The spies who came in from the cold

Now that Russia has an ex-KGB boss as President, Jeremy Atiyah visits the Lubyanka while it's still a museum

By Jeremy Atiyah

Published: 11 June 2000

If, 30 years from now, my grandchildren ask me to tell them stories of the KGB, I know where I would like to take them in Moscow. South across the bridge by Gorky Park, behind the arts centre Tsentralny Dom Khudozhnikov, I'll show them a bizarre little park known as the Graveyard of Fallen Monuments. There, in wintry sunshine, they will see statues in dark metal of men with arms like machines and heads like anvils. A Communist theme park for children? There is old Uncle Joe in pink granite with his nose missing. Behind him, hundreds of shattered stone faces are packed, jumbled together inside a wire cage - a nameless memorial to the victims of the gulags.

Further in, under the trees, stand numerous diminutive Lenins, a Kalinin, a Sverdlov. But dwarfing them all, towering in a great green coat at the back of the park, like a race-horse out to grass, looms the shadowy figure of one Felix Dzerzhinsky: the founder of the KGB.

Face-to-face with Dzerzhinsky under the chestnut trees last month, I tried to guess which Moscow square this awesome statue had originally dominated.

Certainly not Red Square, sacrosanct to Lenin, or Gorky Street, home to statues of Pushkin and Mayakovsky. Where then? As any Russian will tell you, in a hushed voice: Dzerzhinsky belonged to Lubyanka Square, where the old headquarters of the KGB is still located, and which - some 70 years ago - came to be eternally associated with the terror of Stalin's purges.

I visited it on a cold May morning this year, with an arctic wind spitting snowflakes. In such conditions, Lubyanka still musters a certain bleakness. "Lubyanka? Oh, the name itself sounds sweet, actually," a Russian friend assures me. "Maybe it has some connection with lyubov, meaning 'love'. " But the bowels of this great granite block, with its wire-covered windows, once resounded to the screams of the ideologically incorrect.

Odd, then, that guided visits to the so-called "demonstration hall" of the Russian secret services, right next door, have been possible for some years, even for foreign tourists. This is the new Russia; even the secret services are in need of a few bob. And there's the question of PR to consider. At the demise of the USSR, the secret services dropped the old name "KGB", with its sinister connotations, and renamed itself the FSB ("Federal Service of Security"). They have even produced a glossy coffee-table book entitled Lubyanka2, costing 500 roubles and (allegedly) sold out.

There is no plaque saying "museum" - only a smiling, beautiful interpreter in her fifties, standing in the street on time for our appointment. My fellow visitors are mostly middle-aged Americans. Our guide, who will refer to himself and to all his colleagues as "professionals", gives his name as Valery. Is this his real name? His eyebrows are so thick and bushy that I suspect they can double as a moustache in a crisis.

"Nothing really secret gets said here," he explains jovially. He reminds me of Mikhail Gorbachev, short and unexpectedly human, cracking jokes about the hell that was 20th-century Russia, for the interpreter to explain. "Thank God they stopped shooting us," she translates, in merriment, after reeling off the names of a string of KGB bosses murdered by Stalin. The last boss but one was, of course, Vladimir Putin - now very much alive as the newly elected Russian President.

The first issue Valery wants to clarify concerns the statue of Dzerzhinsky, the founder of his organisation and hence a Good Thing. "Had he lived in the 1930s, he would have been shot," he exclaims, in his defence. "He wanted to introduce market reforms. He tried to abolish the death penalty. Last year, the Russian parliament voted to return his statue to Lubyanka Square - but the Moscow city council have opposed this." He adds, with perhaps a trace of bitterness, that they are going to get a White Russian general instead.

The museum was first opened in 1984 by Yuri Andropov, who was chief of the KGB for 15 years. "At that time," Valery explains, "it was strictly an internal affair. We never dreamt that foreign guests would ever be permitted." But then came glasnost, and soon the museum was welcoming not only "fellow professionals from foreign intelligence services" but even plain old tourists.

Visitors have included Robert de Niro, who came in search of inspiration for a possible role as a KGB officer. "He asked me about the uniforms," explains Valery, "until I reminded him that secret service professionals do not wear uniforms." One less probable visitor was the "professional" who now works as the director of the Cold War museum in Los Angeles, but who was born the son of Gary Powers - the American spy shot down and captured during a secret flight over Russia in 1962. No hard feelings, then? "Oh no," smiles Valery. "He brought a picture of the rug woven from potato-sack thread by his father during the years he was a guest in our jails."

The collections of photographs and espionage bric-a-brac are not so much the attractions as the stories that pour from the mouth of this entertaining little man. We hear about Philby, Maclean et al ("they did little damage to Britain but saved the lives of thousands during the Second World War"). We also hear about Sydney O'Reilly, the British spy captured in Russia in 1924 who "shared much interesting information with us before being shot". Valery concedes that O'Reilly was a skilful spy, but that he made one crucial mistake: daring to enter the USSR in the 1920s.

Another outstanding character who emerges is one Bistroletov, one of the greatest "professionals" ever to have worked for the Russian secret services, who spoke 22 languages, and at various times passed himself off successfully as a Chicago gangster, a Brazilian businessman, a Hungarian count and a Greek grocer. Strictly in the interests of his profession he married an Italian countess while - for the same reasons - his (real) wife was busy marrying a German colonel.

The examples of James Bond-style gadgetry on display are less sensational than the stories. Inside glass cases we see the usual tree branches with radio cables inside them, tape recorders in briefcases, hiding places for agents inside rubbish containers, false moustaches, hidden cameras etc. I ask Valery how the challenges facing his organisation have changed in recent years. "Before, we had the USA and UK as enemies. Now, it's the whole world. We have arrested agents from 68 different countries in the last three years." Small fry, no doubt, beside the colossal struggles of the past. When the tour is over I step outside into the square once overlooked by Felix Dzerzhinsky. Today, the only clue as to Lubyanka's nefarious past is a small monument across the road: a rough, uncut block of stone taken from the remote Solovetsky camp in Siberia, beside a simple inscription: "For the victims of totalitarianism". A single pink carnation taped to the stone flutters in the icy wind.


Getting there
Jeremy Atiyah travelled as a guest of Interchange (tel: 020 8681 3612), which specialises in tailor-made packages to the former Soviet Union.


Where to stay
Three nights b&b at the Hotel Rossia, including return flights and transfers, costs £ 459 per person, based on two sharing.


Lubyanka tour
Tours take place twice a month, on non-specific days. Booking is essential, through Patriarshy Dom Tours (tel: 007 0957950927). Show up on the day at the tour office round the corner from the Lubyanka and pay $15.


Visas
Interchange can obtain your visa for you, but at least two weeks' notice is required. If applying in person, get to the embassy by 9am to avoid long queues, and make sure your paperwork is in order. For a £ 30 fee, you will collect your visa five days later; for £ 100, you can collect the same morning. Russian Embassy, 5 Kensington Palace Gardens, London W8 (tel: 0900 117 1271, premium rate number).


Books: 'The Rough Guide to Moscow', £ 9.99.