Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War

11. Mila and Mervusya

Mervyn awoke to birdsong. Outside it was a bright summer morning in a neat English suburban garden. From the kitchen downstairs he could hear the clink of breakfast plates and the drone of BBC radio. As he lay in bed, the events of the last few days crowded in like the aftermath of a nightmare.

‘He’s a stubborn fool, and he should know better,’ his forthright mother had told the Daily Express the day before, and she was surely right about the stubbornness. But there was more to it than that. Mervyn had fought all his life against the provincial drudgery that others had ordained for him. Now, he realized, he would have to fight for Mila too.

That morning Mervyn resolved to do everything in his power to get Mila out of Russia. This was no impulsive decision. Ever the pragmatist, he gave himself five years. Then, if it was still hopeless, he would reconcile himself to failure, and move on.

Mervyn set up an office in the back bedroom of his halfbrother Jack’s small house in Barnes. From there he began making calls, picking up the strands of his life. One of his first was to St Antony’s. The college’s warden, Bill Deakin, had been following the press coverage of his student’s antics in Moscow with increasing concern. Deakin suggested they have dinner at Scott’s fish restaurant in Mayfair the next evening. Deakin was a stately character, patrician to the fingertips. He had been an associate of Churchill’s during the war, and had parachuted into Yugoslavia to make contact with Tito’s partisans alongside Sir Fitzroy Maclean. Though Mervyn liked and respected Deakin, he was exactly the kind of smooth establishment figure who put him on the defensive.

Deakin had taken little notice of Mervyn before he left for Moscow, but now that the shy Welshman had committed the sin of putting the college’s name on the front pages it was time for a serious chat. The dinner was expensive and indifferent my father thought that Alexei’s hospitality in Moscow had been superior – but Deakin was charming as he downed his whisky and sodas. His first concern as he extracted the full story from Mervyn was to ensure that he had not been involved in any criminal activity in Moscow which could damage the reputation of the college. Over coffee, Deakin suggested that my father ‘have a talk with the security people’ about his experiences. Outside, Deakin hailed a taxi, leaving my father to walk to the Tube. My father noted Deakin’s lavishness with ten-shilling tips.

Even as he was boarding the plane in Moscow, Mervyn had come up with a plan bold enough to fulfil his urgent need to act. Nikita Khrushchev was due to visit Sweden with his wife the following week, and Mervyn planned to deliver them a personal letter, pleading for them to help two ordinary young people get married.

Somehow, either from something he’d said to the press or to his brother Jack, Mervyn’s mother got wind of his plan. ‘For my sake, Mervyn, give up the idea of going to Scandinavia to see Khrushchev,’ she wrote to her son from Swansea. ‘He is moving about with a terrific bodyguard and you might get shot.’ Mervyn ignored her advice, which was to become a habit over the years to come.

He boarded a plane to Gothenburg, but landed just as the Khrushchevs were leaving. The Swedish police were waiting for Mervyn, having found out from the newspapers about his visit, and were enormously relieved when he arrived too late. ‘Khrushchev gone,’ a Swedish plain-clothes policeman told Mervyn, pointing up at the watery sunset.

Mervyn was invited to dinner by the editor of the Göteborgs Handels och Sjöfarts Tidning, and gave an interview. Having missed Khrushchev in Gothenburg, Mervyn followed him to Stockholm, taking the train through the rainy Swedish night. When he arrived he found himself a cheap room at the Hellman Hotel, and set up his tea kit: an electric spiral element, a perforated spoon for the leaves, and a mug. It was a habit he stuck to well into my childhood. I vividly remember the tea kit, always there on stained tables in cheap hotel rooms wherever we stayed, in Provence, Istanbul, Cairo, Florence, Rome. He also brought a plate and cutlery, because he couldn’t afford Swedish restaurants. Instead, he ate snacks and sandwiches bought in grocery shops.

In the morning Mervyn made for the offices of the two big Stockholm dailies, Aftonbladet and Stockholms-Tidningen, where reporters told him that the security around Khrushchev was tight, and that he shouldn’t try to get near the great man. They promised to run major feature articles in the next day’s edition.

That evening, Mervyn went alone to an amusement park on one of the islands and watched the young couples dancing. They had to pay separately, he noticed, for each number. He imagined himself and Mila going through the turnstiles together.

At three in the morning he was woken by a knock at the door. It was Des Zwar, a reporter from the Daily Mail. Mervyn tried to get rid of him, but Zwar was persistent. He’d been round every hotel in town looking for Mervyn, he said. ‘The office thinks there might be a good story in it, so they sent me over.’

They sat on the bed and talked. Mervyn told Zwar his story, and Zwar told Mervyn about the passions of his life, golf and beautiful women, ‘in that order’. Zwar’s story, a masterpiece of tabloidese which my father preserved in the first of many files of newspaper clippings, appeared in the next day’s edition.

