On October 30, 2020, the City of Moscow daily newspaper Moskovskaya Pravda published an interview of Lyudmila Nuykina, veteran KGB illegal intelligence officer. The interview was conducted by Ilona Yegiazarova, a long-time journalist who has recently published a book on Soviet intelligence officers. Below is my English translation available only on this website.
I have also translated two other recent interviews of Nuykina, one published by RIA Novosti on March 7, 2018, and the other published by Moskovsky Komsomolets on February 21, 2020. They can also be accessed on my website here and here.
Ilona Yegiazarova: Lyudmila Nuykina - I Was Lucky With My Husband
Moskovskaya Pravda October 30, 2020
A beautiful, elegantly dressed, energetic lady. Her speech mixed with English and French words. In her 80s, the retired colonel, illegal intelligence officer Lyudmila Ivanovna Nuykina makes you turn after her... She was declassified only three years ago, and her husband, Colonel Vitaly Nuykin, this year to mark the 100th anniversary of the SVR. Their biographies include a couple of decades of productive service in almost two dozen different countries, dangerous missions, life under false names, separation from their children. Lyudmila Ivanovna recalls some events with tears in her eyes and others with a laugh…
Childhood
Talking to Lyudmila Ivanovna, I admire her aristocratic manners and her European charm, and I can’t believe that she comes from the Siberian hinterland, from the village of Verkh-Uba in the Shemonaikhinsky region [Kazakhstan] where she grew up doing farm work.
She hardly remembers his father. He was drafted in 1941 and, a year later, they were informed that he was missing in action. On the eve of a big battle, he wrote: “We are going into battle. We will either be decorated heroes or die fighting.” For him, the latter came true.
Her mother was left with three small children. Lyuda, five years old, was the eldest. All three fell ill with pneumonia. Lyuda and her brother made it, but her younger sister died.
-The living conditions were difficult, recalls Lyudmila Ivanovna. A loaf of bread cost a lot of money. My grandmother saved me from hunger: she took me to her village. She had a farm: potatoes, carrots, cows, calves, pigs... There were no men in the family and women were all at work. As a result, I learned to do everything by myself: to milk the cows, to prepare the compressed dung [used as fuel], to plant vegetables, to heat the stove.
A tragic page in the biography of our heroine is connected with the stove. In 2012, her 96-year-old mother and her brother died as a result of its malfunction.
-There used to be a big stove in the house, but they had to replace it when they decided to expand the room. I was there when the new stove was being installed, and I immediately told the person doing it that it was not done correctly. But he replied that I should mind my own business... I think my family first suffocated from carbon monoxide. Then, apparently, the fire started. There was one gas cylinder in the kitchen and the other in the hallway and they exploded. Nothing remained of my loved ones. My cousin found only a splinter of a skull with soldered hair, by which she identified my mother: she had combed her hair the day before. It’s tragic to live to be 96 years old and die such a terrible death... I had been telling my mother to move to Moscow and stay with me for a long time, I even prepared a room for her. She didn’t want to do it. She didn’t want to leave her son. Now they are together forever...
The only relatives I have left are two cousins and their children. One lives in Moscow, she worked as a nurse for 22 years, and the other stayed in Kazakhstan.
- Did your relatives know that you and your husband were intelligence officers? - I asked in order to change the painful subject.
- Our relatives believed that all these years we worked at the Foreign Ministry. We never discussed the details. But after the screening of the TV series Seventeen Moments of Spring, my brother began to have a vague idea that something more was going on. Still, he remained silent and did not ask any questions.
They only learned the truth in 1985. I came from a long assignment abroad to visit my mother and arrange for my son to go to school and then I was planning to return to my husband. I remember doing the laundry, and a woman came running in and said: “Tell me, who is Nuykina here? KGB is looking for you.” My heart sank: I thought my husband was arrested abroad. However, the news was that our mission was over, that Vitaly was successfully exfiltrated by our people and that we were all returning to Moscow.
Horses, Childbirth, Prisoners
If you think that from her youth Lyudmila dreamed of being an intelligence officer, you are wrong. She graduated from the medical school as an obstetrician-gynecologist and assisted in the dozens of births.
