Farewell (4 page)

The young couple was determined to officially unite their lives, even against the will of Svetlana’s father. Vladimir wanted to present Svetlana with a gold wedding band. In those days, men did not wear any, as it was viewed as a bourgeois tradition. Only one ring fit Svetlana’s very thin fingers. And yet it was fairly heavy, and it cost twice as much as the others, sixty-two rubles. Short by a few rubles, Vladimir ran home to get some more money and came back to buy the ring. Svetlana has been wearing it ever since.

The public records office in Vetrov’s neighborhood was undergoing remodeling. So, to get married, they went to the one in the Kuibyshevsky district, near the Krasnoselskaya subway station. Svetlana was so apprehensive that she hid behind a kiosk when Volodia stopped a passerby to ask for directions. They also did not know that you needed two witnesses to get married. Fortunately, two derelicts who were hanging around in the entrance hall agreed to sign the registry. The day was December 8, 1957.

Now husband and wife, they exchanged a kiss and…went back home to their respective families. This was their routine for the next two months, seeing one another every day and going their separate ways every night, until they could not take it any longer. One day, Svetlana showed her father her domestic passport stamped by the registry office. This was a terrible shock for Barashkov. But Svetlana did not give up. She moved out to go live with the Vetrovs. Her father attempted several times to get his daughter back. The storm took almost six months to abate.

Vladimir’s parents accepted the de facto situation of their son’s marriage much more easily. Of course, at first, Volodia’s mother was a bit jealous. Svetlana had a hard time calling her “Mother,” the common way to address your mother-in-law in a plain and simple family. She found it artificial, while “Maria Danilovna” sounded way too formal, like addressing an official. To them, Svetlana was a breed apart, but they soon considered her like their daughter and gave her as much affection as they gave Volodia.

It was very easy to treat Svetlana as another child since she did not look like a married woman. Skinny and frail, she looked fifteen. Even at the salon next door the hairdresser asked Svetlana, “Why did you take your mother’s wedding ring? If she finds out, you’re in for trouble!” The neighbors too thought Volodia was going out with a kid.

The four of them were living in a room of less than 130 square feet. The parents had their own bed. Every night, the newlyweds had to arrange four chairs together in the little space still available, place boards on top of the seats, then a mattress on the boards. They were happy, though, and did not complain about the situation.

Svetlana was getting along just fine with her in-laws. She enjoyed teasing Ippolit Vasilevich. For instance, one time she tied his feet with a scarf while he was taking his nap on the couch. He woke up and was not able to get up to his feet. “Ah, girl!” he protested happily. “Just wait and I’ll catch you!”

Ippolit Vasilevich worried because Svetlana did not have those full cheeks seen on the colorful nested wooden dolls called
matrioshki
. “Girl,” he used to say, looking at her with compassion, “why are you so skinny? I’ll go get you some fish.” And he would rush to the neighborhood grocery store to buy smoked sturgeon. Or he would order caviar from Saratov, shipped in one-liter glass jars, to feed her properly. In those days, everybody could afford those traditional food items.

Outwardly, everything seemed to be for the better in Volodia’s life, except at work. At the plant, he worked on the assembly and maintenance of the first computers. Yet, this had nothing to do with innovation and creativity, and Vetrov was getting very bored. Moreover, prospects for promotion were bleak. The young engineer had started thinking hard about what else he could do when he received a totally unexpected offer. The KGB had launched a massive campaign to renew its ranks. The Stalinist old guard was sidelined and had to be replaced. In addition, the iron curtain was being lifted a bit more every day, and Soviet secret services urgently needed backup.

The recruits from those years became the stars of post-war special services. Even their adversaries in the Western Bloc shared this opinion, among them Marcel Chalet, head of the French DST from 1975 through 1982. “In the post-war period,” he writes, “because of the lack of opening of the Soviet world, intelligence officers were not very sophisticated. They had a hard time adjusting to our way of life; they could not speak our language very well and were easy to spot. Later, they made significant efforts to improve the quality of their officers, aiming at making them socially acceptable, able to be introduced just about anywhere. They were more discreet, more skilled, having integrated our culture better, and were much better educated. They created a generation of high-quality intelligence officers. This turning point came at the end of the sixties. Then, we sensed some kind of slacking off, probably due to lower morale and a certain degree of ideological contamination. Little by little the influence of the West was permeating their way of thinking.”
¹

The KGB looked for honest and outgoing young people, preferably with a proletarian background. Vladimir met all these criteria. He was from a working-class family, was a good student and a team leader at his university, and he had solid technical training with a rare specialization in computers. He was a reserve officer (military training was part of the curriculum at MVTU), a good performance athlete, and already a member of Dynamo (a plus, since sports were very much in favor in the KGB as much as in Soviet society at large).

Vladimir was very excited by this job offer even if, at first, he was to work in counterintelligence. An aura of mystery and adventure surrounded the profession of secret services officer, and it was a great honor to be part of those shadowy fighters. He did not accept the offer right away, however. He wanted to consult with Svetlana first. More and more, she was the one making the decisions for the couple. His wife was in heaven with the news. It was so romantic! She had always dreamt of being a spy or a ballet dancer.

