aquarium piece

Outside the sun shone brightly and the pigeons had
settled on the ledges of the tall buildings. Kir was ready
for me.
'Come this way, please.' His office was vast, with one
wall entirely of glass looking out over a huddle of green
roofs belonging to the Central Committee buildings. The
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other walls were light grey in colour and there was a soft
grey woollen carpet on the floor. There was one huge
desk without a single scrap of paper on it, a big safe, and
nothing else.
'Good morning, Viktor Andreyevich,' a kindly voice
said.
'Good morning, Kir Gavrilovich.'
He didn't like being called 'general'. Or perhaps he
liked it but didn't show it. In any case the orders were to
say 'Kir Gavrilovich' and not 'comrade general'. An odd
name. According to his surname he is Ukrainian, but his
first name recalled an Assyrian warrior. How could they
keep a man with such names in the Central Committee?
But perhaps it was not an anti-Soviet name but, on the
contrary, a very Soviet one. Following the Revolution the
orthodox Marxists invented all sorts of names for their
children: 'Vladlen' came from Vladimir Lenin; 'Iskra' was
the name of a Bolshevik newspaper; 'Kim' was made
from the initials of the Communist Youth International.
Maybe 'Kir' had the same origins - the Communist
International, perhaps.
'Sit down, Viktor Andreyevich. How are you?'
'Very well, thank you, Kir Gavrilovich.'
He was quite small in stature, with only the first signs
of grey hair, and nothing remarkable at all about his face.
If you met him on the street you wouldn't even turn to
look at him, or be struck by his appearance. He was
wearing the most ordinary of suits, grey with a stripe, but
beautifully tailored of course. That was all. He looked
altogether like a very average man. But this was the great
Kir!
I had expected to hear pompous phrases from him: 'The
head of the GRU and the Central Committee have placed
tremendous trust in you . . .' and so forth. But there were
none of those phrases about the front-line
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struggle with capitalism, the duties of a Soviet intelligence
officer, the all-conquering ideas of Communism. He
simply looked me in the face, like a doctor, silently and
attentively.
'You are aware, Viktor Andreyevich, that in the GRU
and the KGB we very seldom have people who flee to
the West.'
I nodded.
'All those who have done so are unhappy. That is not
just propaganda. Sixty-five per cent of defectors from the
GRU and KGB return in the end and admit their guilt.
We execute them. They know that and they still return.
Those who do not return to the Soviet Union of their own
free will finish up by committing suicide, drinking
themselves to death or just going to the dogs. Why?'
'Because they have betrayed their socialist motherland.
They have bad consciences. They haye lost all their
friends, family, language . . . !'
'That is not the most important, Viktor Andreyevich.
There are more serious reasons. Here in the Soviet Union
you are one of us, a member of the upper class. Every
one of us, even the least important officer of the GRU, is
a superman by comparison with all the rest. So long as
you are part of our system you enjoy colossal privileges
compared with the rest of the population of the country.
When you have your youth and your health, your power
and privileges, you forget about it all. And you recall it
only when it is too late. Some of us flee to the West in the
hope of having a magnificent car, a mansion with a
swimming pool and a lot of money. And the West really
does pay well. But once he's got his Mercedes and his
own swimming pool, the traitor suddenly realizes that all
the people around him also have nice cars and pools. He
suddenly feels like an ant in a crowd of equally rich ants.
He loses the sense of superiority over those around him.
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He becomes an ordinary person, like the rest. Even if the
enemy intelligence service gives that traitor a job he will
still not recover his feeling of superiority over others,
because to work in intelligence in the West is not regarded
as a great honour and is not highly esteemed. You're just a
civil servant, a little insect, that's all.'
'I had never thought of it that way.'
'Well, think about it, and keep thinking about it.
Wealth is relative. In Moscow if you drive around in a
Lada you have all the pretty girls looking at you. But if
you drive round Paris in a Citroen, however big it is,
nobody looks at you. It's all relative. In our Far Eastern
districts a colonel is God and Tsar, master of all, a very
despot. But in Moscow a colonel is just a pawn, because
there are thousands of other colonels around. If you
betray your country you lose everything. And you will
remember that you once belonged to a powerful organiz-
ation and were a very special person, set apart from
millions of others. Betray your country, and you will find
yourself as insignificant and unimportant as the rest of
the population. Capitalism provides money, but it does
not provide power or respect. There are also among us
some especially smart guys who do not defect to the West
but remain among us, secretly selling our secrets. They
receive money from the capitalists and still enjoy the
status of a superman provided by socialism. But we
quickly run them down and destroy them . . .'
'I know, Penkovsky . . .'
'Not only him. Penkovsky is known everywhere. But
there were many who are not known. A man called
Konstantinov, for example. He returned to Moscow on
leave and was immediately put under investigation. The
evidence against him was incontrovertible. He was sen-
tenced to death.'
'He was put in the furnace too?'
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'No. He begged not to be executed.'
'And he wasn't executed?'
'No, he was not killed. But one day he fell asleep in his
cell and woke up in a coffin. Deep in the ground. He
begged not to be executed, so we didn't execute him. But
the coffin had to be put into the grave. Those are the
instructions. Off you go, Viktor Andreyevich. Good luck.
And remember that the level of betrayal in the GRU is
much lower than in the KGB. Try to maintain that good
tradition.'