Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War

Epilogue

Mila and Mervyn arrived at Heathrow in a grey London drizzle. They took the bus to Victoria; a taxi would have been too expensive. As they drove down the Westway London struck Mila, she told me, as being ‘very poor, very down-at-heel’. When she saw old women in woollen coats and headscarves she told her new husband that they were ‘just the same as our Russian babushkas’.

Mervyn’s little one-bedroom flat on Belgrave Road in Pimlico was an ascetic place, with a tatty carpet and barely warmed by large brown electric storage heaters, set low to save money. My mother remembers that Mervyn’s single bed was just two foot six inches wide, and covered with thin army surplus blankets. When the newly freed Gerald Brooke called round to ask if there was anything Mila needed, the first thing she thought of was proper woollen blankets. After the overheated apartments of Moscow, Mila found the flat desperately cold. In order to warm up she would go out for brisk walks through the streets of Pimlico. Her abiding memory of that first winter in London was ‘the terrible damp chill which penetrated your bones – much worse than the Russian winter’.

My parents went for walks in St James’s Park, and visited the House of Lords for tea with Lord Brockway, one of the dignitaries whom Mervyn had persuaded to help his campaign. A friend of Mervyn’s took Mila to Harrods, but she was unimpressed. Western plenty didn’t amaze her as it did some Soviet visitors. ‘We had all this in Russia – before the Revolution,’ she joked as she was reverently led into the Food Halls. Mervyn drove her to Swansea, stopping off at Oxford on the way, and introduced Mila to his mother. For all her entreaties to Mervyn to give up his struggle over the years, Lillian embraced Mila warmly.

My mother immediately set to work making my father’s flat as cosy as possible, setting out the old china she’d brought from Russia and putting her books on the shelves. She made a great effort to become the perfect wife of her imagination, preparing dinners from her well-thumbed copy of 1000 Tasty Recipes, the Soviet housewives’ culinary Bible. She tried to make friends with the neighbours, but most of them snubbed her and wouldn’t even greet her in the hallway – whether out of British coldness or because Mila was a citizen of an enemy empire, she never worked out. Often in her first six months, the shock of dislocation would overwhelm her and she would burst into tears. She wept from the cold as she typed translations to earn a bit of money, her tears falling among the typewriter keys. Mervyn was at a loss as to how to comfort her. He chose to let her cry herself out.

‘I can’t say I was completely unhappy,’ my mother recalled. ‘But I think I had spent too much of my life in Moscow for leaving not to be a terrible trauma.’

She missed her friends, and the passion and excitement of the dissident lifestyle – swapping samizdat books, waiting for the next issue of the Novy Mir journal (which had even dared to publish Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962), being part of a devoted group of like-minded people who had become like a family to her. And though she had never been rich, even the small luxuries of Soviet life had always been affordable. But in London, Mervyn’s salary barely covered his own needs, let alone Mila’s. She remembers standing weeping outside a Tube station after she’d spent all her money on little presents for her Moscow friends at a haberdasher’s on Warren Street and didn’t have enough left over for the fare. In a fit of generosity, my father took her to Woolworth’s and bought her a green wool dress for a pound. It was the only item of clothing she bought all ofher first year.

For the first time in her life, Mila felt depressed, unable to summon the unconquerable will which had fuelled her fights ever since her childhood illness. She wrote to her sister in Moscow of her terrible homesickness. My mother didn’t say openly that she wanted to return, but Lenina feared that was only because her headstrong sister couldn’t bear to admit to herself that all her years of struggle had been a mistake. Lenina showed the letter to Sasha, who sat down at the kitchen table to compose a reply. ‘Dearest Mila, there is no way back for you,’ he wrote. ‘You have chosen your fate and you must live with it. Love Mervyn; have children.’

After so much expectation, so much idealization, so much sacrifice and burning, high ideals, could the reality have been anything but a disappointment? What marriage, what life in the fairyland of the West could ever live up to the expectations of six years of longing? I believe that to my parents, the fight had become an end in itself sooner than either of them realized. When victory came neither of them knew how to continue the story. For years Mervyn and Mila had been superhuman creatures to each other, bounding over mountains and valleys, beating on the doors of heaven, confronting the juggernaut of history. But when they finally came together as real, living people, they found themselves having to invent something neither of them had ever known – a happy family. After a life as actors in a great drama they found the hardest thing was simply to become human again.

