BOOK REVIEW: The Compatriots: The Brutal and Chaotic History of Russia’s Exiles, Emigres, and Agents Abroad
By Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan
Reviewed by Joseph W. Augustyn
Joseph W. Augustyn is a 28 year-year veteran of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, and once served as the Director of the Defector Resettlement Operations Center. He is also a Cipher Brief Expert.
Over the past several weeks, much has been written in the Western media about the alleged “outed” spy who reportedly provided insider information linking the Kremlin to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. There is some concern, of course, that Russian President Vladimir Putin will now add this “spy” who is reportedly living in the United States… to his target list for assassination. As disturbing as this sounds, those who study and know Russian history understand that taking action against alleged traitors, political deviants and simple critics of the Soviet/Russian regimes is not unique to Putin, but rather a part of the Kremlin’s playbook since at least 1917, reaffirming the adage that in Russia at least, ”the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Alexander Litvinenko was one who tested the system. The one-time officer in the KGB who had defected, fell ill after drinking tea in London on November 1, 2006. He died three weeks later after authorities said his tea was likely poisoned with Polonium-210. A public inquiry into his concluded that his death was likely an assassination approved by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Russian oligarch and vocal critic of Putin, Boris Berezovsky, was likely another victim. In March 2013, Berezovsky was found dead hanging in his apartment near London under very suspicious circumstances after escaping at least one foiled assassination plot by a Russian hitman in 2007.
And then there is Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military officer and British double agent, and his daughter Yulia, who were poisoned in Salisbury, England in March 2018 with a Novichok nerve agent smuggled into the UK by two members of the Russian GRU. While the Skripals survived, a British national died a few months later after finding the nerve agent in a perfume bottle.
The new book,The Compatriotsby Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, helps us understand and put into perspective the history of the Kremlin’s efforts to cope with, and control its perceived enemies. Focusing primarily on the Russian diaspora, which has grown today to over thirty million and ranks as the third largest in the world after India and Mexico, the authors detail the historical evolution of the Russian emigre phenomenon and the Kremlin’s reaction to it.
Soldatov and Borogan argue in convincing fashion that since 1917 one of the Kremlin’s biggest perceived threats to its existence has come from those who have fled the country. They meticulously describe how leaders from Lenin to Putin dealt, and currently deal with the problem of a disaffected, disillusioned and, at times, disruptive segment of the Russian population abroad. In so doing, Soldatov and Borogan simultaneously chronicle and link the emigre movement and the Kremlin’s reaction to it, to the emergence of Russian espionage and the creation and maturation of the country’s intelligence services.
For over two decades, Soldatov and Borogan, both Russian investigative journalists and cofounders of the intelligence-centric web-site Agentura, have researched ways in which the Kremlin seeks to control the Russian people. In The Compatriots, they provide a compendium of examples to show that the Kremlin has always believed that ensuring political stability at home also meant brutally policing emigre communities and out-spoken critics abroad.
Soldatov and Borogan divide their book into four main parts, the first three of which represent a history of the Soviet/Russian emigration movement. Part One covers the Soviet period from Lenin’s death, when Soviet intelligence first began to develop ways to deal with the threat of emigration, through the end of the Soviet Union. Part Two focuses on the 1990’s and how newly opened borders were exploited by Russian American financiers, Russian spies and a more enlightened and aggressive wave of emigres. Part Three discusses how Putin changed the game by promulgating the belief that Russian “compatriots” should advance Russia’s international position beyond its borders. And finally, Part Four describes how Putin reintroduced the concept of political emigration, forcing anti-Kremlin Russians into exile and finding ways to signal to those who had left that Moscow’s hand could reach them anywhere and everywhere.
Reading The Compatriotsis like reading a history of the Soviet Union and Russia from 1917 to the present day, but with a focus almost exclusively on emigres and the Kremlin’s attempts to keep them under control. To Soldatov and Borogan, the entire Russian intelligence apparatus and its foreign intelligence collection arm began only in order to monitor, disrupt and eliminate emigres who opposed the new Soviet, and later Russian regimes. They chronicle the activities of the Bolsheviks, who were determined to kill off those White Russians who fled the homeland for China and Europe, and they describe in perhaps the best portion of the book the details of the hunt for Leon Trotsky. Following World War II, it was Stalin who, out of revenge, created a department within his intelligence service dedicated to assassinating his enemies abroad using poisons developed exclusively for that purpose. And, as we now well know, poison as a Russian political tool remains fashionable to this day.
In addition to chronicling the history of the emigration movement, Soldatov and Borogan devote several chapters of The Compatriots to discussing the accomplishments of a number of successful entrepreneurial emigres living in the West, beginning in the 1990’s. The authors recount how a number of bankers and financiers profited immensely while Putin tacitly entrusted and embraced their activity, believing they were advancing Russia’s international stature overseas. In this vein too, they describe the rise of Russian media moguls in Europe and the United States in the early 2000’s who, for a time, controlled Russian television outside the Kremlin’s reach. All this, of course, before Putin inevitably realized an uncontrolled media undermines his authority. Soldatov and Borogan describe too, in detail, how Putin attempted for years to reunify what was left of the so-called Red and White Orthodox churches in the West, the latter of which was absorbed in 2007 by the Red Church thus essentially, in Putin’s mind, nullifying what he called the “other Russia.”
For all intents and purposes, The Compatriotsis a history of Russian emigration over the past one hundred years and, as such, does make an important contribution to the historical record of the Soviet Union and Russia. Soldatov and Borogan are clearly superb researchers, but in demonstrating their breathe of knowledge, parts the book seem disjointed, making it difficult to discern a common thematic thread throughout. The authors are clearly masters of detail - detail which, unfortunately, too often strays into the category of minutia, making it a slow read for all except those steeped in the discipline of Soviet and Russian history.
The Compatriots earns 2.5 out of four trench coats.
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