Freedom Bridge: A Cold War Thriller (2 page)

Chapter 2

F
or the first three weeks of Anna and Kolya’s departure, Yuri Glazov had been able to placate his Cheka colleagues despite their insistent questions about when his wife and son would return—a task made more difficult by Anna’s unwillingness to communicate with him. Glazov’s excuses were plausible. The child’s heart surgery was more complicated than originally diagnosed. Tests were needed. Finding the best surgeon took time. The doctor’s operating schedule was overbooked. An operating theater had to be available. A judge’s order was necessary for such a major operation. Financial arrangements had to be made. Serious cardiac complications had arisen. But as three weeks turned into two months, his excuses became more transparent, and he knew it.

He also knew that during the past two months, GPU agents in Berlin had kept their Moscow superiors abreast of the developments. So when he was informed, along with his superiors, that the operation had been performed but that recovery time for repairing Kolya’s heart valve repair was lengthy, he celebrated by drinking himself into an alcoholic stupor and prevailed upon his widowed sister, Sofia Andreyev, to care for Aleksei.

Three more months passed, after which reports from the GPU agents in Berlin ceased. Yuri Glazov’s drinking continued unabated, his mental and physical condition deteriorating so rapidly that Sofia took over the care, not only of Aleksei, but—despite the pleas of Marissa Petrovsky—of seven-year-old Kiril as well.

Glazov’s GPU superior, Oleg Reznikov, had run out of patience, and Yuri Glazov’s descent into physical and mental oblivion was the least of his problems. He issued orders to his GPU agents in Berlin to find out exactly what had happened to Yuri’s wife and son.

The agents’ inquiries, having taken a back seat to more pressing intelligence assignments, took another two months. Finally, fearing for their lives, they reported to Reznikov in December that Anna Glazov and her child, together with one of the boy’s physicians, had the month before departed from Bremen for the United States—and that they had been married by the captain of the passenger ship
S.S. Stuttgart
.

Reznikov
was apoplectic. Two citizens of the Soviet Union had defected to the United States despite the promises of a fellow GPU operative who had sworn on his life that his wife and child would return!

On his life
.

If he were to save his own skin, Reznikov knew, he had to act quickly. He arranged for poison to be slipped into Glazov’s vodka, followed by a bad fall that broke the poor fellow’s neck. Since it was a way of life with Yuri—the drinking, the falls—Reznikov was confident an autopsy would be ruled out. It was.

As for the Glazov children—Aleksei, age eight and Kiril, three years younger—Reznikov came up with the perfect solution. The children would be raised by Yuri Glazov’s widowed sister, Sofia, reliable long-term member of the Communist Party.

Nor did the red-haired Marissa Petrovsky present a problem. Tainted by her sister’s traitorous conduct, she would only need to be reminded that the State was omnipotent. That the Gulag awaited.

Oleg Reznikov was not without a sense of humor. In Anna Glazov’s haste to defect with her German surgeon, she’d had no opportunity to divorce her husband. By arranging for Yuri’s death, he thought drily, he had done Anna the great service of obliterating the stigma of bigamy.

His sister, Sofia Andreyev lived in Novogorod, an important historic city in the Soviet Union that lay between Moscow and St. Petersburg. Using a stubby finger to push his wire-rimmed glasses up his nose, Reznikov decided that henceforth the surname of both children would be Andreyev. They would be told their mother and brother had deserted them and their father, Yuri Glazov, had died in the service of his country.

Reznikov burned the Glazov file and flushed the ashes down the toilet.

* * *

Asserting her Party status, the widow Andreyev immediately enrolled eight-year-old Aleksei in a nine-year school—the highest level of general educational institutions. Five-year-old Kiril would be enrolled in three years as soon as he turned eight.

As each boy turned ten, Sofia enrolled him in the Young Pioneers—a mass youth organization designed to turn young children into staunch Communists from an early age. The main trappings were the red banner flag and a red neck-scarf. There were salutes, parades, rallies, flag-raising events, camping, bonfires, festivals, and jamborees. Membership was roughly from primary school through adolescence.

Sometime between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, each boy would be moved up into the Young Communist League. But it was the Young Pioneers experience that drove a wedge between Aleksei and Kiril.

