Shame and disappointment aged her parents, bringing on grey hair and brittle bones.
‘Life had always been predictable for them. They liked that others made decisions, that they were relieved of responsibility. Do your job, be respectful, abide by the rules, and everything will be fine. But it wasn’t.’
Yet as her parents withered, Adina blossomed into ‘a special time, a time of no limits’. She trained to be an IT engineer and took advantage of the open borders, spending all her earnings on long-distance bus journeys, visiting Berlin and Paris, sleeping on new friends’ sofas in Belgrade and Tel Aviv. To fund her travel bug she answered the ambiguous Internet Research Agency advert. Her good school English helped her to land a job. Her technical knowledge led to her assignment on the pensioner and employee message boards of UK telecoms companies. At the start of each shift she and her fellow ‘content managers’ – about eighty English speakers – were given the day’s topics, advocating for groups perceived as useful to polarise British politics, championing the left-wing Momentum movement while at the same time, through different personas, praising right-wingers in the Conservative and anti-immigrant UK ‘independence’ parties.[6]
‘No one liked the work but nobody quit because the money – a thousand dollars a month – was so good.’
‘You were helping to change the world, post by post, person by person,’ I said, shaken by her collusion.
‘I didn’t want to change it,’ she insisted, raising her faint voice in defence. ‘I wanted to see it.’
Adina wasn’t naive so I wondered aloud about her readiness to subvert truth for a pay cheque, and about the tug of morality. Had she agreed to meet me because of regret?
‘We were told to never apologise,’ she replied with a flash of defiance. ‘Facts are white noise and emotions rule.’ Then she fell quiet, turned her glass in her hand and added, ‘None of us realised that we were at war.’
She explained that she had been laid off after a year, when the Agency began to favour younger, hungrier, non-Jewish freelancers.
‘You see, I’ve become too old for Russia. I am almost forty and no one wants to hire old people like me. I want to move to a country where forty is not a terrible age but now I can’t leave.’
In summers past, Adina could have applied for an Israeli passport, as so many did, but she never had the heart to abandon her parents.
‘They beg me to visit them every weekend. I got Skype for them in the hope that it would excuse me. Now my mother calls me every night.’
Her father never again found employment. Her mother – who had worked in the aerospace industry – took a job making motorway noise barriers. Adina was desperate to break free of her parents, yet she was unable to let go of them. And there was more.
‘Away from them I used to speak my mind, do what I wanted to do. But the situation goes backwards in Russia. Like I said, people are again becoming used to being silent, to accepting rules. My friends tell me not to worry, that we’ll be in a queue for the rest of our lives. And now there are restrictions on foreign travel for soldiers, judges and former Internet Research Agency employees like me.’ She laughed at the irony, her work in support of Russia now denying her the chance to leave the country. ‘When I used to return from abroad it felt like coming back to prison. Now it is my prison.’
Adina wanted to show me Morskoi Boi again so we moved back into the arcade. She stared into a large periscope and aimed at ships moving across a virtual sea. With a press of the thumb she sank a dozen 8-bit boats.
‘You know, Soviet arcade machines were supposed to be different, to have “real” value: no fantasies, no adrenaline rushes, no Pac-Man. We were told that they had to align with Marxist ideology. It was such a lie.’
Adina turned to leave. On the walk to the door she told me that she survived on both ‘black and white pay’, working as a barmaid and on the odd small IT contract. In the courtyard, in the shadow of the Church of the Spilled Blood, she said, ‘I don’t know why I am the way I am, why I made the choices that I did. Does anyone know?’
On my journeys I’ve always had the freedom to choose. I can accept or refuse an offer. I can fly out of a country to escape compromise, corruption and fear, unlike the many individuals who have entrusted me with their stories. Yet in my cold curiosity to fathom her acquiescence, and despite an attempt to empathise, I felt sudden anger towards Adina. Yes, she had been used, even abused, but she had also had a choice. And she’d become a willing saboteur.
I asked her, was she afraid?
‘We have a saying that Russia is famous for its bad roads, crooks and stupid women,’ she answered. She looked down at the ground for a moment and then in an unexpected gesture lifted her hand to touch my cheek.
Then she walked away.
In Soviet times, survival often meant lying. Only by spouting dogma could a child excel at school, a student win a place at university, a worker secure a good job. Ideology was used, not believed. The regime itself had to lie to survive, falsifying the past, pretending that no honest citizen needed to fear it.
Today the troll state’s lies target the West. Many of us – lacking the bitter Soviet experience – gobble up its dezinformatsiya as truth. In our gullibility we allow Adina and her former co-workers to propagate a toxic nihilism, undermining objectivity, deepening splits in our societies and even changing the way we think. Democracy may well be brought down from within, for the cost of a few free lunches.
14
Party Party (Like It’s 1969)
What makes a leader? What forces drive a young man or woman to reach for the top, to go with the flow and then to forge ahead of it? And where does their journey begin? In imaginary childhood games? In redemptive fantasies? In the thrill of beating the shit out of an opponent at a martial arts tournament? Many factors determine the course of a life, but for Vladimir Putin there was one key moment, one brilliant flash of light when as a restless fifteen-year-old he saw his future.
In 1968, Russia was captivated by The Shield and the Sword, a four-part black-and-white blockbuster set during the Second World War in which a Soviet agent – armed with steel nerves, a cool demeanour and perfect German – infiltrated SS headquarters in Berlin to steal the Nazis’ war plans. In the dark, the teenage Putin gazed in awe at the dashing figure, his eyes fixed on the screen, his palms sweaty with excitement. At that moment he decided that he wanted to be a Soviet James Bond, subduing enemies, filled with glory. It was within days of seeing the movie – in the same week that real Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia – that he walked into the Big House on Liteiny Prospekt.
Five years later, by which time he was a law student and fluent German speaker, Putin was again transfixed by a celluloid hero, along with 80 million other Russians. The twelve-part television series Seventeen Moments of Spring spun a similar tale, of another handsome Russian altering the course of history. In it a KGB agent uncovered a Nazi plot to negotiate peace with the Western allies behind the back of the Soviet Union. No matter that no such spy or plot existed,[7] the series – in which wartime newsreels mutated into fiction – was perceived as historical fact. Almost every viewer came to believe that Russia had been betrayed and that Stalin had divined the foreign trickery.
Seventeen Moments of Spring – Russia’s most popular television programme, ever – was no independent production. It was conceived and commissioned by Yuri Andropov, then the chairman of the KGB. The series’ director was ‘assisted’ by Andropov’s deputy and two KGB operatives brought in as ‘technical advisers’. As well as unifying the nation by reinforcing suspicion of the West, its purpose was to encourage young, educated recruits to join the security agency. With its annual rebroadcast on the anniversary of the end of the Second World War, Seventeen Moments remains one of the KGB’s most influential operations, eclipsed only by Russian intelligence’s diversiya – subversion – of the 2016 US presidential election.
6
Russia did not act alone, of course. The West had – and has – its own virtual disrupters and digital kleptocracies, working solo or in concert, targeting and manipulating behaviour either to make a buck or to turn a country against itself.
7
For all its avowed realism,