The amazing story of an outstanding illegal Soviet intelligence
The names of the "great illegal immigrants" of the 1930s are inscribed in the calendar of Soviet intelligence in a special font, and among them the name of Dmitry Bystroletov shines with a cheerful splendor. He himself contributed a lot to this. A sick and sardonic man, he found himself in oblivion in his declining years and took up his pen. His pen was light, even frivolous, but his brisk notes did not find demand. He went so far as to write interviews with himself.
I hastily took out my pen and notebook.
- Tell me, please, what could you tell our readers? For example, how they become a scout, how they live in a foreign underground. And, of course, I would like to hear a few examples of your own work.
Dmitry Alexandrovich thinks about it.
- I was warned about your arrival. Everything is agreed. But I can speak only under one indispensable condition. German and Italian fascists were destroyed during the last war. But imperialism as an international system is alive, and its fosterlings are again waging a fierce, secret and overt struggle against our Motherland. Therefore, in my story, I must be careful - I will tell about the essence of several operations, but without naming names or dates. It will be calmer this way …
There was nothing in him of the "fighter of the invisible front" - neither communist ideology, nor a ponderous sense of duty. Young, light, courteous, exquisitely dressed and charmingly handsome, he resembles a character from a Viennese operetta. He could be a spy for any European country. But fate determined him to work for the NKVD.
Suffering from obscurity and the consciousness of a life wasted in vain, he once went to order a suit at the atelier of the Ministry of Defense, to which he was attached, although he had never served in the Red Army and did not have a military rank. After talking with a talkative tailor, he learned that the tailor's son-in-law was writing humorous stories and feuilletons in the newspapers. Bystroletov gave his phone number and asked his son-in-law to call on occasion.
This comedian's name is Emil Dreitser. Now he is a professor of Russian literature at New York Hunter College. In the United States, his book about Bystroletov has just been published, the title of which - Stalin's Romeo Spy - we jointly translated as "Stalin's spy-lover" by analogy with the classic theatrical role of "hero-lover". We met at the presentation of the book at the Library of Congress, and then we talked for a long time on the phone.
The first and last meeting of Emil with Bystroletov took place on September 11, 1973 in a cramped apartment on Vernadsky Avenue.
- It was a somewhat strange meeting for me. I published myself as a freelancer in the central press, but I worked in a completely different genre in which Bystroletov might be interested. When my father-in-law told me that one of his customers wanted to meet with me, I was surprised, but not very much: acquaintances quite often offered feuilletonists some incidents from their lives. When I came to him, he said that he wanted to try with my help to write a novel about his life. And he began to tell. I was amazed - I never thought that I could write anything other than humor. And by that time he was a much more experienced writer than me: he had already written two novels, screenplays. I think that at that moment he simply despaired, lost faith in the fact that someday the truth about his life will see the light.
I didn't know what to do with this material. I came home, wrote down his story, and since the time was anxious - this was the year when Solzhenitsyn was exiled - I wrote down his name in pencil, just in case, and everything else in ink. It was clear that it was impossible to publish it. I did not fully understand why he chose me. Then, when I met with his relatives, they said that at that time he met with several other journalists. That is, he, apparently, was looking for a way to somehow capture his life. I think he was, in fact, a very naive person. He did not understand, as any practicing journalist of the time understood what could and could not be written, he did not have a sense of self-censorship. For example, I read his script, written in 1964-65, and was amazed: did he not understand that this cannot be staged in Soviet cinema or on the Soviet stage?
- As Bulgakov's Master: "Who advised you to write a novel on such a strange topic?"
- Exactly! He really did not understand, just like a child - he sent the manuscript to the KGB, and from there, of course, they returned it to him.
Emil Dreitser kept his notebook. Many years later, already overseas, he realized that fate brought him together with an amazing personality. And he began to collect materials about Bystroletov.
