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  STALIN’S ROMEO SPY

  ALSO BY EMIL DRAITSER

  Fiction

  The Supervisor of the Sea and Other Stories

  The Fun House (in Russian)

  The Lost Boy and Other Stories (in Russian)

  Wedding in Brighton Beach and Other Stories (in Polish)

  Nonfiction

  Shush! Growing Up Jewish Under Stalin: A Memoir

  Making War, Not Love: Gender and Sexuality in Russian Humor

  Taking Penguins to the Movies: Ethnic Humor in Russia

  Techniques of Satire: The Case of Saltykov-Shchedrin

  Who You Are: Autobiographical Notes (in Russian)

  Nineteenth-Century Russian Poets: Anthology (in Russian)

  Twentieth-Century Russian Poets: Anthology (in Russian)

  Forbidden Laughter: Soviet Underground Jokes (bilingual Russian/English)

  This eBook edition 2011

  First published in the UK in 2011 by

  Duckworth Overlook

  90-93 Cowcross Street, London EC1M 6BF

  Tel: 020 7490 7300

  Fax: 020 7490 0080

  [email protected]

  www.ducknet.co.uk

  Copyright © 2010 by Emil Draitser.

  Foreword copyright © 2010 by Gary Kern

  Published in the USA in 2010 by

  Northwestern University Press.

  Parts of this book previously appeared, in somewhat

  different form, in the Journal of Intelligence History 6:2

  (Winter 2006–7) and Gulag Studies 1 (2008).

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  A catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library

  eISBNs

  Mobipocket 978 0 7156 4315 0

  ePub 978 0 7156 4314 3

  PDF 978 0 7156 4313 6

  To Jola,

  whose patience and moral support

  endured through years of this author’s obsession

  with a stranger’s life

  Do you want to write your testimony in ink or in your own blood? The choice is yours.

  —KGB INTERROGATOR TO DMITRI BYSTROLYOTOV

  Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.

  —MARK TWAIN

  He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.

  —GEORGE ORWELL

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Gary Kern

  Acknowledgments

  Notes on Sources, Transliterations, and Translation

  Abbreviations and Terms

  Prologue

  Tea with a Master Spy

  PART I

  The Making of a Spy

  One

  Sowing the Wind

  Two

  A Leaf Torn from a Branch

  Three

  In the Grips of Holy Wrath

  Four

  Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

  Five

  Marriage and Other Calamities

  PART II

  Master Spy at Work

  Six

  Going Underground

  Seven

  Hunting Down a Man with a Red Nose

  Eight

  Handling “Charlie”

  Nine

  The End of “Charlie” and Other British Agents

  Ten

  In the Arms of the Fiercest Enemy

  Eleven

  The “Vivaldi” Affair

  Twelve

  The Last Operations: Africa and Other Gray Areas

  Thirteen

  The Return

  PART III

  Afterlife

  Fourteen

  In Ink and Blood

  Fifteen

  Sentencing and Entering the Gulag

  Sixteen

  The Invalid Camp

  Seventeen

  Love Behind Barbed Wire

  Eighteen

  The High Price of Decency

  Nineteen

  Taking On Challenges of Freedom

  Twenty

  Fighting to the End, Now a Different Enemy

  Afterword

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  Gallery follows page

  FOREWORD

  Gary Kern

  Writers don’t always choose their subjects; sometimes their subjects choose them. An idea comes to mind and takes hold of the imagination; the writer walks around talking to others and answering questions but thinking about the idea. He begins to imagine the way it could go, how it might develop. He might consider that he doesn’t have time for it, and so he writes it down in his notebook in order to put it off. But one way or another it comes back. Did he choose it, or did it choose him? He begins to wonder. Ultimately he decides to go with it. He understands: it has grabbed him.

  At other times it’s not an idea, but an experience or a person. The writer finds that some other person is interesting, that his story is worth telling, and just like the idea, so the image of this person begins to work on him. When he learns that this person has died and that his story has not been told or, even worse, has been told wrongly, then from out of nowhere he feels a responsibility. He can tell the true story, he can save the other’s soul, not in the religious sense, but in the sense of preserving something of his spirit, something of his suffering. And so he embarks on a research project to recover all the facts and figures about his subject, to piece together his broken and scattered biography, to look into his motives, and to try to understand his mind. Years go by. What is he doing? Working like a slave for his subject, a dead man, trying to bring him back to life, to consign his deeds to posterity. It’s the same as with the idea: his hero has chosen him.

  In his prologue to this fascinating book, Emil Draitser describes the time and place it happened: Moscow, September 11, 1973. He didn’t realize its significance at the time but didn’t forget the incident either. The man was curious, impressive, singular even, a former intelligence officer who had spent long years in the Gulag, but Draitser had pressing matters to attend to, such as getting out of the Soviet Union, establishing himself in a new country, making his career as a writer in a new language, surviving, and paying the bills. All the while he was developing the abilities that would enable him to take on the monumental task, in 2003, of recovering the biography of the man he had met, Dmitri Bystrolyotov. And it was good that he was delayed thirty years, because it was necessary for the Soviet Union to crumble, for archives to open, and for previously unpublished materials to come out, including the voluminous memoirs of Bystrolyotov himself. So many new materials were published in the 1990s, not only on Bystrolyotov, but on Soviet espionage in general, that only a native Russian like Draitser could have assimilated them in the six years he spent on the project. For a non-native it could easily have taken ten years or more.

