How a Book by an Ex-KGB Officer Upended Joseph Weisberg’s World

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The following is an excerpt from Russia Upside Down: An Exit Strategy for the Second Cold War, in which Joseph Weisberg, former CIA officer and the creator of the hit TV series The Americans, makes the case that America’s policy towards Russia is failing—and we’ll never fix it until we rethink our relationship.

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Cherkashin

In 2004, a former KGB officer named Victor Cherkashin published a memoir called Spy Handler. Cherkashin had run two of the most devastating moles in the history of U.S. intelligence, CIA officer Aldrich Ames and FBI agent Robert Hanssen. It wasn’t the stories in the book about Ames and Hanssen that grabbed me, though. It was Cherkashin’s description of his KGB colleagues.

Many of these Soviet intelligence officers sounded just like me and my friends from the CIA. They were patriotic, loyal, and believed in their country. They had a high degree of integrity. They liked their work. And many, like Cherkashin, were friendly, social guys you’d want to have lunch with.

The CIA actually hired for this specific attribute, because outgoing, social types supposedly made for the kind of intelligence officer best suited to recruiting foreign agents. My friends and I at the agency were mostly gregarious, glad-handing, and extremely comfortable in social situations. People liked us, people wanted to be our friends. Our training program was almost a competition to out-outgoing each other. And yet it was genuine. We really were a positive, cheerful bunch.

So it made sense that the KGB also hired in part for these social qualities, since they also needed officers who would be able to go out and get foreigners to like and trust them, officers who could use their personalities to recruit spies. But the way Cherkashin de-scribed his colleagues still shocked me, because I’d assumed the KGB was looking for other qualities in its officers, like blind loyalty to the state and a capacity to be cruel. Although I had read serious accounts of the KGB and its activities, my sense of KGB officers themselves had been formed by reading James Bond books and perhaps even more by watching the Bond movies. The one who really stuck with me was Jaws, the giant, metal-toothed villain from The Spy Who Loved Me. Jaws wasn’t actually in the KGB itself, but I remembered him that way, and I think it was this childhood vision that I internalized, slightly modified by a certain amount of more realistic information (I didn’t think KGB officers were giants with metal teeth). Le Carré’s villains were less overblown, but still rapacious and serving the dark cause. They were even more dangerous models for me, since they seemed so realistic.

By the time I joined the CIA, I knew to pay lip service to the idea that we had certain human qualities in common with KGB officers—they could also love their children—but I also knew they worked tirelessly against humanity, thus making them inhuman. For me, KGB officers never emerged as individuals in any way separate from the evil things their organization did.

In Spy Handler, they emerged. They became real people. Even the cynicism and careerism Cherkashin described, which seemed to affect a wider swath of KGB officers than CIA officers (though there are certainly cynical and careerist CIA officers), felt familiar, and human.

As I struggled with the new and discordant information in Cherkashin’s book, I found myself thinking back to my meeting with Ilya in Leningrad, at this point almost twenty years earlier. I remembered his subscription to Newsweek, and how it had surprised me. Now other things about the scene started to bother me too.

Why was a twenty-two-year-old American being sent to smuggle gifts (the black-market Seiko, which I’d been instructed to hide carefully in my luggage) into the Soviet Union? Why was I being asked to face off against the dreaded KGB? And why was the KGB, for its part, so utterly uninterested in me? For that matter, why did the Soviet state allow me to meet with a refusenik in the first place? All these years later, I finally understood what those warning bells had been trying to alert me to. I had seen with my own eyes that the post-Stalin Soviet Union was different from my own dark vision of it. It was a more open country than I realized, and repression there was not as pervasive and systemic as it was portrayed in the West.

Much of what I thought about the Soviet Union still seemed true. They had imprisoned people for their political convictions, put dissidents in mental institutions, tortured people who wouldn’t recant their anti-state views (or views that weren’t even anti-state, but simply pro–human rights).

None of this cruel and inhumane treatment of any portion of the population was morally defensible. But my sense of the Soviet Union as a country where everyone was miserable, suffering, repressed, and hostile to the political system now seemed off-base. That meant the fundamental formulation I’d used for labeling and understanding the Soviet Union—that it was an evil empire—just wasn’t right.

 

Evil Empire

My deeply held conviction that the Soviet Union was an evil empire was a two-legged stool that eventually fell over. Still, the fact that it stood for so long on just two legs is a testament to the stubborn strength of those legs. One leg was built out of complex psychological forces, the other out of facts and logic. I have, and will continue to, ping-pong between these two sources of my conviction in an effort to demonstrate how they worked together to create something as powerful as an absolutist belief system.