‘Dr Mervyn Matthews, the thirty-one-year-old research student who was refused permission to marry a Russian girl, was in Stockholm tonight waiting for his chance to see Mr Khrushchev tomorrow. Earlier today he wandered around Stockholm’s city centre with a letter to Mr Khrushchev in his pocket. He said, “I won’t give up”… If Dr Matthews tries to break through the cordon of machine gun carrying police he runs the risk of being shot dead. Security men, nervous since the reported threat to kidnap Mr Khrushchev, are in the trees, lining the roads and even on horseback, with orders to shoot if there is a sudden move to get near the Russian leader.’

Mervyn’s money was running out, and he had not succeeded in getting anywhere near Khrushchev. The next day, he flew back to Oxford empty-handed.

‘I’m sitting at the window of our college thinking of you,’ wrote Mervyn to Mila in his beautiful, cursive Russian script. ‘This damned [postal] strike is still on, they say it won’t be finished for a while, so I asked a friend to post this from Paris for me. A week has gone by and no news from you. I am waiting for your call very much.’

His language, in those very first letters, was guarded, the style formal. It is as though he was testing her reaction, her expectations of him. ‘I would call myself but I don’t want to interfere… I am still applying all my efforts to find a solution to our question. You can rely on me completely. I don’t forget my Mila for a moment. I have your photos, those old ones, but I am afraid to look at them. They are in an envelope. I know that as soon as I look at your face I will be overwhelmed by such a wave of sorrow that it will be quite impossible. It’s so empty, empty without youThe weather is hot and stuffy. A typical Oxford summer. The college is exactly the same, but I have changed. I want to know what your mood is – it will be easier for me if I know that you are not despairing. When I think of our parting my heart breaks. Do not worry – I will not leave things like this. Remember I am undertaking many steps to achieve our mutual happiness. Look after your little nerves, your health. Your, M.’

A few days later Mila’s first letters from Moscow arrived in Mervyn’s pigeon-hole at St Anthony’s.

‘Today we are starting a new life, a life of letters and struggle,’ wrote Lyudmila on 24 June. ‘I feel very bad without you, it is as though life has stopped… In the three days since you left I have lost a good deal of strength, health and nerves. I know you will be angry, but I could not do anything with myself. I am sleeping very badly, I keep on thinking that you must return, and that I should be waiting for you, I jump at every sound. My friends try and support me… Everybody here who is honest and sensible thinks that [our separation] is stupid, inhumane, vicious and shameful.’

Mila’s friends would come by to comfort her, bringing food and dragging her out to the park to walk a little. But Mila had become ‘silent around people, stupid, unable to say anything’ . She refused to change the sheets on her bed because they still carried ‘the smell of your body’. On the Saturday after Mervyn’s departure she promised herself she’d muster the energy to go to the theatre. It was the premier of Cyrano de Bergerac at the Sovremennik, but for the first time in her life Mila couldn’t sit through the performance, and left after the first act. She felt as though she was running around ‘like a squirrel in a wheel’.

‘I live only with my grief, the world outside has ceased to exist for me,’ she wrote to Mervyn the next day. ‘I am very sorry I let you go. We should have waited longer. Everything is a thousand times harder now, the loneliness is unbearable. At the Institute all the women feel sorry for me, but among themselves they think you deceived me. They say, “Will he go on trying?” I tell them that you certainly will, and that we love one another very much. They all run to the library to read the New York Times. A lot of people liked your photo… I try to get home as quickly as possible and not see anyone. My mother reacted very badly [to your departure]. She says she thought that would happen! You are a foreigner.’

If I have realized anything in writing this book, it is that my father is a deeply honourable man. He had promised to marry Mila, and he would keep his word. More, he would sacrifice much to disprove Martha’s awful accusation that he, a foreigner, would abandon Mila to her fate, orphaning her a second time. ‘My childhood and your childhood and the present all run together into one picture of pain – I so want to smash this mass and start a bright new life,’ wrote a tormented Mila. ‘It’s so bad, so cold and orphan-like since you left.’

Lyudmila left no doubt as to the answer to the unspoken question in Mervyn’s first, tentative letters – her entire existence was orientated towards the fight she had to wage, and her whole life was consumed by the pain of parting.

‘Mervusyal I believe in you, will you let me down?’ Mila wrote. ‘I will go through with this to the end. Either way, I ask you, I implore you: if you don’t want to fight to the last, write me a letter and send it with someone, it’ll be easier for me that way. No prevarication – that is the most terrible, more terrible than death.’

At Bill Deakin’s suggestion, Mervyn wrote a detailed report on his contacts with the KGB for MIS. He also saw a lot of David Footman, his moral tutor at St Antony’s, a tall, grave man who out of term lived in a large basement flat in Chelsea. Footman was, like Deakin, urbane and polished, with a formidable intellect and effortless social superiority. He had won a Military Cross in the First World War and, though my father did not know it at the time, had headed the Secret Intelligence Service’s Soviet desk during the Second World War.

I remember Footman very clearly from various visits to his Chelsea flat in my early childhood. He was very thin and immaculately dressed, and spoke in an upper-class drawl that I had hitherto heard only on the television. His flat was filled with books and photographs of the First World War planes he had piloted (and, I was thrilled to hear, crashed, or ‘pranged’, as he put it), and I recall him solemnly shaking my hand as we left, though I was no older than five or six. I think Footman was the first person ever to do so.

