We sat back to watch. As always, I waited to see how they would do it: how the Polish National Ballet would frame the story, design the costumes and the sets, and elaborate upon what is — let’s face it — a pretty thin plot. I’d seen its version several years ago, but this one was new. The ballet had brought in a Dutch choreographer to redesign the whole thing, to change the dances and think up some new twists to fill the interminably long second half.

In the course of raising two children, I’ve seen “The Nutcracker” many, many times, performed in many, many ways. When they were very young, we watched a Washington Ballet version for several years running. This was pretty much the “Nutcracker” as I remembered it from my own childhood, complete with a preteen corps de ballet. Clara wore her nightgown throughout the performance and threw her shoe at the Mouse King.

That’s what I thought “The Nutcracker” would always be — until we found ourselves in Berlin one Christmas and went to see it at the Deutsche Staatsoper. I took my children and a friend’s son, promising all of them a battle between toy soldiers and the mice.

Instead, we got a dark, strange and distinctly Germanic version of the story, filled with allusions to a possible incestuous relationship between Clara and her godfather, or maybe between the godfather and Clara’s mother. There was no battle at all, presumably because that would offend the antiwar sentiments of the Berliners.

The children were disappointed — but so, presumably, were the children who went to see the Bayerische Staatsoper version this year, which offers a “Nutcracker” that “boldly comments on the state of our society.” So are all of the other children who go expecting sugar plum fairies and get, instead, dark ruminations on modern adolescence.

There are, of course, other ways to deal with the production. In Russia, the focus is on the extraordinarily athletic dancers. I once saw Mikhail Baryshnikov dance “The Nutcracker” and still remember how he leapt into the air and appeared to hang there for several seconds. The Polish version, at least the one we saw last week, provides extraordinary sets, gorgeous costumes and a plot revolving around a magic lantern that all of the characters enter, somehow, to dance out that long second act.

But while the ballet can be designed and choreographed in different ways, the audience never changes. Wherever and whenever I’ve seen “The Nutcracker,” it’s always at Christmastime, and it’s always in a theater filled with children. Many of the little girls, whether in Warsaw or Washington, are wearing velvet dresses. Many of the babies are too small to be there and eventually have to be taken out. All of the parents appear to be middle-class — and very determined to give their children at least this one experience of high culture before they disappear into the maw of pop culture forever. What else can we do? This ballet has a lot more riding on it than one might think.

The lucky ones are there to see their children perform. A few weeks ago, even Barack Obama went to see his daughter Sasha dance the part of a mouse at a performance in Bethesda. My personal experience of mouse costumes makes me wonder whether he managed to recognize her.

As for Dorota’s daughter, she never did appear on stage. We think we heard her — the children’s choir sings offstage during the snowflake dance, at the end of the first act — and we agreed that she was marvelous. After her part was over, she sat with us to watch the Chinese dancers, the Russian dancers, the Arab dancers and the dance of the flowers. My own children, now teenagers, slumped in their seats all the way through the performance, and I think one of them slept. Nevertheless, they declared afterward that they were glad to have seen it. Already, it reminded them of their childhood.

The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin’s Secret Service
by Andrew Meier
Norton, 402 pp., $18.95 (paper)

Spies and Commissars: The Early Years of the Russian Revolution
by Robert Service
PublicAffairs, 441 pp., $32.99

Stalin’s Romeo Spy: The Remarkable Rise and Fall of the KGB’s Most Daring Operative
by Emil Draitser
Northwestern University Press, 420 pp., $35.00

Deception: Spies, Lies and How Russia Dupes the West
by Edward Lucas
Bloomsbury, 372 pp., $26.00

To those who met them in Japanese-occupied Manchukuo in 1935, the Swiss businessman Charles Emile Martin and his American partner, Cy Oggins, must have seemed an enigmatic pair. Oggins was a distinguished-looking man with craggy features, well-made suits, and a penchant for silver-topped walking sticks. He seemed to know a great deal about Oriental antiquities, and sometimes described himself as an art dealer. Martin was more discreet, preferring plain neckties and gabardine overcoats, though his wife Elsa was fond of elegant handbags and furs. Both men were polyglots, with a wide if vague range of European connections. Working in concert with a Milanese businessman, they had come to Manchukuo to sell Fiat cars and airplanes to the Japanese.

