The Kremlin's Confidant, page 2
Trade with us
At first sight, Martin was an unlikely candidate for becoming a commercial favourite of the Kremlin. He had served in Britain’s Royal Navy, with his first posting involving shelling Communist forces in the Korean Peninsula and his last one acting as intelligence analyst in the British and NATO command in Valletta. He was a scion of Empire and Church. His great-grandfather had been the top-selling writer of boys’ stories in imperial times and he was the son of three generations of Anglican priests.
But the priests were all Nonconformist and Martin had grown up with the self-assurance to challenge authority. He had done so in the navy and again while seconded to Cyprus. He had become one of the main supporters of the resistance to the Colonels before being forced to resign his commission as a result of outrage by the Foreign Office. He had then become the confidant of Dom Mintoff, the radical prime minister of Malta. Soviet hopes that Malta could prove the Cuba of the Mediterranean had made relationships with Malta a priority for Moscow, and, with Martin close to Mintoff and exporting a million pairs of jeans a year to the Soviets, he became a person of special interest to them.
‘Let’s go for a walk, Martin. I have something to tell you.’ It was autumn 1985 and Filippov, then a top Soviet trade official, led Packard the short distance from the Castille Hotel through the arch to the Upper Barrakka Gardens with their view over the Grand Harbour far below. Originally the private gardens of the Knights of Malta,1 these colonnaded gardens have long been a rare corner of peace in the tightly built city. They were familiar to Packard, being above the Upper Lascaris Rooms where he had carried out his intelligence work.
Martin recalls vividly the conversation that was to change his life:
I had driven in from my nearby jeans factory to meet Filippov. After we had exchanged pleasantries in a hotel lobby, he took me by the arm and we walked up to the Gardens, which were deserted. The pathways were scented with jasmine. The weather was clear and fresh, with a light breeze blowing into Grand Harbour from the south. It was a romantic spot for a rendezvous. Mikhail said, ‘This is good. We can talk properly. What I have to tell you is confidential.’
The crux of his message was that there were going to be major political changes in Moscow. Filippov continued:
A decision has been taken to end the Communist monopoly on power and we intend to move to a market economy. We are setting a five-year schedule to achieve this. By 1991 we aim to have a fully operational market economy and a functioning democratically elected parliament. During that time we want to pursue industrial and commercial convergence with Western Europe.
With this political message came a personal one. Filippov explained that the Soviets could no longer afford to buy Martin’s jeans, a grim warning as the Soviet Union was taking four-fifths of his exports. Their economy was stagnating, with a foreign exchange crisis developing and jeans using up funds needed for defence and more vital activities. However, for a Soviet bureaucrat, Filippov had a surprisingly commercial offer to make. Some of Martin’s exports could probably be maintained. ‘You can sell to different organisations on a counter-trade basis. For instance, Sojuzpushnina [the International Fur Auction] can buy as much from you as you can buy from them.’ Further, Moscow would phase out rather than cancel its orders, giving him time to find other customers. Meanwhile, it had decided to ask him to help develop Soviet exports to Western Europe:
We want to ask you to help with the process of convergence. If you agree, we will let you assess what opportunities are available and give you political sponsorship to develop counter-trade initiatives and linkage between our industries and those in the West. You are one of three or four foreign businessmen to whom this proposal is being made. Our idea is that the arrangement with you should run through a special protocol with Malta, so as to avoid the scrutiny of major powers which might not be so sympathetic. In the meantime, we shall try to ensure your company has enough orders to keep it viable while it looks for other customers. When you next come to Moscow you will be introduced to key ministers and you can work out a programme and get started.
‘Why me?’ Martin asked, remembering Filippov replying:
Over the past five years you have become the major foreign supplier of jeans to the Soviet Union. You have shipped millions of items to all the big cities in Russia without a single complaint. You have built up a good reputation. You have never tried to bribe anyone or to buck the system. You may be a liberal politically, but in the USSR we tend to trust foreign liberals more than we do foreign socialists or Communists. You have the confidence of Dom Mintoff. We see you as sympathetic and trustworthy.
