To Russia with love

He first studied Russian at Manchester, then embarked on "exceedingly boring dissertation on Soviet youth employment" at St. Anthony's College, Oxford. Ill content with ivory tower contemplation, he took a translation job at the British embassy in Moscow.

Local colour was hard to come by, however. "There was a great gulf between the Embassy and the rest of society. All foreigners were regarded as potential spies," he explains. "Even a diplomatic pass did not guarantee a quiet life." KGB operatives, nicknamed "goons", followed Mervyn constantly. Despite the surveillance, he craved escape from the socially inbred embassy.

"One of my great pleasures was to go off walking and observe the antics of the operatives as they tried to keep up. Making them break cover was an unending source of fun. One of the best ways, I found, was simply to start running. If they were not to lose you, they had to run as well, revealing all. It was particularly hard on the middle-aged and fat."

His desire to meet real Russians inadvertently lead the Anglo-Welsh scholar into danger. "The Russians were always on the lookout for gullible foreigners of proletarian stock, people who may have born the brunt of 'capitalist exploitation'." Mervyn certainly qualified: "My childhood world featured houses without running (let alone hot) water, no bathrooms, telephones, cars or even books; poor, war-damaged schools; and no foreign travel. Most of the men were labourers, while the wives stayed at home attending to endless domestic chores.

"Apart from that, I had a couple of extra disadvantages - separated parents and a crippled grandmother. So although my father taught me 'table manners', and we were always warm and well-fed, I lacked the upbringing, graces (and monied appearance) required in diplomatic circles." The KGB latched onto this misfit with his working-class background in the Hafod, Swansea, imagining a brother in arms. He was soon befriended by a dashing young fellow, Vadim Popov, who hosted lavish evenings at his uncle's dacha. Mervyn was experiencing life and Russia, giddy with excitement.

At the same time, embassy life soured. He was reprimanded for using the diplomatic bag to smuggle poems by Dr Zhivago author Boris Pasternak into Britain. Slowly his privileges were revoked and official disapproval made itself known. His contract was not likely to be renewed.

Vadim stepped in and helped Mervyn transfer to Moscow University, where he lived alongside native students. In autumn 1959, the friends embarked on a carousing journey to Central Asia, but here, the warning bells became to loud to ignore. Mervyn had just invited a pretty Russian girl up to his rooms. He disturbed two KGB goons searching his possessions - and drinking his vodka.

Outraged, he ordered them out, then repulsed the girl as well, afraid that her tender advances were a trap. "I freed myself from her clinging embrace, and managed to usher her out, protesting, into the corridor. A fine opportunity had been missed, but at least I was safe."

The KGB intensified its efforts, introducing a polished gentleman named Aleksei Suntsov. Mervyn recalls, "Still in his early thirties, he had a broad handsome face, high cheekbones, and swept-back hair. He was beautifully dressed and obviously much at ease." Aleksei arranged holidays in Siberia and Georgia. "Possibly, at that point, I should have broken off our relationship. But when one is young, one is naturally egotistical and over-confident. I thought that if the KGB considered me valuable, and wanted to give me a smashing time in Russia, so much the better."

The KGB finally confronted Mervyn, threatening him to co-operate. The Welshman refused, but he could not entirely distance himself from the sinister Soviet organisation.

"On my return to Oxford in 1961, I found that a number of strange things were going on there, too. The hand of the KGB was not entirely absent from the city of dreaming spires." Mervyn avoided falling into the academic spy ring, and returned to Russia two years later, aged 31. That's when the trouble began, classically, with a woman.

"The first thing I noticed about her were her eyes - grey, sharp, but very kind, with a wonderful smile. Her features were very Russian, even Tartar, with the characteristic high cheekbones and slightly olive skin."

Friends introduced him to Mila Bibikova, who impressed Mervyn with her sincerity, warm smile and survival skills.

"Her father had been arrested on trumped-up charges of treason and (as the family later found out) tortured and shot. A few weeks later Mila's mother was arrested merely because she had been married to him. Soldiers came to take her in the middle of the night, and Mila's first memory, as a child of less than four years, was being awakened by a soldier with a gun." She and her sister were sent to different children's homes, where Mila contracted measles and tuberculosis of the hip. "When the war started, she was evacuated to a home in a little town on the edge of the Urals, where she survived starvation, sometimes through eating grass."

Mila became an historical researcher in the well-known Institute of Marxism-Leninism. "Like many of her colleagues, she retained her staunchly anti-Soviet views - but kept quiet about them," he says.

The couple began quietly dating but Mervyn can pin-point the moment his fate was sealed. As the couple parted ways one grey February evening, "suddenly, for no discernable reason, I realised I was profoundly in love with that lopsided figure, and I could see no future for myself without her." This was just what the goons needed. They used his romance to pressure Mervyn into spying. "Before now, there were no emotional links. When I fell in love, the KGB got nasty."

Once again, he rebuffed them. Angry agents then set a trap for the idealistic scholar. He was arrested for selling a red jumper to a friend - in the twisted Soviet legal system, this became "speculation" for profit. Mervyn was rescued by his KGB contacts, who forced an oath of cooperation from him.

The problem was that Mervyn has nothing to report. He was an academic, and had only held a lowly translating post at the Embassy. Soon his 'handler' was enraged: "You have not been helping us properly," he barked. "All we get from you are useless bits of information about the green lawns of Oxford." The couple were refused permission to marry, but tried to shame the Palace of Weddings into conducting the ceremony, backed by international journalists. The authorities were livid and deported Mervyn Matthews.

"As the engines started I burst into tears - it was the first time I had cried since I was a boy."

Back home, he received a letter from Mila. "Today we are starting a new life, a life of letters and struggle," she wrote. "I feel bad without you, it is as though life has stopped."

Mervyn began campaigning, through politicians and press, to rescue his fiance from the Soviet Union. He flew to Stockholm chasing Khrushchev, badgered the Russian ambassador, plagued the British government - all to no avail. His efforts did ruin his St. Anthony's aspirations, however. One night Howard Smith and a group of Foreign Office officials came to the College for dinner.

"When he appeared in the doorway I was so agitated that I rather lost control of myself, and expressed an earthy view of his person. The incident was the final nail in the coffin of my Oxford career, if one were needed."

Mervyn took up an academic post in Leeds and kept pestering the powers-that-be. When the struggle seemed futile, he snuck back into the USSR three times for clandestine meetings with his love.

Five years after their separation, a glimmer of hope began to grow. A young English lecturer, Mervyn's Oxford acquaintance Gerald Brooke, had been sentenced to five years' imprisonment as a 'spy'. The Soviet authorities offered to swap him for two genuine Soviet agents, Peter and Helen Kroger, who were serving 20-year prison sentences for espionage in England. Three marriages were tacked onto the deal, including Mervyn and Mila's.

Safely back in London after the wedding in Moscow, they scorned further publicity and settled in Pimlico, raising two children. "For a Soviet citizen like Mila, it seemed like fairyland."

Yet the memories of that long, hard struggle were too fresh, too painful, for discussion. The children knew peculiar things happened in Russia, but were surprised when Mervyn broke 30 years of silence, dusting off old headlines and photographs. He has now published the account in Mila & Mervusya: A Russian Wedding.

"The shadow of Russia - or glow - has remained over this household forever," he says. "As old age approached, it was time to tell the tale.

Story date: Saturday 08 April

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.