Before moving in with his Aunt Sofia, Aleksei had doted on his father. Yuri Glazov had taught him to be regimented, obedient, distrustful, cagey, dishonest, cruel—a fearsome bully.

Kiril, three years younger, had never had much contact with his father when he was sober, which wasn’t often. Nor did he care for his aunt. For one thing, she took him away from his gentle and loving Aunt Marissa. For another, Aunt Sofia had thick legs and walked like a man—sometimes even wearing long pants! Her hair was black and very short. He often found himself staring at her stubby fingernails whenever she gripped his arm to drag him off someplace.

While Aleksei prospered in the junior communist organizations, becoming feared rather than liked, Kiril rebelled as best he could by disobeying orders, breaking discipline, and refusing to participate in overtly patriotic conduct.

When Sofia had had enough of Kiril’s disobedience, she decided to teach her young charge a lesson. Reminding him
he was the son of an Enemy of the People, and that the state could do what it wished with him— from sending him to a Gulag camp to deporting him to some remote place in the Soviet Union, or even dumping him in some state-run orphanage—she took him to such an orphanage to underscore her point.

It was late November. The first thing Kiril saw was children without shoes, their bare feet frostbitten. Sofia described how starvation and malnutrition were the norm and child-inmates were left to forage through rubbish. She pointed out acute shortages of everything from shoes and clothing to blankets, and then took him to see four
lucky
children who shared a filthy lice-ridden mattress without blankets while the
unlucky
ones slept on the floor. Reliable heat was non-existent, as were washing facilities. Trips to the bathhouse were, at best, every other month. The absence of toilets forced the children to relieve themselves anywhere—yards, hallways, even where they slept—which, of course, led to disease. Typhus, dysentery, malaria, scurvy, and rickets were rampant. Corpses lay where they died until someone with a face-mask got around to removing them. The mortality rate in some orphanages—particularly in the Ukraine—was one-hundred percent, she told him. Beatings by older children and staff were common. So were sexual attacks.

Kiril refused to give his aunt the satisfaction of bursting into tears even as he bit his lip until it bled. Only after he was alone in his own room did he allow himself to cry. For weeks he cried himself to sleep every night.

But he got the message.

“There, but for the grace of State and Party, go I.”

While Aleksei thrived—not academically, but in contact sports and extracurricular activities—Kiril learned as much as he could about as many subjects as possible. He had never forgotten his visit to the orphanage. He vowed he never would. Someday, somehow, he would liberate himself from the Soviet Union.

From 1936 to 1938, there were four major show trials in the Soviet Union as Josef Stalin rid himself of his enemies, real and imagined. Three of every five marshals were eliminated, along with 90 percent of the generals, 80 percent of the colonels, and every regimental commander—a total of some 30,000 military officers. The entire Politburo was purged, as was most of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and countless intellectuals, bureaucrats, factory managers, and foreign communists who lived in the Soviet Union. Mass arrests, torture, imprisonment, execution without trial, and an absence of authentic judicial process was the rule, not the exception. The NKVD’s own estimate was two-fold: roughly 700,000 men, women, and children shot in 1937-1938 alone and hundreds of thousands more shipped to the Gulag work camps.

The charges against these political prisoners ran the gamut from sabotage, spying, and counterrevolution, to conspiring with foreign powers. Most of the accused confessed under torture. As to those who steadfastly refused, they too were guilty because Stalin
said
they were.

Aleksei was eighteen years old when the trials began. He followed the proceedings with morbid interest, identifying with the prosecutors. He was convinced the charges were legitimate, the confessions and proof conclusive, the convictions and sentences just. In the Young Pioneers, the Young Communist League, and then as an observer of the Stalin show trials, Aleksei Andreyev was learning two important lessons. That fear was a powerful weapon. And that to induce fear one had to possess power. Wielding both would bring even strong men to their knees.

Kiril, who had just turned fifteen when the show trials began, instinctively recognized they were a sham. Stalin was murdering innocent people so he could consolidate his power and feed off the slogan popularized by Karl Marx in 1875: “From each according to his ability to each according to his needs.”

From that time on, not a day passed when Kiril did not feel the weight of collectivism and statism pressing down on his soul.