The emergence
Bystroletov's path to reconnaissance was thorny and winding. Writers of popular essays about him usually take his own autobiographical notes on faith. Even in the official biography published on the SVR website, it is said that he was the illegitimate son of Count Alexander Nikolaevich Tolstoy, an official of the Ministry of State Property. But there is no confirmation of this version. Dmitry Bystroletov was born in 1901 near Sevastopol, on the Crimean estate of Sergei Apollonovich Skirmunt, a well-known publisher and bookseller at the beginning of the last century. His mother, Klavdia Dmitrievna, was one of the first feminists and suffragettes in Russia, a member of the Society for the Protection of Women's Health, wore trousers and, as a challenge to the then propriety, decided to give birth to a child out of wedlock. Here is Emil Dreitzer's version:
- His mother simply persuaded one of the vacationers in Crimea to become a father, because she was a suffragette and wanted to prove that she did not care about the so-called decent society.
So Dmitry Bystroletov was born, who never knew his biological father. The advanced views of his mother caused him a lot of suffering. He rarely saw his parent. Three years old, he was sent to St. Petersburg, to the family of the widow of a guard officer who had shot himself because of the gambling debt, who had two daughters. Mitya did not need anything, but he was terribly sad. “The years of staying in Petersburg,” he wrote later, “are now pictured to me as a pink, sweet toffee, which annoyingly sticks to the teeth, and meetings with the Wasp are remembered as the whistle of a whip.” Wasp is the mother's nickname.
In 1917, Bystroletov graduated from the Sevastopol Naval Cadet Corps and ended up in the World War, was a participant in the operations of the Black Sea Fleet against Turkey. In 1918, after graduating from the naval school and gymnasium in Anapa, he entered as a volunteer, that is, a volunteer on preferential terms, in the Naval Forces of the Volunteer Army. In 1919 he deserted, fled to Turkey, worked as a sailor, learned what physical labor, hunger and cold are.
From Bystroletov's books "The Feast of the Immortals". I saw a German submarine and a Turkish destroyer, heard the whistle of shells aimed "at me." I got used to sleepless nights, to carrying sacks on my back, to swearing and drunkenness, to the roar of waves, to prostitutes. I was surprised at how absurd the existence of the intelligentsia and all these Tolstoys and Dostoevskys seemed, if you look at them from the standpoint of working life.
Finally Dmitry Bystroletov found himself in Prague - one of the centers of Russian emigration - without a livelihood and with vague prospects. There he was recruited by an employee of the Foreign Department of the OGPU. Many formerly irreconcilable enemies of the Soviet regime went to cooperate with the Soviet "authorities" - out of lack of money, out of despair, out of patriotism (recruiters played on this string especially skillfully).
However, Bystroletov himself, in a conversation with Dreitzer, claimed that he had been recruited back in Russia, and in Prague he had been “reopened”:
- He told me that he was recruited during the Civil War, when he, together with his friend, ferried a Greek ship to Evpatoria, where then there were already Reds and there was a Cheka. A representative of the Cheka turned to him and said that if you want to help your homeland, then go with the flow of refugees to the West, we will let you know about ourselves in time. And then, I remember, he said to me: "Well, what did I understand there, what I knew, I was a young man … Who can say" no "when they offer to be useful to the motherland." And then in Czechoslovakia, he became secretary of the local "Union of Students - Citizens of the USSR". He was very active in the activities of the Union. In the Prague archives, I saw newspapers from 1924-25, where his name is mentioned more than once. They opposed themselves to the White emigres. For example, he and his friends set up a guard of honor when Lenin died. And just then the Soviet trade mission in Prague noticed him and gave him shelter, gave him a job, because they wanted to expel him from the country.
Emil Dreitser is convinced that his childhood psychological trauma, the complex of abandonment and uselessness, which he carried through all his childhood, played a significant role in Bystroletov's consent to work for Soviet intelligence.
- What was Bystroletov as a person? What were his convictions? Why did he go on reconnaissance?
