Spymaster, page 40
Since I lived in one of the city’s most prestigious neighborhoods, just a few blocks from the Hermitage, I had other artistic neighbors, including the Leningrad Philharmonic’s chief conductor, Yevgeny Mravinsky. He lived just upstairs from me, and I began visiting with him and his fellow musicians. I made no secret of my ties with this group of freethinkers and dissidents, and no doubt my association with them further hurt my chances of rebirth at the KGB. But by 1983, I no longer cared. In the mid-1980s, one of my friends in the Fifth Department, which fought against dissidents, warned me that Mravinsky’s apartment was bugged.
“You must be careful,” my friend told me. “You know some of these people are under surveillance. They are political dissidents.”
“Listen,” I said, “I don’t talk politics with them. We discuss art. They talk about their projects with me.”
“Well, we just wanted to warn you,” said my friend. “Be careful not to say anything wrong.”
I was surprised at first that Leningrad’s cultural elite would welcome a KGB general into their salons, but I imagine they had reasons for doing so. Perhaps they thought it was simply in their interest to be on friendly terms with a high-ranking member of the security services. In addition, my friends in the arts knew that I had a background in intelligence and was disgusted by the shenanigans of the domestic KGB. I think that as time went by and our association created no problems for them, my Leningrad artist friends realized that I was genuine and not an informant. Finally, I genuinely liked many of the artists, and I think they were fond of me too.
One of my friends, Boris Piotrovsky, director of the Hermitage Museum, treated me to some of the most memorable nights I spent in Leningrad.
It was in June, the season of the city’s White Nights, when the northern sun barely sets. One night, around eleven o’clock, Piotrovsky escorted me, Tovstogonov, and Yevgeny Primakov (future director of Russian intelligence) through the deserted museum along the banks of the Neva River, once the czar’s Winter Palace. A melancholy twilight seeped through the windows of the Hermitage as we walked down the long corridors. The echo of our footsteps was the only sound in the enormous museum. Piotrovsky took us past the Italian and French masterpieces, stopping occasionally to talk about one of the paintings.
On a later visit to the Hermitage, Piotrovsky asked me, “Would you like to see some pictures no one ever does?” I wasn’t prepared for what I was about to see.
Piotrovsky led me up to the top floor of the museum. He unlocked two heavy steel doors and ushered me into a room filled to the ceiling with masterpieces. There were French Impressionist paintings and works by old German masters, all stacked on shelves or piled on the floor. I watched in amazement as Piotrovsky pulled out thirty or forty masterpieces, and then I asked the obvious question: Why were they tucked away in this dusty storage room? Why weren’t they hanging in the galleries downstairs?
During and after World War II, Piotrovsky told me, the Soviet Army had taken all these pictures from the private collections of some of Germany’s wealthiest families. Piotrovsky said he had been lobbying to display the pictures or give them back to their rightful owners, but the Ministry of Culture had refused even to discuss the matter and insisted that the masterpieces be kept under lock and key.
“The heirs may still be able to claim these pictures,” said Piotrovsky.
“Then why don’t you show these paintings one by one and see what the reaction will be?” I asked. “You don’t have to display them all at once. Perhaps no one will know. Besides, you can always say you bought the picture from a private person.”
“That’s a good idea, but the Ministry of Culture won’t even discuss it,” answered Piotrovsky.
The Hermitage director let me wander around the room for a few minutes, gaping at the priceless artworks. Later I asked Piotrovsky to give me a list of the stolen German treasures, and within a week he did so. I quote now from that list, which contained the names of families that had owned the artworks and the number of works taken. (The list contains only the oil paintings; it does not include hundreds of drawings and lithographs.)
Krebs, 47
Scharf, 6
B. Kotler, 5
Siemens, 2
A. Meuer, 3
M. Saxe, 6
The Kürfurst of Saxony, 1
Weldenstein, 3
Goldsticker, 5
Bechstein, 24
Hitler and Schacht, 3
Willie Goerter, 25
Koestenberg, 46
Konig, Vienna, 1
Otto, 1
Rochas, Paris, 3
Lashkoni, 2
Tashbein, 5
Dresden Church, 3
Piotrovsky also said the Hermitage contained Oriental masterpieces stolen during the war from Russian-occupied Manchuria. I decided to go see Nozyrev to urge him to do something: either put the paintings on display or return them to their native countries. It was clear the Leningrad KGB boss knew about the art trove, and he treated my suggestion with typical boorishness.
