Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union. David Satter

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СКАЧАТЬ Putin and Obama in St. Petersburg

       The Curse of Russian “Exceptionalism”

       Snowden’s New Identity

       Did Putin Insult the Pope?

       Why Journalists Frighten Putin

       Open Letter to Margarita Simonyan, Chief Editor of Russia Today

       My Expulsion from Russia

       Putin’s Shaky Hold on Power

       The Russian State of Murder Under Putin

       Putin Is No Partner on Terrorism

       Russia Questions for Rex Tillerson

       The ‘Trump Report’ Is a Russian Provocation

       Trump Gives a Boost to Putin’s Propaganda

       From Russia With Chaos

       Trump Must Stand Strong Against Putin

       How America Helped Make Vladimir Putin Dictator for Life

       Who Killed Boris Nemtsov?

       100 Years of Communism —and 100 Million Dead

       A Christmas Encounter With the ‘Russian Soul’

       How to Answer Russia’s Escalation

       Putin’s Aggression Is the Issue in Helsinki

       The Satirist Who Mocked the Kremlin —and Russian Character

       When Russian Democracy Died

       Contribution to “We Need Sakharov”

       Collusion or Russian Disinformation?

       A Pioneer Who Witnessed Revolutions

       Hold Russia Accountable for MH17

       Afterword to English Language Edition of Judgment in Moscow

       Acknowledgements

Abbreviations and

      Administrative Delineations

      FSB — Federal Security Service

      FSO — Federal Guard Service

      IMF — International Monetary Fund

      KGB — Committee for State Security

      RUBOP (formerly RUOP) — Regional Directorate for the Struggle with Organized Crime

      SVR — Foreign Intelligence Service

      Krai — Province or territory

      Oblast — Region

      Raion — District

      Okrug — Administrative subdivision, for example, of Moscow or military district

Introduction

      The Marquis de Coustine, writing in the early 19th century, said that it was possible for a foreigner to travel from one end of Russia to the other and see nothing but false facades. In June, 1976, when I arrived in Moscow as the accredited correspondent of the Financial Times of London, I was confronted by a country that resembled nothing so much as a giant theater of the absurd.

      I spent six years in the Soviet Union, from 1976–82. During this period, I sensed the uniqueness of the situation and began collecting the personal stories of Soviet citizens with the intent of preserving them for posterity. I was banned from the Soviet Union after 1982, allowed back in 1990, and finally expelled from Russia in 2013 on the grounds that the security organs regarded my presence as “undesirable.”

      During these years, I observed four different Russias which managed to differ radically from each other while remaining essentially the same. From 1976 to 1982, I witnessed the Soviet Union at the height of its world power and a people in a state of ideological stupefaction. With the advent of Gorbachev’s perestroika, the Soviet population was liberated from the unreal world of the ideology and the state hurtled to its inevitable collapse. When independent Russia emerged from the wreckage, the failure to replace the missing ideology with a genuine set of universal moral values led to Russia’s complete criminalization.

      Finally, the unreal world of the Soviet ideology took its revenge in September, 1999 with the bombing of four Russian apartment buildings that made possible Vladimir Putin’s rise to power and the resurrection in Russia of the Soviet Union in a different guise.

      The imaginary world of Marxist-Leninist ideology never really went away because the issue was never its validity but rather its political effectiveness. Mentally subjugated individuals can be treated as raw material for the purposes of the state which is why an ideology is so useful. By the time I was expelled from Russia in 2013, the re-propagandizing of Russia had been long accomplished and Russia is in a state of ideological control without an ideology to this day.

      As Russia evolved, the conditions of work for a journalist also changed. During the Brezhnev period, all official information was organized to confirm the truth of the imaginary world. Real information was available but it was unofficial and getting it entailed taking a risk. This accounted for the unique role of the Soviet dissidents. They took it upon themselves—and often paid for their efforts with terms in Soviet labor camps—to provide truthful information about historical events and the conditions in the country to diplomats and journalists. The best informed foreign journalists were those with the closest ties to dissidents.

      During the perestroika period, the regime itself began to release information that, had it been published months earlier by a dissident would have led to the latter’s arrest. Gorbachev wanted to use limited freedom to, as he put it, “unleash the potential of socialism”. This was only possible, however, by lifting the dead hand of the ideology which meant free information. For journalists, this situation was nearly incomprehensible. The regime seemed to be organizing its own demise. But journalists were not the only ones who were confused. Gorbachev’s effort to reform the Soviet Union by undermining the credibility of its ideology led inevitably to the Soviet Union’s collapse.

      After the fall of the Soviet Union, journalists faced a country that, while no longer communist, was taken over by criminals and so was not truly free. If the Soviet Union was justified by the myths of communism, Yeltsin’s Russia was justified by the myth of democratic, anti-communist reform. Foreign journalists could travel and write freely (although Russian journalists were frequently killed) but they had to struggle to distinguish appearance from reality. The endurance of the belief that the Yeltsin period was the flowering of Russian democracy is a tribute to the fact that very few journalists passed that test.

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