Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War

13. Escape

Mervyn arrived in New York at dawn on 20 April 1969. He took a yellow cab to the Hotel Master on Riverside Drive, where he checked into a large but dingy room. Mervyn cared more about the phone lines, and went straight down to talk to the elderly switchboard operator, Grace. She assured him that he would probably be able to get through to Moscow. Satisfied with the communications, Mervyn went out for a ninety-nine-cent breakfast in a diner.

The next week brought important news. Derek sent him a small dipping from the Guardian: ‘The Fea yesterday asked the Soviet ambassador, Mr Smirnovsky, if he could confirm reports that Gerald Brooke, aged thirty, a lecturer, serving a five-year prison sentence in Russia for alleged subversive activities, was likely to be re-tried for espionage…’ Brooke had been due for release in April 1970; the Krogers still had over a decade of their sentences left to serve. Izvestia had suggested as early as 1967 that Brooke might be re-tried because of alleged involvement in espionage. Now the summoning of the Soviet ambassador meant the rumours were well-founded. But how Wilson’s government would react to Moscow’s renewed blackmail was still unclear.

Mervyn wrote to U Thant, Secretary-General of the United Nations, and penned two indignant articles for the Russian émigré newspaper, Novoye Russkoye Slovo. As previously arranged, he exchanged long letters and audio tapes every week with Derek, the phone being too expensive except for urgent news.

More news on Brooke appeared in The Times on 16 June: ‘A Foreign Office spokesman has said that the negotiations on Mr Brooke’s case (not necessarily on a transfer with the Krogers) have been proceeding. There, it appears, the matter still rests. A spokesman did, however, yesterday deny reports of a visit to Britain by Herr Wolfgang Vogel, an East German lawyer, as being in any way part of the exchanges.’ If Vogel was involved, reasoned Mervyn, something must definitely be afoot.

My father fired off terse telegrams to the Foreign Office: ‘Brooke-Kroger Exchange Must Include Soviet Fiancées Bibikova, Ginzburg. Watching Developments Closely. Considering Public Action,’ he wrote to Michael Stewart, who was now serving a second stint as Foreign Secretary. ‘Brooke Negotiations Include Bibikova And Ginzburg, No Other Course Acceptable,’ he telegraphed Sir Thomas Brimelow, Deputy Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office and one of Mervyn’s most hated FO mandarins.

On 18 June he followed up with letters. ‘Dear Brimelow [sic], It has just come to my attention that you may be considering a Brooke-Kroger exchange. Both Derek Deason and I will expect our long-suffering fiancées to be included in it… The disastrous events of 1964 are still fresh in my memory, and it is not my intention to allow the FCO to make more blunders at my expense. A Brooke-Kroger exchange [without the fiancées] would be another collapse on your part… Frankly, we will require an undertaking that any further exchange negotiations will also include our fiancees. Otherwise we shall have no alternative to take every possible step, public and private, to prevent our interests being ignored after so many tearful years. Copies to the Prime Minister and the Director of Intelligence.’

There was a heated row over the proposed exchange in the Cabinet on 20 June 1969. The arguments in favour of getting Brooke out of Russia were strengthened by the testimony of a British sailor, John Weatherby, who had been briefly interned in Russia and had met Brooke in prison and confirmed that his health was deteriorating. Harold Wilson had firmly opposed the swap since it had been first suggested in 1965, but finally allowed himself to be won over. Perhaps he remembered the persistent young Welshman who had buttonholed him in his Moscow hotel room and on the street in London. More likely, he wanted the seemingly endless saga of Brooke to disappear, and the addition of the Soviet brides to the deal would help to sweeten the bad publicity and charges of giving in to blackmail which would surely follow. Citing humanitarian grounds, the Cabinet formally authorized the exchange. Negotiations on the practicalities would be opened with the Soviets forthwith. Finally, the ‘juggernaut of history’ of which Mila had written so bitterly had shifted its course.

As Mervyn returned from New York on 20 July, the American astronaut Neil Armstrong clambered down from the Apollo 11 lander on to the surface of the moon. ‘We are on different planets,’ Mila had written to Mervyn in 1964, in the first days of their separation. ‘For me to fly to you is as hard as to fly to the moon.’ But now someone had flown to the moon – and, just as unexpectedly, it seemed that Mila’s dream of leaving the Soviet Union wasn’t so impossible after all.