Here, I’ll focus on the psychological leg of the stool again, how my black-and-white vision of the Soviet Union sprang out of two specific issues in my personality. One, I was imbued with a sense of my own (and America’s) superiority, which made me a more self-righteous, less empathetic person. And two, I had a desperate need to have enemies, bitter political foes I could fight with and could look down upon as the embodiment of everything I wasn’t. Let’s start with my sense of superiority. I’ve already described the sense of superiority in my family, how our remove from our feelings made us believe we were better than people who were controlled by their emotions. It was important for us to be better than other people in this way because we thought you couldn’t navigate the world while screaming, crying, and losing sight of reason.

Superiority, then, was necessary for survival in a complicated world. But you couldn’t say you were superior, and more important you couldn’t think it. That would be arrogant. So my own sense of superiority manifested as a belief that the United States was superior, that it was good and the Soviet Union was bad. (I was an American, so if America was better, so was I.)

I could easily prove this American superiority, because I saw the whole world through the lens of American virtues—freedom of expression, freedom of religion, democracy, all of our strengths. If those were the points of comparison, we beat the Soviets by a landslide. I wasn’t exactly unaware of the extreme poverty in the richest country in the world, or of our murder rates, but I didn’t count them in this particular debate.

I simplified the Soviet Union in the same way, but in reverse. I saw only its bad sides, while ignoring all of its good sides. I literally had no sense of any Soviet good sides. When Soviets themselves enumerated them, I believed they were either lying or deluded. So in the moral contest between the United States and the Soviet Union, the deck was stacked—it was our good sides versus their bad sides.

My relationship to the Soviet Union, then, was judger to judged. I was good (America was good). The Soviets were bad. I needed them to be bad in order to understand that I was good.

Mix all of that together, and I had an enemy. Something to hate. Something to define myself against. My need to make and retain enemies didn’t just help me feel like a good and moral person, though. I also needed an enemy in order to feel passion, in order to have something to fight against. This gave my life clarity and purpose.

The whole thing fell apart if the enemy wasn’t really, truly bad—if they had even a few fully human or relatable qualities. The enemy had to be evil. So I also dehumanized the Soviets (see earlier discussion of my intractable perception of KGB officers as something close to killer robots).

Where was my empathy? Where was my ability to relate to other human beings? They were wholly reserved for my enemy’s victims.

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I don’t think my own psychology and worldview have any greater political significance. Unless—meaningless cog though I am, I represent a fairly substantial number of other cogs. I suspect this is, at least to some degree, true: that my own sense of superiority, and my need to make enemies, were both fairly common. Only the reader can say if they, too, were motivated by these factors, but I doubt I was alone. And I think these tendencies, in a collective way, helped to fuel the Cold War.

After all, the Cold War was a competition about who was better, us or them. As a nation, in word and policy, we systematically focused on Soviet failings and were blind to their virtues. President after president defined “them” as the enemy and used their flaws as a way to reflect American virtues back to us.

Is there a case to be made that this overpowering rejection of the Soviet Union was simply reality, that they actually were that awful, while we were that good? Is there any possibility our sense of superiority was justified? I used to justify it by focusing on the tremendous internal political repression in the Soviet Union, an area where we shone. We didn’t have that kind of repression.

But did this really make us better than the Soviet Union, or just different? At least in the twentieth century, patterns of violence suggest that some countries tend to take their anger and aggression out on their own people, and some countries take it out on others. The Soviets had the Great Purge and the Gulag; we had Vietnam and a long list of other foreign countries that were devastated by our actions and policies. Although there were significant counter-examples for both the United States and the Soviet Union, the general pattern was that the Soviets tended to let their violence loose on their own citizens via significant internal repression, and we let ours out on other countries through foreign wars and military actions.

Was the scale of Soviet atrocities somehow bigger than the scale of American atrocities? Is this what justified our sense of superiority? How can you decide which was bigger, which was worse, between slavery and the Gulag? Between collectivization and the near-extermination of Native Americans? Between Afghanistan and Vietnam?

Still, wouldn’t it have been better for the Soviets if their country had been a liberal democracy? Wouldn’t a free press and the right to speak one’s mind without risking prison have been obviously better? They could have asked the same about us. Wouldn’t a Marxist America have avoided the catastrophe of slavery or, later on, embraced civil rights sooner and more fully?

If you still think we were “better” than the Soviet Union, I’d suggest that some of our own moral failings are simply on a different timeline from Russia’s. Look at slavery compared to Stalin’s atrocities against his own people, roughly a hundred years later (counting from the end of slavery). Or discrimination against gays in the United States decades ago versus discrimination against the LGBTQ community in Russia today. It’s odd that we would be so judgmental, and consider them so awful, when we’ve been there too.

Neither country was innocent. But our constant judging of the Soviet Union, our need to declare ourselves the obvious winner in a moral competition, made us believe we were better. And this blinded many of us to our own flaws and weaknesses. All our judging actually made it harder to see ourselves. To understand that we were flawed and human too.

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From Russia Upside Down: An Exit Strategy for the Second Cold War by Joseph Weisberg, copyright © 2021. Reprinted by permission of PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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