The Spy and the Traitor

The communist Soviet Union’s reputation for its terrifyingly effective state apparatus has barely dimmed since its dissolution in 1991. One name still instantly recalls the pervasive fear that riddled the country: The KGB. The Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security, was the country’s primary security agency. To put it mildly, it was ruthlessly efficient.

Oleg Gordievsky’s father, Anton Lavrentyevich Gordievsky was a lifelong member of the KGB. Although the exact details are scarce, he likely identified many “enemies of the state” during the Great Purge of 1936-8. This state campaign under Stalin resulted in the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Though he never spoke of these atrocities, Gordievsky was proud of his role in the KGB, even opting to wear his uniform on the weekends.

Oleg Gordievsky was born 10 October 1938. It seemed that he, like his brother Vasili, was assured of employment at the KGB thanks to his father’s membership. That was just how it worked with the children of KGB members. Gordievsky’s career path to the KGB was settled, but his conscience was not. From early on, there were signs that he was discontented with the communist ideology fueling the organization.

Two early influences on Gordievsky were his mother, a gentle nonconformist who kept a quiet distance from Soviet ideology, and his grandmother. The latter kept her religious beliefs secret, an absolute necessity in a country where religious faith was illegal. By the time 17-year-old Gordievsky enrolled at Russia’s most esteemed university for diplomats, politicians and spies – the Moscow State Institute of International Relations – a change was in the air. After Stalin’s death in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev began to liberalize some of the Soviet Union’s most oppressive practices, for example, allowing foreigners to visit, as well as making previously banned publications and magazines available.

Gordievsky was thus able to learn more about the West from foreign newspapers and periodicals in the institute’s library. At night, he began tuning his radio to the BBC World Service and Voice of America, even though that was still forbidden. Around this time, he found a companion at the institute, Stanislaw Kaplan. Like Gordievsky, he was skeptical about communism. The two became fast friends, and often went out jogging together. Though neither Gordievsky nor Kaplan had yet dropped their loyalty to communism, it was clear that this friendship would shape the rest of their lives.