This story is from my Uncle Boris:
When my family entered into a “pay to play” bribing scheme to leave the USSR through the help of a KGB agent, we had to drive to the other side of Leningrad to meet a mysterious man, our handler. By that time we had a car, a Fiat 124 Russian knockoff, called “ΠΆΠΈΠ³ΡΠ»ΠΈ.” I was the only person in my family to know how to drive. My mom and I went to those “meetings " at night, so no other members of the family would be “compromised.”
We drove in the dark to a tall apartment building, climbed several flights of stairs, and came to a large still door of an apartment that was the actual home of our “handler.” We rang the doorbell. Several locks began to open and the door slowly and to revealed a medium built, middle aged man with a small beard. He didn’t look particularly scary. Behind him two small dogs of unknown bread came running toward us. They were the first French Bulldogs I had ever seen.
Inside the apartment we saw very expensive looking antique furniture and several paintings that turned out to be the original works of art looted from the Hermitage, to be sold later for “convertible currency” and dollars. The man we called “Ρ ΠΌΡΡΡ” was always alone at the time of our meetings. We were told that his wife was a ballerina and he himself was not a KGB officer, but a deal maker for a particular faction of KGB, competing for money and power with another faction.
I found the meetings fascinating, but my mom probably felt differently. One night he asked her: “You are a chemist, aren’t you? I want you to make me some poison. Cyanide would do nicely.”
She was scared, but came up with a way out: “I am only working in spectral analysis of metals that Russian diplomats steal from American exhibitions. I do not mix any chemicals.” The answer satisfied him and he dropped the request.
One other time he asked me to drive his drunk friend from the party. The “friend " happened to be the head of the Russian Orthodox church from “Π‘ΠΌΠΎΠ»ΡΠ½ΡΠΉ.” We got out of that request too, pointing out that KGB would likely be watching the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, our names would get into the hands of the competing faction, and the outcome would be bad for all of us.
Every time we went, we had no idea if it would be the last time, and we would all be arrested and end up in Siberia instead of America. But we had to take that risk and we got lucky at the end.
A few weeks after we left the Soviet Union forever we received a a coded letter from our friends informing us about the arrest of our “Ρ ΠΌΡΡΡ.” That iron door had closed just behind us.
You can also read this story from my dad’s perspective