Dois livros contam um pouco...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Comrades, Gangsters, Spies
By BRET STEPHENS
Who is America's principal geopolitical foe? When Mitt Romney suggested recently that it was Russia, he was met with howls of high-minded derision. Didn't the presumptive Republican nominee know the Cold War was over? Wasn't he aware of all the benefits the U.S. had reaped thanks to the Obama administration's "reset" of relations with Moscow?
Mr. Romney's smug critics might laugh a bit less once they read "Deception," Edward Lucas's riveting follow-up to his prescient 2008 book on Russia, "The New Cold War." Mr. Lucas, a senior editor at the Economist and its former Moscow bureau chief, understands that even if the West has ceased to think of Russia as its enemy, the reverse has never really been true, especially among those who now govern from the Kremlin.
"The New Cold War" dealt mainly with how Vladimir Putin's Russia bullies its perceived enemies, using everything from pipelines to polonium poisoning. "Deception" has a narrower focus: the regime's aggressive use of its intelligence services to achieve ends that are malign and frequently criminal.
True, most states conduct espionage, and many of them, including the United States, collect intelligence on friend and foe alike. Yet Russia is a case apart. A country that runs spies like no other is run by a spy like no other. Mr. Putin spent the formative part of his career as a KGB counterintelligence officer in East Germany. The suspiciousness, double dealing and mania for control that went with that job have become the leitmotifs of Russian policy making today.
There is also the sheer scale of Russia's intelligence apparatus. The Russian military may be a ghost of its former self, but the old KGB—now divided among the FSB (for domestic intelligence), the SVR (for foreign intelligence) and the GRU (for military intelligence)—maintains all its prestige and lavish funding. The FSB alone, Mr. Lucas reports, employs 300,000 people, a larger force by far than the U.S. Marine Corps.
Deception
By Edward Lucas
(Walker, 372 pages, $26)
(Walker, 372 pages, $26)
Finally, there are the purposes of the regime. Russia today does not seek to install totalitarian governments the world over or imprison its people behind another Iron Curtain. Yet a state without an ideology is also one without a scruple. Possibly the most notorious recent example here is the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a Moscow lawyer who uncovered a quarter-billion-dollar tax fraud conducted by Interior Ministry officials against the Russian state. Magnitsky wound up dying a gruesome prison death in 2009 in the custody of the very officials he had publicly accused. Yet the Putin regime's response has been to put Magnitsky's bereaved mother in the dock and launch a bald-faced diplomatic campaign to protect the officials Magnitsky accused of fraud from being sanctioned abroad.
This sort of criminality also extends beyond Russia's borders. A leaked State Department cable calls Russia a "virtual mafia state" and accuses its spies of using gangsters to smuggle guns to Kurdish rebels and advanced anti-aircraft missiles into Iran. A Spanish prosecutor cited by Mr. Lucas believes that "one cannot differentiate between the activities of the [Russian] government and OC [organized crime] groups" and fears that the gangs are gaining the upper hand over the Spanish legal system.
Or consider Anna Chapman, the notorious redhead caught and deported by the U.S. in 2010 as part of a larger Russian spy ring. With her sex-bomb looks and ditzy demeanor, Ms. Chapman (née Anna Vasilyevna Kushchenko) is easy to dismiss as sheer tabloid fodder. But Mr. Lucas's careful investigative work reveals Ms. Chapman's earlier involvement in an elaborate money-laundering scheme based in the U.K. and tied to Zimbabwe.
As it is, Ms. Chapman was perhaps the least accomplished member of a ring of "illegals" who succeeded in blending into American life—the ultimate test of successful tradecraft. More dangerous were characters such as "Donald Heathfield" (real name: Andrei Bezrukov), who passed himself off as a Massachusetts management consultant and sought to befriend such well-connected figures as Leon Fuerth, the former national security adviser to Al Gore.
That relationship never quite took, but the ingratiating Mr. Heathfield might have yet succeeded with other figures of influence had he not been unmasked. Far more damaging was the Estonian Herman Simm, who rose to top positions within his country's security apparatus and then within NATO before he was caught spying for Moscow in 2008. The information he passed along remains a closely guarded secret, but his story suggests how deeply Russia has been able to penetrate Western security establishments.
Mr. Lucas's account of his jailhouse interview with Mr. Simm is one of the highlights of "Deception," as is his meticulous reconstruction of the way the SVR recruited, ran and ultimately abandoned the Estonian. One depressing conclusion from reading "Deception" is that Russians are much better than their Western counterparts at the spy business. Another is that, even now, the West doesn't much seem to care that its secrets are being pilfered by a regime that wishes us ill.
"Chinese spies seem to attract more attention than Russian ones," Mr. Lucas writes. "Admittedly, Beijing's agencies have formidable hackers and are good at stealing military and technological secrets. But they do not murder people, rig our decision-making, or disrupt our alliances." Anyone who imagines that Mr. Obama's "reset" has done much to change that picture should read this sobering book.
Mr. Stephens writes Global View, the Journal's foreign-affairs column.
A version of this article appeared July 26, 2012, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Comrades, Gangsters, Spies.