Chapter 3

L
iving with Sofia
Andreyev, a die-hard Communist since 1922, had by 1938 driven thoughts of Anna and Kolya, and even of his father, from Aleksei Andreyev’s mind. Under his aunt’s tutelage, and after a decade in communist youth groups, nineteen-year-old Aleksei had become a dedicated Communist. Ordinarily, as the son of an Enemy of the People, he would have had no chance to enter training for any of the Soviet intelligence or security services. But proud of what she had turned the boy into, his aunt got him admitted to training for the secret police—by then known as the NKVD. The organization had a huge jurisdiction. Performing mass extrajudicial executions. Operating the Gulag’s forced labor camps. Deporting Russians and other nationalities to unpopulated regions of the U.S.S.R. Guarding Soviet borders. Conducting espionage. Assassinating political opponents. Influencing foreign governments. Enforcing Stalinist policies in other countries’ Communist movements. Recruiting foreign spies. Interrogating arrestees. Coercing confessions. As befitting such an organization, NKVD training was physically arduous, mentally challenging, morally ambiguous, and often brutal. Aleksei loved every minute of it.

Having raised the two brothers during their most formative years, Sofia Andreyev knew that because Kiril so hated the State, he would have to be channeled into adult work that was largely divorced from politics. And because he’d always excelled in math and science and shown an interest in anatomy, his aunt had convinced him to try for medical school. Being admitted wasn’t hard. Kiril had finished the nine-year school with honors. He possessed a rudimentary knowledge of English and German, and his Aunt Sofia was a formidable presence in the Novogorod Communist Party. What also worked to his advantage was how the State, in the 1920s, had made a special effort to increase the number of doctors—partly in anticipation of a coming war with Germany. New medical schools were opened. One year was cut from the course of study and Latin was eliminated as an entrance requirement. All of which shifted the emphasis away from written examinations and increased the number of social and political subjects in the curriculum. Ever since his frightening experience at the orphanage, Kiril had avoided political problems. By the time he entered medical school, his early childhood taint, neutralized by his aunt, was over a decade old. Ironically, having a brother in the NKVD didn’t hurt either. But no matter how comfortable he was in the apolitical cocoon of medical school, Kiril continued to feel isolated and alone.

On September 1, 1939, forces were set in motion which would fundamentally impact the lives of both brothers. On that day Nazi Germany—and, sixteen days later, the Soviet Union—launched a pre-planned joint attack on Poland. The combined onslaught against an essentially defenseless sovereign country would be prelude to a war between the two aggressors at a time in the not entirely unforeseen future. Indeed, Stalin knew Hitler would attack the Soviet Union. He just didn’t know when. In anticipation of this falling out between partners, the NKVD rushed Aleksei through his final training and into the field. As for the medical school Kiril was enrolled in, it accelerated his final course, dispensed with exams, and graduated him months ahead of time.

On November 30, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland. A miscalculation, as it turned out. While the Red Army outnumbered the Finns two-and-a-half to one, the Soviet troops were ill-equipped for the freezing, snowbound, winter weather. And thanks to Stalin’s 1936-1938 purges of the Red Army’s officer corps, there were no competent commanders. Despite fierce Finnish resistance and substantial support from the Allies, nature proved determinative. Not until the spring of 1940, after the snow had melted, were more able commanders available to lead a new Red Army offensive. The Finns finally capitulated, relinquished territory that the Soviets coveted, and Dr. Kiril Andreyev got to spend a few months mostly treating frostbite cases.

In mid-1940, the Soviets took over Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Aleksei was posted there to suppress anti-Soviet sentiments. But the tide turned on June 22, 1941 when the formidable Nazi war machine attacked the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. Aleksei, by then a lieutenant in the NKVD, was recalled to Moscow to hunt Nazi agents.

Kiril, already in Finland, spoke some English. He was sent to the Eastern Front—to Murmansk—where Soviet doctors were needed, and where the Germans were already experiencing huge casualties. Murmansk, not far from Russia’s borders with Norway and Finland, was the largest city north of the Arctic Circle. Being a port city—a crucial link to the Western World—it was expected to play a large role in the Soviet Union’s receipt of American and other allied Lend Lease. By September 1941, three months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Lend Lease war materiel began to flow by Arctic convoys into Murmansk—tanks, artillery, ammunition, airplanes, trucks, and jeeps. As grateful as Stalin was for American and allied assistance, and as much as he understood how necessary it was for Americans to be stationed in Murmansk—how else to manage the countless tons of materiel flooding the port?—his paranoia dictated there be as few Americans as possible.

