Yeltsin rambles now, about his desire to be forgiven for not fulfilling some of the hopes of the Russian people; of the huge difficulties he’d faced in taking the leap from a grey, stagnating, totalitarian past into a bright, rich and civilised future in one go.
‘Today it is important for me to tell you the following,’ he says. ‘I also experienced the pain which each of you experienced. I experienced it in my heart, with sleepless nights, agonising over what needed to be done to ensure that people lived more easily and better, if only a little.’
Dimly, from outside the dacha, the muffled sound of a car starting its engine filters through the falling snow and the forest’s trees. And then another follows, and another, one by one and slowly, like the staggered start to a long cross-country race.
‘Everyone now goes to Moscow,’ Nana remarks. ‘To pay homage to Yeltsin’s heir.’
Finn pours himself another brandy.
‘So,’ Finn says, ‘that’s it, then. A civilised, voluntary handover of power from one president of Russia to another,’ he echoes Yeltsin’s words. ‘In other words, Putin gets to be president if he gives Yeltsin immunity from prosecution.’
We look at the sick man on television like awestruck children.
‘I am leaving,’ Yeltsin continues. ‘I have done everything I can. I am not leaving because of my health, but because of all the problems taken together. A new generation is taking my place, a generation of those who can do more, and do it better. In accordance with the constitution, as I go into retirement, I have signed a decree entrusting the duties of President of Russia to Prime Minister Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
‘For the next three months, again in accordance with the constitution, he will be head of state. Presidential elections will be held in three months. I have always had confidence in the amazing wisdom of Russian citizens. Therefore, I have no doubt what choice you will make at the end of March 2000.’
This bitter flattery of Yeltsin’s to deceive the Russian people, this endorsement of the man who has, as Finn predicts, given him immunity from prosecution, is the real beginning of the new era when Yeltsin’s attempts to lead Russia to democracy are finally abandoned.
‘In saying farewell, I wish to say to each of you the following,’ Yeltsin continues. ‘Be happy. You deserve happiness. You deserve happiness and peace. Happy New Year, happy new century, my dear people.’
Before the national anthem has finished there is the sound of more official cars crunching across the snow towards the main road to Moscow.
And that is how, on New Year’s Eve in 2000, we Russians learned we had a new president. Vladimir Putin, only the second KGB boss after Yuri Andropov to achieve this, slips quietly into power. But this time, unlike back then, it takes place in our bright, new, democratic Russia.
7
FINN GETS UP, walks over to the window, stretches, and looks out.
‘So they’re all leaving for the city,’ he says. ‘I suppose I should hurry along to the embassy like a good boy too. They’ll want to code a special British welcome to the new chief.’
He pauses by the window and carries on looking out at the heavy snow falling in the pitch darkness and lit only by the porch light. The track from the dacha is always kept clear and the road out to the motorway into Moscow is open even in extreme conditions. I watch him watching the red tail-lights streaming towards the motorway.
‘Why would anyone want to leave a little wooden house in the forest, with a warm fire blazing inside, to go to the city on New Year’s Eve?’ Nana asks him. She approaches Finn to put a hand on his arm.
‘Typical bloody Russians,’ Finn says to her and forces a smile. ‘Why do you always choose our holidays to change the world? Why don’t you use your own bloody holidays?’
‘Telephone them at the embassy,’ Nana urges him. ‘Say you’re sick. Say you’ve been poisoned,’ she giggles.
We are always joking about poisoning Finn, Nana and I, ever since he’d told us he’d been warned by the embassy to be on his guard against it. Now, it seems like a bad joke. But back then, there was still some light in the East, as Finn put it. I had taught Nana the English words, ‘Doing him in’, and she would go around the dacha when Finn was staying, muttering about ‘doing him in’ to his face, and cackling loudly.
But the idea of Finn being poisoned seemed to have lodged itself in the mind of Finn’s station head at the embassy.
‘I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t see this girl Anna,’ Tom, Finn’s station head, had told him.
‘OK, Tom.’
‘In fact, it might be useful if you do. If we can learn something from it. We’re trying to get a profile on her for you. She’s new, she’s young, no record, but she’s straight out of the Forest, we know that much.’
Tom thought for a moment.
‘Only thing is, what if they grab you, Finn, when you’re in Barvikha? Poison you, and you spill out all our lovely secrets?’
‘I’ll eat only off Anna’s plate,’ Finn told him.
‘We’ll have a watch on you, of course, but we can’t follow you in there.’
‘I’ll wave from the end of the road every hour.’
‘Just remember, Finn. You’re supposed to be tapping her, not the other way round.’
‘Oh, don’t worry. I’ll tap her all right,’ Finn said, but this rare crude allusion was lost on his boss.
In retrospect, Finn and I saw the window that had briefly opened for us to be together in the year leading up to the millennium as one of those fleeting moments in history when two opposing sides seem temporarily to be struck with amnesia about why they are fighting.
The British would never have allowed Finn to come on to KGB territory, either before that brief historical moment at the end of Yeltsin’s presidency or after it. The end of the Yeltsin era, the final years of the 1990s, opened the window to our relationship for a camera-flash instant, before it was slammed shut again under Putin. At any other time, we would have seized Finn immediately to suck out the marrow of his professional life, before handing him back–empty, soul-destroyed, useless–in exchange for some similar unfortunate from our side whom the British possessed.
Our luck–Finn’s and mine–was to benefit from that moment when history paused, like the crest of a wave, before gathering its force to move on again.
‘It’s a moment,’ Finn once said, ‘like the one in the First World War when British and German troops stopped killing each other for a day and played football instead.’
Finn and I took advantage of the moment given to us.
One of our early meetings was at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow where Finn was particularly fascinated by Petrov-Vodkin’s painting, ‘The Bathing of a Red Horse’.
We walked around the gallery together until we stopped at this painting. Both Finn and I noticed the man in a black fur hat and black coat and the woman wearing a rabbit-skin hat and a thick Scandinavian herringbone coat. They were behind us, apparently looking at other works on the walls, but not really seeing what they were looking at.
‘Guess which one of them is your side,’ Finn said and grinned at me. ‘Or do you know?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said.
‘Come on, Anna.’ Finn grinned more broadly at me. ‘I bet you a thousand roubles the man’s one of ours.’
Even though Finn and I had already openly discussed our own roles in this seduction, I still tried to maintain the pretence that we had met casually, that our affair had nothing to do with anyone but us.
As Second Secretary for Trade and Investment, Finn had long been marked down by us as a member of the Service. He’d been in Moscow too long and he practically had ‘spy’ written all over him. He would joke in public about his job, a ruse he called a double bluff and which, admittedly, confused us for a while. In fact, it was only when, in late November 1998, we eavesdropped on a recording of his station head telling him to stop joking about being a spy that we knew he was a spy.