- The roots of everything that happened to him were personal, deeply personal. Due to the circumstances of his birth, this strange relationship with his mother, he was a strangled person from a young age. He felt his inferiority. When he found himself outside Russia, he felt an inner need to be with his mother-homeland, without this he did not feel like a normal person. That's why it was easy to recruit him. Moreover, he was completely destitute. He writes bluntly that when the Soviet trade mission finally took him in, he ate his fill for the first time in many years. He was poor and ready to do whatever he wanted, because he was promised that he would be returned to the Soviet Union, but this must be earned, something must be done for this.
- That is, on the one hand, this is restlessness, and on the other, self-affirmation and, apparently, the romance of espionage.
- Oh sure. He believed in the ideals of the revolution, because he really eked out a terrible, miserable existence … And he, of course, did not know the real face of the revolution.
Bystroletov received a modest position as a clerk and at first did not do anything substantial. But in the spring of 1927, the Soviet spy network in Europe suffered a series of crushing failures. The first purge took place in the leadership of the Foreign Department of the OGPU. It was decided to shift the center of gravity to illegal reconnaissance. It was as a result of this directive that Dmitry Bystroletov was transferred to an illegal position.
- He wanted to return in 1930. He already understood everything, he was tired of all this. And then there was a colossal failure of the Soviet spy network not only in Europe, but, if I am not mistaken, also in China and Japan. It was then that a new draft was urgently required, and he was offered to stay for a couple of years, but already as an illegal immigrant. There was a great element of risk in this lesson, and it is not for nothing that he quotes Pushkin's "Feast during the Plague": "Everything, everything that threatens death, conceals inexplicable pleasures for the heart of a mortal …" He was attracted by this sensation. But he did not think that it would drag on for many years, that when he wants to return, he will be told: the country needs to do this and this, the fifth or tenth …
Seduction
In many of his qualities, Bystroletov was ideally suited for work in illegal intelligence. He had an innate artistry, he spoke fluently in several languages (he himself claimed to be 20), and managed to get a good and versatile education. Finally, he had one more quality, which the chaste authors of his official biographies are embarrassed to talk about. Bystroletov was charmingly handsome and knew how to use his masculine charm. Emil Dreitzer says:
“At first he did what intelligence normally does: he read newspapers in search of information that might come in handy. And then he was attracted for the first time … He told me bluntly when we met: “I,” he says, “was young, handsome and knew how to deal with women.”
In the arsenal of intelligence, this weapon is far from the last place. Once I already told on the pages of "Top Secret" about how the common-law wife of the head of the Soviet intelligence network in the United States, Yakov Golos, Elizabeth Bentley, after the death of her husband, fell into depression, and the resident asked the Center to send her a new husband, but the Center hesitated, and Bentley gave out to the authorities the whole network. Another example is Martha Dodd, the daughter of the American ambassador to Berlin, recruited by Soviet intelligence officer Boris Vinogradov, with whom she fell passionately in love. One can also recall the Don Juan adventures of the Englishman John Symonds, who in the early 70s himself offered his services to the KGB as a spy lover. In his autobiography, Symonds fondly recalls the professional lessons he learned from two adorable female Russian instructors. One of the major film companies acquired the rights to film adaptation of Symonds' book last year, but has not yet decided who will play the main role - Daniel Craig or Jude Law.
In his declining years, Bystroletov not without pride recalled his men's victories. The first of them he won back in Prague. In his notes, he names the lady he met on the instructions of the resident, Countess Fiorella Imperiali.
From The Feast of the Immortals. I start work. But soon came a passionate love for another woman - Iolanta. She reciprocated me, and we got married. Despite the marriage, I continued to work out the assigned … And the nights in two beds continued. In one I slept like a husband. In the other, as an engaged groom. Finally, a terrible moment came: I demanded from Fiorella proof of the irrevocability of her choice … A few days later she managed to bring a package containing all the code books of the embassy, begging:
- Only for an hour! For one hour!
And then Iolanta received an assignment from the resident on the bed part …
According to Emil Dreitser, the Bystroletov invented the magnificent title of his passion, partly for reasons of secrecy. In fact, it was a humble secretary of the French embassy. In the book by Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin "Sword and Shield", the real name of this woman is named - Eliana Okuturier. She was then 29 years old.
