Glamour: Lord and Lady Truscott at last week’s St Petersburg Ball
Revealed: The secret Soviet past of sleaze peer Truscott
By Simon Walters, Glen Owen and Will Stewart
The Labour peer at the heart of the Lords sleaze row has secret links to Soviet Russia, a Mail on Sunday investigation has uncovered.
The party faced calls for a new inquiry into Lord Truscott in the face of fresh information about his astonishing rise to power, which throws new light on the ‘love at first sight’ account of how he met his Russian wife Svetlana in the former Soviet Union.
At the time they married, Lady Truscott was an active member of the Communist Party and her father was a senior Red Army officer at a secret military institute connected to the Soviet equivalent of the SAS.
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The Mail on Sunday has also obtained new details about the couple’s private fortune, which includes a £1million home in Mayfair, a country home in Bath and property interests in Russia.
Meanwhile, Lord Truscott faces new questions about his political career, and the way he has used it to promote and defend Russian leader Vladimir Putin and the country in general.
This newspaper has been told that Lord Truscott was awarded his peerage by Tony Blair in 2004 after offering private advice on relations with Russia.
He chose a double-headed eagle identical to Russia’s official emblem for his heraldic crest as Baron Truscott of St James, then joined Labour’s defence team in the Lords before becoming a Minister.
Official records show how Lord Truscott used the Lords as a platform to defend Mr Putin after his decision to invade Georgia last year.
Last night, the 49-year-old peer refused to respond to the latest disclosures.
But Tory MP Patrick Mercer, an adviser to the Government on security matters, said: ‘I would like some assurances that Lord Truscott’s activities are wholly in the interests of Great Britain.
‘Since Lord Truscott is not willing to address these matters it is incumbent on the Labour Party to do so.’
Lord Truscott is one of four Labour peers being investigated by police after he was recorded by undercover reporters claiming that for £2,000 a day he could influence legislation by ‘identifying people…meeting people, talking with people’. He denies any wrongdoing.
Symbolic: Truscott’s coat of arms features Russia’s two-headed eagle
In just 13 years, Lord Truscott rose from political obscurity as a borough councillor in Colchester, Essex, to a seat in the House of Lords.
But the most astonishing aspect of his rapid ascent is that it can be traced to a single day in the summer of 1991: the day he met his wife Svetlana, then 24, in Leningrad, now known as St Petersburg, just before the Soviet Union collapsed.
According to the couple’s version of events, it was a chance meeting and love at first sight. They married and settled in Britain.
From that moment Truscott’s career took off. With the striking and upwardly mobile Svetlana at his side, he became an expert on Russia, and a well-known figure in defence and intelligence circles in Russia, Brussels and Britain, while their social and financial fortunes soared.
Before that meeting, Truscott’s political career had apparently stalled. The Oxford graduate, then 32, was living in lodgings and had a modest salary working on a project for the homeless.
An official who worked with him in the Labour Party said: ‘He was a slippery character. He was like a bar of soap. He would be Left-wing talking to one person and Right-wing talking to another.
‘He was a very average councillor. Nobody was more shocked than I to discover he had become a Lord.’
Just before he went to Russia, Truscott was selected as Labour’s Parliamentary candidate for Torbay in Devon. He had virtually no chance of winning and, in the event, came third, ironically enough losing to Tory MP Rupert Allason, better known as spy writer Nigel West.
However, the contest would have focused Truscott’s mind on marriage, as a wife would have been a big asset in such a conventional constituency.
On August 1, 1991, his marriage to Svetlana was reported by the Colchester Evening Gazette in terms as romantic as any Barbara Cartland novel.
It said Truscott ‘noticed Svetlana as soon as he stepped off the plane at Leningrad Airport – she was meeting a group of colleagues’.
It went on: ‘He introduced himself and soon she was showing him around her home city during his week’s visit. It was virtually love at first sight, because when it was time for him to leave, they realised they had to meet again. So Svetlana came to Colchester in May to visit Peter.
‘Soon after, he proposed to her and the couple married in June… Some of the heartiest congratulations the couple received came from the Soviet Embassy in London.’
In the account given to the paper, the Truscotts said their grasp of each other’s language was so slight that they could barely communicate. ‘She had only learnt a few English phrases, while he only knew a few words of Russian,’ it said.
Svetlana also said that she approved of her new husband’s politics: ‘The Labour Party is popular in the Soviet Union as it is the party of the ordinary person,’ she told the paper.
It is not known whether Truscott went to Russia hoping to find a bride, but, intriguingly, a former friend recalls his interest in Russian women.
