Spies: The KGB in the United States

Posted on July 25, 2009 by Jonathan Mok

In Spies: The Rise and Fall of The KGB in America, historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr teamed up with former KGB member and journalist Alexander Vassiliev to illustrate the phenomenon of Soviet Espionage in the United States from 1930s till the end of the Second World War, using documents Vassiliev accessed in the KGB archive. Haynes and Klehr recently corresponded with Jonathan Mok for GlobalComment, discussing the book and the history behind it.

Can we talk about why this book was written? What were some of the challenges of writing it?

The USSR conducted extensive espionage operations in the United States in the decades leading up to the Cold War, and hostile American public reaction to revelations in the late 1940s about the extent of that espionage played a significant role in shaping public and government attitudes in the opening years of the Cold War. Consequently, an accurate account of Soviet espionage assists in more fully understanding the history of that period.

The chief challenge of a reliable historical account of Soviet espionage in this period has long been the paucity of archival documentation. The investigative files of security agencies such as the FBI, trial transcripts, and testimony before congressional investigative committees are useful but only tell part of the story. The continued closure to research of the leading Soviet intelligence agencies has been a major barrier to a more accurate account. But the combination of the release by the American National Security Agency of some 3,000 deciphered KGB cables (mostly 1943-1946) and, more importantly, the 1,115 pages of Alexander Vassiliev’s transcriptions and summaries of KGB archival documents allow a much more comprehensive account.

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Alexander Rybak: sexy, sparkly multiculturalism

Posted on May 16, 2009 by Natalia Antonova

One of the most endearing moments of Alexander Rybak’s record-setting Eurovision win for Norway tonight came when the performer of the charming “Fairytale” alternatively gushed in both Norwegian and Russian as he took the stage to perform the winning song one more time.

Originally started in 1956, the Eurovision Song Contest is alternatively derided as a trashy spectacle and a chance for so-called Eastern bloc countries to band together and take their revenge on Western Europe for its higher standards of living. Being cynical about Eurovision, however, is a little bit like putting on an obligatory scowl for Valentine’s Day. You’re not really making a statement, and you kind of wish to give in to the silliness underneath it all anyway.

Tonight’s winner, Rybak, was born in Belarus back when it was still part of the USSR, and moved to Norway at the age of four. In Russia, he has already been adopted as “our Sasha” and Ukrainian singer and past Eurovision winner Ruslana has noted the influence of both Slavic and Scandinavian styles in the bit of folksy street theater that is “Fairytale.” For those of us who inhabit different cultures simultaneously, Rybak’s win is particularly delightful.

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Inside Chernobyl: those who stayed

Posted on April 30, 2009 by Natalia Antonova

Workers at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant pass through a radiation checkpoint © Michael Forster Rothbart Photography

“Inside Chernobyl,” an exhibition by photographer and Fulbright scholar Michael Forster Rothbart, recently made its debut in Kyiv, and will be making its way to such places as Moscow and Washington D.C.

Forster Rothbart’s undertaking is quite unexpected, standing in contrast to the usual Chernobyl fare; under the subtitle of “life goes on,” he tells the stories of ordinary Ukrainians who still work at the infamous Chernobyl nuclear plant, as well as the families they come home to every day.

Curious about his premise, I chatted with Forster Rothbart about the exhibition, his subjects and the ongoing narrative that is Chernobyl.

First of all, how did such an unusual project come about?

I came to Ukraine for the first time in 2007; my wife was doing research for her dissertation at the time. I was here for four months, and that’s when I first got started. I had studied previous photographic work on Chernobyl, and so I was prepared to see mutations, birth defects and people dying of cancer. You know, the usual stuff. That’s the world’s image of Chernobyl but it’s not the reality. What intrigues me are all the normal people in the region who are simply living their lives — farming the land or going to work at the Chernobyl plant. They didn’t move away, they stayed behind. The plant workers are now doing important work to ensure that there won’t be future contamination.

I am fascinated by the human consequences of environmental problems. Journalists cover environmental disasters as breaking news, and then they get filed away, but the repercussions continue. It’s important to look at Chernobyl a generation later. There are health effects that come directly from radiation, but then there are secondary effects that occur when people are relocated or lose family members or lose jobs. All of these social problems are more serious than health problems.

Really? More serious than health problems?

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Happy March 8th! Now smile and put on some make-up!

Posted on March 8, 2009 by Natalia Antonova

The first thing that greeted me as I browsed Russian LiveJournal today was a story on Ukrainian politician Vladimir Litvin – and his address to Ukrainian women on March 8th, International Women’s Day. Despite the usual howlers on motherhood, femininity, and women’s “poetic souls,” I found myself thinking that “this one’s not so bad.”

I have gotten used to the fact that March 8th, in most former Soviet countries, is about flowers, and candy and the husband doing something heroic, like vacuuming the living room for once. It’s certainly not about rights, equality, or the challenges facing women today – be they sex trafficking or domestic abuse.

