Mystery still surrounds the exact escape route the two men took. Writers have suggested all sorts of routes, one – Deceiving the Deceivers – even speculating they were picked up by submarine in Nantes. Robert Cecil, quoting private information, argues they used the same route as Melinda a few years later, through the Soviet zone of Austria, which Burgess’s KGB minder Sergei Humaryan confirmed.1
Christopher Andrew, in his official history of MI5, and Modin, give more-or-less the same route to the one Burgess gave Driberg. The two men caught a train from Paris to Geneva and then an overnight one to Berne, arriving at 6 a.m. on Sunday 27th. They presented themselves at the Soviet embassy, where they were given two false passports, and flew out on the first suitable flight two days later to Stockholm, alighting in transit in Prague, where they were ‘processed’ and at the beginning of June flown to Moscow.2
Guy Liddell revealed in his diary that ‘GCHQ reported an increase in volume of traffic between London and Moscow as from 25th May, the day Burgess and Maclean left. Two or three days later there was an increase in the traffic from Berne, and about the 4th or 5th June an increase in traffic from Prague’, suggesting that maybe Burgess’s account was broadly accurate.3
Once in Russia, no one quite knew what to do with the agents until Stalin and Beria had decided. Nigel Burgess recalled how, when he was in Moscow in 1963:
Donald showed me a great hotel balcony on the first floor overlooking the Kremlin. He told me that when they arrived, they all had dinner on that balcony. They had got drunker and drunker on vodka until three in the morning. People were running about all over the place looking for them and there they were on the balcony boozing. The next day, Donald was in bed with a hangover and Guy told him that he was going out. He had to find a bar, he said. Donald said that they were in Moscow now … Guy said he could find a bar anywhere in the world. And after a long bar crawl, he was hauled back to the hotel that night.4
Modin gave a similar version, saying the pair ‘arrived in Moscow, the authorities met with them, shook their hands, drank cordials of good brandy, and sent them to Kuybyshev’.5 A city on the Volga, and formerly known as Samara, Kuybyshev had been where the Soviet government had been evacuated in 1941 when Moscow was threatened by the Germans, and was closed to foreigners. Burgess told foreign correspondent John Miller they were ‘put in a small house guarded night and day by KGB troops. To all intents and purposes, they were under house arrest. The debriefing became an interrogation. This went on for several months and it quickly dawned on the two runaway diplomats that their hosts suspected they were in fact double agents. So they had to be broken …’6
It’s a view confirmed by Sergei Humaryan, then in his early twenties, who guarded them and was later director of the KGB museum in Samara, who said the men first shared a flat, and when Maclean’s family arrived they were housed on the same floor in the same apartment building.7 There the two men were fully debriefed on the issues, personalities and material they’d supplied. Burgess ‘had to recall a lot, add new information, make comments on different documents, expound on the information the Cambridge Five had given to the Soviet Union. Many KGB agents from Moscow were coming to Samara to work with them … He got drunk a lot. Also, he could walk alone for hours. Samara at that time wasn’t especially fancy or attractive. Surely not the best city in which to spend time.’8
The men took on new identities: Maclean was Mark Petrovitch Frazer (in homage to the Scottish anthropologist James Frazer) and Burgess was Jim (after his Cambridge friend Jim Lees) Andreyevich (after a character in War and Peace) Eliot (after his beloved George Eliot).9 Whilst Maclean learnt the language and took a job in a linguistic institute, Burgess, who never progressed beyond kitchen Russian, spent his time reading and drinking cheap liquor.
Quite how long they stayed there is unclear. Many writers have taken Burgess’s claim to Driberg of six months at face value, but it’s clear the two men were there at least until after Stalin’s death in March 1953, and probably longer. Petrov claimed that Burgess and Maclean were still living in Kuybyshev in 1954, Burgess told Miller they were there until 1955, and it is likely they had only just come to Moscow when they appeared at their press conference in February 1956. A Russian internet project says they were in Kuybyshev until 1954.10
Burgess later told Stephen Spender how Kuybyshev ‘was a horrible place and things were made worse by the fact that Beria, in an effort to gain popularity after the death of Stalin, released 80 per cent of the criminals in Russia. Kuybyshev was invaded by gangsters and scoundrels. That’s how I lost the tooth on one side of my face. I was walking along a street when a thug saw my watch and knocked me down.’ The tooth was replaced by a stainless steel one, which proved disconcerting to those meeting him for the first time.11
When Modin saw Burgess, after his tour of duty in the summer of 1953, he claimed Burgess was living in a small village on the outskirts of Moscow on the road to Sheremetyevo airport – a description that matches the dacha Driberg stayed at during the summer of 1956.
