 |
|
May 24, 2013
May 22, 2013
John Thorne:
They launched the 'Arab Spring' but now yearn for the good old days of a strongman
May 20, 2013
Richard A. Serrano: Is Meir Kahane's assassin now a changed man?
Melissa Healy: Genetic copies of living people from embryos no longer science fiction
Jewz in the Newz by Nate Bloom : Jews Inducted into Rock Hall of Fame; Anton Yelchin co-stars in New "Trek" film; Kutcher (but not Kunis) visits Israel; Jewish TV Star Praises Jewish Rap Star
The Kosher Gourmet by Cathy Pollak: WARNING: This WALNUT CAKE WITH PRALINE FROSTING, perfect for afternoon coffee, is addicting
May 13, 2013
Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo: Why the giving of the document that would permanently change the world could only be done in desolation
David G. Savage: Church-state, literally? Supreme Court weighing public school graduation in a church
May 10, 2013
Rabbi Berel Wein: Be all that you should be
May 8, 2013
Peter Ford: Why China is welcoming both Israel's Netanyahu and Palestinians' Abbas
Warren Richey: Obama administration quietly backs out of appeal over new contraceptive mandate
Fred Weir: At Kerry-Putin meeting, US-Russia relations thaw --- a tad
The Kosher Gourmet by Leela Cyd Ross : Almost too pretty to eat, this colorful salad with Sicilian inspiration will tickle the taste buds and delight your visual sensibility
May 6, 2013
May 3, 2013
Kids, kittens the Same? With employee perks at struggling Internet pioneer Yahoo! it's hard to tell
Sandy Kleffman: Artificial kidney offers hope to patients tethered to a dialysis machine
April 29, 2013
Roy Gutman: Poland's new Jewish museum celebrates life, doesn't revisit Holocaust
Mark Clayton: Terrorism in America: Is US missing a chance to learn from failed plots?
Kim Murphy: Boston Bomber's 'Svengali' Revealed
Pete Spotts: Tiny satellites + cellphones = cheaper 'eyes in the sky' for NASA
April 26, 2013
Clifford D. May: Defense in the Age of Jihadist Terrorism
Sharon Palmer, R.D.: How to feel your best -- with plenty of energy, a healthy weight and optimal mental and physical function -- without driving yourself batty
April 24, 2013
|
| |
Jewish World Review
Sept. 15, 2010
/ 7 Tishrei, 5771
Our Man in Moscow
By
Paul Greenberg
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
It's got to be the funniest or the saddest spy story of this post-Cold War period, or maybe both. The two, humor and pathos, blend inextricably in Russia. Like good and evil mixing.
But I'm getting ahead of myself, becoming oh-so-philosophical and all too confiding, not to say confusing -- like most of the Russians I would meet on a three-week tour of the old Soviet Union back in 1983. What a country, empire and mystery wrapped in an enigma! My hosts would become quite talkative once the sun had set, the vodka started flowing and confidences were exchanged in a whisper. Or just with a hand signal. As when somebody would point at the chandelier in the middle of the ceiling, meaning: Beware, we're being recorded. The three great pastimes all Russians still seem to share are drinking, talking and secrecy.
Those were the days, my friend, we thought Communism would never end. A succession of geriatric figures sat in the Kremlin and pretended to rule as the whole creaking system began to grind down. But not many noticed much of a difference from the time when Communism was supposed to be in the ascendant, maybe because there wasn't one. Russia, under czar or commissar, remains Russia.
How much Russia has changed even now -- which is all too little -- was illustrated by a brief item in the news just the other day: Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was quoted as warning any dissenters who didn't have government permission to "peaceably assemble," to use a good old American phrase from the Bill of Rights, that they'd keep getting beaten "upside the head with a truncheon." There in brief you have the difference between the Russian and American ideas of due process. What is a right here is a crime there.
