Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War

8. Mervyn

I was always fascinated by my father’s study, on the first floor of the narrow Victorian house in Pimlico where I grew up. It smelled of French cigarettes and Darjeeling tea, and it was filled with the sound of Bach cantatas and Handel operas. Now it seems a small room, but in my mind’s eye it is always enormous, seen from the height of a seven-year-old hovering by my father’s venerable armchair and gazing up at the towering walls of books. The cavalry sword hanging over the mantelpiece and the collection of model steam engines spoke of an unknowable but overpowering masculinity, while the drawers full of telescopes, compasses, family photographs and knick-knacks were a forbidden treasure trove. Even in my mid-teens, as my father and I grew apart, I remained fascinated by his past, which he refused to discuss and the key to which seemed to be inextricably linked to the mystery which was his study.

Once, when I was about sixteen, I found a packet of photographs of my father while illegally rooting though his desk drawers. The images were not of the father I knew, but a surprisingly cool-looking young man in a sharp sixties suit and Malcolm X-style sunglasses. In one photograph he was strolling along a sunlit seaside promenade. Other photos showed him in a heavy overcoat, standing on the ice of a giant lake; browsing among watermelon stalls in a picturesque marketplace in Central Asia; looking relaxed and confident in a seaside restaurant, surrounded by pretty girls. The photos all had when and where they were taken neatly marked on the back in pencil in his careful hand.

I asked my father later that day, perhaps seeking to provoke him with a confession of my brazen invasion of his hallowed desk, what he had been doing in Bukhara and Lake Baikal in 1961. He looked away, smiling thinly – his favourite mannerism – and settled into his chair.

‘Oh,’ he said noncommittally, as he poured himself tea through a strainer. ‘Baikal? The KGB took me there.’

My father was born in July 1932 in a tiny terraced house on Lamb Street in Swansea. He grew up in a world of coal grates and tiny, unheated bedrooms, unused front parlours packed with heavy furniture, strident women and harddrinking men. I visited the street where he grew up a couple of times as a child, always on blowy days when a grey sky spat drizzle and the streets were empty. Swansea, in my mind’s eye, is always suffused with a dirty yellow light, somehow poisoned and gravity laden. The sea wind from the great sweep of Swansea Bay brought the smell of salt and oil. The streets were monochrome, as was the human flesh: heavy, sagging complexions the colour of suet.

South Wales seems a washed-up place now, ugly and unsure of itself, filthy and emphysemic after many lifetimes of toil and smoke. But in my father’s childhood it was very different. Swansea was one of Britain’s busiest coaling ports, and the giant ships which docked there were the arteries of an empire which was still the greatest in the world. My father grew up during the twilight years of a great Victorian port city. Belching steam engines still hauled the colliery cages up and down, and a few handsome old sailing schooners still moored among the great liners and freighters at the docks.

I imagine that I have, at various moments in my life, experienced a few echoes of that vanished world of my father’s childhood. Driving on a foggy evening through a miserable mining town in Slovakia in 1993, when I breathed damp night air suffused with the smell of coal smoke and frying onions. Standing among the endless rusty cranes and cargo ships at the port of Leningrad, leaning into a biting sea wind which came off the Gulf of Finland, bringing the tang of rusting steel and the clang of metal on metal. And there was a week in Chelyabinsk, an industrial city in the southern Urals, in the company of miners, hard-muscled men with moustaches and grimy faces who drank with grim determination, and said little. Their women looked drained, struggling to keep up appearances with a smear of lipstick and a fading perm. These are the images which populate my picture of South Wales during the Depression. A place, I imagine, where everyone’s share of happiness was tiny and precious, to be paid for by a lifetime’s drudgery.

Mervyn’s immediate family were poor but respectable, clinging desperately to the bottom rung of petit-bourgeois life, keeping up appearances. Some time around 1904, my great-grandfather Alfred took his family to the photographer’s for a formal portrait which exactly reflected the family’s strained circumstances. In the daguerreotype, Alfred is every inch the Edwardian paterfamilias, in his stern black suit and gold watch chain; his son William and daughter Ethel are prim, he in an outsize jam-jar collar, she in a high-necked black dress and black stockings. But his wife, Lillian, looks pale and unhealthy, and the heavy chairs and potted aspidistra which frame the stiff group are photographer’s props, grander than anything they had at home. The giant photograph, expensively hand-tinted and framed, presided over Mervyn’s modest young life in the tiny house he shared with his mother and grandmother in the Hafod area of Swansea, like a reminder of the family’s inexorable fall from respectability.

My father’s father, William Alfred Matthews, organized the loading of coal into the holds of ships so that it didn’t shift as the ship rolled. It was called ‘trimming’ the ships, and was, in its modest way, a skilled job. It was filthy work, but at least not quite at the bottom of the working-class social ladder. That place was reserved for the navvies who actually shovelled the coal, stripped to the waist and knee deep in the coal dust.

William Matthews seems to have been a man of no ambition at all. His major interest in life was drinking his wages away at the Working Men’s Club with his old comrades from the trenches. He had been wounded five times in the Great War. But like many of his generation he had nothing to show for it but a strong head for drink, a collection of medals and the respect of his fellows in the Comrades’ Sick Club, a kind of cooperative health-insurance society, from whom in 1932 he received a cheap mantel clock which still ticks in my father’s study, in recognition of his services as Secretary. German mustard gas on the Somme had also fatally weakened his lungs, which he further abused by chain smoking Players’ Navy Cut.

My grandfather was a handsome man. He always wore sharp three-piece suits with his father’s heavy gold watch chain, adorned with a sovereign in a gaudy gold holder. When he died in 1964, one of the few things he left his son were his pocket diaries, in which he’d marked off the days when he’d met his fancy women in Swansea parks.