Extraordinary as all this may sound, probing into the economic policies of the times and the memories of those involved bears out Martin’s tale. Filippov himself, visited in Malta where he had settled in 2015, well remembers the conversation. He had needed someone efficient to work with to build up trade with Malta. Earlier, he had worked with Anne McKenna, the export director of Martin’s jeans company, CIM, and daughter of Mintoff. She had introduced Martin.
The talk in the Upper Barrakka Gardens was to launch a relationship between Martin and Filippov which has continued through the years. Interviewed through a long afternoon in Saint Julian’s Bay, north of Valletta, Filippov insisted that the approach was his own idea:
I was instructed to develop trade between the Soviet Union and Malta, but was not given any budget. I was expected to produce results, not to return with requests for support. We needed growth. I thought Martin could help. He was doing a good job with jeans. I suggested to him that he broaden his activities and told him I would set up meetings in Moscow for this. Traditional trade was slowing down – ships, jeans, fur coats. I had to adjust to new circumstances. I could do whatever I wished. If you knew the bureaucrats’ requirements and how they think, you could ship an elephant to Iceland. I had set up a similar arrangement in Ireland, and Martin was one of the few people in Malta who could make this work.
Filippov was not just a credible messenger but a personality in his own right. He had been married to the granddaughter of the general secretary, Leonid Brezhnev, becoming a member of the inner circles of the nomenklatura running the Soviet Union. He had excellent political connections. He was ideally cast to induce Martin to venture into the unknown, becoming, however well intentioned in the light of what happened to Martin, his Mephistopheles. Indeed, for Martin, their agreement proved something of a Faustian pact.
The Irish connection from that time – Brian Reid – remembers the spell that Filippov cast:
When I met him in the late 1970s, he was a young man, athletic in appearance and the epitome of the tag ‘tall, dark and handsome’. He was about 6ft 5in, spoke English well, was impossibly good looking (women loved him, my wife’s friends here in Ireland still ask about him), and was erudite, charming, witty, ambitious and highly intelligent. His marriage gave him stature, and he had been an international water polo player. Overall, he was an impressive figure with enormous charisma.
Martin recalls that while Filippov was still married to Victoria, the Soviet leader’s granddaughter, he had been tagged by Brezhnev as a future Foreign Minister.
Four decades later, Filippov retained many of the characteristics which had struck Reid: a striking presence, courtesy, eyes twinkling with humour, and a natural dignity. Age has given him grey hair and a slight limp, and experience has made him a historian of the decline, implosion and devastation of the society in which he grew up. That, he opines, was bound to collapse, and only the twists and turns of history extended its existence.
Changes were in the air at the beginning of the 1980s and he had a unique opportunity to observe the ongoing transformation of the ideology and morality of the rulers of the Soviet Union, remembering the conversations he used to have with two of the three general secretaries who had preceded Gorbachev, and with Andrei Gromyko and Dmitry Ustinov, the long-term ministers of foreign affairs and defence. He had met these and other rarified officials while living with Brezhnev. Part of this time was in the general secretary’s palatial ground-floor apartment at Kutuzovsky Prospekt 26; Brezhnev’s successor, Yuri Andropov, lived in the same building in a more modest apartment on the sixth floor, and would often drop by.
But most of this period was spent at Brezhnev’s dacha in Zarechye, west of Moscow:
We were all under the same roof, with everything shared. Brezhnev raised Victoria almost from her first days. When she and I separated, it was unusual in that Brezhnev then broke relations not with me but with his granddaughter, exiling her to Leningrad. He had originally thought of sending her to Sverdlovsk in the Urals, but his assistant suggested this was too harsh.
He refused to allow a divorce and asked me to wait. He took our 4-year-old child, Galina, and brought her up, as he had her mother. I found myself staying with him and his wife. No other adult was present, except security. I was out of place. His relatives silently hated me. So I left.
