Stephen Spender’s Soviet Sojourn

The Russian couple arrived in 1923. Sergei Konenkov—a sculptor highly regarded as the “Russian Rodin”—had been given a role in the promotion of an important exhibition of Soviet art to be held at the Grand Central Palace in New York early in 1924. And while his American stay, with his wife Margarita, was intended to last only a few months, it extended to twenty-two years. During this time, Sergei received many commissions, but is best remembered for a 1935 bust of Albert Einstein for the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton University, where the eminent physicist was then based.

In 1998, the auction house Sotheby’s was consigned nine letters written by Einstein to Margarita Konenkov, written in 1945 and 1946, after Margarita had returned to the Soviet Union. The letters provided conclusive evidence that she and Einstein had been long-time lovers and that Einstein had fallen for the artist’s wife almost immediately on meeting the Russian couple. This was testimony to a vivacity that had attracted a number of suitors, including at one time the pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Interest in the letters intensified when an adviser to Sotheby’s, Paul Needham, stumbled upon a reference to Margarita in the memoirs of Soviet spymaster Pavel Sudoplatov (Special Tasks, 1995), as having been a long-term Soviet spy. Einstein had no practical involvement in the research and development plan for the first nuclear weapons—the program known as the Manhattan Project—and nor was he privy to the testing at Los Alamos in New Mexico, or the engineering works undertaken at Oak Ridge in Tennessee, but prominent scientists such as Robert Oppenheimer, who oversaw Los Alamos, often frequented Princeton. Margarita’s mission had been, according to Sudoplatov—and using the codename Lucas—to exert influence over them. More specifically, Sudoplatov related: “she talked Oppenheimer into hiring people known for their leftist views. Our agents were ready to work with them.”

Another task, successfully undertaken, was to introduce Einstein to Pavel Mikhailov, the Soviet vice-consul to the United States who, Sudoplatov claimed, worked for the GRU, the military intelligence agency of the Soviet Army. And while critics argue that there is a sketchiness, if not downright inaccuracy, in Sudoplatov’s claims about Margarita, it is noteworthy that the Konenkovs remained in the United States for such a long and unintended time.

No letter from Margarita Konenkov to Albert Einstein has ever come to light.

In 1960, the English poet Stephen Spender accepted an invitation from the American psychiatrist Muriel Gardiner to accompany her as a travelling companion on a brief visit to the Soviet Union. Gardiner was keen to visit two old friends.

She had met the Konenkovs in 1939, when the outbreak of the Second World War had forced her to abandon studies in Vienna—where she had also undertaken important work for the Austrian Revolutionary Socialists—and return via Paris to the United States. She soon became the couple’s most trusted confidante and would recount in her memoir, My Friendship with Konenkov (part of the 2001 volume The Uncommon Vision of Sergei Konenkov 1874–1971) that Sergei had always predicted that one day, when the war was over, he would be recalled to the Soviet Union by its leader Joseph Stalin and made state sculptor. To this effect he kept a suitcase at the ready, filled with neatly pressed clothes, and often spoke of his eagerness to return to his homeland. This enthusiasm, Gardiner noted, was not shared by Margarita. Sergei’s prophecy would prove correct. He was promised a large studio in the centre of Moscow and the couple’s extended stay in the United States came to a close.

Gardiner was insistent that, having arrived in the Soviet Union, she and Spender should each attend to their own interests. Spender’s hopes in this regard were met with continual disappointment. Attempting to meet with Lily Brik, “the muse of the Russian avant-garde”, as Pablo Neruda had described her, he was told she was unwell and would not see him: the poet Anna Akhmatova was in Leningrad and Ilya Ehrenburg, author of the post-Stalin novel The Thaw, was ironically in London.

