Stalin’s Englishman

In November 1961 Burgess’s stepfather John Bassett died. It had never been a good relationship – the two men were too different and Burgess was jealous of another man in his mother’s life – but it created more worries about his mother, herself not in good health. Many of his friends, such as Anthony Blunt, Harold Nicolson and Tom Driberg, took the trouble to visit her and pass on news of her son and she sought out the company of many in his circle.¹

Rosamond Lehmann recorded in a notebook, ‘Mrs Bassett, Guy Burgess’s mother came at her own request to see me. Although perfectly “real”, she looked and spoke so like a stock uninhibited character-Mum that I had constantly to remind myself that I was not watching her and listening to her speaking her lines in one of those typical West End comedies, sealed off from life. Garrulous, staunch, naïve-shrewd, scatty, naval and military wife and widow … Smartly dressed. Brisk and bright.’²

Eve told Rosamond how she thought ‘Soviet discipline was good for Guy … he had drunk too much in the old days’ and was drinking less now but that he ‘must miss his friends so, and although of course he’d made a lot of new ones they were such a very different type – not what one was accustomed to …’ Was there any secret behind her round bright light-coloured eyes? Only a child-like sadness, it seemed.³

When Keen mentioned he was just off to a photo-assignment showing Muscovites on vacation at the Black Sea resorts in April, Burgess – off to Sochi himself for a month’s holiday – offered to show Keen the sights.

He would be staying at the sanatorium of the Council of Ministers as an official guest, though his engineer friend would be ensconced in one of the resort’s many hotels. We met at my hotel, minus the engineer, where I ordered coffee and he vodka, even though it was only mid-morning … We sat for a while on the main promenade just managing to talk above the blaring martial music, interspersed with propaganda messages which came from loudspeakers on poles placed every hundred metres along the sea front.⁵

Keen remembered how ‘Burgess smoked continuously without even stopping to eat. He walked energetically, talked enthusiastically’ and he talked fondly of his mother, who was too ill to make her yearly visit to him. He asked Keen, whom he hardly knew, if he would ‘take photographs of him sitting in a quiet corner in the grounds of the sanatorium, where in the past he would sit with his mother, and send them to her on my return to London’ on the understanding that Keen would only release them to the press on Burgess’s death.⁶

Burgess’s request had been precipitated by rumours that he and Maclean might be passing through Britain or flying to attend a communist conference in Havana. Other newspaper rumours suggested they were heading for the United Arab Republic or Guinea. The authorities were immediately put on alert. Special Branch searched the 7,490 ton Soviet liner Baltika as it docked at Tilbury, and Shannon airport was watched. The authorities were in a quandary, as they still did not have sufficient evidence to convict Burgess. Word was put out that should they step on British soil, they would be arrested.

In fact, the intelligence leak applied only to Maclean, who was believed to be in Cuba and it was thought might transit in Britain on his flight back to Prague. Burgess’s whereabouts were a mystery, the Daily Express claiming he had ‘been at a convalescent home near Leningrad for the past fortnight. He is under medical supervision because of heart trouble, ulcers and his heavy drinking.’¹⁰

Stephen Harper called round at Burgess’s flat. The black leather upholstered door was answered by Tolya, still in pyjamas, who told him Burgess was at the Black Sea and uncontactable, but he had telephoned the night before ‘with instructions to tell callers that he had gone to Cuba or somewhere’.¹¹

In fact Burgess had been in Sochi, and rushed back to Moscow, claiming he wanted to set the record straight and not alarm his mother, but he was only too happy with the attention paid him by journalists. Discovering he was at Wolfenden’s room in the Ukraine Hotel, Harper sped across town, meeting John Mossman, the Daily Mail correspondent, in the lift on the way. Harper would later recall:

We burst into room 2702 and found Burgess, then aged fifty, sitting on the edge of the bed in stockinged feet, a tumbler of Canadian Club whisky in his hand, and his flies undone. Wolfenden looked surprised and hastily put typewritten sheets into a desk drawer. The jacket of Burgess’s Bond Street-tailored suit hung over the back of a chair, with the white ribbon of the Order of the Red Banner in the lapel. It was awarded for services to the Soviet Union, but Burgess joked, ‘It shows I support Dynamo football club.’¹²

