The private life of Kim Philby

by Rufina Philby with Hayden Peake and Mikhail Lyubimov,
Little Brown

It was inevitable that all those bright young men and women in the nineteen thirties should embrace Communism. This proposition has been repeated with such frequency that it has become accepted wisdom. So ghastly was the threat of Nazism (until the formation of the Axis, Italian Fascism seemed to many admirable or, at least, benign) that a whole generation is forgiven for looking on Stalin, the greatest monster of the twentieth century, as the leader of the promised land, the workers' paradise.

This is all, of course, the greatest nonsense. There were plenty of warning voices who had seen the appalling reality of the Soviet Union - Malcolm Muggeridge to name only one. The Webbs and George Bernard Shaw might accept Potemkin villages at face value but the truth of collectivisation, the destruction of the kulaks, and the Terror itself was apparent. Fellow-travellers might use convoluted logic to explain away the show trials, but in reality one gang of murderers was bumping off another gang of murderers. Only the wilfully self-deceived could see things otherwise.

Psychologists have suggested several ingenious explanations for treason, one of which is that the traitor is revenging himself on his father. This particular motive, whilst plausible, has been advanced as the motivation for a wide variety of aberrant behaviour. Similarly, we are told, homosexuals like Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt became agents of the NKVD as a sign of their "otherness" and in rebellion against an unsympathetic society: much the same as identifying with the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Established Church. The choice was, I suppose, a matter of taste. Kim Philby did not conform to either of these theories. He was the son of a famous father, the Arabist, explorer, and author, with whom he enjoyed cordial, if distant relations. It was his father who gave him the nickname Kim, alluding to the Kipling story. St John Philby was rumoured to have gone in for spying himself. He did resign from government service in 1924 as a protest against pro-Zionist policy, renounced his status as a British subject, and lived as an Arab. Philby always spoke affectionately of his father's eccentricity and was with him when he died in 1960. Philby was emphatically heterosexual. His first marriage was to the Austrian Litzi, a communist on the run who badly needed a British passport. During his second marriage he conducted a series of affairs: one produced a son and another was with the wife of his partner in treason, Donald Maclean.

Philby himself, in an unfinished memoir included in this volume, accounts for his aversion to capitalist society in general and the British Empire in particular with a youthful rejection of Christianity. He records an early affinity with the poor, not many of whom he came across at his Surrey prep school, Aldro, or Westminster where he went as a King's Scholar in 1924. From his public school he won a scholarship to Trinity, Cambridge, where he came into contact with Marxism for the first time.

Speculation as to Philby's psychological motivation is entertaining but ultimately fruitless. There is probably no "Rosebud". What is beyond question is the role drink played in his life. No doubt alcohol provided some escape from contradictions and complexities. Philby was the most spectacular success of the NKVD in its drive to plant agents inside British intelligence. It seems incredible now that someone known to be a heavy drinker with communist affiliations should so easily have penetrated MI6 - though, of course, Philby was a model of caution compared to his friend Guy Burgess who, in addition to being a drunk and a vociferous leftwinger, was a promiscuous homosexual. It is hardly surprising that a man forced to live a life of deception, to masquerade as a pillar of the society he despised, and who knew that his actions led directly to countless brutal murders, turned to the easiest escape route. Much later in his life, when he had found some sort of happiness with Rufina, his Russian third wife and the author of The Private Life of Kim Philby, he described his drinking as "the most painless method of suicide."

Rufina took a variety of risks when she became involved with Philby, each of them daunting in their own right. She was taking on a much older man who was addicted to the bottle. The fact that he belonged to the KGB (as the NKVD had become) meant that she was encroaching on an exclusive world with its own loyalties and which did not welcome outsiders. Clearly she is a resourceful and brave woman who loved Philby and was prepared to put up with a great deal in order to be with him. There were times, however, when, in common with anyone living with an abusive drinker, life became intolerable. She writes movingly about the endless occasions when the third drink of the evening would change him from an intelligent and entertaining companion into a foolish, incoherent dolt. Mornings after the night before required a tumbler of vodka as a kick-start to the day. In true alcoholic style, when Rufina was in agony with appendicitis, Philby showed his sympathy by sitting next to her and drinking a bottle of whisky instead of calling an ambulance. Rufina says that her one consolation was that at least Philby stayed at home when drunk, unlike Donald Maclean who would disappear into Moscow in an alcoholic haze.

In the end, it was Philby's fear of losing Rufina, though she nobly never threatened him with this, which enabled him to cut down drastically and avoid the grossest excesses of his drinking. Thanks to Rufina, his last years were spent in relative sobriety and contentment. Some might say that it was more than he deserved.

Many alcoholics have moments of lucidity when they see the horror of their situation and the pain they have inflicted on their loved ones. After his death Rufina found a strange message scrawled on the cover of a folder: "If Rufina Ivanovna has killed me, I testify that she had good and sufficient reason to do so. KP."

Andrew Varley