Mervyn was summoned to the Foreign Office. Sir Thomas Brimelow was at first reluctant to admit that Mervyn had finally succeeded. My parents’ case had given the most trouble in the negotiations, Brimelow told my father, and the Russians had wanted to exclude it from the agreement. Mervyn’s tireless campaigning had certainly hindered his case, and it was only with the utmost difficulty that the Soviets had been prevailed upon to overcome their distaste for the gadfly Matthews. Nevertheless, they had given their consent, and Mervyn could finally expect a Soviet entry visa as soon as the Krogers were free. Mervyn drove home to Pimlico, not daring to believe the news. He decided to mention nothing to Mila, for fear of raising false hopes.

Brooke arrived back in England four days later. His release was on the front pages of the evening papers, with brief mentions of Mervyn and Mila. The same afternoon Michael Stewart made a statement in the House of Commons. Mervyn got a place in the Diplomatic Gallery; Derek was in the Strangers’ Gallery. Stewart announced that it had been agreed to release the Krogers on 24 October. ‘It has been arranged, as a separate matter, that three British subjects who have for some years been endeavouring without success to marry Soviet citizens will be granted visas to enter the Soviet Union to register their marriages…’ Derek and Mervyn, on different sides of the House, raised a small cheer.

The next day’s Times carried full details. Apart from Derek and Mervyn, a third person, Camilla Grey, an art historian, was to be allowed to marry her fiancé Oleg Prokofiev, son of the composer. Camilla had wanted nothing to do with Mervyn’s campaign. There had been some other, more shadowy, side deals. Bill Houghton and Ethel Gee, two Ministry of Defence employees who had been recruited as KGB agents by Peter and Helen Kroger, were to be paroled early.

Most of the papers were disapproving. ‘The higher a value you put on human life, the more vulnerable you are to inhuman blackmail,’ editorialized the Daily Sketch. ‘There is nothing but contempt and a very great concern for future relations after this example of blackmail, applied to a man who had obviously committed no offence that would be regarded as an offence in a democratic society.’

‘Mr Stewart was asked in the Commons, what is to prevent an innocent British tourist being seized in Moscow to set up a sinister package deal for a Russian spy? Mr. Stewart’s reply: “I think one can say with reasonable confidence that a British citizen who goes to the Soviet Union and carefully observes their laws is not at risk.” This is obviously true at the moment while the Red spies Peter and Helen Kroger are still held in Britain. But once they are freed in October?’

Mervyn, though he had benefited from Wilson’s deal, felt his patriotism stung. Britain had indeed got a terrible bargain.

Now the news was official, my father booked a call to Mila in her Moscow apartment, and just caught her as she was preparing to go on a motoring holiday in northern Russia with friends. He told her the news that the spy exchange had begun, and that they were part of it. Yet the imminent prospect of an end to their epic struggle seemed to give neither of them any great joy.

‘I had not expected exclamations of delight, nor tears of joy, and there were none,’ my father wrote later. ‘We had both gone through too much, and had been disappointed too often.’

There seemed to be a hint of distance, and sadness, in Mila’s voice. Apart from all the bureaucratic obstacles still to be overcome, she would have to face leaving her family, friends and homeland. There seemed little prospect that she would ever be allowed to return to see them. She would soon be irrevocably parted from everything she knew and loved except for Mervyn, who had become an almost mythical being to her.

‘Mervusik, my dear,’ Mila wrote the next day, as the news of Brooke’s release broke in the national papers. ‘Today, the 25th, is your birthday, sincere congratulations, I wish you good health, success at work, personal happiness. And I love you very much. I am in a spin. Victor Louis started looking for me from the morning onwards. I didn’t say anything, but they’ll make things up, anyway. He wanted me to say something for his readers. Perhaps I should have, but I refused. He uttered some banalities about our being brave, heroes, and lucky. Then Lena, who’s on holiday in the Baltic, rang. Valery [Golovitser] and my friend Rima called in. Journalists rang from the Daily Express, but I put them off as well. Friends called and congratulated me, they’re all overwhelmed… I can hardly stand up.’

Mervyn’s mother wrote with congratulations, the phone in the Pimlico flat began to ring incessantly. Reporters began turning up on the doorstep. Des Zwar sent a telegram. A few days later Mervyn received a letter from the Inland Revenue, on which an unknown hand had written, ‘Glad to hear the good news yesterday.’

