PART 2:
Salisbury attack suspects Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov. Photograph: Tass/Getty
I first met Suvorov in 2015. At the time, a public inquiry was under way into Litvinenko’s murder. It concluded that Putin “probably” approved the operation, together with the head of the FSB, the agency that succeeded the KGB. The men identified by the inquiry as the killers, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, were lousy assassins: they left a ghostly trail of polonium across London, and tipped the murder weapon down the bathroom sink.
In 2016, a decade after the Litvinenko murder, a team of GRU officers hacked into the servers of the US Democratic party, according to Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor investigating collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. The release of these stolen emails by WikiLeaks hurt Hillary Clinton and helped her opponent, who is now in the White House. The operation might be marked down as a great Kremlin victory, but it was hardly clandestine. In July, Mueller laid bare the GRU plot in a forensic indictment, embarrassing both Putin and Trump.
Are Moscow’s spy agencies losing their touch? Suvorov says there has been a major falling off since the glory days of the GRU, in the 30s and 40s, when its agents stole US atomic secrets. This decay is part of a general debasement, he thinks, affecting everything in post-communist Russia, from rocket-building to journalism. The country is “slowly crumbing”, he says; those who can are moving abroad.
***
Viktor Suvorov is a literary pen-name: he was born Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun in Soviet Ukraine; his father a military officer, his mother a nurse. (His Ukrainian roots are another reason the Kremlin might have it in for him, sources in Moscow tell me.) His father was a confirmed Bolshevik who believed the USSR could flourish were it not for the “bad guys at the top”, and Suvorov grew up a “fanatical communist”. He attended military school, joined the Red Army and took part in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. An outstanding officer, he trained tactical reconnaissance sergeants and served in the intelligence division of the Volga military district headquarters – an experience Suvorov describes in Aquarium.
In 1970, he was recruited by the GRU. He was now part of an elite organisation that was a bitter rival of the KGB. His disillusionment with the Soviet system began only when he got to Geneva, he says, where he was attached to the UN mission. Suvorov says he was summoned to the airport one day to watch the arrival of an Ilyushin-76 transport plane from Moscow. When its ramp was lowered, gold bars were taken out of the cargo bay – to buy food from America. “We couldn’t feed ourselves,” he says.
Further disillusion came when he and his “wonderful spy wife” Tatiana went on holiday. They took the train from Basel and travelled across West Germany to east Berlin, passing the wall. “It was the same people, same history, same bloody Germans. [But] it’s a Mercedes here and it’s a Trabant there,” he recalls with a laugh. He read George Orwell’s Animal Farm. “At first I thought: ‘These aren’t Russian pigs, they’re pigs from Berkshire.’ Then I realised it was about the people in the Kremlin. They had banned the book inside the Soviet Union because they recognised themselves.”
He read Nineteen Eighty-Four. “Orwell was never a communist, but was close to them. He understood the totalitarian state has to be like that. He never visited the USSR, but he realised everything better than anybody could imagine,” Suvorov says. He says his wife – the daughter of an intelligence officer – agreed to defect with him. They have been married for 47 years. “It’s an achievement,” he says.
Suvorov’s books have appeared in 27 languages. Photograph: Sebastian Nevols for the Guardian
From his new home in the UK, Suvorov wrote one of the most influential books of the perestroika era, Icebreaker. When it was published in 1988, his argument was heretical: that Stalin had been secretly plotting an offensive against Hitler’s Germany, and would have invaded in September 1941, or at the latest by 1942. Stalin, he wrote, wanted Hitler to destroy democracy in Europe, in the manner of an icebreaker, thereby clearing the way for world communism. The book undermined the idea that the USSR was an innocent party, dragged into the second world war. Russian liberals supported Suvorov’s thesis; it now has broad acceptance among historians.
Altogether, Suvorov’s books have appeared in 27 languages. His first, Liberators, was a vivid personal account of life in the Soviet army, and his primers on Soviet military intelligence have become mainstream texts. In a previous interview, he pointed out that there is a tradition in Russian literature of military officers turning their experiences into books – Tolstoy, Lermontov and Solzhenitsyn. Suvorov doesn’t rank himself with these greats, but notes that war offers rich material. “There is a sense of romance in battle,” he says.