  But Draitser didn’t stop with what was available. As he relates in the prologue, he flew to Moscow, Prague, and London and collected a body of publications, manuscripts, and documents such as no one else possesses, save the Russian State Security—the KGB. Also, he sought out and interviewed a relative of Bystrolyotov who himself had already collected and preserved rare materials and who kindly furnished him copies. By the end of his project, he had become—like every biographer—the one man in the world who could tell the complete story of his hero.

  His quest perhaps would have seemed a private mania had the name Bystrolyotov not mean
while emerged from obscurity and revealed its legendary status. Bystrolyotov was one of the “Great Illegals,” the first generation of Soviet spies who operated underground throughout Europe with the flair and success that earned them such a striking title. Even among them, he was outstanding, both for his feats of espionage in Europe, Africa, and America, and for his personal traits. He was a “Romeo spy,” handsome and dashing, with slick dark hair, a moustache, and a Greek or Hungarian name, who seduced secretaries and other women with access to government secrets; he recruited agents under a “false flag,” encouraging them to think that they were helping Japan or Germany when actually they were helping the Soviet Union. He destroyed people’s careers and lives wherever he went. His manipulation of a London code clerk and his wife was particularly sordid, and the end was messy. Yet, like some others of his clan, he was a sensitive and troubled man, with artistic and literary talents, humane aspirations, and selfless dedication to the Communist ideal.

  He was, in short, a monster—a cheat, seducer, and destroyer of other people’s lives for the glory of the Soviet state and the good of all mankind. The biographer of such a figure is confronted by more than one task. First, of course, he must establish the basic facts in the life and career of a spy, a man whose person and profession are clandestine and deceptive by nature. Even in his own writings, the spy may spin the story, not only minimizing his unheroic deeds or failing to recall entire episodes, but also embellishing his exploits. His idea of the truth is not the same as that of his biographer. Further, Bystrolyotov lived and died in the Soviet period, so everything he wrote and hoped to get published had to keep the censor in mind. Draitser, sifting through all these problems and gleaning the basic facts, has also to account for his hero’s actions—for the fact that he became a monster. And here he is obliged to engage in psychoanalysis, finding a cold mother, who gave birth to an illegitimate son only as a form of feminist protest and then left the boy to suffer years of agonizing loneliness; the wounded boy becomes a Romeo spy but has a pathological relationship with his wife, a beautiful woman who conceals her sexual proclivities. Draitser has also to explain the historical and social context in which the spy operated: the Stalin period, the purges, the omnipresence of the Secret Police, the Leader, the Doctrine. He knows the period well, having spent his childhood and teenage years under Stalin. Naturally, he has to accomplish all these tasks not one after the other, but simultaneously.

  Bystrolyotov the Great Illegal did not enjoy a long career and retire with a comfortable pension. His reward for selfless sacrifice was the same that many other intelligence men received in the years of the Stalin purges: arrest on false charges, torture at the hands of the KGB, and a twenty-year sentence in the Gulag. Unlike most others, he survived his term and recorded his life inside the camps. Thus his story continues beyond the espionage phase and joins the literature of the Gulag.

  This in turn leads to a spiritual transformation, a redemption of sorts that produces the stately man who sought out the young Draitser. Bystrolyotov knew that this young journalist was a Jew, which automatically meant that he would know about persecution. The older Draitser, the biographer, therefore proceeds with great sensitivity to follow the changes in his subject, to show what must have gone through his mind: his persistence in believing in the doctrine and the cause, even while being wronged by the state; his recognition of his own guilt before others; his questioning of the results of his work and the work of others like him; his reassessment of the great cause; and his ultimate realization that the Soviet system was no better than Nazism. Describing this process, Draitser conveys Bystrolyotov’s indomitable spirit, which carries him through periods of great mental stress to write memoirs and other literary works, to paint landscapes, and to assume a serene transcendence. It is a slow transformation, from monster to hero.

  Deep in his work, Draitser was astonished to discover that new versions of Bystrolyotov’s life and career were being produced in Russia. In articles, books, and three documentary films, Bystrolyotov was presented as heroic and patriotic; basic facts were cut from his biography, personal relationships were changed, and cloak-and-dagger scenes were invented. The mustachioed Romeo spy had become the latest icon in the State Security’s ongoing series of public relations programs. Looked at another way, the beaten and imprisoned “traitor” had become, in Draitser’s words, a “poster boy” for the FSB. And so a new task arose before the biographer: clear away the propaganda.