He neglected his son Mervyn and couldn’t bear to live with his wife Lillian. He took little interest in his son’s schooling and never read a book in his life. Mervyn was always deeply repelled by his father’s philistinism; one reason, perhaps, that he himself became so bookish and studious. From time to time William would assert his paternal authority arbitrarily over a son he certainly sensed was cleverer than himself, refusing to lend Mervyn his precious tools or scoffing at his lack of physical toughness.

The humiliations inflicted by his father echoed through Mervyn’s whole life. In the letters he was to write to his Russian fiancée, Mervyn comes back time and again to his father’s cruelty and selfishness. Their shared experience of neglect in childhood became a powerful bond between Mervyn and Mila.

‘Your joyless, nasty, humiliated childhood, the constant lack of warmth and affection, kindness, respect, all your humiliations, illnesses, tears, I understand them all, to the point of pain,’ wrote Mila to Mervyn in 1965. ‘How I hated your father because he refused to give you his wood plane when you wanted to make yourself something out of wood. What horrible cruelty, what a lack of respect for a person – I suffered the same a thousand times! I so wanted to return those for ever lost minutes and buy you a whole workshop, to give you everything you wanted, to make your life rich and happy.’

Mervyn grew up a rather lonely boy, I think. He liked to spend hours wandering alone through the shunting yards of the great docks and the machine houses of the collieries which ringed the grimy city, admiring the steam engines. On Sundays he would walk to the tops of the vast colliery slag heaps and look down on the ships in the channel, and the Irish Sea beyond, and he would dream, in the manner ascribed to young boys who end up following unusual destinies, of travelling to distant lands.

He spent much of his childhood with his mother Lillian and his crippled grandmother. The family’s life was punctuated by screaming rows between his parents, which either ended in one of his father’s regular walk-outs, or by his mother taking little Mervyn and running away to stay with her mother. Mervyn’s mother was an emotional woman, prone to hysterics. Her son was the focus of her hopes, and she lived entirely for him – and Mervyn was to devote much energy to getting as far away from his mother’s intense, controlling love as possible. In later years, Mervyn frequently complained to Mila that his mother, addicted to hyperbole, would accuse him of ‘killing your old mother with your thoughtlessness’.

Lillian’s emotional volatility is hardly surprising. Her life had been permanently scarred at the age of nineteen when she became pregnant by a married man, a local solicitor who refused to recognize the child. In the stern, Methodist world of South Wales, a child born out of wedlock was a stain for life. When William Matthews married her she was a fallen woman, a fact which coloured their relationship for ever. My father was brought up believing that his half-brother Jack was his uncle, and only learned the truth in his late teens.

The coming of the Second World War provided a deeply thrilling interlude in Mervyn’s boyhood. His stories of the war filled my own childhood – the drone of bombers on moonless nights, the sight of the docks and railway lines bombed. At the war’s outbreak, along with his schoolmates, Mervyn was hastily evacuated to the flower-filled meadows of Gwendraeth on the Gower Peninsula, clutching a small cardboard suitcase with his name and address carefully pencilled on to it. But most of the children soon returned from evacuation after their mothers decided the dangers had been exaggerated.

They were wrong. Mervyn was in Swansea during the heaviest bombing raids of 1941. He remembers the great thundering of the bombs slamming into the town, and the excitement of scurrying to the air raid shelter at the bottom of the garden with candles and an old brass miner’s lamp.

Just before one of the worst air raids, Mervyn’s mother took the boy to spend the night at his grandparents’ house. There was no particular reason for her decision; she had simply been seized by a powerful desire to get out of her house. As Mervyn and his mother crested the hill to Lamb Street the next morning, walking hand in hand, they found that their house had been completely demolished by a direct hit from a German bomb. Half the street had disintegrated into a pile of smoking bricks, and many of their neighbours had been buried alive in their Anderson shelters. Mervyn was horrified, and, as any little boy would be, profoundly impressed.

Every father, I think, re-visits his own boyhood when he plays with his son. And by the same token, every small boy shares his father’s passions, until puberty interposes the desire to break free. The landscape of my own childhood in London was populated by mementoes of my father’s youth. More so, I think, than my schoolfellows, I had a very 1930s childhood. One of the first books I remember reading was my father’s copy of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, produced for the 1937 Disney film and illustrated with three-dimensional pictures you viewed through a pair of cardboard spectacles with red and green celluloid lenses. Later I loved his old Boys’ Own annuals and thick adventure books filled with biplanes and menacing fuzzy-wuzzies. On the morning of my eighth Christmas I discovered a great hessian-covered suitcase standing in my bedroom. It contained a wonderful a-gauge Hornby electric train set, with a magnificent green locomotive called the Caerphilly Castle. It had been one of the few gifts my grandfather had given to my father, for the Christmas of 1939. Another year my father gave me his boyhood Meccano set, in a special wooden box with drawers and compartments for the bolts and girders and accompanied by wonderfully illustrated instruction books featuring boys in shorts and long socks. I would spend hours, alone, sitting on the floor of my attic bedroom constructing elaborate gantry cranes, armoured trains and suspension bridges for the Caerphilly Castle to cross over.

Sometimes my father would set his collection of model steam engines spluttering into life, powered by a little boiler fired with a methylated spirit lamp. I loved the smell of hot engine oil and steam. At weekends we’d drive to the East End to see the Thames barges at St Katharine’s dock, or we’d go scavenging for bits of clay pipes and old bottles on the mud flats of the Thames at low tide. When I grew a little older, we’d go for long walks every evening through Pimlico. We’d ignore the neat white Thomas Cubitt facades of the main streets and turn instead down Turpentine Lane, a short cut which led us down to the great, sluggish Thames opposite Battersea Power Station. Of all the streets I’ve seen in London, Turpentine Lane, with its smoke-blackened brickwork and tiny backyards, looks the most like a South Wales backstreet.