In 1976, they broke Brezhnev’s resistance and the divorce went ahead.2 We maintained good relations until he died. These were mostly on the phone. Sometimes he called me directly at my office. A couple of times my colleague answered the calls, being shocked when he heard the voice which was usually coming to him from the television.
Victoria was allowed back to Moscow but, with the fall of Communism, things did not work out well for her or her daughter, Galina. Brezhnev had bequeathed all of his property to Victoria. The latter fell in with a gang of ‘black realtors’ who robbed her. The two were left alone on the streets of Moscow without housing, money or passports. Yeltsin and Putin refused them the grace and favour traditionally shown to the families of former dignitaries. Filippov has been helping them, and Galina now has her own apartment, but the fate of the descendants of Brezhnev is a recurrent subject, luridly treated in more than twenty television programmes and a number of magazine articles. The unsupported assertions made in these have caused Filippov to become a more private person.
Russian journalists have tried to get him to talk about this period and one from Express Gazeta, pretending to be a friend, did entice Victoria to describe how she had met ‘Misha’ at the perfume shop ‘Lilac’ on the Kalinin Prospekt and that he was ‘one of the nicest guys in Moscow’.
When I first met Filippov, he talked of his youth, the years playing water polo for Moscow City team and winning international tournament medals, his conscription in the navy, and the professors who influenced him at university, including economists involved in the Kosygin Reforms of 1965. As we talked then, and later in Cyprus where he moved in 2018, his discourse was on the forces driving Soviet society, never on his family. Indeed, after our first talk, he reacted as if discussing his youth had been a violation of his privacy.
He was a graduate of the G.V. Plekhanov Institute of the National Economy, one of Moscow’s ‘Ivy League’ institutions, and of the academy of the USSR Ministry of Foreign Trade. From 1979, he worked in the Ministry’s Department of Foreign Trade with Western Countries under Brezhnev’s son, Yuri. His portfolio included Britain, Ireland and Malta. He became Executive Secretary of the British-Soviet Committee for Applied Sciences and Trade.
He remembers one evening looking out of his office beside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and seeing the British ambassador arrive in his ageing Rolls Royce to visit Andrei Gromyko. When Filippov came out to set off home, the ambassador’s aide asked him for a 2-kopek coin. The Rolls Royce had broken down and he wanted to telephone for a fresh car. Filippov gave him two coins. Two months later, at a reception at the British Embassy, the aide came up and repaid him, saying that he would have to work hard to change the opinion of the Western diplomatic corps that he had sold out to the Soviets for 4 kopeks.
Around the time Filippov was divorcing, Yuri Brezhnev gathered in the portfolios he had been managing, taking away Britain, Australia and New Zealand, and leaving him Malta and Ireland. Filippov traces this demotion not to the divorce but to jealousy over the gift of a Lada VAZ-2101 around the time of his marriage in 1970. Cars were scarce and prestigious, and Yuri had thought the car was to be for him. To make matters worse, Filippov did not use it for around six months. ‘I was into motorbikes and it was only when someone told me that not driving it would seem like ingratitude that I started to use it.’
Brezhnev appears to have had little respect for his son, whom Filippov remembers as an immoral alcoholic. Yuri was to be stripped of his possessions after criminal investigations in the late 1980s. By then, worse had happened to other members of the family. In January 1982, when Brezhnev was still lingering on, his daughter, Galina, the mother of Victoria, and her entourage had been investigated for corruption and jewel smuggling. These investigations cost Galina’s husband, Yuri Chorbanov, his job at the Ministry of Interior and caused another Brezhnev relative by marriage, Semyon Tsvigun, the first deputy chairman of the KGB responsible for the investigations, to take his own life after being accused of a cover up. Chorbanov was later sentenced to twelve years in a harsh-regime labour camp for corruption.