At the time, Mussolini was courting the Japanese regime—he had just sent an “Italian Fascist Goodwill Mission” to Manchuria—and the business seems to have been a success. At the end of 1937, the Japanese imperial government bought seventy-two Italian planes. The Japanese military attaché in Rome reported the deal with approval. It was, he declared with satisfaction, “equal to three heavy bomber regiments.” As Fiat’s representatives in Manchukuo, Martin and Oggins surely shared some of the credit. But by the time the sale went through, both Martin and Oggins had disappeared.The deal was real enough. But the salesman had not been quite what they seemed. Charles Emile Martin—alias George Wilmer, Lorenz, Laurenz, or Dubois—had been named Max Steinberg at birth. Though he spoke fluent German and French with a Marseilles accent, Steinberg was born not in Switzerland but in Belgorod-Dnestrovsky, a Ukrainian port town on the northern coast of the Black Sea. He had obtained a genuine Swiss passport through the use of fraudulent identity documents. Oggins’s surname was authentic, as was his American passport, but his persona was not. Before living in Manchuria, he also passed some time in Paris, living innocuously next door to one of the last members of the Romanov dynasty—an excellent place from which to keep a close watch on the White Russian diaspora—as well as Berlin. Those who had once known him as Isaiah Oggins, the son of a Jewish shopkeeper in the Connecticut mill town of Willimantic, would have been astonished by his aristocratic demeanor. Those who had known him as a Columbia graduate student dabbling in radical politics would have been even more surprised.Steinberg and Oggins looked and acted like wealthy businessmen, but in fact they were Soviet spies, operating not as diplomats but as “illegals,” under false identities and beneath deep cover. “Charles Martin and Co.” may have been a real business, but as Andrew Meier discovered while writing The Lost Spy, his meticulously researched and beautifully written biography of Oggins, the company also provided its “owners” with a reason to be in Manchukuo in 1935. From this unusual vantage point, they were able to observe not only Axis politics but also, again, the large White Russian community that had emigrated to Harbin after the Russian Revolution. They abandoned the effort only because the war between China and Japan was intensifying. There is no record that they were ever exposed.Their success was not unusual at the time. Nowadays, we tend to place spies into a cold war narrative: East vs. West, intrigue around the Berlin Wall, Graham Greene’s Vienna, and George Smiley’s London. But the first and most successful Soviet spies emerged much earlier. As Robert Service observes in Spies and Commissars, his equally colorful history of the Bolsheviks’ early relationships with the West, the first Soviet espionage efforts were amateurish: “on this as on other practical matters, Marx and Engels had left no handbook of instruction behind.” Most of the Bolsheviks’ knowledge of intelligence and counterintelligence came from their own experiences with the Okhrana, the tsarist security police, who had often used double agents to infiltrate the revolutionary movements in Russia. A young protégé of Lenin was among these agents, as the Bolsheviks discovered when they opened the Okhrana files, and some have always thought Stalin himself may have been as well.But the new spies learned fast—so much so that the 1930s, W.H. Auden’s “low dishonest decade,” became a period of extraordinarily creative skulduggery for Soviet espionage. In this era, Soviet agents recruited Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and (probably) John Cairncross, the infamous “Cambridge Five.” In the US they recruited Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss. At the same time, the NKVD also trained a group of men who later became known as the “Great Illegals,” Russian spies who were or pretended to be foreign nationals and who lived under deep cover. They took their tradecraft to such high levels that CIA officers once studied their exploits as a part of basic training. “Before the war the Soviets ran circles around us,” a retired CIA officer told Meier. “The twenties, the thirties—that was their heyday.”Members of this generation of illegals included Richard Sorge, a Soviet spy who spoke fluent German from childhood—his mother was Russian, his father was German—and who penetrated the German embassy in Tokyo by posing as a Nazi reporter. Among other things, Sorge sent Stalin advance warning of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, though Stalin chose to ignore him. Ignace Poretsky, alias Ignace Reiss, was another leading figure of the era. Based in Paris for many years, well known to Communists across Europe, Reiss was murdered by NKVD agents in Switzerland in 1937, after he objected to Stalin’s policies and tried to defect. His death set off a chain of other events, among other things convincing Whittaker Chambers to abandon his own career as a Soviet agent.In Stalin’s Romeo Spy, Emil Draitser tells the life story of yet another Great Illegal, Dmitri Bystrolyotov, the inventor of the modern “honey trap.” Bystrolyotov, the bastard son of a member of the aristocratic Tolstoy family (or so he claimed), was recruited by the nascent Soviet secret services while living abroad in the 1920s. Encouraged by his superiors in Moscow, he obtained a fake Greek passport from a crooked consul in Danzig, started a cloth-trading company in Poland, and then moved to Berlin, where he embarked on a career seducing secretaries, countesses, and diplomat’s wives. At one point he married his own wife off to a French intelligence officer in the hopes of obtaining even more information.Like so many spies, Bystrolyotov’s attraction to intelligence work grew out of his psychology: Draitser points out that “by his own admission, he ‘reveled in it, despite the danger; a new world opened for [him].’” As Meier writes, many of the other Great Illegals were also “masters of seduction” who could “ingratiate themselves in any company, whether their interlocutor was a visiting ambassador or a train-station prostitute.” Those attracted to the deepest levels of clandestine work had to love disguises, secrets, deception, and pretense. They had to be able to memorize new identities, new biographies, and complicated cover stories. In practice, they had to get some pleasure out of doing so as well.Yet in this era, many spies were drawn to serve the USSR for more than mere love of secrets. Certainly Steinberg, Oggins, Bystrolyotov, Sorge, and—until their defection—Reiss and Chambers all intitially served the USSR out of profound ideological conviction. The roots of Oggins’s loyalty to the Communist Party ran deep into his mill town childhood. Bystrolyotov’s mother had been a convinced progressive, a radical feminist who had deliberately given birth to him out of wedlock.The economics and the politics of the time also led many into collaboration with the USSR. Chambers himself later described the appeal of communism in Witness, his autobiography: “The vision inspires. The crisis impels.” To an extent not appreciated now, both Europeans and Americans were deeply disappointed by the failures of capitalism and liberal democracy in the 1930s, the era of the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler. Many came to feel that their choices were limited to fascism on the one hand or Marxism on the other, a polarized view of the world that was promoted and encouraged by people on both sides. Nor, among many leftists, was there a stigma, as there would be in later years, in taking “Moscow Gold.” To the truly dedicated, the goals of the international proletariat and the Soviet secret police would have seemed equally laudable and utterly interchangeable.The feelings were not always mutual. From the beginning, the Soviet Union deployed foreign spies—but from the beginning, the Soviet elite never trusted those spies either. Anybody willing to go abroad and live among capitalists, even for the sake of the regime, always lived under a cloud of suspicion upon his return. In its earliest incarnation, the Cheka, the Soviet secret police (later renamed the OGPU, the NKVD, and then the KGB), were considered to be above the law, as were their foreign agents. This meant, however, that they could be controlled—and eliminated—by extralegal measures too. They often were.Soviet spies also had to cope with Lenin’s ambivalent approach to international relations. Immediately after the revolution, as Service describes, the Bolsheviks began plotting the downfall of regimes all across Europe, the better to hasten the international revolution that they were certain would come. At the same time, they sought diplomatic recognition and trade links. Although the revolutionary impulse cooled after Stalin declared that it was possible to have “socialism in one country,” Soviet agents were always interested, at least theoretically, in the eventual collapse of capitalism and democracy as well as in the furthering of Soviet national interests. To put it differently, this generation of Soviet spies and Soviet diplomats was expected to be active revolutionaries on the one hand and representatives of a sovereign state on the other, often pursuing directly contradictory goals.Their heyday was a short one. By the end of the 1930s, this generation of spies-by-conviction had almost entirely disappeared. Some fell victim to the Great Terror. Bystrolyotov was arrested in 1938 and spent sixteen years in the Gulag. Oggins disappeared into the camps in 1939. Unusually, the American government took an interest in his case—most Americans arrested in the USSR at that time were ignored—but this unusual concern may have hastened his death. When he was due to be released from the camps in 1947, Soviet secret police decided that it was too dangerous to set him free. He was injected with poison in a Moscow prison, and died on the spot.Many others left the secret service because they had lost their faith. The arrests of their comrades, the spectacle of the Moscow show trials, and above all Stalin’s pact with Hitler in 1939 convinced many that they had made the wrong choice. Chambers was only one of several Soviet agents in the United States to “defect”—and to reveal his contacts to the US government. By 1940 the Soviet Union’s American network had fallen apart and its networks in Europe were much weakened. They never really recovered. Contrary to popular assumptions, the cold war era that followed was not the apex of Soviet espionage. Although the postwar Soviet foreign espionage services were more professional, better funded, and better organized, they never again had so many friends in so many high places.Fast forward seventy years: if the life story of Isaiah Oggins will surprise those who identify spies with the cold war and the cold war imagination, the life story of Andrei Bezrukov, alias Donald Howard Heathfield, will come as an even bigger shock. The stories of Bezrukov and his wife, Yelena Vavilova, alias Tracey Lee Ann Foley, are brilliantly told in Deception, Edward Lucas’s book on contemporary Russian spies. Like his predecessors in Manchukuo, Bezrukov was an illegal, operating under deep cover. “Donald Heathfield” was the name of a dead Canadian child whose passport he used and whose identity he stole. But as with all of the most effective illegals, much else about Bezrukov was genuine. Arriving in Canada in 1992, he really had studied international economics at York University in Toronto as his website declared, and he really had earned a master’s degree in public administration at Harvard. He had also really worked as a management consultant, sold a decision-making software system called “FutureMap,” and wrote an academic paper for an Oxford colloquium on “Future Studies.” He really had a son at Georgetown University. His wife worked as a real estate broker in Cambridge; on her website she wrote of her “ability to ensure quality service, honesty and integrity.”Just as their Italian airplane company gave Oggins and Steinberg an insider’s view of wartime Japan, Bezrukov’s management consulting company gave him an insider’s view of what Lucas calls the “the think-tank world: the soft under-belly of the American security and intelligence community, where retired officials, those hoping for jobs, and those taking a break from government mix and mingle with outsiders.” Once he had been accepted in Cambridge and Washington, Bezrukov assiduously promoted his software to companies with international and defense links, attempting to cultivate relationships with people like Leon Fuerth, Al Gore’s former national security adviser. He developed professional ties in Europe and Asia as well, and though he exaggerated his professional successes, he was hired as a consultant by at least one French company.He might have gone even farther—he was trying to persuade several companies to install his software, perhaps in order to insert spyware into their clients’ systems—but in June 2010 Bezrukov/Heathfield and his wife were arrested, along with eight other Russians illegals. Some had been living for many years in the United States, buried deep in suburbia and doing very average-sounding, even inconsequential jobs. At the time, they were ridiculed, particularly when one of the illegals, Anna Chapman—maiden name Anna Khushchyenko—turned out to be an unusually attractive redhead with a fluffy-sounding career in “international real estate.”Lucas points out that this was deliberate: “Spies need to seem as boring and inconspicuous as possible, to develop the capabilities that their real jobs require.” Some need jobs—in international real estate, perhaps—that allow them to meet a wide range of people without attracting suspicion. Others, like Bezrukov, a man whose “striking quality was blandness,” had labored for many years to acquire more solid professional credentials, hoping eventually to gain access to people with real power.Lucas traced the activities of these modern spies with the same kind of attention to detail as Meier used to uncover the activities of Oggins. He discovered that the apparently silly Anna Chapman was entangled, along with her ex-KGB father, in what seems to have been a complicated effort to launder money in Zimbabwe—a scheme involving a British-registered company with a phantom owner and several cases of identity theft. Bezrukov/Heathfield, as noted, had made himself into a plausible “consultant.” Another member of the group, Mikhail Semenko, was touting his genuine academic credentials—he spoke Mandarin and Spanish as well as English and Russian—in an effort to get a job at a think tank.Some of these spies shared certain qualities with their 1930s predecessors. Espionage still attracts “a certain kind of person, often flawed or troubled,” who is willing to “shed the social mores that hamper deceiving, cheating and manipulating people.” But none of them appears at all motivated by the kind of ideological conviction that sent someone like Isaiah Oggins to Paris and Berlin, or that led Ignace Reiss to write an anguished letter to Stalin, accusing his Politburo of having betrayed the Russian worker.Instead, they were attracted to the opportunities and the material goods available to them in the West. Their missives back and forth to Moscow concerned not the ideals of the revolution, but the houses they felt they had to buy or the private schools they felt their children had to attend—in order to maintain their cover, of course. Life in a New Jersey suburb had clear advantages over life in Tomsk, the original home of one of the couples. Chapman is said to have wept “buckets” when she learned that her British passport had been revoked—she obtained it through a short-lived marriage—and that she would never be able to return to the US or the UK. Bezrukov appeared deeply attached to his phony consultant’s career, and has apparently tried to continue the same line of work in Moscow.The attitude of the Russian state toward its foreign agents has also changed. At least in public, spies are no longer figures of suspicion. Russia’s current president, Vladimir Putin, is himself a former spy, and espionage is a part of his biography that he chooses to celebrate. Upon returning to Russia, the expelled American illegals were duly lionized by the Russian media as heroes who had been cruelly evicted by vicious traitors and the wicked FBI. Chapman became a national icon, with her own column and television show, even joining a youth group linked to the Russian president. Paradoxically, she was lauded as a symbol of upward mobility and success—success in London and New York, of course, not Moscow. But that is precisely the kind of success many Russians want. Unlike their Soviet predecessors, Russia’s contemporary elite openly craves the material goods of the West, and openly admires those who get them.The feeling is not mutual, which is why Russia will always have an advantage over the West in the deployment of illegals. Clever and educated Russians will compete hard to become long-term (and heavily subsidized) residents of the American suburbs, and once they arrive they find it easy to fit in. Nowadays, there’s nothing at all unusual about a Russian accent in New Jersey. Some of the recent batch of spies, Chapman included, never even bothered to change their names. But the reverse is much harder to imagine: How many Americans would agree to spend twenty years in suburban Tomsk, living under deep cover (or even light cover), and how many could convincingly pretend to be Russian for that length of time? Historically, Western intelligence agencies don’t have a great track record for this sort of thing. Lucas has a chapter in his book dedicated to a famously disastrous British-American attempt to parachute anti-Communist illegals into the Baltic states after World War II. The plan was revealed before it was enacted to Soviet counterintelligence by Kim Philby himself, and never had a chance of success; the “partisans” who greeted the men as they dropped into Lithuanian and Estonian villages were all employees of the KGB.Somewhat lost in the amused publicity that surrounded the more recent espionage scandal was the question of what the new generation spies were actually doing in the United States, and how great a threat they really posed. “Russian Spies Too Useless, Sexy to Prosecute” was the headline in New York magazine. Lucas vehemently disagrees with this “oddly complacent” attitude, arguing that Russia “uses its intelligence agencies as part of a broad and malevolent effort to penetrate our society and skew our decision-making.” Though many reviewers have disagreed with his analysis—after all, none of the illegals, at least the ones we know about, ever did get close to anyone remotely important—it is also true that, when seen in the longer light of Russian, Soviet, and KGB history, his view gains strength.Modern Russian foreign policy—like Soviet foreign policy before it—often has mutually contradictory goals. On the one hand, the Russian ruling class, dominated as it is by former members of the KGB, genuinely wants stable and open relationships with the West. Russian businessmen want to trade, to travel, and to live abroad, and they don’t want to jeopardize their access. But at the same time, this same Russian ruling class would very much like to skew Western institutions—banks, think tanks, the media, government bureaucracies—so as to make the West more comfortable for themselves.To put it differently, the members of the Russian elite may no longer aspire to launch international Communist revolution, as they did in the 1930s. But they do aspire to change the Western norms and behavior that they see as standing in their way: they want to make Americans and European less interested in human rights, more accepting of corruption, and perhaps more amenable to Russian investment and Russian oligarchs. To some degree, they can try to do so openly. Their money buys them the services of retired Western officials, including a former German chancellor, as well as access to public relations firms, advertising agencies, and lawyers.But there may be times when they need some clandestine means to pursue these goals as well. Even if Anna Chapman, “Donald Heathfield,” and the others never got very far in their bid to penetrate elite America, they were in a position to handle illegal money, pass along information, and generally do and say the kinds of things the Russian government prefers not to do and say openly. Besides, a great deal of time and money were invested in their education, their living expenses, their travel. Someone cared a good deal about creating and maintaining their cover stories—and that alone is evidence that someone thought they were important.The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin’s Secret Serviceby Andrew Meier Norton, 402 pp., $18.95 (paper)Spies and Commissars: The Early Years of the Russian Revolutionby Robert Service PublicAffairs, 441 pp., $32.99Stalin’s Romeo Spy: The Remarkable Rise and Fall of the KGB’s Most Daring Operativeby Emil Draitser Northwestern University Press, 420 pp., $35.00Deception: Spies, Lies and How Russia Dupes the Westby Edward Lucas Bloomsbury, 372 pp., $26.00
Sergei MilashovDmitri Bystrolyotov, who was recruited by the Soviet secret services in the 1920s, on a reconnaissance mission in Bellinzona, Switzerland, circa 1934To those who met them in Japanese-occupied Manchukuo in 1935, the Swiss businessman Charles Emile Martin and his American partner, Cy Oggins, must have seemed an enigmatic pair. Oggins was a distinguished-looking man with craggy features, well-made suits, and a penchant for silver-topped walking sticks. He seemed to know a great deal about Oriental antiquities, and sometimes described himself as an art dealer. Martin was more discreet, preferring plain neckties and gabardine overcoats, though his wife Elsa was fond of elegant handbags and furs. Both men were polyglots, with a wide if vague range of European connections. Working in concert with a Milanese businessman, they had come to Manchukuo to sell Fiat cars and airplanes to the Japanese.At the time, Mussolini was courting the Japanese regime—he had just sent an “Italian Fascist Goodwill Mission” to Manchuria—and the business seems to have been a success. At the end of 1937, the Japanese imperial government bought seventy-two Italian planes. The Japanese military attaché in Rome reported the deal with approval. It was, he declared with satisfaction, “equal to three heavy bomber regiments.” As Fiat’s representatives in Manchukuo, Martin and Oggins surely shared some of the credit. But by the time the sale went through, both Martin and Oggins had disappeared.The deal was real enough. But the salesman had not been quite what they seemed. Charles Emile Martin—alias George Wilmer, Lorenz, Laurenz, or Dubois—had been named Max Steinberg at birth. Though he spoke fluent German and French with a Marseilles accent, Steinberg was born not in Switzerland but in Belgorod-Dnestrovsky, a Ukrainian port town on the northern coast of the Black Sea. He had obtained a genuine Swiss passport through the use of fraudulent identity documents. Oggins’s surname was authentic, as was his American passport, but his persona was not. Before living in Manchuria, he also passed some time in Paris, living innocuously next door to one of the last members of the Romanov dynasty—an excellent place from which to keep a close watch on the White Russian diaspora—as well as Berlin. Those who had once known him as Isaiah Oggins, the son of a Jewish shopkeeper in the Connecticut mill town of Willimantic, would have been astonished by his aristocratic demeanor. Those who had known him as a Columbia graduate student dabbling in radical politics would have been even more surprised.Steinberg and Oggins looked and acted like wealthy businessmen, but in fact they were Soviet spies, operating not as diplomats but as “illegals,” under false identities and beneath deep cover. “Charles Martin and Co.” may have been a real business, but as Andrew Meier discovered while writing The Lost Spy, his meticulously researched and beautifully written biography of Oggins, the company also provided its “owners” with a reason to be in Manchukuo in 1935. From this unusual vantage point, they were able to observe not only Axis politics but also, again, the large White Russian community that had emigrated to Harbin after the Russian Revolution. They abandoned the effort only because the war between China and Japan was intensifying. There is no record that they were ever exposed.Their success was not unusual at the time. Nowadays, we tend to place spies into a cold war narrative: East vs. West, intrigue around the Berlin Wall, Graham Greene’s Vienna, and George Smiley’s London. But the first and most successful Soviet spies emerged much earlier. As Robert Service observes in Spies and Commissars, his equally colorful history of the Bolsheviks’ early relationships with the West, the first Soviet espionage efforts were amateurish: “on this as on other practical matters, Marx and Engels had left no handbook of instruction behind.” Most of the Bolsheviks’ knowledge of intelligence and counterintelligence came from their own experiences with the Okhrana, the tsarist security police, who had often used double agents to infiltrate the revolutionary movements in Russia. A young protégé of Lenin was among these agents, as the Bolsheviks discovered when they opened the Okhrana files, and some have always thought Stalin himself may have been as well.But the new spies learned fast—so much so that the 1930s, W.H. Auden’s “low dishonest decade,” became a period of extraordinarily creative skulduggery for Soviet espionage. In this era, Soviet agents recruited Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and (probably) John Cairncross, the infamous “Cambridge Five.” In the US they recruited Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss. At the same time, the NKVD also trained a group of men who later became known as the “Great Illegals,” Russian spies who were or pretended to be foreign nationals and who lived under deep cover. They took their tradecraft to such high levels that CIA officers once studied their exploits as a part of basic training. “Before the war the Soviets ran circles around us,” a retired CIA officer told Meier. “The twenties, the thirties—that was their heyday.”Members of this generation of illegals included Richard Sorge, a Soviet spy who spoke fluent German from childhood—his mother was Russian, his father was German—and who penetrated the German embassy in Tokyo by posing as a Nazi reporter. Among other things, Sorge sent Stalin advance warning of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, though Stalin chose to ignore him. Ignace Poretsky, alias Ignace Reiss, was another leading figure of the era. Based in Paris for many years, well known to Communists across Europe, Reiss was murdered by NKVD agents in Switzerland in 1937, after he objected to Stalin’s policies and tried to defect. His death set off a chain of other events, among other things convincing Whittaker Chambers to abandon his own career as a Soviet agent.In Stalin’s Romeo Spy, Emil Draitser tells the life story of yet another Great Illegal, Dmitri Bystrolyotov, the inventor of the modern “honey trap.” Bystrolyotov, the bastard son of a member of the aristocratic Tolstoy family (or so he claimed), was recruited by the nascent Soviet secret services while living abroad in the 1920s. Encouraged by his superiors in Moscow, he obtained a fake Greek passport from a crooked consul in Danzig, started a cloth-trading company in Poland, and then moved to Berlin, where he embarked on a career seducing secretaries, countesses, and diplomat’s wives. At one point he married his own wife off to a French intelligence officer in the hopes of obtaining even more information.Like so many spies, Bystrolyotov’s attraction to intelligence work grew out of his psychology: Draitser points out that “by his own admission, he ‘reveled in it, despite the danger; a new world opened for [him].’” As Meier writes, many of the other Great Illegals were also “masters of seduction” who could “ingratiate themselves in any company, whether their interlocutor was a visiting ambassador or a train-station prostitute.” Those attracted to the deepest levels of clandestine work had to love disguises, secrets, deception, and pretense. They had to be able to memorize new identities, new biographies, and complicated cover stories. In practice, they had to get some pleasure out of doing so as well.Yet in this era, many spies were drawn to serve the USSR for more than mere love of secrets. Certainly Steinberg, Oggins, Bystrolyotov, Sorge, and—until their defection—Reiss and Chambers all intitially served the USSR out of profound ideological conviction. The roots of Oggins’s loyalty to the Communist Party ran deep into his mill town childhood. Bystrolyotov’s mother had been a convinced progressive, a radical feminist who had deliberately given birth to him out of wedlock.The economics and the politics of the time also led many into collaboration with the USSR. Chambers himself later described the appeal of communism in Witness, his autobiography: “The vision inspires. The crisis impels.” To an extent not appreciated now, both Europeans and Americans were deeply disappointed by the failures of capitalism and liberal democracy in the 1930s, the era of the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler. Many came to feel that their choices were limited to fascism on the one hand or Marxism on the other, a polarized view of the world that was promoted and encouraged by people on both sides. Nor, among many leftists, was there a stigma, as there would be in later years, in taking “Moscow Gold.” To the truly dedicated, the goals of the international proletariat and the Soviet secret police would have seemed equally laudable and utterly interchangeable.The feelings were not always mutual. From the beginning, the Soviet Union deployed foreign spies—but from the beginning, the Soviet elite never trusted those spies either. Anybody willing to go abroad and live among capitalists, even for the sake of the regime, always lived under a cloud of suspicion upon his return. In its earliest incarnation, the Cheka, the Soviet secret police (later renamed the OGPU, the NKVD, and then the KGB), were considered to be above the law, as were their foreign agents. This meant, however, that they could be controlled—and eliminated—by extralegal measures too. They often were.Soviet spies also had to cope with Lenin’s ambivalent approach to international relations. Immediately after the revolution, as Service describes, the Bolsheviks began plotting the downfall of regimes all across Europe, the better to hasten the international revolution that they were certain would come. At the same time, they sought diplomatic recognition and trade links. Although the revolutionary impulse cooled after Stalin declared that it was possible to have “socialism in one country,” Soviet agents were always interested, at least theoretically, in the eventual collapse of capitalism and democracy as well as in the furthering of Soviet national interests. To put it differently, this generation of Soviet spies and Soviet diplomats was expected to be active revolutionaries on the one hand and representatives of a sovereign state on the other, often pursuing directly contradictory goals.Their heyday was a short one. By the end of the 1930s, this generation of spies-by-conviction had almost entirely disappeared. Some fell victim to the Great Terror. Bystrolyotov was arrested in 1938 and spent sixteen years in the Gulag. Oggins disappeared into the camps in 1939. Unusually, the American government took an interest in his case—most Americans arrested in the USSR at that time were ignored—but this unusual concern may have hastened his death. When he was due to be released from the camps in 1947, Soviet secret police decided that it was too dangerous to set him free. He was injected with poison in a Moscow prison, and died on the spot.Many others left the secret service because they had lost their faith. The arrests of their comrades, the spectacle of the Moscow show trials, and above all Stalin’s pact with Hitler in 1939 convinced many that they had made the wrong choice. Chambers was only one of several Soviet agents in the United States to “defect”—and to reveal his contacts to the US government. By 1940 the Soviet Union’s American network had fallen apart and its networks in Europe were much weakened. They never really recovered. Contrary to popular assumptions, the cold war era that followed was not the apex of Soviet espionage. Although the postwar Soviet foreign espionage services were more professional, better funded, and better organized, they never again had so many friends in so many high places.Fast forward seventy years: if the life story of Isaiah Oggins will surprise those who identify spies with the cold war and the cold war imagination, the life story of Andrei Bezrukov, alias Donald Howard Heathfield, will come as an even bigger shock. The stories of Bezrukov and his wife, Yelena Vavilova, alias Tracey Lee Ann Foley, are brilliantly told in Deception, Edward Lucas’s book on contemporary Russian spies. Like his predecessors in Manchukuo, Bezrukov was an illegal, operating under deep cover. “Donald Heathfield” was the name of a dead Canadian child whose passport he used and whose identity he stole. But as with all of the most effective illegals, much else about Bezrukov was genuine. Arriving in Canada in 1992, he really had studied international economics at York University in Toronto as his website declared, and he really had earned a master’s degree in public administration at Harvard. He had also really worked as a management consultant, sold a decision-making software system called “FutureMap,” and wrote an academic paper for an Oxford colloquium on “Future Studies.” He really had a son at Georgetown University. His wife worked as a real estate broker in Cambridge; on her website she wrote of her “ability to ensure quality service, honesty and integrity.”Just as their Italian airplane company gave Oggins and Steinberg an insider’s view of wartime Japan, Bezrukov’s management consulting company gave him an insider’s view of what Lucas calls the “the think-tank world: the soft under-belly of the American security and intelligence community, where retired officials, those hoping for jobs, and those taking a break from government mix and mingle with outsiders.” Once he had been accepted in Cambridge and Washington, Bezrukov assiduously promoted his software to companies with international and defense links, attempting to cultivate relationships with people like Leon Fuerth, Al Gore’s former national security adviser. He developed professional ties in Europe and Asia as well, and though he exaggerated his professional successes, he was hired as a consultant by at least one French company.He might have gone even farther—he was trying to persuade several companies to install his software, perhaps in order to insert spyware into their clients’ systems—but in June 2010 Bezrukov/Heathfield and his wife were arrested, along with eight other Russians illegals. Some had been living for many years in the United States, buried deep in suburbia and doing very average-sounding, even inconsequential jobs. At the time, they were ridiculed, particularly when one of the illegals, Anna Chapman—maiden name Anna Khushchyenko—turned out to be an unusually attractive redhead with a fluffy-sounding career in “international real estate.”Lucas points out that this was deliberate: “Spies need to seem as boring and inconspicuous as possible, to develop the capabilities that their real jobs require.” Some need jobs—in international real estate, perhaps—that allow them to meet a wide range of people without attracting suspicion. Others, like Bezrukov, a man whose “striking quality was blandness,” had labored for many years to acquire more solid professional credentials, hoping eventually to gain access to people with real power.Lucas traced the activities of these modern spies with the same kind of attention to detail as Meier used to uncover the activities of Oggins. He discovered that the apparently silly Anna Chapman was entangled, along with her ex-KGB father, in what seems to have been a complicated effort to launder money in Zimbabwe—a scheme involving a British-registered company with a phantom owner and several cases of identity theft. Bezrukov/Heathfield, as noted, had made himself into a plausible “consultant.” Another member of the group, Mikhail Semenko, was touting his genuine academic credentials—he spoke Mandarin and Spanish as well as English and Russian—in an effort to get a job at a think tank.Some of these spies shared certain qualities with their 1930s predecessors. Espionage still attracts “a certain kind of person, often flawed or troubled,” who is willing to “shed the social mores that hamper deceiving, cheating and manipulating people.” But none of them appears at all motivated by the kind of ideological conviction that sent someone like Isaiah Oggins to Paris and Berlin, or that led Ignace Reiss to write an anguished letter to Stalin, accusing his Politburo of having betrayed the Russian worker.Instead, they were attracted to the opportunities and the material goods available to them in the West. Their missives back and forth to Moscow concerned not the ideals of the revolution, but the houses they felt they had to buy or the private schools they felt their children had to attend—in order to maintain their cover, of course. Life in a New Jersey suburb had clear advantages over life in Tomsk, the original home of one of the couples. Chapman is said to have wept “buckets” when she learned that her British passport had been revoked—she obtained it through a short-lived marriage—and that she would never be able to return to the US or the UK. Bezrukov appeared deeply attached to his phony consultant’s career, and has apparently tried to continue the same line of work in Moscow.The attitude of the Russian state toward its foreign agents has also changed. At least in public, spies are no longer figures of suspicion. Russia’s current president, Vladimir Putin, is himself a former spy, and espionage is a part of his biography that he chooses to celebrate. Upon returning to Russia, the expelled American illegals were duly lionized by the Russian media as heroes who had been cruelly evicted by vicious traitors and the wicked FBI. Chapman became a national icon, with her own column and television show, even joining a youth group linked to the Russian president. Paradoxically, she was lauded as a symbol of upward mobility and success—success in London and New York, of course, not Moscow. But that is precisely the kind of success many Russians want. Unlike their Soviet predecessors, Russia’s contemporary elite openly craves the material goods of the West, and openly admires those who get them.The feeling is not mutual, which is why Russia will always have an advantage over the West in the deployment of illegals. Clever and educated Russians will compete hard to become long-term (and heavily subsidized) residents of the American suburbs, and once they arrive they find it easy to fit in. Nowadays, there’s nothing at all unusual about a Russian accent in New Jersey. Some of the recent batch of spies, Chapman included, never even bothered to change their names. But the reverse is much harder to imagine: How many Americans would agree to spend twenty years in suburban Tomsk, living under deep cover (or even light cover), and how many could convincingly pretend to be Russian for that length of time? Historically, Western intelligence agencies don’t have a great track record for this sort of thing. Lucas has a chapter in his book dedicated to a famously disastrous British-American attempt to parachute anti-Communist illegals into the Baltic states after World War II. The plan was revealed before it was enacted to Soviet counterintelligence by Kim Philby himself, and never had a chance of success; the “partisans” who greeted the men as they dropped into Lithuanian and Estonian villages were all employees of the KGB.Somewhat lost in the amused publicity that surrounded the more recent espionage scandal was the question of what the new generation spies were actually doing in the United States, and how great a threat they really posed. “Russian Spies Too Useless, Sexy to Prosecute” was the headline in New York magazine. Lucas vehemently disagrees with this “oddly complacent” attitude, arguing that Russia “uses its intelligence agencies as part of a broad and malevolent effort to penetrate our society and skew our decision-making.” Though many reviewers have disagreed with his analysis—after all, none of the illegals, at least the ones we know about, ever did get close to anyone remotely important—it is also true that, when seen in the longer light of Russian, Soviet, and KGB history, his view gains strength.Modern Russian foreign policy—like Soviet foreign policy before it—often has mutually contradictory goals. On the one hand, the Russian ruling class, dominated as it is by former members of the KGB, genuinely wants stable and open relationships with the West. Russian businessmen want to trade, to travel, and to live abroad, and they don’t want to jeopardize their access. But at the same time, this same Russian ruling class would very much like to skew Western institutions—banks, think tanks, the media, government bureaucracies—so as to make the West more comfortable for themselves.To put it differently, the members of the Russian elite may no longer aspire to launch international Communist revolution, as they did in the 1930s. But they do aspire to change the Western norms and behavior that they see as standing in their way: they want to make Americans and European less interested in human rights, more accepting of corruption, and perhaps more amenable to Russian investment and Russian oligarchs. To some degree, they can try to do so openly. Their money buys them the services of retired Western officials, including a former German chancellor, as well as access to public relations firms, advertising agencies, and lawyers.But there may be times when they need some clandestine means to pursue these goals as well. Even if Anna Chapman, “Donald Heathfield,” and the others never got very far in their bid to penetrate elite America, they were in a position to handle illegal money, pass along information, and generally do and say the kinds of things the Russian government prefers not to do and say openly. Besides, a great deal of time and money were invested in their education, their living expenses, their travel. Someone cared a good deal about creating and maintaining their cover stories—and that alone is evidence that someone thought they were important.