“Mind your own business,” Nozyrev barked. “The hell with those pictures. I don’t care. Why don’t you catch me a spy instead of worrying about it?”
As far as I know, the Hermitage is still holding on to these treasures.
In my first few years in Leningrad, tensions between the United States (where Ronald Reagan had now become president) and the Soviet Union reached a level unmatched since the 1960s. We felt it even in Leningrad when, in 1981, we received what I can only describe as a paranoid cable from Andropov warning of the growing threat of a nuclear apocalypse. Reagan’s hard-line, anti-Communist stance, his Star Wars program, and the massive American military buildup scared the wits out of our leadership, and Andropov notified KGB stations around the world to be on the lookout for signs of an imminent American attack. A brand-new program (the English language acronym was RYAN) was created to gather information on a potential American first nuclear strike.
“Not since the end of World War II has the international situation been as explosive as it is now,” Andropov wrote in a cable to KGB personnel worldwide.
Meanwhile, I still held out hope that my career at headquarters in Moscow was not finished. Nozyrev told me that Andropov had been asking after me, and in 1981 I was given an award for a manual I had written earlier on foreign counterintelligence techniques. In 1982, Andropov was transferred to the Party’s Central Committee Secretariat. Unfortunately he was replaced by a Brezhnev hack, Vitaly Fedorchuk, the former KGB boss in Ukraine. He was a rude, conceited bone crusher, bent on smashing internal dissent and tightening discipline within the KGB. He peppered KGB offices at home and abroad with ridiculous warnings of impending Western aggression, imperialist plots, and CIA efforts to destroy the Soviet economy. Thankfully, Fedorchuk didn’t last long. Brezhnev died on November 10, 1982, and Androprov took over as Soviet leader. A week later Viktor Chebrikov was named KGB chairman.
I was visiting Ludmilla and my daughters in Moscow when I got word that Brezhnev had died. “Oleg,” a KGB friend of mine said over the phone, “it looks like he is dead.”
I needed no further explanation. He undoubtedly was the sickly and senile Brezhnev. Like millions of my compatriots, I was elated that the old dinosaur had passed away. I thought that our dismal era of stagnation had finally ended. But I had selfish reasons, as well, that caused me to welcome Brezhnev’s demise. With my old mentor, Andropov, installed as leader of the country, I thought that my exile in Leningrad might come to an end, that Andropov would bring me back into Moscow in a top position at KGB headquarters.
A week after Brezhnev’s death, my father passed away following a stroke. He had moved to Moscow in the 1970s to be close to me, and we buried him in the Soviet capital. My father had remained my biggest fan until the end, and he was nearly as disappointed as I was when word came of my demotion and transfer to Leningrad. He died, as so many Soviets did, deeply disillusioned with his country and its leaders. I would miss his love and support in the difficult days that lay ahead.
When I got back to Leningrad after Andropov’s ascension to power, rumors spread through our office that I would soon be replacing Nozyrev as Leningrad KGB boss. But it was not to be. I was chosen, along with forty other high-ranking KGB officers, to take an advanced course of study in Moscow. This, I thought, boded well. And then, a week before the course was to end, one of the KGB’s chief personnel men called me into his office and made an offer that flabbergasted me: He wanted me to take a job as a professor at the KGB Higher School.
“You’ve got a teacher’s gift, Oleg,” the man said. “People listen to you. Your wide knowledge will enable you to get a doctorate quickly, so you can be a full-fledged professor.”
I couldn’t believe my ears! Clearly I was being put out to pasture; the KGB Higher School was a dead end. Despite the insistent pressure, I refused the offer. Later that week, I went to see Philip Bobkov, deputy KGB chairman, and reminded him that Andropov said I would be back in Moscow within two years. It was now the fall of 1983, and I had served my time in Leningrad, I told Bobkov. I wanted to talk to the new KGB chairman, Viktor Chebrikov. Bobkov said he would see what he could do. But not now, said Bobkov. Not now.
