Review: To Build a Castle

When I picked up Vladimir Bukovsky’s To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter, I didn’t know that he is currently an opposition party leader in Russia. It was better for me not to know this, because it would have been better for Bukovsky to die in GULAG. This gruesome statement is the darker side of the recognition that things are not always what they seem, especially when concerning the Soviet Union and today’s Russia.

This line of thinking, enforced by numerous experiences, leads Useless Dissident to suspect any so-called “dissident,” “opposition leader,” or “moderate voice” coming from Russia, a state obsessed with its image in the West. Thus Mikhail Gorbachev’s “perestroika” is kind of unbelievable, as are any reported divisions within the political leadership, or the Army, or the KGB. Furthermore, so-called dissidents like Andrei Sakharov who call for “peaceful coexistence” between the West and East are to be seen as serving the interests of their totalitarian state.

When we hear the cry of “dissent,” then, from within the Soviet Union (or modern Russia, or China, or other totalitarian states), we must ask, “How does this serve the regime?” That must always be our first question. “Why did they allow this to be published?” Knowing the circumstances of a text’s release is important, but not always necessary. From the book itself we can discern, if we have been paying attention, what its purpose is and whose it is.

But of course, there is real dissent, and word of it will inevitably reach Western shores in authentic expression. What, though, is authentic? Certain writers are so naïve and know so little that what is for them authentic and heartfelt opinion is considered so harmless and inconsequential by KGB and Party censors that it is allowed to pass to the West virtually unedited. Some of these may even work for Writers’ Unions, and are paid by the state to write their feckless criticisms, a fact sure to be included in their works. Thus their “dissent” turns into an endorsement of the regime and a backhanded criticism of those who identify more completely the evils of communism.

Bukovsky approaches this subject: “I have even heard the following argument: Your protests are misleading world public opinion: people in the West will think that we are allowed to speak openly here and change things. Therefore you are helping Soviet propaganda.”

Well? It’s true, right? But no excuse, nevertheless, for cowardice in the face of oppression. And that’s Bukovsky’s point, for this “argument” is given in a list—a catalogue—of excuses:

No man can flay a stone.

What can I do? (If everyone acted, so would I.)

If I didn’t, someone else would. (And better me because I’ll do less harm.)

You must make compromises, concessions, and sacrifices for the sake of the main cause. (Thus the Church holds that it must make concessions for the sake of self-preservation, yet there is no end to these concessions…)

We must live for Russia, and the Communists will one day disappear of themselves.
(This argument is a favorite with scientists and the military.)

We must live for posterity, create the eternal values of science and culture, a trivial reoccupation with protests merely distracts us from the main thing.

Never ever protest openly; that is a provocation which merely enrages the authorities and brings suffering on the innocent.

Open protests play into the hands of the hard-liners in the Politburo and prevent the doves from carrying out liberalization. [Russia is fond of using this argument to stifle Western criticism today. –UD]

Open protests hinder liberalization, which can only succeed by means of power politics and secret diplomacy.

To protest about details is merely to expose oneself. The thing to do is to lie down. Then, when the decisive moment comes, okay. But in the meantime we’ll disguise ourselves.

Yes, but not now, this is the worst possible time: my wife’s pregnant, my children are ill, I have to defend my thesis first, my son’s about to go to university… (and so on till the end of a lifetime).

The worse things get, the better. We must deliberately take all the system’s idiocies to their logical and ridiculous conclusion, until the people’s patience runs out and they understand what is happening.

Russia is a land of slaves. The Russians have never had democracy and never will. They don’t have the aptitudes for it, it’s no use trying. There’s no other way for our people.

The people are silent. What gives a handful of malcontents the right to speak out—whom do they represent, whose opinion are they expressing?

Your protests are misleading world public opinion: people in the West will think that we are allowed to speak openly here and change things. Therefore you are helping Soviet propaganda.

You have to get on quietly with your career, get to the top, and try to change thins from there; you won’t achieve anything from the bottom.

You have to gain the trust of the leaders’ advisers and teach and educate them on the quiet, there’s no other way of influencing the government’s course.

You protest; I’ll stay out of it. Someone has to survive to bear witness. (I heard this in the labor camp just before a hunger strike.)

If only there were a new theory to replace Marxism and carry people away; you can’t build anything on sheer negation.

Communism has been visited upon Russia in retribution for her sins; to resist God’s retribution is equally sinful.

And so everyone, from members of the Politburo, academicians, and writers down to collective-farm laborers and factory workers, manages to find a justification. Moreover, most people sincerely believe that these are their true feelings. Very few realize that they are pretexts and excuses. And hardly anybody will admit openly and honestly that he is simply afraid of reprisals.

Though To Build a Castle contains many fine passages, I believe that none is more representative than this one. Bukovsky and his fellows are principled dissidents, who will not compromise. In this passage we see that he can see through the justifications that everyone uses to get ahead and get along in the evil communist state. And surely that is why he cannot but be a dissident.

But his group also has its pitiful side. Many of the “dissidents” still are ideologically-believing socialists/Marxists/Leninists who just want to return Russia to its glorious, righteous pre-Stalin roots. One man is obsessively focused on the Constitution and the law (in the USSR), and goes about teaching other dissidents their “rights” so that they will know them when they are arrested, even though they won’t be respected. The title thus becomes apt in a presumably unexpected way: the dissidents are no more realists than those who delude themselves with excuses for not resisting, and the author’s “life as a dissenter” as he describes it is compared to life “for hundreds of years in [a] castle... I built it between interrogations in Lefortovo, in the camp lockup, and in the Vladimir punishment cells. It saved me from apathy, from indifference to living. It saved my life.” But, of course, it’s imaginary.

These dissidents are often students who have been kicked out of universities and/or their positions because of their disagreements with the regime. They had to exhibit courage to get to even this point. And then they do whatever small things they can do, like distributing samizdat, organizing underground art shows, and meeting for silent protests (sometimes holding banners) in public places.

These are small things, but they did have an impact on the West. To some extent one has to suspect that the Communist Party and KGB laughed at these protestors, because they were showing the West that protest could happen in the USSR and thus reinforced their wishful thinking about how the Communist giant couldn’t really be that bad. But on the other hand—if one denies the Golitsyn thesis about the complicity of the Eurocommunists with the Russians in fabricating their own dissent—even Western leftists sympathized with the Soviet dissident movement.

Revelations from this time period like Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago—about the labor camps—and Bukovsky’s To Build a Castle—about the dissident movement and the use of psychiatric hospitals to incarcerate and debilitate those dissidents, did much to awake the West from its partially self-induced and partially propaganda-induced stupefied thinking about how the Cold War was a waste of time and money, how the world needed a convergence of the two systems (a “peaceful coexistence”), how the West should work with “liberal reformers” in Moscow instead of approaching the country aggressively.

Of course, the West soon forgot all about this. It has deluded itself again into thinking it “defeated Communism” and that labor camps, propaganda, brutal civic repression, and heinous things like state manipulation of churches and psychiatric hospitals are things of the past. They’re not.

To Build a Castle is very much worth reading, but it is hardly a timeless book in the way that Gulag Archipelago is. It strikes me that the author has insufficient sense of the dissident movement’s place in Russian history, its scope of influence in the West, and its meaning in relation to the Russian state. Gulag is not only solid on all of these points but is also a story of the spiritual value of suffering and the way of forgiveness and redemption. These lofty heights To Build a Castle aspires to but does not attain, but it is nevertheless a beautiful and important memoir.

Today Vladimir Bukovsky lives in exile in Britain from his native Russia. He is a strong ally of conservatism and national sovereignty. He is a critic of internationalist schemes and extremely skeptical of all new “glasnosts” and progressive reforms. He was not and is still not taken in by the Mikhail Gorbachev’s “perestroika.” He has, however, been taken in by some of the ridiculous exaggerations and accusations of “torture” surrounding the United States’ military detention facilities. This is unfortunate, but somewhat understandable.

David Kahane

If you're not reading David Kahane, how can you call yourself a paranoid, right-wing anti-communist lunatic?

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I’m currently working on yet another sequel to The Manchurian Candidate and I’ve come up with this crazy notion that, seven years after 9/11, the American people elected a man they had not even heard of a few years before, a man whose campaign was handled by a red-diaper baby, a man who was part Arab-African, the son of a Muslim, the circumstances of whose nativity are still unclear, whose college applications and transcripts have never been seen, who appears to have no friends from his days at Punahou, Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard. Heck, Hussein even went to Georgetown and made them cover up Jesus. And yet the enchanted Washington press corps finds Michelle’s bare arms and the Obamas’ new puppy — oddly enough, named BO — of far more journalistic interest. Talk about the dogs that don’t bark in the nighttime, the daytime, or any time!

Or, to put it another way, if BHO II actually were the nutbag Right’s worst nightmare, a crypto-Muslim Marxist bent on the destruction of the Principal Enemy, as our friends the Soviets used to call us, how would he act any different?

Grab your shotgun and get with the program!

Review: Abel

Abel is a perfect example of how terrible some books about the Cold War can be. This account, written by Louise Bernikow, covers a relatively narrow subject in the intelligence battle between the Soviet Union and the United States, yet it widely misses the mark.

In the book's epilogue, the author and her main source, Rudolph Abel's "friend" Burt Silverman, go to Moscow in an attempt to meet Abel. This is ten years after the trial, and Abel has since been exchanged for an American pilot. They never get to meet him, but Silverman writes a letter to Abel:

The book about you will, I think, be a truthful and honest one. It will try to explain why you are remembered so [d]early by many of the people you met. Certainly all my friends have that memory and think of you affectionately.

He is, of course, talking about a man who lived in the United States under false pretenses and spied on it for a hostile foreign power. Yet, he is thought of "affectionately."

Bernikow, Silverman, and their ilk think that they have a sophisticated and nuanced view of the world, not like those reflexive "McCarthyist" anti-communists who are somehow the villains of this story. Yet their idiocy-- their useful idiocy-- is manifest. Here is a book in which a Soviet illegal's legend-- a man who never really existed-- is held up as a charming and beautiful human being, worthy of adoration and respect. Even after he was revealed to be a spy for the KGB! Instead of facing reality, the author and her accomplice Silverman chose to believe that it was the legend, Emil Goldfus, who was real, and the spy Rudolph Abel who was the legend. One could excuse them for thinking this way, but to write a book with this as the premise is just incredible.

The story is a good one, to be sure. The man known to Burt Silverman and his group of New York intellectual, liberal, Jewish artists as "Emil Goldfus," to his fellow KGB illegal and incompetent subordinate Reino Hayhanen as "Mark," to those who inspected his travel documents for his journey to the US as "Yurgesovich Kayotis," to different people in New York as "Martin Collins," and to those who investigated him for espionage as "Colonel Rudolph Abel, KGB," was in fact none of these; he was Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher, born in England but raised in the Soviet Union.

The name Fisher never appears in Abel, as it was unknown to the author and pretty much everyone else. Nevertheless, Bernikow knew the extent to which Abel's life was a deception and yet chose to believe that Emil Goldfus, painter and musician, friend of liberal intellectuals, was the real man. Why? Because it is more convenient and comfortable to believe it, despite all the evidence. Because to admit otherwise would be to challenge a catalog of presumptions that Bernikow would prefer unchallenged.

Still, it's interesting why Fisher maintained such a legend. In The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, Christopher Andrew writes, "The Centre [KGB] instructed Fisher not to seek employment for fear that his employer would make inquiries which would blow his cover. Instead, he was told to open an artist's studio and claim to be self-employed."

Bernikow would argue that, despite the determination of the outward appearance of Fisher's life by the KGB, in his inward life Abel really was a thoughtful and sensitive artist and intellectual. The alternative, that liberal intellectual types are easily deceived and naturally sympathetic with political systems that are the antithesis of our own, is apparently too much for the author.

Bernikow spends most of the time with the trial arguing that the case being made in the press, that Abel was a 'master spy' and connected to all sorts of illegal KGB activity in the country, is ludicrous. In her understanding, Abel was a professional who did what he was asked but didn't do very much, while his subordinate Hayhanen (who testified against Abel), was an incompetent, drunken philistine.

Thus, there is not much about this book that is "truthful and honest" as Silverman claims. The reader does not learn practically anything about Fisher/Abel/Goldfus's actual activity in the United States. For example, from Sword and the Shield:

In 1949, as the basis of his illegal residency, Fisher was given control of a group of agents headed by Morris Cohen (codenamed LUIS and VOLUNTEER), which included his wife Lona (LESLE). Following Elizabeth Bentley's defection, the Centre had temporarily broken contact with the Cohens early in 1946, but renewed contact with them in Paris a year later and reactivated them in the United States in 1948. The most important agent in the VOLUNTEER network was the physicist Ted Hall (MLAD), for whom Lona Cohen had acted as courier in 1945 when he was passing atomic intelligence from Los Alamos.

Andrew writes later that "in recognition of the VOLUNTEER group's success, Fisher was awarded the Order of the Red Banner in August 1949." Yet Bernikow in Abel makes it sound like any connection between Abel and Cohen is highly spurious.

Nevertheless, it is true that the American media made the spy out to be much more than he actually was. (Later, the KGB did the same thing.) Andrew writes:

In reality, Fisher never came close to rivaling the achievements of his wartime predecessor, Iskhak Akhmerov. During eight years as illegal resident, he appears never to have identified, let alone recruited, a single promising potential agent to replace the VOLUNTEER network. Unlike Akhmerov, however, he did not have the active and enthusiastic assistance of a well-organized American Communist Party (CPUSA) to act as talent-spotters and assistants. Part of the reason for Fisher's lack of success was the post-war decline and persecution of the CPUSA.