A quick quiz: which American political party talked about social issues, military families and foreign policy at its convention? Which American political party celebrated the achievements of its most recent president and spoke about his legacy? And which American presidential candidate declared, “I have never been more hopeful about America?” If you guessed “Republicans” to the first two and “Mitt Romney” to the third, you would be quite wrong. And that was the odd thing about this two-week American political convention season: the parties’ core messages are the same as ever, but their roles are now strangely reversed.

At the Republican convention in Tampa, Florida, Clint Eastwood famously spoke to an empty chair. Perhaps the chair could have been filled by one of the many Republican luminaries not in attendance. Former president George W Bush was nowhere to be seen. Former president George H W Bush, his father, was absent as well. Former vice-president Dick Cheney was presumably off duck hunting. Former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin was not in the hall and not even visible as a commentator on Fox News, the television station which now employs her.

It was almost as if eight years of Republican control of the White House did not happen, though not entirely. Condoleezza Rice did appear, she did talk about foreign policy, and she did get in a few good lines: “We cannot be reluctant to lead and you cannot lead from behind.” But other than that she stuck to generalities, and devoted a chunk of her speech to her childhood in Birmingham, Alabama. The word “Iraq” did not pass her lips.

In fact, although he was the candidate for the party that most Americans once trusted to handle relations with the outside world, Mitt Romney devoted only a single paragraph of the most important speech of his life to foreign policy. And during that paragraph, he not only failed to mention Iraq, he also failed to use the word “Afghanistan”, despite the fact that nearly 70,000 American troops are still posted there and still will be if he becomes president. Nor did he devote any of his speech to “our men and women in uniform”, as American candidates usually do. As for the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, he did not mention any foreign countries or any foreign policy or military issues at all.

There were other words missing, too. Key Republican phrases such as “right to life” and “family values” were scarcely heard, at least not during prime time, even though they were so important during the Republican primary a few short months ago. Strangest of all, there wasn’t much optimism on display in Tampa either. Though Romney often speaks of his admiration for Ronald Reagan, there was no Reaganite “Morning in America” rhetoric, no talk of the US as a shining city on a hill. Instead, the Republican candidate sketched a grim picture of the US economy and its prospects. “Americans,” he declared, “now doubt our children will have a better future.”

By contrast, the Democrats – historically the party with less interest and less talent for foreign matters – gave speech after speech at their convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, about foreign policy. Joe Biden and John Kerry talked at length about the outside world. Michelle Obama and Jill Biden talked about their work with military families. When the president finally got up to speak, he actually boasted about his achievements. “Four years ago,” President Obama declared, “I promised to end the war in Iraq. We did. I promised to refocus on the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11. We have. We’ve blunted the Taliban’s momentum in Afghanistan, and in 2014, our longest war will be over. A new tower rises above the New York skyline, al-Qaeda is on the path to defeat, and Osama bin Laden is dead.”

Far from avoiding all social issues, neither the president nor anyone else in Charlotte was especially secretive about the Democrats’ policies on legal abortion or homosexuality. In his speech, Obama clearly alluded to his more lenient policy on homosexuals in the armed forces, declaring that “selfless soldiers won’t be kicked out of the military because of who they are or who they love”. He was echoing comments made by his wife, Michelle, a few days earlier, who also declared that her husband wanted everyone in America to have equal opportunities, “no matter who we are… or who we love”. Michelle did steal some traditionally Republican family values rhetoric, speaking of her role as “Mom-in-Chief”. But at the same time she declared that “women are more than capable of making our own choices about our bodies and our health care… that’s what my husband stands for”.

Finally, the Democrats not only brought their most recent ex-president to Charlotte, they put him centre stage on Wednesday night and asked him to formally nominate President Obama, giving him a role usually reserved for the vice-president. Bill Clinton, looking older and skinnier than we remember, also bragged about his record. He dwelled on the “roaring” economy of 1996, a prelude to the “longest peacetime expansion in the history of the United States”, most of which he’d had the good luck to preside over. Optimism and American exceptionalism – of the kind we used to hear from Republicans – overflowed from the podium, during his speech and that of many others.

Indeed, now that both conventions have ended, it’s become clear that we are watching a double gamble: both major American political parties have decided to re-invent themselves, at least for the purposes of this US election. Clearly, the Republicans now reckon that the more socially conservative planks of their platform are not popular among the mob of swing voters who invariably determine the outcome of US presidential elections. Neither are their recent presidents, or their recent foreign policy.

