The lonely exile who drank himself to death

Stuck in a drab Moscow flat and pining for Britain, how traitor Guy Burgess became ...

HE WAS flamboyant, treacherous and depraved. And this week our gripping extracts from a new book on Guy Burgess — drawing on a wealth of previously secret papers — have described his journey from Cambridge dandy to Russian spy. Today, in the final part, we chart the gnawing regret that plagued him in Moscow, as drink and a longing to return home finally overwhelmed him.

AFTER THEIR triumphant welcome in Moscow in a haze of vodka, life in the Soviet Union quickly soured for defectors Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Almost immediately they were whisked away from the capital to Kuybyshev, a remote city closed to foreigners.

To their annoyance, there they were lodged in a small house guarded by KGB troops and rigorously interrogated for weeks until their Russian hosts had satisfied themselves that the new arrivals fresh from Britain’s Foreign Office were not double agents.

The pair stayed in this town for several years after taking on new identities. Burgess called himself Jim Andreyevitch Eliot (after his beloved George Eliot).

Maclean adjusted well, began learning Russian and took a job in a linguistic institute. But Burgess, who never progressed beyond kitchen Russian, spent his time reading and drinking cheap booze. He hated the place and likened it to ‘Glasgow on a Saturday night’. He was once beaten up on the street by a thug who stole his watch.

Nonetheless, he maintained that he still admired Russia and communism.

Later Burgess was moved to a comfortable dacha in a village just outside Moscow, but still under the KGB’s watchful eye. Visited there by Yuri Modin, who had been his Soviet handler back in London, he complained about the way he was being treated in Russia.

Bull-headed as ever, Burgess couldn’t understand why the KGB wouldn’t allow him to simply return to Britain, where he was adamant he could withstand any MI5 interrogation. This was despite the security services in London making it clear that if he returned he would be arrested for breaching the Official Secrets Act.

It was not until after he and Maclean revealed themselves to the world in 1956 that Burgess finally got to live in Moscow, in a one-bedroom, sixth-floor block. His neighbours were all senior Red Army officers and party officials — hardly his sort of company.

In this Stalinist skyscraper he largely recreated the rooms he had lived in at Cambridge and in London. His porcelain desk lamp, clavichord, Regency sofa-table and inkstand for writing were shipped from home at KGB expense.

Framed reproductions of English hunting scenes adorned the walls. On his desk were pictures of his mother and himself at Eton. In a wardrobe hung his bespoke suits from a tailor in Eton High Street. One drawer was full of Old Etonian bow ties.

This home-from-home made him feel more settled. ‘It really makes a great difference to life in Moscow to have one’s eyes soothed instead of affronted by one’s surroundings,’ he told one of the many Western correspondents who now regularly came to see him.

He also had work to do now, with a job at a publisher recommending authors such as E.M. Forster and Graham Greene for Russian translation. He also worked in the Foreign Ministry analysing news reports from papers and magazines in the West and interpreting changes in policy.

Another project had him writing a training manual for KGB recruits about the British way of life.

His life, though, was pretty lonely. The Soviets made it clear from the start that his homosexual antics were unlawful and would not be tolerated. He had no choice but to stop.

This changed when — after he and Maclean disclosed to the world their presence in the Soviet Union — he was immediately visited from London by an old friend, the gay Left-wing Labour MP Tom Driberg.

A compulsive and notorious ‘cottager’ in public lavatories in whatever country he was in, Driberg introduced Burgess to a large underground urinal close to the Kremlin where hundreds of Russian homosexuals stood in a line to be picked up.

There Burgess met Tolya, a young electrician in a state factory, whose grandmother had supposedly been one of Tolstoy’s lovers. He became Burgess’s lover, amanuensis, servant. As was the way in Russia, he also informed on him to the authorities.

(Driberg’s good turn did not go unpunished after he was caught in a KGB sting operation at the urinal. Confronted with photographs of his sexual encounter, he agreed to work as a Soviet agent and for the next 12 years was used as a source within the Labour Party, reporting back on rivalries within the leadership.)

Drink and cigarettes were still the mainstays of Burgess’s life, as they had been back in England. He ate little — except when several times a year his mother sent a hamper from Fortnum’s. Billy Bunter-like, he scoffed up the pâté, chocolate and tinned fruit, everything washed down with slugs of cognac and squeaks of: ‘Goody-goody gum drops! What’s next?’

He was constantly under surveillance. His flat was bugged and, when he ventured outside, he was followed. Yet he managed to casually pick up men on the street for sex. For some reason, his KGB minders turned a blind eye, which was surprising given that they couldn’t stand him because he was so aggressive and provocative to them.them In letters, he assured a still loyal co coterie of friends in England — writers,writers poets, politicians and exlovers — that ‘I really am very well and thingsthi are going much better for me here than I ever expected. I’m very glad I c came.’

One t thing he admitted to missing was goodgo conversation and banter. ‘The C Comrades, though splendid in every w way of course, don’t gossip in quiteit t the same way about quite the same people and subjects.’

That was why he took every opportunity to mix with Western visitors, lingering in haunts where they might be found such as hotel lobbies or the Bolshoi. He was often annoyed at how few visitors noticed him. To those who did he explained that he was in Russia ‘preventing World War III’.