Post-Skripal, he has written a new book about the GRU, currently being translated from Russian into English and scheduled for publication next year. He says his trainers at the GRU academy in Moscow never explicitly mentioned novichok to him; the USSR developed the powerful nerve agent in the 1970s, and it appears to be one of many lethal substances at the GRU’s disposal. But his instructors did make clear that, “from time to time”, the GRU has to eliminate its enemies. He was told: “When you have such an operation, an expert will meet you. He will personally explain how to do it.” The GRU has its own dedicated chemicals directorate, he says.
As well as attempted murder in Salisbury, did the Kremlin interfere in British politics by assisting the Brexit vote? Suvorov admits he has no inside information here but, based on his knowledge of Moscow’s methods, he thinks it was an opportunity: “If there is any kind of internal problem in the camp of your enemy, you try to exploit that.”
Despite our current political turmoil, he remains an admirer of Britain, describing it as a place of great “creative imagination”. And what about its spies? He declines to say much about MI6, the organisation that spirited him away to a new life, other than that it is full of “clever” and “professional” people.
I have met many Russians living in exile. They include KGB defectors wanting assistance with their memoirs, oligarchs who quarrelled with Putin, and political opponents of the regime in Moscow. Some adjust to exile; others don’t. Suvorov is undoubtedly the happiest I have encountered. He is still lovingly married. His grownup children are clever and successful, he says, and he has two grandchildren.
There is still every possibility the GRU will try to kill him, he says. This despite the fact that his books have – to some degree – flattered the GRU and served as an advertisement for its subterranean activities. “Will they forgive me? No. It’s not a question of whether they like me or dislike me. It’s an example for everyone else. Yes, you can escape. Yes, they like your books. But they will remember you, always.”
Before we shake hands and go our separate ways, I ask Suvorov one final, delicate question. I don’t want to reveal his home address – I don’t know it – but where should I say that he lives? Suvorov laughs again. “Say England. Or perhaps Wales. Or maybe Great Britain.”
• Commenting on this piece? If you would like your comment to be considered for inclusion on Weekend magazine’s letters page in print, please email weekend@theguardian.com, including your name and address (not for publication).
Salisbury attack suspects Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov. Photograph: Tass/Getty
I first met Suvorov in 2015. At the time, a public inquiry was under way into Litvinenko’s murder. It concluded that Putin “probably” approved the operation, together with the head of the FSB, the agency that succeeded the KGB. The men identified by the inquiry as the killers, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, were lousy assassins: they left a ghostly trail of polonium across London, and tipped the murder weapon down the bathroom sink.
In 2016, a decade after the Litvinenko murder, a team of GRU officers hacked into the servers of the US Democratic party, according to Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor investigating collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. The release of these stolen emails by WikiLeaks hurt Hillary Clinton and helped her opponent, who is now in the White House. The operation might be marked down as a great Kremlin victory, but it was hardly clandestine. In July, Mueller laid bare the GRU plot in a forensic indictment, embarrassing both Putin and Trump.
Are Moscow’s spy agencies losing their touch? Suvorov says there has been a major falling off since the glory days of the GRU, in the 30s and 40s, when its agents stole US atomic secrets. This decay is part of a general debasement, he thinks, affecting everything in post-communist Russia, from rocket-building to journalism. The country is “slowly crumbing”, he says; those who can are moving abroad.
***
Viktor Suvorov is a literary pen-name: he was born Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun in Soviet Ukraine; his father a military officer, his mother a nurse. (His Ukrainian roots are another reason the Kremlin might have it in for him, sources in Moscow tell me.) His father was a confirmed Bolshevik who believed the USSR could flourish were it not for the “bad guys at the top”, and Suvorov grew up a “fanatical communist”. He attended military school, joined the Red Army and took part in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. An outstanding officer, he trained tactical reconnaissance sergeants and served in the intelligence division of the Volga military district headquarters – an experience Suvorov describes in Aquarium.
In 1970, he was recruited by the GRU. He was now part of an elite organisation that was a bitter rival of the KGB. His disillusionment with the Soviet system began only when he got to Geneva, he says, where he was attached to the UN mission. Suvorov says he was summoned to the airport one day to watch the arrival of an Ilyushin-76 transport plane from Moscow. When its ramp was lowered, gold bars were taken out of the cargo bay – to buy food from America. “We couldn’t feed ourselves,” he says.