As a result, Romney has become a single-issue candidate. He has one argument in his favour, though admittedly it is a very simple and thus very powerful one: the economy isn’t what it should be, the recovery is anaemic and Romney, with his business record and his executive experience, will be better able to fix it. When he or his supporters ask, as Ryan did a few days ago, “Are you better off now than you were in 2008”, they are gambling that the majority of Americans will answer “no” – and that they will therefore decide that they want a new president.

But the Democrats have also taken a gamble. They are betting that the majority of Americans, when asked “Are you better off now than you were four years ago” will either answer “yes” or at the very least “no… but I like enough other things about this president to vote for him again, and anyway the next term might go better”. In other words, the Democrats are asking swing voters to accept their socially liberal policies, to embrace their famously controversial past president, to approve of and admire their foreign policy record and, in addition to all of that, to believe that the economy will do better in the next four years, even with the same president in charge.

That’s a more complicated argument, but it’s also broader and deeper, designed to appeal to people who think about other things besides economics, if there still are any. It’s also the closest thing to optimism currently on offer – if, in this grim and unusual election season, Americans still want to hear that things can only get better.

Scotland’s civic pride and example
By Anne Applebaum, Published: September 6, 2012
ABERDEEN, Scotland
After two weeks when you probably spent too much time watching speeches beamed from Tampa and listening to “spontaneous” applause from Charlotte, let me take you away, just for a moment, to the Braemar Gathering: a day of bagpipe contests, footraces, games and parades, held every year in a remote Scottish village.
Although Highlands gatherings are alleged to have taken place on the site for more than a millennium, the Braemar Games in their current incarnation date to the 19th century. They were organized then by the Braemar Highland Society, originally an insurance group that provided members with sickness and death benefits. In 1832, the society started offering five-pound prizes for the winners of various contests, including a race up and down a steep hill. Queen Victoria started coming in 1848, visiting from nearby Balmoral Castle, and Queen Elizabeth II keeps up the tradition.
That hill race is still run every year. On Sept. 1 I watched the runners take off in large numbers, blue-faced from the cold. Other traditional contests included Highlands dancing competitions, relay races, tug of war, “putting the stone” (throwing 16- and 28-pound weights) and “throwing the hammer over a bar” (self-explanatory).
The clear favorite of the crowd was “tossing the caber,” an event that involves lifting, carrying and throwing a very long wooden log. Indeed, the sight of an enormous tattooed man in a kilt and sneakers, flipping what appears to be a telephone pole into the air, is not to be missed.
But though the sports might sound old-fashioned, there is nothing archaic about the atmosphere. Local companies cheerfully support many of the contests. Glenfiddich T-shirts are much in evidence. Most of the contestants come from nearby — the rules clearly state which postal codes qualify as “local” — but a few with Slavic surnames give away the presence of 21st-century immigrants.
Locally organized, sustained by local businesses, providing local entertainment and local employment, the Braemar Gathering has not been created by the British government, yet neither is it the product of a single person’s will to power.
In other words, the Braemar Gathering — like Texas rodeos, Iowa county fairs, Wisconsin cheese festivals and New York block parties (not to mention Quaker meetings, Catholic charities, 4-H clubs, book groups and the Girl Scouts) — is a classic example of civil society, a phenomenon that gets too little, or maybe the wrong kind of, attention during election seasons.
Nowadays, we Americans spend a lot of energy arguing about the role of the individual vs. the role of the state. We did it during the Republican convention, we did it during the Democratic convention and we’ll probably keep doing it until November.
But we still spend a lot of our time living and working somewhere between the extremes. And most of our best ideas for reform and economic growth come, as they always have, from this in-between sphere.
The Braemar Highland Society figured out how to give its members health insurance in the 19th century. More recently the political scientist Robert Putnam has documented the achievements of groups such as the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, which revived a decaying neighborhood in Boston; and the Branch Libraries of Chicago, which has reinvented public libraries as cultural centers. Even in a society where such things are supposed to be declining, what Putnam calls “social capital” or what De Tocqueville called “associations” are still the source of much original thought.
Politicians have long known this: George W. Bush was on to it when he championed faith-based organizations, as was Barack Obama when he spoke of the “spirit of service” in his inaugural address. Although politicians might well look at a county fair or a street festival as an opportunity to canvass for votes, civil society by definition isn’t a political phenomenon. In fact, when a civic organization is politicized — or, sometimes, even when it is funded with public money — its character is inevitably changed.
How then can politicians capture the energy of a kilt-wearing Scot throwing 28-pound stones, or the energy of an enthusiastic librarian or energetic neighborhood activist? The answer is that they can’t. They can encourage and inspire them, make sure that the legal system supports them and that regulations don’t strangle them; they can use their ideas or co-opt them into government. Nevertheless, what is most interesting and creative about democratic societies almost always happens outside the political process, not within it. Remember that while watching this final phase of the American election campaign, if and when you need cheering up.

The fate of three fellow pop stars, however, is clearly different — and it is precisely that difference that poses an unusual challenge to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Although it is often assumed otherwise, Putin’s regime has long permitted political dissent — so long as it appeals only to a small elite. Although most television stations are controlled in one way or another by the Kremlin, a few low-circulation newspapers have long been allowed to keep up some criticism. Although anyone with real potential to oppose Putin was put under financial or judicial pressure — or, in some cases, arrested or murdered — other critics have been allowed to keep talking, as long as too many people aren’t listening. The Internet is controlled in Russia, as it is in China, Iran and other authoritarian states, but with a relatively light hand: Confident that not many Russians read human rights Web sites anyway, the regime never bothered to block all of them.

At least until now, this formula has worked. Indeed, the genius of Putinism has always been its ability to keep the apolitical masses ignorant of or apathetic about the regime’s opponents, while at the same time eschewing mass arrests. Putin understood this very well: The modern elite Russian doesn’t want to live in a pariah state, and he doesn’t want to be cut off from the outside world. He might not care if his foreign friends think Russia unpleasant, but he isn’t keen to be compared to North Korea either. Putin’s solution was to keep the pressure on serious opponents while studiously ignoring those he deemed unserious. Political speech is controlled, but entertainment media are free.

But in a Russia open to global pop culture, it’s getting harder to recognize who is serious and who isn’t. Three punk rockers, members of a band known more for its desire to cause outrage than to make music, surely didn’t look like much of a challenge to the Kremlin. But when one accounts for the vast potential for copycats — the same radical Ukrainian women’s group has recently protested not only in Kiev but also in Minsk and Davos, while others have protested in Marseille and New York — as well as the inevitable eye-catching photos, not just on news pages but also in the entertainment sections, one can see how this story could run and run. The simple fact is that Madonna and her ilk are more likely to defend stylish fellow musicians than serious journalists or activists — and far more likely to attract widespread attention for doing so.

It’s a conundrum not only for Russia but for any regimes that seek to be open to some outside influences but not others. It might be possible for the Russian leadership — or the Chinese leadership, or the Iranian leadership — to block the Web sites of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, but will they eventually have to ban TheHollywoodGossip.com and E! Online as well? How about Al-Jazeera? Or South African Web sites that report “human interest” stories involving girl punk rockers? Global pop culture mutates and changes week by week, just as technology does: Modern dictatorships will have to make some fast decisions if they want to keep up.

Ignore the gaffes. They’ll soon be forgotten, and they don’t matter anyway. The real problem with Mitt Romney’s trip to Europe wasn’t that he sounded less than convinced about the London Olympics or that he gave short shrift to Palestinian culture. The problem was that the very idea of this particular trip — where he went and who he met, at least in Europe — was based on an outdated and increasingly misleading narrative about U.S. foreign policy.

In Britain and Poland, at least, Romney appeared to think he was paying visits to allies who are deeply disappointed by Barack Obama and who long for a return of American leadership in the form of a new George W. Bush — or, even better — a new Ronald Reagan. He imagined he would find soul mates in the British Tory party, just as Republicans used to do long ago. He imagined that Poles, freshly released from communism, would all thrill to a speech about John Paul II, Solidarity, Lech Walesa and the Cold War.

He was wrong. Yes, many abroad are disappointed with Obama, and yes, this administration has made a number of awkward mistakes with Europe, and with Poland in particular. Yes, those Romney met — again, Poles in particular — were flattered that he came. Contrary to media reports, he made a good impression on the politicians he met, everywhere.

But Romney, or perhaps his advisers, doesn’t seem to realize that the disillusionment with U.S. leadership in Europe isn’t solely the product of the current administration. “New Europe” — the British, the Spanish, the Italians, the Central Europeans, the pro-American “coalition of the willing,” the countries that supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq in defiance of France and Germany — was a concept that fell apart a few years after its formation.

Having attained the support of these allies in 2003, the Bush administration, not its successors, ignored them, failed to reward or acknowledge them, and then bungled the Iraqi “occupation” so badly that they all suffered political setbacks at home. Tony Blair’s loyalty to the United States in Iraq is remembered, in Britain, as a great stain on his record, not as a moment of triumph and glory. The U.S.-Polish negotiations over the missile defense program are remembered for the broken promises made in the Bush years, not for the unity and friendship supposedly broken by Obama. Full disclosure: I am married to the Polish foreign minister. But I wouldn’t need to ask him about this disillusionment, because it’s been all over the Polish newspapers for years.

As for the Tories, this is a political party whose leader supports gay marriage and fears global warming, whose constituents are fully committed to the National Health Service, which is far more centralized and government-dominated than anything ever imagined by Obama. As a result, the U.S. political debate sounds strange and faraway in Britain. The Republican primary seemed utterly mystifying.

That distance helps explain the lack of coverage this year in Britain of the presidential campaign. The British press used to follow American campaigns with the same who’s-up, who’s-down horse-race excitement as the American press itself. That isn’t happening at the moment, and although interest will surely pick up as we come into the homestretch, I don’t think it’s going to be what it was, not in Britain and not anywhere else.

Even foreigners now understand that an American president has only a limited ability to change the course of U.S. foreign policy. Obama’s most important decisions abroad — in Afghanistan, in Iraq — aren’t so very different from those Bush or Romney would make. More important, foreigners understand that the world is changing and that while the United States is still the world’s strongest power, it isn’t the world’s only power. Europeans are just as concerned about their own internal alliances, about their relationships with the emerging countries in the rest of the world — Brazil and India as well as China — and about their own complicated relations with Russia, still a major economic power on their continent by virtue of its gas reserves. They can’t dismiss Russia, as Romney did, as nothing but a “geopolitical foe.”

Indeed, they aren’t interested in any of the rhetoric that gets thrown around during American election campaigns, because it doesn’t really matter. Everyone knows that a new president will eventually change his tone — as Clinton did, as Bush did — whether it takes one year or four. So yes, there is disappointment abroad with Obama. But it doesn’t matter as much as Romney’s campaign team thinks.

A few good jokes were made in the aftermath – “unless Romney brings bacon-wrapped shrimp to the Wailing Wall, I guess this’ll be the worst day of the trip” – and everyone got some witty headlines out of it, too. But although it was all very amusing, I do hope this sudden burst of hearty Olympics spirit doesn’t represent some national change of heart. Just a few days ago, the complainers, whingers and moaners dominated the news, not the boosters and boasters.

British politicians were up in arms about G4S, London taxi drivers were on strike, Charles Moore declared that “there is nothing but boredom, inconvenience and officially sanctioned insolence on offer” in London this summer, while Cameron begged journalists not to call this the “soggy Olympics”. Nor was this unprecedented: as far back as 2008, a columnist for this newspaper called the eight-minute handover ceremony in Beijing – involving a red London bus, umbrellas and David Beckham – a “British fiasco”. In particular, Charles Spencer objected to the “raddled, sweat-drenched face of Led Zeppelin lead guitarist Jimmy Page” whose music resembled “a badly tuned transistor radio in a tin bucket”.

Which is as it should be. At the time, still dumbstruck by the sight of thousands of Chinese marching in unison, I wrote this sentence: “Thank you, Britain, for giving the world the gift of nasty, negative, snarky journalism, along with the culture of free speech that sustains it.” Four years later, I fear the whinge culture is needed now more than ever.

If nothing else, the Beijing Olympics proved that propaganda works: what the world saw on the screen was the triumph, the glory and the fireworks. What no one saw, especially not the Chinese public, were the arrests and threats that the Chinese government thought necessary to make the Games run smoothly. No one saw the pre-emptive detentions of people who might possibly have thought of complaining in public. No one saw the thousands of people evicted from their homes without compensation to make way for the Olympic stadiums, either.

At the time, Amnesty International wrote of the “continued deterioration” in the treatment of human rights advocates, journalists and lawyers in the run-up to the Games, Human Rights Watch called the Beijing Olympics a “catalyst for human rights abuses”, and there were a few indignant grumbles when some foreigners were arrested for carrying signs about Tibet. But most of the politicians, celebrities and journalists in attendance said nothing about any of that. Foreign newspapers were as full of praise for “China’s Show of Power” and Beijing’s “Exceptional Games” as the Chinese press, and it is still generally accepted that the Beijing’s Olympics inaugurated, somehow, China’s entry onto the world stage.

In London, there are going to be plenty of attempts to emulate Chinese methods. There will be pushy policemen, overzealous anti-terrorist squads and ludicrous attempts to protect the rights of the corporations that sponsor the Games. There have already been clampdowns on café owners who decorate shop windows with five bagels, and butchers who do the same thing with sausages. Apparently – can it really be true? – you aren’t meant to link an article to the official Olympics website unless you have nice things to say about the Games. Meanwhile, known graffiti artists have not only been ordered to stay away from the Olympic Park, they have been forbidden to possess spray paint and markers between now and November.

But at least in London, one is still allowed to complain about these things, to talk about them and to write about them. I know about all of these incidents, in fact, because I read about them in the Spectator (whose cover showed an athlete being strangled by the Olympic rings), in the Guardian (which investigated the graffiti story) and on a blog published by Index on Censorship (as well as on another site where someone gleefully wrote obscene things about the Olympics and linked them to the official website, just to see what would happen).

There may or may not be consequences: court cases, lawsuits, public outrage sufficient to persuade politicians at least to apologise to the people told to remove the bagels from their windows. If nothing else, people who were unreasonably treated can say so in public. Which is also how it should be.