We made model sailing boats together, not from kits but carved out of giant blocks of wood we’d scavenge from skips. We made the spars, sails and tackle with a little vice, a Stanley knife and an old pair of pliers. With special pride, he gave me a lovely wood plane with which I fashioned a large and beautiful Thames barge.

The turning point of my father’s boyhood came when he broke his pelvis falling off a bicycle, aged fifteen. The break revealed that Mervyn had been suffering from a rare, wasting bone condition. To heal the pelvis and his brittle right hip, doctors prescribed a course of traction. Mervyn was strapped into a special bed and his legs were encased in plaster and weights attached to them. For hours at a time he couldn’t move, or see anything but the hospital ceiling.

In all, Mervyn was hospitalized for over a year, most of it in agonizing traction. Like his future wife Lyudmila, also in hospital with a crippled right leg at exactly the same time, Mervyn had no choice but to devour books, and to think. It seems that the intense boredom of forced immobility at a formative age sowed a lifetime’s restlessness in both of them. Their bodies were immobilized, but their young minds wandered far. My father’s deep need to travel and appetite for quixotic adventures, his contempt for authority and his penchant for taking risks was born, I believe, at this time along with a certain talent for self-pity and unhappiness.

‘It seems to me that my childhood mirrored your childhood, my universities were the same as your universities, my thoughts, your thoughts, your doubts and fears matched my doubts and fears,’ Mila wrote to him in 1964. ‘A certain physical defect and a mental superiority over your peers (remember how you wanted to excel at sport but were the first in your class instead?) – everything was similar in our lives, identical, even our illnesses.’

It was soon after his time in hospital that Mervyn developed an interest in Russian. For a young boy from the Valleys who had never travelled further than Bristol, the enthusiasm was eccentric, to say the least. Now, when I ask him to talk about the decision which was to shape his life, he can think of no other reason than that Russian was the ‘most exotic possible thing I could think of’. Russian was the language of a universe utterly unrelated to the reality of his life in the Hafod.

It is hard, now, to strip away the Cold War associations and envisage just what Russia meant for an impressionable schoolboy in 1948. In the United States, the House Un-American Activities Committee had just launched its investigation into Communist infiltration in Hollywood, searching for metaphorical Reds under the beds. But in Britain, attitudes were more equivocal, especially in a working-class city like Swansea where Trade Unionism and Socialism went hand in hand. Just a few miles away from Swansea in the collieries of the Rhondda Valley, Harry Pollitt, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, had recently narrowly failed to get elected to parliament. There were plenty of Communists in William Matthews’ Comrade’s Sick Club who had yet to get the message that Uncle Joe Stalin, an ally just a few years before, was now on the other side.

But, as the ousted Prime Minister Winston Churchill had recently observed in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, an ‘iron curtain’ had descended across Europe. The Soviet Union was rapidly transforming, in the eyes of its former allies, into a dark and threatening place. And when the atomic scientist Igor Kurchatov detonated Russia’s first atomic bomb on 29 August 1949 at Semipalatinsk – the Godforsaken piece of Kazakh steppe where Martha Bibikova had been imprisoned in 1938 the Soviet Union became a very real and immediate enemy. The culture and country with which young Mervyn was becoming fascinated was, in every sense, alien.

By the time I was growing up, Communism and Russia were synonymous with menace. The only voice of dissent was a lumbering elderly neighbour called Vicky, who was the first person outside my family whom I had ever heard speak well of Russia. She lived round the corner in a council flat, had a beard and didn’t wash very often (though I noticed her bitter smell was quite different from the hormonal, foody smells of Russian old ladies). Vicky would sometimes walk me to school and back, and on the way tell me riveting tales about ‘milk bottle bombs’ – incendiary bombs shaped like old-fashioned broad-necked milk bottles – which fell on London during the war. She’d also tell me how her father was in an Allied convoy taking American supplies to Murmansk which was torpedoed by a U-boat. He had been a stoker, and I was fascinated to learn that he was first scalded by the boiling water from the bursting boilers, then frozen as he drifted in the sea. I was convinced the two would cancel each other out, leaving warm bathwater.

‘Them Reds,’ said Vicky in her high-pitched cockney voice, ‘was very good to me Daddy. I won’t hear a word against them.’

My own school contemporaries had other ideas. The realization that Russians were enemies, Reds, Communists, dawned on some of my fellows, and spread through that strange psychic osmosis by which childhood cruelties multiply. When I was about seven, someone at school accused me of being a ‘Red’, and demanded to know when we would pull all tanks out of Afghanistan. When I protested that I wasn’t, I was called a liar and, worse, a sneaky liar because of the vehemence of my denials. The crowd of boys, canny as a pack of bloodhounds, caught the scent of my desperation, and sensed something was amiss – did I really have something to hide? If I was so upset, I must be a Red, and that must be very bad. A fight ensued, and I ran home with a black eye. For nearly three years afterwards, I refused to speak Russian at home.

In 1950, after passing his Russian A-level, Mervyn was accepted by the fledgling Russian faculty of Manchester University. He was overjoyed finally to get away from the Hafod, and away from his mother. Among the thick fogs and flat vowels of Manchester he applied himself to the study of Russian, of which he achieved an impressive mastery. By the end of his Finals he had struggled through all 1,200 pages of War and Peace in the original, a spectacular feat of masochism which he would often mention in relation to my own, more faltering efforts to master written Russian.

My father graduated from Manchester with a solid First and his tutors recommended that he go to Oxford for a postgraduate degree. St Catherine’s, the university’s newest college, would be the place for a bright young chap from South Wales who had intellectual spark but not much social polish, they thought, entirely correctly. St Catherine’s was an energetic institution, though not yet installed in its current modernist campus, which Mervyn, a conservative in architecture as in so much else, strongly disliked. When he turned up to his first out-of-college tutorial at New College, his new tutor asked politely if English was the young Welshman’s first language.

