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New Statesman
25-06-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
How a Moscow archivist exposed the KGB, file by file
Photo by ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images In the autumn of 1988 I travelled from Helsinki to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Estonia. The reformist Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had allowed a limited free-market enterprise to take hold in Estonia and elsewhere in the communist Baltic. Not since Lenin had introduced his abashedly capitalist New Economic Policy of 1921 had profit-making sought to transform the monolithic face of Soviet communism. Gorbachev did not intend to dismantle the ailing Soviet project, however, and was unaware that the USSR was on the verge of disintegration. It was my first visit to the communist bloc and I was filled with excited suspense. My mother was born in the Baltic in 1929 but, having lived most of her life in London, she was resigned to a permanent British exile. She had not been back to her birthplace since the end of the Second World War. In the capital of Tallinn, an air of Kremlin austerity hung over the shops in which Estonians queued with their string 'perhaps-bags' for the odd windfall purchase. The talk was of Gorbachev's economic reforms, but Tallinners looked harried and cowed, and they were mindful not to dally outside the KGB headquarters on Pagari Street. Officially the top floor of the Intourist hotel where I was staying did not exist; it was occupied by the KGB whose listening devices came to light only after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Room telephones were tapped and electronic limpets fitted to the underside of dinner plates. One evening, two very polite detectives from the Spets Sluzhba (Special Branch) of the KGB came to interview me. 'Your mother is from Tallinn? A Baltic German? When did she leave?' The absurd interrogation had one effect: afterwards all three of us went to the Café Moskva in the Old Town to share a bottle of Caucasian Champagne. I was careful to speak in platitudes only: Soviet intelligence was as insidiously effective under Gorbachev as it always had been. What happened next happened quickly. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and with Ukraine's independence proclaimed two years later, the Soviet Union underwent what historians call sudden 'state death'. It rapidly disintegrated into 15 independent countries, the largest being the Russian Federation; the smallest, Estonia. Considering the magnitude of what happened, remarkably few people died in the last days of the Cold War. The deaths, thousands of them, would come later, in the inter-ethnic rivalries over Chechnya and Nagorno-Karabakh, and in Vladimir Putin's murder war in Ukraine. Vasili Mitrokhin, a senior KGB operative, had expected to end his days in his native Russia under communism. The demise of the Soviet regime was as unthinkable to him as the prospect that KGB plotters would one day mount a coup against Gorbachev: the world was divided into the communist East and the capitalist West and that was the immutable order of things. Instead, Red Moscow had gone before Mitrokhin knew it. As the KGB's in-house archivist, he had despaired at the inhuman, penalising labour of the gulag and what the Soviet regime had done to Russia and the Russian people in the seven decades since the 1917 revolution. Telling the 'truth' about the Soviet past would serve to strengthen and purify Mother Russia of its accumulated corruptions, he believed. The belief prompted him to note down particulars of the crimes and atrocities as revealed to him over a number of years in the KGB archives. The work was risky in the extreme but Mitrokhin felt he had no choice. As an instrument of Kremlin surveillance, he had himself witnessed enough 'horrors', as he called them. In Ukraine, where he worked as a Soviet prosecuting lawyer in the late 1940s, he most likely sent hundreds of 'class enemies' to the Siberian ice fields as punishment. He seems to have felt some remorse for that. In 1992, while post-Gorbachev Russia opened up to American capital with an undignified free-for-all scramble for state assets, Mitrokhin and his family were smuggled out to the West by MI6. He arrived with an extraordinary cache of top-secret Soviet foreign intelligence files which ranged in chronology from the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik uprising to the eve of the Gorbachev reforms in the late 1980s. The notes Mitrokhin had taken from the thousands of files in his care contained details of KGB operations in most countries and identified some 1,000 agents. Mitrokhin's was, said the CIA, the biggest counter-intelligence 'bonanza of the postwar period'. The story of Mitrokhin's exfiltration to the West via the Baltic and repudiation of Soviet communism is the subject of Gordon Corera's pacy, John le Carré-influenced work of non-fiction, The Spy in the Archives. Corera, a former BBC security correspondent, presents Mitrokhin as a Slavophile patriot figure driven by a quasi-spiritual mission to bear the truth. Mitrokhin's aversion to Kremlin-directed communism deepened after 1956 when the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced Stalin's 'personality cult' and the murderous purges and Moscow show trials of the 1930s. While Khrushchev did not admit to all the regime's depredations – he was implicated in many of them – the unmasking of Stalin paved the way for Gorbachev's perestroika 30 years later and the Soviet Union's eventual demise. During the uneasy thaw that followed Khrushchev's revelations, Mitrokhin became ever more outspoken in his criticism of the KGB's unreformed bureaucracy. He was viewed as a potential liability. Therefore, in 1956 he was demoted from operational assignments overseas to what looked like a dead-end job in the state intelligence archives, where he worked for the remainder of his career. Mitrokhin was energised in his secret work by the example set by the holy redeemer personality (as he saw it) of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The half-Ukrainian Red Army officer, having been jailed for making jokes about Stalin, had gone to ground in Estonia in 1965-67 in order to write his memoir, The Gulag Archipelago, which compared the Soviet penal system to a cancer metastasising up and down the railways and rivers of the USSR. Solzhenitsyn's was a documentary of unsparing lucidity and stern moral judgement that impelled Mitrokhin to expose more of what he called the 'the trail of filth' left in the archives by KGB operatives. He came to see the entire Soviet system as the negation of everything that Solzhenitsyn stood for. In the Soviet state's vaunted egalitarianism he found no promise of a bright, red future but a spirit of malice and suspicion, in which every Russian lived in fear of his neighbour and schoolchildren were urged to spy on their own parents. The initials 'KGB' came to have flesh-creeping associations for him. In Mitrokhin's view, the nomenklatura system under the Soviets had replaced the career nobility system under the tsars. A fawning class of policemen-bureaucrats had dogmatised Marxian thought to their own self-serving ends. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Mitrokhin wanted nothing so much as to 'destroy' the nomenklatura, says Corera. He saw his chance in 1972 when he personally oversaw the transfer of the KGB archives from Moscow's infamous Lubyanka to an HQ outside Moscow. He began to smuggle out, concealed in his shoes or socks, scraps of the notes he had been taking in shorthand; he then secreted them in milk churns under the floorboards of his dacha. After his retirement in 1984, he plotted ways to move the archive out of the shadows into the West. Only after the USSR's dissolution was he able to take samples to the British embassy in Riga, Latvia's capital, where MI6 Baltic took him at his word. On the 75th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution – November 1992 – he was allowed to settle in the UK. Mitrokhin, the man who waged war on Red Russia from from the archives, died from pneumonia in London in 2004 at the age of 81. The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB Gordon Corera William Collins, 336pp, £25 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: Giorgia Meloni's selective memory] Related
New Statesman
04-06-2025
- Business
- New Statesman
The lost futures of Stereolab
Photo by Joe Dilworth Nikolai Kondratiev was born in Russia in 1892. An influential theorist of the New Economic Policy under Lenin, in the 1920s he pioneered the idea that would define his posthumous reputation. Capitalist economies, he argued, underwent predictable cycles of about 50 years' growth followed by stagnation. In 1938, Kondratiev fell out of favour and was executed under Stalin's Great Purge. But after his death, his theory found acclaim in the West, memorialised as 'supercycles', or the Kondratiev wave. One small ripple from this theoretical legacy came in the summer of 1994, on the fringes of the British Top 40 singles chart. A basic schooling on the Kondratiev wave could be found in the lyrics of 'Ping Pong' by the avant-pop band Stereolab, a catchy, three-minute single sung in French-accented English, and built around sultry electric organ and sparkling, understated guitars. The release peaked at 45, mounting no threat to that week's imperial Wet Wet Wet chart-topper. From the vantage of the mid 2020s, perhaps Nineties guitar bands require their own theory of stagnation and growth. After long absences, this summer sees a new album by Pulp and the live return of Oasis (the latter a group impelled by very different economic theories). At a quieter volume in the public consciousness, we now have a largely unexpected new album by Stereolab, the long-running project of onetime romantic partners Tim Gane and Lætitia Sadier. Stereolab burst from the ruins of Eighties indie. Ilford-born Gane – a teenage devotee of experimental bands like Throbbing Gristle – was the guitarist in McCarthy, a badge-wearing socialist outfit whose verbose and accusatory songs included 'We Are All Bourgeois Now' and 'Should the Bible Be Banned'. At a 1988 Paris show, Gane met, and quickly began a relationship with, a McCarthy fan: Lætitia Sadier. Born in 1968, Sadier grew up in the eastern suburbs of Paris, interrupted by long stays in the US following her father's corporate job. Sadier briefly joined McCarthy before the band split in 1990. The pair then moved to south London, signed on to the dole, and plotted an entirely new project. By the Nineties, rock had amassed so much past that would-be musicians could pick a spot in virtually any niche of its history, and burrow there for a whole career. Stereolab's early releases were in