Just because you have a democracy doesn’t mean you automatically have reasonable policemen, sensible legislators or wise bureaucrats. But at least if your culture encourages you to complain, often and loudly, about the misbehaviour of unreasonable policemen, thoughtless legislators and thuggish bureaucrats then there is a chance you can do something to stop them. Please, Britain, don’t stop complaining about the Olympics: this is London, not Beijing.

Another day, another set of crisis headlines — but there is a silver lining: Finally, Europeans are being forced to face up to decades’ worth of fundamentally dishonest politics. Since the 1970s, one government after the next has spent, borrowed and then inflated its way out of the subsequent debt. Then they recovered — only to spend, borrow and inflate once again. Not coincidentally, this cycle was most severe in countries with weaker democracies. Spain ceased to be a dictatorship only after Franco’s death in 1975, Greece was ruled by a military junta from 1967 to 1974, and Italy has had more than 60 governments since World War II. Successive leaders in all of those countries have tried to “buy” the electorate with elaborate pensions, state-sector employment and other perks. Banks across the continent and around the world have greedily facilitated them.

Now they can’t. Though no one recognized it at the time, joining the euro was like adopting the gold standard: It meant that individual governments couldn’t inflate their way out of trouble anymore nor pass on to the next generation the bill for today’s expenditures — as they still can in the United States and Britain. All along, it has been a mistake to describe the euro zone’s difficulties as a “currency crisis.” In fact, it’s a political crisis, caused by an addiction to debt, and it requires a political solution. Electorates have learned the truth: They are bankrupt. Whatever decisions the European Union now makes, future recovery depends on how much of the plain facts ordinary people can bear to absorb.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, it’s not clear that the Greeks really understand their situation. Nearly a third of them voted last month for a party that promises, yet again, to create 100,000 state jobs without explaining who will pay for them. Nationalist rumblings about the authoritarian Germans who want Greece to cut its budget in order to remain in the euro zone are also a symptom of delusion: Whoever is lending to Greece, whether Germany or Ghana, would demand evidence of changed behavior.

In the past, Spanish politicians often played the blame-someone-else game too. The former socialist prime minister José Zapatero was unduly fond of conspiracy theories about the bond markets. Although his conservative successor, Mariano Rajoy, was elected with a large majority and a mandate to make major changes, it’s not clear whether he has the will or the popular support to push them all through. Major demonstrations by public-sector workers last week in Madrid ended with riots and rubber bullets. The Italian leader Mario Monti seems bound and determined to tell citizens the truth, and in his first six weeks in office in the autumn of 2011 he passed more reform measures than Italy had seen in a decade. But since then things have been rockier: This week, Monti put the bankrupt region of Sicily under what almost amounts to compulsory emergency rule.

This political unrest is happening after, not before, a series of bailouts, major and minor: These three nations, and their banks, have already received funding that ultimately comes from Germany, the only truly solvent member of the euro zone. They may need more help — but before that, German politicians will have to tell their electorate the truth too. Which is this: No country has made more money out of the euro than Germany; no other country has profited more from the current crisis — which has kept German borrowing rates relatively low — and no other country’s banks own more of the continent’s debt. Germans aren’t “rescuing” their neighbors out of magnanimity, as many seem to think, but out of self-interest. But does the German public know it? And do the southern Europeans understand how few options they really have? August is the traditional month for financial crises: We may be about to find out.

I don’t know whether this was the intention — one certainly assumes so — but the handful of new investigations into Mitt Romney’s investment arrangements in Switzerland, Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands have come at a particularly interesting moment in the U.S. electoral cycle. With four months to go, both presidential candidates are frantically drawing lines in the sand: Each is arguing that he offers American voters a clear and distinct choice on health care, immigration, taxation — and that his opponent offers something quite different.

On purpose or otherwise, the tales of the Cayman Islands make clear that Romney and President Obama are offering American voters another kind of choice as well. One of the words most frequently deployed during the midterm elections and the now-forgotten Republican primaries was “elite,” usually as a term of opprobrium and usually by Republicans — but sometimes by Democrats, too.

In running for the Senate, Christine O’Donnell had a campaign adthat declared: “I didn’t go to Yale . . . I am YOU.” Attacking Obama, Rand Paul called the president a “liberal elitist” who “believes that he knows what is best for people.” Occupy Wall Street rose up against the “1 percent” but fizzled out before it could propose an alternative. At one point, even Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife railed against the Washington political class, leading columnist Dahlia Lithwick to wonder how that term could possibly exclude her husband (“If ever there were nine people who are actually paid to think they know better than the rest of us, Supreme Court justices are it.”).

Granted, the word elite is often used, blurrily, to mean “a group of people whose views I dislike.” But that doesn’t mean that elites don’t exist. On the contrary, the previous debates on the subject were insufficiently subtle, failing to recognize that in the modern world, there are multiple elite groups, each with its own customs and habits, its own moral codes and its own domestic and international connections. And let us be clear: When we are offered the choice between Obama and Romney, we are offered a choice between two sets of them.

You know the stereotypes already. Both Obamas come from what might loosely be called the intellectual/academic meritocracy, the “liberal elite,” the post-WASP Ivy League, easily caricatured as the world of free-trade coffee, organic arugula, smug opinions and Martha’s Vineyard. The Romneys, by contrast, belong to the financial oligarchy, the “global elite,” the post-financial-deregulation world that is just as easily caricatured as one of iced champagne, offshore bank accounts, dressage trainers and private islands.

The two groups have some important overlaps. Although Romney got some attention for holding a fundraiser in the Hamptons last week, Obama has raised more money in the Hamptons overall (the president scored particularly well in Sagaponack, by one account, where the median home price is $4.4 million).

They also have some important differences. The financial oligarchy, as we learned from the Barclays scandal in London last week, is happiest when it operates in deep secrecy, where it can manipulate interest rates, package derivatives, hide its profits and shelter its taxes as it sees fit. The liberal meritocracy prefers to operate in the glare of publicity, where it can give lectures, write books, make documentaries and generally promulgate its own views as loudly as possible. Aged 34, Obama wrote his autobiography. Aged 37, Romney founded Bain Capital.

But while you might think one or the other group more preferable or more offensive for reasons of politics, culture or taste, you certainly cannot argue that either of them is in close touch with “average” or “ordinary” or even “middle-class” people, however those terms might be defined. And although they and their supporters may shout about “radical left-wing professors” on the one hand or “Gordon Gekko” on the other, neither Obama nor Romney can plausibly claim to leading a populist revolution against the “elites” who are allegedly destroying America.

Which is just as well, because the political success of both Obama and Romney proves that radical populism in the United States has failed spectacularly. For all of the attention they got, neither Occupy Wall Street nor the tea party has a candidate in this race. Neither found a way to channel inchoate, ill-defined public anger — at the deficit, at the banks — into electoral politics or clear alternatives. Whoever wins in November, we’ll therefore get the elite we deserve.

That relief may have been premature. Eleven days ago, the apocalypse did not happen — but since then, the apocalypse has continued to unfold in slow motion. The new government has pledged to maintain “austerity” even as crises of various kinds erupt all around it. The newly appointed finance minister resigned after being hospitalized on the day he was supposed to be sworn in. The newly appointed deputy minister for the merchant marines resigned after being accused of conflicts of interest. The newly appointed prime minister is recovering from an emergency eye operation and couldn’t attend a crucial European Union summit this week. Early Wednesday morning, three armed men drove a bus containing gasoline canisters through the entrance to Microsoft’s Athens headquarters and then set it alight. No one was hurt, and the building didn’t blow up, but the ground floor was heavily damaged.

Meanwhile, the excruciating squeeze on the oversize Greek budget continues, producing strikes, angry speeches and dramatic headlines. Greece’s recession deepens and tax revenue continues to fall. In the coming months, the new government must decide how to cut 150,000 jobs by 2015 instead of creating more, and to reduce government spending by billions if it wants to stay solvent. This would be asking a lot of a popular, respected government. For a government disliked and distrusted by much of the population — and apparently plagued with dramatic health and personal finance problems — it may prove impossible.

In truth, a good solution to Greece’s problems can’t be found in left, right, conservative, liberal or any other kind of politics, because Greece’s problems don’t have an ideological solution. Greece’s problems are about simple math: The Greek government is bankrupt. If it wants to spend more, it needs to borrow money. Nobody wants to lend Greece money unconditionally, however, because Greece is unlikely to pay it back. Whether Greece is in or out of the euro, and whether the rest of Europe does or doesn’t offer to help, Greece will face this problem for a very long time.

Although there aren’t any other good options, Syriza continues to speak for those who think that there are. Syriza continues to promise an alternative: No austerity, more spending, more government jobs. Reject the conditions that Europe demands in exchange for sending good money after bad. Reject what many Greeks perceive as a foreign, German-led attempt to undermine their nation. Wave a magic wand, and let money pour into the economy. Never mind that it can’t be done: If Greece breaks its budgetary promises, Europe will stop lending, Greek banks will fail and the country will be forced into a rapid exit from the euro. In the long term, this outcome might well be better for Greece. In the short term, there would be massive chaos.

Syriza doesn’t put it quite like this, of course, because the party doesn’t have to. Its politicians are still out of government and do not have to choose between the hardships of austerity and the chaos of exiting the euro. But until they are forced to confront that challenge — until Greeks are persuaded that there are no good alternatives, no magic wands — Greek politics will be chronically unstable. Expect more emergencies, more resignations, maybe even more attacks on corporate headquarters. Until the Greeks are convinced that austerity is the right policy — or until they are determined to take the consequences of leaving the euro — the crisis has not been averted but merely postponed.

At the beauty shop on Grzybowska Street, the manicurist was glancing at her watch. Dressed in a red and white top, wearing red and white feather earrings, she’d been painting people’s fingernails red and white all day long. But now she wanted to finish — soon it would be time for the match. Was she going? Of course she was going. “Everyone I know is going!”

Last Friday, it seemed as if everyone in Warsaw was going to the match — the opener of the 2012 European soccer championships, which is co-hosted this year by Poland and Ukraine. Poland was playing Greece in the first game, and more than 50,000 people were heading for the stadium. Several tens of thousands of others were gathering in the “fan zone” in the center of town. Most were dressed in the colors of the Polish flag: red shirts, white trousers, red bikini tops, white ribbons, red socks, white shoes.

The tiny minority sporting blue and white for Greece certainly stood out. But when they met, the Greek fans chanted “Hellas! Hellas!” and Polish fans responded “Polska! Polska!” and both laughed and moved on. This lack of ill will might reflect the lack of historical enmity between Poland and Greece, since Polish and Russian fans did take a few slugs at one another after their match on Tuesday. It might also reflect the fact that neither Poland nor Greece has much chance of winning the tournament anyway. I told the manicurist that many feared Poland would fail to advance past the first round. She shrugged and said, “I’m just happy we have the tournament, and I really want to enjoy it.”

I thought about those words later that evening, when I headed for the stadium, dressed in red and white, and listened to the crowd’s roars of ecstasy and agony (Poland tied Greece, 1-1 and also tied Russia 1-1, to general relief). Everyone really did have a good time chanting “Polska, Polska,” inside the stadium and out. But was it was worth it?

Based on just the math, it’s pretty clear that it wasn’t. Nobody knows yet what the final cost of the month-long Euro tournament will be to Polish and Ukrainian taxpayers, but the stadiums alone were an enormous investment. Eight arenas had to be built or refurbished, at a cost of approximately $2.8 billion, while ticket sales during the tournament are expected to yield only about $190 million. Even counting what’s likely to be spent on food, drink and hotels, there’s a large budget gap, and it isn’t going to be made up later. Warsaw’s new National Stadium cost taxpayers, according to which estimate you believe, about $550 million. It will be used four times during this tournament, and then what? Will it stand empty, like the “Bird’s Nest” stadium built for the Beijing Olympics? Or will it host tiny crowds, like the money-losing arenas built for the 2002 World Cup in South Korea and Japan?

It would hardly be surprising if this year’s soccer hosts lose money, since most international sporting events do. Consider next month’s Olympics: In 2002, the British government estimated the cost of hosting the Olympic Games at $2.8 billion. Ten years later, the price has passed $15 billion and is still rising. When everything is added up — lost business, as many as13,500 British soldiers patrolling the streets of London (more than are in Afghanistan) — the expenses may come to $38 billion.

That’s a hefty sum for any government to spend on bread and circuses — unless the nation is getting something else out of it. And after watching the opening ceremony in Warsaw last week, I wonder. The happiness of the Polish manicurist, for example, so pleased that “we have the tournament” and that Warsaw, like other European capitals, now has a “real” soccer stadium: What price do you put on that? The cheerful Ukrainian fans, their faces painted blue and yellow, so pleased to host a bunch of foreigners who otherwise wouldn’t know they exist: How much is that worth?

In modern Europe, big sporting events are pretty much the only time you’re allowed to scream your country’s name without embarrassment. At an otherwise gloomy historical moment, they’re also about the only time you’re allowed to ignore bad economic news. The Spanish prime minister abruptly ended his news conference Sunday on the bailout of his nation’s banks, on the grounds that he had to fly to Gdansk to watch his nation’s team — and everybody forgave him. Every budget-cutting bone in my body feels that major sporting investments are a waste of money. But if there were a way to put a monetary value on the national mood, perhaps the sums would come out differently.

I met Her Majesty the Queen once, at St. James’s Palace, at a diplomatic gathering I was attending in my part-time role of foreign minister’s wife. At the equivalent American event — at, say, the party the president throws every year at the U.N. General Assembly in New York — the foreign diplomats stand in line, shake the president’s hand, have their picture taken and are then rapidly ushered away. But when you meet the queen, you are at a fake cocktail party. You are standing in a small group — four or five of you, plus a “minder” from the British foreign office — and holding a drink while you wait for the queen to walk over.

She enters the room and moves from group to group. At each one, the British foreign office minder introduces her to the dignitaries present and she always — always! — thinks of something to say. “Yes, I so enjoyed my visit to Norway last year.” Or: “So looking forward to meeting your prime minister next month.” Some people curtsey. I didn’t, but not out of any particularly American revolutionary sentiment: in the excitement of being introduced to a small woman in unfashionable glasses and a dowdy pastel silk suit, I just forgot.