Despite such hitches, Mervyn thrived, worked hard and avoided the beer-drinking social life of the college. After two years at Catz he was offered a junior research fellowship at St Antony’s, a far more prestigious college which was home to the best British experts on the Soviet Union. It was the crucial first step to becoming a tenured don. To all intents and purposes, Mervyn, purely by dint of hard work, was on the verge of becoming a made man in the fast-growing profession of sovietology, one of the many bright young fellows then speculating on the strange machinations of the Red empire rising in the east.

But peering at the strange land from a distance was not enough. In 1957, the opportunity to visit Russia, unimaginable for anyone but accredited diplomats or the occasional journalist for the previous two decades, suddenly arose. Khrushchev had ordained a great Festival of Students and Youth in Moscow, with young guests from all over the great community of socialist nations (which Battista-controlled Cuba had yet to join) and also, stunningly, from among the ‘progressive elements’ of degenerate capitalist countries too. Mervyn signed up. Much to his surprise, he was granted that rarest of official favours, a Soviet visa.

The festival was a carefully scripted and tightly controlled affair, but to Mervyn and the six hundred Western students who attended it was an intoxicating immersion in the world they had studied for so long. Mervyn was so thrilled he barely slept, even though he found himself instinctively disliking the communal sing-songs and flag-brandishing parades through stadiums full of cheering young Communists. Muscovites were no less intoxicated. Young Westerners were as exotic as mythical beasts, all the more so because for the past two decades any contact with foreigners had been easy grounds for a spell in the Gulag. Some of the African comrades present took fuller advantage of the opportunities for fraternization than the authorities had anticipated, fathering a whole generation of mixed-race babies for ever known as Children of the Festival.

Mervyn fell in with a couple of bold spirits who had taken advantage of the atmosphere of licence the festival had created to chat to foreigners. One was a devilishly handsome young Jewish theatre student called Valery Shein, who wore jaunty caps and striped shirts, and his quieter cousin Valery Golovitser, an intense balletomane a couple of years Shein’s junior. The three young men walked down Gogolevsky Boulevard, locked in intense and earnest conversation about their respective lives. When Mervyn’s all-too-brief week in Moscow ended, they swapped addresses. It seemed unlikely, to all concerned, that the miracle of the festival would ever repeat itself, or that Mervyn would ever be allowed back. The prospect of the two Valerys ever having the opportunity to visit Britain was so remote as to be laughable. In a sense, they were right. Moscow was not open to a mass influx of foreigners again until the 1980 Olympics.

But the following year, 1958, Mervyn heard of a job opportunity in Moscow. True, it was in the British embassy, and he would have to live the hermetic life of a diplomat, sealed off from the real Russian life that he had tasted during the festival. But the job, a humble one in the research department, would at least get him to Russia.

The post was applied for, arrangements were made for a sabbatical from St Antony’s, and in due course a formal letter of acceptance on Foreign Office notepaper arrived in Mervyn’s college pigeon-hole. He bought an extremely heavy dark blue overcoat in the Oxford Co-op in anticipation of the hard Moscow winters, which I still wear to this day. And some time in late summer Mervyn took a can of black oil paint and sat down to mark his handsome new steamer trunk with the neatly printed words ‘W.H.M. Matthews, St Antony’s College, Oxford, АНГЛИЯ’, the last word in bold Cyrillic letters, leaving no doubt as to the trunk’s destination.

People, detached from their homes and set loose in the world, drift till they find the places that fit them. By the end of my first week in Moscow in April 1995, I knew that I had found my place in the city’s rampant, filthy raucousness. I thought: either this is the real world, or there is no real world.

The Russia I knew had caught a viral dose of the century’s chaos. It was long in incubating, but suddenly, almost without warning, the whole rotten edifice collapsed under the weight of its own hypocrisy and dysfunction. For Russians the shock of the implosion of the system which had sustained their every physical, spiritual and intellectual need was far more profound than anything the Soviet system had ever thrown at them even the Purges, even the Second World War. Both those horrors, at least, had easy-to-understand narratives. But now they were hit by something entirely inexplicable – not an enemy, but a vacuum. They had nothing but their Russianness to fall back on, the intense experience of being Russian which pulled them together like straggling soldiers in a blizzard.

People reacted in different ways. Blinking like earthquake survivors, some quickly found their new God in money, sex, drugs, nationalist fantasies, mysticism, charismatic religious sects. Others rediscovered the stern and ancient Orthodox God of All the Russias. Some, possessed by aimless frenzy, thrived on looting trinkets and scraps from the ruins. Others, who would soon become the country’s new masters, ignored the scraps and went for the treasures.

And yet, with so many jeopardies inwardly stalking them, most Russians still lived their outward lives on spec, on spiritual credit. In other countries a trauma of this magnitude has ripped society apart and plunged it into decades of soulsearching. But in Russia the twin forces of fatalism and apathy meant that the country reacted with little more than a collective, resigned shrug and slogged on with the painful business of staying alive.

I came to Moscow desperate. After graduating from Oxford, I had spent two years of hapless wandering in the generation expat hinterlands of Prague and Budapest, drinking strong coffee by day and cadging pints of beer from American girls by night. I was trying, though not very hard, to write, which brought me eventually to besieged Sarajevo on a freelance reporting trip with a borrowed flak jacket and a rucksack full of blank notebooks. I found the thrill I had been seeking by riding UN armoured personnel carriers past piles of shattered concrete and the beautiful, boyish debris of my first war. I walked down unlit streets filled with people strolling on a summer’s night like the damned in a Gustave Doré engraving. I read The Brothers Karamazov during a bout of shelling, imagining myself in communion with the darkest forces of the world. But then I saw a child shot dead by a sniper as he ran across a road, picked up off his feet by the impact of the bullet and thrown down lifeless like laundry tossed from a basket, and felt a surge of revulsion at my own voyeurism. On my return to Budapest I decided I could no longer face the Bohemian folly of café society, and began to seek something bleaker and more hard-bitten.