Over weak tea in cracked cups, Footman listened sympathetically to Mervyn’s story, carefully filling his pipe as Mervyn spoke. Young people were supposed to get into scrapes, he told my father; he’d been in a few himself. Footman confided that he’d always preferred to have a secretary who’s had a ‘tumble in the hay’ rather than a prim one, they were easier to get along with. After Mervyn had finished, Footman suggested that he have a word with ‘Battersby, from the Foreign Office security section – they would be interested.’ He refilled his pipe and passed his hand over his distinguished brow.

‘You’re not reckoning on getting her out, are you? That would be a bonus. You’ve got to be realistic about these things.’

But Mervyn could not be realistic; it was against his nature. Also, I think he had become infected by something of the irrationality and maximalism of Russia. Not so much the superficial addiction to self-dramatization, which is undoubtedly a very Russian habit, but rather the true soaring of the spirit which thrives only when reality is impossible to deal with. Being realistic, in Russian terms, meant surrender. For Mila it would have meant going to work in a cloth mill at the age of fifteen. For Mervyn it would have meant a clerk’s job in the local Co-op. Both Mila and Mervyn had always refused to reconcile themselves to what others believed was reasonable.

Soon after his conversation with Footman, a letter arrived from Moscow via Italy, where it had been posted by an Italian Communist friend of my mother’s. It was Mila’s manifesto, at once a challenge and a cri de cceur. What it emphatically was not was realistic, which makes it so magnificent – and almost unbearable – to read, even a lifetime later.

‘You will get this letter on the eve of your birthday,’ Mila wrote. ‘I am sending it via Italy. This is the cry of my love, this is just for you and me.’ Their other letters, they both assumed, were randomly checked by the KGB; this one, Lyudmila was determined, would be absolutely private.

‘I have never written such letters to anyone, everything here is honest and true. My love for you may seem pathologically strong. In our time people have been taught to be content with a little, with half-measures, with the artificial. They forget feelings easily and easily part with and betray one another, they easily accept surrogates, including in love. All my life I went against the flow; all my life has been a fierce struggle against attempts to impose a way of life on me, a way of thinking which seems to me to be absolutely unacceptable. My life has been a fight to get an education, to become cultured, a fight for independence and finally a fight for love.

‘From my earliest childhood I have conducted a heated running argument with life. Life told me: Don’t study! Don’t love wonderful things! Cheat! Don’t believe in level Betray your friends! Don’t thinkl Obey! But I stubbornly maintained that my answer was “No”, and ploughed my difficult path onwards through the debris. Life was cruel and vengeful. It denied me love, kindness, warmth. But my thirst for them only grew. Life tried to convince me that happiness is impossible, but still I believed, continued to search for it and wait, ready to fight for it when I found it and never to give it up.

‘They say that you should only love someone for their good qualities – but I love everything in you, good and bad. I am not ashamed of your weaknesses, I carry them within me like something sacred, unattainable for outside eyes. I don’t hear when someone speaks ill of you. I believe that only I see all of you, and from this comes my conviction that you are the best. I love you as my child, like a part of my body; I often feel that I have given birth to you. I so want to rock you in my arms, to protect you from danger, to save you from illness.

‘Do you believe me, my boy, that I am willing to give up my life for you? I try, with my feeble woman’s courage, to help you to refuse to fear these people, not to give in to them. Do you feel that? I still refuse to fear them, even though they are all-powerful. Truly, these dark days have shown me how much I love my mouse, how I have grown together with him in heart and soul, and what terrible surgery has been carried out on me – an operation on my heart. My aim now is to show this avenging eagle, this ravenous predator, that my love is stronger than their hate.’

How could Mervyn have refused to fight after such a soulwrenching letter? How could anyone, after being made the object of such love and faith and hope, let their beloved down? ‘Love me,’ she wrote. ‘Or I will die.’

‘For me nothing was as it was before,’ he replied. ‘But you have placed a heavy moral task on my shoulders and I am not sure that I will have the strength to carry it. I am not talking about the difficulties in our marriage – you can be sure that this plan will be fulfilled by 150 per cent. No, I mean the high moral example you set me, the necessity of perfecting myself. Your praise embarrasses me. It suggests that I am better than you. But for the most part I can only learn from you. You gave me a completely new outlook on life exactly when I needed it.’

His Russian, for all the years they corresponded, was as stiff and formal as hers was fiery and passionate. It is almost as if he is struggling against his upbringing to find words to express feelings too big, too powerful to fit into the narrow confines of polite letter writing. My father signed the letter just quoted with a flamboyant flourish; a small thing, perhaps, but it was a more extravagant signature than he’d allowed himself on any previous letter.

Mervyn managed to book a telephone call to Lenina, and told her to pass on a message to Lyudmila to be at the Central Telegraph on Gorky Street later in the week. Mila was electrified by the first long-distance conversation since their separation. ‘As soon as I heard your voice the blood rushed around my body like a rocket,’ she wrote. ‘I want to kiss your voice.’ Lyudmila couldn’t use the communal phone in the corridor of her apartment because of her nosy neighbours, so they set up a system of fortnightly phone calls. The calls had to be booked in advance, and they had to be short because of the cost. But the few minutes of conversation in a cramped booth at the Telegraph became a lifeline for Mila.

