Masha Gessen

When I left for my two-week Fulbright visit to Russia, I thought that I'd have a lot to write about.  However, my trip came in the midst of mounting tensions related to Russia's seizure of the Crimea and ethnic tensions in the rest of the Ukraine.  The diplomatic crisis in the Ukraine overwhelmed me and utterly overshadowed my trip.  Where was Russia heading?  Why were U.S.-Russian diplomatic relations seemingly worse than they had been than at many points during the Cold War?  Although I have always been primarily interested in Russia's early Bolshevik history, my work in Russia, coupled with the Ukrainian situation, pulled me into the present.  Who was the man behind the portraits which pervaded Russian academia, and dominated the global headlines?

Upon my return from Russia, I turned toward Masha Gessen's The Man Without a Face:  The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.  To be honest, I don't know enough about the Russian present to be sure that Gessen is the most objective analysis of Putin's legacy.  Although Gessen's journalistic credentials are impeccable, she hardly seems to credit Putin for any sort of political legitimacy.  Upon leaving his job, the editor of The Moscow Times excoriated Putin's undemocratic legacy but acknowledged that the autocrat's Moscow was becoming safer, richer, more culturally vibrant, and perhaps more liveable.  Even so, Gessen's biography of Putin is a good place to start if one wants to examine the worst aspects of Putin's rise to power. She has done her homework on the man who has helped to eliminate a variety of democratic practices and institutions in order to promote a more stable or at least more powerful Russia.  Gessen's Putin is a crude if also wiley man.  While it seems unfair grant too much significance to the fact that Putin spent his early years fighting neighborhood toughs in the streets, Gessen provides a great deal of evidence to suggest that Putin's meteoric rise to power was made possible by his status as an active, or at least reserve, KGB officer.

Gessen's overall critique of Putin in power is that he is a ruthless, Soviet-style, autocrat, obsessed with recovering Russia's lost glory and prestige.  On the issue of corruptness, Gessen acknowledges that Putin had once made a name for himself by refusing bribes, but then proceeds to say that Putin may now be one of Russia's richest citizens, building a $1 billion vacation house on the Black Sea.  Gessen admits that she cannot conclusively prove many of the darkest allegations against Putin, but she seems to several politically-motivated murders, in addition to two incidents of mass terror, either directly or indirectly at Putin's feet. Clearly, Gessen's virulently anti-Putin biography cannot be the last word on either Putin the man or the nation he leads. For many of Gessen's strongest attacks against Russia's strongman aren't contextualized either by Russia's disappointing experience with liberalism, or by the West's imperfect record of respecting the prerogatives of a great power.  Even so, in an undemocratic society, an undemocratically elected regime as the burden of proof when it comes to establishing a record for respecting human rights.

In any event, my own travels made me agree with Vladimir Sorokin's recent article on the matter.  My strongest impression in Russia came when I went to see the Lubyanka symbol of so much Soviet terror. How could this monument to the secret police's criminal past remain in operation under the auspices of the FSB?  In Hungary, the main site of detention and torture is now a museum, appropriately titled The House of Terror.  Not so in Russia.  Sorokin remembers how the anti-Soviet mob brought down the state of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet Union's secret police.  When a few brave members of the crowd scaled the statue to topple the statue of one of the Bolshevik's most repulsive representatives, they were asked to wait patiently for a truck to cart the statue away.  The fear was that a falling statue would damage some wiring under the pavement below it.  Sorokin recalls how he knew the Russia's emerging revolution was in real trouble.  If the Russian people didn't have enough willpower or anger to clarity of historical memory to destroy even this symbol of terror, how would they overthrow the mentality it represented?

Sorokin's perspective corresponds to my own thoughts on the matter.  Soviet symbols are everywhere in Russia today, and the cult of personality surrounding Putin closely resembles that of the Soviet apparatchiks who ruled the country for seventy years.  Perhaps Russia still awaits the revolution that was promised in 1991 but never really occurred.

The Dark Lord of Mordor

Andrew Meier's The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin's Secret Service reminds us that the Soviet Union's battle with its capitalist enemies had important clandestine dimensions. The story of Cy Oggins, an American spy entangled (along with his wife) in the clash of ideologies, illuminates a great deal about interwar espionage, radical politics in America, and the ties that bound American and Soviet strands of communism together.



