Back in the USSR

The Telegraph Magazine yesterday featured an article about the ‘young Conservative activists’ who smuggled letters and documents in and out of the Soviet Union in the early Eighties.

Most of the people mentioned or quoted in the article I know personally. One or two I know very well indeed.

Peter Young and I were at university together. We co-edited a student newspaper called Campus and later shared a house in Camberwell, south east London, for five years.

I have known Richard Thoburn since I moved to London in 1980. We worked around the corner from one another and we would meet after work for a drink at The Old King Lud at the bottom of Ludgate Hill and Fleet Street. We later shared a flat in West Kensington.

Also featured in the article is Julian Lewis MP, my boss when I worked for the Media Monitoring Unit, and George Miller-Kurakin, grandson of a Russian emigre, who recruited many of the couriers who went to the Soviet Union.

George and I were good friends in the Eighties - I was best man at his wedding in Frankfurt - but we lost touch after the USSR collapsed and he moved to Russia with his young family.

It was only much later that I discovered he had returned to Britain, disillusioned with the political and economic chaos in Russia and the return to power of many of the old KGB henchmen.

At this point I ought to mention that I too was recruited as a ‘courier’. I’ve written about my experience before but one mystery the Telegraph article cleared up was the fate of Alex, my Frankfurt-based ‘handler’.

Before I went to Moscow Alex and I would meet up in pubs and parks - or occasionally at George Miller’s house in Lee, south London - where he would instruct me on what I was to do in Moscow.

He also advised me on how to avoid standing out as a Western visitor in the non-tourist parts of the city where I was to deliver the books and letters that were in my bag and sown into my sleeves, and what to do if arrested.

(Although it was rare to be arrested it wasn’t unknown. Peter, Richard and Harry Phibbs, another courier, were all arrested at different times and places.)

Anyway, I was very happy to read that Alex (who looked just like Lenin!) is alive and well:

The grandson of a Russian émigré, Alex is now 75 and lives in Frankfurt. He still works for the NTS publishing house Possev, which printed many of the works smuggled out by couriers and which the KGB once tried, unsuccessfully, to bomb.

The work of handlers like Alex was being repeated all across Europe, with couriers recruited in Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Italy and France. ‘I doubt there was a single day when there was not at least one courier in Russia on behalf of NTS,’ says Alex. ‘This story is not widely known but it should be – these people took risks to help the people of Russia.

‘Our experience was that the more someone loved their own country, the more he or she could understand the suffering of another nation and want to help. We found sympathy and understanding primarily on the Conservative side, not on the Left.’

Sadly George Miller died, aged 54, in 2009. (See ‘Reflections on the death of a friend’.)

A few months earlier, by complete coincidence, I had posted on my blog the letter I sent my parents shortly after I returned from Moscow. My mother had kept it and you can read it here.

In hindsight I am pleased to have acted as a courier but I would be lying if I said that my initial motivation was much more than the chance to have a week in Moscow at someone else’s expense.

The hours spent with Alex did focus my mind on the potential risks and responsibilities but it was only after I arrived in the Soviet Union and met the people I was recruited to engage with that I fully appreciated the purpose of what we were doing.

Their modesty, determination and gentle good humour - despite the threat of imprisonment if they were caught - were extraordinary and I was deeply humbled.

As couriers we could leave the Soviet Union on the next plane. Our contacts couldn’t. The risks we were taking were quite small. The risks they took every day were enormous and potentially life changing.

My principal contact was arrested a year or two after my visit to Moscow. He received a three-year prison sentence. I don’t know what happened to him, or his wife, after that.

PS. Russell Walters, another courier mentioned in the Telegraph article, now works for Philip Morris. Small world.