-I really loved my job, it’s a miracle to be the first to see a child being born, smiles Lyudmila Ivanovna. - But it was difficult. The medical unit was located near an impenetrable forest and the branches of the trees converged so that the light did not penetrate into the thicket. Sometimes, I’d be called to assist a birth 12 or even 20 km away. I went there on horseback. Sometimes I would fall from the horse and sometimes I mistook the big trees for the bears. Although I am not a coward, I was afraid of bears. In addition, there were prisoners working for the logging cooperative. They even came to the medical unit with axes: they demanded a fake medical note or alcohol. The nurse always kept the back door unlocked in order to escape if there was trouble. They could easily attack me in the forest.
And one day I almost froze to death. In winter, it gets dark early and I should have stayed overnight with the people I went to check on. However, they did not offer me to stay, so I had to go back. I was a young girl, desperate, in a harnessed carriage, and the snow started to freeze. Well, I either fell asleep, or fainted from the cold. Completely covered with snow, I was found in the carriage by a watchwoman. The horse got to our medical unit by itself. They stirred me up, rubbed me with alcohol, gave me alcohol to drink. After that incident, the chairman of the village council said: “You won’t ever go alone anymore. From now on, you will have an escort.”
Love
In the conversation, Lyudmila Ivanovna refers to her husband by using the English word “father.” She thinks of him with reverence: - I am an Old Believer, for us a man is a God. But Vitaly really deserved love and respect. He was very erudite and was interested in everything, from technology to politics and religion.
And Lyudmila met him at the age of 16.
- Vitaly’s father, who served in the KGB, returned from Germany, and he was offered a job in Ust-Kamenogorsk [Oskemen, Kazakhstan]. He agreed because he was originally from the neighboring region, from the Altai Territory. So that was where Vitaly and I met and were friends for five years. Then Vitaly went to study at MGIMO, and in December, having passed the external exams, he came back for me. From that moment, I began to live with his family. After a while, when he was about to return to his classes in Moscow, his father asked: “Hey, guys, when are you going to get married?” It never crossed our minds. We went to the registry office, and, fortunately for us, a woman who worked there was a friend of my uncle. She registered us right away. There was no wedding, the whole event was very modest.
They will have one more marriage registration during their assignment “in another life.” Our heroine will get married in a foreign country, under a false name, as a foreigner (as a German woman brought up in a French family) to another foreigner. In the country where the Nuykins were based, one had to wait for three months to get married. But the Center was in a hurry and looked into alternatives. So, they went to another country and first put the ad in the newspaper three times according to the local rules: Mr. So-and-So is getting married to Miss So-and-So (this was done in order to check whether they were currently in another marriage). Then, they waited for two weeks and – after that – tied the marriage knot.
-Lyudmila Ivanovna, when did your husband tell you that he was working for the intelligence service?
- In 1960, when his father died. Vitaly came to his hometown for the funeral and said to me: “Redhead, do you want to get a job with someone else’s passport?” I was surprised: “Why do I need somebody else’s passport? My own serves me pretty well.”
Of course, my husband was sure that I would follow him to the end of the world, but it was also necessary for the foreign intelligence service to give its approval. Fortunately, I was approved. We began to study together, although we studied different languages. For example, I firmly refused to learn German and said that I would not speak the language of the people who killed my father. We learned how to communicate using the radio and also various sabotage techniques. Although we were not military intelligence officers, we were trained according to the laws of wartime: while there is peace today, war could break out tomorrow. Later my husband and I obtained additional education in Europe. Vitaly was very well-versed in technology. I remember how in his youth, as if preparing in advance for his future intelligence work, he would take apart and then re-assemble the first television sets in the USSR.
I was nine months pregnant when he was sent on an assignment to be an intern in the company that produced TVs. They did not ask him for a diploma, they just left him for an hour in a room with tools and a broken TV and said: fix it. And he did it.
