Today Aleksei Yefimov still works for the intelligence services, but in an internal position. Just as he had feared—it was another of the reservations he’d had about being the point man on the operation—Lonetree identified him to the CIA, and it spelled the end of his involvement with the American Embassy. He has not been directly connected with recruitment and operative work since the Lonetree case.
When he reflects on his “moment in history,” the area Yefimov seems most uncomfortable talking about is what happened to Violetta. He developed a fondness for her as they worked together, and over the course of the operation he realized that she had been inadequately prepared for her role. It would have been better if they had used someone who possessed a detachment that would have allowed her to act in a loving way and would not have subjected her to raw emotions that would pull her in different directions.
“I feel very sorry that this girl ended up so poorly,” he says. “I thought she would come out of this experience in a better fashion than she did.”
Asked to elaborate, he returns to his belief that the women who worked at the foreign embassies had personal reasons for taking those positions. But then, using another of the military analogies favored by his organization, he expresses a sincere regret that Violetta “found herself in the path of a big tank, and thought she could sneak underneath. But it didn’t work out that way, and she got run over.”
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When Genrietta Khokha cracked the book on her family history, which included long chapters on Violetta’s life story, I understood her motivation to be a resentment toward the KGB for “stealing” her daughter. Over the course of more than a dozen interviews, during which a genuine friendship evolved, I realized there was a subtext for her. In her own way Genrietta feels responsible for what happened to Violetta. Had Violetta not become estranged from her family, had her home life been more satisfying, then perhaps she would not have become involved with the “servants of intelligence.” Or so Genrietta thinks.
When this story broke in the press and Violetta was identified as the woman who “seduced” a Marine into spying and then betrayed him, Genrietta was so upset at the characterization of her daughter as a whore for the State that she considered marching into the American Embassy, asking for the ambassador, and telling him it was not her daughter’s fault. Blame the KGB, an evil organization that brought an entire population to its knees, that created generations of people who were “neither the lords of their deeds, nor their will.” Much tougher people than her daughter had been unable to stand up to the system, and to single out a young woman was unfair.
She never followed through with her plan—after she told Violetta what she was thinking, two men who represented themselves as Soviet diplomats showed up at the house and calmed her down—but she did continue to entertain the notion of challenging her daughter’s slanderers to a duel, with pistols, as they did in the nineteenth century when the honor of an innocent woman was sullied.
Genrietta’s efforts to create a more understanding and forgiving context for Violetta’s behavior would find support from social psychologists who teach that, a lot more than we rugged individualist Americans like to admit, people are reflections of the culture in which they are enmeshed, and before we judge them too harshly we must consider the society and times in which they live. When one takes into consideration the perverse pressures the Soviet system put on its people, the absolute control the secret police had over the average person’s life, the manipulation of opportunities and privileges by the ruling elite, and the duplicity and deception that were woven into the social fabric—where leaders lied to citizens, citizens lied to one another—it is hard not to be sympathetic toward Violetta. When she says she was a victim of circumstances and anybody in her place would have made the same choices, only those who have been in her situation and chose otherwise are truly qualified to take issue.
To one of her friends Violetta said she imagined her life as a kind of literature—a drama turned to tragedy. When I heard that, it made sense that she would view her life with the sort of shape and charge found in the romantic fiction she so loved to read as a student. In some ways hers was even a conventional love story: The lovers meet, impediments are placed in their path, they surmount them or seem to until at last they have to face what appears to be an obstacle that threatens to keep them apart forever.
After learning that she sentenced herself to a misfortune comparable to Lonetree’s, when I thought about her self-imposed punishment and penance, I found myself thinking of Violetta in the tradition of the great Russian tragic heroines, women ennobled and purified by suffering, women brought closer to God by their grief….
But before drifting too far into melodrama, I was yanked back to earth by a Russian contemporary of Violetta’s, a woman her age who also attended the Institute of Foreign Languages, who also was approached by the “servants of intelligence,” but who declined to cooperate with them.
“The people who were open to the charms of the KGB, who allowed themselves to be recruited, were people lacking in moral character,” she insisted. “If you chose the path of covert collaboration, it meant you agreed to do dirty things. You would sit and drink vodka with your friends and ask them about their feelings, their family. And if they criticized society or told you a political anecdote or made the slightest comment that was unfavorable, they could never go to the West. Their careers would be ruined, and they would never know why. You cannot forget the lives that were affected by her. Thanks to those ‘bloody bitches’ we all lived in fear and distrusted everyone around us.”
Evoking a Faustian motif—the willingness to sell one’s soul to the devil in return for worldly gains—this woman condemned Violetta for committing herself to a life of treachery, not out of an idealistic protest against the enemies of socialism, but out of self-interest and for material advancement, which was worse.
“She knew the rules. She knew her relationship with Lonetree could have no future. Soviet citizens who collaborated with the KGB received benefits, but permission to go abroad with someone they recruited was not one of them. And yet she lied to him and got him to believe that somehow, if he continued to cooperate with ‘Uncle Sasha,’ their difficulties would be overcome.”
And yet, even as this woman called people who engaged in such duplicity despicable, she acknowledged that “Violetta is a product of the Soviet socialist system. She is a typical ‘Homo sovieticus.’ And this is what distinguishes her radically from the heroines of Russian literature. The worst thing that seventy years of socialism did for my country and the national consciousness of the Russian people was to destroy the moral basis of human existence…. I see Violetta more like an anti-heroine. A kind of socialist perversion of the marvelous Russian women characters created by classic Russian literature. Because in spite of the trials and suffering endured by Violetta, I do not believe that she has cleansed her soul. I do not believe that she has repented her sins. Because if she were truly remorseful, she would have broken off all her connections to the KGB, and she has not done that.”
After several years, Violetta gradually emerged from her seclusion to lead a somewhat normal life. With the end of Communism had come an infusion of Western companies that set up branch offices in Moscow and were in need of people with bilingual skills. She has worked for several joint-venture firms as both interpreter and administrator, facilitating the complicated business of doing business in the new Russia.