‘Little Mervyn! I miss you so much, I so want to kiss your little head, your neck, your little nose, but what am I to do, eh, my little boy?’ she wrote soon after their first phone call. ‘How are we to overcome this obstacle which divides us so absolutely? It’s so cruel, so hard, to have a loved one and not be able to see him, to be near him. Sometimes hope blossoms in me, belief, I want to be so courageous and strong, but more often I feel such despair, such frustration, such a terrible pain in my heart, so bitter, that my strength leaves me and my nerves can’t bear it, I want to cry out to the whole world. I still can’t believe it’s true, that you aren’t by my side. So cruel, so unfair! But who will you prove this to, who has time for our pain, our injustice? A machine doesn’t feel, it doesn’t think, it only sweeps people underneath it, this evil juggernaut of history.’

Mervyn was just beginning to learn about the ways of the juggernaut of history. Despite all that had happened, he still had the mad idea that he could take it on and win, in spite of the wise counsels of his mentors and the imprecations of his mother. Mervyn stood before a decision to pursue something fine and beautiful and probably impossible – or to reconcile himself to something ordinary and banal. He chose the extraordinary. In that decision there lies a moment of great courage, bright enough to light a whole lifetime.

Lenina also showed her mettle in a small but life-affirming act of bravery. She wrote to Mervyn to assure him that she would support their struggle to marry. ‘Mila is my first child and I love her very much, especially now,’ wrote Lenina. ‘All I think about is your affair, wherever I am. We all love you. You are a full member of our family. Ofcourse another in my place would not have loved you, seen you as a thief who in broad daylight tore a piece out of my heart. But because I want Mila to be happy and to be loved I love you too, difficult as you sometimes are.’ Lenina’s daughter Nadia wrote, too, hoping that Mervyn would be back for the winter and the mushrooming season.

In mid-August, Mervyn made another attempt to buttonhole a Soviet leader and pass them a letter about his plight. He took a plane to Bonn to try to meet Khrushchev’s son-in-law, Alexei Adzhubei. Since the press fanfare in Stockholm had got him nowhere, he decided this time to approach Adzhubei as unobtrusively as possible. Through a college friend he got in touch with Carla Stern, a well-connected West German publisher, who gave Mervyn details of Adzhubei’s move- ments, and an invitation to a private reception he was due to attend.

Mervyn, in his best suit, made his way through the crowded drawing room. Adzhubei was surrounded by a group of German businessmen, all eagerly discussing breaking into the Soviet market. There was almost no security. Mervyn shook hands with Adzhubei, and gave him a letter. Adzhubei looked faintly embarrassed, nodded curtly at Mervyn, handed the letter without comment to an aide, and turned back to the businessmen. My father left immediately, and the same evening returned to London. It had hardly been an auspicious meeting.

‘The only thing which comforts me – and I hope you too – is the understanding and sympathy of everyone who knows our unhappy story,’ he wrote to Mila on his return, not mentioning his failed trip. ‘In the end I am sure that the evil which occurred will be cancelled. I am undertaking many steps to achieve our mutual happiness.’

At Bill Deakin’s prompting, Mervyn called a Mr Battersby from MI5. They had an inconclusive chat. The only thing Battersby revealed was that his colleague Sewell in Moscow had no evidence for telling Mervyn that his fiancée was a KGB plant; it had just been a ‘precautionary presumption’. As far as British officialdom was concerned, that was the end of the matter.

A few weeks later, in early September, MI5 sent an officer up to Oxford to interview Mervyn in person. M.L. McCaul was plump, middle-aged and very deliberate, with the manner of a sergeant major. He drove Mervyn out to the Bear in Woodstock for dinner and went over the details of Mervyn’s earlier report, checking if there was anything he’d left out. McCaul referred to Alexei and Alexander Sokolov as ‘your mends’ and ‘that pair’.

‘We liked your phrase, “using an aura of friendship for purposes of recruitment”, in your report,’ McCaul told my father. ‘So we put it in one of our things.’ He did not elaborate as to what piece of MI5 literature Mervyn had unwittingly contributed to. A few days later McCaul sent Mervyn two photographs to see if he could identify them. One was of a Russian research student who’d been up at St Anthony’s two years previously, and had nothing to do with Mervyn’s case. The other picture was of a man Mervyn had never seen. He remembered Alexei’s sarcastic comments on how ineffective MIS was, and found himself in full agreement.

M15 did, to Mervyn’s surprise, finally come up with the goods on 2 March 1966, when a man met him at Charing Cross Station to show him a photograph of an elegant figure with a broad, handsome face and a distinctive streak of grey hair over his temple. It was Alexei. The M15 man told Mervyn his surname was Suntsov, the first time Mervyn had ever heard it. In Moscow he had never dared ask Alexei his surname.

In Moscow, for Mila, Mervyn was everywhere, appearing like the ghostly overcoat in Gogol’s haunting short story. At the theatre she saw some ‘long-necked, long-fingered countrymen of yours, and I became so sad, so bitter, that I decided not to stay for the performance,’ she wrote. ‘My Boy! Where am I to find the strength to wait for so long?’

