Naturally Kenneth Lindblom was thoroughly searched at the port. Naturally he had to part with the photos of the blue, black and white flag, and a whole shipload of passengers had to wait while his interview with Heinz Valk was listened to, in an office which was assigned for such purposes. In the end they didn’t take that from him, but then it wasn’t so significant without the photographs. In the ship’s bar he ordered brandy instead of champagne. Two brandies. It had been one of those days.
Meanwhile, Major Vinkel was sitting lost in thought.
He’d long since suspected that those guys with the banners weren’t as innocent as they appeared, but he hadn’t suspected that there could be a thread leading directly from them to foreign intelligence agencies (who else could be behind all this?). He wasn’t as paranoid as his comrades in Moscow who, to put it figuratively, saw the long arm of the CIA behind every sloppily tied Pioneer neckerchief. But then nor was he as naïve as some of that new lot in the Party Central Committee who thought that letting critically minded poets go on foreign trips presented absolutely no danger to the socialist order, rather that it showed the Party in a better light because it was open to rational dialogue. Major Vinkel knew very well that every one of us was a soldier on the battlefield of an information war, and that in the end the outcome of the war would not be decided by the number of tanks or nuclear warheads, but by the strength of the trenches which were dug into people’s minds – although he also had to concede that the ideological work they’d been doing for a couple of decades now hadn’t produced the expected results. Kryuchkov had visited from Moscow, lectured the locals, made a real dog’s dinner of things, and now they had to lap up the consequences. How could the people in Moscow not understand that all that stuff was grist for the Americans’ mill? If you really want to tighten the screws, then give us a decent screwdriver to do it with, damn it!
In general, Vinkel favoured a fair but firm approach. He didn’t do the interrogations himself, as he knew that he was likely to fly off the handle and start shouting at the suspect. For that same reason, they didn’t tend to let him report to the senior bosses. But he had no equal when it came to planning, analysis and coordination of operations. He knew that himself. And as a professional in his field he could appreciate how well his colleagues handled the interrogations. Take for example Yevstigneyev, or now that Särg too, whom Fyodor Kuzmich had assigned to help him from the sixth department, which investigated economic crimes. They knew how to talk to suspects calmly and patiently – not like Ots or Zhukov, who would always resort to harsher methods too quickly, such as, for example, dispatching suspects to Seewald mental hospital for electric shock treatment. In Vinkel’s view those kinds of tactics were tantamount to admitting defeat, but then he wasn’t in the habit of criticising his juniors if there was no absolute need to. If the desired results were not achieved, for example… An American president had once said that he who can, does, and he who cannot, teaches. Those Americans had hit the nail right on the head on that point, at least.
Chapter 9
It’s hard to say how many of us had one of those people who was prone to corpulence but otherwise in good shape situated somewhere on the outer edges of our social circle, but it’s safe to say that plenty of us did. The kind of person you might meet at a distant relative’s wedding and talk to at length about fishing, or at some garden party, where he somehow popped up quite unexpectedly, but was very welcome because of his barbecue skills. Or because he could expertly explain why the Zhiguli 07 was a significantly better car than the 05. Some of them might have sailed for a hobby, or gone with their wives to the Sõprus cinema, followed by Gloria restaurant. Because they had their lives to live as well, did they not? They somehow had to exist in the same world as the rest of us – to eat, love, sleep and shit. To yearn and to fear. But where did they come from? How did they explain to themselves who they were, and justify what they did? Surely they had to explain it in some way? A more disturbing question is what these people would have done if our history had turned out differently, more happily. The majority of them would still have been here somewhere, wouldn’t they? It can’t have been that the Soviet system, which held so many people in fear, could have survived for so long just because a sufficient number of our fellow citizens were moral scum, cynics, sadists and dregs of society, who desired nothing more than to cut their betters down to size. Because it’s surely not possible that those people who had a much better idea of what was going on, certainly more than an orangutan’s inkling, could have seriously believed what was written in the textbooks of scientific communism.
Or did they largely mix with their own kind? Believing that they were somehow cut from a better cloth. They probably had neighbours, but not friends? Perhaps they were proud of their own professionalism and thought that even if the system which they were helping to keep afloat was not ideal, it was at least preferable to the chaos which would inevitably ensue if it were not for them? Or maybe it was all a kind of rough sport for them, a chess game against invisible opponents, with human fates at stake instead of chess pieces. Or were they really of the view that the rulers of this world were incorrigible brutes and pigs, much the same wherever you went, and that it was a mistake to believe that some leaders could be better than others according to some kind of objective principle: that was just the honeytongued propaganda of the enemy. The Russian authorities, which have always brazenly plundered the country’s riches, silencing any opposition with a heavy blunt object, have systematically tried to convince their smarter citizens of that point, and they do so to this day. Everyone else is at it, so why not me too, or so the logic goes. And if it repeatedly proves necessary to slam some confused citizen’s fingers in the desk drawer, it might not be pretty, but there’s nothing else for it. Could it even be that when a security operative gives up some part of his humanity in the name of the common good, he is making a tough but benevolent sacrifice which releases him from any higher-order responsibility?
Or maybe they didn’t give it much thought so long as they could keep their cosy jobs and put bread on the table. I don’t know.
Unlike many of my older colleagues my encounters with the KGB were only fleeting. They tried to recruit me a couple of times at university. One time I expressed myself a little too frankly to my fellow students and one of them reported me, so I was invited to the Komsomol Committee where I was presented with various denunciatory letters, including from people whom I’d considered to be friends. But I was already expecting that, since quite a few of them had come to see me about it beforehand. They told me that they’d been forced into it, but that they’d tried to write in such a way that nothing too bad would come of it. Others kept quiet. One of them refused to write anything, although he didn’t tell me that himself; I found out later from other sources. Maybe because the person who reported on me was his roommate. I was seriously afraid, because the man who conducted the correctional discussion with me was known to be connected to the KGB. Although it seemed that my case was initially just an internal matter for the university, and my academic supervisor stood up for me. At that time our department was headed by a very elderly Jewish professor who had spent her best years in a Stalinist labour camp, where she’d been sent after the regime had executed her first husband. He was a Japanese communist who had somehow ended up in the workers’ paradise and was naturally accused of being a spy by the paranoid Soviet authorities. By now she’d remarried and after that incident I started to be a frequent guest at her pleasant home; I still have some of the old editions of Japanese classics which she gave me. But that’s another story. The KGB recruiters wouldn’t leave me in peace, and I had to endure a couple more conversations like that during my university years. The last one to try was someone who introduced himself as Valent Kirilovich (name unchanged) from the KGB headquarters on Liteyniy Avenue in Leningrad, who had an intellectual demeanour and an athletic build. In the end he had to content himself with me writing down his phone number and promising that I would call if I ever felt like talking. Of course we both knew I wouldn’t. I only saw him once after that, when Rosita and I were travelling by metro in St Petersburg (we were not yet married, but she already knew all these stories). We were sitting facing the doors and there he was, boarding at some station somewhere in the middle of our journey, and then standing at the end of the carriage. I tried not to look in his direction. After a couple of stops he got off.