This weekend, the queen celebrates 60 years on the throne. In 1952, the year her father died, Winston Churchill was the prime minister of Britain. Since then, she has remained head of state while a dozen governments have come and gone. During that time Britain has been ruled by right-wing Conservatives and left-wing Labour leaders, by Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. For some of that time, the queen wasn’t particularly popular or especially beloved. At one particularly low moment, following the death of her daughter-in-law, Princess Diana, she and her extended family were very unpopular indeed.

All of that is in the past now, as the Diamond Jubilee celebrations kick off with a stunning, overwhelming and un-British lack of irony. I think it was Andrew Sullivan who once described Britain as a country in quotation marks, where everyone speaks as if they were laughing about something or at least distancing themselves from what they were about to say. None of that ironic distance could be heard this week in the voice of my friend the banker, who asked whether I would be watching the boat parade “in honor of our great queen.” Nor is it visible even in left-wing, sometimes anti-monarchical publications like the Guardian newspaper, which are filled this weekend with gushing articles about the “new Elizabethan age” and lots of details about the carriage the queen will be riding in the Jubilee procession on Tuesday.

The new enthusiasm for Her Majesty has something to do with her presentable grandsons and her new granddaughter-in-law, something to do with lower profiles — sometimes less media is more — and quite a lot to do with the passage of time. People now associate the queen and her family with certain moments of their own lives and their collective history. They remember where they were when they heard Prince Charles was born or the queen’s mother died. They remember what they were doing at the time of the Silver Jubilee. They feel nostalgic about the queen, because she’s associated with their childhood and their youth.

Most of all, the queen, simply by living so long, has come to epitomize an increasingly rare idea of duty that many in Britain, and elsewhere, admire. She doesn’t quit, she doesn’t complain, she doesn’t talk to the press or protest when people draw nasty caricatures or say unpleasant things about her family. For six decades, she has shown up at charitable events, raised money for good causes, represented Britain when she was told to, met regularly with the British, Canadian and Australian prime ministers, among others, attended all of the state ceremonies, always looked the way she was supposed to look and always thought of something to say.

She may or may not be an interesting person — there are different schools of thought on this point — but it doesn’t really matter. She isn’t supposed to be interesting, she is supposed to be steadfast, consistent, patriotic. And she is. At the end of the day, the queen is one of the few public figures who can always be relied upon to keep her emotions under control. She used to be mocked for her stiff upper lip, but no longer: In a world of kiss-and-tell books, vengeful memoirists and television confessions, her unrevealing face, reliable public smile and formal appearance make a welcome contrast. There are too many emotions on display in the public sphere at the moment, and it’s a relief that one celebrity, at least, can be relied upon never to show any at all.

Just Send Me Word
By Orlando Figes
Allen Lane, 333pp, ££20

Anyone who has ever written a history book will feel a twinge of envy on reading the preface to Just Send Me Word:

We opened up the largest of the trunks. I had never seen anything like it: several thousand letters tightly stacked in bundles tied with string and rubber bands, notebooks, diaries, documents and photographs…

It was a unique family archive, the property of Svetlana and Lev Mishchenko, and it contained, among other things, packets of their love letters.

The two had met as university students in Moscow in the 1930s, but their relationship was cut short by the outbreak of war. Lev joined the Red Army in 1940, fought near Moscow but then fell into German captivity. Upon returning to the Soviet Union in 1945 he was arrested — a common fate for Soviet ex-POWs, who were automatically considered traitors — and he remained in the Gulag until 1954.

For 14 years they lived apart. Svetlana remained in Moscow, finished her studies and took a job at a research institute. Lev was condemned to live behind barbed wire in barracks in Pechora, in the far north of Russia, where he worked in a wood-processing plant.

During that time, they wrote one another more than 1,200 letters. Many were sent via camp-smuggling networks, thus by-passing the censors. Unbelievably, they then preserved the letters for 60 years, creating the only known Gulag correspondence collection of such size and scope. What historian or history-lover could resist such a treasure trove?

Orlando Figes didn’t resist. Instead, he helped organise the transcription of the faded, yellowed, almost illegible and partly encoded letters. He consulted the very elderly Lev and Svetlana, both since deceased.  He visited Pechora and its archives. He then faced a choice: analyse the correspondence for its unusual historical content, or tell the love story of Svetlana and Lev.

Figes chose the second course, and the result is Just Send Me Word, a book which depicts with unusual intimacy the private lives of two people living in Stalin’s Soviet Union, while simultaneously telling the more universal story of what we would nowadays call a long-distance relationship.

Lev and Svetlana were separated first by war, then by distance and barbed wire. They were also separated by taboo. Before the war they had not married, and thus Svetlana had no ‘right’ to have a relationship with Lev, an ‘enemy of the people’. Her correspondence with him was considered suspect, and she was several times interviewed by the police. Most women in the same position would have broken off the relationship. But not only did Svetlana keep writing, she made the extraordinary decision in 1947 to travel to Pechora, where she smuggled herself into the camp in order to meet Lev after a seven-year separation.

Had she been caught she too would have been sentenced and sent to a camp. Years later, she marvelled at her own daring: ‘How could I have gone there without even thinking of the dangers involved?’ A photograph taken immediately after the visit shows a very determined-looking young woman with a large suitcase and a large smile. After that she went home, returned to work, took up her pen and once again began writing to Pechora twice a week.
Lev’s motivations in maintaining this horrifically difficult relationship are clear.Unable to leave Pechora, his correspondence with Svetlana provided the motivation he needed to stay alive. But Svetlana’s complicated feelings are harder to understand. She did meet other men from time to time, and she constantly had to explain her relationship with a convict. Occasionally, her frustration seeped into her letters: ‘When I got home and read your letters, I just wanted to cry, but I had nowhere and no time to cry.’

She was supported throughout not only by her love for Lev and by his eloquent letters, but also by an idealistic moral code and a sense of duty. These came mostly from her supportive family, but seem also to have been reinforced, odd though it sounds, by her equally idealistic Soviet education. In 1951, Svetlana marched in the Moscow May Day parade and was caught in a thunderstorm. ‘We had a lot of fun,’ she wrote to Lev. She and her colleagues had been singing popular songs with lyrics like ‘Pour cold water over yourself if you want to be healthy’ and ‘Become as hard as steel.’

One of the most intriguing elements of the Lev-Svetlana correspondence, in fact, is what it reveals about the relationship ordinary Russians had with Stalinist ideology. Svetlana disliked many things about the Soviet political system which had separated her from Lev. She hated the Marxist-Leninist jargon she was forced to use, and she was disturbed by the anti-Semitic ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign which Stalin launched in the early 1950s. But she was also a loyal Communist Party member, and at some level she believed in the Soviet promise of progress through science, technology and general enlightenment.

Odder still, so did Lev. At one point, he tells Svetlana that the prisoners had been shown a documentary about the Volga-Don canal:

I had no other thoughts or feelings but a sense of pride and admiration for the power of the human mind and the systematic and harmonious transformation of thousands of ideas into a human marvel.

But the Volga-Don canal had been built in part by prisoners, as he well knew. One of his campmates had been sent to work on it. Yet like so many other Soviet citizens, he had no difficulty adopting some elements of Soviet ideology — especially the quasi-religious belief in scientific progress — while rejecting others.

Separated in time and space from Stalin’s Soviet Union, we often imagine that all of its inhabitants were either automatons who mouthed every piece of propaganda with conviction, or else secret dissidents, who seethed in bitter silence. Yet the vast majority of Soviet citizens, even those inside the Gulag, had a more complicated relationship with their state and its propaganda, adopting some of its elements while privately rejecting others. In Pechora, ‘no one cried for Stalin’, Lev later remembered. Yet even after the dictator’s death he performed his Gulag ‘job’ conscientiously.

Their story ends happily: Lev and Svetlana finally married. They had two children who were brought up according to the same strict moral code. As their son remembered, Lev didn’t talk to them about the horrors of the Gulag, but rather tried to impress on them the lessons he had learned there. The most important were ‘never to feel sorry for yourself’, and ‘wherever you may find yourself, if only temporarily, you should always try to live as if it’s permanent’. He never told them ‘love conquers all’, but then he didn’t need to. He taught them that by example.
Blackwell Bookshop

If you didn’t know what lay behind the gates of the vast structure in Janzour, just outside the Libyan capital, you’d probably assume it was the Libyan Naval Academy. That, after all, is what it used to be. But drive past the empty main building and into the former living quarters, and you won’t see any sailors. Laundry hangs from the balconies. Children play in the dust below. Women in black abayas walk up and down the concrete plazas, while elderly men in long white gowns smoke cigarettes and stare at the sea.

Instead of junior officers, the naval academy now houses more than 2,000 refugees, a fraction of the 70,000 people displaced by the Libyan revolution and scattered across the country. Most of this camp’s residents come from Tawergha, a town whose inhabitants had the misfortune to be caught between soldiers loyal to Moammar Gaddafi and the anti-Gaddafi militia forces in the nearby city of Misrata last summer. A few residents — no one agrees how many — joined the regime’s soldiers, and now the Misrata militia doesn’t want any of them back. To be precise, the militia has threatened to murder anyone who returns and has bombarded some of their homes for good measure.

You won’t learn much about Janzour from the Libyan media. Although Libyan journalists have filmed interviews at the camp, their reporting has yet to be broadcast, and no one is quite sure why. The journalists speak of different priorities — the country is preparing for elections — but those in the camp blame pressure from the Misrata militia or racism: Most of the refugees are black. Lack of coverage means lack of interest. Nobody in power feels any urgency to help them.

And thus the Tawerghans remain, semi-invisible, in limbo, like so many other things in Libya, where power is still held by a Transitional National Council and a provisional government; where elections are scheduled for June; where decisions are suspended “until we have a government” and would-be investors hang around the lobby of the Radisson, drinking mint tea and waiting to see what will happen next.

This might be a good thing: In a society where everything has been controlled for more than four decades, a vacuum can be creative. Civil society, unknown in Libya until the revolution last year, has begun to reformulate, and civic groups have emerged to help care for refugees and to lobby on their behalf. The brand-new Libyan Housing Authority, a charity, helped arrange for journalists to go to Janzour. The camp itself has elected a spokesman, and tribal leaders are negotiating with the Misratans about a possible return.

But just as a vacuum can produce constructive forces, it can produce destructive ones too. Janzour has been attacked more than once by armed militia members from Misrata. In a recent raid, five people were killed.

What is true of Janzour is true of everything else: The Libyan media hang in a legal and institutional vacuum. While in Tripoli this week — I was visiting on behalf of the Legatum Institute — I went to at least three institutions that thought they were responsible for state-owned media and spoke with one state television boss who felt beholden to none of them. Dozens of newspapers and radio and television stations have emerged, as has a new breed of citizen journalist: popular talk-show hosts who have never spoken on the radio before, writers whose work previously appeared in anonymous blogs.

Would-be regulators are proliferating almost as quickly. Wanting fair elections, the transitional authorities passed a law mandating equal coverage of all 2,000 parliamentary candidates. Some think this means that anyone who airs an interview with one candidate is legally obligated to cover the other 1,999. Hoping to prevent regime loyalists from returning to public life, the transitional authorities have also banned any criticism of the revolution. But the law they have written is so vague it could imply imprisonment for anyone critical of the current government, or perhaps anyone who discusses revolutionary excesses in places such as Misrata. In that climate, it’s easy to see why Libyan reporters might not want to write about the refugees in Janzour.

Describe this situation to anyone here and most will shrug: “It will change after the elections, inshallah, when this ‘transitional period’ ends.” But while the election will give Libya its first legitimate government in generations, it won’t decide everything. The real contest isn’t between the 2,000 candidates or the dozen-odd parties, after all, but the constructive and destructive forces within Libyan society. After the voting ends, watch what happens to the talk-show hosts, the refugee advocates and the environmental activists on the one hand, and the militias and the regulators on the other — and you’ll have a good idea which way Libya is heading.

Another week, another European government falls by the wayside — and in each recent case the center was defeated by the extremes, or by what used to be the extremes before they crept into the mainstream. The Greek center-left and the Greek center-right were pummeled by outliers on both sides of the political spectrum. In the Netherlands, the machinations of an upstart party forced the centrists out of power, too.

In France, the story is subtler but still similar: In fact, both candidates spent the latter part of the campaign pandering to the far reaches of their respective parties. Hollande, a Socialist, had to win the 11 percent of French voters who cast their first-round ballots for Jean-Luc Melenchon, a Trotskyite who wants to impose tax rates of 100 percent on high earners — a policy that made Hollande’s 75 percent proposed tax look reasonable. Sarkozy, in the center-right, had to compete with Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front, who won 18 percent in the first round. Le Pen is a little vague about what she actually wants, but Sarkozy tried to attract her supporters by promising, among other things, to impose a test of “French values” on any foreigner who wants to live in France. It was an intriguing thought — perhaps would-be French citizens should be required to undergo a blind tasting to see if they can tell the difference between California chardonnay and the real thing? Alas, that idea didn’t appeal.

I once promised never to use the term “far right” to describe any European political party because these parties differ so much, from country to country, and because they often want such different things. “Far left” is usually a more useful term, since far-left parties are usually Marxist or Maoist, so they actually share some political views. But as I look across Europe, I don’t know what to call the wave of discontent, as most of the parties on the outlying right or left now have more in common with one another than they do with anyone in the center. Generally speaking, they are anti-European, anti-globalization and anti-immigration. Their leaders, in the words of a French friend, want to “withdraw from the world.” They don’t like their multiethnic capital cities or their open borders, and they don’t care for multinational companies or multilateral institutions.

Above all, they are anti-austerity: They hate the budget cuts that they believe were imposed on their national governments by outsiders in the international bond market and by their own membership in the euro zone. Never mind that those same national governments had created the need for austerity by overspending and overborrowing, or in some cases — most notably Greece — by funding vast, unaffordable and corrupt state bureaucracies over many decades. And never mind that many of them had begged to be part of the euro zone — nobody was forced to join — or that they benefited for many years from being members.

Often, they are also anti-American, or at least anti-Western-alliance. Melenchon wants France to leave NATO and cozy up to the Chinese Communist Party instead. Syriza wants Greece to move closer to Russia. And, yes, they share their dislike of liberal democracy and liberal capitalism with an earlier generation of Europeans. The far left and far right of the 1930s also dreamed of alternatives to the bland and bankrupt political center and, in some cases, tried to implement them.