In the spring of 1970, as she was returning from Brighton on the train after a session teaching Russian, Lyudmila had one of her attacks of melancholy and burst into tears. Unlike in Russia, no fellow passenger came to comfort her or to ask what the matter was. But she looked up out of the window at the green English fields. ‘What a fool I am,’ my mother remembers thinking. ‘I have been crying for six months. This Russian blackness must stop.’ Slowly, Mila began to make a life for herself in London. My father was always shy of company and never had many close friends, but my gregarious mother soon made English friends who loved her warmth and wit, and with whom she could go to the theatre and ballet. They never became the close-knit, comradely surrogate family of my mother’s youthful circle, but being among cultured people helped ease the pain of losing her old Moscow life.

My mother took on more translation work and part-time teaching at Sussex University. An organization called Overseas Publications offered her a job editing samizdat literature in Russian, which offered the opportunity to continue her old dissident enthusiasms. She edited Let History Judge, a meticulous indictment of Stalinism by the dissident historian Roy Medvedev, as well as many other books published by Overseas Publications, copies of which were sent into the Soviet Union via parcel post by a network of Russian émigrés across Europe. Surprisingly, almost all the books would get through, to be avidly circulated and copied in typescript by Mila’s friends in Moscow. The organization’s director told Mila that it was funded by a wealthy American industrialist; in reality it was covered by the CIA’s covert anti-Soviet activities budget, as was Radio Liberty, where my mother also got work as an editor. Radio Liberty even offered her a presenting role, but she refused in case it damaged her chances of one day revisiting her homeland.

Mila was soon earning enough of her own money to subsidize secretly the tiny household budget her husband gave her to buy clothes and books. Though they’d both grown up poor, my mother enjoyed spending money in a way that my father has never been able to. She’d always loved beautiful things, and as soon as she was able she bought old furniture and pictures.

Mila followed Sasha’s advice: by summer 1971 she was pregnant. I was born on 9 December 1971, at Westminster Hospital, which Mila found ‘as luxurious as the Kremlin clinic’. It was a difficult delivery because of my mother’s deformed hip, and I was pulled into the world with calipers. The doctors told her that she had ‘a beautiful baby’ – a remark which impressed her greatly, and which she often repeated to me during my childhood. Soviet doctors usually kept their opinions to themselves. My father scraped together the deposit for a £16,000 Victorian terraced house on Alderney Street, which my mother decorated with paisley patterned orange wallpaper she’d found on sale at Peter Jones. For the first time since very early childhood, Mila was finally part of a proper family of her own.

In the winter of 1978, nine years after she had left, my mother returned to visit the Soviet Union, taking me and my baby sister Emily with her. We stayed at Lenina’s apartment. I remember a constant stream of visitors weeping in the hallway as they embraced my mother, who they never expected to see again. I found everything utterly different from England, from the queues in the bread shops to the vast snow banks and the palatial Metro. I thought I understood exactly what Pushkin meant about the smell of Russia. It was a distinct odour, partly cheap disinfectant, partly (though inexplicably) the smell of a certain Soviet brand of Vitamin C tablet, tangy and artificial. Russian people smelled, too, in a way that English people never did, an overwhelmingly powerful body odour which was not unpleasant, though I felt its carnality was somehow not very decent or respectable.

Though I had travelled a lot as a child to visit my father in various academic postings around the world, in Russia I was for the first time in my life overwhelmed by my own foreignness. Everyone wanted to show me how things were ‘u nas’, or chez nous, and asked me whether English chocolate was as good as Russian Bears Wafers (answer – yes), whether we had champagne or toy soldiers or snow or even (this from a particularly moronic and patriotic boyfriend of my cousin Olga’s) cars as fine as Soviet ones. Even aged seven, I could tell that Soviet cars were rubbish. But despite the vividness of Russia to my imagination, I never, even then, felt that this was anything other than a strange and foreign place.