As a result, their cover story was always linked with the companies that produced and developed new technical equipment. Vitaly Alekseyevich was considered a valuable specialist [by these companies]. He was often sent on business trips by them, which was also useful for his intelligence activities. By the way, some of these companies are still doing well. Lyudmila Ivanovna does not specify exactly what secrets she and her husband obtained for the Homeland but notes that what they did was very significant. “We took everything we could lay our hands on,” she says, laughing.
- When we were in the foreign intelligence service, the country’s leadership did not treat intelligence officers with proper respect. It is only now that many illegal intelligence officers are decorated with the title of Hero of Russia. Before, even lesser medals were rarely awarded. So, my husband has two Orders of the Red Banner: one from the SVR, and the other from the GRU. His third order is that of the October Revolution. This shows you how effective his work was.
- You yourself have the Order of the Red Star and the Medal For Courage. Are you proud of your awards?
- It feels good, of course. I remember once they invited me to the theater “Sovremennik” when they had a play about intelligence officers, and Galina Volchek [Soviet actress and theater director] said: “I am very embarrassed in front of you because I have all four Orders “For Merit to the Fatherland,” but what did I really do for our country that was so important?!”
- How did you live abroad?
- We lived modestly. Everything we earned in our foreign-based companies, we sent to the state treasury and what was left to us was the salary paid by the Center. It was difficult for us to live up to the level of our rich friends, my husband’s colleagues. And some, probably, considered us misers.
One day, my husband’s company sent him on a business trip, and, out of the Soviet habit, he decided to buy a plane ticket in the economy class. He was immediately summoned by the management of the company and told: “You should never do that again, otherwise there will be rumors that our company is cutting corners because we are going bankrupt.”
Another time when he went with top company chiefs on a business trip abroad, everyone bought gifts for home, but he didn’t because he could not afford it. They said to him: why didn’t you buy anything; don’t you love your wife? So, he had to get me some souvenir.
My husband and I didn’t really care about the money. We were accustomed to a modest lifestyle from our youth. I remember when we just moved to Moscow, Vitaly was sent to study at the School No. 101 (today, it is called the SVR Academy. - Ed.). We had little money. We rented an apartment in Balashikha, and paid a lot for it, 35 rubles, although the conditions were more than modest: two people could enter the room, but the third already could not. For the kindergarten of our son Yura, we paid 12.50 rubles. I worked as a doctor at the clinic and received 45 rubles. Vitaly and I had already passed various tests at the KGB. I successfully passed yet another test and was sitting by the Bolshoi Theater, waiting for my husband. On one end of a long bench, there was a woman with a child, and I was sitting on the other. Suddenly a man sat down, too. I tried to move away, but he came closer. He asked me to go with him and offered 40 rubles. I got up and started waving my bag. The man shouted at me: “You fool” and ran away. I came home and told the landlord, and he said to me: “Well, the truth is you are a fool. You pay 35 rubles a month for an apartment, and here he would give you as much as 40 rubles. You’d even have 5 rubles left.” I almost hit him, too.
Beauty is a Powerful Force
- An attractive woman is a delicate topic in intelligence work. Did your appearance help or hinder you?
- Oh, the looks have always been my problem. I dyed my hair blonde, I was young... Men were constantly after me.
I would home and cry. I complained to my husband. Do I look like a fallen woman? Why do they always pester me?! I liked neither Paris nor Italy because of this. When I went somewhere without a husband, I made myself look older on purpose. I put my long hair in a bun, I wore scarves, but even this didn’t always help.
Once in a certain country an Italian man started flirting with me at the airport. According to my cover story, I was a young woman on my way to meet my fiancé in a communist country. And this Italian began to dissuade me. He did everything to distract me. So much so that I missed my flight because of him. The suitcase flew away without me. A person in that country was supposed to meet me and now what would he think? What happened to me, right?! The next plane was in a week. I also had another problem. I had very little money with me. So, I told the representative of the airline: “If you don’t send me to my fiancé right away, I will blow everything up with a Molotov cocktail.”