Lunch, Mossman remembered, comprised of roast suckling pig served by his elderly housekeeper and was accompanied by so much vodka, whisky and Georgian wine that Burgess ‘broke off once or twice to rush to the bathroom to be violently ill. He explained that it was the tension of his life in Moscow that affected his stomach so badly.’ Dressed in a shabby and food-stained maroon smoking jacket, Burgess paced up and down the room talking about ‘my friend Harold Macmillan’ and reminisced about his London clubs – now he ‘had to content himself with the Workers Club attached to the Foreign Languages Publishing House’ – whilst Tolya (who Mossman remembered as being called Jan) strummed a guitar nearby.

‘“Look,” said Burgess. “I’m a firm believer in communism, of course, but I don’t like the Russian communists. Oh, what a difference it would make if I was living among British communists. They are much nicer, more friendly, people, you know. I’m a foreigner here. They don’t understand me on so many matters.”’ He gave a deep sigh and suddenly changed the subject. He finished the meal ‘in ruminative silence, pencilling a brilliant drawing of Stalin on the tablecloth’.¹⁴

The two men met occasionally, often for lunch in the Moscow hotel where Mossman lived, ‘during which he became progressively more drunk’. After one such lunch, Burgess impishly suggested he should crash a French reception at one of Moscow’s smartest hotels. Mossman tried to dissuade him, to find on his arrival Burgess in the line-up ‘waiting to be introduced to the hostess. When it was his turn, he introduced himself as Lewis Carroll. “You’re Guy Burgess,” exclaimed the alarmed woman, who was the wife of the Agence France-Presse correspondent. Burgess staggered drunkenly into the room and pretended to urinate in the fireplace.’¹⁵

Mark Frankland, then the Observer correspondent in Moscow, remembered a visit from Burgess in 1962. His ‘expression was defiantly louche, challenging me to show alarm, and ready to jeer if I did. The eyes were large and watery, the lips full and moist. A trilby hat and a camel-hair overcoat patterned with stains and cigarette burns completed the impression of someone got up as Laurence Olivier playing Archie Rice …’16

Both had been members of the Apostles and they talked about Cambridge and the society. ‘It was clear after only a few minutes of our first meeting that he still lived in London in his mind. The airmail edition of The Times, which he read each day, and the London political weeklies and BBC broadcasts that supplemented it, were his parish magazines, for he knew most of the British public figures they reported on and many of them had been his friends.’¹⁷ Having given his flurry of interviews, Burgess set off on 24 April for ‘Bokhara and Samarkand in the footsteps of Tamerlane (sic) and Genghis Khan’.¹⁸

On his return, he wrote to Harold Nicolson dismissing the suggestion he had planned to return. ‘I had no such intention or plans. Chiefly because any return and any trial which they might have to bring, presumably would cause pain and troubles to dear friends … HMG has been as badly advised by the people who once nearly arrested Hilda Matheson as a German spy.’ He was saddened that friends, such as James Pope-Hennessy, were no longer writing to him and ended wistfully, ‘I should love to see you and them in Albany.’¹⁹

What the press hadn’t realised was how ill Burgess was. On Easter Monday 23 April he wrote a letter with his last wishes to Esther Whitfield:

Anything may happen at any operation. If anything happens to me – it’s 99% against – I’ve sent this plan since everyone makes muddles and puts things off. There should be a balance to my account at Lloyds Bank, St James’s Street, and Montreal Trust Company, St James’s Square, but owing to me. It won’t be much. But as a souvenir want to send a quarter each of total to these four – a quarter each to:

1. Sir Anthony Blunt

2. Miss Esther Whitfield

3. Tollya [sic] Borisovich Chishekov – Russian name and address is below

4. Kim Philby

If 1, 2 or 4 don’t want this, send his/her share to Tollya [sic] … Mummy I’m sure would like her sofa table as a family thing to go to Nigel, which I have arranged. Other furniture, books, clothes here also disposed here – some books to nephews. Russian dining set to a Russian is arranged. Not family & it should stay here. Aunt Peggie’s White Russian loot. Sorry brother. Guy not a worry really.20