I returned to Leningrad and called Bobkov a few weeks later. “Chebrikov is willing to see you, but later this year,” said Bobkov. “Call me in December.”
I waited until January and called again.
“Wait a while longer,” Bobkov said dryly. “We’ve got lots of problems here and yours isn’t a priority.”
“How long must I wait?” I asked. “Am I going to be received?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Bobkov growled, and hung up. Even I, blind as I could sometimes be, could see that my career at KGB headquarters was finished.
Andropov had tried to kick-start our moribund economy and society. He stressed discipline and instituted a campaign to crack down on shirkers and ne’er-do-wells in the workplace. He fought against petty corruption, though he never attacked the deeply engrained corruption within the Communist Party. “The better we work, the better we shall live,” pronounced Comrade Andropov, but the fact remained that our system was, for all intents and purposes, dead. It was too late for slogans, and even the most devout Soviet could see that, no matter how hard he worked, he still was living in relative poverty: the Communist Party, the military-industrial complex, the army, and the KGB were siphoning off the country’s wealth.
Andropov’s last days were marked by failing health and the disastrous downing of Korean Airlines Flight 007 over the Kamchatka Peninsula, in which all 269 passengers aboard were killed. And then, on February 9, 1984, the general secretary of the Communist Party—the man who had been my guardian angel at the KGB—died.
Andropov’s passing left me profoundly depressed. Indeed, I date my utter disillusionment with the KGB to early 1984, when Andropov’s demise and several other events forced me to see that there was no hope of reviving my career or redeeming the old Soviet system.
For all his shortcomings, I had admired Andropov, and as long as he was alive I held out some hope that we could, as he preached, fix our system by doing some major repair work. But when Andropov passed away, I saw everything with stark and depressing clarity. First of all, Andropov was replaced as general secretary of the Communist Party by Constantin Chernenko, a walking corpse even more out of touch with reality, even more retrograde, than Leonid Brezhnev. In the KGB, Viktor Chebrikov was proving to be an absolute nonentity, a weak and indecisive man who was a pale reflection of Andropov. Everywhere, from the top bosses in Moscow to my own superior in Leningrad, all I could see was incompetence, drift, and rot.
Perhaps most important, when Andropov died I lost all hope that somehow my mentor would help resuscitate my career. By mid-1984, it was evident that there was no light at the end of the tunnel, that I was on a joyless road to retirement. Friends of mine in Moscow had told me the full truth about the Cook case—I had been as much a suspect as Cook himself. One friend in KGB headquarters informed me that KGB bosses had secretly filmed my interrogation of Cook at Lefortovo Prison. A KGB official actually thought that when I put my fingers under my shirt collar during the Cook interview, I was giving the scientist a secret sign! It was all too much. The system mistrusted me. Indeed, it trusted nobody. Four years in Leningrad and the loss of Andropov showed me how deluded I was, and how utterly senseless was the work I had been doing since leaving Moscow. In 1984, as winter slowly gave way to spring, I was plunged into a deep depression and resolved to live only for myself and my family.
But my work routine did not let me remain depressed for long. In the end, this period allowed me to make a few discoveries.
One of the most dismal revelations in Leningrad had been that our job in the domestic KGB was to do the bidding of—and cover up for—the local Communist Party bosses. And in Leningrad the top two Party bosses were particularly repugnant, a pair who vividly symbolized the sort of pompous mediocrities that had driven our country into the ground.
The first secretary of the Communist Party in the Leningrad area, the undisputed emperor of our region, was a tiny, conceited man with a Napoleon complex, named Grigory Vasilyevich Romanov. For seventeen years he reigned as lord and master over the Leningrad region, his authority virtually unchallenged. Throughout the vast expanse of the Soviet Union, a country that sprawled across eleven time zones and comprised one sixth of the earth’s land surface, there were several hundred other little dictators like Romanov. They were the regional Communist Party first secretaries, men who lived like socialist pashas, grabbing the best apartments, the best food, the best women, the best hunting lands, all the while espousing the glories of our egalitarian society. Gazing at their pictures now, studying the jowly, smug, vodka-ravaged mugs, I see these men as cartoon characters, the very embodiment of Communist stagnation. But at the time, they instilled fear into the hearts of millions of Communist Party minions, and they ran their little fiefdoms with swaggering pride.
