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Authors: Roland Perry
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visitors with a limited function for the average Muscovite. The gullible visitors were happily sucked into its apparent opulence. Blunt went further in his appreciation by suggesting that buildings in Moscow and Leningrad were superior to the best in London’s Regent Street and London University.
The tourists were very open to accepting the propaganda being thrown at them on their carefully managed tour, especially about increases in production of all industries. If any of the tour noticed anything that indicated backwardness in the economy, or poverty and squalor, they werereminded that the Soviet Union was in the middle of a five-year plan. All would be sorted out in the medium-term.
There was not a whisper of the forced “collectivization”—the brutal takeover of farms throughout Russia and the Ukraine—that led to the deaths of between 15 and 20 million peasants. Not a word was mentioned of the burgeoning state concentration camps—the gulags that in August 1935 controlled five percent of the population for forced labor (and by 1939 would control ten percent).
Despite their gullibility, none failed to notice the restrictions on foreigners. Mayhew was keen to take photos of the Kremlin surrounded by its high walls. “We weren’t allowed to take shots,” he recalled, “we could do nothing. I got Anthony Blunt to hold my legs while I leant out of the hotel window so that I could take a picture.” 11
Restrictions did not subdue Straight’s enthusiasm. At the hotel, he put on some drab clothes and asked Charles Rycroft if he looked like a proletarian. “No,” Rycroft replied, “you look like a millionaire pretending to be a proletarian.”
Undaunted, Straight later was observed caressing a mantelpiece in the hotel dining room and mumbling: “This is made from Soviet timber, Soviet marble. . . . ”
A highlight in Moscow that excited some of the group was a visit to the Home for the Rehabilitation of Prostitutes. The visitors were led to believe that the women at the home had been taken off the street, given psychiatric counseling, and directed toward retraining in factory work. The Intourist guide (a KGB agent), with the help of the home’s “manager,” babbled on about how the women were guided into seeing the error of their ways by “instruction in the moral values engendered in the State by the teachings of Marx and Lenin.”
“It was run by the KGB,” Young remembered with a smile sixty-one years after the visit. “We were far more interested in the women themselves than how they were being rehabilitated. They were of all ages, and stunning, very beautiful.”
In actuality the KGB controllers of the home were the women’s pimps. It was the practice of Russian intelligence since the czars to use prostitutes to gain information. Stalin’s era had seen the increased development of the “honey-trap,” where women were forced at home and abroad to seduce diplomats, foreign agents, and businessmen into relationships in order to blackmail them. Not every woman at the rehabilitation center wasused this way. But by controlling them, the KGB could pick, choose, and direct whom they liked.
Some of the party wanted to take pictures of the women. They pretended to be interested in the home and its inhabitants. But shots were forbidden. Once a photograph was taken, the women pictured could never be used in operations against Westerners.
Again Blunt was able to leave the tourists with his brother and spend time at the Pushkin Museum, but they did attend a shoe factory. They were also entertained by Noel Charles, the acting counselor at the British Embassy. The dinner they attended at the Embassy, without dinner suits, verged on farce.
Over predinner drinks, Wilfrid was asked if he intended to publish any more diaries. “I have not published my diaries,” Wilfrid replied tartly.
“Oh,” the host replied with a frown.
“Perhaps more poetry?” the hostess inquired, expecting to restore the
The tourists were very open to accepting the propaganda being thrown at them on their carefully managed tour, especially about increases in production of all industries. If any of the tour noticed anything that indicated backwardness in the economy, or poverty and squalor, they werereminded that the Soviet Union was in the middle of a five-year plan. All would be sorted out in the medium-term.
There was not a whisper of the forced “collectivization”—the brutal takeover of farms throughout Russia and the Ukraine—that led to the deaths of between 15 and 20 million peasants. Not a word was mentioned of the burgeoning state concentration camps—the gulags that in August 1935 controlled five percent of the population for forced labor (and by 1939 would control ten percent).
Despite their gullibility, none failed to notice the restrictions on foreigners. Mayhew was keen to take photos of the Kremlin surrounded by its high walls. “We weren’t allowed to take shots,” he recalled, “we could do nothing. I got Anthony Blunt to hold my legs while I leant out of the hotel window so that I could take a picture.” 11
Restrictions did not subdue Straight’s enthusiasm. At the hotel, he put on some drab clothes and asked Charles Rycroft if he looked like a proletarian. “No,” Rycroft replied, “you look like a millionaire pretending to be a proletarian.”
Undaunted, Straight later was observed caressing a mantelpiece in the hotel dining room and mumbling: “This is made from Soviet timber, Soviet marble. . . . ”
A highlight in Moscow that excited some of the group was a visit to the Home for the Rehabilitation of Prostitutes. The visitors were led to believe that the women at the home had been taken off the street, given psychiatric counseling, and directed toward retraining in factory work. The Intourist guide (a KGB agent), with the help of the home’s “manager,” babbled on about how the women were guided into seeing the error of their ways by “instruction in the moral values engendered in the State by the teachings of Marx and Lenin.”
“It was run by the KGB,” Young remembered with a smile sixty-one years after the visit. “We were far more interested in the women themselves than how they were being rehabilitated. They were of all ages, and stunning, very beautiful.”
In actuality the KGB controllers of the home were the women’s pimps. It was the practice of Russian intelligence since the czars to use prostitutes to gain information. Stalin’s era had seen the increased development of the “honey-trap,” where women were forced at home and abroad to seduce diplomats, foreign agents, and businessmen into relationships in order to blackmail them. Not every woman at the rehabilitation center wasused this way. But by controlling them, the KGB could pick, choose, and direct whom they liked.
Some of the party wanted to take pictures of the women. They pretended to be interested in the home and its inhabitants. But shots were forbidden. Once a photograph was taken, the women pictured could never be used in operations against Westerners.
Again Blunt was able to leave the tourists with his brother and spend time at the Pushkin Museum, but they did attend a shoe factory. They were also entertained by Noel Charles, the acting counselor at the British Embassy. The dinner they attended at the Embassy, without dinner suits, verged on farce.
Over predinner drinks, Wilfrid was asked if he intended to publish any more diaries. “I have not published my diaries,” Wilfrid replied tartly.
“Oh,” the host replied with a frown.
“Perhaps more poetry?” the hostess inquired, expecting to restore the
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