His old friend from West Meon and Eton, William Seymour, on a visit to Moscow as part of a United Nations delegation in 1962, ‘saw quite a bit of him in the three weeks I was there, and he was most helpful. I remember his mother had given me some socks to take to him.’ They talked about British politics, Burgess offered to fix him up with some good fishing and before he left ‘instructed his housekeeper to buy me two kilos of the best caviar not then on sale to tourists … There was much to like about Guy, and I enjoyed his company when I was in Russia.’ The two continued to correspond afterwards.²¹

The art historian Francis Haskell, in Moscow to bring back to London his future wife Larissa, a curator at the Hermitage, was invited by a friend to a party to celebrate Burgess’s birthday. He remembered an evening talking about the past – Haskell was also an Apostle – and books. To Haskell, seventeen years younger than Burgess, he appeared ‘like a figure from P.G. Wodehouse’ but also ‘cultivated and intelligent’. He took up an invitation to lunch at Burgess’s flat – guinea fowl cooked by the housekeeper – where he told Haskell he wished to be buried in the Novodevichy cemetery.²²

Increasingly, however, Burgess became more and more drunk, until he suddenly said ‘“Of course we’re bugged in here. I know where it is,” shouted Burgess, and he pointed, “It’s up in that corner,” and shook his fist at the invisible bug. “I hate Russia. I simply loathe Russia. I’m a communist, of course, but I’m a British communist, and I hate Russia!”’²³

Burgess was not welcome at the British embassy and the embassy staff were told to avoid him, so he tended to socialise with a mixed bag of expatriates, many of whom were keen on ‘baking cakes, making jams and cordials and selling old English memorabilia’. The sports writer and novelist Jim Riordan, studying in Moscow that year, remembered Burgess would often pop in to the Daily Worker bazaars to raise money for its ‘Fighting Fund’ held in the flat of the translator Hilda Perham, ‘hoping for a jar of home-made marmalade or his favourite seed cake’.24

Riordan met Burgess several times either at funeral wakes for British communists or in his flat, where he ‘delighted in showing off a whole drawer full of Old Etonian bow ties and the tailor’s tag on his bespoke suits from Eton High Street’. Discovering Riordan came from Portsmouth, Burgess ‘reminisced about the “sailorboys” he’d known, the nights he’d spent with them at the Keppel’s Head Hotel down by the Hard, and his sexual activities in the Queen Street red-light district’. Riordan’s abiding memory, however, was of the smell of ‘alcohol and tobacco intermingled with garlic and cloves, which he would pop into his mouth from a side pocket as if he were chewing gum’.²⁵

What must be one of the strangest sporting events to have been held in Moscow took place that summer – a cricket match organised by Donald Maclean, who captained an eight-man Gentleman’s team against a seven-man Player’s, team, captained by the Daily Worker correspondent Dennis Ogden, with Burgess as umpire. Melinda Maclean and the other wives prepared a cricket tea of cucumber and caviar sandwiches.

A reasonably flat grassy area, though with the added hazard of cowpats, was found near the dacha of another member of the expatriate community, the translator and former British diplomat Robert Dagleish. Although a man short, the Players won with fifty-four runs and one wicket to spare, helped by the ‘runs scored by a former American spy who adopted a baseball stance’ – much to Maclean’s chagrin.²⁶

That summer the journalist Erik da Mauny visited Burgess to discover if he knew the whereabouts of Kim Philby, who hadn’t been seen since his disappearance from Beirut in January. Let in to the book-cluttered flat by Burgess’s grey-haired and rather motherly housekeeper, Nadezhda, Mauny found Burgess lying on a Victorian chaise-longue, wearing pyjamas and a stained, dark-blue silk dressing-gown:

His face was puffy, with a greyish tinge like liver paste, but he had managed to preserve a sort of ravaged jauntiness; there was even a weary seigneurial quality in the gesture with which he invited me to pull up a chair. We might have been meeting for sherry in the rooms of an Oxford college, except for the hash reek of Russian tobacco, under which lay a mustier, sickroom smell, accentuated somehow by the bright sunshine beyond the closed windows. It was Burgess’s conversation, however, that produced the strange effect of a complete throwback to an earlier period before his dramatic disappearance with Maclean. All those years in Moscow seemed to have washed over him without a trace; I had the impression that he had remained totally unassimilated into Russian life.27

Burgess claimed to have no knowledge of Philby’s whereabouts. The two men shared a bottle of Hungarian brandy and reminisced about mutual friends in London, Burgess twice letting a bowl of chicken broth brought by his housekeeper go cold, preferring instead to chain-smoke.