Derek and Mervyn met at the Albert to plan the details. The Soviet consulate had been unhelpful to the last, saying that their visas would only be issued in October, and then they would be able to see their fiancées and register for a date at the Palace of Weddings. They would then have to leave, the official claimed, and come back to Russia a month later when the statutory waiting period had passed and the ceremony was due. In the event, that turned out not to be true – the gruff vice consul was simply exacting his own little piece of revenge on the young men who had, somehow, beaten the system.

Derek signed a deal with the Daily Express. The paper paid for his air tickets and hotel in exchange for an exclusive interview. My father preferred to pay his own way and avoid publicity now that it was no longer needed. ‘Everyone enjoys being famous, but my own public image, in so far as I had one, was too coloured by misfortune and failure. I appeared to be more of a victim than a hero,’ he wrote in his memoirs. Mervyn also hoped to re-launch his academic career with his book, and maybe even get back into ‘one of [Britain’s] two venerable universities’, something notoriety in the press might damage.

The Krogers were due to leave Heathrow for the Soviet Union at 11.15 a.m. on 28 October 1969. Mervyn heard later that their release had provoked a patriotic demonstration in Parkhurst Prison, the prisoners rhythmically banging their tin plates in protest at the spies’ early release.

Derek and my father went to the Soviet consulate the same morning to collect their visas. The Soviet vice consul put on a broad official smile, told them they’d have to wait, and disappeared. As they sat nervously Mervyn came up with an explanation for the delay – the officials were probably waiting for the Krogers’ plane to leave British airspace.

The consul eventually returned with the familiar blue visas. They were only for ten days, and Derek protested that they were too short. ‘Ten days is enough to get married and divorced,’ said the consul, and laughed.

They arrived at a near-deserted Vnukovo Airport in Moscow well after midnight, and took a taxi into town. They pulled up to the double arch of Mila’s apartment block on Starokonushenny Pereulok. It was bitterly cold, though it was not yet snowing. Mervyn went up the familiar four steps to the ground floor landing and rang the bell. There was no answer. He rang again, and again, with increasing trepidation. He had called Mila from London to tell her that they would be arriving that night. Surely she hadn’t been taken away in some treacherous KGB double-cross?

He decided to try and telephone before jumping to dark conclusions. Leaving Derek in the taxi, he walked to a public phone on the corner of the Arbat. Miraculously, he happened to have a single two-kopeck piece on him, the only coin accepted by Moscow phone boxes. The phone worked, didn’t swallow his coin without connecting, and Mila picked up the phone, a further series of small miracles. She sounded no closer than she had in London. Mervyn recalled the conversation in his memoir.

‘Hello, Mila?’

‘Yes, yes? Mervusya? Is that you?’

‘Is everything all right?’

‘Yes?’

‘Why didn’t you answer the door bell, then?’

‘I didn’t hear it. I was afraid that I wouldn’t sleep, so I took a sleeping tablet.’

‘Oh, my God. A sleeping tablet? Tonight of all nights? Anyway, Derek and I are here, on the Arbat. We’ll be there in two minutes.’

Mila met them at the door, ‘a small figure in a colourful Russian dressing gown, sleepy, but with an expectant look on her face’. They embraced ‘warmly’, my father wrote later, recalling that he felt ‘no great romantic surge, only a deep contentment that we were at last together’.

In the books of my mother’s childhood, or in a play by her beloved Racine or Molière, the story would end here. A great love is thwarted; the lovers fight back against the forces of evil, and finally triumph over adversity. In the final act, the two soulmates are united. The sleeping pill would be a tragicomic flourish before the two lovers, hand in hand, turn to the audience and bow before the final curtain. Did my mother, subconsciously, not want the romance to end? Did she take pills in order not to dream on that, the last night of her old life, the life of innocent passions and of living for an imagined future? Now the future had, at last, arrived, ringing insistently at her door. It was time to open it to a new life.

On the morning of Thursday, 30 October 1969, Mervyn and Mila woke early. It was their second attempt to get married, hopefully to be more joyful than the last. But over breakfast they decided, in an impulse of rebellion, or perhaps resignation, that all the misery of the last five years did not justify their dressing up. So instead of donning his suit Mervyn put on an old tweed jacket and trousers he usually wore in the lecture room. Mila set aside the dress my father had brought from England and wore a workaday skirt and blouse. They took the gold ring which had been bought five years earlier, and found a taxi to take them to the registry office. They had already decided to forgo the usual champagne celebration.