To some of those who met Filippov when his empire was reduced to Malta and Ireland, his talents seemed under-utilised. But Filippov seems to have remained undaunted, instead appreciating the importance of Malta to the Soviet Union at the time, and the opportunity this offered to him to shine.
Malta as Cuba
Malta had followed a tortuous road to independence. In the 1950s, Dom Mintoff and his Labour Party had favoured integration with the UK: Malta would have had three seats in the House of Commons, the only time that Britain offered the option of integration to a colony. After Britain refused to provide financial guarantees to the island, Mintoff switched to support independence. This eventually came in 1964. In 1971, Mintoff came narrowly to power and two years later embedded Malta in the Non-Aligned Movement. The last British ships and sailors left the island fortress on 31 March 1979.
The 1970s were a tense period in the Mediterranean, with the US Sixth Fleet flying a forceful flag and the Soviets sending heavy aircraft-carrying cruisers and nuclear-powered battleships through the Bosphorus. During this Cold War in warm waters, NATO members’ navies made use of Gibraltar, Malta, Italy and Crete, and the Soviets had bases in Egypt and Syria. From 1977, Moscow concentrated its activities in Tartus, Syria and started developing what became its largest electronic communications facility abroad at Latakia. It is from these facilities that it has supported President Bashar al-Assad through the Syrian civil war.
Those years, the Soviets saw Malta as another key target, and were encouraged by Mintoff’s identification with the Non-Aligned Movement. As Filippov recalled, ‘It reminded our politicians of Cuba. Some hoped that Malta could become a Soviet base, others that at least it would be a friendly nation. At one period, my minister would start his day by asking about Malta before asking about the US.’3
The Soviets had been quick to recognise the new republic. In 1981, the two countries signed an agreement under which the Soviet Union guaranteed Maltese neutrality and Malta agreed to service Soviet commercial vessels. The two countries also renewed an earlier trade agreement and established a trade council.
In 1983, Mintoff insisted on visiting Moscow. With Andropov ill, the Kremlin stalled. In December 1984, Mintoff came to meet his successor, Konstantin Chernenko. As Filippov recalls:
He was met with the same protocol as the president of the US. Everything was as for the highest leader of the world – a meeting with Chernenko, police escort, flags, the whole works. Then disaster struck. Two days after his return, Mintoff announced his retirement.
Chernenko himself died three months later.
Reform in Russia
Filippov’s meeting with Packard came at a time when the Soviets were seeking to regain momentum in their links with Malta. It also came at a time of major changes in the Soviet Union and its approach to economic management. Those running the country knew that growth was slowing and that each year a greater gap was developing between the Soviet and US economies.
Nikita Khrushchev had launched a first round of reforms in the 1950s, which, for all their inconsistencies, left a lasting impact. In October 1964, Leonid Brezhnev took over as general secretary, initially supporting policies to extend the independence of enterprises, and to increase the role of profit, but then backing away from them.
As plan targets were missed by increasingly large margins, the pressure for reform developed. In December 1979, Alexei Kosygin, premier of the Soviet Union, submitted to the Politburo a broadly based attempt to revive his earlier proposals. His report was refused but this did not deter the economists and sociologists gathered at Akademgorodok, now a part of Novosibirsk. This Siberian think-tank city, built as far from Moscow to the east as Dublin is to the west, was no academic Gulag but a cluster of centres of excellence. Particularly prestigious was – to give it its full title – the Institute of Economics and Organisation of Industrial Production of the Academy of Sciences. This had been studying what alienated agricultural and industrial workers from their jobs and had produced a withering critique of the existing systems of control. In April 1983, what became known as The Novosibirsk Report was presented to the country’s top economic officials, managers and economists.
The report started by pointing out how in the late 1960s growth in national income had been at a rate of 7.5 per cent per year, in the late 1970s only one-half of that, and in the early 1980s one-third.4 It noted that introduction of new technology required more personal involvement of workers in plan fulfilment. Its authors castigate the:
