“The Estonian KGB,” Tsalitis said.
“You mean the whole thing, the meetings, the arguments, the discussion of KGB tactics, the small army they had following me, all that was a performance?”
“They are brilliant actors,” Antanas said.
“But what was the point of it? Just to prevent me from meeting a group of Estonian dissidents?”
“Not only that,” said Antanas. “The Soviet Union is a land of miracles and from time to time the KGB likes to create reality.”
The snow was coming down harder now and it was getting late. We rode silently through the Lenin Hills and along the embankment to Kutuzovsky Prospekt and then across the bridge and past the American Embassy to the Sadovoye Ring Road. I drove them to the bridge over the Tsvetnoy Boulevard where we got out of the car and shook hands. Terleckas gestured toward me as they got ready to leave. “Look at him,” he said to Tsalitis, “a free man. Can you imagine, a free man.”
Several weeks after my meeting with Terleckas and Tsalitis, the Financial Times published my report on nationalism in Lithuania under the headline, “The Ghost in the Machine.” A detailed summary of the article was broadcast back to the Soviet Union by the Russian service of the BBC so, in the end, the Lithuanian dissidents got their wish. What was happening in the republic became known in both the Soviet Union and the West.
I never made direct contact with the Estonian dissidents but, in May, the real Erik Udam arrived in Moscow and left a statement describing the KGB’s reaction to my visit to Tallinn. I was away and only received a copy of the statement several weeks later. According to the statement, Major Albert Molok of the Estonian KGB met with Udam in April at Molok’s request and suggested he organize a dissident group to give false information to Western correspondents. Molok said that it was his achievement that David Satter of the Financial Times had not met with him in February. He said Udam could choose the group’s members but they would have to be approved by the KGB. Udam said that such a scheme would quickly be discovered, Molok said that to keep the KGB connection secret, he would make sure that the group was lightly persecuted. When Udam rejected Molok’s suggestion, Molok asked him if he could recommend someone else but Udam said he would not recommend such a gigantic deception to anyone.
I ended up working five more years for the Financial Times in Moscow and never again fell for a KGB provocation. Indeed, I became convinced that Terleckas was right and the whole point of the Soviet system was to create reality and then impose this world of illusions on a helpless population by force. In early 1983, I testified before the U.S. Congress on “Stopping Communism without War” and argued that the Soviet Union’s false ideology compelled it to create illusions and, as a result, the most effective weapon against communism was not arms but the truth. I published an article based on this testimony on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.
Several days after the article appeared, I wrote to Kestutis and enclosed a copy. Kestutis had succeeded in leaving Lithuania and was working for the Lithuanian service of Radio Liberty in Munich. A week later, a reply came that showed he had finally forgiven me for my mistakes in the Baltics. It said: “You did not spend your years in the Soviet Union in vain.”
ERZEUGT DURCH JUTOH - BITTE REGISTRIEREN SIE SICH, UM DIESE ZEILE ZU ENTFERNEN
Financial Times, Tuesday, August 17, 1976
Impressions of Moscow:
Beyond the Looking Glass
On a summer afternoon, Moscow from the Lenin Hills is a vast city of wide avenues and brownish yellow apartment blocks, crisscrossed by greenbelts of forests and parks. A meandering river divides it, lined by factories pouring smoke into a hazy sky and dotted by ancient churches with golden cupolas.
The city spreads out for miles, powerful, busy, like any other major capital. It is only down below, on crowded streets full of bare shops and communist slogans, that it is different.
Few, if any, cities can compete with Moscow in the style of its public pronouncements or the omnipresence of the police. Rooftop signs and placards extol comradeship, brotherhood and freedom. Posters on street corners call for an end to the arms race.
Even so, it is not Moscow’s progressivism that strikes one so much as that for the capital of a “peace-loving” society, it is unusually tightly controlled. Militia men are a common sight on the streets or in cars, traffic police are posted at virtually every intersection and armed guards stand watch 24 hours a day at the entrances to every one of Moscow’s embassies and foreign “ghettos.” Sometimes it seems that the city exists simultaneously on two different levels, propaganda and reality, with a continual effort being made to convince people that the first is the truth.
To help propaganda along, ordinary Russians are cut off from outside sources of information and from foreigners, who live, shop, and work in special facilities. The guards at the embassies and foreign ghettos give a friendly salute to foreigners they recognise. But if an unauthorised Russian approaches, they become sneering and, if the Russian has the nerve to try to get past, rough.
After a few weeks in Moscow, the new arrival begins to realise that he is living in an unreal world where there is little connection between what he is being told and what he knows to be true. Because of the control over information, what is obviously black can frequently be referred to as white.
Examples are everywhere. Although Soviet citizens will feel its effects for years to come, the 1975 harvest failure is always referred to obliquely in public and attributed exclusively to unfavourable weather conditions. Signs in restaurants announce that Thursday is “fish day,” not because of a nationwide meat shortage but to “balance people’s diets.”
Three middle-aged American correspondents are not only denounced as CIA agents and described for good measure as men whose adventures resemble those of “James Bond.” The attempt to construct reality is also extended to Soviet history, which is presented as a series of triumphs with little mention of its darker side.
Few foreigners realise how much attention is still devoted in the Soviet Union to the last war. It is a favourite subject of newspaper articles, television programmes and films. Posters printed last year to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the victory hang in people’s offices and flats, young men wear commemorative medals and people buy cups with 30th anniversary of the victory insignias.
There are human reminders of the war too, an entire generation of widows. They are a familiar sight in Moscow checking coats in restaurants, working as attendants in hotels or offices or sweeping the streets with twig brooms near the Kremlin Wall. They can be officious busybodies or sweet and kind-hearted but somehow the sight of them lends a certain credence to the Russians’ oft-repeated desire for peace.
On the other hand, there is not a word about the millions who died in Stalin’s purges and labour camps. Most of the old Bolsheviks put to death by Stalin remain non-persons in the country they helped found, and no guide is likely to point out “Solzhenitsyn Square,” on busy Leninsky Prospekt, where the now exiled writer worked as a prison labourer on a construction site, or the large grey house opposite the Kremlin where members of the Soviet elite lived a privileged existence until the fury of the purges in the late 1930s.
Reality is distorted in the Soviet Union. But the task of disentangling Soviet reality from Soviet propaganda, filling in the spaces deliberately left blank, is all the more difficult because the Soviets occasionally succeed, by concentrating enormous effort and
