The Compatriots

by Andrei Soldatov

  Indeed we were. The center is the property of the administration of the Russian president, and it is run by people experienced in promoting Russia’s foreign policy. The head of the center was a career Russian diplomat. And Bishop Nestor, the prior of Holy Trinity Cathedral, was no stranger to Russian diplomacy himself; he had spent four years serving in the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations, an alliance the Moscow Patriarchate called “a symphony between the state department and the church.”2

  We walked back to the main hall, where a handful of French visitors were wandering around, looking at photographs on the walls. Announcements were posted everywhere about an upcoming concert featuring a male choir and an exhibition marking the centenary of the Bolshevik persecution of the Orthodox Church. Indeed, the center was getting ready to embark on an entire year of events commemorating the suffering of the church under the Communists.

  The message was clear: Orthodox believers in France, mostly Russian emigrants and their descendants, were invited to come to a church that was clearly under Moscow’s control. There, they would be embraced by the new Russia, one no longer divided into two groups—the Russian diaspora and Russians still living in Russia—but constituting a single Russky Mir (Russian world), whose members were all “compatriots.”

  Putin latched on to the concept of Russky Mir—the worldwide community of Russian-speaking people whose identity is firmly connected to Russia’s history, culture, and language—in the early 2000s.3 It is a community whose members are, by definition, closely tied to Russia. No wonder Putin liked the idea; it could serve as a good political instrument for promoting Russia’s influence abroad. According to Putin, this “Russian world” now consists of more than thirty million people, with ten million living in Europe.4 And, he decided, the church would provide them all with spiritual guidance.

  To make this work for the Russian émigrés, two things were needed. First, prominent emigrant families would need to cooperate with Moscow. Second, the Russian Orthodox Church had to be united and the abyss bridged between the priests inside and outside the country.

  Putin achieved both sets of conditions. He was not the first to take steps in this direction; his predecessor Boris Yeltsin had started a conversation with the émigrés in the final year of the Soviet Union. But Putin’s goals were completely different.

  Russia’s diaspora is the third largest in the world, exceeded only by those from India and Mexico (China is fourth), according to UN statistics.5 That didn’t start recently. Russians began leaving the country in large numbers in the late nineteenth century, fleeing pogroms, tsarist secret police persecution, the Russian Revolution, then Stalin and the KGB. This exodus created a rare opportunity for the Kremlin. Moscow’s masters and spymasters scored their biggest successes—recruiting among the Western establishment, stealing the secrets of the American atomic bomb—through networks of spies, many of whom were emigrants driven from Russia. During the 1930s and 1940s, dozens of spies were in New York City gathering information for Moscow.

  The history of Russian espionage is soaked in blood, as Russian agents proved themselves ruthless and efficient at killing their fellow emigrants abroad. The Kremlin had learned well that to ensure political stability, it was not enough to have people inside the country under control; the émigré communities had to be brutally policed too. After all, the mighty Russian empire had been taken down by a bunch of emigrant revolutionaries who, at the end of World War I, had seized the opportunity to return to the country. Their descendants in the Kremlin had good memories, which they put to good use.

  Did that story end with the collapse of the Soviet Union? No.

  Mikhail Gorbachev opened the borders, and in the 1990s, Russians started to leave the country in much bigger numbers. Emigration remained a golden opportunity for the Russian spymasters but also a challenge. Post-Soviet Russia lived without politically motivated emigrations for only ten years. When Putin came to power, he immediately returned to the practice of forcing his enemies out of the country.

  We are Russian investigative journalists based in Moscow. (Full disclosure: Although we have traveled extensively, including while researching this book, we have never lived abroad for more than a few months.) For more than twenty years we have been focused on researching the ways in which the Kremlin controls the Russian people. Our first book, The New Nobility, was about the secret services—Moscow’s traditional means of “running a tight ship.” In our second book, The Red Web, we described the Kremlin’s desperate attempts to bring the internet to heel. So it seemed like the next natural step was to look at another serious challenge to the Russian authorities—the people who have moved outside Russia’s borders—and to explore the ways in which the Kremlin is dealing with them.