Nostalgia for a lost homeland is a particularly Russian affliction; at parties given by my mother’s émigré Russian friends, the hostesses tried to recreate a lost world of Russianness in suburban London. The tables groaned with sturgeon and caviar, pickles and vodka, the air was thick with the smoke of Russian papiros cigarettes, and the talk was of recent or planned trips back to the Rodina. But my mother, for all her emotional nature, was never sentimental about the Motherland, and I don’t believe that she ever really missed Russia – at least not after she got over her first, wrenching bout of homesickness soon after her arrival in Britain. Throughout my childhood she was always full of praise for what she saw as the peculiarly English virtues of punctuality, thoroughness and good taste; the only thing which irritated her was English thrift, which she saw as meanness of spirit. One thing she shared with her fellow emigres was a deep contempt for the Soviet regime, as well as a love for the latest cynical political anecdotes from Russia. One of her favourite jokes was about Brezhnev’s mother: the old woman visits her Party boss son in his luxurious seaside villa and nervously admires the pictures, furniture and cars. ‘It’s lovely, son,’ she says. ‘But what will you do if the Reds come back?’

Mila’s example proved infectious. One by one, almost all her friends and relations were to either leave Russia or marry foreigners. In 1979, Lenina’s elder daughter Nadia and her Jewish husband, Yury, who had shouted at the photographers at Mila’s wedding, got leave to emigrate, taking their baby daughter Natasha to Germany. Sasha cried hysterically at the airport and tried to run after his daughter as she went through passport control, hobbling on his artificial leg. ‘I’ll never see you again!’ he shouted.

Six months later, Sasha was summoned by his boss at the Ministry of Justice, who stood at his desk and shouted at Sasha for not having informed his Party organization that he had not only a sister-in-law but a daughter in the West. Sasha collapsed with a massive heart attack right there in the Minister’s office, and died that afternoon in hospital. Nadia was not allowed back from Germany for the funeral, and for ever after blamed herself for her father’s early death.

My mother’s shy balletomane friend Valery Golovitser, who introduced my parents, finally got an exit visa after nine or ten applications. In 1980, along with thousands of Soviet Jews, he took his family to the United States. He soon left his wife Tanya and finally came out as a homosexual, living with his long-time lover Slava in New York and organizing ballet tours by Russian artists.

Valery Shein, Mervyn’s bohemian friend from the Festival, had a wildly successful career in theatre management, became rich and famous, and married a beautiful Russophile Englishwoman in 1987. She was famous among Valery’s friends for having stood for an hour in a queue for bananas and then having bought only one kilogram – a normal Soviet shopper would have bought all they could carry.

Georges Nivat’s fiancée Irina Ivinskaya was let out of the Gulag at the end of 1963. She married a well-known dissident and later emigrated to Paris. Her mother Olga, Pasternak’s Lara, stayed in Moscow, where she died in 1995.

Mila’s niece Olga followed her sister to Germany in 1990 by way of a fictitious marriage with an Englishman, leaving her daughter Masha behind in Moscow to be brought up by her grandmother, my aunt Lenina. When Masha finished school she, too, left, for a cancer operation in Germany, and stayed there, eventually dying of the disease. Lenina was left alone in Moscow, where she died of a heart attack in May 2008.

My father has never lost his wanderlust. Throughout my childhood he would leave for months at a time to take up visiting professorships at Harvard, Stanford, Jerusalem, Ontario, Australia. I doted on the wonderful letters he sent, illustrated with coloured sketches of Australian lizards, pirates and little caricatures of himself in funny situations – falling out of boats, driving a car on the wrong side of the road. And I missed him, terribly, and waited desperately for his letters. Several times I flew alone – as an ‘unaccompanied minor’ complete with a label with my particulars securely fastened to my coat, like Paddington Bear – to join him in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and San Francisco, California. Men alone, we ate pizza in our pyjamas and stayed up late watching Godzilla films on the television. He taught me to sail dinghies on the Charles River basin in Boston.

At home, the situation was less harmonious, though I never for a moment felt anything less than absolutely loved. Rather the contrary: with no epic battle to fight, my mother turned her energies to the people closest to her – her husband and children – and the result was often overpowering. A terraced house in Pimlico was far too small to contain that dynamo of emotional energy. My father’s reaction to the frequent dramas of the household was to retreat into his own private world, stalking away in silence from the dinner table after a minor argument, leaving my mother in tears, and retreating into the fastness of his study. There were times when the tension in the house crackled like frost.

