Smiley's people

Another’s words can bring old memories to new life. I recently reread John Le Carré’s iconic 1979 spy novel. George Smiley is a British spymaster, and his people are Estonian émigrés whose gathering of secrets eventually forces their Moscow Centre nemesis, Karla, to defect to the West. But not without Soviet reprisals along the way, and Smiley explains the mindset of a former agent to his superiors, and hence the value he places in him:

“Vladimir’s father was an Estonian and a passionate Bolshevik. A professional man, a lawyer. Stalin rewarded his loyalty by murdering him in the purges. Vladimir still wanted to believe, despite what they had done to his father. The war promoted him, he fought like a lion, and when it was over, he waited for the great Russian liberation that he had been dreaming of, and the freeing of his own people. It never came.

“Instead, he witnessed the ruthless repression of his homeland by the government he had served. Scores of thousands of his fellow Estonians went to the camps, several of his own relatives among them. The lucky ones escaped to Sweden and Germany. We’re talking of a population of one million sober, hard-working people, cut to bits.”

The incomparable Alec Guinness as George Smiley

As a teenager, dad used to dream of being part of an Estonian liberation force. The older lads who arrived with him on the Dundalk Bay talked about it. This was early 1950s Wellington, bright sunlight, clean rain and plenty of food. Stalin died in March 1953, and Estonians and others in Siberian gulags were permitted to return home. Many of those who survived, did.

There was a sinister side: the Bolsheviks wrote a friendly letter in Russian to grandma, saying she would be welcome to return to the homeland; she was needed there to help rebuild the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic – although, of course, she would have to spend 5 years in a labour camp first.

Grandma did not reply to the letter. She did develop serious mental illness after many years of living in fear and worry, in occupied Estonia and later in refugee camps in Germany, moving from one place to another, always searching for a safe haven. Even in faraway New Zealand, the KGB was ever-present in her imaginings; she would tell us of the tenants in the flats upstairs, typing reports on Erika Salme Napp née Lehova for the KGB on their typewriters.

We learned as we grew to be teenagers to simply accept grandma’s words, and not try to refute them. This was the time when Le Carré wrote his Karla trilogy, starting with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) and ending in Smiley’s People.

It was a time of a Labour government in England, and Democrats in the US under Jimmy Carter who went head-to-head with the USSR’s Leonid Brezhnev in SALT – strategic arms limitation talks. The world was afraid of a nuclear war.

Grandma and dad had long given up on Estonian freedom; the Soviet Union was trying to prop up states in Africa and Asia (as was the US; the Vietnam war ended in 1975), culminating in the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the year of the Islamic revolution in Iran.

Le Carré wove a fictional world of ageing Estonians in Paris, Hamburg and London, living in poverty and keeping alive a flame of belief in a return to independence, engaging in espionage and counter-espionage, with deadly consequences.

Our world in New Zealand was mundane by comparison. Even so, on the night of 26 September 1974 police in Wellington arrested a senior public servant, Dr Bill Sutch, during a clandestine rendezvous with a Russian diplomat, Dmitri Razgovorov, a known KGB agent.

This was a shock for New Zealanders because Sutch was also locally a famous writer and intellectual. He was accused of being a Russian agent, later exonerated for lack of evidence, and he died in 1975 of liver cancer. To this day Sutch’s repeated dealings with the Soviet Embassy remain controversial: his daughter denies the charges, while papers brought to the West by a KGB defector in 1992 pointed to Sutch as an “agent”, code name, Maori, recruited by the KGB in 1950.

For our family the Sutch arrest and trial coincided with the end of dad’s long correspondence with his uncle Bernhard who passed away at around that time. Grandma continued to receive letters from her older sister Johanna, still living on the Lehova farm where dad had spent part of the war. For us kids, our long road continued over 50 years into higher education and adulthood, forging careers and families, winding our way through the path of life.

Fast forward to today, the Ukraine conflict in its fourth year, in which Russia is firmly entrenched in the industrial east and south, a region where Russian speakers are dominant. For now talk of peace seems illusory; both sides are at an impasse, each blaming the other for causing the war, no one willing to budge.

The European Union’s refusal to support any ceding of Ukrainian territory to Russia is unsurprising. Its outspoken foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas is a former Estonian prime minister whose mother and grandmother were deported to Siberia during the Soviet occupation. Since February 2024 she has been on Russia’s “wanted list”.

The Cold War is still with us, and I record Le Carré’s words in 2019, a year before his death, speaking of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin – the two are an impulse “for oligarchy, the dismissal of the truth, the contempt, actually, for the electorate and for the democratic system”.