Moscow had changed almost unrecognizably since I had last visited; there was a palpable sense that the old order, which had once seemed so permanent, was disintegrating. Traffic police seemed powerless to stop motorists from executing illegal U-turns; everyone roundly ignored the official prohibition on using private cars as taxis. The black-market exchange rate was ten times the official one, making me rich overnight. True, there wasn’t much to buy, but I did clean out the Melodiya record shop on the new Arbat of every classical disc they had for a total of twenty pounds, and staggered home with parcels of art books bought for pennies at the Tretyakov gallery shop. The newly opened McDonald’s on Pushkin Square, the first in the Soviet Union, had sent the embassy some vouchers for free Big Macs, so one lunchtime some British colleagues and I commandeered the ambassador’s Rolls-Royce and trundled over to get some lunch. The line of Russians waiting patiently for their first taste of the West snaked down the street. Stepping out of the Rolls we marched straight in, waving our vouchers and our foreignness as selfevident marks of privilege. I’m not proud of it now, but Moscow made me feel, for the first time in my life, flushed with cash, cool and ineffably superior.
Everything about Moscow still seemed dilapidated and terminally shoddy: people’s clothes and shoes were shoddy; so were the cars and the electrical goods and the bus tickets and the buses. But there was a new hope for the future in anyone who was young and intelligent. Friends took me to a history lecture by Yury Afanasiyev, my mother’s old classmate, who spoke about Stalinism for two hours to a huge hall packed to bursting. The fact that he was addressing a taboo subject so openly seemed intoxicating. The audience wrote questions on slips of paper and passed them to the speaker in a constant stream after the lecture, in approved Soviet style, and the meeting broke up only when someone came to warn them that it was nearly time for the last bus. There was a hunger for truth among these people which impressed me profoundly supported by a powerful faith that somehow the truth would make them free. I found my new Soviet friends sentimental and naïve, but there was no mistaking their earnestness, and their conviction that, as Solzhenitsyn had exhorted, they should not live by lies any longer.
Five years later I passed once again through the mirror into Russia via the infinitely depressing half-gloom of Sheremetyevo Airport – this time not as a visitor but to start a new life. The old smell of Soviet detergent and mouldy heating was still there, remembered from childhood trips. But much else had changed. Instead of empty, echoing corridors and stern-faced border guards, I found myself in the middle of a throng of hustling taxi-drivers. Garish hoardings advertised imported beer and More cigarettes. Beefy female shuttle traders pushed past me, hauling massive bags full of coats and boots bought on shopping sprees in Dubai and Istanbul. I was picked out from the serum by Viktor, a Moscow Times driver, who bundled me into his ageing Lada and steered it through the weaving traffic of Leningradsky Prospekt.
The overcast sky was the colour of smoke, and the watery late-winter light washed the city in pale grey. On either side of the road lines of apartment blocks marched out towards a horizon of billowing chimneys and haze. Heavy-set buses trundled along, cowlings flapping, belching black exhaust. At the edges of the road huddles of pedestrians waited to cross the Prospekt’s forbidding sixteen lanes. Even as we approached the centre of the city, there was still something of the steppe in these great windblown spaces.
It must have been very different when my father first arrived in Russia. The city’s soul was swelling with victory and pride, not deflating in exhaustion. The Moscow he knew was spick and span, the carefully planned capital of an expanding empire. It was a controlled, oppressive place, not the teeming mayhem into which it was to descend after the Soviet Union collapsed. And emotionally, for my father, the distance was greater. For a generation unused to travel, Russia might as well have been on a different planet. But Mervyn could not have been happier. He had finally loosed himself from his home and was drifting towards a place which would fit him.
The time and city were pregnant with pitfalls for a young man in love with Russia and blessed, or cursed, with a strong wayward streak. The Cold War was approaching its height. Soviet tanks had recently crushed the Hungarian Rising and there was no doubt in the minds of many in the West that it was the ambition of Socialism to conquer the earth. It was a time when the world was cleanly divided according to moral absolutes, when the opposing teams wore different coloured jerseys and the nuclear handicaps were listed on the programme.
It’s hard, now, to imagine the thrill and the mystery of living in the secretive capital of a parallel, hostile world. The Moscow my father knew is separated from the Russia in which I lived not just by half a lifetime but by a seismic shift of history. My father’s generation was defined by a bitter ideological divide which ran across the world, and he, for reasons that I only began to understand when I went to live in Russia myself thirty years later, did everything in his power to live on the other side of that divide. To the embassy cold warriors with whom he worked, if not to Mervyn himself, Moscow was the heart of all the darkness in the world.
There is a photograph of my father I had never seen until he handed me a copy of his memoirs, without comment, on the stairs of our London house late in 1999, before turning away with an embarrassed smile and retreating back into his study. It is a photograph of a surprisingly handsome young man, his tie and collar slightly askew, looking dreamily and slightly selfconsciously over the photographer’s shoulder as he stands on the balcony of the diplomatic block of flats on Sadovaya Samotechnaya Street – known to its inmates then, as now, as ‘Sad-Sam’ – some time in the early autumn of 1958. He is staring into the middle distance over the Garden Ring – not yet a choking artery of solid traffic – and he seems a serious fellow, eager to please, a little unsure of himself. The photo was taken shortly after he arrived in Moscow. He was twentyseven years old, had a promising academic career ahead of him, and was delighted to be in the Soviet Union. The great adventure of his life was beginning.
Mervyn’s life was comfortable – or, by Soviet standards, positively luxurious. He shared the three-room apartment at Sad-Sam with another young embassy staffer, Robert Longmire. The power plugs and appliances were imported from England, and the telephone was marked ‘Speech on this line is NOT SECURE’. They had a lackadaisical cleaning lady called Lena and a Siberian cat called Shura, and stocked up on home comforts like whisky and digestive biscuits at the embassy’s little commissariat shop. The dinner suit Mervyn had bought when he went up to Oxford was in constant use for diplomatic cocktail parties, which he found insufferably dreary.
My father may have been physically in Moscow, but he quickly found that he and his fellow foreigners were forced to live separate lives from the Russians who surrounded them. His foreign accent and clothes would raise frank alarm and wonder among shop cashiers and tram passengers. Contacting his old friends from the festival was unthinkably dangerous, not for Mervyn but for them. His every move was monitored by gangs of KGB plain-clothes officers – dubbed ‘goons’ by the young diplomats, after the thugs of contemporary American gangster films – who trailed him on his nocturnal wanderings around the Boulevard ring. Mervyn invented games to play with his minders. One of his favourites was to break into a run on a crowded street, and glance backwards to see who also started running. On the Metro, Mervyn, in a flippant mood, once went up to a KGB watcher he recognized and said, ‘How many summers, how many winters?’, the standard greeting for those one has not seen for a long time. The man remained absolutely expressionless and said nothing. The KGB, to Mervyn, was no more than a slightly menacing prop in his young man’s world of adventure.