He maintained the fiction that he was not a spy, that he had come to Russia as a ‘tourist’ and that as ‘an extreme socialist’ and Marxist he was delighted to be living in the USSR. Yet if pressed, a faraway look came into his eyes and he would admit: ‘My life ended when I left London.’

But his hope that he might be allowed to slip back to England one day as if nothing had happened was not to be, no matter how much he invoked the names of old acquaintances such as Randolph Churchill and even Prime Minister Macmillan — ‘my friend Harold,’ as he referred to him.

The realisation sank in that he was never going home, and that led to depression. A Canadian journalist who met him in 1959 drew a vivid picture of ‘a tired-looking man, run- down like the building he lived in. He was not what I had imagined a super-spy to look like’.

‘On hunched shoulders he carried a worn- out tweed jacket over a white shirt, which had endured too many washings with Russian detergent. A bow tie, baggy trousers and a pair of Church’s brogues, worn down on the heels, completed his outfit.

‘But in his eyes there was such deep sadness. Pools of despair. A man who had given up hope.’

He was not yet 50, but his body was going downhill, too. A regime of little food and excessive alcohol was taking its toll. Angina left him in pain and very tired.

Dining with Yuri Modin, his old KGB handler, in a Moscow restaurant, he collapsed with what seemed to be a heart attack, though it turned out to be too much drink. When he recovered, he was ‘very emotional’, pleading that ‘he did not want to die in Russia’.

At the beginning of 1960, he was visited by his old friend the poet Stephen Spender, who was shocked at how much Burgess had deteriorated.

‘He had a seedy, shame-faced air and a shambling walk, like some ex-consular official you meet in a bar at Singapore and who puzzles you by his references to the days when he knew the great, and helped determine policy.’

Spender was struck by the extent to which Burgess had reinvented the past in his mind.

The journalist James (later Jan) Morris met him and felt sorry for ‘the poor wretch’. ‘He seemed almost a parody of a broken man.’ Another visitor noted Burgess’s ‘almost childlike hunger for first-hand news of London and, indeed, of anything British’. Another thought that ‘he still lived in London in his mind’.

In 1960 and then again the following year he was hospitalised with hardening arteries, ulcers and arthritis and nearly died. But still he drank.

A Daily Mail journalist who had lunch at his flat watched Burgess — dressed in a shabby and food-stained maroon smoking jacket — swill down so much vodka, whisky and Georgian wine that twice he had to rush to the bathroom to be violently ill.

Burgess’s unhappiness was all too apparent. He insisted he was a firm believer in communism, ‘but I don’t like the Russian communists. Oh, what a difference it would make if I was living among British communists. They are much nicer people.’

There were some small pleasures in his life. Though Burgess generally saw little of Maclean, in 1962 both took part in what must be one of the strang-

Burgess claimed to be ‘preventing

World War III’ ‘Tired, hunched ... he was a man who had given up hope’

est sporting events ever held in Moscow — a cricket match.

On a grassy area spotted with cowpats, Maclean captained an eight- man Gentleman’s team against a seven-man Players team, led by the correspondent of the Daily Worker ( as the Morning Star newspaper was then called). Burgess was umpire.

But this was an unusual outing for him. Soon, all he could do was to lie on a chaise-longue in pyjamas and dressing-gown, smoking 60 cigarettes a day and drinking Armenian brandy or Scotch, which he ordered by the case.

A nurse visited him several times a day to give him injections. Once, when she failed to turn up, Burgess asked a visiting journalist to do it instead. Where should he put the injection, the visitor asked. ‘In the bum, of course, where I am badly pricked,’ Burgess replied with a flash of his customary wit.

In late August, 1963, he was taken to hospital. As he lay dying, he had a brief visit from Kim Philby, his fellow Cambridge spy, who himself had defected to Moscow a few months earlier.

It was not a happy reunion, despite all the years they had known each other and the huge conspiracy they had shared. Philby still resented Burgess for disobeying orders and fleeing with Maclean. Burgess in turn was conscious that his action had exposed Philby to suspicion.

A few days later, Burgess died in his sleep from acute liver failure. He was 52. His death created headlines worldwide — except in the country he had chosen over everything else. The daily newspaper Izvestia give him a short, 78-word obituary.

The KGB immediately cleared Burgess’s flat of all his papers. Tolya, his boyfriend, disappeared, never to be heard of again.

Burgess’s brother Nigel flew out for the funeral. When he bought his ticket to Moscow at Thomas Cook’s and gave his name, the clerk paused for a moment before asking: ‘Will that be a single or a return?’

Later that year, Guy Burgess did finally come home. His ashes were brought back and the casket quietly buried in the family plot in an ancient graveyard in the Hampshire village where he grew up.

It was a typically English setting — strange perhaps for a man whose Englishness was his trademark yet who was a traitor who sold his country down the river.

ADAPTED by Tony Rennell from Stalin’s Englishman: The Lives Of Guy Burgess by Andrew Lownie, published by Hodder on September 10 at £25. © Andrew Lownie 2015. To buy a copy for £20, visit mailbookshop. co.uk or call 0808 272 0808. Pre-publication discount until September 5. P&P free.