FROM RUSSIA WITH THORNS
Moscow 1940: a young woman is escorted from her apartment into the back of a waiting car by two smartly dressed men. A third man is already inside, partially shielded by the evening darkness. He taps his fingers against the car’s glass partition and orders the chauffeur to drive on. The girl nervously balls her hand into a fist and pummels it into the palm of the other. She is right to be afraid. The men are NKVD officers, the notorious Russian secret police responsible for mass deportations, extra judicial killings, and running forced labour camps.
The silence in the car is like a crushing weight. The third man, who has been staring out of the window, abruptly turns to face his reluctant passenger. “What were you doing with that foreigner?” he asks coldly, “What did you talk about?” “Why did you not seek authorisation to meet him?” The interrogation is relentless but ends with an accusation of disloyalty to the state and a means of atoning: spy for Stalin, otherwise the authorities will kill her family.
The opening to a spy novel, or maybe the outline of a screenplay? Neither, just an abridged account of a real life-event. The girl in question was 21 year old Nora Korzhenko, daughter of a disgraced Communist party official, who was all but destitute when officers from the forerunners of the KGB made her an offer she was in no position to refuse. Working under the code name “Swallow”, Nora passed information from the foreigners she befriended to her NKVD handlers who later ordered her to target John Murray, a British embassy employee they mistakenly took for a spy. Murray was wise to Nora’s game, yet incredibly he fell for the Kremlin honey trap and in 1942 after nerve shredding delays and a journey through frozen Arctic wastelands, the couple escaped from Russia to build a new life in Britain. Nora and John wrote two separately published accounts of their story and more than six decades after their release, they have been reissued as a single volume by the independent British publisher GP Publishing Org. How the company beat the competition to lay claim to these remarkable memoirs is a story for another day. What matters is that Nora and John’s description of life in Stalinist Russia has lost none of its relevance or tear jerking power.
Nora’s position as the child of a senior NKVD officer shielded her from the violent paranoia that underpinned the Russian state. Yet when her father was jailed after a government purge she was stripped of her privileges and forced to care for herself, her stepmother, and a half brother. I Spied for Stalin lays bare the pitiless grind of surviving on nothing, the emotional agony of familial separation, and the small acts of kindness from strangers who risked all to help her. The narrative is stark and unflinching, yet Nora does not demand pity. If anything, we admire her formidable courage and the fact she never stopped loving the country that had treated her so badly. It wasn’t the Russian people she blamed for her suffering but the Communist party apparatchiks who imposed their authority via a network of “secret police, concentration camps and firing squads”.
John was already aware of those tactics when he was called to work at the British embassy in Moscow as a diplomatic cipher. Russian agents had clumsily attempted to recruit him when he lived in Latvia, although he never imagined they would try again using a shy girl with “large grey-green eyes” and high cheekbones as bait. John approached those encounters with the same levelheadedness that allowed him to escape with Nora while staying one step ahead of the authorities. By any measure that made him a hero, although he never saw himself as one. The man who emerges from the pages of A Spy Called Swallow is hardworking and diligent, with a stiff upper lip Britishness allied to a strong sense of duty. His “far too serious disposition” and the demands of his job meant that girlfriends were a no, no, although Nora’s arrival changed that. At the age of 33 John fell hopelessly in love and that acknowledgement, told with a boyish reticence, is endearing unlike his cliched, toe curling description of the first time he and Nora had sex! He’s not the only one who overdoes the adjectives. The forward to I Spied for Stalin, by Lt Gen Sir Noel Mason Macfarlane, has the patronising tone of a nineteenth century school master. It’s not so much what Macfarlane says that raises the hackles, but the way he says it. Communist party supporters are “misguided intelligentsia”, Britain’s wartime partners are “Christian allies”, while Russian troops are “the forces of anti-Christ”. In fairness, McFarlane was writing in the 1950s from a Cold War warrior’s perspective and his choice of words would have probably resonated with a contemporary audience.
Still, these are minor complaints about a book whose simple, polished narrative paints a compelling picture of a society driven by violence, secrecy, and persecution. Imagine living in a country where friends and family inform on each other, or where words spoken in haste can lead to death or exile to a labour camp. This was Nora and John’s reality, yet they approached it with a self-effacement that was typical of their generation. They were just two ordinary people whose “get on with it” attitude helped them survive an extraordinary situation. Sadly, they separated in 1956 although they died many years later still loving each other.
The arrival of this book is more than timely. In February 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine, escalating a conflict that had started eight years earlier and which resulted in Moscow’s eventual annexation of Crimea. As the war in Ukraine drags on with no immediate end in sight, Kremlin watchers debate whether Russia’s geo-political muscle flexing is assertiveness or the beginnings of a 21st century Cold War. What would Nora and John have made of it, or of Moscow’s alleged interference in the politics of other countries? I doubt they would have been surprised.
This article first appeared in Dante Magazine: http://www.dantemag.com