Fortunately for me, on that exact day, a Bulgarian dance troupe was returning home after their tour, and the airline promised to seat me on the plane together with them. The representative of the airline took my passport with the words: “Just don’t blow up anything here please.” I was taken to the hotel to rest before my flight. And there I sat, a sad-looking blonde in the hotel lobby, reflecting on what transpired. Suddenly the waiter brought me a cup of coffee and a piece of cake and said: “That man over there sent it to you.” Naturally, I didn’t accept, then this man came up to me and introduced himself as the owner of the hotel. He asked me who I was. I told him my cover story about going to meet my fiancé. He also began to dissuade me: that’s a communist country, everyone is put in prison there... Though many years have passed, but I still remember the lesson that this man taught me. He said: “Never give your passport to anyone. Who are you now [without it]? Nobody. People can do whatever they want with you…” Believe me, my heart sank to my heels.
He invited me to a restaurant. I was scared. If he kidnaps me, how will they ever find me? After this incident, I didn’t like to give my passport to anyone, not even to our border guards.
In the end, I was able to fly out. Nobody was there to meet me. How will I make my presence known? Where is our embassy? I asked at the hotel reception desk. I told them that since I was in a communist country, I got very interested in the Soviet Union and I wanted to visit it, but I didn’t know how to go about doing that. They gave me the phone number of the Soviet embassy. I called, but what language should I speak? In a mixture of English and French, I gave them a hint as to what happened, and they found the person who was supposed to meet me. He came by immediately... In general, everything ended well. But the main culprit was that cursed Italian Don Juan.
- Was your husband jealous of you?
- He didn’t show it. Once we were standing on the street and reading a newspaper at the stand. I was on one side and he was on the other. A short man from the Caucasus region appeared and began to pester me. I told him right away: “Here is my husband.” He turned to Vitaly and said: “What a lucky man you are. She is such a beauty.” My husband grumbled to me: “You cannot be left alone for a second,” and I answered: “Well, then, don’t leave me.”
Once in Paris, my husband decided to take a picture of me at the Pigalle against the backdrop of those “entertainment” houses. I didn’t even have time to cross the street, and the “clients” were already accosting me... (laughs).
- Did you have to use your female charms on duty?
- That was unpleasant, and I did it only at the request of my husband. Once, I remember, we worked in a certain country – it was a small one, but it was a hornet’s nest - all the intelligence services of the world were operating there. We had acquaintances, a woman from the Philippines and her English husband. Our trained eye immediately identified them as intelligence operatives. They didn’t have a job, but had a villa on the ocean shore, and were inviting everybody to their parties. You know, ocean, beach, swimming, games. And in the evening, good food, drinks, everyone staying overnight. It was a golden mine for collecting information. And then somehow “father” [Nuykina uses the English word “father” to refer to her husband] fell asleep there, and I was guarding him, I thought, you never know, he got drunk and could accidentally say something in Russian. And then a drunken Pole came up to me, nasty, red-faced, wet, either from sweat, or from swimming, and in his swimming trunks, he invited me to dance. And Vitaly said: go dance. I did. We made friends. He then invited us to visit him and introduced us to the German ambassador who was a big fish. That was a promising acquaintance, but the Center forbade us any further meetings. The German turned out to be a career intelligence officer, so the only information we collected from him was during that first meeting.
Children
This is the most difficult chapter in the biography of Lyudmila Ivanovna. While talking about her children who had to be left behind, sometimes for years, this “iron woman” cannot hold back her tears even today. Her eldest son Yura, in fact, grew up without his parents being present at all.
- Yes, our children didn’t receive enough maternal love. That was so hard on me. I worried a lot and cried. You are somewhere far away, and you think: what if he got sick and needed his mother now, what if nobody is around. Yura lived in a boarding school. We missed his entire childhood. I was rarely allowed to travel home. I would visit him in the boarding school, and he would run to greet me in sandals in the wintertime. Or he’d be in a shirt with frayed sleeves. He had a suitcase full of beautiful clothes, but there appeared to be no one to make sure that he was dressed well. I would say to the boarding school staff: how can this be happening?! Why aren’t you doing your job?