As for another passionate romance - with the mistress of a Romanian general, today no one will undertake to assert for sure that it was in fact, it was described in a very tabloid way, just some kind of Paul de Kock.
From The Feast of the Immortals. At a table with champagne on ice, we probably seemed like a very picturesque couple - she in a deeply lowered dress, me in a tailcoat. We whispered like young lovers. “If you betray me, you will be killed as soon as you stick your nose out of Switzerland,” she said in my ear, smiling sweetly. I smiled even sweeter and whispered back to her: "And if you betray me, you will be killed right here in Zurich, on this very veranda, over blue water and white swans."
Emil Dreitser believes that, in fact, Bystroletov had two or three intimate ties with espionage goals, no more.
- I think he used it with a Frenchwoman and there was also the wife of the English agent Oldham, who, by the way, came to the Soviet embassy. And then there was a different situation: she herself took the initiative, because her husband was an alcoholic, and she was in complete despair.
The operation of developing the British Foreign Ministry ransomware Captain Ernest Oldham was Bystroletov's greatest professional success. In August 1929, Oldham came to the Soviet embassy in Paris. In a conversation with OGPU resident Vladimir Voinovich, he did not give himself his real name and offered to sell the British diplomatic code for 50 thousand dollars. Voinovich brought the price down to 10 thousand and made an appointment with Oldham in Berlin early next year. Bystroletov went to the meeting. It was then that he began to impersonate a Hungarian count who had fallen into the networks of Soviet intelligence, and entered into an intimate relationship with Oldham's wife Lucy in order to tie the spouses to himself more tightly.
There is an echo of this plot in the 1973 film "Man in civilian clothes", filmed according to the script by Bystroletov, who himself played a cameo role in it. The film told about the adventures of the Soviet intelligence officer Sergei in Nazi Germany three years before the start of World War II. The picture differed from other spy militants in that it had absolutely no heavy Soviet ideology, nostalgia for Russian birches and rhetoric about a high debt. Sergei, played by young Juozas Budraitis, was an elegant handsome man who performed his espionage exploits easily, gracefully and not without humor. The character of "The Man in Plainclothes" was akin to James Bond, and the film, like the Bond films, was a bit of a parody. I remember that I was especially amused by the fake name of Sergei - the noble but ruined Hungarian Count Perenyi de Kiralgase. It reminded me of the word kerogaz.
Lucy Oldham in this picture turned into the wife of the Colonel of the General Staff of the Wehrmacht, Baroness Isolde von Ostenfelsen. She was played by Irina Skobtseva, and the baron himself was played by Nikolai Gritsenko. Of course, no alcoholism and bed scenes: the baron is an ideological spy.
Another line of the film is not devoid of a documentary basis - the relationship of the hero with a female Gestapo officer. Emil Dreitzer reports:
- She was not just ugly - she had a burned face, as a child, she got into a car accident. And of course, it was impossible to approach her the way, say, to a French woman, to pretend that you fell in love with her. The Frenchwoman was pretty and young, and this one was about 40, and she was completely disfigured. But he found a psychological clue. She was an ardent Nazi, and he tried all the time to ask how to provoke: what is so special about this Mr. Hitler, in Goebbels? I am Hungarian, I lived in America and I don’t understand why you have such a great excitement in Germany. And he was able to convince her that he is such a naive young man who does not know European politics. So gradually he was able to seduce her and become her lover. This is, perhaps, the highest class.
Lyudmila Khityaeva plays the role of SS Sturmführer Doris Scherer in The Man in Civilian Clothes. Over a glass of wine, she converts the Hungarian playboy to her faith: "You must understand, Count, that the German northern race will soon become the master of the world." "What do you promise us Hungarians?" - the graph is interested. "It is a joy and honor to work under the guidance of a Nordic man!" - Doris answers with ecstasy. The subject of her special pride is an album with a project of an exemplary concentration camp. All this was a revelation in the then Soviet cinema.
