In famous Long Ago, when the KGB was the KGB and foreigners were Martians, facing the border guards' booths at Moscow airport was something of an ordeal.


A young man with a Ph.D. in charmlessness and suspicion would hunch behind glass over your visa and passport photographs and endlessly run his eyes between the two. Your job -- indeed your paranoid necessity as you stood there -- was to arrange your features into some pattern which would roughly conform with what was in front of him.


"I am definitely me," ran your side of the unspoken conversation on these quintessentially Soviet occasions. "No, you're not," said the guard, as he finally looked up with penetrating gray eyes. "You are possible." Look down at the visa and passport. "You are plausible." Look up again. "But you are only pretending to be who you say you are."


Well, autres temps, autres moeurs, as they say. Today the airport border guards are happy little rubber-stampers by comparison with the old days. And the KGB mind-set has been transferred downtown -- lock, stock and paranoia, as I've recently found out -- to the Embassy of Great Britain.


I'd like to say immediately at this point -- which is probably a measure of how cowardly I am -- that my own personal dealings with the British Embassy have actually been very amicable. But in the past couple of months, on behalf of Russian friends, I've had to deal with the mad scrum at the embassy's back door: the ticketing, the queues, the desperation, the exposure to rain, drizzle, cold and snow.


I've listened to the stories about truculent interviewers, about personal visits being summarily denied. And the other day, I myself had to deal with what is clearly a more or less universal experience for Russians down in Repin Square: the assumption that you must be guilty of deception unless you're proved innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt.


The occasion of this was a visit my step-daughter Kseniya wanted to make to London, where my wife and I are currently perched. She is a bookish sort, Kseniya. A post-graduate student at Moscow University, she works part-time for Encyclopedia Britannica, and she reads Heidegger and Derrida with every appearance of pleasure. She wanted to join us in London for a couple of weeks, a) to celebrate her mum's birthday, b) to dig around in the London University library, and c) to meet as many experts on the poet Yeats as she could rake up.


Hardly the stuff of sedition or incipient defection, you would have thought. And you'd be right -- especially if you met Kseniya, who believes London, apart from its academic facilities, to be anything but the promised land -- played-out, passionless and really rather dull. All the first-run films she might otherwise be interested in, in any case, she's already seen in private videos in Moscow.


This, though, did not stop the official in charge of her visa application -- though it was supported by me and by a member of the British Council -- from assuming that her real intention was to jump ship and to become a burden (forever, presumably) to the British taxpayer. He demanded to see (by fax) a copy of my wife's British visa, and when I telephoned him to expostulate, he announced that he was going to give Kseniya "a very tough interview," and that if he did finally allow her to leave, she could expect a pretty grueling time from the airport immigration people in London too. This was no idle threat: I know one Russian woman, a correspondent for a Western newspaper, who was held at a London airport, on arrival, for close to seven hours.


In the end, as it happened, the whole thing was finally resolved (at a considerable cost in faxes and telephone calls), and Kseniya made her visit to London unimpeded. But the buried threat in what the man said still sticks in my gullet; the truculence; the assumption that both Kseniya and I must have been trying to pull a fast one. And this at a time when the cash tills all over London are happily ringing up the money brought in suitcases to the city by Russian hoods.


The assumption in all this seems to be that the hoods -- who have both money and Western connections -- are fine: They're doing their bit for the British economy. But those who don't have money -- and are going to London for personal reasons -- are not: They must be wanting to stay in paradise forever (which is actually what the hoods often end up doing). What was simply a nuisance for me must be a total nightmare for ordinary Russians. And the hypocrisy, well ... the hypocrisy is awe-inspiring.