A few months later I found myself standing on the rainwashed pavement outside a McDonald’s in downtown Belgrade counting change for a hamburger and chips. I was unsuccessfully stalking a man called Željko Ražnjatović, aka Arkan, one of the most notorious warlords of the Bosnian war, who had retired from his career of marauding into a soap-star lifestyle of unrestrained kitsch, football fanaticism and mafia violence which I thought would make a good magazine piece. I stalked him at the Red Star Belgrade football matches, I stalked him at his home and his office, I visited his former pet tiger cub mascot, now grown huge and morose in a cage in Belgrade Zoo. Good material it may have been, but I was finally out of money, and there was no sign that Arkan was willing to talk to me.

I called my mother in London from the Belgrade Press Club (whence I discovered one could make international calls for free). She told me that a local English-language paper in Moscow, to which she had encouraged me to apply during one of my periodic bouts of jobless idling in London, had offered me a post as a staff reporter. It was time to get a job. Time to go to Russia.

I had visited Moscow several times before: as a small child with my mother, and later as a teenager with my father when he was allowed back into the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. I’d never liked it much. I always hated the lack of privacy in my aunt Lenina’s two-room apartment and I was constantly irritated by the stream of self-righteous advice and correction which Russian old women consider their right to mete out to youngsters. I found the hospitality overwhelming, and the effusiveness of everyone I met embarrassing. Elderly friends of my aunt’s were recruited to troop me round museums and theatres, and their teenage grandchildren tasked with taking me to dilapidated Soviet amusement parks and to listen to street singers on the Arbat. I was shy and fogeyish, and found my young companions’ open adoration for all things Western uncomfortable – all the more so because I hated pop music and discos, which seemed to be their idea of nirvana. Above all I found the place impossibly claustrophobic, not least because my Western clothes made me the object of unabashed stares wherever I went – or so it seemed to my selfconscious sixteen-year-old self.

In the summer of 1990, after finishing school, I was finally allowed to go to Moscow alone. I found a summer job as a translator at the British embassy thanks to former students of my mother’s who worked there. Like my father four decades before, I found myself employed in an office in the former stable block behind the old Kharitonenko mansion, ferrying piles of visa application forms and occasionally being trotted out to pose as the vice-consul whenever angry visa applicants demanded to speak to a real, live Englishman. I was eighteen years old. I learned croquet from the sons of the chargé d’affaires on the immaculate lawn of their residence just off the old Arbat, and hired an official black Volga sedan to pick me up at my aunt’s apartment and transport me to work in the mornings.

Moscow had changed almost unrecognizably since I had last visited; there was a palpable sense that the old order, which had once seemed so permanent, was disintegrating. Traffic police seemed powerless to stop motorists from executing illegal U-turns; everyone roundly ignored the official prohibition on using private cars as taxis. The black-market exchange rate was ten times the official one, making me rich overnight. True, there wasn’t much to buy, but I did clean out the Melodiya record shop on the new Arbat of every classical disc they had for a total of twenty pounds, and staggered home with parcels of art books bought for pennies at the Tretyakov gallery shop. The newly opened McDonald’s on Pushkin Square, the first in the Soviet Union, had sent the embassy some vouchers for free Big Macs, so one lunchtime some British colleagues and I commandeered the ambassador’s Rolls-Royce and trundled over to get some lunch. The line of Russians waiting patiently for their first taste of the West snaked down the street. Stepping out of the Rolls we marched straight in, waving our vouchers and our foreignness as selfevident marks of privilege. I’m not proud of it now, but Moscow made me feel, for the first time in my life, flushed with cash, cool and ineffably superior.

Everything about Moscow still seemed dilapidated and terminally shoddy: people’s clothes and shoes were shoddy; so were the cars and the electrical goods and the bus tickets and the buses. But there was a new hope for the future in anyone who was young and intelligent. Friends took me to a history lecture by Yury Afanasiyev, my mother’s old classmate, who spoke about Stalinism for two hours to a huge hall packed to bursting. The fact that he was addressing a taboo subject so openly seemed intoxicating. The audience wrote questions on slips of paper and passed them to the speaker in a constant stream after the lecture, in approved Soviet style, and the meeting broke up only when someone came to warn them that it was nearly time for the last bus. There was a hunger for truth among these people which impressed me profoundly supported by a powerful faith that somehow the truth would make them free. I found my new Soviet friends sentimental and naïve, but there was no mistaking their earnestness, and their conviction that, as Solzhenitsyn had exhorted, they should not live by lies any longer.

Five years later I passed once again through the mirror into Russia via the infinitely depressing half-gloom of Sheremetyevo Airport – this time not as a visitor but to start a new life. The old smell of Soviet detergent and mouldy heating was still there, remembered from childhood trips. But much else had changed. Instead of empty, echoing corridors and stern-faced border guards, I found myself in the middle of a throng of hustling taxi-drivers. Garish hoardings advertised imported beer and More cigarettes. Beefy female shuttle traders pushed past me, hauling massive bags full of coats and boots bought on shopping sprees in Dubai and Istanbul. I was picked out from the serum by Viktor, a Moscow Times driver, who bundled me into his ageing Lada and steered it through the weaving traffic of Leningradsky Prospekt.

