Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union
ibidem-Press, Stuttgart
Content
Abbreviations and Administrative Delineations
Introduction
Never Speak to Strangers
Impressions of Moscow: Beyond the Looking Glass
Soviets’ Long Queue to Nowhere
Angry Russians Can’t Understand Inflation
The Dissidents Who Strive for Western Freedoms in Russia
The Ghost in the Machine
The Price of Respectability
Taking a Healthy Rest
The Price of Soviet Achievements
A Burning Issue
From Russia Without Love
Trials of the Workers
The Price of Calling the Helsinki Bluff
Shaken, but Ready to Rise Again
Soviet Dissent and the Cold War
Why Moscow Has Georgia on Its Mind
Angry Nationalist Struggle Against Soviet Power
Afghanistan’s Rocky Road to Socialism
Russia’s ‘Civilised North’
Moscow Yields to ‘Interference’
Tensions Between Systems Show at Summit
Bitter-Sweet Search for Ancestors in Ukraine
The Crime That Can Only Exist Behind Closed Borders
Planning and Politics Strangle the Soviet Economy
Josef Stalin’s Legacy Leaves Soviet Leaders in Dilemma
Sakharov’s Arrest Links Dissidence with Detente
The Limits of Detente
200 Soviet Officials Held
Fighting a War of Shadows
Moscow Starts ‘Phoney War’ Over Peace
Why the Russians Think They Have Taken Schmidt for a Ride
Russia Through the Looking Glass
View from Middle Russia
How the Kremlin Kept Moscow Under Wraps
Russia Keeping Its Hands off Poland
Where Some Miners Are More Equal Than Others
Moscow Weighs Gains and Losses Against Dictates of Ideology
Soviet Defeat in Poland
Few Goods in Grocery Store 7
The Soviet View of Information
A Match for the Soviets
The KGB Puts Down a Marker
The System of Forced Labor in Russia
The Soviets Freeze a Peace Worker
What Russia Tells Russians About Afghanistan
The Legacy of Leonid Brezhnev
The Soviets Slam the Door on Jewish Emigration
Soviet Threat Is One of Ideas More Than Arms
Treating Soviet Psychiatric Abuse
The Kremlin Tortures a Psychiatrist
Yuri Andropov: The Specter Vanishes
Private Soviet Screenings of Forbidden Films? Insane!
In New Gulag, Soviets Turning to Murder by Neglect
Don’t Talk with Murderers
Moscow Feeds a Lap-Dog Foreign Press
Moscow’s ‘New Openness’ Illusion
A Test Case
Why Glasnost Can’t Work
A Journalist Who Loved His Country
Response to Fukuyama
Winter in Moscow
Setting the Sverdlovsk Story Straight
Moscow Believes in Tears
The Seeds of Soviet Instability
The Rise of Nationalism
Yeltsin: Shadow of a Doubt
A Tragic Master Plan
The Failure of Russian Reformers
Rude Awakening
Yeltsin: Modified Victory
Organized Crime Is Smothering Russian Civil Society
The Wild East
The Shadow of Aum Shinri Kyo
The Cost of the Yeltsin Presidency
The Rise of the Russian Criminal State
David Satter interviews Ida Milgrom, the mother of Jewish dissident, Anatoly Shcharansky, outside the courthouse in Moscow where Shcharansky was tried in July, 1978. In the background (center) is Kevin Klose, Moscow correspondent of The Washington Post (photo by Robin Knight).
The Human Rights Situation in Russia
Anatomy of a Massacre
The Shadow of Ryazan
Not so Quick
Death in Moscow
Stalin’s Legacy
A Low, Dishonest Decadence
Terror in Russia: Myths and Facts
Ordinary Monsters
The Murder of Paul Klebnikov
The Tragedy of Beslan
The Communist Curse
Stalin Is Back
What Andropov Knew
G-8 Crasher
Nikita Khrushchev’s Hard Bargains
Who Killed Litvinenko?
Boris Yeltsin
Russia on Trial
Land for Peace
Putin Changes Jobs—and Russia
Poisonous Patriotism
Obama and Russia
Who Murdered These Russian Journalists?
Obama’s Outreach to Muslims Won’t Achieve Its Goal
Putin Runs the Russian State —and the Russian Church Too
Mission to Moscow
Obama’s Russian Odyssey
Psyching out U.S. Leaders
The President’s Mission to Moscow
The Summit: Day 2
Natalya Estemirova
A Wounded Bear Is Dangerous
Pining for Authoritarianism
Remembering Beslan
Afghanistan: Lessons from the Soviet Invasion
Yesterday Communism, Today Radical Islam
A Passion to Relive the Past
Road to ‘Zero’
Symposium: Is Hannah Arendt Still Relevant?