After a few weeks in the old Soviet Union back when it was collapsing on itself, you couldn't tell whether you were lost in a tragedy or a comedy, probably both. The only sure thing was that you were lost. Much like Igor Sutyagin himself, the hero and goat of this spy story.
I'm not even sure if I should call his saga a spy story. A non-spy story would be more like it. It begins innocently enough. A researcher who'd been trained at the grandly titled Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, young Sutyagin had visited the West during the euphoric 1990s, when Communism was pronounced dead and Russia was going to be a free country like any other. Uh huh.
Attending a conference in England, Comrade and now Citizen Sutyagin was offered a sweet deal. A firm called Alternative Futures was interested in drumming up investment in Russia -- there were a lot of outfits like that around in the '90s -- and this one was in the market for some expert analysis. It would pay him $1,000 a month, which was more than his day job did, just to read the Russian papers and official government statements, then summarize them. Easy money, right? And who couldn't use a few extra rubles now and then?
Was this company a CIA front or legit? Who knows? To this day Igor Sutyagin doesn't. How would he? He's no spy. And did it matter who was putting up the dough? He wasn't going to do anything wrong. But of course that doesn't matter, either, not in a country where guilt or innocence change with the changing requirements of the state.
Maybe you had to visit the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies back in the '80s and interview its founder, director and reigning apparatchik, Georgiy Arbatov, to realize the depth of Russian naivete about the West. Comrade Arbatov was one of those English-speaking members of the Party who'd made a life's study of this country, learning every detail of the American system and absolutely nothing of its spirit.
At the time, Director Arbatov was warning that the current American president, a B-movie actor and capitalist tool named Ronald Reagan, was going to plunge the world into a nuclear holocaust if re-elected. The experience wasn't unlike reading the New York Times' editorials back then. Or press releases from the Democratic National Committee. It was Clark Clifford, the party's grand old man, who had summed up Ronald Reagan as an "amiable dunce." Well, he got the amiable part right.
But how could anyone have known that this washed-up actor in the White House, far from ending the world, would wind up ending the nuclear arms race -- by the simple expedient of ending the Soviet Union? Comrade Arbatov, the Kremlin's official expert on all things American, was like one of those musicologists who know every note in a piece but can't hear the music. Confident he knew everything about us, he knew nothing.
Igor Sutyagin didn't know much about his own country if he thought Russia was about to change into another Western-style democracy, where he would be free to pick up a few rubles every month just by reading and repeating whatever was in the papers. By 1999, the Russian thaw was ending, a former KGB colonel by the name of Vladimir Putin had become prime minister, and Russia was becoming Russia again.
Soon young Sutyagin was accused of treason. And to be accused in Russia is to be convicted. Even if it took the KGB, now renamed the FSB, three trials to finally get him declared guilty as charged and sentenced to 15 years in the nearest gulag. For heinous crimes like repeating what had already appeared in top-secret publications like the Washington Post and Red Star, the Russian military's official organ. Some secrets.
A decade later, stuck in a labor camp near Archangel, our non-spy was suddenly told to throw his stuff together; he was being transferred to Lefortovo in Moscow, a Russian version of our own country-club prisons for white-collar types. He began to suspect something was up when he was told to change into suit and tie for an official photo. Turns out he was one of the zeks picked to be exchanged for the 10 real Russian spies who'd just been arrested in this country -- sleepers who were supposed to meld into American life. Lucky him.
All he had to do was sign a confession and board the plane. At first he resisted, but, offered freedom, he signed. "I was between a rock and a hard place," he told Peter Baker of the New York Times, "and if I didn't sign, the rock and hard place would have pulverized me." So it was off to London.
Once there, he was given a change of clothes, $3,000 and left on his own. He wants to go back to Russia now that he's been officially pardoned. (Breathes there the man with soul so dead/ who never to himself hath said,/ This is my own, my native land!) But when he asks old friends there if he should return, they have a word of advice for him: Don't. Something tells me he would do well to take it.
