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

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conversation and promised to call him again.

      A week passed and there was no word from anyone in the Baltics until one night I received a frantic call from someone who said he had to meet me and was waiting in front of the Puppet Theater across the street from my apartment on the Ring Road. I didn’t recognize the caller’s voice and after the affair in the Baltics, I was wary of provocation. But I decided to go. When I pulled up in my car, I saw Antanas Terleckas and Ints Tsalitis.

      We got into my car and began looking for a place to talk. It was too dangerous to talk in an apartment and we would have had to queue for hours to get into a café. Finally, after driving around for half an hour, we adjourned to the stairwell of a building on Leninsky Prospect.

      Neither Terleckas nor Tsalitis appeared upset about the consequences for them of the loss of my suitcase. They were more concerned to make sure that I did not lose the opportunity to write about nationalism, particularly in Lithuania. During the next hour, they repeated to me the information that I had received in the Baltics, much of which I had already reconstructed from memory. When my notes were complete, we left the building and went for a ride in my car.

      “The one thing you’ll never find,” Terleckas said as we drove, “or at least almost never find is a Russian who is willing to recognize a small people’s right to its own country. If you talk about Lithuania, they say that’s our Russian land, our country.”

      I remarked to Antanas that I liked the Russian people. “They are good, sweet, kind people,” he replied, “but it doesn’t occur to them that the Lithuanians consider Lithuania to be their country and want to be able to live in it without them.”

      “By the way,” Tsalitis said. “Why didn’t you meet our friends in Estonia?” Below us, Moscow was a carpet of apartment lights broken by the shadows of gothic government skyscrapers. “They called me and wanted to know why you never contacted them.”

      “Who called you?”

      “The Estonian nationalists, Udam, Ratas …”

      “They said I never contacted them?”

      “Yes.”

      “Ints, I spent two days in Tallinn with Udam and Ratas. I’m expecting them to meet me here. Did either of you get a telephone call from Estonia telling you that my suitcase with the notes on Latvia and Lithuania had been stolen?”

      “No,” Tsalitis said, “we heard about it from Kestutis.” I pulled the car over to the side of the road. A light snow began to fall and the snowflakes seemed to hang immobile in the arcs of light cast by the streetlamps.

      I turned to look at Tsalitis and Terleckas who were sitting in the back seat. “If I didn’t spend those two days with Udam and Ratas,” I said, “then who did I spend them with?”

      There was silence in the car.

      “Do you mean?”

      Antanas smiled. “They’re clever. You’ve got to hand them that.”

      “Yes,” I said, “but these were Estonians.”

      “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.”

      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

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