life for you, a home, good food,’ wrote Mila later, of her vision of their future. ‘It will give me such pleasure to help you with your work. I am sure that we can make a real family, bound together by love and friendship, mutual understanding, helping each other. Everything we have we have done with our own work, by our own wits. Together, we can achieve anything.’

Most important of all, perhaps, was that Mila understood Mervyn’s painful past as no one had ever been able to before. ‘I see your desire to get yourself out of poverty, out of anonymity into the big world,’ she wrote. ‘I see how you, alone and without patrons and without a clear path to follow, are pushing on with life and scaling its heights; I understand your tastes, your interests, your weaknesses.’

There was a moment, on a slushy February evening, when Mervyn and Mila left the apartment on Starokonushenny Pereulok together and walked down to Gogolevsky Boulevard. Mervyn had to turn right to go to Kropotkinskaya Metro, Mila to the left to go and visit some friends. They embraced, and as he walked away in the twilight Mervyn suddenly realized, as he wrote in his memoirs, that he was ‘profoundly in love with that lopsided figure, and I could see no future for myself without her’.

He had no idea – how could he – of quite how hard they would have to fight for that love in the years to come, or how profoundly it would transform his life. His love for Mila, like his love for Russia, began as a romantic infatuation. What had gone before were adventures, free of consequences and exciting. What was to come would expel him from himself and summon all his reserves of determination.

Mila invited Mervyn to her sister Lenina’s apartment on Frunzenskaya Embankment, a sure sign of the growing seriousness of their relationship. Even after all his years in Russia, Lenina’s was the first family home Mervyn had ever visited. None of his friends, not even Vadim, had invited him back to anything other than a bachelor room in the university or a kommunalka like Valery Golovitser’s.

It was a characteristically brave move for Mila to ask him, and for Lenina to accept the idea of a foreigner coming to visit. Mervyn’s sporadic KGB tails were a fact of life for both of them, and they cheerfully ignored it – but his visit could prove dangerous for Lenina’s one-legged husband Sasha, who was by now head of the finance department of the Ministry of Justice. Still, Mervyn came, and was fed shchi soup and meatballs and cake and tea, and treated as a member of the family. He was invited back. Despite my father’s dangerous foreignness and the odd formality of his manner, Lenina, Sasha and their two teenage daughters quickly grew fond of him.

Summer came, and Mila invited Mervyn to the Vasins’ dacha at Vnukovo, an hour’s drive from the centre of Moscow but already firmly in the Russian hinterland of infinite skies, endless fields, earth privies and water brought in buckets from a well. In the sunshine, Mervyn helped Sasha dig the garden and plant potatoes and cucumbers. In the afternoons they would feed twigs and birch bark into the samovar and drink smoky tea and eat blackcurrant jam as the light faded. Mila and Mervyn would go for long walks in the birch woods, he in a short-sleeved shirt, she in a long cotton print baby-doll dress, pinched at the waist, copied from a picture in a magazine.

I visited the dacha myself, when I was eight, on a trip to Moscow with my mother and baby sister. I was deeply excited at living in the little wooden house, with its creaking floorboards, filled with the smell of earth and pickles and with dust swirling in beams of summer sunshine. The northern summer days seemed to stretch for ever, the sky cloudless and vast. But however hot the day was, the wheat fields were always damp and filled with frogs and snails. There was a small pond full of miniature perch, one of which I once caught in a jam jar and brought home. My little fish died overnight, and I was so guiltstricken that I buried it ceremoniously in the garden, digging the thick earth with my fingers.

The garden ran riot, despite the efforts of my uncle Sasha to tend it. Lenina used to say scornfully that he’d planted three sacks of potatoes and harvested two. This may have had something to do with the fact that we boys – oddly enough I remember no awkward period of shy integration with the other village boys, we were immediately a gang – would surreptitiously dig them up in the afternoons while the grown-ups were having their naps, replace the potato plant carefully in the ground and repair with our haul to the woods, where we’d bake the potatoes in the ash of our camp fire.

In the late afternoons we would sometimes go into the forest to collect berries and mushrooms. This ancient habit seemed part of the Russian psyche; everyone in the village did it obsessively. After the breezy summer heat in the fields and dusty lanes the forest was dark, still and musty. It was a classic Russian birch forest, endless and disorientating and silent. I was always afraid of clearing away the dead leaves to expose the mushrooms at the foot of the trees after a huge millipede ran on to my hand. The Russian spirit was here, it smelled of Russia. Out of sight of the path it seemed primeval, full of shadows and whispers, unlike any English wood.

