Notes from Downunderground

EMPIRE OF FEAR (351 pp.)--Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov--Praege ($5).

True patriots all; for be it understood

We left our country for our country's good...

--George Barrington (Australian ex-convict poet), 1796

It is improbable that Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov ever heard this cynical rhyme from the period when Australia was an English convict colony. But it might well have applied to the two Soviet citizens in 1954 when they left the service of the Russian secret police and were granted asylum in Australia. The story of the Petrovs--as they tell it themselves--is fascinating and informative on two counts. It gives a salutary refresher course in the feeding and breeding habits of the pestiferous swarm of Soviet agents at work outside Russia. And it gives a self-portrait of the "new" Soviet citizen to whom freedom is a myth and all the Christian charities of Western life are not even a memory. Moreover, unlike the stories of Kravchenko in the U.S., Gouzenko in Canada or Krivitsky in Europe, the Petrovs' Australian adventure has an unconscious touch of high comedy, together with its low politics.

Born for Tomorrow. The Petrovs were children of peasants. First war, then the Revolution, disrupted the life of the primitive villages in which they were born--his in Siberia, hers near Moscow. The two entered the sinister service of the MVD, after apprenticeship in the Red Youth Organization, as happily and naturally as ambitious U.S. youngsters would take a job with General Motors. Each had early experiences of hardship that evoke the lower depths of Gorky. (Evdokia was hung by her heels in a barn and whipped by a grandfather because she had picked a cucumber; Vladimir went hungry because the family horse he tried to sell to the White army was too poor.) But they worked their dutiful way up as career Communists, and for these ex-peasants, the new life was rich.

Vladimir rated annual vacations with other tired terrorists, new warm clothes, passes to an excellent restaurant and to "any bathhouse." Both had the feeling they had been born for a bright tomorrow, despite some drawbacks, e.g., one of Vladimir's vacations was spoiled a little by shop talk about executions. After Evdokia and Vladimir were married in 1940, they were an enviable and well-adjusted husband-and-wife team in the world's bloodiest police force. What went wrong with their lives? Posted to the Soviet embassy in Canberra, the Petrovs never had it so good. With his pay as colonel in the MVD--plus her pay as captain--they made $18,550, more than the salary of the Australian Prime Minister. But in contrast to the loose, shirt-sleeved, friendly Australian society, the Petrovs lived a life between nightmare and farce.

The Barnyard. The Soviet embassy was a true enclave--an island of cruel and clownish Soviet life. The best part of the Petrovs' book describes in detail the life of the higher Soviet bureaucracy: by a paradox, the egalitarian theory of Communism has produced a pathologically heightened sense of status--so that life in the embassy went on by rules something like the pecking hierarchy observed by barnyard fowl. Mrs. Petrov got into hot water for having put a comic picture within eyeshot of Stalin's portrait, and even hotter water when she was falsely accused of having thrown a pie at the ambassador's wife.

However, work went on. The Russians had a derisive, unofficial code name for Canberra--"The Village"--and a cynical code name for the Australian Department of External Affairs--"The Bank," i.e., a fund of information. "The Village" had its usual village idiots--Communists, sympathizers and plain simpletons who fed information to Vladimir. He might have wound up his Australian tour of duty with an Order of Lenin but for one thing--the fall and execution of his boss in Moscow--Beria. As a Beria-tainted man, and according to Soviet protocol, both he and Evdokia were thus in mortal danger.

Blowing the Gaff. The story of Petrov's defection is well known (TIME, April 26, 1954). What the book makes clear is that it was not idealism but plain fear, plus a peasant's nose for security which led to Vladimir's decision to blow the gaff on his elaborate downunderground. After Mrs. Petrov escaped the two Soviet goons who dragged her aboard a Moscow-bound plane, the Petrovs settled down in Australia, became citizens, are now supported and housed by the government. The case stands as a model case history of espionage--in which the final and usual grace note was supplied by Australia's Opposition Leader Herbert Vere Evatt, who loudly cried that the whole thing was a "foul conspiracy" to discredit him and the Labor Party. The Petrovs knew better. It is good Commonwealth form down under to call immigrants "New Australians." In the Petrovs, Australians got something newer than they bargained for--a new variant on the human race both pitiable and frightening. Yet, like the convicts of 150 years ago who did a good turn to England by being transported to Australia, the Petrovs and the whole legion of Soviet defectors may appear in history as Russia's truest patriots.

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