Oggins' story begins right before the First World War. At that time, many American workers as well as Ivy League intellectuals, immigrants, and pacifists were irresistibly drawn to radical politics. Cy Oggins' journey to the extreme left of American life wasn't all that unusual. Soviet Russia filled many of his countrymen with rapture. Wasn't it extraordinary that a regime had chosen land and peace over war and colonialism, chosen a red flag, the symbol of the workers' struggle, or selected a revolutionary national anthem, the Internationale? As Maier points out, many Americans were so inspired that they actually supported a new form of Russian tourism for those who wished to see what the future looked like. Or, to put matters the way Meier does, this was an epoch in which the theories behind great 19th century economic treatises were "spilling out onto the streets."



Oggins had plenty of reasons to be inspired by Russia, and plenty of other reasons to be repulsed by Russia's capitalist opponents. In addition to the general complaints about bourgeois exploitation of American workers (and indeed Cuban and Philippine ones), the Left had reason to complain about the way America's ruling class abused its power in undemocratic, illegal actions against worker-supported parties and movements. This was the age of the Wobblies, Emma Goldman and anarchists, Maurice Hindus, war resisters, Beard and Dewey, etc. And overseas, this was also the age of the Comintern, when the Soviet Union was, at least theoretically, only the nexus of an international strategy to liberate working people everywhere. Indeed, Meier reminds us that even in Russia ordinary Communists waited from one day to the next for the German Revolution that Marx had promised.



And all this Left-wing excitement existed even before the Great Depression, when capitalism seemed be collapsing even from the perspective of its greatest proponents in Washington and on Wall Street.



The Lost Spy does a wonderful job of showing readers why communism was so exciting. It also explains how international spy networks functioned, and how valuable so-called "traitors" could be to Moscow, euphemistically called The Center by its various agents abroad. Oggins ended up tracking White Russians and Trotskyites in France, and Japanese militarism in Shanghai and the Far East puppet state of Manchukuo. The book also tracks the hazards of working for Stalin. Many of the Oggins' friends were executed in Stalin's Great Purges. Most others were at least forced to confront some bitter truths about the Great Leader, as Stalin was sometimes known, including the fact that he eventually chose to ally himself with Nazi Germany. Oggins himself ended up in Lubyanka, one of the most infamous prisons in Russia, before being sent to a concentration camp in the distant north, where he inevitably died.



Ultimately, The Lost Spy elucidates the strange interplay between the ordinary and extraordinary in the secret life of spies. One minute the book is about a traveling man's sad inability to spend time with his seven year son; the next minute the book is about how a single spy could be of value to the Generalissimo as he sought to come to grips with Trotsky's Fourth Internationale or indeed the Empire of Japan. But as interesting as Meier makes his spies seem, Stalin is even more interesting. In this book, Stalin is Souron from the Lord of the Rings, searching out resisters across the world with a roving eye, no matter how small or seemingly innocuous. In this world, Trotsky's apparently futile resistance, takes on new significance. Even as his son and closest supporters fall to the rising tide of evil, Trotsky's hobbit-like opposition continued to occupy the thoughts of the Dark Lord of Mordor right up until an ice pick put an end to him.

Postscript: Cy Oggins was survived by his wife by 50 years. Ms. Oggins died at the age of 97, a fervent believer in the Communist ideal until the end. Cy died at the hands of Russian Mengelee, a mad Soviet scientist who performed medical experiments on gulag prisoners for Beria and his henchmen. Cy was killed by means of an insidious poison which paralyzed him even as he remained conscious. In the end, the author concluded that Cy was imprisoned because his spymaster had attempted to flee from the Soviet underground. Whenever a spy attempted to defect, it was a routine matter to "roll up" anybody connected to him. In these circumstances, Cy couldn't be released. It wasn't that he would betray the secrets of the gulag. Many in the West already knew about then. It was that he had the ability to betray the entire Soviet system of espionage. Oggins' case came up again the Yeltsin era, with the historian Volkogonov wrongly insisting that Oggins was an innocent man, unconnected with any underground activity for either side, who had been killed in cold blood by the criminal Soviet regime.