Talking Location With … Deborah Lawrenson: MOSCOW and SUKHUMI

5th February 2025

TalkingLocationWith … Deborah Lawrenson, author of The Secretary

Set in Moscow and Sukhumi, a resort on the Black Sea; USSR

“As the dawn lightened from charcoal to ash, wide streets emerged, grander and even more intimidating than Lois had anticipated: magnificent granite threats rising from banks of snow. She caught her first sight of Red Square, vast and empty, through a murky mist. St Basil’s cathedral was a twisted-sugar confection, out of place in the austerity. The bus took a bridge over the Moskva river, where ice-sheets cracked and rode the dark water in a slowly-moving mosaic.”

Moscow in January 1958 was a bleak, threatening place for Western diplomats and staff at foreign embassies. Their morning journey in a private bus from apartments near the Garden Ring to the British Embassy ended at old sugar merchant’s mansion across the river from the blood-red Kremlin walls.  Nowadays, the Kharitonenko Mansion is the residence of the British Ambassador, but then it housed the whole embassy, too.

The Cold War was at its height. Five years after the death of Stalin, his successor Nikita Khrushchev was testing nuclear weapons. Notorious British traitors Burgess and Maclean had defected to Russia, while Kim Philby remained only suspected, a source of frustration on both sides of the Atlantic. This is where my parents met, and I grew up with stories of their romance tailed by the KGB and the listening devices they prised out of the walls only to find them re-plastered in as if by magic the next day.

The Secretary is based on the diary my late mother Joy wrote in Moscow that year, and while the story is a fiction, the background and historical details are all authentic, given piquancy by her admission to me when she was in her eighties that she had been more than just a secretary: she had been part of MI6.

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I even had a few childhood memories of Moscow to draw on. Some years later, when my father was posted to Peking (as it was then), Moscow was a stopover en route there, involving foul-smelling Aeroflot flights with strange boiled sweets at take-off and landing. The buildings loomed grey and high; inside one apartment I was given a Russian Matryoshka doll and a recording of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf  to listen to while the adults talked.

Joy at Donskoy Monastery

In the novel, I’ve also drawn on the romantic September holiday my parents took in Sukhumi, a resort on the eastern Black Sea once regarded as the Soviet Riviera. They arrived to find an attractive town unexpectedly lush with sub-tropical plants and palms. My mother noted drily that it was still undeniably the USSR: the Intourist hotel looked impressive but suffered from a squalid lack of cleanliness, especially in the bathrooms.

Despite the pebbled beach, the sea was glorious and the views across the bay entrancing. The mountains behind the coast were green and inviting, and the town’s Greek and Ottoman history gave it a raffish, cosmopolitan atmosphere, with an elegant esplanade and pleasure piers.

Sukhumi is now the capital of the breakaway Georgian republic of Abkhazia, and it’s hard, though not impossible, to get there as a foreign traveller. After the fall of the USSR in the early 1990s, a bitter and bloody war broke out between Georgian forces and Abkhazian separatists backed by Russia. The separatists still prevail, though their state remains disputed territory, unrecognised internationally.

Old postcard Sukhumi

The author’s father at Sukhumi

The airport is used only by the Russian military, and the grand railway station is long closed. Italianate and Stalin-era buildings are gunshot-riddled, and grand 19^th century villas lie in ruins. The decaying pleasure piers of the Soviet years are frozen in time, rusting and disintegrating into the sea.

But abandonment and isolation have preserved the details of monolithic communist design, and some Russian holidaymakers make nostalgic trips there to remember bygone times. Slowly the city is regenerating.

As for my parents, their last evening in Sukhumi already had a touch of melancholy. My mother wrote in her diary:

“Shan’t forget the mournful notes of the mouth organ on a deserted beach, with scrub behind & the sea whipping up. The Black Sea, near to Turkey. Our last night, I’m afraid. He said he’d send me a single air ticket to his next post; one had to be sure.”

I wove a version of these words into my narrative as the novel grew from real life and real locations. Sukhumi was a dream-like interlude from the challenges of Moscow. Officially, today, Azkhabia doesn’t even exist, its troubled history ensuring that for once time has not made it unrecognisable from the place they saw.

Deborah Lawrenson

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