The wedding party met on Griboyedov Street just before ten – Mila, Mervyn, Mila’s niece Nadia, Nadia’s husband Yury, a couple of Mila’s friends, and Derek, Eleonora and Eleonora’s sister. Lenina and Sasha did not come – it would have been too risky for Sasha, given his position at the Ministry of Justice. A large crowd of reporters had also gathered, including Victor Louis. Inside the palace, the formalities went smoothly. Mila and Mervyn handed in their passports, then went into a large red-draped hall with a white bust of Lenin where a portly matron read the Soviet marriage vows. After five years and five months of unremitting efforts, Mervyn finally placed the ring on Mila’s finger.

‘And you are our least attractive bride!’ the woman who stamped their passports told Lyudmila with classic Soviet tartness. Mervyn was ‘glad our gesture of protest had been noticed’. They had a few photos taken in the corridor, inadvertently using the entrance to the gents’ lavatory as a backdrop.

Outside they were bombarded with questions, but none of the party were in the mood to say anything. Mila and Mervyn were tired of all the fuss, Derek and Eleonora had to keep silent because of their deal with the Daily Express. The press followed them down the street as they walked away, and Yury took a swing at one of the photographers and shouted ‘Bastard!’ at them.

In his story the next day in the Evening News, Victor Louis, piqued at having been denied the sugary ending he thought he deserved after covering the story faithfully for so many years, attributed Yury’s remarks to Mervyn. ‘After the ceremony, which was surprisingly short, taking about five minutes, they realized they had been unwise to dismiss the taxi in which they had arrived,’ Louis wrote. ‘While waiting for another, Dr Matthews and his bride were photographed by a newsman. In fact the couple had been doing their best to avoid the press, and tried to hide their faces behind the bride’s bouquet of white chrysanthemums. The bridegroom tried to discourage the photographer with shouts of “Bastard”.’

They next day they were invited to the British embassy for a quick glass of wine and good wishes. They took photos of each other outside the embassy on Sofiskaya Naberezhnaya, opposite the Kremlin. In the photos a fine drizzle is falling, and the sky is a miserable grey, but my father wears an almost childish grin as he poses with my mother, his arms around her shoulders as she buries her hands deep in the pockets of her mackintosh and leans her head against his shoulder.

Mervyn had hoped to stay on a few days after the wedding to work in the library and buy books, but OVIR informed them that they were to be out of Russia as soon as possible. A sour-faced official at OVIR took Mila’s internal passport away and handed her a foreign travel one, all without saying a word to the woman who was turning her back on the Motherland.

The last evening in Moscow was one of the saddest of Mila’s life. Dozens of Mila’s friends came round to her tiny room to say goodbye, sitting on low stools and crowding on the bed as they filed in and out. Valery Golovitser stayed throughout, silent and mournful, brooding on the departure of his closest confidante, taken away by a Britisher he had once befriended. Most of Mila’s friends were delighted. But my mother was frightened, and found the prospect of being wrenched away from her dissident friends achingly sad. ‘I was like an old prisoner who’s been set free,’ she once told me. ‘I didn’t want to leave my cell.’ The crush got too great and Mervyn left for a solitary midnight walk on the Arbat. The street was silent and deserted.

On 3 November Derek and Eleonora left Moscow for London for a triumphant homecoming, courtesy of the Daily Express. Mila and Mervyn, to avoid publicity, took a plane to Vienna. As they walked into the arrivals hall Mervyn felt, with a huge flush of relief, that at last it really was all over. Mila’s eyes widened at the neatly uniformed bag handlers. In Vienna they spent an afternoon and evening’s honeymoon before going on to London the next morning.

At Heathrow, because they had arrived from Vienna not Moscow, there was a small delay as officials sorted out the paperwork. Mila and Mervyn stood briefly on different sides of the barrier. But soon they were on their way, collecting their luggage, pushing their trolley through the arrivals hall along with the other travellers.

Mila and Mervyn had spent more than half a decade living for a future they only half-believed would ever arrive. Now they were finally reunited, it was time to face another challenge – the unheroic one of dealing with the present, and of living with each other as real human beings.

But that was all a beat in the future. Mervyn and Mila, my parents, had won their battle to be together, against the most formidable odds their times could range against them. This was their moment. The moment I imagine when I think of my parents at their best and boldest; two young people contra mundi, their love all-conquering, alone at last and together after all the efforts of the world to keep them apart.