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Freedom Unleashed
By EDWARD LUCAS
Delight and despair jostle in the mind when reading Leon Aron's masterly survey of the greatest period of Russian-language journalism—the heady years between the birth of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost (openness) policy in 1987 and the death of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The delight is in the intoxicating evocation of freedom unleashed. For this writer, who was there, the pleasure is particularly sharp because the book stirs many fond memories. In the words of Alexander Yakovlev, a leading reformer, it was a time when people "tore off the rusted locks of bolshevism and let truth out of an iron cage." Those who had been muzzled and misinformed for decades could suddenly find the truth and speak it.
The despair lies in what came before and afterward. The stories unearthed were of mass murder, colossal waste, vile prejudice and grotesque dishonesty. Many of those wrongs were exposed but not righted. And after 1991 the yearnings for truth and liberty fizzled away in the messy, greedy politics of the Boris Yeltsin years, and the crony capitalism of Vladimir Putin and his sinister friends that followed.
Mr. Aron is a distinguished scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and a skillful polemicist. He brings this history of Russian journalism to life with a fine attention to detail and a bold narrative sweep. He and his researchers have read a colossal amount of newspapers and magazines from those years, and filleted them for the most telling phrases, anecdotes and arguments.
The title of "Roads to the Temple" alludes to movie scene that Mr. Aron describes in his introduction: In director Tengiz Abuladze's "magnificent anti-Stalinist saga" made in 1987, a work that "heralded glasnost," the final scene shows an older woman asking a passerby which street leads to a temple or church. The stranger says: "Not this one." The woman replies: "What's the use of a street if it does not lead to the temple?"
Roads to the Temple
By Leon Aron
(Yale, 483 pages, $40)
(Yale, 483 pages, $40)
Mr. Aron notes: "All great revolutions begin with the search for streets, or roads, to the 'temple'—a kingdom of dignity, justice, goodness, fairness, equality, freedom, brotherhood." Russians began that search as the Soviet Union crumbled. Reporters fanned out across the nation, bringing back stories that exploded myths long promoted by Moscow—like the "golden childhood" supposedly enjoyed by every Soviet youth. The media told of children as young as 10 forced to work in fields for 12 hours a day; in 1986, there were "35,000 labor accidents involving children under fourteen." News stories showed harrowing conditions in orphanages. Soviet medicine was revealed as a disaster. A doctor "cried out" to a Pravda interviewer in 1987 about the lack of ultrasound equipment, shortages that led to the deaths of countless babies: "Not a single Soviet-made [ultrasound] machine in thirty years! In the era of space exploration!"
The greatest target was Stalinism—a taboo subject since the failed Khrushchev thaw of the mid-1950s and early 1960s. Even if the Soviet Union had been an economic, cultural and social success story, it could scarcely have survived the revelation that it was based on the murder by shooting and starvation of millions of innocent people, and the enslavement of tens of millions. As Mr. Aron recounts, secret archives were opened and firsthand accounts by former prisoners were aired. "In the November 27, 1988, issue of Moskovskie novosti . . . Marxist historian and former dissident Roy Medvedev for the first time in the Soviet press" estimated the number of arrested, imprisoned or executed under Stalin before 1937—"no less than" 10 million died.
Mr. Aron also captures well the sensational 1989 revelation of the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact of 1939. The public emergence of the pact's details destroyed the great myth of Soviet wartime history: that Stalin's deal with Hitler was a wise tactical ruse to buy time for the Soviet war machine, when in truth it was a sincere and disastrous miscalculation. The valor of the Soviet Union's soldiers was the only aspect of the war, Mr. Aron says, that did not come "under assault by the glasnost mythslayers."
On top of all the historical truth-telling came public soul-searching about the corrosive effects of the modern Soviet system on morals and behavior. As Maya Ganina wrote inLiteraturnaya gazeta in 1988: "Let's find out at what point in our lives bribery, thievery, lies, humiliation of the powerless and servility towards the powers that be have become more than just a deviation from the norm."
Mr. Aron writes: "The most urgent concern was not the economy itself but rather what it did to the men and women who worked in it: their ideas, their views of themselves, their conscience—their 'souls.' Surrounded by waste and negligence, poverty and neglect, arbitrariness and incompetence of all-powerful bureaucracies implementing myriad irrational laws and regulation, men and women were found to have lost much of what was needed to make their country free and prosperous."
And so it proved. The journalists and commentators in the 1990s soon concluded that the country needed four huge changes, which Mr. Aron renders as debolshevization, privatization, deimperialization and demilitarization. But diagnosing the problem is not the same as curing it. Two decades later, Russia is plagued by much the same woes: arbitrary power, feeble property rights, a desire to bully its old empire, and a top-heavy and expensive military. And the Russian media today live with the sobering knowledge that several crusading reporters have been murdered in crimes that remain unsolved. Though far freer than it was in the Soviet ice age, Russian journalism lacks the sparkle, passion and integrity that it displayed in the vibrant era that Mr. Aron describes so well.
Mr. Lucas, international editor of the Economist, is the author, most recently, of "Deception: The Untold Story of East-West Espionage Today" (Walker & Co).
A version of this article appeared July 3, 2012, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Freedom Unleashed.
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