We drove toward Kreshchatyk, down the Vladimirsky Descent, past the Pochtovaya Square, and came to Podol’s narrow streets.
Outside, pedestrians in winter jackets and coats scurried on the sidewalks. They don’t teach you in school what to do when the KGB sends an officer with an uber-Ukrainian name like Bogdan, in a black Volga for goodness’ sake, to pick you up. Don’t ask where you’re going, stay calm. Patience and respect, show them that.
“Are you a member of the Komsomol, Nikolai?” Bogdan said.
Is this what it’s about? Me, slipping through the system and never taking out the Komsomol membership? Don’t you guys have CIA spies to catch?
Becoming a member of the Komsomol, or All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, was a formality. Most fourteen-year-olds went with the flow without thinking too much about it. Nobody forced you to join. Stay out of it and you’d set yourself up for problems in the future you never thought would be there waiting for you. When it was my time to join, I didn’t bother with it. Boring membership classes and, once you’re in, after-school meetings to waste time. My training started one hour after the last class, Komsomol didn’t fit in.
First time Komsomol bit me in the ass was when I applied to Kiev Sports University. The application form asked if I was a member. Part of the Titan team by then, I knew the Uni wanted me more than I wanted the Uni and I ticked the yes box. Nobody checks this.
Then came the passport application form with dozens of trivial questions. One was about Komsomol again. This time it was an important document checked for veracity by the KGB.
You couldn’t apply for a passport in the USSR and go anywhere you liked. KGB controlled comings and goings, and the passports. You want one, tell them everything about yourself. Have a reason to go abroad. No reason, no passport.
Most people never bothered with it. Not that they had any secrets to hide. Too hard. Athletes, artists, scientists, these are the face and the image of the People, the Idea, and the System. The privileged minority, the golden boys and girls of the workers’ paradise. These can have their passports but only after we check what they eat, breathe, and think.
Stuck again, I told Nikolai Rogozyan about Komsomol and he said to tick the yes box. If you’re not a member, the Party’s ideals don’t fit you or you don’t fit the Party’s ideals. Either way, the KGB will choke your passport application if you’re not a member of the Komsomol.
Will fix it up later, Rogozyan said, when we come back to Kiev. I ticked the box and forgot about it.
I wasn’t a member I said to Bogdan.
“So, you lied on your passport application form?”
I told him how busy I was in school and missed the Komsomol boat and how I was going to fix this later but cycling got in the way.
He grinned and leaned over to the front passenger seat. He grabbed a black, plastic briefcase by its handle. He placed the briefcase flat on his lap and, looking straight ahead, said: “Where’s your brother, Nikolai?”
Not about Komsomol.
“Kamchatka,” I said.
“End of the world,” he said and turned his head toward me. “Why so far away from home?”
“Money. He’s making good money in Kamchatka. Long holidays. He likes it there.”
“I see. Let me ask you this. Are you a liar, Nikolai?”
How he said my name at the end of the questions, he could’ve been my physics teacher chatting about an overdue assignment. Words flew from his lips with a chummy tone of a guillotine blade falling on your neck. He set the trap and nudged me to step into it.
“I’m not a liar.”
He opened the briefcase and pulled out a shabby, buff-colored manila folder. It had my black-and-white passport photo clipped to its corner. My name hand-written in capital letters was under a file and volume number heading. He placed the folder on top of the briefcase and said, “Who filled out your passport application form?”
“I did.”
“Very well. Do you remember a question about your immediate family?”
“Which one?”
“The one that asked you if anyone from your immediate family has ever been sentenced for a criminal offense.”
“I was a kid when my brother went to jail,” I said. “So long ago, stopped being real to me.”
“Let me tell you what’s real. You lied to the government in full knowledge of the consequences for doing so. You signed the form. You acknowledged possible repercussions for lying to the government. You lied to get a passport, a document we give to those only we trust. Do you know how long the sentence is for this crime?”
He sneered saying, “No? I didn’t think so.”
“What was I supposed to do?” I said. “Without a passport, I can’t race abroad. Useless to the national team.”