Sometimes the people sent to meet with us abroad would bring us the photographs of our children. They would just show the photos to us and immediately take them away. I had one tiny picture of Yura and hid it on my chest. That was a severe violation of the rules. Only once were we allowed to take the letters from our loved ones abroad. The Center already trusted us one hundred percent, and we didn’t stay in a hotel but in our own apartment. We arrived, we read the letters in the calm surroundings, and then we burned them.
I stopped worrying a bit when I saw Yura on the photograph as a high school student. He grew up, he was handsome, he could definitely be on his own without the help of his mother. But this photograph could not remain with us either.
- However, your younger son Andrey still managed to get some attention from you. He was born abroad, wasn’t he?
- Yes, between him and Yura, there is a difference of 16 years. Andrey was born a hero. He weighed 5.5 kg and the entire hospital staff came running to take a look at him. They envied us, because, apparently, only girls were being born there during this period. By the way, “father” often said that he wanted a girl. Everyone thought he was crazy. They didn’t know that we already had an older son, but he said something along the lines of ‘first, you have to get a nanny and then a baby’ [Russian proverb].
- But couldn’t the doctors see that you were a woman who had already given birth?
- Yes, and I had to tell them that my first child died. Can you imagine, he was alive, living in Moscow, and I had to say something like that!?
- Did the birth of Andrey make your work more difficult?
- No, on the contrary, he helped us! You know, who would suspect a young mother? I would breast-feed him with one hand and check the dead drop with another. Or I would do it while tying his shoelaces.
We had to leave Andrey in the USSR when he was four years old. When he arrived, he was a genuine foreigner. The plane landed at Sheremetyevo, and he sat and did not want to get up. He looked out of the window in shock: “Mommy, mommy, look at snow.” He had never seen snow before, not even in the refrigerator. He only knew it from fairy tales we read to him.
At home, he began to be demanding: “Give me bananas,” and I would say: “There are no bananas.” “Give me Coca-Cola.” “There is no Coca-Cola.” “Well, okay, then, give me Pepsi-Cola” (he did not like Pepsi-Cola and always drank Coca-Cola). I would say: “There is none of that!” And then he asked: “Why did we come here then?!” I answered: “This is our home.” “No, this is the home of the older brother.” Well, how could I explain it to him? What could I say when he used to live on the 45th floor of a building where there was a swimming pool on the 35th floor and his father’s car was in the garage on the 7th floor, and here the things like that did not exist? The tragedy of many illegal intelligence officers is that their children grow up as foreigners. Some even refuse to come back with their parents. They say: you are Russians, you go back, but we want to stay.
After all, when we are on a mission, we must bring up children the way the inhabitants of that country do. We cannot raise them in the Soviet way.
Andrey did not speak Russian. Even when we returned for good, everyone thought we were foreigners. We walked in our Tyoply Stan neighborhood and spoke a foreign language. And in the store, they would serve us ahead of everybody.
The boys in the neighborhood refused to play with Andrey. In winter, they would write things on his sled. They didn’t let him play with them, they said that he was an American spy, but he did not understand them. Maybe I made a mistake, but I translated to him what they said. So, he stopped speaking foreign languages. He wanted me to buy him the Russian dictionary and he studied it diligently. At first it was funny when he would say something like “give me [in English] a hand” but he soon got really good.
- Do your sons hold a grudge against you for the things they missed in their childhood?
- They never talked about it. Maybe there was some resentment that we couldn’t see. I remember that once when Yura was already an adult, a student at the university, I asked him: “Tell me, my son, did you need anything [when you were a child]?” And he replied: “I needed everything, I needed you.”
The Betrayal
Having a colleague who defects is a nightmare for any intelligence officer. And this nightmare, unfortunately, became a reality for the Nuykins. Their productive work abroad was cut short by the betrayal of Oleg Gordievsky. A former KGB station chief (rezident) in Copenhagen and about to become the station chief in London, Gordievsky knew the Nuykins very well and he outed them as soon as he was able to.
