USSR

Yakir sings

pavid Levy

If a man talks much about honesty, you can be sure he is a crook. And if a man talks much about discretion, you can count on him to be a blabbermouth. But who would have thought that Pyotr Ionich Yakir, formerly the acknowledged king-pin of Russia's anti-regime dissident underground, who talked as one immune to police pressure, would crack SO quickly and turn state's evidence? I for one.

I cannot go so far as to claim now that that Was why I expelled Yakir from my Moscow apartment one grey Saturday afternoon over a year ago, with the invitation never to darken my door again. Like most other mortals, ny insights generally come after the fact too. mY quarrel with Yakir was prompted by fear of how he would talk about me the moment I might come to seem to him to be disloyal to 11,is cause. This fear was prompted, in turn, by nia allegation to me that an eminent AmenCan correspondent and colleague was a KGB agent The proof he offered for this allegation Would have been laughable were it not so heinously slanderous.

The sure sign of a man's weaknesses are the corresponding strengths that he obsessively claims for himself. And so it was with Yakir.

"1 suppose they could arrest me," said .PetYa Ionich one evening, ensconsed in my ravourite swivel wing-chair, "and make me

fairly uncomfortable. If they hung me up on a • meat hook I don't suppose I would like that very much." (Here he jerked one shoulder upward for theatrical effect.) " But I don't care , about this old flesh of mine. It's not important. They (i.e. the KGB) know very well that they would get nothing but frustration out of me if they arrested me, so they don't."

Indeed, we all constantly wondered why this man who regularly fed us news of the goings-on in Russia's prisons and police stations, in incredible defiance of the Soviet authorities who never allowed us blokes into an ordinary court trial, remained so long at large. Yakir was a frequent visitor to my apartment at the time my building lacked a police guard outside it and was therefore ostensibly without overt surveillance, though I myself always presumed that for that very reason the covert surveillance must have been all the more thorough. That was in the winter of 1970-71.

My final involvement with Petya came about through just such a circumstance. Bernard Gwertzman, the then New York Times correspondent, had got hold of some sort of diary from the Russian underground, a document offering considerable enlightenment on the plight of a certain political prisoner. Unlike most such documents, it had not passed through Yakir before reaching Western hands.

"How did he get hold of it then?" was the question that burned in Yakir's mind. So he asked me to ask Bernie, and then report back to him.

"Why don't you ask him yourself?" I ventured.

" He won't tell me. Maybe he'll tell you. I'm not asking to know what's in the diary." (Why should he? Someone supplied him with clippings of the NYT anyway.) "I just want to know who he got it from."

Dutifully I phoned up Bernie Gwertzman and simply relayed this to him verbatim. Gwertzman, a very diligent worker and nice, bland guy, failed to see why he had to report his sources to Yakir. This, of course, was because he failed to acknowledge Yakir as the public relations man, sole licensed agent, for the dissidents, the way most others did. The homage rendered to Yakir by an influential group of Western correspondents bordered on sycophancy. The name of the game was very explicitly enunciated by Yakir at the outset to all who wished to associate with him and thus acquire Membership in the in-group of Western correspondents. "First," explained Yakir to me, having first led me into my own office and seated himself in my chair, "you must supply me with a certain quota of gin and vodka. Second, you must be prepared to drive me wherever 1 have to go after I leave you." It was a mug's game all right, and I confess that I played it myself for a short time. It was the in-thing to have Yak, and at least one, and often more of his sidekick ' dissies,' frequenting your home, drinking your tax-free liquor in impressive quantities and filling their overcoat pockets unabashedly with bottles of gin as they prepared to leave. While they treated yor pantry cupboard as if it were the corner liquor shop, you tried to feign gratitude for being thus honoured.

My first spat with Yak happened one snowy evening when, true to contract, I was driving him home from my place. His companion that evening was his young daughter, a silent, pointedly aloof girl of perhaps twenty. As we drove over the new, crunchy snow on Kalinin Prospekt around midnight, Petya ordered me to make a long detour to drop his daughter off first. I refused, stopping instead at a suitable corner to let the uncomplaining girl off. (Lest the reader think me overly callous, I beg him to understand that one of the real occupational hazards of being a Western correspondent in Moscow is the way your Russian contacts immediately come to regard you as their personal taxi driver. It is part of being a Have in the Have-Not society, and one is simply forced to develop anti-exploitation resistance mechanisms.) All hell broke 'loose in my car that night, but I just kept right on to the end of the road to Yak's place, way down upon the Moscow River. By the time we got there he had calmed down, but I know he never forgave me for my insubordination as a soldier in the .fight for Russian freedom.

