In 1962, while living in Leningrad, Sylva Rubashova received a telephone call from a man who introduced himself as Anatoly Kuznetsov.

She immediately recognised the name as that of an established Russian writer. Would she mind, he asked, if he came to see her to learn about her life?

Not yet 30, Sylva had already spent ten years in Siberian exile, first aged seven when she and her parents were seized by Stalin’s troops in Riga, Latvia, and again as a 19-year-old student in Leningrad.

Kuznetsov explained that he had heard about her from a mutual acquaintance and wanted to write about her.

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Sylva with Anatoly Kuznetsov in the 1970s

He duly turned up at the communal flat she shared with 22 other tenants with a tape-recorder and a litre-bottle of cognac. Ten hours later, after listening agog to Sylva’s life story, he gloomily declared: “Neither under your name, nor mine, will this ever be published in our country.”

He had good reason to say this. His own memoir of the horrors he had witnessed as a 12-year-old boy at Babyn Yar, near Kyiv, would also never be published in full under Soviet rule.

(Although in 1966, a much-censored and inaccurate version was published in the USSR.)
But with Sylva’s help, Kuznetsov’s book, Babyn Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, translated into English in 1990, would become a worldwide best-seller and reveal the full horror of the massacre of 33,000 Jews by the Nazis in 1941.

Now for the first time Sylva, 89, widowed and living in Golders Green, has told the JC how the pair unveiled the full, uncensored story to the world.

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Sylva with a Russian edition of Babyn Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel

Kuznetsov defected to the UK in 1969. Sylva had already escaped to Israel and was working for the radio station Kol Israel, broadcasting in Russian to the USSR. She had found romance too, marrying an English announcer, Henry Eldar.
On the day he defected, Kuznetsov rang Sylva from London, begging her to come and help him “with all kinds of things”, she told the JC.

It was “rather awkward, as I had a loving husband, a career in Israel’s broadcasting service and a happy life in my new country. Now, a good friend was asking me to give all that up for him and his book. Henry’s attitude surprised me somewhat: he told me to go to London, since the world needed to know the truth about Babyn Yar.

He would wait for me, however long it took. So I came to Britain and, like Anatoly, without a word of English, but we had a shared goal: we would tell the world the truth about Babyn Yar.”

She was met by a government official at Heathrow Airport and taken to Kuznetsov’s flat. The pair hadn’t seen each other for four years. Kuznetsov told her how he had defected after persuading Communist Party officials that he should be allowed to carry out research work in the British Library for a biography of “Comrade Lenin”.

He was given permission — and a KGB minder called Georgi.

He convinced Georgi to accompany him to a striptease show in Soho, then threatened to tell his superiors if he didn’t allow him to leave the hotel for a walk alone. “Of course Anatoly did not return to the hotel,” said Sylva.

“Instead he headed straight for the BBC’s Bush House in the Strand, where he knew the name of one person working there, Anatol Goldberg. Kuznetsov told Goldberg: “You are my only hope. I’ve fled my hotel and by now my guard will have told the Soviet Embassy about my disappearance.”

Goldberg gave him the name of a Russian-speaking journalist at the Daily Telegraph, David Floyd, who agreed to help. “Floyd contacted the Home Office and Anatoly was debriefed, approved for British citizenship and provided with a two-bedroom flat near Marble Arch,” said Sylva.

Kuznetsov had smuggled his memoir out of the USSR on 35mm film sewn inside the lining of his coat. He and Sylva toiled day and night, transcribing, editing and recording the text for 50 15-minute programmes to be transmitted to the USSR by the US radio network Liberty. The live recordings became the book that established Kuznetsov’s place in literary history.

Sylva said: “Listeners in the Soviet Union were able to hear our broadcasts despite heavy Soviet jamming. The KGB definitely did not like our broadcasts. I noticed a man had been following us for several days. Then, one evening, the man suddenly appeared in front of us.

Looking straight at Anatoly, he said in Russian: ‘Dogs deserve a dog’s death.’ We had a Home Office protection officer, whom we told about the incident. He rang us the next day and said: ‘Don’t worry, we’ll deal with it.’

"We never heard from the Russian guy again.”

A few months later, Sylva was joined by her husband, who took unpaid leave so he could help Kuznetsov in his interactions with the literary world while his novel was being translated into several different languages. Sylva said: “By then Anatoly was living with a nice Polish girl called Jolanta. They married in 1978 and, in May 1979, Jolanta gave birth to a baby girl, Maria.

They were happily settled in Crouch End. Henry and I met up with them often. On 11 June, 1979, Anatoly telephoned , asking me to come over. I found Jolanta and Maria in the sitting-room. Anatoly was asleep upstairs.

“When he came down, he complained: ‘No man should wake up and find there is no coffee ready for him yet!’ Anatoly then walked past us into the kitchen and Jolanta called out ‘Make coffee for us too!’ Ten minutes later, Jolanta went out to see why no coffee had appeared. Then I heard a loud scream. Anatoly was lying motionless on the floor and

Jolanta was crying hysterically. I called an ambulance.

“He had died of a heart attack. His baby daughter was three weeks old and she was left on my lap while Jolanta went in the ambulance.”

Initially, Kuznetsov was buried in Willesden Cemetery. “Six months later his mortal remains were re-buried in Highgate Cemetery,” Sylva said, “because Anatoly used to say, jokingly: ‘I should like to lie near Karl Marx’, who had been buried at Highgate.”

Former JC political editor Martin Bright recently launched a successful fundraising campaign for a headstone.

v John Sweeney in Ukraine, p8-9