- He studied with Vitaly at the School No. 101 [The SVR Academy at this time]. Also, just imagine, he prepared the documents for my husband that my husband used for his cover story! Thank God, he did not prepare mine but, of course, he knew that I was helping my husband. Gordievsky would visit us at our home, in our apartment in the Tyoply Stan neighborhood. He taught my husband a few Danish words and expressions and I treated him with coffee and brandy. Before leaving for London, he visited Yury Ivanovich Drozdov (the head of the Illegal Intelligence Directorate of the KGB’s First Main Directorate - Ed.) and asked where we were working. Yury Ivanovich replied: “Don’t worry, not far from you.” That saved us. For 12 years they were looking for us in Europe, and we were in Southeast Asia.
- How do you feel about traitors?
- I feel contempt. But I also feel pity. They are afraid to walk the streets openly. They don’t like them even there [on the other side] and they try not to communicate with them too much, because if you betrayed once, you might betray again. They say that Gordievsky wears a wig and a mustache. He is now afraid of his own shadow. That’s his punishment.
Once a man drove me to visit a couple who were illegal intelligence officers. On the way there, we discussed the issue of betrayal. I said to that person: “If I met Gordievsky, I would scratch his eyes out.” And I made a show of putting my fingers in the eyes of that man. After a while, it turned out that he was also a traitor - Alexander Poteyev.
-And could you really scratch his eyes out?
- Yes, I could! I fight to the bitter end. [When I was a child] I would defend my brother from other boys who teased him about not having a father. I got on my horse and charged at them.
“But this is a failure!”
There are no trifles in the work of intelligence officers. Many of our heroes admitted how in the beginning they would betray themselves in minor everyday situations, but [fortunately] no one paid any attention to their mistakes. I ask Lyudmila Ivanovna to recall such incidents from her life. Nuykina laughs. There were indeed funny things that happened while she and her husband were on their serious missions.
- At first, the Russian word for “yes” [da] would come up now and then in the “father’s” speech [Nuykina uses the word “father” to refer to her husband]. And I had an embarrassing accident, too. I was travelling on a train in one of the socialist countries, I was tired and was sitting on the upper bunk bed. The borders were close to each other, and the border guards kept coming in and out. And here was another border, the people in uniform came in, and I blurted out in Russian: “What, again?!” I said that and froze in horror. Then I blushed and huddled in the corner, but no one paid attention to my mistake.
There was also a comical incident. Lyudmila Ivanovna arrived in a European country and went to the store to buy clothes. The saleswoman who helped her in the dressing room immediately realized by her bra that she was from the USSR. In the USSR, the bras were fastened with buttons, while in Europe they had small hooks.
Or here’s another story. Sending the Nuykins abroad under the cover story of the engaged, but not yet married couple, the Center did not consider that while civil marriages were not common in the USSR, abroad they had long become the norm.
- The service told us: while you are not married, you need to stay in different rooms at the hotel. But that was a big mistake, and it drew [unwanted] attention to us. In the West, that looked very strange. They told my husband: “Are you such a fool to pay for two rooms?”
I also remember a funny episode: at the very beginning of our assignment, I did something stupid. My husband and I went to the store, and, at that time, in the USSR, there was a shortage of toilet paper. So, when I saw it, I loaded the whole cart. Then, my husband came up and said quietly: “What are you doing? Get rid of it immediately.”
- You probably had to avoid buying certain products and control your eating habits so as not to arouse suspicion?
- Of course, we ate whatever was the diet in the given country. But when we got really homesick, I would cook a little borsch or prepare 20-30 dumplings, and we ate it very quickly. We didn’t worry that smells might give us away, since there was a Chinese restaurant under our apartment and the smell of garlic and onions from there overpowered the smell of everything else.
Once, when “father” [again, “father” stands for Vitaly] was on another mission, I received information that he had been promoted. I celebrated according to the Soviet tradition. I poured two glasses of liquor, clinked them, drank from one, and quickly got rid of everything.
- Have there been any other interesting, though not necessarily funny, situations?