International Women’s Day has its roots in socialism, but where I come from – it has degenerated mostly into Valentine’s Day, minus fat-bottomed cupids. I appreciate indulgences as much as the next person, and (sincere) male courtesy besides, but it grates on even my flower-loving, frivolous soul that a day that originally centered female workers and female solidarity has degenerated into a ceremonial throwing-of-a-bone.

“It’s alright, ladies, if your salaries are crap, domestic violence rates remain high, and some of you aren’t even viewed as proper football fans anymore – here’s something pink to make up for it!” Continue reading →

Love, Money, Violence: the economic crisis and the post-Soviet marriage

Posted on February 20, 2009 by Natalia Antonova

If you happen to sit around watching Ukrainian television these days, you might notice a public service announcement on domestic abuse, straight from the Ukrainian Ministry of Family, Youth, and Sport (I have no idea why sport has been lumped in with this ministry, but when people are doing something right, you want to keep peripheral criticism in check).

The PSA features a man picking up his kids from school and preparing dinner together with them. A woman in business clothes – the wife – arrives home, and the family sits down to eat dinner happily. The PSA ends with a slogan against domestic violence.

There are several interpretations we can take from the PSA. On one of my recent trips to Kyiv, I approached several people who were in a pub with me when the commercial aired as the bartender was idly flipping channels, to see what they thought. Continue reading →

Cold War revisited: “Red Dawn”

Posted on September 1, 2008 by Mark Farnsworth

As certain factions speculate that the world is headed toward a new Cold War, Mark Farnsworth examines the artistic legacy of this phenomenon.

Director, screenwriter, and producer John Milius has always fancied himself as a latter day Hemingway, a warrior-poet on the board of directors of the NRA, fiercely opposed to gun control, and a consultant for the deceptively named military think tank – the Center for Creative Technology. A member of the 70s movie brats alongside Lucas, Spielberg, and Scorcese, Milius is the man responsible for the finer moments in “Jaws,” “Magnum Force,” and “Apocalypse Now.” His heroes are Patton, MacArthur, and Roosevelt; not your average right-wing American icons, but mavericks, tyrants, and visionary leaders.

The film critic David Thompson wrote of Milius as having, “earned and even provoked the press reputation of a strident, magnum-brandishing reactionary. But he is more than that. He is an anarchist, he is articulate, and he has an unshakable faith in human grandeur.” This would seem true from his directorial efforts, “Dillinger,” “Conan The Barbarian,” and “The Wind and the Lion.” Yet “Red Dawn” is a rather strange nut to crack.

“Red Dawn” is the ultimate ‘what if?’ movie. Continue reading →

Cold War revisited: “The Thing”

Posted on August 24, 2008 by Mark Farnsworth

As certain factions speculate that the world is headed toward a new Cold War, Mark Farnsworth examines the artistic legacy of this phenomenon.

“The Thing” is the darkest film in the Kurt Russell trilogy of Carpenter’s science fiction films and the beginning of his “Apocalypse” cycle. It is a master class of pessimism nearly unrivalled in cinema and a bleak critique on the nature of humanity itself, inspired by the Reagan administration, Carpenter’s first foray into studio film making, and the escalation of the arms race with the Soviet Union.

The plot is more closely related to John W. Campbell’s novella; “Who Goes There?” than the earlier Hawks production of “The Thing from another World.” Special effects allow the shape-shifting alien to be realised in all its bloody glory, which in turn gives Carpenter the freedom to develop a claustrophobic atmosphere of mistrust, fear, and growing nihilism.

In the earlier movie the scientists and soldiers work together to destroy the visible threat of the thing, as they would do with communism. There is a unity mostly derived from the fact that they are white and embody a people fresh from the moral victory in WW2. America in the 1950s was still perceived as the ‘good guys’, the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’.

With Carpenter’s creature everyone could be the thing and, as a consequence, an enemy. Continue reading →

Russia and Georgia: darkness falls

Posted on August 10, 2008 by Natalia Antonova

This is a special edition of this column.

Here are two things you ought to know about the conflict flaring up between Russia and Georgia:

First of all, Russia does not want NATO on her doorstep, and Georgia was getting ready to join NATO. Second of all, Georgia does not want to deal with the conflict that inevitably arises when certain parties, such as the South Ossetians, decide to break away.

I can understand where both sides are coming from. As much as I deplore Russia’s meddling in its neighbours’ affairs, I have to say that said meddling makes sense to the Kremlin. And as much as deplore Saakashvili’s government (have we already forgotten Georgia’s political crises?), I have to say that I understand not wanting to deal with the inevitable lawlessness that rebel regions such as South Ossetia create within and around themselves.

