The two families had come that evening for the gala opening of Arkadi Raikin’s new show at the Rossiya Hotel in Moscow.
‘Yes, maybe.’ Her husband spoke without looking round at her. ‘The disguises certainly are good.’ Yuri Andropov was gazing intently at the stage where a few minutes before the comedian had undergone one of his instant character transformations and he seemed to be still trying to fathom the trick, the mechanics behind the comedian’s sudden and complete changes of identity.
‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘Arkadi Raikin — he’s not bad at all. But doesn’t he sometimes overdo it a bit? No? What the Americans would call an “old Vaudeville Ham”?’
Yuri Andropov took off his spectacles, blinked, rubbed the corners of his eyes vigorously between thumb and forefinger. He was a tall, heavily built man with a generous flow of lightly silvered hair going straight back from his forehead, an equally straight and forceful nose, a perfectly bowed upper lip matched by a lower one that turned outwards gently, invitingly, like a sensualist’s. Only his eyes betrayed his substantial bearing: they were very small, the lids narrowed together — almost a deformity in the generally expansive context. There was nothing generous here: care and suspicion were the only spectators at these windows of the soul.
‘What do you know about American Vaudeville, Tata?’ his daughter Yelena said. ‘Why should there be anything American about Arkadi Raikin?’ She laughed. Yet Yuri Andropov did know about such things. Long before he had hoped for a theatrical career and then something technical with Mosfilm. But neither idea had borne fruit. Instead, at 57, he had done well elsewhere.
He was head of the KGB.
He was therefore one of the very few people in Moscow who could afford to openly criticise Arkadi Raikin by comparing him to an ‘old Vaudeville Ham’. If Arkadi Raikin had put himself beyond reproach through laughter, so too had Yuri Andropov through fear.
‘What do you think?’ Yuri Andropov turned to his son-in-law. ‘Do you really think he’s as good as all that? You ought to know in your job. You were in America too last year. Of course you’re aware of his background, aren’t you?’
It was a leading question, among a million others that had come from the same source over the years. The wrong answer could mean nothing more than a delayed promotion, a drop in salary, a change of job, a smaller apartment, a move to a provincial town. But it could lead to worse: a labour camp, a hospital ward, an asylum for the sane; the wrong grammar here could make you a non-person overnight. All this change of fortune lay within Yuri Andropov’s gift, and he was a generous man. His son-in-law knew these things well and he was relieved in the end that he did not have to give any full reply for just then an aide came in behind them, reminding Yuri Andropov of some pressing business elsewhere in the huge hotel.
‘My appointment. You’ll forgive me.’ Andropov stood up and bowed round at his family as though he were a courtier and not a father. ‘I’ll probably be back late. Don’t wait up.’
Accompanied by two aides, his personal assistant and a bodyguard, Yuri Andropov walked briskly along a deserted corridor leading from the hall towards the central courtyard of the hotel. It was a few minutes to nine. For the moment everyone in the hotel was either trying to eat or watching Arkadi Raikin. There must have been more than 5000 people in the huge building. But here in this long corridor there was nobody and no sound.
At the end of the passageway one of the many KGB men permanently attached to the hotel opened the door out into the courtyard for them like a dumb waiter. The group passed through into the chilling April cold, the air lying brutally about their faces for a moment before they entered the Presidential Wing, the twenty-three storey tower that rose from the middle of the hotel. This building had been made to accommodate important state guests in a number of exclusively furnished suites. But even now, nearly twenty years after the construction of the Rossiya had begun, not all of these luxurious boltholes had been finally completed.
The suite on the 19th floor where they met that night was one such. It had never been completed at all. The rooms were nude: the walls and ceilings were completely bare; the central conference table was enclosed by a membrane of soundproofing material, like a huge barrage balloon. There were no telephones, light fixtures or power points — illumination being supplied by a series of freestanding battery lamps. The floor had never been laid and was raised up now, on open joists, in a series of wooden duckboards a foot above its true level. The furnishings were minimal and spartan, without drawers or any other appendages, and cast in solid steel. Nothing could be concealed here anywhere.
This suite — one of two in the tower (the other was for guests, when they had such) — was permanently reserved by the KGB as office space outside their various official headquarters where unacknowledged business might be conducted. And tonight was just such a case — a meeting between Andropov and the heads of his five Chief Directorates. They were the only two areas in the hotel where no electronic eavesdropping equipment had been installed and, just as importantly, where it could, literally, be seen that none ever was.
The reasons for this isolated choice were several. Here the five KGB Directorates, each intensely jealous of the others’ place and power in the overall hierarchy of the organisation, could meet secretly and speak openly; for there were no minutes kept, no records of any sort. The suite was a clearing-house for misunderstandings, budding antagonisms, bureaucratic rivalries — far from the centres of that bureaucracy in Dzerzhinsky Square and elsewhere. It was also a place to discuss future policy and for Andropov to try and glean some true measure of past mistakes from his five chiefs. It was a think-tank, completely isolated, lurking high in the freezing weather above Red Square, where the behaviour of more than 300,000 KGB employees could be studied in the long term, without any one of those people having an opportunity to study their masters in return.
And that was the most important point in the present circumstances. Yuri Andropov and his five directors had come to this place at the start of 1971 in order to discuss, and be able to continue to discuss in the utmost privacy, the most serious ideological threat to the Soviet Union since Trotsky’s deviations nearly fifty years before.
In November of the previous year, the KGB Resident at the Embassy in London had given Andropov a confidential report on the matter — mere outlines, but with some quite conclusive, though impersonal, evidence. The Resident had returned to London charged with pursuing the matter but the few trails had by then gone quite cold: a hotel porter had disappeared, the address on a piece of paper had become an empty apartment, the tenants so far untraced. The real trail, through which the whole thing had come to light, was impossible to resuscitate: crossed lines on the Resident’s home telephone one evening in Highgate when he had broken in on a long conversation in Russian. Through an astounding electronic and professional error, he had found himself listening to the technical staff of a British counter-espionage section, incarcerated in some basement telephone exchange, reflecting on the strange dialogue they had all of them just heard: the British had been monitoring the same mysterious source.
But the Resident had clearly established one fact, given actual foundation at last to rumours that had come and, thankfully, gone over the years. He had confirmed now, without question, one of the worst and oldest fears of the KGB, and before that the NKVD and GPU, something which went back, indeed, to the earliest days of the revolution in 1917: there was within their organisation another and far more secret group; the nucleus of an alternative KGB, and therefore, potentially, of alternative government in the Soviet Union — a clandestine Directorate as Yuri Andropov had come to see it, which must logically then be complete with its own Chief, deputies, foreign Residents, couriers, counter-intelligence and internal security operatives: its own impenetrable cells and communication arrangements, its own fanatical loyalties and carefully prepared objectives. And this was the worst thing to emerge from the evidence: although they had no precise knowledge of what its objectives were it was quite clear from the overheard telephone conversation in London that the group was politically orientated towards democratic rather than dictatorial socialism. Thus further supposition was not difficult: ‘Communism with a human face’, as the journalists had it. Yuri Andropov could almost exactly visualise Time magazine’s description of this counter-revolution if it ever came to light: ‘… It was a move in the direction of a more human brand of Marxism, towards one of its happier variants, that had in the past found favour among so many deviants in the movement, from Rosa Luxemburg to those who perished in the Prague Spring.’