“Thinking too much, Nikolai, and running ahead of yourself. You make false conclusions about things you know nothing about. You think we wouldn’t give you a passport because your brother served time ten years ago? It’s none of your business, to think. What is your business is to be honest and open with us when we ask you to be honest and open with us. We may or may not care about the information itself. I mean, who cares what your brother did ten years ago, right? It’s how truthful you’re with us we want to know. And so far, you’re not doing too well I’m afraid.”
We turned on Vladimirskaya street and headed to Kiev’s KGB headquarters. This is it, this is how they take you out, a small slip-up and it’s all over, no second chances.
Meters away from the parking bay in front of the building, the driver’s eyes popped into the rear-view mirror and glanced at Bogdan. “Keep going,” he told him with a hand wave.
The Golden Gate was on our right when Bogdan said, “You tried to defect in France, didn’t you?”
I looked in his direction, ice melting in my guts, dry throat, heart pumping blood with loud thumps. Get the hell out of the car and run, hide somewhere, anywhere, go underground and wait out the storm to pass over. And then what? How long can you hide? How far can you run? As we say in the Soviet Union, you can’t run farther than Siberia.
“Why do you think I was going to defect?”
“We heard it on the BBC radio.”
“What?”
“Let me read you something.” He smirked and opened the folder with a sheaf of loose and stapled printing paper in it. The one at the top was the first page of my passport application form. He flipped it over and stared at the next page with a neat handwriting on it. He scanned the text holding the page with one hand. When he found what he was looking for, he stuck the index finger at it and said, “Here, a description of what we found in your sling bag in France: ‘contained the following: two thousand four hundred US dollars; nine hundred Deutschmarks; two thousand eight hundred French francs; a passport; a gold medal, world champion’s jersey and diploma; two pairs of socks and underwear; a toothbrush; a notebook; a Bic Cristal pen, and a London-printed Russian Bible.’ This, my friend, looks like a bag made ready for a run. What do you think?”
Someone sold me out. Someone went through my bag, by chance or on purpose, and wrote a report. I ruled out my roommate in Caen. Both from Titan, we were close friends, no way this was him. That tidy handwriting, the dry, formal language. Crap, a London-printed Russian Bible? That’s not him, he wouldn’t write that.
“Then there’s this.” Bogdan said and turned the page over. “Yes, here: ‘The evening before the road race, during the team meeting, Nikolai requested to be withdrawn from the start list citing fatigue. The next day, while the team attended the last championship event, at approximately one o’clock, Nikolai left the hotel on his bicycle. He was not wearing the cycling uniform. Clearly, he did not intend this to be a training ride. He wore the national team’s tracksuit and Adidas running shoes. He carried the above-mentioned sling bag across his back.’ Interesting. You give a bullshit excuse to skip out a race, pack a chunk of cash and a passport, hop on a bike, and ride into the sun. If this wasn’t a run, then I want to know what it was.”
“Shopping,” I said.
“I thought so. With roughly three thousand in US currency. What did you buy, a Swiss watch?”
“I didn’t buy anything. I changed my mind and went back to the hotel.”
“You changed your mind. Why?”
“Didn’t feel like shopping once I got into town.”
“I’m not talking about shopping. Why did you change your mind?”
I shut up and we drove in silence for half a minute.
“Let me remind you how deep you have dug yourself in,” Bogdan said. “One, you have committed two counts of perjury when you applied for a passport. Two, we have evidence you tried to defect in France. An act of treason in other words. And three, you’ve been found in possession of a foreign currency, a substantial amount of I must add, which is illegal and a criminal offense. This last one brings another charge with it. As life goes, one crime leads to another. At any rate, that cash you had in your bag, you crossed the border with it. Probably more than once. You know what it’s called, don’t you?”
Yeah, tell me.
“Contraband. Ever heard of Yan Rokotov?”
“No.”
“Was sentenced to death for illegal foreign currency possession. Article twenty-five of the Law on State Crimes. You should familiarize yourself with that book instead of wasting your time reading the Bible. Where you got the Bible from is a topic for another conversation. For now though, if I were you, I’d be talking about what made you decide to defect, where you got the currency from and how you smuggled it in and out of the country. I’m listening.”
I looked out the window and said, “I didn’t want to defect. I went shopping. My passport was in that bag all the time because it could’ve gotten lost in the room. The jersey and the medal have been in the bag since the race day. I grabbed the bag, jumped on the bike and went shopping.”
