The Spy Net (25 page)

From everything I had heard of eastern Europe in those days, I was prepared to feel that I should be jumping from the edge of civilisation at the Russian border. The sensation arrived even earlier. At Wirballen, I crossed the border into Lithuania, the most uninteresting country I have ever been in; when I saw the mud in the streets and the huts out of which Kovno is composed, I readily understood the remark which a Pole once made to me during the Lithuanian conflict – that Poland would never bother to seize Lithuania, because it isn’t worth having.

On the other hand, Riga, the capital of Latvia, was quite a city. It was built on the German plan: the dwellings were all large buildings, with a flat of nine or ten rooms to each floor. The streets were wide, and parts of the town closely resembled certain sections of Berlin. However, the best hotel, the Hotel de Rome, where I spent the night, was a great disappointment. I was nearly eaten up by the bedbugs. In the morning, when I approached the desk clerk with a grim look on my face, he smiled serenely, and before I could get a word in, he countered: ‘Yes, it is terrible, I know, but we will never be able to get rid of them until we strip the papers off the walls. It is a souvenir that the
Bolsheviki left us.’ One bright spot I found – a small German restaurant, recommended by Prince K. I had an excellent lunch there; it was the last good meal I was to have for three weeks.

That evening I left for Moscow, and at about 10 p.m. got to the border, where we changed into a Russian train. It was Labour Day; all the cars were decorated with red flags, and the front of the engine carried a huge sickle and hammer, the emblem of the USSR. I was to meet the same colour and the same emblem at every turn during the whole of my stay in Russia.

I was prepared for anything after my experience at the Hotel de Rome, but to my surprise, the train was clean and comfortable. The conductor provided me with tea, piping hot, at regular intervals; this was a privilege, for the few other travellers made their own from the supply of boiling water they got at the stations. Food we carried with us. I had rebelled somewhat at the annoyance of it when I departed from Riga, but I recognised it as a necessity when I saw the food that was on sale at the various stopping-places. I was thankful for the kindly advice and the ample supply of sandwiches which the Riga restaurant owner had supplied me with.

Along the railway I got my first glimpse of Russia; its rolling hills, stretches of forest – birch trees and pines – reminded me of eastern Canada. But here the likeness ceased; typical of Russia alone were the peasants, all dressed alike, dirty and ill-kept, wandering aimlessly up and down the platform, waiting for the great event of the day, the arrival of the train. From time to time one caught glimpses of relics of the old regime: a departed aristocrat’s country mansion crumbling to ruin in a partitioned estate, or in the villages the church with its five minarets, a large one for Christ and four smaller ones for the gospels.

The hot and tiresome journey dragged on for some thirty-six hours, but at last we were in Moscow. From a distance I was dazzled by the sight – the sun beating down on hundreds of golden minarets gave me the impression of an
Arabian Nights
city. At the station, however, the first impression seemed a mirage, a mere vision which faded before the depressing reality of new Russia. The place was packed with humanity, people as usual standing about aimlessly, with apparently no reason for having come there and no reason to go away. In the enclosed space their odour was overpowering. They were like a horde of robots, with no distinctions except of age and size, to tell one from another. Their passivity, their dull lack of expression, their absence of any self-direction, made them seem cut and stamped to pattern by a machine. Not a sign of individuality, of self-respect, or taste, did I see. There was not one white collar or tie in the crowd; I did not, in fact, see one during the whole of my stay in Russia.

Outside the station I hailed a cab-driver, who took me to the Savoy Hotel, reserved for foreign visitors. I soon discovered it to be the only hotel open in Moscow. I was the only guest there. The rooms were clean and comfortable, but terribly expensive. In Russian chervonetz I paid the equivalent of £3 per day for a room, plus £1 for each bath I took; the food, which was very poor, was correspondingly dear. I made a rapid calculation of the cost
per diem
, and resolved to get out of Moscow as quickly as possible, but my resolution was in vain, for it took me three weeks to secure my concession.

I found Krassin, with whom I negotiated, a charming man; he spoke perfect English, and having been the Soviet representative in London before Rakovsky, he was thoroughly acquainted
with trade conditions in England. He had also been employed as an engineer before the war by Siemens-Schuckert in Berlin; it was obviously his experience there which had qualified him so pre-eminently for the post of Trade Commissar which he now occupied.

He quickly agreed to accord me the same terms which he said had been granted the Germans in their concessions: namely, a company was to be formed with sufficient capital for working purposes – in our case, £100,000; half the shares of the company were to be given to the Soviet government; there was to be equal representation on the board of directors, and the chairman, with the casting vote, was to be a Soviet member; the headquarters of the company was to be in Moscow, and the board meetings were to take place there; the working capital of the company was to be deposited in the Russian state bank; the profits were not to be exported.

These terms may have satisfied the Germans, and there was an obvious advantage in having a government partner, who would guarantee to buy and sell to the concessionaire, but I knew my friends would be disappointed; they would never agree to putting their heads in the Soviet mouth in this fashion. As for me, who had had visions of myself as an executive in a large London office handling a flood of Soviet trade, my hopes vanished into thin air.

I smiled somewhat grimly to myself. There I was in Moscow, paying out goodness knows how many chervonetz a day, waiting for the official seal and signature to a concession which I was almost certain my friends would reject. However, there was nothing to do but to remain on for a few more days; I might as
well take back the piece of paper which I had travelled so far to get. At least I was making history, for it was the first trade concession that had ever been granted by the Soviets to a purely British company.

During the period of waiting in Moscow I met two people whom, perhaps, I might not mention, had I not noticed their names of late in a situation which seemed a sardonic echo of my own wasted weeks in Russia. Both were figures in the recent Monkhouse trial, in which several British engineers and employees working for Metropolitan Vickers were tried for sabotage of the machinery in some of the water-power stations which were in the course of construction in Russia. One whom I had known was Anna Sergievna K. I do not deny that a slight chill ran over me when I recalled that she had acted as my secretary while I was in Russia. She was a quiet, reserved, capable woman, an accomplished linguist, and a creature of unlimited energy. I had felt rather absurdly that she was my Soviet chaperon, for she had been recommended to me by one of the staff at the Savoy Hotel, an obvious GPU agent, before whom I had made a careful parade of having nothing to hide. I asked this recommendation as an instance of good faith on my part, and I assumed that my discreet secretary was not without instructions. Yet here she was involved in a situation of more than threatening character. These reversals of fortune have been common in the new Russia from the first; I had no reason to be surprised at all – no reason, that is to say, except the human tendency to regard our own affairs and those of our acquaintances as exempt from dangers which, however regretfully, we accept as probable or inevitable for the rest of mankind.

My other acquaintance in Moscow has suffered the same reversal, but as a foreigner he has been more desperately placed, and his story is marked by a strong ironic quality which makes the remembrance of my conversations with him infinitely pathetic. This was Saunders, an English engineer, to whom I took a letter of introduction from his brother in England. He interested me immensely, for he was one of the few Englishmen who had lived in Russia continuously since before the war. He had been connected with some English Works in Moscow, and had remained through the years of war and revolution to look after their interests, though when I saw him, he was without a job. When I asked him why he did not return to England, I found him possessed with the idea that he was the only Englishman on the spot available for commercial work, and that someday this would infallibly bring him a rich return.

Saunders took me out to his home in the country, about an hour’s journey by train. Here living was cheaper, he informed me, and it was much healthier for his children. Also he had a cottage, whereas in Moscow he would only have been permitted a single room. He was so concerned about his family that I am sure he would never have jeopardised their future by engaging in acts of sabotage; on the contrary, he seemed at the time I saw him painfully anxious not to displease the Bolsheviki, and was obviously afraid to discuss Soviet conditions. I confined myself, therefore, to giving him news of his brother, and to telling him what conditions were like in England, while in my mind there took root the assurance that Soviet Russia opened no future for any Englishman. Ten years and the Monkhouse affair have not altered that conviction.

After two weeks had elapsed, I was glad to get a note from Greenfield, Krassin’s secretary, asking me to call at his office. Without comment, he handed me the concession containing all the terms agreed upon, with the Soviet seal affixed. I accepted it without enthusiasm. Even when one is ‘making history’, as I was doing in gaining this document, one is not always personally exalted. I should have been even less enthusiastic had I realised that even this official, so highly and securely placed, was to be ploughed under by caprices of Soviet fortune. He was a bit of a mystery, however, this Greenfield. Where he got his English name, I do not know; he was probably Grünefeld once, in New York or London. He spoke perfect English. I wished to draw him out on the few occasions I met him, but without success; he knew the value of silence and discretion. It was years afterwards in Paris, when I met a Russian who was well up in Soviet affairs, that I learned his fate through a passing allusion to his name. ‘He was condemned to Siberia,’ was the laconic comment that closed his history. Many a Soviet official has met the same end; even the highest ones were not safe from the eyes and ears of the GPU.

The concession settled, I turned my attention to my other mission, and applied for a return visa, allowing me to proceed via Leningrad. This delayed me another day, in which my nervous tension may be imagined. I was cross-examined for nearly an hour by a GPU official as to why I wanted to go by this route, instead of choosing the shorter one through Riga. It was in some ways a comic experience. Here was I, who had spent hours in my time examining spies, traitors, purveyors of information of all sorts – sitting meekly in the character of a suspect; I actually
began to feel guilty of some crime or other, as people say they do at the sight of a policeman. My positive conviction that the Russian police knew all there was to know of my work in espionage made me even more self-conscious. However, I took a leaf from the book in which both spy and thief are so well versed – the art of innocence – and relied upon blank simplicity to shield my movements and my purpose. Both the address of Prince M.’s father and the necessary password existed in my memory only; nothing in my papers or bags could give me away.

I was therefore, and I repeated it
ad nauseam
, a simple English man of business, who wished to see the sights – no more. My answer did not seem to please my examiner, but eventually he told me that permission would be granted, and that my passport, duly stamped, would be sent to me at my hotel. He dismissed me with an abruptness which I fancied I understood: he had determined to have me watched on the way to Leningrad.

The journey took about twenty hours, but the instant I settled myself in my compartment I realised – with inward chuckles – that it would not be monotonous or dull. The watcher I had expected was cheerfully installed and awaiting me. Most comic of all, from Anglo-Saxon standards of privacy in compartment travel – it was a woman. She was a good-looking brunette of about thirty-five, who opened up conversation with me immediately. She began in excellent German; I found out afterwards that she spoke English and French equally well. Somewhat too carefully, she explained that she had been employed in the Soviet embassy in Berlin, and was on her way to visit friends in Leningrad.

In spite of my amusement, I was on the alert to observe that she plied me with innumerable questions about my trip
to Leningrad, and seemed especially interested in the Berlin White Russian colony. Many of my acquaintances she mentioned by name. I parried with amiable but empty gossip, pretended a vastly greater ignorance than I had, and with every appearance of candour turned my share of the conversation into petitions for information on Russian life, sights, and manners. Apparently my sight-seeing role satisfied her, for after a while she confined herself to telling me the places of interest to visit in Leningrad.

I enjoyed her company; she was both attractive and intelligent, and mistress of a solid fund of interesting information. I smiled as I said goodbye to her. Our roles had been reversed, for it was to her, my quondam examiner, that I am indebted for much that I know of Soviet Russia.

As the train pulled into the city, my first impulse was to make immediately for the address Prince M. had given me, but on reflection I realised that the surveillance over me might be continued; so I decided to find rooms and pretend a preliminary round of sightseeing. The Europaiski Hotel, where I stopped, famous in pre-revolutionary days, was a distinct improvement on the Savoy. The room I occupied had been well kept up, and compared favourably with the best hotels in Europe. The same high prices as in Moscow prevailed, however. As I took my key at the desk, I spied a box of Corona cigars. I had not been able to smoke the insipid Soviet cigarettes, and I was dying for a smoke. ‘How much?’ I asked the desk clerk. ‘A chervonetz [£1] apiece,’ he replied. I succumbed; I had already grown accustomed to the prices. But I smiled ruefully as the cigar crumbled to dust in my hands. It was at least seven years old.