- There was this situation on one of our missions. I went with my husband to a meeting with our contact with bags full of important information. If they captured us with this, we’d go to prison immediately. The contact had to identify us by our photo and say the password. We didn’t know who he was. We came and no one was there. Well, we turned around to go home. And then I saw a short, plump man running behind us. He turned to my husband and said: “Give me a smoke” and Vitaly replied: “Sorry, I don’t smoke.” Then he went on, muttered something under his breath, grabbed my hand and started speaking in Russian: “Guys, please wait, I forgot the password!” I broke free. And then this man, apparently making a supreme effort of the will, tensed up and suddenly remembered the password. In general, everything ended well. He apologized later, but the experience was far from pleasant.
And here’s one more unpleasant situation. We came to visit a young American couple we were acquainted with. They had a large apartment; paintings covered all the walls. They left us alone and said they needed to change their clothes. And then I noticed a book in Russian left on the table: it was Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. I told “father” [Vitaly] about it in a whisper, and he whispered back: “Just pretend to look at the paintings.” Obviously, they wanted to see our reaction, and maybe they even recorded us. They soon returned and they asked us all kinds of questions in the course of the evening. It was clear beyond any doubt: they were intelligence officers. We all use the same methods, you know.
And once at the airport, a man with whom my husband had studied at MGIMO ran up to him, while my husband was undercover. “Hey, Vitaly, don’t you recognize me?!” My husband responded in French: “You have mistaken me for someone else,” and when this man did not calm down, my husband threatened to call the police. The man was so angry that he later went to our embassy to complain about the arrogant former friend from his student days.
The most unpleasant incident happened toward the end of our mission when they were looking for us everywhere. They rang the doorbell, I opened: there was the security guard of our building and three other people I didn’t know. They encircled me in the corridor so that I couldn’t leave. Then they said some nonsense about flowerpots, and one of them went inside. I immediately understood. They came in to plant a bug. In the evening, I showed it to my husband, and he said to leave it there.
- Did you forbid yourself to speak Russian at home?
- Yes, we forgot Russian as soon as we got into the car to go the Moscow airport. In general, I’ve developed a peculiar relationship with my native language. I made it my enemy, tried to forget it, and never made any mistakes, except during that situation on the train early in my career. So, I had the opposite problem. When I returned to the USSR, I could hardly remember Russian.
-And what about the famous episode from the [Soviet TV series] Seventeen Moments of Spring that women giving birth shout the word “mother” in their native language?
- I never understood why one would scream during childbirth. Maybe because I delivered so many babies when I worked as a doctor. Both times I gave birth, I did it in silence.
Out of modesty, our heroine is silent about a terrible and extreme situation in which she displayed incredible courage and self-control. Lyudmila Ivanovna almost died on the operating table. She lost consciousness and a lot of blood but did not give herself away.
-The mother of our Irish neighbor was visiting me, and he asked me to show her around the city. We took a walk and returned home to have coffee. I suddenly had a seizure, I turned pale, but I didn’t show it because I had a guest at home. She, however, noticed that I was not feeling well and left. I took a pill and went to bed. A whole day passed, but I didn’t get better. At night I went to the toilet and collapsed. I only remember that Vitaly took me in his arms and put me in the hall. When I opened my eyes, I saw in front of me a nun dressed in black. Well, I thought I already crossed into the other world. It turned out that I was in the hospital. I had a miscarriage, lost a lot of blood, had a surgery... “Father” [Vitaly] donated as much blood as he could, but 400 ml was not enough. I needed more blood, but the hospital could not provide it. Not knowing what to do, my husband shared his misfortune with our Irish neighbor. The Irishman said: “You are a member of the club (when abroad, in order to gain status in the community, you must be a member of some club), let’s go there.” They did and the Irishman said: “Our European woman urgently needs blood.” The men there acted immediately, got into three cars, and drove to the hospital. 15 people donated blood to the hospital’s blood bank. And immediately they had enough blood for me, while before that, they literally ignored me.
- Were you afraid you would die in a foreign land?