  Without invention, without embellishment, the life of Dmitri Bystrolyotov, as Draitser tells it, is one of the most sensational in the pantheon of desperate lives lived by Stalin’s illegals. By turns routine, thrilling, conventional, extraordinary, disquieting, disgusting, pathetic, and inspiring, it stirs emotions of both revulsion and respect, even as it adds a new and instructive chapter to a bleak and terrifying period of history. In this case, the hero chose his biographer well: no one but Draitser could have written this book.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It is customary for an author to begin his acknowledgments with the phrase “This book would never have been written if not for the help of many people,” which is true of any book project. It is even more so when it comes to one as intricate and complex as the biography of a spy, whose job description calls for aptitude in duplicity and the ability to leave as few tracks as possible. But regarding my colleague—scholar, writer, and publisher Dr. Gary Kern—the word “help” is grossly inadequate to describe his contribution to this project. To begin with, if not for a fateful conversation with him, described in the prologue, the bug of historical research into the life of a man whom I had met three decades earlier would have had very little chance to bite me. Before that day, my scholarly interests lay in areas that had nothing to do with the history of Soviet espionage and Gulag studies. In addition, Gary’s own scholarship offered the highest standard of meticulous research and superb writing, a hard act to follow. His many useful suggestions on how to go about my work significantly shortened the time spent on this project—for this alone I express my deep gratitude. Gary’s spirit of generosity is, by far, among the highest and rarest I have ever encountered.

  I would also like to thank Sergei Sergeyevich Milashov, Bystrolyo tov’s stepgrandson, who gave me unlimited access to my subject’s invaluable personal archive. I greatly benefited from his noble intention to finally make public the true life of the man whom he had always admired so much and who strongly influenced him as he was growing up.

  I am also indebted to my friend and colleague Dr. Vadim Birstein, whose vast knowledge of minute details of both Soviet secret police operations and the Soviet labor camp system elucidated for me many circumstances of Bystrolyotov’s life, to which my subject only alluded in his writing.

  I also highly appreciate the help of Czech scholar Dr. Anastasia Koprivova. Besides expertly navigating me through the catalogue maze of the Czech State Archives as I searched for material related to Bystrolyotov and the Soviet Trade Mission in Prague, she also brought to my attention her own research on the lives of the Russian immigrant community in Czechoslovakia of the 1920s and translated a few archival documents from Czech into Russian.

  I am also indebted to Loic Damilaville, for helping me to track down the whereabouts of documents related to Bystrolyotov’s French agent, and Dr. Peter Huber, who generously shared with me some of his findings in the French National Archives pertaining to Bystrolyotov’s assistants in many of his operations, Joseph Leppin and Erica Weinstein. I also appreciate the help of my electronic correspondents, Edward Kershaw of Great Britain, who provided me with information on the background of Lucy and Ernest Oldham, and Nick Crittenden, who filled me in on additional Italian sources related to Bystrolyotov’s activities.

  I would like to thank Norman Clarius of the Hunter College Interloan Department, Paul Johnson, manager of the Image Library of the British National Archives, and alas, nameless, the employees of the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) and Centre des Archives Di
plomatiques de Nantes. I also appreciate the help Isabelle de Rezende of the University of Michigan gave me in fine-tuning some cultural notions in my African chapter.

  I would also like to express my appreciation for the benefit I received from the questions and encouragement of many participants in the annual meeting of the European Studies Conference at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, especially Dr. Raymond W. Leonard of Central Missouri State University, and the conference organizer, my friend and colleague Dr. Tatyana Novikova. To get to the bottom of such a complex personality as Dmitri Bystrolyotov was not an easy task. To that extent, I solicited help from some of my professional friends, including psychiatrist K. P. S. (“Bob”) Kamath, M.D., and psychoanalyst Harvey Mindess, Ph.D. However, any mistakes I have made in trying to decipher the motives for Bystrolyotov’s behavior are mine only.

  My friend of many years, Dr. Anthony Saidy, one of the most enthusiastic supporters of this project for the duration of my work, not only provided feedback but also advised me regarding the medical aspects of Bystrolyotov’s life, whether it concerned assessment of his medical training, his medical practice in the camps, or his own health-related problems. Here again, I am solely responsible for any mistakes concerning these aspects of the book.

  As my work progressed, my friends Selim Karady, Martin Weiss, and Dr. Jolanta Kunicka read several chapters of the manuscript and gave valuable suggestions. I also owe a great deal to my former dissertation adviser and friend, Professor Michael Henry Heim of UCLA, for his constant moral support during what has been the most challenging undertaking of my writing career. I also enjoyed the moral support of my friend and colleague Dr. Susan Weissman, whose own work inspired me along the way.

  My friend writer Bill Bly read a few chapters of my manuscript-in-progress and helped to fine-tune my command of idiomatic English. In this respect, I greatly benefited from Therese Malhame’s thorough and expert work on the whole manuscript before it went into production. I deeply appreciate the extra efforts of Anne Gendler, managing editor of Northwestern University Press, not only for her diligent reading of my work but also for bringing to my attention those episodes of Bystrolyotov’s messy life that needed additional elucidation for the reader.