The old samovar was there from my father’s day, and I would collect dry pine cones to stoke the fire, which never quite seemed to boil the water as it was supposed to. As we drank warm tea and ate homemade jam, I would ask Sasha about the war, and his tank. He was a good-natured man, and answered my questions patiently. An old local woman known as Babka Simka, who helped my aunt about the house, chastised me for my awful ignorance of the history of the Great Patriotic War, but I persisted. Later, my village friends and I would play at Civil War, Reds versus Whites. The greatest honour would be to pull a wooden model of a Vickers machine gun made by one of the village boys’ grandfathers on its little trolley. As we trundled it down the rutted main street past my aunt’s dacha, Sasha would sometimes shout, ‘Peace to the land of the Soviets!’ in encouragement as we passed.

Back in Moscow, on the evening of 27 March 1964, Mervyn was having dinner with Mila in her room. He was a methodical man, and had resolved to wait for a while before proposing to her. But as they went into the kitchen to put the dirty dishes into the sink, he suddenly blurted out, ‘Let’s get registered!’

‘Oh Mervusya,’ said Mila, using the diminutive of his name she had invented. They embraced in the greasy warmth of the kitchen. But she didn’t say yes. Instead, she said Mervyn should think about it, in case he wanted to change his mind. They kissed goodbye in the corridor, and Mervyn walked to the Metro.

The next day Mervyn stopped by, and Mila accepted. Immediately, they went to the mansion on Griboyedov Street which housed the Central Palace of Weddings, the only place foreigners were allowed to marry. In the secular Soviet Union, couples were married not in the name of God but in the name of the State, presided over by busts of Lenin and accompanied by a taped burst of Prokofiev from a machine manned by a scowling old woman. Mervyn and Mila waited in line outside the director’s office during the busy lunch hour to put their names down for a wedding date. They were told that the earliest slot was nearly three months away, on 9 June, and they took it. They left with an invitation form certifying their marriage date, and were duly issued with vouchers for champagne which they could redeem in special shops. On the street they parted, my father taking the trolleybus to the Lenin Library and my mother going back to work.

The long Moscow winter was drawing to its end. Mervyn would sit at Mila’s tiny table, making notes from his books in a pool of lamplight, while Mila sat on the bed and knitted. She bought Mervyn records and books on her way home from work, where all the girls were curious and envious of her tall, shy fiancé. Most nights he would take the last Metro home to his room in the university, but sometimes he would stay, the two of them squeezed on to the tiny bed like teenagers, and Mervyn would tiptoe out before the neighbours rose. They had both, at last, achieved happiness.

Their idyll was bitterly short. In May, after a tedious meeting with his supervisor at Moscow State University, Mervyn noticed an unusually heavy KGB team had been assigned to follow him. He had an appointment with a university friend, Igor Vail, that afternoon, but because of the goons Mervyn called and suggested they meet another time because, Mervyn explained in unmistakable euphemism, ‘I don’t like to come round under certain circumstances.’

Mervyn was nervous because Vail had bought a red sweater from him a few weeks before. Mervyn was due to collect the money, which Igor hadn’t been able to pay him straight away. Mervyn had also given Igor an old brown suit to give in to the kommisionka, or second-hand shop, which only a Soviet citizen could do. Technically, both actions were illegal, as was all private commerce in the Soviet Union. Igor had taken the suit, saying he could get a better price from an African student at the university. Igor sounded unnaturally tense when Mervyn telephoned, but insisted that he come round anyway.

Vail shared a room in a communal apartment on Kropotkinskaya Street with his mother. He greeted Mervyn overwarmly at the door. His mother was not there, but two middle-aged men in suits sat on the divan. ‘My two friends,’ blurted Igor, ‘are interested in buying that brown suit that you wanted to sell, remember?’

‘Yes, we are interested in anything you want to sell,’ said one of the men stiffly.

There was a silence. Mervyn turned to leave. This was obviously a hideously amateurish set up, and with rising panic he realized who must have organized it, and why. Igor continued to smile, desperately. The man who had spoken got up from the sofa and produced a red police identity card. Mervyn, he said, was under arrest for the crime of economic speculation.

The detectives drove Igor and Mervyn in silence to the nearest police station, the Sixtieth Militia Precinct on Maly Mogiltsevsky Pereulok, just behind Smolenskaya Square. After a short wait Mervyn was shown in to the office of the duty investigator, a Captain Mirzuyev, who painstakingly composed a long account of the incident, dwelling on Mervyn’s crimes as a corrupter of Soviet youth and a capitalist speculator. But the accused refused to sign, and asked the militiaman to show him to a telephone. Mervyn knew perfectly well who was behind the whole incident and could, at least, feel a little superior at the fact that the calibre of his persecutors was higher than that of a mere police captain.