During the summer of 1963 Burgess stayed in his flat, lying on a chaise-longue in pyjamas and dressing-gown, smoking up to sixty cigarettes a day – and drinking Armenian brandy or Scotch, which he ordered by the case. A nurse visited him several times a day to give him injections in his backside. Once, when she failed to turn up, Burgess asked John Miller: ‘“I say, old boy, would you give me an injection?” “Where?” I asked, suspecting trouble. “In the bum, of course, where I am badly pricked.”’²⁸

On 20 August he was admitted to a special third-floor general ward for heart cases at the Botkin hospital with an advanced case of arteriosclerosis – the disease that had killed his father some forty years earlier. It was there he died in his sleep at 6 a.m. on Friday 30 August of acute liver failure. He was fifty-two.

The only coverage in Russia was a seventy-eight-word obituary on page four of Izvestia, but his death created headlines around the world, including a television interview with Tom Driberg that had been made the previous year. Blunt was staying with John Golding in the south of Italy when he received news of the death and Golding remembered how he ‘was transparently moved and distressed by it’.²⁹

But Philby’s third wife, Eleanor, says they did meet ‘briefly as he lay dying in hospital’, as does his biographer Patrick Seale. The KGB general Sergei Kondrashev confirms it, but in a final irony, the two men, whose lives had been so entangled and who had given up everything to go into exile, found they had ‘grown apart’. According to Kondrashev, Burgess ‘was conscious of the fact he had put suspicion on Philby’.³¹

Eve, now in her late seventies, was too ill to attend the funeral, so Nigel went alone. When Nigel was buying his ticket to Moscow at Thomas Cook’s, the clerk paused for a moment after he gave his name. ‘Will that be a single or a return?’

Burgess’s funeral was held on a warm September morning – Wednesday 4 September – at the Donskoi Crematorium, a ghoulish 1930s hall notable for the number of urns and plaques around the walls dedicated to former members of the Soviet Secret police who had died on duty. It was attended by just over a dozen people including Donald and Melinda Maclean, the ever-faithful housekeeper Nadezhda Petrovna, journalists such as John Miller and Richard Hughes, colleagues from the Foreign Languages Publishing House, and some Soviet intelligence officers, including Modin. Philby was told not to attend because of the presence of journalists. There were also a few members of the expatriate community such as Archie Johnstone, a former editor of British Ally, the British propaganda newspaper in Russia, Ralph Parker, a former Moscow correspondent of The Times, and Len Wincott, who had been involved in the 1931 Invergordon Mutiny in the Royal Navy.³²

After Burgess’s death, the KGB cleared his flat of all his papers, including a manuscript memoir, letting the family take only a few sentimental effects.³⁴ Tolya disappeared, never to be heard of again. Nigel remembered how ‘I brought back one or two books – that table, that funny inkstand and that’s really all – his pianola I gave to his daily – an absolutely terrifying lady of enormous size who promoted herself into a wailer – they have wailers at funerals. She made a noise like a steam engine. She had the pianola.’

Burgess had left no will, but the instructions in his letter of intent sent to Esther Whitfield at Easter 1962 were followed. The £6,222 in his British account was left to Nigel,³⁵ but Philby’s £2,000 proved to be a financial headache, as it had been gifted when Philby was in Beirut and not Russia. The Treasury looked at whether ‘The Third Man’ might at least be in breach of the Exchange Control Act if the monies were transferred to his account in Russia, as technically he was still a UK resident for exchange control purposes.³⁶

Burgess also left him a dressing table, portable organ, plum-coloured wing armchair, carved bedhead, his clothes – he was about the same size – and many of his books. Eleanor Philby took a fancy to a Paul Klee print that had hung in the bathroom.³⁷ Though Maclean had helped Nigel deal with Muscovite bureaucracy after the death, Burgess and Maclean had never been close in life and had seen little of each other since coming to Moscow. To the man with whose name he has indubitably become linked, but whose association was only fleeting, Burgess left nothing.³⁸

41

‘I’m a communist, of course, but I’m a British communist, and I hate Russia!’