Mila’s life was slowly being suffused and taken over by the virtual presence of Mervyn. She covered one wall of her little room with photographs of her fiancé, and in the evenings she would walk alone down Gogolevsky Boulevard to Kropotkinskaya Metro and look at the people streaming out, watching for Mervyn to appear. ‘If only I could meet you now at the Metro; we would walk home together, breathe the summer night air. The Arbat backstreets would seem beautiful, the people kind, the evening soft. But now it seems that everyone looks at me judgmentally. The trees seem old and yellow with you they were young and alive. I look enviously at women who have a man’s hand on their shoulder.’

On the large boards by the Metro where the day’s newspapers were pasted up, she would stop and read stories about mods and rockers fighting on Hastings beach. Then she’d go back home and write, leaving the apartment again late at night to post her letter in the postbox on the corner of Starokonushenny Pereulok and the Arbat so that it would go with the first post. The little rituals which were to rule her life for the rest of her time in Russia were forming into a comforting pattern, a routine which could assuage, at least a little, the powerlessness of her situation.

‘In the morning, as soon as I wake up I write a letter, my beloved boy… I imagine you sleeping, getting up, bathing… No more letters… the waiting is the worst. Even if the postman brought three a day it would not be enough, and now we have a gap… No news, it is as though my life has stopped.’

Mervyn spent the rest of the summer working with Alexander Kerensky, the bright lawyer who had risen to head the Provisional Government of the Russian Empire in the precipitous months between July and October 1917, when he was overthrown by the Bolsheviks’ coup. Kerensky was now very elderly, a spidery little man with a shock of grey hair and thick glasses. Mervyn helped him with his research, which was devoted to trying to unravel the events in which he himself had played a leading part. Mervyn told Kerensky his story. The old man was sympathetic, but for him Russia was a distant and hostile country which he had fled half a century before and would never see again. They talked about the Revolution and the ruthless men it had brought to power.

‘Rasputin? Oh, yes, he was very strong, very strong!’ Kerensky would mutter. ‘Lenin! I should have had him arrested when I could.’ Mervyn nodded in sincere agreement.

My father began writing to sympathetic MPs and dignitaries who might be able to help his fight. Professor Leonard Schapiro of the London School of Economics gave him a list of names and addresses, and Mervyn began a tireless correspondence which eventually grew to fill an entire three-drawer filing cabinet. He wrote to Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, who was in the Soviets’ good books for his anti-nuclear campaigns; Selwyn Lloyd, the former Conservative Foreign Secretary who had ‘got on well’ with his Soviet counterpart, Andrei Gromyko; Sir Isaiah Berlin, the Riga-born philosopher of All Souls College; George Woodcock, Secretary of the Trades Union Congress and a well-known fellow-traveller. All replied with polite expressions of concern, but offered little real help.

By now most of Mervyn’s time was spent writing letters, making phone calls and visits. His academic work was falling by the wayside. Mervyn paid a visit to the Soviet ambassador’s private secretary, Alexander Soldatov, but to his disappointment the meeting yielded nothing beyond polite platitudes. My father, with perverse persistence, kept filing Soviet visa applications; with equal persistence, the Soviets kept turning them down.

Mervyn had little hope that a visa would actually come through. Mila, on the other hand, seemed to have formed a firm belief that her own application for a Soviet exit visa, a rare privilege usually granted only to the most politically trusted, had a chance of being approved. When she learned on 18 August that her exit visa had been refused ‘at the highest level’, she was distraught.

‘The last two months with the help of my friends and family I have lived in hope that my suffering will end but yesterday I discovered that my hopes are in vain,’ she wrote, the writing paper stained with tears. ‘All night I wandered in the heat, unable to sleep, and today I am still bathed in tears, as though in front of my eyes a piece of my heart has been torn out. I am once again in terrible despair. I beg you, my darling, don’t let me down, I am on the verge of death.

‘I am sitting at home like a bird in a cage, I slept badly, in a terrible mix of love and pain, but I will have to live, bear it, wait. It seems one more minute of waiting and my heart will tear itself to pieces and blood will pour from my mouth. Together with you I am ready to bear any tortures, but alone it’s terribly hard… Some people are rejoicing: there is nothing they love more than to see the blood dripping from souls they have torn apart with their claws. They think they have saved me from a fiery Gehenna. They think you are a devil incarnate, and they themselves are saints. Keep knocking at the gates of heaven, listen and you will hear my voice calling to you from behind them. Even though the gatekeeper won’t let you through, don’t let him sleep.’

A few days later her mood seemed to have lifted. Mila apologized for her desperate letters of the previous week. ‘If only you knew how your decisiveness is like oxygen to me. Please, Mervusya, never tell me that you have given up beating your head against the wall. Don’t retreat! Storming the walls doesn’t always work first time. I can never bear to hear that you have given up hope, faith in your own powers.’

