The Other Side of Silence

“Today is the twenty-eighth of April nineteen fifty-one and I just turned forty a couple of weeks ago, which seems incredible and rather horrible to me. Currently I am aboard a Russian freighter which must remain nameless, I’m afraid, and on my way to Leningrad in the company of my Foreign Office colleague Donald Maclean, with a collected edition of Jane Austen in my bag and a new raincoat from Gieves in Old Bond Street. But I can tell you that Donald and I reached Saint-Malo on the Falaise, from Southampton. And that prior to this, I hired a car from Welbeck Motors in Crawford Street to make the journey to Southampton. I think it was an A-forty. Cream color. In Saint-Malo I paid a taxi driver rather a lot of money to drive his empty taxi to Rennes and to buy two tickets to Paris in our names. Meanwhile, we boarded this Russian ship. Because the fact of the matter is that I’ve decided I want to live in the Soviet Union because I am a socialist and it’s a socialist country. And I think Donald feels the same way that I do. In fact, I know he does.

“The reason I’m saying all this on tape now is so that my Russian friends can send the recording to the BBC in London in the hope that they might broadcast it and let people back home in England know for themselves the truth about my decision and not what they’ve been told by the British government. I expect the newspapers are already calling me a traitor, but of course I’m nothing of the kind. That’s a lot of nonsense. No more is it true of Donald Maclean. Besides, I really don’t know what this word means anymore. I did what I did for conscience sake, for something I believed in, and which I happen to think is rather more important than some outmoded notion of loyalty to king and country. As it happens, I do love my country very much indeed, I just think it could be governed rather better than it is. (But for my poor eyesight I would very likely be a serving naval officer right now, like my late father.) But I still have family back in England and at some stage I would rather like to be able to go back for a month or so, and see them again, but I couldn’t ever do that, of course, unless I knew for certain that I could get out of England again and come back to Russia.

“My critics will doubtless see this recording as a confession; I prefer to think of it as an explanation. As Voltaire once said, ‘Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.’ And whilst I don’t expect to be forgiven, I do hope that my actions might come to be better understood. Consequently, I think it only right to place this explanation firmly in the context of my early life. So I suppose I ought to begin by mentioning that when I first went up to Cambridge in the summer of nineteen twenty-nine I found that most of my friends had either joined the Communist Party or were at least very close to it politically. Indeed, by nineteen thirty-two, the atmosphere in Cambridge was so febrile and the issue of Fascism so horribly pressing that I joined the party myself. It seemed to me inarguable that the Western democracies had taken an uncertain and compromising attitude toward Nazi Germany and that the Soviet Union constituted the only real bulwark against European tyranny. I believe that during the war the Soviet Union was never treated as a full and trusted ally by Britain and America in spite of the fact that the sacrifices made by the people of Russia were greater than those of all the other Allies put together.

“After I joined the Communist Party, like most young men I did a lot of talking and not much else. But by January nineteen thirty-three, with the election of Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany, that no longer seemed enough. Perhaps if I’d come down from Cambridge in the summer of nineteen thirty-seven, I might have gone to Spain to fight in the civil war, but in the summer of nineteen thirty-three I felt obliged to look elsewhere for some means of making my new beliefs seem at all relevant. Then, in December nineteen thirty-four, I met a Russian called Alexander Orlov who recruited me into the Russian People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD-the forerunner of the KGB, Russia’s foreign intelligence service. It was he who persuaded me that I could best serve the cause of anti-Fascism by resigning from the Communist Party and spying for the Soviet Union.