I don’t foresee a new rise of fascism, and I’m not predicting the return of Stalinism, but should they get their way, the parties challenging the European center today would carry out a different kind of revolution. They would end the European Union, end the NATO alliance and drop out — or try to drop out — of the global economic order. They would turn back the clock, if they could, to a time when national governments really made decisions all by themselves — a charming fantasy that could end in various forms of disaster. It still sounds impossible — but just because something can’t work doesn’t mean someone, someday, won’t try it.

The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin
by Masha Gessen
Riverhead, 314 pp., $27.95

On November 20, 1998, Galina Starovoitova, a member of the Russian parliament, was murdered in the stairwell of her St. Petersburg apartment building. In the weeks that followed, obituaries, articles, and tributes to her life poured forth from all over the world. Starovoitova, almost everyone agreed, was different from the Russian politicians of the past and different from her contemporaries too. She spoke differently, moved differently, thought differently. She was frank, she was energetic, and she seemed genuinely interested in improving people’s lives. “Everything she said seemed fresh,” wrote The Economist. “Unlike others, she did not compromise her principles as the political winds changed; she did not mix business with politics,” wrote The Independent.

To many Russians at the time, Starovoitova’s murder also seemed like an ill omen, maybe even a major turning point in Russian politics. “If at the beginning of the reforms there was an enthusiasm, an optimism, now something has changed,” one of the thousands of mourners at Starovoitova’s funeral told The New York Times. “This shows that in our society the process of intolerance to each other is developing. I think we are on the brink,” a liberal Russian parliamentarian told Ekho Moskvy, a Moscow radio station.

It was therefore not for reasons of sentiment that Masha Gessen chose to begin The Man Without a Face, her book about Putinism—the system both created by Vladimir Putin and embodied by him—with the death of Starovoitova. In November 1998 Gessen was a young journalist who had just returned to Russia after several years in America, and she had thrown herself into Moscow life with enthusiasm. She was personally close to Starovoitova (“Galina clearly felt motherly toward me,” she writes), but she also understood Starovoitova’s symbolic significance:

In a country where political role models ran from leather-jacketed commissar to decrepit apparatchik, Galina was trying to be an entirely new creature, a politician who was also a human.

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For Gessen’s generation—liberal journalists, activists, and intellectuals in Moscow, mostly under the age of thirty when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991—Starovoitova represented the hope that Russia, and Russians, could change. Uncorrupt, unscripted, dedicated to serving her constituents, willing to speak honestly, able to laugh at her own flaws and foibles—perhaps if more politicians were like her, then Russia’s future really could be very different from the past. By contrast, her death represented the end of that hope. It also coincided with the beginning of Putin’s rise to power.

In fact, at the time of Starovoitova’s murder, Putin was not yet president of Russia. He had only recently been named head of the FSB, the successor organization to the KGB, and was just beginning to become a nationally known figure. Until then, most of his career had been passed in Dresden, East Germany, where he worked for the KGB, and in St. Petersburg where, Gessen believes, he continued working for the KGB, both while “studying” (he wrote a plagiarized thesis) and while serving as deputy to Anatoly Sobchak, the city’s flamboyant and rather opaque mayor in the tumultuous years between 1991 and 1996.

Though he hadn’t been in office very long, Putin had already begun to work on the FSB’s tarnished image, and the even more tarnished image of the KGB that had preceded it. He brought back the word “Chekist,” an old term for Lenin’s political police, coined in the 1920s, and used it with pride. He also initiated a minor cult of Yuri Andropov, the longest-serving KGB boss in Soviet history (1967–1982), as well as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, a post he held only briefly, in the year before his unexpected death in 1984. As FSB chief, Putin laid flowers on Andropov’s grave, and dedicated a plaque to his hero inside the Lubyanka, the KGB’s notorious Moscow headquarters. Later, as president, he ordered another plaque placed on the Moscow building where Andropov had lived and erected a statue to him in a St. Petersburg suburb.

But Putin wanted to restore more than Andropov’s name. He also, it seems, wanted to restore the old KGB boss’s way of thinking. Andropov, in Soviet terms, was a modernizer—but not a democrat. On the contrary, having been the Russian ambassador to Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, Andropov understood very precisely the danger that “democrats” and other freethinking intellectuals posed to totalitarian regimes. He spent much of his KGB career stamping out dissident movements of various kinds, locking people in prison, expelling them from the USSR, and sending them to psychiatric hospitals, a form of punishment invented during his tenure.

At the same time, he understood, like everyone else in the KGB, that the Soviet Union was falling behind the West economically. At the time of his death he was seeking ways to solve that problem, and he’d come to the conclusion that the problem was one of order and discipline. Though some, in retrospect, believe he sought a “Chinese” path to reform—free markets and unfree politics—only one of his ideas was ever put into practice. This was the mass anti-alcohol campaign, which included everything from restricted vodka sales to the destruction of Moldovan vineyards, and it was carried out by one of his successors, Mikhail Gorbachev.

The anti-alcohol campaign was a disaster. Not only did it create sugar shortages—sugar being an ingredient used in homemade vodka—it may have unbalanced the budget, which had relied heavily on alcohol taxes. In any case, Gorbachev abandoned it, decided that more profound changes were necessary, and the rest is history. Nevertheless, nostalgia for Andropov remained widespread among the ex-KGB elite for a very long time. The idea that Andropov died “too early” was a sentiment common to many in the ranks of the former KGB, and some even saw a conspiracy in his premature death. “They got him before he finished the job,” one ex-officer told me wistfully in 2000, just after Putin became president for the first time.

But Putin had not only made his career in Andropov’s KGB, he also shared some similar experiences with the former secret police boss. As ambassador to Budapest, Andropov had been shocked when young Hungarians first called for democracy, then protested against the Communist establishment, and then took up arms against the regime, even lynching one or two secret policemen along the way. Putin had a similar experience in Dresden in 1989, where he witnessed mass street protests and the ransacking of the headquarters of the Stasi, the East German secret police. Both men drew the same conclusion: talk of democracy leads to protest, protest leads to attacks on the Chekists, better to stop all talk of democracy before it goes any further.

For Putin, and for those in his generation—twenty years older than Gessen, and as loyal to the old Soviet state as Gessen’s friends were to the idea of a “new Russia”—Starovoitova was not, therefore, a happy harbinger of a better future. On the contrary, she was exactly the kind of person who threatened the social order. Putin understood very well the threat that uncorrupt, unscripted politicians had posed to the KGB. By 1991, he also understood very well the threat that uncorrupt, unscripted politicians posed to the secret business empires then being created by the former KGB.

Gessen does not suggest that Putin killed Starovoitova. In fact, she never found out who killed Starovoitova. The two men eventually convicted of the murder were just hired hands. As Gessen writes, “It was impossible to determine what had gotten Starovoitova killed, precisely because her standing as an enemy of the system had made here a marked woman, a doomed one.” But her friend’s death did lead her to explore, as a reporter, the secret police milieu from which Putin had emerged, and within which there were so many people who might have wanted Starovoitova out of the way.

Her book, although focused on Putin and his rise to power, is at heart a description of this secret police milieu. Born in Andropov’s KGB, it subsequently gave rise to the Russian business and political elite, while never losing the deeply cynical worldview and twisted morality of the Soviet secret police. Putin did not bring this elite to power. On the contrary, it was already in place by the end of Boris Yeltsin’s first presidential term in 1996, by which time Yeltsin, not Putin, had already restored many of the powers and privileges of the security services, and Yeltsin, not Putin, had overseen the redistribution of Russia’s natural resources to a tiny group of insiders. But as Yeltsin’s health declined, some of these insiders began to look around for a trustworthy successor who would look after their interests, and Putin seemed to have all of the right qualities.

To illustrate the nature of Russia’s new ruling class, Gessen provides portraits of several major and minor characters who have functioned within and around it since the 1990s. They include Mayor Sobchak, a friend and mentor to both Putin and his sidekick, ex-president Dmitri Medvedev; Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch—a former mathematician and engineer—who, by his own account, introduced Putin to Yeltsin, and thus facilitated his rise to power; Andrei Bystritsky, the Russian state television executive who was one of the chief propagandists for the Putin reelection campaign in 2004; and Alexander Litvinenko, the FSB officer murdered by radiation poisoning in London in 2006, after attempting to expose corruption in the FSB. She investigates Putin’s role in the botched KGB coup attempt of 1991, in the terrorist attack on a Moscow theater in 2002, and in the prosecution of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oil oligarch who was arrested in 2003 after becoming too critical of Putin, and who remains in prison almost ten years later, following a series of what can only be called show trials.

In some ways the most intriguing of all Gessen’s characters—with the exception, of course, of Putin himself—is Marina Salye, a liberal St. Petersburg politician who was chairwoman of the Leningrad City Council’s committee on food supplies in 1991 (and who died at age seventy-seven on March 21 of this year). At that time, Sobchak was the mayor, Putin was his deputy, and Leningrad, now renamed St. Petersburg, ran out of food. The Soviet economic system was imploding, there had been a tobacco riot and a sugar riot, and the city council negotiated the purchase of several trainloads of meat and potatoes. Salye was sent to Berlin to sign the contracts, as Gessen relates:

“And when we get there,” Salye told me years later, still outraged, “and this Frau Rudolf with whom we were supposed to meet, she tells us she can’t see us because she is involved in urgent negotiations with the City of Leningrad on the subject of meat imports. Our eyes are popping out. Because we are the City of Leningrad, and we are there on the subject of meat imports!”

applebaum_2-042612.jpg

Patrick McMullan/Sipa Press

Masha Gessen, New York City, March 2012

The meat never appeared. The money Salye thought was earmarked for the purchase—90 million deutschmarks—disappeared. Subsequently, Salye discovered that Putin, who then headed the mayor’s “Committee for Foreign Relations,” had been responsible for that swindle as well as many others. She learned that Putin, a trained lawyer, had knowingly entered into a dozen legally flawed contracts on behalf of the city, mostly involving the export of timber, oil, metals, cotton, and other raw materials. As Salye explained:

The point of the whole operation was this: to create a legally flawed contract with someone who could be trusted, to issue an export license to him, to make the customs office open the border on the basis of this license, to ship the goods abroad, sell them, and pocket the money. And that is what happened.

Although she couldn’t track most of the contracts, she did find documentation proving that Putin had arranged, at a minimum, for the export of some $92 million worth of commodities in exchange for food that never arrived. She wrote her findings into a report for the Leningrad City Council, which passed it on to Sobchak, with a recommendation that he fire Putin and his deputy. Salye also passed the report to President Yeltsin’s comptroller, who interviewed Sobchak and then passed the same conclusions on to President Yeltsin. “And then,” writes Gessen, “nothing happened.” The story died.

The Leningrad City Council did not get rid of Putin. Instead, Putin—or rather Mayor Sobchak—got rid of the Leningrad City Council, which was dissolved by administrative fiat not long afterward. Salye left politics. In 2000, she wrote one final article about Putin’s years in St. Petersburg. Its title: “Putin Is the President of a Corrupt Oligarchy.” That was her last public statement on the subject. Not long afterward she was so badly scared—by something—that she ran away. Gessen found her ten years later, living in a tiny village twelve hours’ drive from Moscow. Even then she wouldn’t tell Gessen what or who had frightened her. And there, once again, the story ends.

Ultimately, Salye’s story, like many of Gessen’s stories, is unsatisfactory. We never find out what really happened. We never learn why she retreated to the provinces. We never identify the mysterious forces that somehow conspired to prevent the missing meat and the crooked contracts from becoming a public scandal. Some of Gessen’s other reviewers have complained about her failure to fill in the blanks (“The problem is, there is no proof for these claims,” one wrote), or have implied, almost condescendingly, that she is a little hysterical and perhaps prone to “conspiracy theories.”

But that is exactly the point about contemporary Russia: there is no proof of anything that happened. Documents are missing. People have disappeared or changed their identities. Major companies are owned by nonexistent shell companies, and they mysteriously do the president’s bidding. After Putin’s government arrested him in 2003, Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s company, Yukos, was driven into bankruptcy and its enormous assets were sold at auction. Only one buyer turned up to bid at that auction: a previously unknown company called Baikal Finance Group, whose listed address turned out to belong to a vodka bar in the provincial town of Tver. That company then sold those assets for a pittance to Rosneft, another oil company whose major shareholder is the Russian government. Rosneft’s CEO, in addition to his business career, also held down a second job as President Putin’s deputy chief of staff.

Rosneft subsequently received the imprimatur of the international financial establishment and sold its shares on the London Stock Exchange. Yukos’s former owners and shareholders are now in jail or in exile, reduced to filing endless lawsuits against the Russian government. At times, some of them do seem a little hysterical. So does William Browder, the head of Hermitage Capital, who launched a personal and political vendetta against the Russian government after the FSB tortured and murdered his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, in a Russian prison. Before her death, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya could also seem a little hysterical. Her own book about Putinism contains even more convoluted tales of corruption, mafia, and terrorism than The Man Without a Face.*

Like Starovoitova, Politkovskaya was murdered in the stairwell of her Moscow apartment building in 2006, and that murder has never been solved either. As the corpses pile up, as the capital flows out of the country, as colonies of Russians pop up like mushrooms in London, Nice, and Courcheval, where they busily launder themselves into respectability, it’s hard not to develop a conspiracy theory, or even a set of conspiracy theories, to explain what is going on. Gessen’s book has some flaws—she fails to fill in some of the background, skips too quickly over major events, and slightly loses the chronology as a result—but it has one major virtue. Although Gessen is enough of an outsider to write beautifully clear and eloquent English, she is enough of an insider to convey, accurately, the wild swings of emotions, the atmosphere of mad speculation, the paranoia, and, yes, the hysteria that pervade all political discussion and debate in Moscow today.

Though not a standard biography, Gessen’s book is also very good at evoking not so much the precise details of Putin’s life but the culture and atmosphere within which he was raised, and the values he came to espouse. Though “proving” nothing, she establishes that he probably came from a family affiliated with the KGB—his parents were suspiciously well off, relative to their surroundings—and that he was certainly obsessed with joining the KGB from an early age. By his own account, he was drawn to the organization’s glamour, secrecy, and power. “I was most amazed by how a small force, a single person, really, can accomplish something an entire army cannot,” he told his official biographers. “A single intelligence officer could rule over the fates of thousands of people. At least, that’s how I saw it.” Putin, Gessen concludes, “wanted to rule the world, or a part of it, from the shadows.”