What horrifies is me is not just the violence, as if it isn’t bad enough, but the fact that being ethnically Russian and Ukrainian, I grew knowing that the Georgians are our friends. I grew up in a household in love with Georgian culture. To my Russian mother, Georgia was “the most beautiful place in the world,” and she wasn’t alone in this by far.

The people baying for blood on both sides, have they honestly forgotten our common ties? If the forgetting is this easy, perhaps we really ought to be worried about the future of Russia and Ukraine. The unthinkable is already happening before us, and history has entered a gloomy and bewildering chapter. This is the sort of thing that happens when empires fail; it’s bloody and vile. It reeks of gunpowder and rot and the dried-up glue that used to hold together our old, red memorial wreaths.

Now, for all the understandable grief surrounding the loss of life, I have found something to be bitterly amused about: Continue reading →

The deaths that bind us: Solzhenitsyn, Pugovkin, Mordyukova

Posted on August 4, 2008 by Natalia Antonova

It feels instinctive to say that the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn marks an end of an era. Which era, though?

Solzhenitsyn’s life spanned many eras: WWII, the gulag, the Khrushchev years, stagnation, the last gasps of the Cold War, and, most recently, the strange and wondrous and bewildering reality of post-Soviet Russia. Solzhenitsyn’s legacy is crystal clear if one is looking at it from an outsider’s perspective. His legacy among his people and the people who love and study Russian literature and culture, however, is a much more complicated phenomenon.

In the West, Solzhenitsyn is most readily regarded as a symbol of All That Stalin Did Wrong. In today’s Russia and other post-Soviet countries he is a public figure whose function was and is debated, whose artistic achievements are criticized with gruffness rarely found elsewhere, and whose insistence on criticizing liberal democracy has earned him respect for the searing honesty with which he presented his views.

Living in the U.S., I have repeatedly run up against the sentiment that today Solzhenitsyn is intellectual Russia’s beloved grandmaster, a kindly, fatherly figure. The truth is, most people I know responded more emotionally when the likes of Nonna Mordyukova and Mikhail Pugovkin passed on earlier this summer – old school Soviet actors whose movies also serve as reminders of a time and a place gone forever.

The deaths of Mordyukova and Pugovkin did not, for the most part, make international headlines. But these figures were no less important in a cultural and historical context. Continue reading →

Today, the Washington Post made me gnash my teeth

Posted on January 30, 2008 by Natalia Antonova

Sweet Jesus, Anne Applebaum, stereotype much?

Of course there were many very famous “sultry” women in the USSR – things did not begin, and end, with Stalin and Liubov Orlova (an actress from the 1930′s). Where on earth do people get such ideas in the first place? Just because nobody was wearing Chanel does not, somehow, mean that there was no beauty, no style, no sensuality.

And no, not everyone in the USSR wore polyester. But thanks for checking with actual people who lived under the regime.

Why is it OK to assume that before the introduction of Vogue, an entire country couldn’t possibly understand what beauty and style is all about? Sure, consumer goods were practically nonexistent. Sure, looking “different” may have garnered you some unwanted attention. Yet, the Soviets had their own pop culture, they had their own sirens – whether sauntering across the theater stage or walking home from the bus stop. Because the Soviets, amazingly enough, were human beings, with or without Western influence.

While I appreciate the fact that Anne Applebaum isn’t screeching about them evil Russians and, instead, finding something she deems positive, her outlook also completely disregards the thousands of women who have been trafficked from the Soviet Union following its dissolution. Those gorgeous women she sees hanging out with the older men in the posh restaurants? I sincerely hope that 100% of them are there of their own volition, enjoying their time, having a blast.

However, as someone who has actually done research, I’m not entirely sure that my hopes correspond with reality.

I’m not against beauty culture. I do think it’s been, and continues to be, unfairly used against women – especially those who have no interest in participating. Applebaum’s piece has reminded me of the fact that beauty culture can also obscure the issues of traffickers and other exploiters.

I understand the sort of piece that Applebaum was trying to write. She was having fun. I like to have fun too – and get very irritated when pious wailing about Oppressors and Oppressed overwhelms me, because, not every single damn piece of writing has to be incredibly serious and somber and grave. If it was, we’d all shoot ourselves in the head and let the cockroaches take over.

Yet, if you’re going to rely on ridiculous generalizations, your piece is no longer fun. It’s merely tacky. And, quite possibly, damaging.

Before, it used to be “evil Russians.” Now, it’s “attractive Russians” (with an occasional smattering of “evil” – I should also note that people use the word “Russian” to refer to practically all of us who came out of the USSR, but that’s a whole other conversation).

I don’t mind the “attractive” in principle. I get equally tired of condescending Western women who roll their eyes at the poor foreign dears – wearing that make-up! Balancing on those heels! The Feminist Revolution will save you, my darlings, each and every one! Just shut up and don’t speak for yourself!

I merely want there to be a balance. Is that too much to ask for, in this day and age? Continue reading →