‘I need to call the KGB,’ he told Mirzuyev, who took him immediately to the front desk phone.

Mervyn called a number Alexei had given to him years before, which he had in his notebook. An unknown woman answered, who seemed unperturbed by the news that Mervyn was calling from a police station. She took his details and told him to wait.

Half an hour later, Alexei walked into the interview room in a sharp suit, dapper as ever. They had not seen each other for nearly three years. He eyed Mervyn disapprovingly and went through the pretence of asking what had happened. Mervyn, deciding it best to play Alexei’s game, told him the details of what had happened. ‘You realize it’s a very serious charge, Mervyn,’ Alexei said coldly. ‘Very serious.’

There were few formalities. Alexei simply led Mervyn out of the police station and into a waiting car, a ZiL. Alexei has come up in the world, thought Mervyn as they drove up into the Lenin Hills and back to the university. Alexei tried to make small talk, politely asking about Mervyn’s mother. Mervyn replied that she was ill, but would be a lot worse if she knew what trouble her son was in. ‘Oh yes, Mervyn,’ said Alexei. ‘You are in trouble.’

They had little else to say to each other as they sat side by side on the ZiL’s wide back seat.

Later, alone at night in his room at the university looking over the lights of the city, Mervyn thought hard about what to do. He assumed that Alexei would soon renew his old offer to work ‘for the people of the Soviet Union’. There were six weeks to go before his planned wedding day, and the Soviets could very easily expel him or imprison him for up to two years if he played his cards wrong. He was on borrowed time.

Mervyn told Mila the next day that the KGB had staged a ‘provocation’ against him. Mila, who could be so unreasonable over trivialities, was calm in crisis. She poured Mervyn a cup of tea. ‘Well that’s life in Moscow,’ she said, and served him some of her jam on a saucer to eat with a spoon. Somehow, Mervyn hoped that he could continue stalling the KGB long enough to marry Lyudmila and carry her away to England for ever.

Unfortunately, the KGB had other plans. There were a series of tense meetings in the Metropole Hotel with his old antagonists, Alexei and his boss, Alexander Fyodorovich Sokolov. Mervyn tried to prevaricate, telling them of his great love and sympathy for the cause of international peace and understanding of peoples. The KGB men were getting impatient and pressed hard for a straight answer. Sokolov, for one, had been brought up in an era when such caprices were customarily dealt with by the simple application of brutality. He cut acidly through Mervyn’s floundering – would he work for the KGB or not? He became aggressive, banging the table, infuriated by my father’s increasingly desperate evasions. At the end of what was to be their last meeting, it was very clear that the KGB’s patience was fast running out, if it had not done so already.

For as long as I have known of it, my father’s defiance of the KGB has struck me as a noble and principled act. But on another level I also find it incomprehensible. It has occurred to me, as I write this, that if I had been forced to choose between being separated from the woman I loved and signing a paper saying I would work for the KGB, I would have unhesitatingly signed on the dotted line. Whatever my private feelings for the KGB, I would have considered the cause of my personal happiness supreme above all others. I cannot decide if this is a difference between my and my father’s generation, or one of temperament between us personally.

My father was born into a generation whose fathers had walked in good order into withering machine-gun fire for King and Country. He grew up in a conformist age, and though much in his life was remarkably individualistic, the idea of betraying his country and capitulating to the blandishments of the KGB, never mind how delicately phrased, was something he could not countenance. But his refusal wasn’t a question of choosing conformity over the extravagant folly of treachery. His deeply held sense of personal honour simply would not let him do it; despite a lifelong cynicism about politics, he never had doubts about his love for his country. He was to pay a heavy price for his principles.

A note arrived, on thin official notepaper, announcing that my parents’ wedding date had been cancelled because ‘a criminal case has been opened’ against Mervyn – which wasn’t actually true, as the police case was still at the investigation stage. The KGB had also called Valery Golovitser in for a long series of interrogations, on condition of strict secrecy, but he nevertheless let Mervyn know through mutual friends that the hammer had fallen on him. My father, by now thoroughly scared of what the KGB’s next move would be, realized that the consequences of his stand were beginning to be felt by his friends.

One way, Mervyn thought, to stop this spiral of revenge might be to buttonhole the Labour leader Harold Wilson, at that time still leader of the Opposition. Wilson was in Moscow for a meeting with the Soviets, who took a keen interest in Labour’s chances at the next election. Mervyn took a trolleybus to the National Hotel on the evening Wilson arrived, and used his foreignness as a talisman to brush past the hotel security and find his way to Wilson’s room. Wilson himself answered Mervyn’s knock, but when he began to explain his predicament and to ask him to intervene personally with Khrushchev, Wilson, smelling trouble, politely but firmly refused. A visit two days later to Wilson’s shadow foreign secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker, was even more firmly rebuffed. Walker advised my father, fatuously, to contact the embassy.