Even so, there were enough Americans for Kiril to hone not only his English, but a lot of American slang as well. Over time, he realized his NKVD watchers had lost minute-by-minute interest in him. Having settled into a routine, they were satisfied he was somewhere on the base; after all, there was nowhere for him to go. Taking full advantage of this sliver of independence, Kiril made it a practice whenever he was treating his American patients for relatively minor ailments—frostbite, alcohol poisoning, pneumonia, broken limbs, and accidental gunshots—to learn everything the GIs were willing to share with him about their country. Its culture and geography. Its economic system and how the free market actually worked. Fascinating accounts of individual rights. And most important, America’s
Declaration of Independence
and
Constitution
. Kiril took a kind of defiant pleasure in this last, knowing that it would be treasonous for him to possess a
copy
of either document!

One day, as he set the broken arm of an American GI with a legal background, Kiril and the GI were so deeply engaged in discussion that he barely noticed how new patients were lining up just outside the clinic door. Until he realized that the first man in line wore the uniform of a Soviet Air Force officer who was pressing a bloody rag against a gash just under his hairline. Quickly finishing up with the American GI, he gestured for the officer to step forward.

“Your English is excellent,” the officer said.

Kiril’s jaw tightened.

How much did you overhear?

“My name is Stepan Brodsky,” the Soviet Air Force officer said with a smile, then added
sotto voce
, “You have nothing to fear from me, doctor.”

Kiril studied the man. They were about the same height, though the Russian officer was a bit more muscular. His blond hair was closely cropped, his eyes hazel. But what impressed Kiril was Stepan Brodsky’s ability to turn his inquiring eyes into blank unreadable discs depending on whom he was talking to.

What made them fast friends over time was the discovery that they both lived and breathed the same dream—defecting from the Soviet Union to the United States of America.

When Stepan was reassigned to Moscow, he and Kiril vowed to keep in touch.

The war went on. As materiel continued to flow from Arctic convoys into Murmansk American servicemen remained, giving Kiril the chance to become more and more fluent in American English and the opportunity to learn more and more about his devoutly-wished-for destination: the United States of America.

* * *

When the war ended in 1945 and the Murmansk pipeline was shut down, Kiril was ordered back to Moscow. He looked up his brother Aleksei, now a captain in the NKVD, hoping to enlist his assistance in finding their Aunt Marissa. Aleksei offered to help, but either the war or the NKVD had buried all traces of her. As for his inquiries about Stepan Brodsky, Kiril learned his friend had been drafted by the NKVD to be a translator in the Soviet zone of Berlin. Although Brodsky had been admonished not to fraternize with anyone outside the NKVD, the two were soon in contact.

Kiril began looking for work as a physician. Although his medical education had not been of the best quality and not nearly long enough, his practical experience in Finland and Murmansk had turned him into a more than capable generalist. But with so many war veterans returning home, there was a surfeit of doctors. For the next few years Kiril took whatever medical work he could find. Drawing blood at laboratories. Filling in at emergency rooms. Assisting physicians at public health clinics. Taking x-rays at special Communist Party hospitals.

One day, about six years after he’d left Murmansk, Kiril was working as a nurse in a private Kremlin hospital reserved for top officials. During an operation, an anesthesiologist—a high-ranking Politburo member—collapsed from what later proved to be a heart attack. While attendants prepared to operate, the chief surgeon instantly turned to Kiril and asked if he knew anything about the IV anesthesia drip in the patient’s arm.

“I do,” Kiril replied.

The surgeon—muttering that if the patient died, all of them would no doubt suffer the same fate—handed Kiril the instructions. Kiril kept the anesthesia flowing, the surgeon removed an about-to-rupture appendix, and there were smiles and handshakes all around. The appreciative and renowned surgeon, Dr. Mikhail Yanin, took Kiril under his wing, taught him how to operate a heart-lung machine—its purpose to bypass the heart during open-heart surgery—and used Kiril in so many operations that he became one of Moscow’s leading heart-lung physicians. As such, he was invited to join Yanin’s heart surgery team.