After a fruitless and tiring first day, Spender received a telephone call at 1.15 a.m. It was the infamous Guy Burgess, and eight hours later Burgess was banging on the door, his opening remark: “I love living in this country. It’s solid and like England in the 1860s, my favourite time in history, and no one feels frightened.” After a furtive look Burgess gestured to a point where a wall met the ceiling, telling Spender that the room would be bugged. He explained his wearing an Old Etonian bow-tie in tandem with an Order of the Red Banner medallion by saying it helped in restaurants.

Burgess had arrived in the Soviet Union in 1951, along with co-conspirator and fellow Englishman Donald Maclean, as part of the most notorious espionage story of the twentieth century. The two had mysteriously disappeared from England, having travelled from Paris to Switzerland, and there obtained false passports from the Soviet embassy. Their next stop had been Sweden, and from there they hastened to the Czech capital, Prague. On arrival in Moscow, they were whisked away to Kuybyshev, some five hundred miles from the capital, a “closed city” that had housed Stalin’s bunker during the Second World War. The two defectors were each provided with a flat overlooking the Volga River, as well as servants and a car. Officialdom recognised a need for the rapacious Burgess to be provided with appropriate male lovers, however Burgess indignantly expressed a preference for attracting his own. On his first foray into the seedier parts of Kuybyshev he was beaten badly enough to lose all the teeth on one side of his face; these teeth were replaced by ill-fitting Soviet dentures that would embarrass him for the rest of his life.

Western spy networks had no idea of the two men’s whereabouts until Vladimir Petrov—the Third Secretary at the Soviet embassy in Canberra—volunteered most of what he knew during his defection and seeking of political asylum in 1954. The details are still surprisingly hazy, but it seems Burgess and Maclean remained in Kuybyshev at least until Stalin’s death in 1953, and possibly until 1955. Burgess was eventually granted an apartment in a new block in Moscow, built primarily for senior army and party officials and not far from the Novodevichy Convent, whose cemetery houses the remains of Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich amongst others and also features works in stone by Sergei Konenkov. He too was later interred there, having met his end in 1971 at the age of ninety-seven.

On the day before Burgess vanished, he had visited Eton and had tea with the headmaster, Robert Birley. Later, he made several telephone calls to Spender. These were unsuccessful attempts to contact their mutual friend, the poet W.H. Auden. Though Burgess had been a guest at Spender’s first wedding in 1936, the calls had come as a complete surprise, since they had rarely made contact since.

It was the convoluted chain of events that followed Britain’s MI5 and SIS becoming aware of the telephone calls that Burgess initially wanted to discuss with Spender in Moscow. These events—Burgess delighted in listening to Spender stumble his way through his own version—were broadly as follows.

Interviewed by intelligence officers, Spender insisted he had told Auden of the telephone calls. Auden was just as adamant that Spender had not. It appeared that one of them was lying. Neither could relate any reason for the calls other than Auden’s suggestion that it may have had something to do with previously discussed holiday arrangements. Later, when an SIS officer confronted an inebriated Auden, he reluctantly admitted that Spender was “probably right”. (Decades later, Spender said he could still vividly recall Auden’s response to being told Burgess had sought him out as, “Do I have to see him? He’s always drunk!”)

Later, a Daily Express reporter could not believe his luck when a by now much-flustered Spender produced a letter recently received from a long-time friend and fellow poet, John Lehmann. The letter told him that somebody they both knew well was “absolutely sure” Burgess was a spy. The person in question was the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, John’s sister. She had confided in her brother that, as long ago as 1938, Burgess had attempted to recruit her then lover, the journalist Goronwy Rees. Lehmann was horrified when he found the letter published in the Daily Express with his own name attached and further aghast to find himself hounded by authorities as to why he had not come forward with such information. The friendship was irreparably damaged, Lehmann describing Spender’s act of making private correspondence public as, “without parallel in the dealings of gentlemen”.