My father began visiting Russia regularly again in December 1988, thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika. He found late Soviet Moscow outwardly the same as the city he had known, but on his first trolleybus ride he noticed no KGB cars, no goons. For the first time, my father felt free on the streets of the city, anonymous at last.

Three years later, and Communism had collapsed in Eastern Europe. I spent the summer vacation of 1991 travelling there with my girlfriend Louise. By coincidence, we arrived in Leningrad on the evening of 19 August 1991 – the eve of the attempted putsch by Party hardliners against Gorbachev which marked the final death-twitch of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. We woke to see the grim televised face of General Samsonov, head of the Leningrad garrison, warning citizens that gatherings of more than three people were illegal. A day later, and I stood on a balcony of the old Winter Palace and saw Palace Square filled with people, a rolling sea of faces and placards. Near St Isaac’s Square we helped students build barricades across the street out of benches and steel rods. The following day, Nevsky Prospect was filled as far as the eye could see in both directions with half a million people protesting against the system which had shaped almost every aspect of their lives for three generations. The slogans on homemade placards carried by the demonstrators were permutations of the words ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. The same day in Moscow, Boris Yeltsin emerged from the White House – the seat of the government of the Russian Federated Socialist Republic – and stood on a tank to address the crowds who had gathered to defend the building against the forces of reaction. It was an iconic moment, and though we in Leningrad didn’t see it because State TV was in the hands of the putschists, it marked the end of seventy-four years of Communist rule. The coup collapsed that evening after an abortive attempt by troops loyal to the KGB to storm the White House.

In a mysterious way vast gatherings of people take on a collective personality of their own, and as I perceived it the animating force of that great St Petersburg crowd was an overwhelming sense of righteousness, a feeling that history was on our side. There was a rather naïvely Soviet sense of the invincibility of reason – that for once life was uncomplicated, we were right, and Communism was wrong. I felt an intense happiness that day. Perhaps, I thought, all the evil of the country, the poison which had tainted Russia, was finally being exorcised by these hundreds of thousands of people who had come out on to the streets to demand the end of a system which had killed millions in the name of a shining future which never arrived. In later years, most of the people who demonstrated on those August days were to be bitterly disappointed by the fruits of democracy. But for many of my parents’ generation – at least for those, like Lenina, who suffered under Stalin – the fall of the Soviet system would always remain something deeply miraculous. An old friend sent a postcard to my mother. ‘Neuzheli dozhili?’ she wrote, in the wonderfully terse Russian phrase which means, ‘Can it be that we have lived to see this day?’

Oddly, my mother seemed rather unmoved by the upheavals of that autumn, which began with the victory for Yeltsin’s democrats and ended in Gorbachev’s resignation on Christmas Day. Russia was, by then, a place of the past for her; with characteristic wilfulness she’d emotionally drawn a line across her old life and become something new. She was pleased, of course, and saw it as a victory for the dissident movement to which she had, in small part, contributed. She says now that she saw the whole collapse of the Soviet Union from her ‘glorious isolation’ in London; she felt no great surge of emotion at the news. But there was one moment, I think, which had resonance for her: the night soon after the coup’s collapse when a roaring crowd gathered outside the old KGB headquarters on Lubyanka Square, shouting for revenge for the KGB’s support of the reactionaries. A steel cable was put around the neck of the sinister, elongated statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky which stood on a plinth in the centre of the square, and a crane wrenched Iron Felix into the air, where he swung above the crowd as though lynched. She’d always believed that Soviet power would collapse in her lifetime, she said, but that was the moment she really believed it had finally happened.

A year later, in 1992, my father pushed open the doors of the Lubyanka on his way to an appointment with the KGB’s newly formed public relations department. Alexei Kondaurov sat in a plush office overlooking the courtyard where prisoners had once been executed. The KGB – or the FSK, as it was known in the early Yeltsin years – were interested in ‘building bridges’ with Western sovietologists, Kondaurov gushed as Mervyn sipped lemon tea. He even asked Mervyn to write an article on how he researched the Soviet Union from abroad for the FSK’s new magazine. My father was more interested in contacting his old would-be controller, Alexei Suntsov. The FSK man made friendly noises, but nothing came of it.

