ABSTRACT
The circumstances which led to the events of October 1983 in a hotel room on Gorky Street, less than a mile from Red Square, were at least partly related to the death of Leonid Brezhnev the previous year and the succession of ex-KGB chief Yuri Andropov. It was under Andropov that the crackdown on corruption amongst officials in the USSR had begun to bite. A visiting un lecturer would not have expected this to affect him, could not have anticipated interrogation and pressure to write a statement and even to make him spy for specific nuclear information.
