At Home with the Frazers

For Soviet citizens, Mark and Natasha Frazer live extremely well. Their five-room apartment in a new building in the center of Moscow has a TV set, an upright piano and a big black dog named Doll. Instead of buying the shoddy, ill-fitting Russian clothes, the family imports its wardrobe from London. Mark, whose Russian is excellent, goes regularly to his job as editor of the Soviet monthly, International Affairs; Natasha edits the translations of Russian stories in the biweekly English-language newspaper, Moscow News. Their children. Fergus, 13, Donald, 11, and Melinda, 6, have spent three years at Soviet schools and are as fluent in Russian as in English.

This was the surface impression of the Frazers gathered last week by a visitor to their home. But Mark Frazer had another name, and another life. Almost seven years ago, as Donald Maclean in charge of the American Section in the British Foreign Office, he fled England with his hard-drinking, notoriously homosexual crony, Guy Burgess, also a Foreign Office man, on the very day British authorities were about to question him on spy charges. Twenty-seven months later, Maclean's U.S.-born wife and three children left Switzerland and also slipped behind the Iron Curtain, joining him at Kuibyshev, a town on the Volga where he was teaching English. They found Kuibyshev dreary and provincial, and both welcomed the move to Moscow.

Maclean changed his name to Frazer probably because of his fear of the press; he is reported to have broken completely with Guy Burgess ever since Burgess gave an extended interview in Moscow last October to Tom Driberg, the British newsman and ex-Labor M.P. Both Burgess and Maclean share a continuing problem: alcoholism. Last summer, when Maclean went on an extended drinking bout that ended in delirium tremens, his wife nursed him back to health, but told friends she was fed up and was considering leaving him. Since then, Maclean has been on the wagon, and both he and his wife deny any rumors of separation.

Mark Frazer, wearing the clothes and upper-class manner of his Cambridge background, goes to his office, does his work, comes home. If asked, he insists that he is unwavering in his support of the Soviet system, and that he would rather live in Moscow than anywhere else in the world. It is either that or the bottle.

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