We had more luck in 1998, when I called the press office of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service on my father’s behalf. I chatted to General Yury Kobaladze, their smooth press flack, and took him to an expensive lunch among the expat dealmakers in Moscow’s best French restaurant, Le Gastronome. Kobaladze revealed that Suntsov had died, but that his widow was still alive.

We found Inna Vadimovna Suntsova through Valery Velichko, head of the KGB veterans’ club. In the club’s offices behind Okyabrskaya Metro he was introduced to a plump, seventy-year-old woman with a pleasant face. She and my father shook hands warily. Neither recognized the other, though they had met twice, once in 1959 at the Ararat no, corrected Suntsova, the Budapest, restaurant. They’d also gone in Alexei’s car up to the Lenin Hills to see Moscow by night.

Suntsova rummaged in her bag and brought out a picture of Alexei in uniform, which came as a shock to Mervyn, even though he had known that he was a serving KGB officer.

‘I know that he was bitterly disappointed in you, and complained,’ Inna told my father. ‘’’Matthews, the nasty boy, he let me down, after all I’ve done for him.” When things didn’t work out with you, it definitely had a negative effect on my husband’s position in the service.’

Mervyn didn’t ask who it was that had blocked his marriage. He doubted it was Alexei, and doubted Inna would know. She seemed surprised when Mervyn told her the story of his battle. Inna gave Mervyn a photo, after some hesitation, of Alexei in civilian clothes.

Mervyn’s oldest Russian friend, the KGB man Vadim Popov, had disappeared. Mervyn tried to look him up at the Lenin Library, but apart from his doctoral thesis there were no other publications, and the Institute of Oriental Studies where he had studied had been amalgamated.

My father did, however, find Igor Vail – the graduate student who had been used by the KGB to entrap Mervyn – by the simple expedient of looking in the Moscow phone book. It turned out that Vail had been waiting thirty years to apologize for the red sweater incident. He had been summoned by the Lubyanka on the fateful morning, he told my father, and threatened for two hours. They had been bugging Mervyn’s room, and had recorded compromising things Igor had said when he had visited Mervyn. Igor would be expelled from the university if he did not cooperate in the entrapment; he had had little choice. Mervyn gracefully forgave him. ‘That was a different life, and a different world,’ he told Vail. ‘It’s all behind us now.’

My father and I saw each other in Moscow, off and on, throughout the nineties. The meetings were rarely happy. My father certainly disapproved of my dubiously bohemian lifestyle. I, in turn, regarded him as a dour spoilsport. Anger is always so much less complicated than love, and for large chunks of my adult life I chose, for no reason I can readily identify, to be angry with my father. Angry for imagined (and real) slights during adolescence, angry at his lack of imagination and his refusal to bankroll me while I indulged mine. I think he found me spoiled, and ungrateful. ‘You’ve had so many advantages, Owen,’ he would scold me when I was a child. ‘SO many advantages.’

It was only towards the end of my time in Moscow, after I had worked out much of my aggression at the world in general, that I bothered to begin to try to understand my father, whose life my own had unwittingly followed so closely. After refusing to believe that my parents’ lives had anything to do with mine, I finally acknowledged that the time had come to record those moments when Russia reached into me, as it had into my father. Both of us had found something of ourselves here and that realization brought me a feeling of fellowship with the old man. The feeling was soundless, but it crackled.

My father has spent much of his old age retreating into himself, working hard to cocoon himself behind walls of solitude. It is odd that while my parents were kept apart by politics, by a seemingly unbridgeable ideological divide, some force of will, of magnetism, drew them together and gave them hope and courage through six years of separation. But now, half a lifetime later, the defining momentum of my family is a centrifugal force which has thrown us physically apart. My father spends much of his time these days in the Far East, far from anyone who knows him, travelling in Nepal and China and Thailand, pottering on beaches, living in rented rooms, reading and writing. At home in London, my parents have reached a kind of truce – founded, perhaps, on a realization that suddenly life has passed and the running series of domestic skirmishes they fought with each other could have no victor.