In Moscow the summer was ending. Mila harvested the potatoes and cucumbers which Mervyn had planted. Berrying season had come, and Mila and her nieces spent days in the woods with iron buckets collecting wild strawberries, bilberries and cranberries in the marshy clearings. Sasha picked fruit, and Mila and Lenina boiled up vast pots of jam in the dacha kitchen. Mila kept some jars aside, which she planned to eat with Mervyn just as soon as he came back.

‘Please tell me all the details of your life, the little curry house in the centre of town,’ wrote Mila to Mervyn, calmer than she’d been in months after her spell in the country. ‘All these things are vital to me. In them I see my real live little person, my beloved boy.’ At the end of the letter Mila drew some little sketches of a shirt she was sewing. ‘Here’s a funny poem for you,’ she wrote a day later. ‘Mervusya – happiness, Mervusya – bottom, Mervusya – joy, For Mila – sweetness… Is your room warm, your blanket? Do demons of temptation come to you?’

‘The postal workers are demanding 7½ per cent, the government is offering 4½ per cent, and until this argument is settled we must suffer,’ Mervyn replied. ‘I think the government is quite wrong on this question, but I do not advertise this viewpoint. The last few nights I have slept badly, and dream of you often. I often think of those wonderful dinners which you made me. I try not to overeat here. I bought myself a new pair of slippers, Hungarian ones, and have begun playing squash. Don’t be sad, dear Milochka, everything will go well for us in the end. I hug you. M.’

It was only a matter of time before Mila’s scandalous love affair with a foreigner who had been expelled from the Soviet Union collided with her position at the Institute of Marxism and Leninism. Behind her back, she knew, there was a lot of gossip. Some of her colleagues clearly sympathized; many others looked at her askance as they passed. Mila did her best to be alone, so as not to embarrass anyone. She tried to bury herself in work, only to find that she had ‘grown stupid from the pain, it is bothering me so much’.

The blow fell after a specially convened meeting of the Institute’s leading Party members, as dour a bunch of zealots as Mila had ever encountered. ‘This week has been a nightmare, constant nerves, tears,’ Mila reported. ‘At work there’s a huge furore. A few days ago there was a Party meeting. They demanded a report about “My Case”. They wanted blood. They shouted, “Why didn’t we know earlier? Why didn’t you tell us everything?” (This is all in the style of the Party Secretary.) “We need to find out more through the Organs [of State Security]. And what does she say for herself? She denies it. You see! If the government made a decision, that means it’s a correct one. She must be punished! She put personal interests before society’s! He will surely use her for anti-Soviet propaganda and then abandons her.”’

A few of Mila’s colleagues, bravely, tried to defend her, urging leniency and saying that falling in love didn’t make her an enemy of the people. But mostly, ‘the clever ones stayed silent, the bastards shouted with all their might’. This hypocrites’ court was the worst sort of pressure, a perfect weapon for the conformity obsessed Soviet society. And not only Soviet society: defying authority is one thing, but few human beings can withstand a chorus of disapproval from those whom they know and trust.

Mila didn’t give them the victory of seeing her break down in tears. But the experience shook her deeply. For all her spirit, she was a Soviet woman, daughter of a Communist, a child brought up by the state. Never, before now, had she been confronted with the prospect of outright dissent. And she was all too aware that the taint of rebellion might follow her through her whole life.

‘I think that even if I do leave, they will immediately telephone my new work or someone will inform on me, in the old fashioned way, and they’ll fire me immediately in turn,’ wrote Mila. ‘Nevertheless, I must leave. The atmosphere is vile, a lot of gossip, little talks “of an instructional nature”, which are enough to give me a heart attack.’

Despite Mila’s public disgrace, the Institute’s director was sympathetic. He arranged a transfer to the Central Library of the Academy of Sciences at the same status and wage, where Mila was to translate scholarly articles from French academic journals. To Mila’s huge relief, her new colleagues turned out to be young and independent-minded. The library was in fact a ‘den of dissidents… it was like throwing a fish into water,’ Mila remembered. The room where she worked was decorated with large, surreal, pencil caricatures of various wanfaced historical figures which the director had allowed some wag to draw directly on to the walls. She and her fellow workers amused themselves by snapping a series of comic photos – one shows Mila and her friend Eric Zhuk posing as the Worker and the Communal Farm Woman, a classic 1937 statue of Soviet youth. He holds a hammer, she holds a sickle, and they stand back to back in a mock-heroic pose. Another shows the young librarians parodying Rodin’s sculpture of the Burghers of Calais, standing in a row with their heads tragicomically bowed. The liberal atmosphere of the library allowed Mila to have heated arguments with the senior researchers over whether Soviet power would fall in their lifetimes. Mila argued that it would; Professor Faigin, an expert on Peter the Great, argued that it would survive for centuries. ‘The Russian pig lay on one side for three hundred years,’ the sprightly old professor joked. ‘Now she’s rolled over on to the other and will lie there for another three hundred.’

On 19 October 1964 Mila went with two new girlfriends to greet the returning cosmonauts Vladimir Komarov, Konstantin Feoktistov, and Boris Yegorov. They had gone into space when Nikita Khrushchev was still in power; by the time they came back to earth he had been quietly removed in a politburo coup, to be replaced by Leonid Brezhnev. For the wider Soviet public, the transition passed with barely a ripple, but Brezhnev’s harder line was to bode ill for my parents’ case. Mila and her friends waved frantically as the cosmonauts cruised down Gorky Street in an open car in a fine drizzle. Then they went to a crowded café and talked till the evening.