Return
- You see, Emil, I have some special difficulty with Bystroletov. He, of course, occupies a separate place among Soviet intelligence officers. And to be honest, it makes an ambiguous impression. It is his own fault, his own writings on his espionage escapades are frivolous fiction. But here the human essence escapes, behind this pose it is not visible. And, in fact, no real deeds are visible. For example, everything is clear in the story of the atomic bomb, we know: a bomb was made. And in the case of Bystroletov - well, I got the ciphers, and then what?
- Everything that you said just explains the tragedy of Bystroletov's life. At the end of his life he understood what you are talking about: everything that he got - diplomatic ciphers, samples of weapons and everything else - was not fully used. He realized that he was a pawn in a huge game. He mined, others mined, but Stalin, as you know, forbade analyzing the data: "I myself will analyze and figure out what this means." The fact of the matter is that his life was almost completely thrown into the trash bin. He understood this and in his last book directly writes: at night I wake up and think about what the best years of my life were spent on, not only mine, but also of my fellow intelligence officers … It's scary to grow old and stay at the end of my life at a broken trough. Here are his words.
I understand perfectly well that in some episodes he as a person causes ambiguous feelings. Since childhood, he was a man of undermined dignity, so he did a lot that does not decorate him at all. But he needed it for self-affirmation.
However, we got ahead of ourselves. Let's go back to the time when the Great Terror was unfolding in the Stalinist Soviet Union. In September 1936, Genrikh Yagoda was removed from the post of People's Commissar of Internal Affairs. He was replaced by Nikolai Yezhov. Arrests of the heads of the Foreign Department began. Intelligence officers from the foreign intelligence service responded to Moscow. Nobody came back. In 1937, the illegal Ignatius Reiss received a call, but decided to stay in France and in the same year he was killed in Switzerland as a result of a special operation of the NKVD. His friend and colleague Walter Krivitsky also stayed in the West. The head of the London illegal station, Theodore Malli, returned and was shot. Dmitry Bystroletov also received an order to return.
- As far as I understand, he knew Ignatius Reiss, knew Malli, apparently knew Krivitsky …
- Yes.
- Malli is back, and Reiss and Krivitsky are defectors. Bystroletov could not help thinking about this topic, he knew, of course, what was happening to those who were recalled to Moscow. Was he ready for what would happen to him, hoping to justify himself? Why did he come back?
- I think he still did not fully believe … He was naive in this sense, did not fully understand the reasons for the Great Terror. He thought it was a mistake after all. Even when he was arrested, after his arrest. Like many others, by the way.
“In fact, almost all of the scouts have returned. Reiss and Krivitsky are a rare exception. They all went like rabbits into the jaws of a boa constrictor …
- In fact, he could not help but return. This was his inner sense of self - outside the country in which he was born, he felt himself insignificant. This was not easy to understand, I consulted with both psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. Unfortunately, this is how it happens in people who are traumatized in childhood. He understood that. He has a chapter in which he describes the psychological deviations of his mother, grandfather, grandmother, and so on. He understood that. He spoke about it directly.
- But really Bystroletov did not guess what was happening in his homeland?
- He preferred not to see it.
In the film "Man in civilian clothes", the intelligence officer who has returned to Moscow with honor, under the chimes, is received in a fatherly way by the head of the intelligence service and gives him a new assignment - in Spain. In fact, they sent him to a completely different place. To begin with, he was fired from the NKVD and appointed head of the translation bureau of the All-Union Chamber of Commerce. In September 1938, Bystroletov was arrested on espionage charges. Even his investigator Soloviev did not understand such resignation to fate.
From The Feast of the Immortals. He stretched. Yawned. I lit a cigarette. And then it dawned on him!
- Wait a minute! - he caught himself. - So you really had that kind of money in your hands, Mityukha? Three million in foreign currency?
- Yes. I had my own company and my own foreign currency account.
- If you have a foreign passport?
- Several. And they were all genuine!
Soloviev looked at me for a long time. His face showed extreme amazement.
- So, any day you could rush off to another country with this money and chill out for your pleasure through the coffin of your life?
- Oh sure…
Soloviev froze. His mouth parted. He bent down to me.
- And yet you came? - and added in a whisper, breathless: - This way ?!