Mervyn and Lyudmila decided to show up at the Palace of Weddings on Griboyedov Street on their allocated date, regardless of the cancellation. Mila wore a linen wedding dress embroidered with pearls, and Mervyn carried a heavy red gold wedding ring he had bought for the occasion in his jacket pocket.

My father, in a gamble which ultimately was to do nothing but hasten the end, invited an entourage of foreign correspondents to cover his attempt to marry. Victor Louis of the Evening News, a mysterious character of Russian birth who was the doyen of the foreign press in Moscow, was present, as well as at least a dozen KGB goons. In the event, the wedding palace’s director wisely chose to stay away from the building all day. Her stubborn deputy refused to marry the couple, saying that their reservation had been cancelled on orders from ‘the administration’. Louis battled bravely on their behalf, pressing the deputy for a ‘valid legal reason’ for refusing to marry the couple. The bureaucrats retreated behind the old Soviet tactic of doing nothing for hours on end, and eventually their supplicants’ energy dissolved into despair, and as evening fell everyone went home.

My father sensed that the inevitable reprisal after his failed publicity stunt was not far away, and went to ground in Lyudmila’s flat. The foreign press, finding him missing from his room at the university, reported that he had disappeared. For two days, Mila and Mervyn clung to the illusion that a miracle might happen, trying to keep the terrible rip-tides of the world at bay outside the flimsy door of her room. Mila called in sick to work, and the two of them spent the days walking on the Arbat arm in arm, or locked in their little room reading and talking. But the shared telephone of the kommunalka ruined their desperate attempt to suspend time. Mervyn was urgently wanted at the British embassy.

One diplomat and one of the embassy’s resident spooks stood waiting for him at the entrance to the Chancery, and took him down to the ‘bubble’, a supposedly surveillanceproof little booth where they could talk without being overheard. The reason for this cloak-and-dagger business was to inform Mervyn that the Foreign Office ‘had reason to believe that Mila was a KGB plant’ . No evidence for this assertion was offered. In what Mervyn later recalled as one of the proudest moments of his life, prouder even than his refusal to work for Alexei, he stood up in disgust and walked out of the room, and out of the embassy, without saying another word.

But though his disgust was genuine enough, the bravado was forced. Now truly desperate, his natural shyness overcome by panic and the rising sense of imminent catastrophe, my father took the trolleybus back to his little refuge on Starokonushenny Pereulok to await the inevitable. The next day, 20 June, two British embassy officials called at the apartment to deliver a letter. The presence of so many foreigners caused a sensation among Mila’s whispering neighbours.

The letter informed my father that the embassy had received an official letter from the Soviet Foreign Ministry to the effect that one William Haydn Mervyn Matthews, graduate student, was now considered persona non grata in the Soviet Union and was to leave immediately. Minutes later, a uniformed militiaman and a druzhinnile, or civilian helper, rang the door bell. Mervyn had been living at the apartment without registration, the militiaman said, and he must come with them. He had little choice.

They drove quickly through central Moscow – the streets were still almost empty of traffic then – skirting Lubyanka Square, which for a nasty moment Mervyn thought might be their final destination, and instead heading up Chernyshevsky Street to OVIR, the passport and registration office. There, Mervyn was served with formal notice that his visa had expired and that he should leave immediately. A British embassy staffer present volunteered to help to find a place on an otherwise terribly crowded plane to London the next day, 21 June 1964. Mervyn was so disgusted that he refused to say a word in English, forcing the embassy man to have every word of his conversation with the officials laboriously translated.

They spent their last night together at Mila’s flat. Mervyn didn’t bother to return to the university to pack his things. Both he and Mila were almost dumb with grief. In the morning she accompanied Mervyn in a taxi to Vnukovo Airport, grey-faced and in shock. They embraced. As Mervyn went through the barrier to passport control and out of her life, probably for ever, Mila was overwhelmed with grief no less bitter than that she had felt when her parents had been taken away from her.

‘God, what terrible minutes I spent there at the airport. I stood alone in the corner, watching your plane, overflowing with tears,’ Mila wrote to Mervyn a few days later. ‘The taxi drivers were trying to help, asking what the matter was; they said they’d take me for free if I didn’t have the money. I couldn’t leave for a long time, I hung around there, hoping a miracle would happen and you would return.’