Further disillusion came when he and his “wonderful spy wife” Tatiana went on holiday. They took the train from Basel and travelled across West Germany to east Berlin, passing the wall. “It was the same people, same history, same bloody Germans. [But] it’s a Mercedes here and it’s a Trabant there,” he recalls with a laugh. He read George Orwell’s Animal Farm. “At first I thought: ‘These aren’t Russian pigs, they’re pigs from Berkshire.’ Then I realised it was about the people in the Kremlin. They had banned the book inside the Soviet Union because they recognised themselves.”
He read Nineteen Eighty-Four. “Orwell was never a communist, but was close to them. He understood the totalitarian state has to be like that. He never visited the USSR, but he realised everything better than anybody could imagine,” Suvorov says. He says his wife – the daughter of an intelligence officer – agreed to defect with him. They have been married for 47 years. “It’s an achievement,” he says.
Suvorov’s books have appeared in 27 languages. Photograph: Sebastian Nevols for the Guardian
From his new home in the UK, Suvorov wrote one of the most influential books of the perestroika era, Icebreaker. When it was published in 1988, his argument was heretical: that Stalin had been secretly plotting an offensive against Hitler’s Germany, and would have invaded in September 1941, or at the latest by 1942. Stalin, he wrote, wanted Hitler to destroy democracy in Europe, in the manner of an icebreaker, thereby clearing the way for world communism. The book undermined the idea that the USSR was an innocent party, dragged into the second world war. Russian liberals supported Suvorov’s thesis; it now has broad acceptance among historians.
Altogether, Suvorov’s books have appeared in 27 languages. His first, Liberators, was a vivid personal account of life in the Soviet army, and his primers on Soviet military intelligence have become mainstream texts. In a previous interview, he pointed out that there is a tradition in Russian literature of military officers turning their experiences into books – Tolstoy, Lermontov and Solzhenitsyn. Suvorov doesn’t rank himself with these greats, but notes that war offers rich material. “There is a sense of romance in battle,” he says.
Post-Skripal, he has written a new book about the GRU, currently being translated from Russian into English and scheduled for publication next year. He says his trainers at the GRU academy in Moscow never explicitly mentioned novichok to him; the USSR developed the powerful nerve agent in the 1970s, and it appears to be one of many lethal substances at the GRU’s disposal. But his instructors did make clear that, “from time to time”, the GRU has to eliminate its enemies. He was told: “When you have such an operation, an expert will meet you. He will personally explain how to do it.” The GRU has its own dedicated chemicals directorate, he says.
As well as attempted murder in Salisbury, did the Kremlin interfere in British politics by assisting the Brexit vote? Suvorov admits he has no inside information here but, based on his knowledge of Moscow’s methods, he thinks it was an opportunity: “If there is any kind of internal problem in the camp of your enemy, you try to exploit that.”
Despite our current political turmoil, he remains an admirer of Britain, describing it as a place of great “creative imagination”. And what about its spies? He declines to say much about MI6, the organisation that spirited him away to a new life, other than that it is full of “clever” and “professional” people.
I have met many Russians living in exile. They include KGB defectors wanting assistance with their memoirs, oligarchs who quarrelled with Putin, and political opponents of the regime in Moscow. Some adjust to exile; others don’t. Suvorov is undoubtedly the happiest I have encountered. He is still lovingly married. His grownup children are clever and successful, he says, and he has two grandchildren.
There is still every possibility the GRU will try to kill him, he says. This despite the fact that his books have – to some degree – flattered the GRU and served as an advertisement for its subterranean activities. “Will they forgive me? No. It’s not a question of whether they like me or dislike me. It’s an example for everyone else. Yes, you can escape. Yes, they like your books. But they will remember you, always.”
Before we shake hands and go our separate ways, I ask Suvorov one final, delicate question. I don’t want to reveal his home address – I don’t know it – but where should I say that he lives? Suvorov laughs again. “Say England. Or perhaps Wales. Or maybe Great Britain.”
• Commenting on this piece? If you would like your comment to be considered for inclusion on Weekend magazine’s letters page in print, please email weekend@theguardian.com, including your name and address (not for publication).
Last edited:
