A meeting with malice

Press, 25 September 1987, Page 18

A meeting with malice

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XAN SMILEY,

', of the “Daily Telegraph,” in Moscow

I get quite a lot of odd telephone calls — from nutters, as well as from genuine dissidents, some of them quite manic too. And I am also rung up by the occasional provocateur, to use a popular word in Sovspeak. There is no public telephone directory here, but a strange Russian called Victor Louis is allowed, twice a year, to print in Britain a little manual of foreigners’ Moscow addresses.

Semitism is still a strong strain both in the Party and among the ordinary “narod,” the people. My lunchtime telephone call was naturally too tantalising to resist. Accompanied by ,a col-

league who is the only correspondent to have tracked down the self-styled leader of Pamyat, I met my new contact outside the nearby puppet theatre. He wore foreign clothes, which the streetwise find on the black

This is a gold mine for the oddballs. Once they get hold of an old copy of “Information Moscow,” they seem to think it their duty to regale us correspondents down the telephone with their tales of invariable woe. Often I brush them off, but sometimes it is worth taking a chance and playing along. Last week, for instance, a lunch-time caller announced himself as a leader of Pamyat and said he needed to meet me urgently. Well, why not, I thought. Pamyat which means “Memory,” is one of. the weirdest and most interesting of the groups to have popped up under Mr Gorbachev’s

market — a blue denim suit and smart new American-style running shoes. Bullnecked ? with a Stalin moustache, sandy hair, a broad Slav face with piercing blue eyes and typically pasty Muscovite skin, he looked tough, unsmiling and businesslike. Most notably, his hands and fingers were covered in bizarre tattoos. One knuckle was tattooed with the five dots of a die, another had a shining sun. He said he was called Oleg, gave no other name, said he was 35. Chainsmoking those unbelievably strong-smelling Russian cigarettes, he instantly began to reel off a startling array of

glasnost. It is a shadowy outfit with no known address, whose overt aims are to preserve the great Russian heritage, particularly monuments and culture. Mr Gorbachev, egged on, it is guessed, by his wife Raisa, is keen on conservation and ecology. So, although it is most unusual for any organisation, be it sporting or musical, to fall outside the control of the Communist Party, Pamyat has been tolerated. Besides, it touches that chord of old-fashioned mystical Russian nationalism which the communists would rather pluck than silence. The side of it that does worry the Party, and many ordinary Russians, is that it is wildly xenophobic and virulently anti-Semitic — although anti-

“facts.” Pamyat, he said, had 10 million members (“not counting sympathisers”) scattered across 50 towns in the Soviet Union. Many were Party members. The Army was particularly well penetrated. He himself was deputy head of the underground coun-ter-intelligence service. Then came the ideology, fast and furious. Monuments never got a mention. “Russia without yids” "rossiya byez zhidov") was the all-pervading aim. Freemasonry too had to be rooted out. Mr Gorbachev was a tool, perhaps unwitting, of the international Zionist conspiracy. Had I read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (an anti-Semitic Tsarist forgery)? No? Well, I

should. There were several Jews in the 14-man ruling Politburo — news to me. The middle ranks of the Party, especially the research departments, are run by Jews (they are indeed highly represented in Moscow's thinktanks). All bent on harming the motherland. What did he think of Hitler? It was “hard to judge.” He had had “similar internal problems to Stalin,” who was a “highly intelligent and honourable chap.” In Pamyat’s book, both monsters, one sensed, had their merits. After half an hour of this sort of poison, he came to the point. As deputy-head of counter-intelli-gence, he needed equipment for printing and help with publicity: “Our friends in the West must be alerted.” Would I help? He would not take no for an answer. He had to be asked to leave. “So you are pro-Jew,” he sneered. “It will not be nice for you when the authorities hear of our conversation.”

Finally, when we had walked past the police who stand guard outside the foreigners’ compound and left him in the street, he declared curtly: "You will remember our talk when you have to leave the country in two weeks time.”

So who was he? A fantasist? A genuine, nasty member of Pamyat? Or, much more likely, a K.G.B. try-on to gauge the stupidity of the “Daily Telegraph” man in Moscow? After all, I have been attacked in the Soviet press recently, and perhaps the Gibisti, as the K.G.B. people are known, were instructed to spice my dossier for future use. Or perhaps he was a K.G.B. provocateur with nonetheless genuine sympathy for Pamyat. He certainly knew the jargon. Impossible, as with so much here, to fathom. It was not a pleasant experience. But then life is never dull.