- Yes, I came back. Although he could well have expected an arrest: the foreign press wrote a lot about arrests in the USSR, and we were well informed about everything.
- So why did you come back ?! Ram! Moron! You cretin! - he shakes his head: - One word - bastard!..
I looked up:
- I returned to my homeland.
Soloviev shuddered.
- I exchanged foreign currency for a Soviet bullet ?!
Dmitry Bystroletov could not stand the torture and signed everything that was required of him to sign.
From the verdict of the military collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. The preliminary and judicial investigation established that Bystroletov for a number of years was a member of the anti-Soviet Socialist-Revolutionary terrorist and sabotage and sabotage organization. While living in Czechoslovakia in exile, Bystroletov established contact with foreign intelligence and, on its instructions, entered the work of the Soviet trade mission. While working abroad in a Soviet institution, Bystroletov transferred information constituting a state secret to foreign intelligence. In 1936, Bystroletov, having arrived in the Soviet Union, got a job at the All-Union Chamber of Commerce, where he created an anti-Soviet Socialist-Revolutionary group. In the USSR, Bystroletov established contact with British intelligence agents and transmitted spy information to them.
With such a corpus delicti, they could have been sentenced to death, but Bystroletov received 20 years in the camps. Why? Emil Dreitser believes that as a result of the next change of leadership in the NKVD, instead of Nikolai Yezhov, then Lavrenty Beria became the people's commissar.
- Precisely because he did not sign immediately, he gained time and survived. Under Beria, as statistics show, there were much fewer executions. And he signed, reasoning: “Well, it’s clear - after the next torture they will kill me. And what will happen next? My name will be spoiled forever. But if I stay alive, then I will have a chance someday to get a revision."
The years spent in the camp, he described in the book "Feast of the Immortals." Its distinctive feature is that the author does not shift the responsibility for what happened to someone else.
From The Feast of the Immortals. In the Butyrka prison, the first acquaintance with the senselessness and massiveness of the extermination of Soviet people took place. This shocked me as much as my own civilian death. I did not understand why this was being done and for what purpose, and I could not guess who exactly is at the head of the organized mass crime. I saw a national tragedy, but the Great Director remained behind the scenes for me, and I did not recognize his face. I realized that we ourselves, the honest Soviet people who built our country, are the minor actual executors.
Emil Dreitzer says:
- There was an incident with him in the camp, and for a long time I could not understand what had happened until the psychiatrist explained to me. At the felling, the guard called the prisoner and when he approached, he simply shot him point-blank. Then he rearranged the red flags indicating the zone, so that it turned out that the prisoner was killed while trying to escape. This was done in front of everyone. Bystroletov, who was observing the whole scene, suddenly paralyzed the right side of the body, an arm and a leg. The psychiatrist to whom I told this case explained to me what was the matter. His natural reaction was to hit the guard. This meant immediate death - he would have been shot on the spot in the same way. He restrained himself with an effort of will - and got paralysis. Then he tried to commit suicide, but could not tie a noose on the rope with his paralyzed hand.
In the Kolyma wilderness, on the bunks, Bystroletov recalled the alpine meadows of Switzerland, the sea breeze of the Cote d'Azur and "squeezed novels."
From The Feast of the Immortals. “Journey to Bellinzona or The Girl and the Stone,” I begin. Then I close my eyes - and, strangely, I suddenly see in front of me what my life once was. This is not a memory. This is either a reality more real than a dead mouth with jelly at my dirty feet, or a saving dream and rest. Without opening my eyes, so as not to frighten off the light vision, I continue:
- In 1935, I had to travel frequently from Paris to Switzerland on business. Sometimes, in the evening, after finishing work, I go to the station. The taxi barely makes its way in the midst of cars and people. Half-closing my eyelids, I tiredly watch the flashes of multicolored advertisements, listen to the waves of music and the chatter of the crowd through the even rustle of the movement of thousands of car tires on the wet asphalt. The world city floats outside the windows of the taxi … And in the morning I raise the curtain on the window of the sleeping car, lower the glass, stick out my head - God, what a sweetness! Porrantruis … The Swiss border … It smells of snow and flowers … The early sun gilded the distant mountains and dewdrops on the roof tiles … Starched girls roll trays with pot-bellied mugs of hot chocolate along the platform …
Enlightenment
Bystroletov believed in the possibility of acquittal for a long time, until 1947, when he was unexpectedly brought from Siblag to Moscow. At the Lubyanka, he was brought to the spacious office of the Minister of State Security Viktor Abakumov. The minister offered him amnesty and return to intelligence. Bystroletov refused. He demanded full rehabilitation.