“Plausible,” Bogdan said, “but not convincing. Continue. Can’t wait to hear a story about how you found a bundle of cash, in three different denominations, on the side of the road.”
I ignored the jest and took a two-second pause to come up with something believable about the money. A mixture of truth and fiction.
“The francs and the Deutschmarks are mine. I sold a few spare singles I didn’t need anymore. Some guys paid in francs, and one or two, the Germans, paid Deutschmarks. The dollars, I won a bet.”
“You won what?”
“A bet. The day before the race, Borysewicz sat next to me in the foyer—”
“Stop,” Bogdan raised his left hand as if I was coming at him. “Who’s Borysewicz?”
“Americans’ coach. He’s Polish, speaks good Russian. I heard he stayed in the US after the Montreal Games. Coaches the US team now. Anyway, he sat next to me in the foyer. I was browsing magazines on a couch and we started talking, asking questions—”
“What sort of questions?”
“About training. What we do or don’t do to train for the worlds team time trial.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him how we train. Is that a secret?”
“Keep going.”
“He said his team will kick our ass no matter how prepared we are. He was sure we were going to lose the race. I called him an idiot and an amateur. I said Americans have no class and should stick to baseball, not cycling. This is when he bet me five thousand dollars that his guys will crush us in a team time trial.”
I stopped talking to check the story’s effect. It helped that some of it was true. I did talk with Borysewicz that afternoon but he never made a bet. When he heard my opinion of him and his team, he stood up and walked away.
“So you won the race and he paid you five thousand bucks?”
“No, he paid only twenty-four hundred and said he’ll pay the rest when he sees me next time at a race somewhere.”
“What did you do with the money?”
Nothing. It was now in my room back at the hotel wrapped in an old rain jacket and tucked away in a wardrobe. Tell him that and you confess smuggling and illegal possession of a foreign currency. If not bad enough to face the firing squad, it’s enough for spending years in a labor camp.
Let’s dig one more time. “I opened a bank account in Caen,” I said. “The money’s in the bank.”
“Which one?” he said.
I looked at and studied dozens of Tour de France pictures in L’Équipe, you could buy it in the USSR. I knew professional cycling’s sponsors and Crédit Lyonnais was one of them.
“Crédit Lyonnais,” I said.
We were a block away from the headquarters again. We sat in silence, the noise of tires rubbing against the cobbles poured in from outside.
Bogdan chucked the folder into the briefcase, shut it, and said, “You now have an account in a French bank. The minute you step on a Western soil, you’ll have access to a considerable amount of cash if you choose to defect. Or, you’ll keep going for a while and top it up every time you travel abroad until you have nothing to gain from our country. And then you defect. You’re going to milk your Motherland as long as you can and then run. That’s your plan.”
We pulled over at the headquarters’ entrance. Bogdan opened his door, stepped out on the sidewalk and shut the door behind him.
“Get the hell out of the car, kid,” the driver said.
A gust of crisp, icy wind hit me on the chest when I stepped outside. The shirt on my back stuck to my skin under a leather jacket. Of all Russian words, one I didn’t want to hear right now was the dreaded poshli, the let’s go. Thousands of men and women in this country heard this word coming out of the KGB agents’ mouths. An epigraph to a hell on earth, the Gulag.
The driver in the idling Volga lit a cigarette and rolled the window down.
“Come here,” Bogdan said.
As a fourth-grade pupil caught by the principal in the act of smashing a school window, I came closer in short steps.
“Right now,” he said and put both hands in his pants’ pockets, “I’m inclined to let this rest for a while. Not that I believed much of what you told me but I’ll let this float around for a bit. We’ll be in touch.”
He turned around, opened the Volga’s front door and sat in. Before he shut the door, he looked at me from inside the car and said: “Do not mention this conversation to anyone.”
I stood still on a sidewalk until the black Volga sped away out of view. Drizzling rain drops filled the air, the daylight dulled to concrete-gray hues. With the Komitet’s headquarters behind my back, I crossed the street not looking at the building. Once on the other side, I turned the corner into Reitarskaya street. A taxi was moving toward me with its green light on and I stepped onto the road with one foot to hailed it. The car swerved and came to a stop next to me.
