Anti-Soviet Activities

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I would like to thank Alan Fox for his help and support; Clive Carrington for his knowledge of diamonds; and B.K., for reasons B.K. knows best.

Our childhood is like our dreams, fractured in our memory, intense but unreal. I remember the Secret Policeman, my father, bending over my truckle bed smiling his affectionate Secret Policeman’s smile. I do not remember his face (though I have photographs, the two that survived the search of our apartment) but his uniform remains: my fingers used to run over the braid and pips of the shoulder boards and touch the collar-tabs of an NKVD general; my nose recalls the wax of his gleaming boots. And what else? He spoke to my mother while I was in the room. A day to remember because something good had happened. He was smiling and full of a policeman’s obscure joy. He said, ‘Lavrenti told me that everything is going to be OK’ — the only words he spoke that I remember. Lavrenti was referred to as Uncle Lavrenti, with a degree of emphasis that meant he was not my uncle but that a good boy should be gifted with such an uncle. One of my photographs includes him. The other is of my father at school, but which of all the faces is his I never could tell. Uncle Lavrenti stands arm in arm with my father, both beaming at the camera. My father is in uniform, Uncle Lavrenti is in white ducks and shirtsleeves and wears a straw panama; and behind them the sun casts long shadows of palm fronds or perhaps ferns: they were at Sochi or some other Black Sea resort. Lavrenti had another name — Beria. He was Stalin’s last police chief after Yagoda and Yezhov had vanished into the execution cellars. Beria himself did not long survive the death of the Great Leader: Khruschev and the rest had him killed to secure their own positions. But that was later.

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