But despite her new job and the support of her friends, the pain of separation would not let her go. ‘I hope so much that our love will not die, I so want to be with you, that it seems that if I were offered a choice I would rather die than never be with you again. Honestly!’ Mila wrote, alone in her room one autumn evening. ‘I miss you. I suffer terribly. I can’t see or listen to anyone or anything. I want to cry out to the whole world from love, from despair, from such a cruel and unfair fate!’

As I read my parents’ letters, sitting by the fire of the dacha where I lived with the woman who is now my wife, I felt a strange thing. As Xenia sat on the sofa and read the difficult, cursive script, and I took notes, sitting on the floor, I could not shake the terrible feeling that both my parents were dead and lost to me. Their voices were so distant, the details of their intimate lives and suffering so moving, that it seemed to me that I was rooting through lives already lived and gone. The letters were powerful as much for what they didn’t say as what they did, and I found myself unable to break the spell, even when I called my mother and heard her familiar voice on the telephone. We spoke of reassuring banalities, and I could not bring myself to say what I was feeling – that I was overwhelmed by admiration and love. And sorrow, for the knowledge that though my parents would eventually be reunited, their unspoken belief that they could erase their traumatic childhoods through prodigious self-sacrifice and struggle in the name of love would ultimately fail.

‘I so want to tell you my feelings, about my unending, deep, warm and eternally sad love for you,’ my mother wrote. ‘My letters seem dry because it’s impossible to say in words what is happening – something wonderful and terrible at the same time. It’s light and beautiful but burningly painful.’

Winter dosed in on Moscow, and, later and with less vehemence, on Oxford. Mervyn continued to write to whomever he thought might be of some help. But it was becoming clear that there would not be a swift resolution. He and Mila continued to speak by telephone for ten minutes once a fortnight, at ruinous cost. They agreed to alternate the calls – Mila would pay 1 ruble 40 per minute after filling in a complex system of forms and bank slips to book the call at the Central Telegraph on Gorky Street. Each call cost 15 rubles 70, a considerable chunk of her salary of eighty rubles per month. Yet to Mila it was worth every kopeck She prepared herself for her twice monthly telephone ‘date’ with Mervyn at the Central Telegraph as meticulously as if he’d really be there, instead of being a distant voice on the crackling line. She made sure not to wear shoes that Mervyn didn’t like. She would ask her cousin Nadia to do her hair in a beehive, and she’d put on her new raincoat and take her new handbag. It is this vision of my mother that comes back to me most powerfully when I think about the letters: a small, limping figure in her handmade best outfit and carefully coiffed hair, walking alone to the trolleybus stop on Gogol Boulevard, proud that she is on her way to a date with a beautiful man of her very own.

In between campaigning, Mervyn had been putting the finishing touches to his first book, a sociological work on Soviet youth. He’d been working on it, on and off, since 1958, and now it was in galleys, ready for final correction. The work, Mervyn hoped, would give his sagging academic career a boost, and prove to be his passport to the permanent college fellowship he had coveted all his adult life. But now, as the battle lines were being drawn for a war of attrition, he had qualms. Could the book, mild stuff though it was, possibly offend the Soviets and harm his chances of getting Mila out?

After weeks of agonizing, he decided not to risk it. Mervyn called the publisher, Oxford University Press, and asked to withdraw the book from its list. There was much consternation at the press, and at St Anthony’s. It was a fantastic sacrifice to make, and Mervyn probably knew at the time that he was doing his chances of academic success irreparable harm. ‘From one point of view this is good,’ he wrote to Mila, telling her of his decision. ‘But so much effort, so much nervous energy, all for nothing…’ As I sit, finishing my own book after five years of effort, my father’s sacrifice seems unimaginably vast. For weeks afterwards, Mervyn could hardly bring himself to believe what he had done.

On 26 April 1965 Gerald Brooke, a young lecturer who Mervyn had known while they were both exchange students at Moscow State University, was arrested by the KGB. He was picked up at the Moscow apartment of an agent of the Popular Labour Union, or NTS, a small and hapless CIA-funded anti-Soviet organization. The organization was so hopelessly compromised, it later emerged, that there were almost as many Soviet informers as real, misguided agitators. Brooke was caught delivering propaganda leaflets to a pair of unfortunate NTS agents who had themselves been arrested a few days before. When Brooke arrived at their apartment, the KGB were waiting.

The NTS had once tried to recruit Mervyn at Oxford. Georgy Miller, an elderly Russian émigré, tried to persuade my father to deliver a package of papers to a contact in Moscow. My father had wisely refused; Miller, it seems, had had more success persuading Brooke. But it had been a close call. There, thought Mervyn as he read the news of Brooke’s arrest, but for the Grace of God go I.