The overcast sky was the colour of smoke, and the watery late-winter light washed the city in pale grey. On either side of the road lines of apartment blocks marched out towards a horizon of billowing chimneys and haze. Heavy-set buses trundled along, cowlings flapping, belching black exhaust. At the edges of the road huddles of pedestrians waited to cross the Prospekt’s forbidding sixteen lanes. Even as we approached the centre of the city, there was still something of the steppe in these great windblown spaces.

It must have been very different when my father first arrived in Russia. The city’s soul was swelling with victory and pride, not deflating in exhaustion. The Moscow he knew was spick and span, the carefully planned capital of an expanding empire. It was a controlled, oppressive place, not the teeming mayhem into which it was to descend after the Soviet Union collapsed. And emotionally, for my father, the distance was greater. For a generation unused to travel, Russia might as well have been on a different planet. But Mervyn could not have been happier. He had finally loosed himself from his home and was drifting towards a place which would fit him.

The time and city were pregnant with pitfalls for a young man in love with Russia and blessed, or cursed, with a strong wayward streak. The Cold War was approaching its height. Soviet tanks had recently crushed the Hungarian Rising and there was no doubt in the minds of many in the West that it was the ambition of Socialism to conquer the earth. It was a time when the world was cleanly divided according to moral absolutes, when the opposing teams wore different coloured jerseys and the nuclear handicaps were listed on the programme.

It’s hard, now, to imagine the thrill and the mystery of living in the secretive capital of a parallel, hostile world. The Moscow my father knew is separated from the Russia in which I lived not just by half a lifetime but by a seismic shift of history. My father’s generation was defined by a bitter ideological divide which ran across the world, and he, for reasons that I only began to understand when I went to live in Russia myself thirty years later, did everything in his power to live on the other side of that divide. To the embassy cold warriors with whom he worked, if not to Mervyn himself, Moscow was the heart of all the darkness in the world.

There is a photograph of my father I had never seen until he handed me a copy of his memoirs, without comment, on the stairs of our London house late in 1999, before turning away with an embarrassed smile and retreating back into his study. It is a photograph of a surprisingly handsome young man, his tie and collar slightly askew, looking dreamily and slightly selfconsciously over the photographer’s shoulder as he stands on the balcony of the diplomatic block of flats on Sadovaya Samotechnaya Street – known to its inmates then, as now, as ‘Sad-Sam’ – some time in the early autumn of 1958. He is staring into the middle distance over the Garden Ring – not yet a choking artery of solid traffic – and he seems a serious fellow, eager to please, a little unsure of himself. The photo was taken shortly after he arrived in Moscow. He was twentyseven years old, had a promising academic career ahead of him, and was delighted to be in the Soviet Union. The great adventure of his life was beginning.

Mervyn’s life was comfortable – or, by Soviet standards, positively luxurious. He shared the three-room apartment at Sad-Sam with another young embassy staffer, Robert Longmire. The power plugs and appliances were imported from England, and the telephone was marked ‘Speech on this line is NOT SECURE’. They had a lackadaisical cleaning lady called Lena and a Siberian cat called Shura, and stocked up on home comforts like whisky and digestive biscuits at the embassy’s little commissariat shop. The dinner suit Mervyn had bought when he went up to Oxford was in constant use for diplomatic cocktail parties, which he found insufferably dreary.

My father may have been physically in Moscow, but he quickly found that he and his fellow foreigners were forced to live separate lives from the Russians who surrounded them. His foreign accent and clothes would raise frank alarm and wonder among shop cashiers and tram passengers. Contacting his old friends from the festival was unthinkably dangerous, not for Mervyn but for them. His every move was monitored by gangs of KGB plain-clothes officers – dubbed ‘goons’ by the young diplomats, after the thugs of contemporary American gangster films – who trailed him on his nocturnal wanderings around the Boulevard ring. Mervyn invented games to play with his minders. One of his favourites was to break into a run on a crowded street, and glance backwards to see who also started running. On the Metro, Mervyn, in a flippant mood, once went up to a KGB watcher he recognized and said, ‘How many summers, how many winters?’, the standard greeting for those one has not seen for a long time. The man remained absolutely expressionless and said nothing. The KGB, to Mervyn, was no more than a slightly menacing prop in his young man’s world of adventure.

Luckily for Mervyn’s sanity, a saviour soon appeared in the diminutive form of Vadim Popov. Popov was a junior official from the Ministry of Education, who became my father’s first real Russian mend. They met when Mervyn visited the ministry to begin his official duties, which consisted of compiling a paper on the Soviet university system. Vadim was slightly older than Mervyn, strong and squat with a square Slavic face. He was a drinker, and fancied himself as a ladies’ man, and at times could be bluff and even abrasive. But Mervyn found himself warming quickly to his new comrade’s rough charm.

Vadim appointed himself Mervyn’s guide to what my father fondly imagined was the ‘real’ Russia – a Russia of smoky restaurants, animated conversations and body-odorous embraces. Over months, and in gradual degrees, Vadim drew Mervyn out of his shyness, and led him into a glamorous world of flirtatious women and sentimental, vodka-induced confidences.

Though Mervyn reported his first, official meeting with Vadim to discuss Soviet higher education policy, he did not, as embassy regulations required, report the many drunken dinners which followed. He didn’t dare. If some fool in Chancery found out they would probably have banned Mervyn from seeing his one Russian chum, his sole window on to a Moscow his embassy colleagues never saw.

By day, Mervyn toiled in the high-ceilinged, bourgeois splendour of the embassy, housed in the former Kharitonenko mansion, a hideous miniature stately home situated directly across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. By night he would spend hours chatting with his flatmate over cups of Ovaltine, or giving his KGB goons a good night-time exercise as he wandered up and down Tsvetnoi Boulevard and Petrovka Street. On the blessed evenings that Vadim invited him out, he would sneak away from Sad-Sam to a forbidden but fascinating night of bad food, terrible music and real, true-to-life Russians on raucous Gypsy restaurant-barges on the Moscow River. He was as happy as he’d ever been.