The Burgess abode was small and attractive, a wooden, typically Russian structure. He had put in a special request to be lodged in old buildings dating from before the Revolution, and this was easily granted. A woman was employed to do the housework, and otherwise Burgess was assigned a KGB bodyguard to help him in his day-to-day existence. He seemed to like his lodging, which had five well-furnished rooms and a fully equipped kitchen. It seemed to suit him, a real intellectual’s retreat, with a large tidy garden planted with fruit trees.12
Burgess made clear to Modin that he resented the way he had been treated since coming to Russia and couldn’t understand why he simply couldn’t return to Britain, adamant he could withstand any MI5 interrogation. When questioned on why he had carried on beyond Prague, Modin ‘concluded that he came along for the fun of it, expecting some kind of party at the Kremlin in his honour, and he was genuinely stunned when they forbade his return to England. He bitterly resented this treatment at the hands of the KGB.’13
In 1956 Burgess moved to a sixth-floor flat in a new block, filled with senior army officers and party officials, Flat 68, 53/55 Bolshaya Pirogovskaya Street. The flat consisted of a long sitting-room, small bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and balcony, and was located in one of the oldest parts of Moscow, and one rich in historical monuments. It looked out on to the crenellated walls and dozen watch towers of the Novodevichy Convent, where amongst others were the graves of Chekhov, Gogol, Khrushchev, Prokofiev and Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who had committed suicide in 1937. Burgess was to become a regular attender of services in the convent.
He confided to Driberg that he would have preferred a couple of rooms in one of Moscow’s old, yellowing houses and told John Miller he wanted to take over an outhouse in Novodevichy but buggers couldn’t be choosers.14 In this Stalinist skyscraper he largely recreated the rooms he had lived in at Cambridge and in London, insisting he couldn’t work without his porcelain desk lamp with its huge shade, clavichord, old regency sofa-table and Tsarist writing-set, which were duly shipped across at KGB expense.
‘My flat in its new form is a continuous joy and the admiration of all who see it. I do hope you will be included in the number some time. It really makes a great difference to life in Moscow to have one’s eyes soothed instead of affronted by one’s surroundings’, he wrote to Driberg, who had organised the shipping out of much of the furniture from London. ‘The curtains are particularly successful, also the lamps. As you know, the best in the way of Soviet lampshades you can get have apparently come straight out of Lily Langtry’s boudoir and are tiring to the eyes, as well as hideous to the sight.’15
Social realist posters from Collet’s left-wing bookshop in Charing Cross Road hung beside framed reproductions of English hunting scenes and a Chagall reproduction. On his desk were pictures of his mother and himself at Eton. Bookshelves lined the walls with hundreds of books on everything from racing cars to a yearbook of English roses. With little else to do apart from listen to music, especially Mozart and Haydn, Burgess read voraciously and widely, as he had most of his life – often about politics and history. Two of his favourite books were David Benedictus’s satirical novel about Eton, The Fourth of June, and a limited edition of the homosexual Irish Nationalist Roger Casement’s The Black Diaries, which he took great pleasure in lending to various visitors in the hope they might be shocked.16
Burgess had told Driberg that he was working at the Foreign Languages Publishing House, recommending Western authors, such as E.M. Forster and Graham Greene, for Russian translation. He did not mention he was also working at the Information Committee of the USSR Foreign Ministry, subsequently described by Boris Piadyshev, who worked there from 1956, as ‘a powerful structure, created at the junction of the intelligence and foreign policy service. It was a clearing house for information coming in from the foreign intelligence service, the Foreign Ministry, and diplomatic missions abroad. This information was analysed and used as a basis for situation assessment and proposals and recommendations concerning global and regional actions that were sent to the country’s top leadership …’17
Piadyshev remembered how:
Guy Burgess’s office was on the second floor, next to our room … His table was piled high with newspapers, books, pipes and other knick-knacks without which a British gentleman is not a gentleman. We received the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune and a couple of other newspapers from Paris two or three days late. Guy was the first to read them. Then he took great pleasure in informing the public about what he thought were the most interesting reports … Unfortunately, he was never able to fit into a new environment. He did not have a family. He had very few friends … Later, Burgess left the Information Committee English-style – that is, without saying good-bye. We were told that he had been offered a new job.18