  In this book, we tell the story of how, throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the Kremlin has considered the presence of Russians in Western countries—particularly the United States—both its biggest threat and its biggest opportunity. Successive regimes in Moscow sought for years to use the Russian émigré community to achieve their goals. But they also sought to neutralize any potential dangers posed by Russians abroad, experimenting with tricks and methods that would also come in handy closer to home.

  Part I covers the Soviet period from the time of Lenin’s death, when Soviet intelligence first began to develop ways to deal with the threat of emigration and ways of exploiting it, through the end of the Soviet Union. Much of that initial tool kit has been in use ever since. We also describe how the Americans struggled to make use of Russian émigré groups in the Cold War landscape.

  Part II looks into the 1990s and how the opportunities created by Russia’s opening borders were exploited—by Russian American financiers, by Russian spies, and by different waves of Russian émigrés.

  Part III shows how Putin changed the game, announcing and promulgating his own view of emigration, namely, that it was high time for Russian “compatriots” to advance Russia’s positions beyond its borders.

  Finally, we describe in Part IV how Putin reintroduced political emigration—forcing Russians into exile and finding ways to signal to those who had left that Moscow’s hand could reach them anywhere and everywhere.

  Russia’s borders remain porous, for the first time in its history, and that gives us hope. We tell the stories of some people who have found ways to fight the tactics of the current regime, both in Russia and from abroad. Their efforts, unsurprisingly, have raised the stakes and prompted the Kremlin to employ more desperate methods. That makes the world more dangerous, and more unpredictable, both for Russians abroad and for the countries that have welcomed them.

  PART I

  SPIES AND DISSIDENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  TALENT SPOTTING

  Lenin, “The Vozhd,”* was dead. Endless queues of silent mourners snaked through the snow as far as the eye could see, from Red Square all the way down to the Moskvoretsky Bridge. Some held large portraits: Lenin’s bold, distinctive head; face framed by a goatee and a moustache; the famous squint. The mourners moved slowly forward in the freezing January air, toward the hastily built wooden cube at the foot of the Kremlin’s wall. They wanted to see his body: the short man with small hands who was now lying there in an open coffin. LENIN read the sign over the entryway of the wooden cube. Long lines of servicemen in swishing greatcoats, large red stars on their helmets, formed a second line as they protected the wooden cube. Closer to the cube stood yet another line of guards—the chekists, the operatives of the Soviet secret police. One of them, a young man with fair hair and a flaccid chin, was in particular danger of freezing: Vasily Zarubin had already spent hours on Red Square and had not been able to leave to put on warmer clothes.1

  Finally, Zarubin’s shift ended. He crossed the square hastily and turned right, onto Nikolskaya Street. From there, he walked briskly to the imposing, five-story building on Lubyanka Square that had been occupied by the Soviet secret police since 1918. Stamping his feet against the
cold, Zarubin cursed himself; he had responded to the urgent summons from Moscow so quickly that he had forgotten to dress for the frigid weather. Now he was paying for his oversight.

  The guards at Lubyanka admitted the young chekist into the secret service headquarters, which, in addition to offices, housed a deadly prison. As Zarubin felt the prickly sensation of warmth returning to his frozen extremities, he received his instructions for his next assignment: he was being sent to China to spy on a community of Russian exiles who had fled the revolution.

  Within the halls of Lubyanka, Zarubin was considered an experienced operative. He was thirty years old and had spent ten of them at war—first in the World War, then in the civil war, and, finally, suppressing peasant revolts in central Russia. But for all his experience, he had deficits: Zarubin had never been abroad, and, as the son of a railroad worker, his formal education extended only to primary school. His real and only education was in the trenches. With his fair hair, pale skin, and Slavic features, Zarubin looked very Russian—something that would help him in his next assignment. After all, Harbin, China, was home to a large community of Russian exiles, and Zarubin’s looks would help him infiltrate this group.

  Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the Soviet secret police, was sure that anti-Bolshevik groups like the one in Harbin were just waiting for the right moment to reclaim Russia. Lenin’s death would provide just such an opportunity: the departure of a charismatic leader rendered the new regime vulnerable. Dzerzhinsky responded to this threat by dispatching dozens of his operatives to countries in which Russian émigrés had found refuge. In the case of Harbin, this was relatively easy to accomplish. China and Russia had recently established diplomatic relations, and the Soviet authorities had already set up a consulate in the city.

  Zarubin traveled to Harbin with his beautiful and intelligent wife, Olga, and their young daughter, Zoya. On arrival, he reported to the Soviet consulate where, as its newest officer, he officially served as deputy head of the economics division.

  Zarubin was to have a long and productive career in Soviet intelligence. The émigré “problem,” his first assignment, would become his lifelong occupation.

  In agreeing to take this assignment, Zarubin was following an already long-standing tradition. As the famous Soviet dissident and political émigré Vladimir Bukovsky once said to us, “This was the way the Russian empire was built: the expansion of Russia was the result of a long process, in which the Russian people fled Russian power, and the power chased the people.”2

  Indeed, in the years and decades to come, Soviet secret police chiefs—Dzerzhinsky and his successors—would continue sending operatives abroad to deal with the threat, real or imagined, posed by Russian political emigration.

  The year 1924 found Zarubin stuck in Harbin. Summer came and went, and by the time September rolled around, he thought he was beginning to get used to the place. He walked to work from the suburbs every morning, and to him, the city felt like Moscow, where his family had lived before World War I. The architecture was in the same messy, provincial style—mostly two- and three-story houses with first floors made of brick and upper floors of wood, sloppily scoured. Now he headed to the more fashionable part of town, up on the hill, known as Novy Gorod (New City). Here, fancy apartment buildings in the modern style added to the mix; they had huge windows, decorated with exquisite trellis work, and Art Nouveau front doors. Overweight, suspicious policemen in black uniforms patrolled streets bearing Russian names and guarded storefronts featuring pre-reform Cyrillic signage. It was a bit like time travel: seven years had passed since the Bolshevik revolution and four years since the end of bloody and brutal civil war, but in Harbin, at first glance, it looked like none of it had ever happened.

  With his modest suit, Russian looks, and Russian language, Zarubin seemed to belong in this provincial city. But the Soviet spy was a hostile agent in a foreign country. Not only was Russia 320 long miles to the north—below the Russian signage on the shop windows, he could see the city’s standard Chinese characters—but the city had an unusual history. Twenty years earlier, the tsar had rented a ten-mile chunk of Chinese territory for the construction of a railroad intended to connect the Trans-Siberian Railroad with Vladivostok. A fishing village—Harbin—was chosen as the location for the railroad’s administrative center on China’s soil. Russian engineers arrived and quickly built a Russian-style city, complete with Orthodox churches, schools, and typical street plan. With the permission of the Chinese authorities, the tsar placed Harbin under Russian administration. By the start of World War I, Harbin had grown to a midsized, essentially Russian city.

  Then, on a dark October night in 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in a military revolt. Many Russians chose to flee from the new masters. Those who found themselves in Russia’s center fled west, taking either the sea road—through Crimea and then to Constantinople—or north, to Finland, with the hope of ultimately reaching Berlin and Paris, but also Prague and Belgrade. Those who happened to be in the east of the country headed farther east, often toward Harbin. Thus, by 1924 there were more than one hundred thousand Russians in the city. The Chinese happily agreed to keep things the way they had been before the revolution, which meant letting tsarist bureaucrats continue to run the town. Indeed, when Zarubin arrived, prerevolutionary Russian rules still governed daily life in Harbin.

  Another consequence of the Chinese approach was that numerous White Guard organizations—remnants of the army that had fought against the “Red,” or Bolshevik, guard—felt safe in the town. They didn’t believe that the power struggle back in Russia was truly over and were biding their time in Harbin, waiting for the moment when they could return to their native land and seize power.