On July 9, 1959, engineer Vetrov from the SAM plant wrote his application to the head of the KGB directorate for the Moscow region, Major General Svetlichny M. P. “Please accept my application to attend the KGB school. I will honor the trust placed in me.”
²

Vetrov (second row, second from right) wears a uniform for the first time for reserve officer training at Bauman Institute.

Vetrov’s labor booklet, the genuine one, shows the following note, dated August 20, 1959: “Discharged from current position due to transfer to the Committee for State Security.” The “cover” booklet made by the KGB indicates that he was an employee of the organization called Mail Box 991 for the next three years, making him a senior engineer on June 18, 1960, and terminating him on September 18, 1962, “due to his transfer to another workplace.”
³

Vetrov’s (genuine) labor booklet at the SAM plant shows the following note, dated August 20, 1959: “Discharged from current position due to transfer to the Committee for State Security.”

And thus, in the fall of 1959, as the new university year started, Vladimir embarked on a two-year program at the Dzerzhinsky
⁴
School dedicated to the training of operational personnel. At the time, the institution was headquartered in Bolshoi Kiselny Alley, a fifteen-minute walk from the Vetrovs’ home. Vladimir’s classmates remember a fairly gifted but lazy young man who did not distinguish himself from the rest of the trainees.

After a year, his promising career was threatened to be cut short before it even started. Khrushchev, who initially hoped to reform the KGB, was now thinking of killing the monster he was not sure he could control. After a wave of layoffs in the army, the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) decided to cut down the number of people employed by State security. The envisioned downsizing was so drastic that it was even planned to close the Dzerzhinsky School.

While looking like everyone else with his fedora and his long trench coat, Vetrov is also the typical portrait of a secret agent. This picture was taken when he was a student at the KGB School #101.

Since they were all considered to be young specialists, the trainees could not be thrown out in the street. They were called into a meeting where the situation was made clear; they were asked to leave the program on a volunteer basis if they wished to do so. Out of thirty men or so, only five or six wanted to regain their freedom. Vetrov was not among them because there was a rumor going around that the intelligence service of the KGB, the PGU (First Chief Directorate), would be spared from the downsizing. On the contrary, the PGU was supposedly about to launch an all-out offensive abroad.

The PGU was every KGB member’s dream. Intelligence officers formed an elite caste, the most privileged in Soviet society, because they could go abroad. The difference between those who could “get out” and those who could not was obvious. Not only could they travel, discover how other people live, and broaden their horizons, but one prolonged stay abroad was sufficient to solve all of their everyday life problems. They could buy an apartment, a car, home furnishings, and good clothing for the whole family. A second mission abroad ensured you a comfortable life until you died. And when you worked regularly in the capitalist world, as was the case of intelligence officers and diplomats, you had reached the best possibilities communist society had to offer!

Vetrov had this unique opportunity. His application, along with a few others, was retained by the PGU human resources department. Now he was going to receive more targeted and more advanced training at the KGB Higher School of Intelligence #101, the future Andropov Institute. It was often referred to as “the school in the woods” because it was located in a forest, east of Moscow, past the city of Balashikha. Until the collapse of the USSR, this area was closed to foreigners, and a special permit was required even to go visit Vladimir and Suzdal, jewels of old Russian architecture. This was for good reasons. There was a major missile control center located there, as well as bases and training centers for the KGB elite troops, and many other institutions which were still ultrasecret not that long ago.

The trainees were housed by the school. On Sundays, those who wanted could ask for permission to go to Moscow. The majority of those who came from provincial towns preferred to stay at the school, which did look like a resort. It consisted of attractive multistory wooden cottages in the middle of a pine forest, with paved walkways. It offered bedrooms with twin beds and a cafeteria where food and service were better than in many restaurants of the capital. Likewise, the library was better stocked than most of the major public library branches in Moscow. One could find books there that had been banned because they were considered anti-Soviet or simply “reactionary,” like the works of Nietzsche or Schopenhauer. Foreign journals and newspapers that ordinary Soviet citizens were not allowed to read were also available there.

Here
L’Express
,
Le Monde
,
Time
, and
Spiegel
were part of the curriculum, as were undubbed movies shown every week. Vetrov, who had studied English in middle school, high school, and college, kept it as his elective or “second language,” as the expression goes. From that time on, his “main language” as an operational officer would be French.

Learning a foreign language was the way to gain direct access to the outside world. It meant communicating with foreigners without the help of an interpreter and getting a better sense of the contents of non-Marxist philosophy and history books (not through quotes cleverly put together by critics); it also meant learning directly about international news, not through the deformed, selectively restrictive, and targeted lenses of the Soviet press as represented by
Pravda
or
Izvestia.
Moreover, it was a tool that allowed one to serve the motherland in the entrenched camp of decaying imperialism. It reinforced the ideological indoctrination of the trainees. The curriculum included advanced studies in Marxism-Leninism, critique of the main bourgeois doctrines, and seminars aimed at immunizing against contagious ideas spread by the capitalist, revisionist, leftist, or nationalist ways of thinking.