Abakumov's response was a three-year confinement in solitary confinement in one of the most terrible prisons of the NKVD - Sukhanovskaya. And then - returning to hard labor. Like many of his comrades in misfortune, even in the Bystroletov camp he did not lose faith in the bright future of socialism.
- You said that for him there was a difference between the regime and the homeland.
- He had the opportunity to escape. In the Norilsk camp. And he decided at the last moment when he saw the construction of a huge combine that the prisoners were building … he was captured by this majestic spectacle, captured by the feeling that, in my country, such a huge combine is being built that everything that is being done now is ultimately done for the benefit homeland, let the prisoners build it. That is, he was a victim of Stalinist propaganda. That's the problem. He was a Stalinist, I think, until 1947. At first, he believed, like many, that Stalin did not know what was happening. Now, if they tell him how people are being grabbed for nothing, he will put it all in order. His change came gradually. And, say, in 1953, by the time the doctors' case was unfolding, he was already completely equating Nazism and Stalinism. By the 53rd year he was a complete anti-Stalinist. But he still believed that socialism must triumph. And only gradually, in the last book "The Difficult Path to Immortality," he comes to the understanding that the point is not even Stalin, that without Lenin there would be no Stalin. He had already come to this at the end - to a complete rejection of communism as an idea.
He survived. He was released in 1954, rehabilitated in 56. Huddling with his wife in a squalid communal apartment, disabled and completely demoralized, he earned his living by translating medical texts (in addition to a law degree, he also had a medical degree). An epiphany gradually came. The experience of the political prisoner made him anti-Stalinist, but he believed in socialism for a long time.
In the 1960s, the new chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, conceived the "rehabilitation" of the Lubyanka. Books, films, memories of the heroic everyday life of intelligence have appeared. Vivid examples were required. They also remembered Bystroletov. His portrait was hung in a secret room of military glory in the main building of the KGB. He was offered an apartment in exchange for the confiscated one and a pension. He took the apartment, but refused the pension. Andropov did not know that by that time the former enthusiastic young man, a romantic intelligence officer, had turned into a staunch anti-communist.
- I read somewhere that in 1974, when the campaign against Solzhenitsyn began, Bystroletov staged or falsified the destruction of his own manuscripts. That is, he has already identified himself as a dissident …
- Of course. When Solzhenitsyn was expelled, he realized that he, too, could be in danger, and faked the burning of his memoirs. He really considered himself a dissident. This is quite obvious - in the last book "The Difficult Path to Immortality" he comes to a complete denial of what he believed in at the beginning of his life. For this reason, the script for the spy film, which he was graciously allowed to write, turned out to be completely apolitical.
- Still an amazing evolution.
- This is what pushed me, after all, I spent so many years studying his life. He is one of the few people I knew who was able to overcome his youthful blind faith in communism. Most of the people of his generation, even those who suffered, remained the same: yes, there were mistakes, but the system was correct. Only a few were able to overcome themselves. For this, I ultimately respect Bystroletov. Although he is, of course, a complex personality. He himself was ashamed of many of his actions. And nevertheless, he was capable of this inner revolution - I think, because he was merciless to himself.
- For this you need to have courage.
- He was, undoubtedly, a courageous man.
Dmitry Bystroletov died on May 3, 1975. Buried at the Khovanskoye cemetery in Moscow. In 1932 he was awarded a personalized weapon "For a merciless struggle against counter-revolution." He had no other government awards.
