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embassy building he noticed two of the new Gaz-11s parked on the other side of the road. There were at least two men in each, and they were presumably waiting for someone to follow. The regime’s paranoia was scaling new heights.
    Once inside, Russell was asked to sign the usual book, and told to wait.
    ‘I have another appointment in twenty minutes,’ he objected.
    ‘This won’t take long,’ the duty officer told him
    Half a minute later, a dark-haired, bespectacled man in his early thirties came down the stairs. Russell hadn’t seen Joseph Kenyon since late 1941, when the diplomat was stationed in Berlin. He’d first met him in Prague two years earlier, during his own brief stint working for American intelligence.
    After they’d shaken hands, Kenyon ushered him through the building and out into a large and barely tended courtyard garden. ‘The rooms are all bugged,’ the diplomat told him, as he reached for an American cigarette. ‘Or at least some of them are. We find them and destroy them, but they’re surprisingly efficient at installing new ones.’
    ‘It’s good to see you,’ Russell said, ‘but I only came to register my presence. I’ve got a meeting at Press Liaison in fifteen minutes.’
    ‘Just tell me who you’re here for,’ Kenyon said. ‘We’ve received no word.’
    The penny dropped. ‘I’m here for the Chronicle , no one else. I gave up working for governments in 1941.’
    ‘Oh,’ Kenyon said, clearly surprised. ‘Right. So why Moscow? Nothing’s happening here.’
    Russell gave him a quick précis.
    ‘Not a chance,’ Kenyon told him, echoing the journalists at the Metropol.
    After scheduling a drink for that evening, Russell hurried back up Okhotnyy Ryad, his NKVD shadow keeping pace. The sky, like his mood, was darkening, and large drops of rain were beginning to fall as he reached the Press Liaison office on Tverskaya Street. A minute late, he was kept waiting for a further twenty, quite possibly as a punishment. There was a picture album of Soviet achievements on the anteroom table, all dams, steelworks and happy kolkhoz workers driving their brand new tractors into the sunset. He laughed out loud at one photograph of Stalin surrounded by nervously smiling women in overalls, and received a withering glare from the young receptionist.
    Someone arrived to collect him, a thin, balding man in his thirties with a worried look who introduced himself as Sergey Platonov. Upstairs, Russell discovered the reason for Platonov’s anxious expression – another man of roughly the same age with bushier hair, harder eyes and an NKVD major’s uniform. His name was Leselidze.
    Russell was reminded of another interview he had endured, in Berlin several years earlier. Then too, the monkey had asked the questions while the organ grinder just sat there, making everyone nervous.
    The room was like a small lecture hall, with several short rows of seats facing a slightly raised dais. They all sat down, Platonov and Leselidze behind the lecturer’s desk, Russell in the audience front row. It felt like more like a tribunal than an interview.
    Platonov asked, in almost faultless English, whether Russell was aware of the wartime restrictions on movement applicable to all non-Soviet citizens.
    ‘Yes,’ Russell replied in the same language. A moving crane caught his eye in the window, proof that some rebuilding was underway.
    ‘And the general rules governing conversations between foreigners and Soviet citizens?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Did he understand the specific rules governing foreign reporters in the Soviet Union, particularly those regarding the transmission of any information deemed detrimental to the Soviet state?
    ‘I do,’ Russell affirmed. He had no knowledge of the current details, but the gist was unlikely to have changed – foreign journalists would be allowed to prop up the main hotel bars, sit quietly at official press confer-ences, and have spontaneous conversations with specially