‘I remember seeing him with a brochure containing mail order Russian brides,’ said the friend. ‘It had photos of Russian girls who wanted to meet English men with a view to marriage.’ There is no suggestion that this is how he met Svetlana.
His trip to St Petersburg raises a number of questions. As a Labour Parliamentary candidate it is inconceivable that he would not have been monitored by the Soviet authorities.
In those days, trips were controlled by Intourist, Russia’s official state-run tourist organisation, which was renowned as a front for KGB agents.
When Truscott set off for the Soviet Union, he was living in lodgings in a home owned by Christopher Manning Press, a Tory councillor.
Mr Manning Press, now 78, said Lord Truscott was known as ‘Twinkletoes’, as he was ‘always rushing around’.
He added: ‘He flew over to Russia, and at the bottom of the aircraft steps was the Intourist rep who was going to take him to wherever he was going to go. He fell in love with her immediately. She was the daughter of a Soviet army colonel, KGB type.’
Svetlana’s father, Nikolai Chernikov, was in fact head of the Red Army’s hand-to-hand combat department. Russian sources said last night that the secret Leningrad institution where he worked trained both regular troops and special service forces.
Nikolai died in extraordinary circumstances in 1994, three days after he dined with Lord Truscott and his wife in Brussels. He died during a rowing race – which the Russian crew nonetheless went on to win.
‘My father was a great sportsman,’ said his 36-year-old son, also called Nikolai. ‘He was in a rowing regatta in Cologne. 200 metres before the finish he lost consciousness. He was sent to hospital, but he was dead. The team still won the gold medal.’
Family friends say that Svetlana is even more steely than her father.
Anatoly Zyukin, a close friend of Colonel Chernikov, said: ‘Svetlana was well educated and loved being dominant in her relationships. Her father was much softer in character.’
Nikolai added: ‘She is a very good organiser and leader. She helped Truscott a lot, because in the beginning he was from a simple village, and she helped him to make his way up to where he is now.
‘She told me once that he was having problems with elections and was upset with everything going wrong – and she encouraged him.’
Truscott has boasted how his wife studied at Leningrad University, ‘just like Vladimir Putin’. But Nikolai says she was ‘expelled’ after flunking her English language courses.
He says she was a member of Komsomol, the Young Communists, but refuses to elaborate on what she did in the seven years between dropping out of college and meeting Truscott.
Leningrad in the early Nineties was full of attractive Russian girls desperate to get out of the Soviet Union.
Just three years after marrying Svetlana, Truscott became Labour Euro MP for Hertfordshire. Over the next five years he carved out a niche as a foreign affairs expert, joining the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with Russia and sitting on the Foreign Affairs Committee.
In 1999 his seat disappeared, but he kept up his Russian links. When, three years later, he wrote a book on the Kursk submarine tragedy, he was given high-level access to the Russian Navy.
He also wrote Putin’s Progress, widely regarded as the most flattering biography of Vladimir Putin written by a non-Russian.
The book includes a glowing tribute to Svetlana: ‘Svetlana has joined me in many meetings over the years, and continued to display unremitting support as we both worked on much of this book’s Russian research material.’
Truscott’s interest in security was noted by the respected magazine Intelligence Online, which said he had advised Tony Blair on Russia.
He was also an Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, whose members include many past and present MI5 and MI6 agents.
Shortly after joining the Lords in 2004, Truscott joined Labour’s defence team and later became Energy Minister.
Although he maintained a low public profile, his Russian connections were his main political asset and must have raised security questions at the Ministry of Defence. The MoD said it could not be established whether checks on his background were carried out.
Last October he told peers that Russia should not face diplomatic sanctions following its military action in Georgia. Two months later, he argued that a fall in investment in Russian gas posed a threat to ‘energy supply and security’.
He has also built up a string of lucrative business interests relating to Russia, including acting as a consultant to Gavin Anderson, the public affairs company which has reportedly carried out work for Vladimir Putin and Gazprom, the mighty Russian gas company.
His political and commercial activities have made the Truscotts a wealthy couple. They bought their home in Jermyn Street, Mayfair, in November 2007 after selling a Westminster flat for £950,000.
They also own a flat in Bath, and Lady Truscott owns a share of her mother’s flat in St Petersburg. Her family also has a dacha near the city.
Unusually, Land Registry records do not show the price the Truscotts paid for their 170-year lease on the Mayfair flat, although similar properties were valued at around£1million at the time.
A spokesman for Lord Truscott said: ‘Lord Truscott is not responding to any media enquiries while he awaits the investigation by the House of Lords sub-committee.’
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