The evening was a success. Alexei loved ballet, and he and Mervyn had a friendly conversation during the interval, as the more philistine Vadim hovered around the buffet, looking at girls. Alexei began calling Mervyn regularly, inviting him out to dinner at the Aragvi, at the Baku, the Metropole Hotel, the National Hotel- the finest restaurants Moscow could offer. Alexei had money, and he had some mysterious special relationship with the mâitres d’hðtel of the city, booking at short notice, always welcomed with an obsequious smile and shown to a good table or private room.
Alexei was more forward than Vadim in conversation, more overtly political, less chummy. He never spoke of women, and drank in moderation. Alexei expressed interest in Mervyn’s childhood, his background, but Mervyn found from his trite responses that he could not conceive of poverty, or class, beyond Marxist-Leninist platitudes. An irony: Alexei, the Soviet champion of the international working class, himself from a privileged élite, and Mervyn, a naïve but sincere British patriot, profoundly anti-Communist, yet in Marxist terms a natural revolutionary.
Over one of their ever more frequent dinners, Mervyn and Alexei got on to the subject of the strict visa regime, surveillance and spies. They were at the National Hotel, a favourite watering hole of the capital’s beau monde for the best part of the century. Alexei remarked that the Soviet Union had to be very careful of foreign spies. Mervyn, perhaps to prove that he wasn’t one of ‘them’, to neutralize the implicit suspicion, jokingly told Alexei that it was a regular source of amusement at the embassy that there was a goons’ booth under the Bolshoi Kamenny Bridge, just round the corner from the embassy, where KGB men would play dominoes while waiting to be called out.
Alexei listened with interest, suddenly even more serious, carefully questioning Mervyn on where the booth was. After dinner he insisted that they drive under the bridge to take a look. Perhaps sensing Mervyn’s discomfort, Alexei made a disparaging remark about the work of MI5 and MI6, as though to suggest that if Mervyn were on the payroll he would know about it. Mervyn didn’t argue with him.
When Mervyn drove past the bridge a few days later he noticed that the booth and the goons were gone.
Vadim arranged another evening at his uncle’s dacha. As before, they went in a ZiL, but this time Vadim had brought along a ski instructor friend and three plump but lively girls. They went cross-country skiing at night among the pines, ungainly Mervyn falling frequently into snow banks as the girls giggled. They warmed up with vodka in front of the fireplace, and then retired upstairs with their respective girls. Mervyn’s girl was large and, he thought, on the old side. But she seemed willing enough to play the role of his bed mate for the night, and it would have been rude to refuse.
Mervyn and Alexei sat in a private room at the Aragvi, well into the Tsinandali wine. On the table in front of them were the ruins of a gigantic meal of lamb kebabs, green bean lobio and khatchapuri cheese bread. Alexei was, for once, in an expansive mood, striking the avuncular tone he sometimes used with Mervyn. He had decided to take a more active interest in Mervyn’s career, he announced. Would Mervyn like to do some travelling? If so, where? Mervyn, delighted, unthinkingly said Mongolia. Not possible, said Alexei. How about somewhere in the Soviet Union? Mervyn suggested Siberia. Alexei was enthusiastic. The great Bratsk Dam, perhaps? Lake Baikal? Mervyn was thrilled and agreed immediately. They drank a toast to seal the bargain.
At what point did Mervyn realize that he was getting in too deep? He may have been naïve, but surely not that naive. Alexei’s KGB connections were becoming increasingly obvious – the disparaging remarks about British intelligence, the mysterious and prompt disappearance of the domino-playing ‘goons’ under the bridge, the leading questions about Mervyn’s politics. It was surely blindingly obvious to Mervyn that he was being recruited.
I think the truth is that they never really understood each other. Alexei’s dogma prevented him from seeing the deeprooted patriotism of Mervyn’s class and generation, who considered it the height of bad taste to leave a cinema before ‘God Save the King’ was over. And Mervyn’s vanity got in the way of ever seriously questioning why it was that Alexei was courting him, an obscure research student, so assiduously, spending so much money and time. I am quite sure that Mervyn knew he was flirting with the KGB. What he didn’t know was just what a dangerous game that could prove to be. Even as he agreed to the Siberia trip, he must have strongly suspected that some time, sooner or later, he would be asked to pay the bill. But adventurousness – again, that now longburied adventurousness – won out. Whatever happened, it would be exciting. And wasn’t excitement exactly what he had come to Russia to find?
Flying over Siberia at night, in winter, there is an eerie sense of having flown off the edge of the world. The dreamscape of snow-covered forests below seems to stretch black and unbroken not just to the horizon but beyond, for ever. When I visited Baikal in 1995, en route to Mongolia – which my father never did get to see – I flew in a tiny Soviet aeroplane, a vintage An-24 which must have begun its long career in my father’s day. It lurched in the slipstream, the roar of the propellers drowning out conversation as we flew on into the night, the light dying behind us in the west.
Solzhenitsyn named the network of prison camps which stretched across the Soviet Union the Gulag Archipelago. But in truth all of Russia is an archipelago, a string of isolated islands of warmth and light strung out in a hostile sea of emptiness. Somewhere in this very vastness of Russia lies one key to the Russian experience. The vagueness and fatalism born of living in a land which once took half a year to cross; a chronic resignation before the whims of authority born of the historic impossibility of communicating with the outposts of such an ungovernably huge empire. When I read of Peter the Great’s famous ukaz (decree) angrily ordering his citizens to obey all previous ukazy, I pictured him as a mad radio operator sending indignant messages into space, and receiving only faint cosmic echoes in reply.
Phone lines, satellite TV and Aeroflot appear to have brought Russia closer together, but in some ways electronic communications only serve to deepen the sense of uncrossable distance. Russia remains the largest country in the world; even after the loss of 17 per cent of its territory after the fall of the Soviet Union, it still spans eleven time zones. A former State TV cameraman once told me that the television signal of Vremya, the Soviet nightly news program me, had to be repeatedly bounced off the stratosphere to compensate for the seventy-degree curvature of the earth between Moscow and the far-eastern extremity of the country at Chukotka. By the mid-1990s one could easily direct-dial the Pacific coastal regions of Kamchatka or Magadan, but the time difference was almost the same as to New York. The final section of highway linking European Russia to the Far East was completed only in 2002 – before that hundreds of miles of makeshift road ran upon the ice of the frozen Amur River, and were passable only in winter.
No wonder, then, that most of those born to life in these great, empty spaces grow up with an instinctive sense of helplessness in the face of the impossible physical realities which define their lives. These physical limitations seem to make the constraints of human making all the easier to accept. ‘God is high up and the Tsar is far,’ goes the old Russian saying, and it could be no coincidence that one of the central teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church was of smireniye, or submission to the burden the Lord has given believers to bear. The combined hostility of distance and climate seems to conspire to wither the spirit and humble the ambition of all but the strongest. Anton Chekhov caught this ennui in his Three Sisters, a study of three young women crushed by provincial isolation, their youthful hopes and spirit slowly but inexorably extinguished by Russia’s infinite inertia. Even life in Moscow, where the sophisticated élite is cocooned from the isolation and medieval darkness of the village, seems defined in a powerful but intangible way by the greatness of the land that surrounds it, just as life on board ship is pervaded by a knowledge of the deep, cold sea all around.