Rodney Barker - Dancing with the Devil - Sex, Espionage and the U.S. Marines - The Clayton Lonetree Story

Sitting in a 1950s vintage kitchen, I called my interpreter, who mediated a conversation with Violetta’s mother over the phone. The gist was that yes, my package had been received. She was sorry for not responding, but if I would meet her tomorrow afternoon at her place of work, she would explain.

The following day Natasha and I met at a central location and walked together to an ornately columned, eighteenth-century building that housed the Artists Union. Violetta’s mother, whose name was Genrietta Khokha, and her second daughter, Svetlana, an eye-catchingly pretty seventeen-year-old with short-cropped hair, were waiting inside. Noticeably absent was Violetta, but her presence hovered over the conversation, as we all knew that without her we would not be sitting here talking.

After a round of introductions and small talk during which I learned that Genrietta was a retired teacher of geometry at an oil-and-gas institute who now designed leather goods, she invited us to join her in her studio. Leaving a high-ceilinged, pillared ballroom, we walked up a flight of stairs, down a series of corridors, through what looked like the dressing room of a theater troupe, and into an attic area, where we followed a walkway of boards across the old rafters before arriving at a safe and private room where chairs were arranged around a table on which a cake and a bottle of Coke were waiting. And there, with very little preamble or prompting, Genrietta announced her willingness to answer what questions I might have.

I couldn’t believe my luck. Perhaps the timing was right, I thought. It almost seemed providential.

But relatively soon Genrietta disclosed the real reason she was confiding in me. “It will be hard for Violetta to talk with you because she has been unable to break off her connections with the KGB. She is still under their control,” she said. “But I will talk to you on her behalf because I am no longer afraid of them. And because”—there was a catch in her throat, and tears welled in her eyes before she finished—“because the KGB stole my daughter from me.”

For her own protection Genrietta had been told very little about her family history, because after the Revolution and the Civil War, when the Communists idealized the peasantry and the working class, families of aristocratic or Jewish origin, families with “foreign connections” or intelligentsia status, were labeled “class enemies” and a threat to socialism in the U.S.S.R. and would hide their heritage out of fear of oppression and purges. She did know that both her parents were Ukrainian. She also knew that as a young man her father had served in a Russian cavalry unit as a “recorder of events,” and that the atrocities he witnessed during Stalin’s forced famine in the thirties so disturbed him, he found a way to be transferred to Moscow, where he was employed as an accountant in a military plant. And she knew that he had brought his young wife, Zoya, with him, and they had named their firstborn Genrietta after the heroine in an English novel her mother was reading at the time she was born.

Genrietta’s childhood memories were dominated by the Great Patriotic War, which had a devastating effect on her family. With the advance of German troops, the plant where her father worked was evacuated to the Ural Mountains, but he remained behind to defend Moscow. By this time German planes were dropping bombs on the city—Genrietta could distinguish the enemy planes by the sound of their engines—and the Moscow suburbs were a front-line town. She was expecting at any moment to see tanks painted with swastikas rumbling down Moscow streets.

Genrietta vividly recalls the day her father left the house for the last time. Authorities were evacuating all women and children from the city, but her father’s parting words were that no matter what happened, they should stay in Moscow. If they left, he said, they would be sent to Siberia, and when the war was over they would not be allowed to return. With that he said goodbye, and like millions of other Russian soldiers, he never returned.

Education had always been important to Zoya, who found work in the postwar period as a librarian, and she successfully passed on the love of learning to her daughter, who at an early age decided to become a teacher. Teachers earned relatively good pay and enjoyed social prestige; and education was recognized as a major force in building the new Russia.

As a student Genrietta was serious and erudite, interested in science as well as the arts. But student activities also provided social occasions, and it was at a university event that she met Sein, who would become her first husband. Looking back now, she found it hard to understand how she could think of him as marriage material. He was the son of a railway worker from an ordinary Russian family, and their temperaments were very different. She was spiritual and progressive in her thinking; he was materialistic, and destined to be the manager of a classified military-defense plant and a district party leader. But he was handsome, clever, and well mannered, and one thing led to another and the next was marriage.

Within a relatively short time, Genrietta realized she’d made a mistake, and their relationship was breaking up when she found she was carrying his child. This was an unplanned, unwanted turn of events, and she gave serious consideration to having an abortion, a common form of birth control in the Soviet Union. She was still in school, she had ambitions, and she knew by now if she had a baby she would be facing single parenthood. But her mother was living with her, so that would be a help, and she just couldn’t bring herself to terminate the life that was growing inside her.

Once she had made that decision, she knew it was the right one, and she found joy in the preparations, embroidering baby diapers by hand. Her daughter was born on October 27, 1960, and she named her Violetta because she thought it was a beautiful name and it rhymed with her own. At the time she was unaware that Violetta was also the name of the expensive courtesan in the opera La Traviata, with whom a young man fell in love to tragic results.

In many ways Genrietta was a woman ahead of her time. She had feminist notions—she didn’t believe men should decide important issues without taking into consideration the woman’s point of view—and she was determined not to let motherhood deter her plans for a career in academia. With the help of Zoya, who babysat Violetta when she was an infant and walked her to and from school when she was older, and Violetta’s father, from whom she was divorced but who would occasionally visit his daughter in the evenings and help her with her studies, the parenting chores were shared in a way that allowed Genrietta to pursue her professional aspirations.

And when she did arrive home, she would do her best to make up for her absence by taking evening walks with Violetta and reading to her until bedtime. Genrietta believed that Violetta’s interest in foreign languages originated with the myths and legends from countries around the world that she read to her daughter at a young age. Hearing stories about magicians and giants, beautiful damsels in distress and rescuing heroes was a lot more interesting to a young girl than what was taught in Soviet schools, where lessons infused with Communist ideology were drilled into the students repetitiously from the day their formal education began. And Violetta exhibited an amazing memory. When she played with her dolls, she would pretend she was reading to them and could repeat the stories her mother had read to her almost word for word.

When Genrietta, who believed that the educational process should take into consideration the God-given nature of the individual, noticed that Violetta was responding with great curiosity to learn more about foreign countries, she encouraged her. At a shop in Moscow that sold international educational materials she purchased a game made up of disks on which different images were painted, and the players were supposed to spin an arrow and name in English the figure or animal it pointed to. Then she bought a record player and a variety of children’s musical records on which the Russian name for something was followed by the English name, all sung to a catchy melody.