Winter in Moscow comes down like a hammer, crushing out light and colour, beating the life out of the city. It closes overhead like a pair of musty wings, enveloping Moscow in a cocoon, cutting it off from the world. The city begins to look like a black-and-white dreamscape, disorientating and subtly disquieting. On the streets streams of huddled figures hurry through pools of dirty yellow light before disappearing into doorways or the Metro. Everything becomes monochrome, the people in black leather and black fur, the city swathed in black shadows. In the underpasses or in shops, the only places one sees people in bright light, faces are pale and strained and everything is pervaded with the wet-dog smell of damp wool. The skies are dirty grey, low and oppressive.

Every winter I spent in Moscow I had a sense that the world was closing in on itself, shrinking into a state of siege behind double-glazed windows, taking shelter in the fug of state- provided steam heating, and that we were powerless in the face of this overwhelming force of nature, fragile, unable to do anything but accept our lot.

As the first frosts of December 1958 began to bite, Mervyn’s dinners with Vadim were becoming more regular. They would arrange the date and time of meetings before they parted; both, for unspoken but obvious reasons, preferred not to call each other on the telephone.

One evening, Mervyn set out for Manezh Square by trolleybus, expecting to go to Aragvi, one of their favourite Georgian restaurants, or perhaps the National Hotel. But to his surprise, and slight alarm, he saw Vadim standing near the trolleybus stop next to a purring official ZiL limousine. Vadim greeted him warmly, and explained offhandedly that the car belonged to his uncle, who’d loaned it for the night to take them to his dacha, where dinner was waiting. Vadim held the door open expectantly. Mervyn wavered, turning over the possible consequences of breaking the rules imposed by the Soviet government banning foreigners from making unauthorized trips beyond the city limits. Then he climbed into the ZiL and drove with Vadim to the dacha, far beyond the city’s edge and deep into the wintry countryside, and into a new stage of his life, strange and dangerous.

The dinner was excellent. Mervyn and Vadim ate caviar, herrings, vodka, smoked sturgeon and steaming boiled potatoes served by an elderly cook. They sat by the dacha’s log fire discussing women, and drunkenly attempted to play billiards. The cutlery was of heavy Victorian silver, the fireside armchairs were overstuffed and of pre-revolutionary vintage. A friend of Vadim’s was there, a fat and jovial gynaecologist who cracked jokes about his research work, which consisted of inflating the wombs of female rabbits. Vadim reminisced about his latest conquests. Politics were not mentioned. Mervyn relaxed, fuzzy with the vodka, for which he always had a weak head. When he praised the house, with its vast dark oil paintings and sweeping staircase, Vadim muttered casually that his uncle was quite the bolshaya shishka, literally, the ‘big pine cone’, slang for big boss.

At one in the morning the cook came up to tell them that their ZiL was waiting. They drove to Moscow in silence, sated, drunk and happy. Back on familiar territory as the huge car eased around the turn on to the Garden Ring at Mayakovsky Square, a rational thought struggled through the vodka haze. Mervyn ordered the driver to stop a couple of hundred yards short of Sad-Sam. He got out in a flurry of thanks and goodbyes, and walked the rest of the distance home. A young British diplomat arriving outside a foreigners’ compound in a Soviet official limousine in the small hours of the morning might have been misunderstood if any of his cocoa-sipping colleagues had happened to notice. This would be my father’s little secret, a secret life with the Russian friends he had discovered which no one at the embassy could take away from him.

My first Moscow apartment was a dingy little place just round the corner from Sad-Sam; from my windows I could see the same intersection, clad in a pall of grey exhaust. In the evenings I would walk down Tsvetnoi Boulevard, alone. No goons followed me.

My place of work in Moscow was on Ulitsa Pravdy, literally the Street of Truth. Every morning I would hail a passing car, briefly haggle with the driver over the two-dollar fare and be driven to work. Some days polished black government Audis with tinted windows would stop for me, sometimes ambulances and, on one occasion, an army truck full of soldiers. In any case, whatever the vehicle, I trundled or bounced past Sadovaya-Samotechnaya, turning north up Leningradsky Prospekt. The old Pravda building, where the Moscow Times leased half a floor, was a grimy constructivist hulk crouching among backstreets lined with sagging warehouses. I would be at work within fifteen minutes and would run up the stairs to the cavernous newsroom.

The paper was run by bright young expatriates, mostly Americans. It was owned by a diminutive Dutch former Maoist who also published the Russian editions of Cosmopolitan and Playboy. Most of my new colleagues were welleducated Russian majors, all bright, friendly and enthusiastic. My own brief at the paper was a simple one. While my more serious-minded colleagues toiled over Kremlin intrigues and the state of the economy, I was cut loose with an open brief to hunt and gather quirky feature stories in the human jungles of the city. It was, for someone of twenty-four, with exactly two years of rather diffident journalistic experience under his belt, a small, but remarkable, professional miracle. Quite unexpectedly, I found that I had the whole screaming, teeming, outrageous, lurid underside of Moscow more or less to myself.

Moscow in the mid-I 990s was vulgar, venal and violent. It was manic, obscene, uproarious and Mammon-obsessed. But above all, I found almost everything about it hilariously, savagely funny. Everything, from the way thuggish New Russians would leave the ‘IN Protected’ stickers on their sunglasses to their habit of stealing oil companies from each other, the way they placed TNT under cars and staged shoot-outs in public places, was comic. By the time you had soaked up enough of the country’s penetrating cynicism, even the tragedy was, on some level, darkly amusing. Soldiers blew themselves up hammering open the warheads of surface-to-air missiles, trying to steal gold circuit boards. Ambulance drivers spent their working day moonlighting as taxis. Policemen ran prostitution rackets and delivered the girls to their clients in squad cars.