Women Who Blow Themselves Up
A Hollow Achievement in Prague
Symposium: When Does a Religion Become an Ideology?
That Russian Spy Ring: The Broader Meaning
Never Forget: New Fanatical Ideology, Same Prescription: Defeat
Khodorkovsky’s Fate
Putin’s Facade Begins to Crumble
Why Putin Is Tottering
The Character of Russia
Obama’s Open Microphone
Russia’s Chance for Redemption
Russia and the Communist Past
Awaiting the Next Revolution
Clinton in the WSJ Strays on Russia Relations
Punk-Rock Authoritarianism
The Long Shadow of “Nord Ost”
Russia’s Orphans
David Satter on Life in the Soviet Police State
Russians Arrest CIA Agent
The NSA and the Soviet Union
Obama Defends Putin
Russia’s False Concern for Children
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.
In September, 1999, Western journalists in Russia faced their greatest challenge as apartment buildings were blown up in the middle of the night and evidence mounted that the perpetrators were agents of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). The bombings were used to justify a new invasion of Chechnya which helped Putin to become Russia’s new president. Putin restored the institutions of the Soviet Union—false propaganda, militarism and hostility to the West. But as Putin’s grip on power tightened and the apartment bombings were followed by assassinations and new provocations, journalists largely restricted themselves to the official version of events, leaving the reality of Putin’s Russia concealed by ever more elaborate lies.
The articles in this collection are a chronicle of Russia almost from the day I arrived in the Soviet Union as a young correspondent in 1976 until the present. Depicted here are the things I saw, the people I met and the events I witnessed as reported by me to my readers in the West. In the broad sense, this is a record of one person’s attempt to penetrate the false reality of a country which was not like other countries but always sought to depict itself as something it is not.
Emigres from the former Soviet Union often despair of their inability to convey the truth of their experiences to the West. Arthur Koestler, a former communist and the author of Darkness at Noon, the classic novel about the Moscow purge trials of the 1930s, told a colleague that it was always the same with the comfortable and insular West. “You hate our Cassandra cries and resent us as allies,” he said. “But when all is said, we ex-communists are the only people … who know what it’s all about.”
In fact, it is not necessary to be an ex-communist to understand what it is all about. But penetrating the veil of Russian mystification requires effort and the ability to understand that seeing is not always believing. The Russians have created an entire false world for our benefit. The articles in this collection reflect my 40 year attempt to see them as they are.
Never Speak to Strangers
By David Satter
February, 1977
A bleak, overcast day in Riga had given way to a night that was clear and bitter cold. The red lights on the last car of the Riga to Tallinn overnight train glowed in the frigid air as the train backed into the station. I gathered my things and walked to the seventh car where I handed in my ticket and boarded the train. I entered my compartment and was surprised to see a young woman seated on one of the bunks. She had black hair, which was freshly set, a heart shaped face, pale complexion, and lovely dark eyes. I guessed she was about 28 years old.
I took off my coat, put my suitcase under the bunk and sat down opposite her. Two other persons soon joined us. The first was a tall, sandy haired man with broad shoulders who was wearing a heavy coat and a double-breasted jacket. He said that he was a boxing instructor from the Ukraine. The second was another woman in her 20’s, who entered the compartment carrying several packages. She was thin and bird like with a petulant expression. She had red hair and wore bright red lipstick. She said her name was Masha Ivanova.
As the train began moving, the attendant gave us back our tickets and brought us glasses of tea. Rivers and the skeletons of bridges passed by in the moonlight. The pale lights of occasional villages appeared and disappeared on the horizon and the train was soon rolling rhythmically through a landscape of pine forests and snow blanketed fields.
It occurred to me that it might be more than just a coincidence that a man and two attractive women my own age were riding in the same compartment with me but I decided that this compartment on a train between two Baltic capitals, on a quiet Saturday night—which the KGB was undoubtedly taking off anyway—was a sanctuary. I felt relaxed and, in any case, believed that members of my generation had something in common wherever we happened to be.
I decided to travel to the Baltics at the suggestion of Kestutis Jokubynas, a former Lithuanian political prisoner who I had met in Moscow. Kestutis and I agreed to meet in Vilnius and he promised to give me the names of contacts in Riga and Tallinn. But, being new to the Soviet Union, I also asked the Soviet news agency, Novosti, for help in setting up official interviews.
I arrived in Vilnius by train on February 15, 1977 shortly after dawn and met Jokubynas at my hotel. We took a bus to Kestutis’s apartment. Kestutis lived in a single room in a housing block in a new area of the city. A solitary window let in the gray light of an overcast day and the walls were bare except for a rectangle of barbed wire over the fold out bed, a reminder of 17 years that Kestutis had spent in the camps. Kestutis poured me a cup of tea. He said he had little hope that he would live to see an independent Lithuania. He then mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that the next day, February 16, was the anniversary of Lithuanian independence.