  Dzerzhinsky, the chief of the Soviet secret police and a founder of the Cheka, was well aware of this. He was convinced that the White Guard would never give up. As a result, he put immense pressure on his operatives to do everything in their power to undermine the exiled White Guard organizations and their allies. In March 1924, he sent his deputy a note regarding “the fight against émigré terrorist organizations.”3 In it, Dzerzhinsky asked if the secret service was keeping comprehensive blacklists of members of these White Guard organizations. What about their relatives, in Russia and abroad? Dzerzhinsky wanted them all watched.

  In early September, the Russian general Pyotr Wrangel founded the Russian All-Military Union, or ROVS, the military wing of the world Russian émigré community. Four years earlier, Wrangel had fought the Bolsheviks in Crimea, lost, and led the defeated White army into exile. By late 1924, in Harbin and elsewhere, Wrangel’s ROVS was actively training its members, preparing them for their return to Russia.4

  Zarubin hastened to a two-story mansion guarded by a fence. The monumental gate defiantly displayed the hammer and sickle on a globe, under the yellow-painted rays of a metal sun, framed by ears of wheat. The Soviet Union’s emblem had been adopted as the proletarian state’s coat of arms only the year before, and the colors on this rendering were still bright. Behind the gate, the mansion housed the Soviet consulate. Zarubin had been coming here every day, month after month, for almost half a year. But he was deeply frustrated: six months into his tenure as a Soviet secret police operative in Harbin, Zarubin had yet to accomplish anything at all.

  As Zarubin passed beneath the Soviet coat of arms and into the consulate, he reflected on his situation. He had, he thought, very little chance of success. For starters, he was a known employee of the Soviet Consulate, so he couldn’t pretend to be an émigré. There were other problems too: Zarubin’s lack of education and social polish made it hard for him to mix with the local émigrés. The qualities he had developed in his brutal decade in the army were not those that could help him in a town full of tsarist administration officials, army officers, bohemians, and members of the intelligentsia. Besides, although the secret service had trained him to be a ruthless secret police operative, they hadn’t taught him any spy tradecraft. In short, he couldn
’t knock on the door of a respectable house in town. Or could he?

  The thing that distinguished Harbin from all other cities populated by Russian exiles was that it was still largely run by Russians. Simultaneously, the city’s Soviet consulate was officially recognized by China. Thus, Zarubin’s place of employment conducted official business with the White Russian–run city administration. It would be perfectly normal for a Soviet official (like Zarubin) to pay a visit to Harbin’s city council. This, he thought, could be a way in.

  Most of the city council’s officials—exiles who had decided to take responsibility for the town they found themselves in—hailed from the Russian intelligentsia. One member of the city council, the official in charge of hospitals and public gardens, had once been a highly respected explorer of the remote and wild Kamchatka Peninsula. The former explorer had a daughter named Anna. She was a pretty but deeply lonely girl with fragile features.5

  True, Zarubin had brought his wife, Olga, to Harbin with him. Olga was a smart and educated young woman who had married him in 1918—just a year after the revolution, it was a time in which a girl’s marriage to a chekist could well save her entire family’s life. And they had their daughter Zoya, only four years old, with them. But, reasoned Zarubin, Anna didn’t need to know these details. As the daughter of a city official, Anna could be his in—an entry point to access the city elite. Zarubin arranged a meeting.

  He started an affair, as planned. He got his agent. But then, something unexpected happened. He fell in love with her.

  Consequences quickly followed. Olga received an anonymous letter from Zarubin’s colleague, a fellow secret police officer, exposing the affair. She was deeply offended. Next, the information was passed to the head of the Soviet intelligence station in Harbin. The commander sensed danger: his officer was no longer reliable. Normally, in the bloodthirsty Soviet secret police, Zarubin’s career would have ended here, but his chief liked him.