A couple of weeks ago, I was leafing through dancer Maya Plisetskaya's autobiography -- did you know she was once refused permission to travel abroad because she was accused of being a British spy? -- when I came across a reference to my old landlord.


Plisetskaya was getting ready for a jubilee of some kind and she wanted to dance Pavel's Bolero. "Oh no," said "the organs" who had to clear this kind of thing. "Foreign muck. Nasty, we've heard. Sexual. Decadent. Can't pollute the comrades that way." So she called up my landlord, and told him her problem.


He listened. He even knew what she was talking about -- which was surprising, she says, given the level of musical education in his neck of the woods. And he said he'd deal with it. He did: He called up Leonid Brezhnev, and when Brezhnev mumbled something incoherent down the phone, he interpreted it -- in time-honored fashion -- as a "Yes, what a good idea." The rest, as they say, is history. Plisetskaya danced -- and was a wow as usual. And my landlord went back to being one of the most secretly powerful people in the land.


His name was Andrei Mikhailovich Alexandrov-Agentov, and ever since I found him in Plisetskaya's book, I've been thinking about him. When I first met him, he had retired: a small, sparrow-boned Siberian, with a weakness for beer and Kipling; something of a tyrant, I thought, to his two middle-aged daughters, but with a courtly grace that he mostly reserved for guests and his beloved wife Margarita.


He lived in a high-ceilinged apartment off Tverskaya Ulitsa, and spent most of his weekends in a little wooden house in Nikolina Gora which had once belonged to the man who organized transport in occupied Germany after the war. (Next door lived the family of the man's brother, the deputy commander of Stalin's bodyguard; the other side, the son of Tupolev, the aircraft designer; and opposite, Tikhon Khrennikov, the long-time head of the Composers' Union. But that's another story.)


I first met him when he and Margarita wandered around to the dacha we were renting in the village. I didn't know much about him, beyond the fact that he'd been the secret sponsor of a series of documentaries on "The Unknown [Russian] War" that my wife had worked on in the Brezhnev years; and that he'd been somehow responsible for her family's move from a communal apartment to one of its own a few years before.


It wasn't until Margarita died and we began to rent his decayed but beautiful dacha a little while later that I finally realized who he was: the chief foreign policy adviser to four heads of state, the U.S.S.R.'s Kissinger for 26 years -- and a man through whom the pure water of Soviet Communism still ran.


After graduating in Scandinavian languages from Leningrad University, he'd been sent to Sweden by Tass. There he'd become an assistant to the Soviet ambassador, the revolutionary and feminist Alexandra Kollontai -- exiled (more or less) by Lenin for her part in a dispute in the early '20s about the role of workers' unions.


From Sweden he had returned to Moscow to the Foreign Ministry, headed at the time by Vishinsky, Stalin's prosecutor and hatchetman in the show trials of the '30s and "one of the most loathsome people I've ever met." He quickly became a head of section; and he was then taken on by Politburo member Leonid Brezhnev as his personal adviser on foreign policy. When Khrushchev was ousted, he moved into the most powerful office in the country, briefing Brezhnev on what was happening in the world every day. It occurs to me now that he must have been somewhere in the vicinity when my brother and I were taken to London to see "the Russians" (Brezhnev and Kosygin) on their state visit to Britain in the late 1950s.


He stayed in the same post through Chernenko and Andropov and into the Gorbachev years. But by now he was done. Though he came down sometimes at weekends -- to take long walks through the snow and drink a little beer -- it was plain that after Margarita's death he had little relish for life. The new times, with their greed and hunger for profit -- "people buying kefir at the back of shops for a ruble and selling it out front for four" -- horrified him.


He died not long afterwards -- before much worse was to come, of course. And today I think of him with a great, if puzzled, affection. He was an extremely civilized man -- he could quote Goethe and Kipling in the original; he spoke Swedish like a native. But he was also the last true Communist. Just as well -- for Maya Plisetskaya, at any rate -- that he was both, I suppose.