Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [110]
Sadly, if we were to wait for Western help, it appeared we would have to wait for a very long time. On June 16, George Bush met with Putin in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He “looked him in the eye … and was able to get a sense of his soul.” The U.S. president liked what he saw and announced to the world that Putin was “very straightforward and trustworthy.”
“Unfortunately, that tells us more about Bush than about Putin,” remarked Boris.
Genoa, Italy, July 21: Russian human rights activists appeal to the leaders of the G7 summit of industrial democracies to pressure the Kremlin on Chechnya. The war is “our national disgrace, but also a disgrace for the international community as a whole,” says former Soviet dissident and human rights campaigner Sergei Kovalyov on behalf of the Committee for Ending the War.
While Boris was reinventing himself in Cap d’Antibes as a leader of émigré opposition, Sasha and Marina slowly adjusted to their new life in London. The IFCL supported them through a resettlement grant, which allowed them to rent a two-bedroom apartment in Kensington. Tolik went to the International School; his school friends’ parents became Marina’s first social acquaintances. She took English classes. Through the school she found some dance students. Sasha spent a lot of time with his lawyers preparing an asylum request. He also spent hours on the phone with Yuri Felshtinsky as he continued to work on their book, Blowing Up Russia, about the bombings of September 1999.
In London Sasha also grew close to two older men who had been legends in the KGB at the time of his recruitment. Negative legends, that is. Vladimir Bukovsky and Oleg Gordievsky personified the two archetypal foes of Kontora. Sasha had first heard of them while studying the “faces of the enemy.”
Bukovsky was a quintessential dissident, perhaps the most famous anti-Soviet activist after Sakharov, a veteran of the anti-Communist underground of the 1970s who spent years as a political prisoner in the Gulag and was eventually exchanged for the leader of the Chilean Communists, who had been imprisoned by the Pinochet regime.
Gordievsky was a true spy. For years, as the head of the KGB’s London station, he worked as a double agent for the British. Betrayed in 1985 by the CIA mole Aldrich Ames, Gordievsky was recalled to Moscow. He would certainly have been executed, along with other victims of Ames’s treachery, if the Brits had not managed to extract him at the last minute. It took a daring operation straight out of a John le Carré novel, involving disguises and decoys and crossing the Finnish border in the false bottom of a tourist automobile.
That these two brave men, icons of anti-Soviet resistance of the previous generation, accepted him as one of their own was a tremendous boost to Sasha’s morale. He called Bukovsky almost daily to discuss his writing and seek reaction to his interviews. Whenever I called him from New York, Sasha would quote Bukovsky or Gordievsky. They became his gurus. One day he cited Gordievsky as he talked about our adventures in Turkey: “You know, although I was not extracted by the CIA or MI6, the way I ran—it was a real blow to Kontora. Oleg Antonovich said that it made them a laughing stock in the trade, that Berezovsky and Goldfarb snatched me out from under their noses. They must hate me at Lubyanka as much as they did him.”
He sounded happy about it.
On May 14, 2001, George Menzies, Sasha’s solicitor, called to give him the good news: the Home Office had granted