Excerpt from Chapter 17 of The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carr

I have been to Russia twice only: first in 1987, when thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev the
life of the Soviet Union was ebbing away, and everyone except the CIA knew it; the
second, six years later in 1993, by which time criminalised capitalism had seized hold of
the failed state like a frenzy and turned it into the Wild East. I was keen to take a look
at that new, windy Russia too. It therefore happened that my two trips straddled the
greatest social upheaval in Russian history since the Bolshevik Revolution. And
uniquely - if you set aside a coup or two, a few thousand victims of contract killings,
gang shootouts, political assassinations, extortion and torture - the transition was, by
Russian standards, bloodless.
Over the twenty-five years leading up to my first trip, my relations with Russia
had been less than friendly. Ever since The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, I had been the
target of Soviet literary invective, one moment as my critics put it for elevating
the spy to heroic status, as if they themselves had not made an art form of doing exactly
that, and the next for making the right perceptions about the Cold War but drawing
erroneous conclusions, a charge to which there is no logical response. But then we were
not talking logic, we were talking propaganda. From the trenches of the Soviet Literary
Gazette, controlled by the KGB, and Encounter magazine, controlled by the CIA, we
dutifully lobbed our bombs at each other, aware that in the sterile ideological war of
words, neither side was going to win. Hardly surprising then, when in 1987 I paid my
obligatory call on the Soviet Cultural Attach at his Embassy in Kensington Palace
Gardens to secure my visa, that he should observe not very nicely that if they'd have me
theyd have anyone.
Not surprising either, when a month later I arrived atMoscows Sheremetyevo
airport as the guest of the Union of Soviet Writers an invitation apparently brokered
by our Ambassador and Mikhail Gorbachevs wife, Raisa, over the heads of the KGB
that the rock-faced boy in magenta shoulder boards behind his glass cage should dispute
the authenticity of my passport; or that my luggage should go mysteriously missing for
forty-eight hours, only to reappear unexplained in my home room with my suits rolled
into a ball; or that my room at the dismal Hotel Minsk was ostentatiously shaken out
every time I left it for a couple of hours wardrobe rummaged, papers strewn in a
mishmash across my desk or that the same pair of overweight middle-aged male
KGB watchers - I dubbed them Muttski and Jeski - was assigned to trail me at a
distance of two yards whenever I ventured out alone.

Piecing together now the encounters crammed into those two short weeks in the Russia
of 1987, I am moved again by the pity of it, by the striving and endurance of so-called
ordinary people who werent ordinary at all; and by the humiliations they were forced to
share, whether standing in line for lifes essentials, servicing their own bodies and those
of their children, or guarding their tongues against a fatal slip. Strolling in Red Square
with an elderly lady of letters in the aftermath of Mathias Rusts unscripted arrival, I
took a snapshot of the sentries guarding Lenins tomb, only to see her face turn white as
she hissed at me to put my camera out of sight.

What the collective Russian psyche most fears is chaos; what it most dreams of
is stability; and what it dreads is the unknowable future. And who wouldnt, in a nation
that gave twenty million of its souls to Stalins executioners and another thirty million
to Hitlers? Was life after communism really going to be better for them than the one
they had now? True, the artists and intellectuals, when they felt sure of you, or bold
enough, spoke glowingly of the freedoms that would soon touch wood be theirs.
But between the lines they had their reservations. What status would they have in
whatever new society beckoned? If they had Party privileges, what was going to replace
them? If they were Party-approved writers, who was going to approve them in a free
market? And if they were currently out of favour, what would the next system restore
them?
In 1993, I returned to Russia in the hope of finding out.