“Lesnoye resort,” I said to the cabbie when I opened the front door.
“That’s out of town,” he said.
“Yeah, I know.”
“How much?” he said, his fingers tapping on the steering wheel.
“Twenty-five,” I said. Half of that would be a good deal.
“Done.”
Basking in the sun and clicking easy miles in Crimea, I heard that the elite national team had drafted me in. In three weeks’ time, I would be riding next to the giants of Soviet cycling. This was the top step on the ladder, nowhere else to climb after that, this was it.
To a day a year ago, I sat at the Titan team meeting and listened to Yuri Elizarov’s gold medal plan. The door to the elite national team and the 1988 Olympic Games. And here I’m, in the Primorskaya hotel talking to a receptionist and telling her why I’m here.
“Oh,” she said, smiling, “you must be one of the Viktor Arsentyevich’s boys. Let’s see what room you’re in.” She gave me keys to my room and said: “You better hurry up to the restaurant, the breakfast had already started. Viktor Arsentyevich is very punctual.”
Viktor Kapitonov, or Viktor Arsentyevich for those not on the first-name basis with him, was one of the Soviet sport’s greats and a cycling legend. The drama and the triumph of the 1960 Olympic road race started the Soviet Union’s reign in amateur cycling. People talked about pre- and post-Kapitonov era, what we did and how we did things before and after Rome.
He authored the first book I read about cycling where he described his Olympic victory. Riding hills in the North Caucasus where I grew up, I liked to picture myself racing that road race. Slip into Kapitonov’s skin and daydream going against Livio Trapè through the wall of tifosi’s roar. I would work out how to overcome the enemy because I knew every detail of that race. What the plan was, how it all went wrong more than once. How Italians destroyed everyone who was anyone. How Kapitonov dragged Trapè to the line, made a mistake and sprinted to victory a lap too early. How Trapè attacked once he saw what an idiot Kapitonov was. The chase, the catch, the second sprint, the real one, the one that counted, and then the win. The monument and the pride of my sport, my country, and our system.
Playing that race back in my mind dozens of times, it stopped being real and turned into a movie I’d seen in a cinema. The hero, I knew he was real, was around somewhere but the chance of meeting him, never mind working with him, were nil.
He retired in 1965 and took over the national team to put the Soviet Union on the map as the cycling top nation. He delivered the goods: three back to back Olympic gold medals in team time trials from 1972 to 1980. With world titles between the Games, the team time trial became the Soviets’ hallmark race.
From the mid-1970s and into the 1980s, men in red CCCP jerseys ruled the Peace Race too. Watching on television four of them riding away from the peloton in 1984 to clinch Sergey Soukhorouchenkov’s second win was a thrill you never forget.
When I walked into Primorskaya restaurant that morning, I walked into a room crowded by the grand riders of the era. Two Olympic and five world champions, guys I watched on TV or read about in the newspapers.
The wooden door opened into a high-ceiling hall with white walls, sunlit from the human-height windows. The white embroidered tablecloth reaching all the way to the floor hung from the tables. The riders sat two or three a table on the opposite side of the hall chatting away and working on their food. No one else was in the restaurant. When the national team ate, the public had no business eating at Primorskaya.
I froze and scanned the tables looking for an empty one I could land at. Some guys glanced at me and kept talking and chewing. Two or three stared with a who-the-hell-is-this-clown look on their faces. The stares burned my skin and my eyes hopped from one face to another, to the end of the room, to the floor, and the windows.
Someone was looking at me. The familiar face was from the Peace Race broadcasts — Yuri Kashirin, an Olympic and world champion. He nodded with his chin pointing at the table he sat at with a guy I’ve never seen before. I steered toward his table and took a chair as soon as I could grab it.
“Yura,” he said and stuck his hand out.
“Kolya,” I said, shook his hand and looked at the other guy to hear his name.
“How old are you, son?” he said.
“Eighteen.”
He turned to Kashirin and said, “Is this even legal?”
“Legal what?” Kashirin said.
“Taking eighteen-year-old kids into the national team.”
“I’m sure he’ll turn nineteen next year, right?” Kashirin said, looking at me.