Brooke was put on trial for anti-Soviet agitation and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. The Soviet press used the case to launch an anti-Western campaign. Mervyn’s old Moscow University friend Martin Dewhirst had also been accused of anti-Soviet activity during Brooke’s trial, as was Peter Reddaway, another friend of Mervyn’s who had also been expelled from the Soviet Union. But, mercifully, Mervyn’s name was not mentioned at the trial or in the press. Why, he never found out.

Soon rumours began to circulate that the Soviet authorities were offering to swap Brooke for Peter and Helen Kroger, a pair of American Communists who had worked as Soviet spies, first as couriers to the Manhattan Project spy ring in the United States in the 1940s and then in lesser roles in the UK. The Krogers were serving twenty-year sentences for espionage in England after having been caught running a spy ring at Portland, Britain’s nuclear submarine facility. Brooke, a mere graduate student, was by no means in the same league as the Krogers, and Mervyn and others suspected that he was simply a pawn in a larger game. The Krogers themselves confirmed this in a BBC interview in 1990. Brooke had been arrested specifically for use as a trading card to get the Krogers back, they confirmed, after intense lobbying in Moscow by their KGB controller in London, Konon Melody, a.k.a. Gordon Lonsdale, who had escaped arrest and made it home when the spy ring was rolled up but dedicated himself to securing the release of his old agents.

Mervyn hatched the idea that Mila could be included in any possible spy swap. ‘There is already talk of a Brooke-Kroger exchange,’ Mervyn wrote to Frederick Cumber, a businessman with good relations with the Soviet embassy. ‘Which means two Ksfor one B. I personally think there are a number of excellent arguments for getting Mila tagged on to this. The Russians would regard it as a negligible concession, and they are certainly anxious to get the Krogers out. The months of separation are weighing very heavily on both of us, and not a day goes by without my giving a great deal of thought to the problem in hand. We live, so to speak, by letter. I have now received some 430 from Mila, and sent her about the same number (not to mention postcards).’

The glimmer of hope of a deal, however, soon dwindled after the British government announced that they would not countenance such an exchange: the Cabinet flatly refused to yield to Soviet blackmail.

In Moscow, Mila would pass her days listening to English language learning records. She repeated the simple stories about Nora and Harry and their lost dog, who was returned by the butcher along with a bill for the sausages the dog had eaten. Some of Mervyn’s letters were posted in error in her neighbour Yevdokia’s box, and Lyudmila picked the lock with knitting needles and a pair of scissors to retrieve them. Prey to growing paranoia, she asked Mervyn to send a list of his letters, suspecting her neighbours of stealing them. ‘They are sharpening their knives,’ Mila feared. She slept badly, plagued by nightmares of separation shot through with long-suppressed memories of her own childhood.

‘Last night I dreamt a horrible dream. I screamed and cried and my sister thought I was ill. I can’t believe the dream wasn’t real, it was so vivid. So now everyone is asleep and I am still crying. My sister says the dream is a very bad omen. It seems I was born to this unhappiness… such burning pain, such perverse sophisticated torture. All my strength and thoughts are put into our love. There is no way back for me.’

The Foreign Office were now taking no pains to conceal their irritation at Mervyn’s harangues. Howard Smith, the head of the ‘Northern Department’ which handled Russia, seemed to consider Mervyn, at best, a troublesome ne’er-do-well, and took his calls with increasing exasperation, bordering on rudeness.

‘Dr Matthews’ case is one with… which we are very familiar,’ wrote Michael Stewart, the Foreign Secretary, to Laurie Pavitt, MP, who had written on Mervyn’s behalf. ‘He has been told repeatedly in correspondence and interviews with officials and Foreign Office ministers alike the reasons why we do not consider it right to single out his case for official representations. In view of the past history of the case there is really no possibility of a favourable reaction to official intervention. ‘

The low point in Matthews-Foreign Office relations came when Howard Smith came to dinner at St Antony’s. Mervyn asked Fred, the College Steward, to ask Smith to come up to his rooms after dinner. When Smith appeared in the doorway, Mervyn lost control of himself and, as he put it later, ‘expressed an earthy view of his person’.

‘Smith came back into the Common Room visibly shaken,’ Mervyn’s friend Harry Willets told him later. ‘He told everyone in hearing that you had been sprawled in an armchair and called him “the shit of Smiths” when he opened your door. His cigar had gone out.’ Mervyn’s recollection is that he only called Smith ‘a fart’. Perhaps he called him both.

It was the last nail in the coffin of Mervyn’s Oxford career. His research had ground to a halt and his book had been withdrawn, he’d been on the front page of the Daily Mail, and now this. Deakin summoned Mervyn to his house for an admonitory glass of sherry. ‘Rude and totally unacceptable,’ said Deakin in clipped tones. ‘And he was a guest of the college, too. We cannot possibly put up with that sort of thing. Have you heard anything more about the job going at Glasgow? Perhaps it would be better for you to go up north and get away from things.’

Oxford, my father’s most cherished dream after Lyudmila herself, was over. Harry Willets confirmed that Mervyn’s research fellowship was being terminated over a pint in the Lamb and Flag on St Giles’ Street. Being thrown out of Oxford was a fall from grace which was to scar Mervyn more profoundly than anything else in his life; it was a blow which was to poison his every subsequent achievement.