thrall to the Seventies Düsseldorf duo Neu! and their propulsive, defiantly minimalist 4/4 beat. A rotating cast of musicians came and went around an unchanging nucleus of Gane, Sadier and the Australian guitarist Mary Hansen, whose bright, volleying harmonies with Sadier were the emotional centre of the band's sound. What set them apart was their politics. Gane wrote – and largely produced – the music, leaving lyrics entirely to Sadier. Delivered in a conversational but strident voice, Sadier sounded like a compelling sociology lecturer suddenly taking flight. On the single 'French Disko', which was performed on late-night TV's The Word, Sadier called for acts of 'rebellious solidarity' before a chorus of 'La Résistance!' But her lyrics tended towards affirmation rather than polemic. There was 'Ping Pong', with its Kondratiev chorus, and the playful 'Wow and Flutter', which does not on first listen sound as though it is questioning the supremacy of the IBM and US imperialism, but somehow pulls it off. In interviews, her political declarations were measured and playful, pondering to Melody Maker in 1993 what exactly to do about 'people like John Major' come the revolution. ('Do we kill them? Do we brainwash them? Do we get them to mop the streets?… That's a hell of a responsibility.') Through punk, the postwar Situationist International – a revolutionary Marxist alliance of artists and intellectuals – for a time held an outsized influence on pop music. You could detect their influence in Stereolab's fusing of anti-capitalist lyrics to the sounds of American consumerism, with their sincere adoption of Sixties bubblegum pop, easy listening and elevator Muzak. In the Eighties and Nineties, leftist bands as varying as the Style Council and the Manic Street Preachers practised entryism, smuggling leftist ideals through catchy pop. That was not Stereolab. 'I would go so far as to say we were avoiding going overground,' Sadier told the New York Times in 2019. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Instead, Stereolab protected their independence – releasing on their own Duophonic imprint – and got better. Between 1996 and 1999, Stereolab came good on the critic Simon Reynolds's declaration of the band as part of the 'post-rock' wave – meaning guitar bands who had been energised by the arrival of hip-hop and dance music. Emperor Tomato Ketchup, Dots and Loops and the sprawling Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, released consecutively, were among the finest alternative albums of the 1990s, coming at the exact moment Britpop ran out of road. Suddenly, this DIY indie project encompassed glitchy German techno, rhythmic Brazilian jazz, sleek and severe 20th-century minimalism and a collagist approach that beat hip-hop samplers at their own game (later, rap producers including J Dilla, Tyler, The Creator, and Pharrell Williams would sample and praise specifically this era of the band). Playful and psychedelic, Stereolab almost resolved political music's central dilemma – that anyone buying the object probably agrees with you already – by flooding their work with what the critic Mark Sinker dubbed 'portals', meaning references to counter-cultural history from filmmaker Stan Brakhage to synth pioneer Wendy Carlos. This couldn't last. Cobra and Phases… received a cruel, attention-seeking 0/10 review from the NME, terming them 'culturally pointless'. It was a harbinger of more than just a casually cruel media culture, proving 2000s indie rock and its skinny-jeans-wearing acolytes would revive just about anything but an interest in politics. And far worse, Stereolab were struck by tragedy. In 2002, Mary Hansen was killed in a traffic accident aged 36. Gane and Sadier separated, and a grief-stricken band lost their zeal. Stereolab's hiatus in 2009 barely caused a ripple. Instant Holograms on Metal Film is the first new Stereolab studio album since 2008's Chemical Chords. After reforming for what appeared to be a slightly awkward, financially necessitated reunion in 2019, something seemed to stick: Stereolab have toured whenever possible since. The first sounds on Instant Holograms are one minute of silvery, arpeggiated synthesizers, introducing the record like some long-lost Eighties television ident. 'Aerial Troubles', the first full-length song on the album, opens with Sadier's declaration – her voice deeper and richer – that 'the numbing is not/it is not working any more'. This is an album uniquely concerned with consumption, greed ('an unfillable hole, insatiable') and 'dying modernity'. Stereolab are back, and they've never sounded so disappointed. On first listen, it surprises that the bubblegum colours Stereolab painted in during the Nineties have been drained to a slightly more parched canvas. On repeat listens, this is to the album's benefit. If Instant Holograms is largely a retread of former Stereolab sounds – and it is – what is different and manages to convince, is its more downcast mood. 