Russia’s president cavorted on a band stage in Berlin drunkenly conducting an orchestra. Russia’s cosmonauts fixed their spacecraft with a monkey wrench and duct tape in between filming ads for Israeli milk and pretzels and drinking cans of vodka labelled ‘Psychological Support Materials’. Girls who went home with you after fifteen minutes’ drunken conversation in a nightclub would be mortally offended when you didn’t bring flowers to a second date. Gogol captured Russia’s sordid craziness best – the nightmarish mood of dislocation, the mad, scheming little people, the petty vanities, the swinish drunkenness, the slobbering sycophancy, the thieving, incompetent, churlish peasantry.

Like my father must have done, I found Russia not just another country, but a different reality. The outward trappings of the city were familiar enough – the white faces, the Western-style shop fronts, the neoclassical architecture. But this European crust only sharpened the sense of otherness. Instead of reassuring, the distortion of the familiar was even more disturbing. Moscow felt as surreal as a colonial outpost on which some distant master had tried to transplant grimly imperial architecture and European fashions. Underneath all the affectations the city’s heart was wild and Asiatic.

One of my first assignments was to cover Moscow’s First Annual Tattoo Convention. The convention was conservatively billed as a kulturny festival in the bemused Moscow press. It was, in fact, a clan gathering of the capital’s alternative society, an exuberant, pagan orgy of nonconformity. A thick wall of body odour welled out of the dark entrance of the Hermitage club, propelled by high-decibel punk rock. Inside, the two main rooms were wreathed in the rancid smoke of cheap Soviet cigarettes and filled with the heaving forms of dimly lit, half-naked bodies, mostly male. Moscow’s punks, skinheads, bikers and a few culturally confused hippies were milling in one giant, pungent, heaving mass, intensifying into a frenzied rhythmic pogoing in front of the stage, where four punks, their Mohican haircuts plastered to their heads with sweat, were pounding out bad Sex Pistols covers.

Another evening found me in Dolls, a flashy and fashionable strip bar where teenage acrobats danced naked on the tables. Paul Tatum, a prominent American businessman, was there, sitting alone at one of the luncheonette-style stools at the edge of the stage, nursing a drink. Tatum was something of a local celebrity for his prolonged business dispute with a group of Chechens over ownership of the business centre of the Radisson-Slavyanskaya Hotel. I greeted him as we came in, but he seemed distracted, his usual bullishness strained. We chatted for a while about the ‘freedom bonds’ he had issued to raise funds for his legal battle with the Chechens and sold to his friends.

We were joined by Joseph Glotser, the club’s owner, who complained, half-joking, in a thick Brooklyn Russian accent about how hard it was to ‘make honest living in zis town’. Tatum seemed keen to get back to his bird-watching, so I wished him luck and rejoined my mends.

A month later Tatum was dead. Someone put eleven AK47 rounds in his neck and upper back as he entered the pedestrian underpass outside the Radisson. Tatum hadn’t been wearing his customary bulletproof vest that evening, but even if he had it wouldn’t have done him any good because the assassin had fired from above, straight down through his clavicle and upper vertebrae. Tatum’s two bodyguards were unharmed. It was a classic Moscow hit. The shooter dropped the Kalashnikov and walked calmly away, and a couple of hours later the police issued the standard statement, that they believed that ‘the killing was connected with the professional activities of the victim’.

Soon the only person left alive who remembered our brief conversation that night at Dolls was me. Joseph Glotser bought it too, a couple of months after Tatum, a single sniper round to the side of the head from across the street as he emerged from Dolls. The marksman was so sure of his shot he didn’t even bother with a follow-up.

Soon after, for a feature on Moscow’s death industry, I interviewed a mortician who specialized in patching up the corpses of Mafia victims for presentation in open coffins. The man wore a Hawaiian shirt under his stained lab coat, and spoke of contract hits as a ballet connoisseur might talk of his favourite performances. The Glotser hit, he said, with deep appreciation, was one of the ‘finest, cleanest assassinations’ he’d ever seen. The cheery mortician was a true hero of the times, wearing his cynicism lightly, making a joke of the awfulness around him so that it wouldn’t get inside. My Moscow Times colleagues and I, it occurred to me, were morticians too, with lab coats over our Hawaiian shirts, all feigning a detached connoisseurship of Moscow’s gothic wickedness.

Spring began one night in late April, a few weeks after my arrival. The evening before a wintry chill had lurked in the night air, although the last, tenacious remnants of filthy snow had finally melted the previous week. The lawns were bare and scrubby and the earth smelt bitter and dead. But when I woke the next morning the sky was a vibrant blue, the tentative buds which had begun to emerge days before had all suddenly burst out and the boulevard exhaled an unmistakable tang of life. By that evening spring was firmly established across the city.

Like emerging butterflies, the girls in the streets shed their winter coats and emerged in high heels and miniskirts. On Sundays I would walk down the gravel paths of Tsvetnoi Boulevard to the Garden Ring. At Sad-Sam, I’d turn towards Mayakovsky Square, and head to the American Bar and Grill. There, a gaggle of Moscow Times staffers were usually hunched, gossiping, under a pall of cigarette smoke and half-hidden behind crumpled newspapers, trailing in the remains of eggs Benedict. Here it was at last, I told myself, the life of a foreign correspondent: the glamour, the girls, the hard-drinking, bootson-the-brass-rail colleagues, the camaraderie of young men far from home in a strange and wonderful city. In truth, I was acutely aware, even at the time, that I was living the headiest and most adventurous days of my life. Though in the company of my new colleagues, of course, I was careful to conceal my joy under a cultivated veneer of world-weary flippancy.