After serving as a code clerk in the Soviet Army during World War II, Romanov rose through the ranks of the Leningrad Communist Party, familiarizing himself with the military factories and institutes that comprised two thirds of the Leningrad economy. In the late 1960s, with the blessing of the Party leadership in Moscow, Romanov (no relation to the Romanov czars) became first secretary of the Leningrad region. By the time I got there, Romanov might as well have been a czar, for he was as much in control of his territory as any of the earlier Romanovs had been of theirs.
He was a dapper little man, in a Communist sort of way. At Party meetings, Romanov used to sit on a pillow so that he didn’t give the appearance of a school kid at a spelling bee. His high living, womanizing, and boozing were legendary. In order to carry out his many trysts, Romanov had two apartments (in addition to the one he shared with his wife) as well as a suite at the Party hotel. He would impress his mistresses with food and gifts purchased from the Blue Hall at the Gostiny Dvor department store, a private shop stocked with imported goods and reserved solely for top Party officials. He had three government cars that he used to squire around his girlfriends. Even his long-suffering wife was given a government automobile.
KGB officers marveled at Romanov’s drinking. He and the region’s other Communist Party big shot, Leningrad mayor Lev Zaikov, would sit in Romanov’s wood-paneled office at Smolny and knock back copious quantities of vodka. (Smolny, seat of the Leningrad Communist Party, is the former czarist girls’ school that was used by Lenin as his headquarters during the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.) Zaikov was a big, rough-hewn man who could hold his vodka better than Romanov; after their legendary drinking bouts Zaikov would always be at his desk the next day, while Romanov would stay home for a day or two, nursing a fierce hangover.
Outside a small circle of KGB and Party officials, Romanov’s drinking was a fairly well-kept secret. I learned of his alcohol problem firsthand one Sunday when I was on duty at KGB headquarters on Liteiny Prospect. Romanov telephoned and, since it was a weekend and I was acting chief, I took the call. I could immediately tell something was wrong—our illustrious first secretary was rip-roaring drunk. He was carrying on about some problem at the city’s central bakery, mumbling about sabotage and declining production. Soon he signed off, and I was left scratching my head. We made inquiries, and everything seemed fine at the bakery. Vladilen Bleyer, my colleague who was in charge of the one-hundred-person bodyguard section in Leningrad and was intimately familiar with Romanov’s drinking binges, told me, “Forget it, Oleg. He was drunk as usual. He’ll be away from work for two or three days until he gets over his hangover and when he comes back he won’t remember a thing he told you. Don’t worry.”
That’s precisely what happened: Romanov never mentioned the bakery to me again.
Since I was in charge of KGB operations in the outlying districts of the Leningrad region, I sometimes accompanied Romanov on his triumphal tours through the boondocks. These trips were invariably well scripted, enabling Comrade Romanov to see the best that our rural regions had to offer. Most collective farms were a mess, run by dim-witted directors who presided over a rabble of dispirited and often alcoholic workers. Many of our villages looked straight out of the nineteenth century, with people living in ramshackle wooden cottages that lacked running water and indoor toilets. But Romanov and other exalted guests never saw that reality. They invariably were squired around the handful of model collective farms that were well run and well funded. One of these was a much-praised meat and dairy farm, a Potemkin village that boasted an astonishing 96,000 pigs. (Actually, the director confided to me that they had 100,000 pigs, but he only reported 96,000, leaving 4,000 porkers he could use to bribe people, barter, or feed visiting dignitaries like Romanov.) The visits to these model farms followed the same scenario in Leningrad and throughout the country. The honored guest (in our case, Romanov) would arrive and be given a quick tour of the state-of-the-art facilities, the farm director invariably mentioning that his production exceeded that of similar farms in the West. Smiling collective farm workers would tell the dignitary how great everything was, and then all the top local officials—Party bosses, KGB chiefs, collective farm directors—would repair to a private dining room attached to the collective farm’s cafeteria. There, the group would sit down at tables groaning with food and drink, and the marathon toasting and vodka guzzling would begin. After a few hours, everyone would be utterly smashed. Stumbling out to their cars, they would pronounce the visit a roaring success.