“That’s the plan,” I said.
“What team are you from?” the other guy said.
“Titan.”
“They cook you by the dozens in Ukraine, don’t they?” he said.
“I’m not Ukrainian. I’m from the North Caucasus,” I said.
“North Caucasus? Where exactly in the North Caucasus?”
“Nalchik.”
“Naaalchik? Do you know Peter Trumheller?”
“He is my coach. Well, was. He was my first coach.”
“How did you end up in Ukraine?”
“Titan offered me a ride.”
“I thought all Russian kids go to Kuybyshev nowadays.”
“I didn’t.”
“Why?”
“Trumheller said go to Titan, I went.”
He poured himself a cup of black coffee from a stainless steel pot and reclined in the chair staring out the window at the Black Sea outside.
Kashirin waved to a waiter. “This young man,” he said and pointed at me, “needs breakfast. He was late.” Without needing to know anything else, the waiter turned around and hurried away to fetch me breakfast.
“Volodya Malakhov and I are from Rostov,” Kashirin said. “Almost neighbors,” he added.
More than three hundred kilometers from Nalchik, Rostov was geographically in North Caucasus, the largest city in the region. Neighbors yeah, I’ve been to Rostov and from what I’ve seen, I wouldn’t want to spend an hour in that dirty, industrial place.
So, this is Vladimir Malakhov, the A-list sprinter and a national road champion.
“We’ve had some Ukrainians coming in the last couple of years,” Kashirin said. “Volodya’s not too keen on the idea.” He looked at Malakhov, grinned and said, “Why don’t you like Ukrainians, you Nazi?”
“Me Nazi? I’m not the one swallowing anabolics all day long.”
“Swallowing what?” I said. I knew what anabolics were. By this time, the genie was out of the bottle. Anyone willing to put two and two together knew what the East German women swimmers were on. Looking more like seals than human, they lost the last traces of femininity even on their faces. They were a joke and everyone knew that. But cycling? The word on the street was: ‘bolics shrink dicks and make men impotent. That’s all I knew about anabolics and now it seemed like there was more to it than I thought I knew.
“What do you mean swallowing anabolics all day?” I said after he ignored my question.
“I heard you gobble ‘bolics by the shovels in Ukraine,” he said. The ‘you’ he used was in a plural form that didn’t refer to anybody. I dropped the diplomacy and asked, using a form of ‘we’ that included me personally: “And why would we be taking ‘bolics?”
“To squeeze a little bit of performance out of your legs?”
“Don’t you gain weight with it?” I said.
“If you behave yourself, one day I’ll tell you what an extra kilo or two of lean muscle can do to your performance. Even on the hills. Meantime, eat your breakfast, shut up and make sure you’re on your best day every day if you want to survive here.”
I took the hint and stayed out of the Malakhov’s way. He always had a life lesson for me or a smart insight to offer. Why at a winter training camp I was riding on 24s and not on 27s? Well, I would reply in my head, because I don’t give a damn. I glue on whatever I grab from the pile. It’s not like we’re racing tomorrow.
“You put too much sugar in your coffee,” he told me one morning at breakfast. “It ruins your teeth and makes your ass heavy as a truck.”
It amazed me how immaculate his cycling kit was even after several rainy days on a bike. We didn’t have washing machines in the hotels we lived in and had to wash our kits by hand in a bath tab or in a sink. During rainy periods I couldn’t be bothered washing every day. A master of shortcuts, I would dry the top layer stuff in the sun, shake the sand off and ride in it again.
Malakhov, he’d turn up in a clean, spotless kit every time no matter how foul the weather was the day before — a class act.
I’d start a race in a rain jacket if Malakhov had been wearing one. A cap over the helmet or under? Look at Malakhov. Arm warmers on or off? Look at Malakhov. He told me to always wear gloves in races and when I forgot to put them on one day, he made me ride back to the team bus to get them. I missed the start and chased the peloton the first few kilometers of the race.
He annoyed the living light out of me with his preaching but I learned one day he meant good. I was getting food out of the jersey pockets with both hands in when someone in front of me dropped a bottle. It rolled under my front wheel, I lost it and hit the floor. Malakhov was on my wheel, tumbled down over my bike and landed next to me. I thought he’d kill me right there on the road. Instead, the first thing that came out of his mouth when we came to a stop was: “Are you OK, kid?”