'Ego skyscraper, erect and collapsible', mourns Sadier on the mid-tempo, gently exploratory 'Immortal Hands', 'nihilistic and vulgar'. More than any other Stereolab release, Instant Holograms does not leave the subject of life under capitalism. The strange romantic songs or surreal asides that were once part of the band's coalition are this time absent. This could all be a bit much, but what separates Sadier from a bad case of what we might call the 'Ian Browns' (specifically the one-time Stone Roses frontman's dire Covid-sceptic barkings about 'masonic lockdowns' and '5G radiation') is the glacial, cool manner in which she delivers them. It is also the way that the music appears to offer solutions, glimpses of possibility. Take that track: what begins as a downcast plea suddenly fizzes into mutant disco, bursting bright with horns and recalling their most expansive material on the classic Dots and Loops. Ditto the track 'Vermona F Transistor', in which – against a lovely, woozy Tim Gane guitar line – Sadier's phrases begin to suddenly drown in bubbling, electronic vocal effects, rendering them absurd, suggesting their own slipperiness. Stereolab broke out at a time when – even for experimentally minded Marxists – the mood was playful and the forecast optimistic. Putting it mildly, this is not the case today. Instant Holograms will not command much of the same audience as Oasis's return, but the continuing appeal of both is more similar than either would admit: those listening to Stereolab will be hoping to set the clock back to half-past-the-Nineties as much as those in bucket hats at Heaton Park. But on the final song 'If You Remember I Forgot How to Dream Pt 2', Sadier closes with a rebuke to the numbing that featured earlier in the album, emphasising the 'power to choose' and the 'courage to heal'. On Instant Holograms, Stereolab find new ways to explore and analyse the disappointing world around them. Useful lessons, some might say. 'Instant Holograms on Metal Film' by Stereolab is out now on Warp Records [See also: Lorde's Brat moment] Related
Yahoo
25-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Opinion - Lenin was right and Fukuyama was wrong
It turns out that Vladimir Lenin and REM were right. Francis Fukuyama was wrong. In 1921, during the Soviet Union's New Economic Policy period, Lenin is supposed to have exclaimed that 'The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them.' In 1987, REM sang, 'It's the end of the world as we know it.' And, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1989, Fukuyama wrote a seminal essay titled 'The End of History?' Barely a month in office, President Trump has dismembered many fundamental precepts of American democracy — including the core principle of three coequal branches of government. Ruling by executive order, the president has sought to eliminate myriad government agencies; bring all agencies under the purview of the White House, including those that are, by law, supposed to be nominally independent; and has engaged in abrupt, willy-nilly firing of tens of thousands of federal employees, creating havoc for countless families. Trump has been abetted by a spineless Republican-controlled Congress that refuses to stand up for itself as an institution, let alone stand up for the judiciary. The massive spending cuts from gutting the government will not go to reduce the $36 trillion national debt, but rather to 'pay for' massive tax cuts to benefit Trump, Elon Musk and the new American oligarchy. The average citizen will see little benefit — and any benefit will be offset by a decline in government services and increased prices. Lenin was right. On the international side, the fundamental tenets of America's bipartisan foreign policy dating back to the end of World War II have been turned upside down by Trump and his collaborators. NATO is now the enemy and Russia is our friend. In classic Orwellian 'newspeak,' Trump has declared Ukraine to be the aggressor against Russia and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator. Last week, the front page of the British tabloid the Daily Star had a huge photo of a poodle with Trump's face and the caption 'Putin's Poodle.' At the recent Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not seek common cause with Europe but actively supported Putin on Ukraine and, in Vance's case, met with leaders of AfD, Germany's far-right party. Musk, for his part, has been shilling for the AfD on his social media site X for months. AfD, spiritual heirs to the Nazi Party, are now the second-largest party in the Bundestag after Sunday's election — though they are unlikely to become part of a ruling collation, as German elites understand the danger. In addition to the party's ties to Putin, AfD leaders have denied the severity and import of the Holocaust. Isolationist proclivities initially kept America out of the two world wars, but there was never a question about which side the U.S. would be on. Today, one must seriously ask the question, 'If Trump was president during World War II, would the U.S. have supported the Allies and gone to war against Germany? Or would Trump have supported the Nazis?' The party of Reagan has been so cowed by Trump that Republican hawks on Russia and Ukraine, such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), are now missing in action. Recently, Senate Republicans voted to confirm former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Gabbard has long beat the drum for Putin and Russia. The intelligence community has now joined the ever-growing list of U.S. institutions being dissembled by Trump. The late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is turning in his grave, but Lenin was right again. Which brings us to political scientist Francis Fukuyama, whose seminal work 'The End of History?' portrayed the Cold War battle of ideas as being won by the West. Fukuyama's premise was the great confrontational ideological battles over the best type of society were over. Now, the Trump administration has unabashedly taken up the bidding for Putin and Russia. It turns out the Soviets — er, the Russians — won. The U.S. has become Russia, not the other way around. The U.S. lost the Cold War — not to communism, but to autocracy. The REM song goes, 'It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.' I definitely don't feel fine. Jonathan D. Strum is an international lawyer and businessman based in Washington and the Middle East. From 1991 to 2005, he was an adjunct professor of Israeli law at Georgetown University Law Center. From 2015 to 2020, he was general counsel to a graduate school focused on national security in Washington. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
25-02-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Lenin was right and Fukuyama was wrong
It turns out that Vladimir Lenin and REM were right. Francis Fukuyama was wrong. In 1921, during the Soviet Union's New Economic Policy period, Lenin is supposed to have exclaimed that 'The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them.' In 1987, REM sang, 'It's the end of the world as we know it.' And, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1989, Fukuyama wrote a seminal essay titled 'The End of History?' Barely a month in office, President Trump has dismembered many fundamental precepts of American democracy — including the core principle of three coequal branches of government. Ruling by executive order, the president has sought to eliminate myriad government agencies; bring all agencies under the purview of the White House, including those that are, by law, supposed to be nominally independent; and has engaged in abrupt, willy-nilly firing of tens of thousands of federal employees, creating havoc for countless families. Trump has been abetted by a spineless Republican-controlled Congress that refuses to stand up for itself as an institution, let alone stand up for the judiciary. The massive spending cuts from gutting the government will not go to reduce the $36 trillion national debt, but rather to 'pay for' massive tax cuts to benefit Trump, Elon Musk and the new American oligarchy. The average citizen will see little benefit — and any benefit will be offset by a decline in government services and increased prices. Lenin was right. On the international side, the fundamental tenets of America's bipartisan foreign policy dating back to the end of World War II have been turned upside down by Trump and his collaborators. NATO is now the enemy and Russia is our friend. In classic Orwellian 'newspeak,' Trump has declared Ukraine to be the aggressor against Russia and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator. Last week, the front page of the British tabloid the Daily Star had a huge photo of a poodle with Trump's face and the caption 'Putin's Poodle.' At the recent Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not seek common cause with Europe but actively supported Putin on Ukraine and, in Vance's case, met with leaders of AfD, Germany's far-right party. Musk, for his part, has been shilling for the AfD on his social media site X for months. AfD, spiritual heirs to the Nazi Party, are now the second-largest party in the Bundestag after Sunday's election — though they are unlikely to become part of a ruling collation, as German elites understand the danger. In addition to the party's ties to Putin, AfD leaders have denied the severity and import of the Holocaust. Isolationist proclivities initially kept America out of the two world wars, but there was never a question about which side the U.S. would be on. Today, one must seriously ask the question, 'If Trump was president during World War II, would the U.S. have supported the Allies and gone to war against Germany? Or would Trump have supported the Nazis?' The party of Reagan has been so cowed by Trump that Republican hawks on Russia and Ukraine, such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), are now missing in action. Recently, Senate Republicans voted to confirm former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Gabbard has long beat the drum for Putin and Russia. The intelligence community has now joined the ever-growing list of U.S. institutions being dissembled by Trump. The late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is turning in his grave, but Lenin was right again. Which brings us to political scientist Francis Fukuyama, whose seminal work 'The End of History?' portrayed the Cold War battle of ideas as being won by the West. Fukuyama's premise was the great confrontational ideological battles over the best type of society were over. Now, the Trump administration has unabashedly taken up the bidding for Putin and Russia. It turns out the Soviets — er, the Russians — won. The U.S. has become Russia, not the other way around. The U.S. lost the Cold War — not to communism, but to autocracy. The REM song goes, 'It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.' I definitely don't feel fine. Jonathan D. Strum is an international lawyer and businessman based in Washington and the Middle East. From 1991 to 2005, he was an adjunct professor of Israeli law at Georgetown University Law Center. From 2015 to 2020, he was general counsel to a graduate school focused on national security in Washington.