At 5 pm, it became dark. We traveled by bus to the Old City, the heart of historic Vilnius, a section of weathered stone buildings, winding narrow streets, and gloomy inner courtyards in the shadow of ornate Catholic churches. From there, we took a bus to see Antanas Terleckas, another nationalist, who lived outside of Vilnius, on the edge of the Nemencine Forest. When we arrived, Terleckas welcomed us and we entered a small room crowded with people of all ages who were sitting on worn couches and chairs. The conversation was about what would happen the next day with nearly everyone predicting a show of force on the streets as in past years on February 16.
Several of the teenagers said that they would try to put flowers on the grave of Jonas Basanavicius, the father of the Lithuanian national movement who, by an odd coincidence, died on February 16. The point of laying flowers on his grave was to mark the national anniversary. But if stopped by the police, they could pretend that it was a personal gesture on the anniversary of Basanavicius’s death. This would convince no one, of course, but the police could be counted on not to arrest them at the graveside because that would acknowledge their fear of nationalism which officially did not exist.
The dissidents described the Lithuanian national activity in recent months—underground journals, the raising of the old Lithuanian flag over the ministry of internal affairs, arrests. I filled up most of a notebook and agreed to meet with Jokubynas in front of my hotel at 7 pm the following night.
The next morning was cold and overcast. I went with my guide for an interview with a government official and in the afternoon, for a trip to a collective farm. On the way, our car stopped to pick up a man who said he was an agronomist.
We left the collective farm in the late afternoon and the agronomist proposed that we take tea at a nearby club. I was anxious to return to Vilnius but agreed and we drove for 20 minutes before arriving at an isolated house. Although we had supposedly come for tea, the table was set for an elaborate meal. The agronomist said the club contained a Finnish sauna. He referred to the sauna several more times and then, elbowing me gently, asked, “How would you like to try it out?”
An hour passed in increasingly stilted conversation. Finally, ignoring the agronomist and addressing the guide, I said I wanted to leave. This brought an angry response from the agronomist who said the time had come to try out the Finnish bath. The agronomist, the guide and the manager of the club began chanting, “Finnish bath, Finnish bath.” I finally got up, took my coat and walked out to the car. It was only after I stood outside for 15 minutes that my guide and the agronomist joined me and we rode back into town.
I arrived in Vilnius at 7:30 pm but there was no sign of Jokubynas. I called Valery Smolkin, one of his friends. He said Kestutis had probably been arrested and suggested I come to his apartment to wait. I caught a cab and we turned down one of the side streets where I saw the scene that had been predicted by the nationalists the previous night. At each corner, uniformed police surrounded by milling crowds of obvious plainclothesmen were stopping passersby and checking their documents. The cabdriver, a Russian, said a policeman had been shot in a robbery of the state insurance company.
I arrived at Smolkin’s apartment at 8:40 pm. Three hours later, there was a knock at the door and Smolkin opened it to Kestutis who took off his coat, which was wet with newly fallen snow. He said that he had been on his way to meet me in front of the hotel when he was surrounded by five plain clothesmen. He was taken to a police station, the same one where he was taken after his first arrest in 1947, and put in a cell. He was then interrogated by a police officer who appeared drunk and spoke in a weird combination of Russian and Lithuanian and told him he was a suspect in the robbery of the state insurance company.” “I’ve been in the camps,” Kestutis said, “I’m not going to participate in your comedy.”
In the end, we spoke for several more hours and Kestutis gave me the address of Ints Tsalitis, a Latvian nationalist in Riga and the names and addresses of dissidents in Estonia. He also made one request. He asked me to make sure my notes from Lithuania never left my hands. I agreed and at that moment, I certainly intended to keep my promise.
The next morning I flew to Riga. The train from Vilnius to Riga was closed to foreigners. After I checked into my hotel, I realized that I had filled a notebook in Vilnius and would need a new one to interview city officials. I had promised the Lithuanians that I would keep my notes with me but the notebook was an awkward size. I finally forced it into my jacket pocket and left for the interview. That afternoon, however, I put the notebook in my suitcase and locked the suitcase in my room, leaving the key with the room clerk downstairs.
When I returned to the hotel, it was already dark. I asked the girl at the reception desk for the key to my room. But she looked and said she could not find it. I went upstairs and asked the floor attendant but she did not have the key either. I was now seriously worried. I went out for a walk. When I returned, I asked the girl at the desk to check again for my key. “Here it is,” she said, reaching into a slot in the key rack, “it was here all along.”
I took the key and went upstairs to my room. The light of the street lamps cast a pale glow in the darkness through the room’s nylon curtains. I opened my suitcase and saw that the notebook from Vilnius was still there. Everything appeared untouched.