Eventually Putin was accepted into the secret service and went through extensive training, learning not only the techniques—including, presumably, how to assume an alias, live undercover, manipulate foreign bank accounts, and create fake companies—but also the mentality of a secret policeman. It is not by accident that Putin and his colleagues all share the KGB’s belief in the power of the state to control the life of the nation, and not by accident that they are instinctively skeptical of independent businesses, people, and organizations. In the course of their training, they learned that events cannot be allowed to just happen, they must be controlled and manipulated; that markets cannot be genuinely open, they must be managed from behind the scenes; that elections cannot be unpredictable, they must be planned in advance—as, indeed, Russia’s now are.

More importantly, these former secret policemen learned to assume that anyone critical of them and their regime is suspicious by definition, probably a foreign spy, and certainly an enemy. Starovoitova was an enemy, Politkovskaya was an enemy, Khodorkovsky was an enemy, but so is anyone who dares to question the absolute right of the Chekists to run Russia. At the end of The Man Without a Face, Gessen has appended a brief epilogue, describing the genesis of the “Snow Revolution,” the series of demonstrations that took place in Moscow at the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012. She explains that these were unplanned gatherings—the product of text messages, telephone calls, Facebook postings, and conversations between friends—that no one was in charge of, and at the beginning no one was very enthusiastic about them either. She set off for one demonstration on December 5, quite reluctantly. “Who is going to brave this kind of weather to fight the hopeless fight for democracy?” she wondered. As it turned out, the answer was “everyone. At least, everyone I know.” Her generation, fed up with the corruption and menace of public life, had finally decided, spontaneously, to take to the streets. Momentum grew, culminating in a demonstration of 50,000 people on December 10, probably the largest opposition demonstration in Moscow since 1991.

But Putin, and Putin’s henchmen, did not believe these protests came about spontaneously, because the FSB does not believe that anything comes about spontaneously. Nor does the FSB believe that independent civic groups are really independent, that nongovernmental organizations are unconnected to foreign governments, and that “democrats” really believe in democracy. “Unfortunately,” he declared back in 2007, “there are still those people in our country who act like jackals at foreign embassies…who count on the support of foreign funds and governments but not the support of their own people.” This was a direct warning to Russia’s tiny community of human rights and trade union activists, and it was perceived as such at the time.

On the night of his third and most recent reelection on March 4, Putin repeated this charge, this time describing the protesters—the men and women of Gessen’s generation—in stark and one might even say hysterical terms. “We showed that no one can impose anything on us,” he declared with great passion, tears welling up in his eyes:

We showed that our people can distinguish between the desire for renewal and a political provocation that has only one goal: to destroy Russian statehood and usurp power.

Putin doesn’t merely dislike his would-be opponents, in other words, he believes that they are sinister agents of foreign powers. He doesn’t just object to the liberal political system they support, he believes they are plotting to “usurp power” and hand the country over to rapacious outsiders. In order to keep them well away from the levers of power, he allowed only officially sanctioned candidates onto the most recent ballot—all tired, familiar faces who have lost to Putin many times before, or who stood no realistic chance of victory. Thus does Russia’s president protect his countrymen from those who would “destroy Russian statehood.”

There is no reason not to take Putin at his word here, or to doubt that he means what he says. As work in Soviet archives in recent years has shown, Soviet secret policemen also usually meant what they said. They really did believe that their internal critics were “enemies,” that the forces of imperialist-capitalist bourgeois reaction were seeking to undermine the regime, and that only the fearless Chekists stood in the way of chaos and defeat. As Gessen demonstrates, Putin has proudly inherited those beliefs, and he runs Russia in accordance with them.

Maybe you’ve read the book (Going Rogue), or perhaps you’ve seen the film (Game Change). In any case, you must know the story of how John McCain thought he’d picked a winner – a talented, unknown female running mate who would bring a touch of youth and charisma to his stodgy campaign – when he chose Sarah Palin to be his vice-presidential candidate in 2008.

Annoyed by the array of undistinguished (and indistinguishable) white, male Republican governors whom his aides were pushing on him, McCain went for a wild card: the moose-hunting, snowmobiling, evangelical governor of Alaska, a mother of five with a part-Eskimo husband and a personable wink.

The choice seemed a brilliant one, until Palin started to answer hard questions. Then it turned out that her knowledge of foreign policy was limited to Alaska’s proximity to Russia, that her grasp of the constitution was shaky and that her five children included an unmarried pregnant daughter, a fact she hadn’t bothered to tell McCain.

Now she lives on as a celebrity television personality – and as a spectre haunting Mitt Romney’s campaign. Earlier this week, Romney, who has now clinched the Republican nomination, declared that his search for a running mate had begun. As a general rule, presidential candidates try hardest to avoid the mistakes of their immediate predecessors, and the Palin disaster looms large in his campaign’s collective memory. Because of Sarah Palin, in fact, most now expect Romney’s shortlist to include politicians who are familiar, experienced and male.

This matters, though not because the vice-presidency matters. Although the job itself is hardly worth having (“not worth a pitcher of warm piss”, in one famously dismissive description), the selection process is very important indeed. It’s the first major decision a presidential candidate makes under full media scrutiny, the same kind of scrutiny all of his decisions will receive if he wins.

The vice-presidential choice is also the candidate’s only chance to make up for what he lacks, whether it is youth, experience or a wider geographical appeal. George W Bush chose Dick Cheney in 2000 because he seemed older and wiser, and because he knew about foreign policy. Barack Obama chose Joe Biden in 2008 for precisely the same reasons. John Kerry, a northerner, chose John Edwards, a southerner, in 2004 in order to shake off some of the New England stereotypes that haunted him, just as John F Kennedy of Massachusetts chose Lyndon B Johnson of Texas in 1960.

Republican candidates in particular make their vice-presidential choices with an eye to ideological balance as well. Moderate Republicans often choose vice-presidents to their Right, in order to keep that wing of their party happy. Thus the moderate Bob Dole named fiscal conservative Jack Kemp in 1996, and the moderate George Bush chose the more conservative Dan Quayle in 1988. By contrast, the conservative Ronald Reagan picked the moderate George Bush in 1980, in the hope of attracting more centrist votes. John McCain’s gamble in 2008 was partly an attempt to do both: he hoped Palin would attract the Christian conservatives to his Right, while also appealing to moderate women to his Left.

Some refuse to play by these rules. Bill Clinton picked Al Gore in 1992, despite the fact that they were the same age, had the same politics, and came from more or less the same part of the country. But that decision sent a message about Clinton, too: he was so self-confident and so sure of victory that he didn’t feel the need to make up for any deficits.

Romney’s campaign knows all of these precedents, and his advisers will be debating them in the coming weeks. But what is it, exactly, that his candidacy needs? Certainly it isn’t a wider geographical appeal. As a former governor of Massachusetts, he has strong ties to the East Coast; as a Mormon, he has strong ties to Utah and the West, which is where most Mormons live; as the son of a former Michigan governor who grew up in Detroit, he has equally strong ties to the Midwest, too.

Nor does Romney need executive experience. As an ex-governor and multi-millionaire ex-CEO of Bain and Co, he’s got it, at least on paper. For that matter, the Republican ticket doesn’t even need ideological balance, because Romney has taken every conceivable position on every issue – for and against abortion, for and against universal health care – so much so that it’s impossible to know whether to characterise him as a conservative or a liberal.

What Romney really lacks is charisma, and what he really needs is someone to help him win back the votes of women who were scared away by a Republican primary campaign that debated, among other things, the merits of contraception. What Romney really needs, in other words, is a talented, unknown female running mate who will bring a touch of youth and charisma to his stodgy campaign. Thanks to Sarah Palin, that is exactly the kind of politician he will go out of his way to avoid.

The coverage of a managed election, of the kind that took place in Russia on Sunday, is necessarily different. The candidates’ views are irrelevant; the public’s views are of marginal interest. The question of who won and who lost is also uninteresting, since everyone, even those who are paid to pretend otherwise, know the outcome has been predetermined. A couple of weeks ago, I found myself in conversation with the Russian ambassador to a European capital. I asked him who the next president of his country would be. “I have no idea,” he said. And then, to his credit, he laughed.

In truth, what matters during a managed election is not the election but the management. How convincing was the propaganda? How expertly did the authorities deflect dissent? The point of a managed election, after all, is not to pick a winner but to reinforce the legitimacy of an illegitimate regime.

By those criteria, last weekend’s Russian election did achieve some successes. Apparently, millions of people did actually vote — some 64 percent, according to (possibly exaggerated) official statistics, though outsiders report “brisk” turnout as well. This is a major achievement for the second Putin presidential regime: It implies that a lot of Russians still believe, at some level, that participation matters, even if the outcome is known well in advance.

The regime also scored some points by not overstating its victory too much. Had Vladi­mir Putin followed in the footsteps of President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, who claimed an utterly implausible 80 percent victory in 2010, he would have made himself look foolish. As it was, the 64 percent Putin claimed is just barely plausible — independent monitors think the real number hovered around 50 percent — but at least he conceded that some other people might have received votes, giving the whole exercise a thin veneer of respectability.

The regime’s decision to tolerate a handful of mass protests in Moscow, at least in the run-up to polling day, was also successful. There were no corpses or bloodied demonstrators on the world’s television screens in the days before the election, and thus no loud Western condemnations, which might have echoed in Russia. Demonstrations in the capital did not, in fact, spread much around the country — cold weather helped — and thus the opposition movement could be plausibly dismissed as an urban hipster phenomenon.

But there were also some important failures. Putin’s victory speech on Sunday was a big one. Before voting had even finished in Russia’s far east, he declared himself the winner using the kind of emotional language usually deployed at the end of a long war. He denounced “attempts to destroy Russia’s statehood and usurp power,” and he appeared to weep as he told supporters, “I promised you we would win. We have won. Glory to Russia!” Later, his spokesman blamed the wind for the copious tears, but the damage was done: If you have just won an election in which you had no genuine opponents — all of the other candidates were regime-approved — and if hundreds of people have reported massive electoral fraud, you shouldn’t overstate the moral significance of your victory.

It’s a tough line to tread, of course. On the one hand, an authoritarian leader who has prevailed in a managed election has to keep up appearances and pretend that the voting mattered. On the other hand, he can’t assume that all challenges to his legitimacy will now automatically disappear. Above all, he must be careful not to make himself look silly. A lot of people will tolerate a little bit of pretense, but fewer will tolerate aggressive lies of the kind Putin told on Sunday evening. If Putin becomes carried away by his own falsehoods — if he really begins to believe that all of his opponents are in the pay of Hillary Clinton, for example, and acts accordingly — he might risk a major backlash.

Perhaps one will come. But it hasn’t yet. Despite criticism inside and outside Russia, despite witty jokes at his expense, despite Internet and street protests, Putin has won in the only way that really matters: Once again, he is president of Russia. The struggle to rid Russia of his corrupt and venal regime has only just begun.

— Fayssal al-Hamwi, Syria’s
ambassador to the United Nations,
in Geneva on Feb. 28

On Sunday, Syrians “voted” in a constitutional referendum that reflected “ citizens’ keenness on moving forward with the reform process ,” in the words of the government’s news agency. On the same day, 17 people were killed in Homs by the government’s military forces, while the International Red Cross tried, and failed, to negotiate safe passage for the wounded out of the city. The Syrian regime now has two faces: the pseudo-democratic one it turns to the outside world, and the vicious one it turns on its own people.

Although that contrast is clear, a Western military coalition of the willing isn’t going to emerge quickly on behalf of Syria, as it did for Libya. Syria’s ethnic divisions resemble those in Iraq, its ruling clique is sustained by Iran, its opposition is chaotic and some of its population is so scared of what might come next that they may be inclined to support the regime. The Syrian army has better weapons than the Libyan army (which itself collapsed only in the nick of time, just before NATO’s ammunition ran out), and Western publics are war-weary. But before we throw up our hands and let the Saudis send jihadists to “help” the Syrian rebels (like they once “helped” the Afghan mujaheddin), we have several more cards to play.

One involves taking Syria’s human rights rhetoric seriously — and turning it against the regime. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations and others have collected, compiled and published evidence of the regime’s abuses, including the names and positions of Syrian officers who ordered soldiers to fire on unarmed demonstrators; accounts of torture and arbitrary detention; descriptions of rape, abuse and murder of children; and evidence of the mass slaughter of regime opponents over many years.

It’s time to refer this material to the United Nations, the Arab League, the International Criminal Court (not a body I like, but since it exists we should use it); to hand it publicly to Syrian officials; to read it in Arabic on the radio; to use it in statements and at news conferences. A single speech by the American president or the British prime minister that named the criminal Syrian army officers could have an enormous impact, once it has been beamed back into Syria via radio, satellite TV, the Internet and word of mouth.

Western leaders have refrained from this kind of language because, as Hillary Clinton put it this week, using labels like “war criminal” to describe Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, can “limit options to persuade leaders to step down from power.” She is right — which is why rhetoric aimed at delegitimizing the regime should be accompanied by immediate and strenuous efforts to not only unify the opposition but also to get its disparate members talking about the post-Assad future. Syrian rebels need to start talking about transitional justice: how, exactly, former regime allies will be treated, how real criminals will be distinguished from mere collaborators, how victims will be compensated and how the minority rule of a dictatorial clan can be ended without bloodshed.

This isn’t an impossible dream: South Africa managed to avoid civil war, in an analogous (though hardly identical) situation. Violence there was avoided in part because the outgoing minority participated in the transition. If some of the Alawite elite can be persuaded to do the same, Syria stands a chance of avoiding civil war. There isn’t anybody to talk to in Assad’s immediate circle; all have blood on their hands. But if the Syrian rebels can reassure others in Damascus, Ala­wites as well as Christians, that they won’t become the targets of a campaign of revenge, then they stand a better chance of persuading more people to switch sides. The crucial moment of the revolution — when the regime’s supporters begin to sympathize with their opponents — may be fast approaching.

One way or another, this conflict will end. Assad will fall — or he will remain in power thanks to a bloodbath, followed by another era of sullen repression. Either way, one of the best things the West can do is help Syrian rebels and the Syrian diaspora think about what might come next. It seems ridiculous to focus on the future in the middle of a crisis. But in this case, that might be the only way the crisis can be resolved.