There was something vaguely familiar about Igor Sutyagin's saga. After a while, it came to me: "Our Man in Havana." Of course! The comic novel by Graham Greene. It's about a prototypical Englishman, one Mr. James Wormold, who somehow has landed in Cuba, where he's supposed to be a vacuum cleaner salesman. Only the poor nebbish doesn't seem able to sell many Phastkleaner vacuums. When he's offered a chance to make some easy money working for the British Secret Service, he takes it. Who couldn't use a few extra pounds now and then, right?
The catch is, Agent Wormold is supposed to be sending the home office top-secret info, only he hasn't any. After trying to palm off newspaper clippings and such as state secrets, he resorts to sending London drawings of rocket-launching pads he says he's discovered deep in the Cuban jungle. (Somehow they turn out looking like huge vacuum cleaners.) Talk about life imitating art, the book appeared only a few years before the Soviets actually did plant missiles in Cuba.
Graham Greene's comic novel may sound all too realistic by now, but Igor Sutyagin might get a kick out of watching the movie version, which is much better. Maybe because it's got Alec Guinness at his ale-dry best in the starring role. Homesick as he is, Comrade/Citizen/Mr. Sutyagin could probably use a good laugh, which remains the best response to all that is crazy in this world, East or West.
Paul Greenberg Archives
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, has won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Send your comments by clicking here.
© 2006 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
|
|
Arnold Ahlert
Mitch Albom
Jay Ambrose
Michael Barone
Barrywood
Lori Borgman
Stratfor Briefing
Mona Charen
Linda Chavez
Richard Z. Chesnoff
Ann Coulter
Greg Crosby
Larry Elder
Suzanne Fields
Christine Flowers
Frank J. Gaffney
Bernie Goldberg
Jonah Goldberg
Julia Gorin
Jonathan Gurwitz
Paul Greenberg
Argus Hamilton
Victor Davis Hanson
Betsy Hart
Ron Hart
Nat Hentoff
A. Barton Hinkle
Jeff Jacoby
Paul Johnson
Jack Kelly
Ch. Krauthammer
David Limbaugh
Kathryn Lopez
Rich Lowry
Michelle Malkin
Jackie Mason
Ann McFeatters
Dale McFeatters
Dana Milbank
Jeanne Moos
Dick Morris
Jim Mullen
Deroy Murdock
Judge A. Napolitano
Bill O'Reilly
Clarence Page
Kathleen Parker
Star Parker
Dennis Prager
Wesley Pruden
Tom Purcell
Sharon Randall
Robert Robb
Cokie & Steve Roberts
Heather Robinson
Debra J. Saunders
Martin Schram
Greg Schwem
Culture Shlock
David Shribman
Roger Simon
Lenore Skenazy
Michael Smerconish
Thomas Sowell
Ben Stein
Mark Steyn
John Stossel
Cal Thomas
Dan Thomasson
Bob Tyrrell
Diana West
Dave Weinbaum
George Will
Walter Williams
Byron York
ZeitGeist
Mort Zuckerman
Robert Arial
Chuck Asay
Baloo
Lisa Benson
Chip Bok
Dry Bones
John Branch
John Cole
J. D. Crowe
Matt Davies
John Deering
Brian Duffy
Everything's Relative
Mallard Fillmore
Glenn Foden
Jake Fuller
Bob Gorrel
Walt Handelsman
Joe Heller
David Hitch
Jerry Holbert
David Horsey
Lee Judge
Steve Kelley
Jeff Koterba
Dick Locher
Chan Lowe
Jimmy Margulies
Jack Ohman
Michael Ramirez
Rob Rogers
Drew Sheneman
Kevin Siers
Jeff Stahler
Scott Stantis
Danna Summers
Gary Varvel
Kirk Walters
Dan Wasserman
Tech Q&A
Mr. Know-It-All
Ask Doctor K
Richard Lederer
Frugal Living
On Nutrition
Bookmark These
Bruce Williams
|