He was that rare breed of a cyclist who’d swap a fifty-three chainring for a fifty-two one because he knew the sprint was on a false flat. He never attacked, yet, a winning breakaway would almost never go without him. He hardly ever talked about races but every time he did, I listened.
No matter how much I thought I was ready for the top league, I wasn’t. Sitting with Malakhov and Kashirin at a dinner table three times a day changed that.
The junior racing at the national level was hard and aggressive. It would start with fireworks, go on stupid for a while and sort itself out into a tiptop group. They’d settle down and wonder what to do next. You could win a race by doing a sneaky move while everyone else was looking at each other.
The elite guys, they’d start easy and give themselves time to warm up. On a cold day, the word would spread to go piano for the first ten kilometers. Then the pace would pick up. If you didn’t get your ass to the front in time, the pooh would hit the fan and cover you from head to toe before you knew what’s going on.
When the hammer went down, it went down with a bang. You turn into a crosswind and if you’re not in the top twenty, you’ll have a hard time to stay on. The strung-out peloton, everyone fighting to stay on the wheel, tortured by the speed you can only hold for so long.
The peloton never broke up even after the crosswinds had gunned it for kilometers. Nobody gave up no matter how painful the speed was. These guys stayed together until the pressure had ended. As the pace dropped, hordes of them would crawl to the front before the next blast. Without time to relax, you had to stay wired and watch where you were at every pedal’s turn.
The national team’s red jersey was another burden I could never ignore. Kapitonov’s creed was: you put that CCCP jersey on, you honor it with performance every time, no exceptions. He expected his climbers to climb better than other climbers, sprinters to nail the sprints every time, and the diesels to win the time trials. He brushed off all excuses if you had one for your crap performance. Kapitonov would cut you some slack once or twice but if you keep on screwing up, you’d be out the door without a warning.
The 1985 was the fortieth anniversary of the Second World War victory over Nazi Germany. For the first and the only time the Peace Race came to Moscow. Symbolically, and on purpose, the race would finish in Berlin. They’d scripted it for the Soviet team to crush the Germans. May 1945, the cycling version.
On paper, we were friends with the Germans. Warsaw Pact allies, fellow communists, and all that jazz. On the road, no enemy was more hated by us than the Fascists. The hatred of Germans was, and still is, deep in the Russian psyche. What they’ve done to us in the war, no one will ever forget that. You grow up and you learn about the monsters west of our border. The beasts who attacked us without warning in 1941 and slew thirty million of our men and women. We smile and pat each other’s backs now, no hard feelings. Except tell us to go get them. Tell us to teach them another lesson and make them remember to never come here but with peace. Call it the Peace Race. Let them believe that.
Kapitonov had to build a team that year made from steel. They even added a time a team time trial in Moscow to secure the team classification for the USSR from the start. Early in the season, they told me to stay out of the Peace Race dog fight. Too young and with no experience, I had no chance to qualify. Instead, I focused on the team time trial again.
Those not in the run for the Peace Race would go to a series of stage races in Germany and Holland. I saw my name on the list going to Germany. Three days before leaving they tell me I’m not going. They come from Germany and go to England for the Milk Race without me. The first two miss outs, I thought okay, I’m not at the top of my game. The standard protocol was to roll the young ones through a stage racing program. No one told me why I’m not part of it. Then they tell me not to worry about the world championship. Take it easy, it’s only your first season in the top league they said.
By mid-summer an invite came from the Coors Classic in America. The top guns were busy getting ready for the worlds in Italy and stayed in Lithuania to prepare. Pack up and get ready to race against Bernard Hinault and Greg Lemond they told me, you’re going to the States.
The night before leaving, Titan’s admin tells me they’d swapped me for someone else at the last minute. Something was wrong. I called Zyama, our military liaison between Titan and the army, to find out what was going on.
“Your passport is on hold,” he said. “You didn’t hear this from me — you understand? — but I probed around, asked some contacts in the intelligence department and I heard, well. You’re screwed. They’ve got something on you, I don’t know what, but you’re screwed.”