With Spender’s version of all this completed, Burgess explained that the real reason for the phone calls had been to sound out the prospect of borrowing Auden’s house on the Italian island of Ischia, after Maclean had been safely got to Prague. As Burgess had already told the visiting English actor Michael Redgrave in 1958, it had never been his intention to enter the Soviet Union. Once Maclean was safely in Prague, Burgess had been under the impression he would be free to go his own way. Redgrave recalled Burgess telling him that he had been stunned by the Soviet insistence that he continue on, and worse still, remain.

Spender’s travel diary records Burgess’s insatiable desire for what he had described to another visitor, Graham Greene, as “parish pump gossip”. He also records his astonishment at the detail with which Burgess remembered even the most trivial aspects of mutual friends and events. To continue their talk of old times, Burgess eventually insisted they lunch at his apartment, an invitation which one suspects must have been accepted with some trepidation, since the Bond Street flat that Burgess had inhabited in London was notorious for its grime and general sordidness. Goronwy Rees had recalled Burgess’s reputation for eating, from a heavy iron saucepan, “a thick grey gruel compounded of porridge, kippers, bacon, garlic, onions and anything else that may have been lying about in the kitchen”.

Once in the street, Burgess, having assured Spender that Moscow policemen were “sweeties”, had one of them hail him a taxi and off to lunch they went.

The flat was small but neatly arranged, with many books, and a small upright piano which Burgess referred to, in the manner of Jane Austen, as his “instrument”. Chagall reproductions adorned the walls. Burgess pointed out an elaborately carved bedhead which he claimed to have once belonged to the French writer Stendhal. He was keen to show Spender a copy of Winston Churchill’s The Gathering Storm, which he pulled from a bookshelf. This is the first volume of Churchill’s history of the Second World War. The flyleaf was inscribed, “To Guy Burgess in agreement with his views. Winston S. Churchill”. Another hand had added in pencil underneath, “and we were right. Anthony Eden”. Burgess explained this as testament to the three agreeing to disagree with Neville Chamberlain’s attempts to appease Adolf Hitler. He offered:

Everyone gives away information. When Churchill was in opposition, he used to give away confidential information about what the government was thinking to Maisky, the then Russian ambassador … during the war there were frequent exchanges of information between the British and the Russians, in which the rules of secrecy were more or less ignored, or considered to be suspended.

The host remained ebullient throughout the lunch his forewarned cook had prepared, and he wallowed in tales from the old times and even suggested Spender write something about him for Encounter, the literary magazine Spender had edited since 1953.

When Spender left the apartment, it was with a feeling of profound sadness, and with a sense of what Burgess had confided to the Australian actress Coral Browne two years earlier when she toured with Redgrave: “The Comrades, though splendid in every way of course, don’t gossip in quite the same way about quite the same people and subjects.”

For Spender, while the prospect of Burgess returning to England and a new beginning has merit, he knows it remains an impossibility.

Meanwhile, Gardiner had renewed acquaintances with her friends and even attended an awards ceremony where Sergei Konenkov was honoured alongside the American singer and activist Paul Robeson and the Soviet violin virtuoso David Oistrakh. When Spender himself met the Konenkovs he was impressed. In Sergei’s studio he observed many works in progress, mostly sculptured ballerinas and effigies of respected dead poets, all in the official style. He described the couple as “nervous about their situation”; this despite the fact that Sergei had been designated People’s Artist of the USSR.

Margarita confided to Spender that having returned to the Soviet Union, she felt it necessary to deliver messages to their many American friends instructing them not to write and also informing them that they should not expect any correspondence, since it was strictly forbidden. These messages were risked via Gardiner. She added that she was still routinely interviewed by the police.

Most telling is her revelation that, once back in the Soviet Union, one of her first tasks had been to pen letters which were dictated to her. “To whom?” Spender asked. The answer is Albert Einstein. “For what purpose?” Spender asked. Unabashed, Margarita replied, “To invite him to visit the Soviet Union.”

Barry Gillard lives in Geelong. He wrote on T.S. Eliot and Lancelot Andrewes in the December issue