Jim Williams
Anti-Soviet Activities
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Alan Fox for his help and support; Clive Carrington for his knowledge of diamonds; and B.K., for reasons B.K. knows best.
EPIGRAPH
I, with a precision that excludes all possibility of misunderstanding, insist on the necessity for a state in this period, but a state without a police opposed to the people.
PROLOGUE
Our childhood is like our dreams, fractured in our memory, intense but unreal. I remember the Secret Policeman, my father, bending over my truckle bed smiling his affectionate Secret Policeman’s smile. I do not remember his face (though I have photographs, the two that survived the search of our apartment) but his uniform remains: my fingers used to run over the braid and pips of the shoulder boards and touch the collar-tabs of an NKVD general; my nose recalls the wax of his gleaming boots. And what else? He spoke to my mother while I was in the room. A day to remember because something good had happened. He was smiling and full of a policeman’s obscure joy. He said, ‘Lavrenti told me that everything is going to be OK’ — the only words he spoke that I remember. Lavrenti was referred to as Uncle Lavrenti, with a degree of emphasis that meant he was not my uncle but that a good boy should be gifted with such an uncle. One of my photographs includes him. The other is of my father at school, but which of all the faces is his I never could tell. Uncle Lavrenti stands arm in arm with my father, both beaming at the camera. My father is in uniform, Uncle Lavrenti is in white ducks and shirtsleeves and wears a straw panama; and behind them the sun casts long shadows of palm fronds or perhaps ferns: they were at Sochi or some other Black Sea resort. Lavrenti had another name — Beria. He was Stalin’s last police chief after Yagoda and Yezhov had vanished into the execution cellars. Beria himself did not long survive the death of the Great Leader: Khruschev and the rest had him killed to secure their own positions. But that was later. First, in 1953, Uncle Lavrenti had my father shot.
THE BREZHNEV VERSION
‘In our country, rich in resources of all kinds, there could not have been and will not be a situation in which a shortage of any product should exist…. It is now clear why there are interruptions of supplies here and there, why, with our riches and abundance of products, there is a shortage first of one thing then of another. It is these traitors who are responsible for it.’
CHAPTER ONE
There are investigations that begin with a bang. There are others that begin with an unregarded event and ease their way along a path of trivia and routine to expire of boredom. The Sokolskoye Incident was an example of the first. The Great Jewish Antibiotics Ring appeared to be a case of the second, and would have remained so if the MVD Anti-Corruption Squad had not decided to arrest Viktor Gusev.
It was difficult to say when the investigation into the Great Jewish Antibiotics Ring started. For years the shortage of pharmaceutical drugs had been a scandal and there was a common opinion that something ought to be done about it. It might, of course, have been possible to produce more drugs; but that raised difficult questions of the performance of the relevant enterprises and ministries, not to mention the broader issue of the priority of antibiotics production within the current economic plan and the drain on the available resources by the army. On balance it seemed easier and preferable to delve into the black market that had sprung up on the back of the shortage, to break up the rackets and arrest the racketeers — Viktor Gusev, for example.
Within the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB the investigation struggled for a place and was shuttled between the 12th Department, the 10th Direction and the Industrial Security Directorate, all of whom might plausibly be interested in the subject but claimed to be short of resources. The problem was of competition with more glamorous topics such as the meat racket operating out of Kiev and the public scandal of the Moscow housing shortage, which could be discussed now that new blood had taken over the Moscow Party machine.
Colonel Pyotr Andreevitch Kirov became involved in the Great Jewish Antibiotics Ring when his superior, General Rodion Mikhailovitch Grishin summoned him to his office. This was in the aftermath of KGB’s investigation into the Sokolskoye Incident, when Grishin was still relishing his promotion and KGB itself seemed bright with change, if only because the painters were in the building in Dzerzhinsky Square, partition walls were going up and down, the place smelled of paint instead of tobacco, and in a world where that could happen anything was possible. So Grishin laid the file on his desk, which was covered with debris for the occasion of the move into the new office that went with the promotion.
‘It’s really a Fraud Squad case,’ he elaborated casually. He fingered two of his favourite talismans, a water carafe with a Ricard label that he had lifted from a café in Paris, and a photograph of his wife and mother — my spouse and my parent, as he called them with a notional tear in his eye. Grishin often gave the appearance of being an emotional, even a sentimental man. ‘Tread gently,’ he suggested. ‘Let the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the boys from Petrovka take the lead.’
Kirov asked whether he was authorised to intervene in the course of the investigation.
‘Intervene? No, not intervene. This is a regular police matter. Consider your job as liaison.’
‘Keep an eye on them.’
‘If you like,’ Grishin mused in a forgiving way as if Kirov were resisting his intentions. Then he smiled again, cheerful and innocent.
The day that Viktor Gusev was arrested, Kirov slept badly. His dreams were troubled by recollections of his father, about whom he had not consciously thought in years. The day before, he had received a message that an old family friend was sick, perhaps dying. Old friends, old memories; he put the dream down to that. Its echoes were still there when the telephone by his bedside rang and he found Bogdanov on the line, saying, ‘The Great Jewish Antibiotics Ring. It’s going live. Bakradze is about to make an arrest.’
Bakradze was an investigator with the Public Prosecutor’s Office, a young, eager lawyer. Bogdanov hated all indirectness and loathed him. But he gave the appearance of being honest and co-operative and so far Kirov had taken him at face value. It was even possible to like him.
‘Where are you? he asked Bogdanov.
‘At the Centre. I got a call from my man at Pushkin Street, who swears he saw our friend himself there at four in the morning, finalising his arrangements with Petrovka for a CID squad to do a dawn raid and pick up some character name of Gusev.’
Kirov did not recognise the name.
‘I’m not surprised. I’m asking myself the same question: how is it that after months of silence we find ourselves with a Gusev? You’ve never heard of one; I’ve never beard of one. Only Bakradze, who’s supposed to tell us about these things, has heard of one.’ After a pause, which used up the remains of his exasperation, Bogdanov asked, ‘What do you want to do?’
‘Drive here. Collect me and we’ll pay them a visit.’
Twenty minutes later Bogdanov was at the door, lounging against the jamb, thin and lugubrious, in a worn fur cap and leather greatcoat, rubbing his finger against his nose in one of the petty criminal gestures he had acquired from the rubbish end of the business. He slipped through the open door and took a position by the coffee jug, batting his arms against his sides and throwing off a cold lopsided grin. ‘Bloody freezing, huh? What a morning for a raid! Who needs it, huh?’ Misery made him cheerful. ‘Sod them all, what do you say?’