My father and I reached a kind of reconciliation, feeling our way towards each other, after I married Xenia. We moved to Istanbul, where my sons Nikita and Theodore were born, but would come back to spend every winter at Xenia’s family dacha. My father came and stayed at my in-laws’ rambling apartment in the backstreets off the Arbat, just round the corner from Starokonushenny Pereulok. He spent his time wandering around bookshops, amazed that the Dom Knigi on the New Arbat was filled with so much literature, and he could pay with his English credit card. On the street were advertisements for the Russian edition of GQ (the latest edition even carrying a flattering profile of his own war correspondent son) and a booth selling mobile phones.

In the last days of 2002 we drove out to the dacha. There was a hard frost, and the tall pines of Nikolina Gora stood stark against a baby-blue winter sky. In the distance, a line of trees was crisply outlined, deep black against the snowfields. The air was so cold it burned the lungs.

My father and I went for a walk on the frozen Moscow River. I lent him the heavy old overcoat he’d bought in Oxford in the fifties, and I wore a shaggy sheepskin Soviet Army coat. My father was getting visibly elderly, his hip was giving him trouble and he limped and stumbled in the snowdrifts of the riverbank. It was so cold that the thick snow overlying the river’s ice creaked like floorboards under our boots.

‘No great shakes, really,’ said my father, of his life. ‘No great shakes. When I realized I wasn’t getting back into Oxford I gave up. When I look at my achievements, they’re quite modest. Quite modest.’

There was a long silence, the low moan of wind blowing the snow into eddies.

‘But you won. You got mother out of Russia. That was a huge achievement, no?’

He gave a dismissive nod, and a sigh. ‘I thought I would be deliriously happy when I got her out, but I wasn’t. The problems started almost immediately, all kinds of tensions. I thought I’d give it a few months, to see if things got better, and they did, to a certain extent. So I just let things drift, really.’

‘So did you ever think of giving up?’

‘No. I never once thought of it. I’d made up my mind and given her my word, and that was that. Though I never imagined it would go on for so long. After five years we were still at square one. If she’d broken it off I think I would have got over it fairly quickly. There was this Erik… I never knew if anything was going on there, but I thought she might end up with him if things didn’t work out.’

He spoke as if it was not himself he was describing but someone he knew – detached, without pain but with a tinge of professional regret, like a surgeon probing an infirm patient.

‘I was very moved when she told me about what she’d been through, her childhood, the war. Terrible really. It struck me very deeply. She’d had such a miserable life I wanted to give her a decent deal. That was an important part of it. And then there was the physical disability.’

In the distance a snowmobile roared into view, and my father winced as we stood aside and it passed in a cloud of exhaust. Through the trees on the high riverbank we could see the pitched roofs of the dachas of Russia’s new super-rich, Xenia’s new neighbours, built on plots of land worth millions. The old dacha of Andrei Vyshinsky, the Prosecutor-General who had signed my grandfather’s death warrant, had been rebuilt as a faux French chateau. A new world.

‘Who would have thought that things would change so fast. I never, ever imagined that it would happen in my lifetime.’

That evening, in the kitchen of the dacha, my father stirred his tea with the same old perforated spoon which has accompanied him on his travels like a talisman. We had a minor row about my sister, and he stalked upstairs, waving me off with his teacup. Half an hour later he came back, we changed the subject, and spoke some more. As he stood to leave to retire to bed he stopped abruptly and hugged me as I sat at the kitchen table, and kissed me lightly on the head.

One final image. My mother, on the terrace of our garden in Istanbul, with four-year-old Nikita. She is seventy-two years old, and her hip is giving her trouble, and she walks with a stick. But as I watch from my study window, I see that the stick is discarded, and she is cutting off a piece of old rope with a pair of scissors. As Kit looks on in delight, she starts to skip, slower, faster, crossing the rope in front of herself as she counts off skipping rhymes she learned in the playground at Verkhne-Dneprovsk. Kit is delighted, and starts chanting the rhymes himself, waving his arms in the air and running in circles in childish excitement. ‘One-two, one-twa-three, the rabbit peeks out from behind his tree,’ my mother chants, just as she had learned when she was Kit’s age and one of Stalin’s children. Like many Russian children’s rhymes, it’s wonderfully rhythmic, absurd, and violent.