- Yes, I was. I told my husband: if something happens to me, don’t leave me here, cremate me, and bring me home. You know, how many of our illegal intelligence officers die under false names and no one comes to their graves... I remember how all these thoughts came back to me at the funeral of Kim Philby, and I cried, although I didn’t know him personally.
Back in the USSR
Returning home after many years of dangerous and stressful work is certainly a joyful occasion for any intelligence officer. But the difficulties of [re]adaptation remain. It took Lyudmila Ivanovna a long time to bring back her fluency of the Russian language. She even had trouble getting used to her real name.
- Once I went to a bank and a girl at the service desk asked me: “What is your last name?” I couldn’t remember! I was so ashamed. But the girl seemed to be frightened even more. She thought that I was losing my mind and began to calm me down.
Upon returning to the USSR, I realized that I was very different from Soviet women. There are now emancipated women in Russia, but, at that time, the majority lived in the shadow of their husbands. Once, at a party meeting, I said publicly that the most oppressed woman in the world is the Russian woman. A whole scandal broke out! If they hadn’t known my character, they would probably have thrown me out, but they simply said: don’t talk about this topic ever again.
I felt free. I got used to the fact that in the West, there were people with jars in public places, collecting money for all sorts of things. So, when I already worked in the headquarters in Moscow and found out that my colleague’s husband got killed in Afghanistan and that his parents needed to go to a sanatorium, but that the woman didn’t have enough money, I took a large envelope and made a round of other offices. I didn’t know anyone, and I spoke Russian poorly. I entered a room with a long table and a lot of people - a meeting was underway. They told me that this was not my department. And I answered: “So, what’s the difference? We are all KGB.” And everyone donated some money for the colleague.
I also collected money for orphans. I put a five-liter jar near the cafeteria. The colleagues sealed the lid for me, made a small hole, and the jar was slowly getting filled. The party secretary, panicking, called his superiors: “Here some Nuykina is collecting money,” but the management already knew about my inventions.
I did not care about the institutional hierarchy. I did not understand who was subordinated to whom. I immediately went to the main boss who decided everything. I was used to that in my work as an illegal intelligence officer. Others signed up on the waiting list and waited, but I went straight in. I was very bold.
I noticed that my courage came to the fore especially in the moments of tension. I remember that once on a mission abroad, we had scheduled an “instant meeting” [in KGB terminology, “momentalka”] just to pass on something to somebody. We were walking down the street and I suddenly saw that there was a gendarme in the telephone booth. Why was he there? Maybe he just pretended to talk while he was actually there to observe us? And I had a bag full of materials, which we couldn’t take back. Instead of being paralyzed by fear, I started hugging and kissing my husband. We reached the right place, quickly did what we were supposed to do and then hugging and kissing took the same way back. That’s what being an emancipated woman means!
You know, Soviet people abroad could always be easily identified from afar. They looked as if shackled, their movements were rigid. Evidently, the Soviet system left a physical imprint on them. They felt relaxed only in large groups. By the way, my husband and I sometimes missed our homeland and our language so much that we would go to the airport just to watch the flights with Soviet passengers and listen to our native Russian swear words.
Epilogue
-Lyudmila Ivanovna, there was so much tension in your life, so many nerve-wrecking events and hardships. Do you think that it was worth it?
- After our return to the USSR, when we encountered unfairness and when we were mistreated for no reason, I thought: “My God, is it for this that I left my two children, that my children grew up without motherly affection?!” But Vitaly would always calm me down, saying there were bad people everywhere. Looking back at what I lived through, I myself sometimes can’t believe it: has this simple village girl really done all of that? And I understand: I did it all for the sake of my husband. I was very lucky to have him. I only regret one thing: he passed away so soon, in 1998. He had a heart attack.
I remember how we would buy books in French and English, how we dreamed we would read them in retirement together. Now I read them by myself. But [I don’t despair], there is family continuation. Our two sons, who are doing well in their careers, two granddaughters and two grandsons: 37, 16, 15 and 9 years old, all very handsome. Vitaly, unfortunately, only got to see the oldest granddaughter. How happy he would be now!
What do I wish for? I want to live to see my grandsons getting married…