When my phone call to Bernie Gwertzman failed to produce the results Yakir had wanted, he invited himself over to my place, adding that he had other things to discuss too. Automatically I got out the vodka decanter set it down on the coffee table in the parlour with three glasses — one for myself, one for Yakir and one for the inevitable companion — and waited. This time however, he turned up with two companions, spotty-faced young men who struck me as possible speed freaks. Instead of sitting down himself at the vodka-equipped coffee table, Yakir seated his two companions at it, took the decanter in his ham-hand and filled two glasses for them, spilling an extravagant excess on the table.

"Let's you and me go into the kitchen and talk," he said, grabbing my arm. Perhaps by this ploy he thought he was outwitting hidden KGB microphones. Perhaps he thought I had myself installed a tape recorder. Perhaps he really did not want his companions to be privy to our discussion. Whatever, I found myself being led, though not quite like a lamb, into my own kitchen while two freaks whom' I had never clapped eyes on in my life before were drinking my vodka in my best parlour corner. It was not easy to take, so it was somewhat testily that I listened as Yakir, his sardonic, drink-glazed eyes peering at me over his full, black beard, asked me to find out various things for him from sundry western correspondents. When I asked him why he did not ask one particular correspondent he had mentioned (not Gwertzman this time) he replied, in that tone of communicating straight, unarguable fact: "But he's a Ka-Geh-Beshnih (KGB)." "I beg your pardon," I replied, danger lights flashing wildly in my mind. "Please leave my house this instant. You are a very dangerous man."

As anger flared on both sides, our rapidly rising voices brought the two freaks out of the parlour to see what was up. They did not need to grasp what had put us two at daggers drawn and so did not attempt to arbitrate. They concentrated entirely on hustling the stocky, protesting Yakir out of the front door, bowing apologies to me as best they could under the fractious circumstances. During the almost comic-opera struggle, I explained that I did not work for Yakir, nor for the correspondent he had alleged to be a Ka-GehBeshnik, nor even for the KGB itself. I said I worked for the Montreal Star whose distant editor was just as content to have the inside news tips that Yakir dispensed a few moments after they hit the world agency wires as a few moments before. Goodbye.

Thus ended my none-too-smooth relationship with the man who until very recently commanded such respect among Western correspondents as a fearless fighter for freedom in Russia that I would not have dared to disclose the foregoing seamy incidents involving him before now. But now that he is apparently exposing his former comrades In arms right, left and centre to the KGB, and living quite well in gaol, thank you very much, these true facts deserve to be read into the record.

They said that Yakir repeatedly told his friends that if he did get arrested he might crack, and asked forgiveness in advance. I cannot corroborate this. On the contrary, he gave me the opposite line — that he had been in gaol SQ many years (about seventeen all told) that they could no longer crack him. He once even told me that life's enjoyments, the pleasures of the flesh were in any case over

by one's mid-forties, so what did incarceration matter to him now?

This may be so for an alcoholic, which Yakir most certainly is, except for the utter necessity of alcohol to maintain clinical sanity. It was, they say, alcohol deprivation that made him sing in gaol. Dissidents now called in by the KGB for questioning report that they found themselves confronted by Yakir.

It is thought by some that the Soviet leadership is preparing public trials to squash dis

sidence once and for all, using Yakir as star witness and putative inquisitor. The truth is probably that in some quarters the idea is being toyed with. But it would be a dangerous venture, smacking of the worst years of the Stalinist show trials at the very time that the outside world is asking for a free exchange of men and ideas with the Soviet Union as the price of European security. And this is no doubt being argued strongly in the Kremlin.

So instead of glory on the world stage as a repentent dissident turned staunch defender of the regime his father helped to found, Pyotr Ionich Yakir will probably just have to settle for the bottle for the term of his natural life.

I can only be grateful that this will be at the KGB's expense, not mine.