So perhaps there is something to Berniknow's account. Did Abel fall in love with his life as a layabout New York artist and intellectual? Despite his professionalism, was his heart just not in recruiting agents in his adopted country? We can't really know, but Bernikow's highly impressionistic and naive book doesn't help us, either.

Here's an example of how terribly wrong Bernikow's book is:

What you learned about the craft of intelligence was elaborate, but wrong. You learned that it was the "Enemy's" craft. The New York Times printed stories of other spy rings that had been "exposed" and a historical rundown of the KGB. It was, of course, terrible one-sided. Although reporters knew enough to liken the KGB to the CIA, they went no further. There was no indication at all that we operated the same way or that we, too, had intelligence networks set up around the world. It was the pre-U2 era and no one spoke of the American craft of intelligence; comparing KGB with CIA only made it more mysterious.

This is the kind of snide assumption that irks me and anyone else who knows anything about the history of the intelligence war between the Soviet Union and the United States. Because the KGB should not be likened to the CIA. It's comparing apples and orchards.

Perhaps the media reports didn't include parenthetical remarks about how, of course, we operated this way too because they were reflexively pro-American. That is the way Bernikow repeatedly presents it. But perhaps they didn't include such remarks because the CIA did not and does not operate in the same way as the KGB. We certainly never had illegal residencies in the Soviet Union; they have had many in the US.

It is Bernikow who is ignorant and blinded by prejudice, yet she and her kind will assume to the end that it is those patriotic, God-fearing Americans who are ignorant and prejudiced. She takes it on faith that of course we do this stuff too, and a lot worse! (as the applause line goes at the leftist universities).

In reality, the KGB and CIA were and remain incommensurable. The KGB is many, many times the size, has far, far more responsibilities and infinite resources to perform them-- it was in fact the most important organization in the Soviet Union, along with perhaps the Party and the Army. And it remains very important in Russia today. The CIA, on the other hand, is quite small in comparison and marked by repeated failure. And at the time of Abel's trial, it was barely a decade old. And in a liberal democracy it is by necessity scarred by constant exposure of its methods and practices, it cannot keep its files secret for long, and it is prevented by law from defending itself in the press against media and public abuse.

And most importantly (in my opinion), the KGB has always made disinformation and propaganda a top priority, and the CIA is a preferred target of those attacks. The CIA's efforts at disinformation and propaganda on the other hand, have been stilted and comical. Yet-- and this is the remarkable thing-- in common perception KGB propaganda and disinformation are regarded as comical and ineffective, while the CIA is seen as devious and conspiratorial. What has caused this but the continued effort from one side and non-effort from the other, to influence public opinion?

Thus for all the tough work and thinking that must have informed the writing of Abel, it might as well have been written by KGB disinformation specialists for the terribly skewed picture it paints of the intelligence world. A definite pass.

Black is Beautiful: Part Four

Continued from Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.

Let me describe briefly exactly how the KGB manipulates your media, apart from these pictures; why they do it, and what to do about it. Some of what I say is described in the book, KGB Today, written by John Barron. Of course, I cannot put all the information that I have in my poor head, which was pumped into me by the KGB during six years of training in Moscow. It took the American CIA six months to debrief me. I am unable to put all of that into one lecture. I have two publications which I published myself in Los Angeles. Love Letter to America: this is the way I feel. And this is the way millions of people feel in my country; we are not your enemies. We are your friends. The Junta in the Kremlin are the enemies of the ‘United States and the enemies of my people. It is not conflicts between nations; peoples do not start wars. Governments do. Your Ronald Reagan was absolutely correct when he said this.

I described it in this little booklet, which I peddle for $5 (I know-- it’s highway robbery). Consider it support of a needy family: mine. I must compete with Jane Fonda. I describe the process in which I took part, the process of ideological subversion, which has nothing to do with espionage. It has something to do with your perception of reality. Why does the KGB want to mess up your minds? Very simple. Soviet international communists realize perfectly well they cannot defeat [the] United States economically or militarily. They cannot force your government to do what they want it to do because your government is being changed every four years. You mess up Jimmy Carter; then along comes Ronald Reagan. It’s impossible. But it is possible to confuse the minds of millions of Americans so that YOU will force your government to do what the communists want you to do.

It is a longer-term process, but believe me, it is easier, and it is bloodless. If war comes, it only comes as a last stage of the process which I describe in this book. The principle of subversion has not been invented by the Soviets, or the communists or Russians. We are too dumb to invent such principles; we drink too much vodka. The principle of subversion is as old as mankind itself. If you don’t believe me, open your Bibles. Read chapters like Judges, Chronicles or Kings. You will find at least 12 examples of “subversion,” when the mightiest rulers were cheating and lying to their own people. Why? Simple. To achieve something they want. Earthly interests, above all: power, money, gold, camels, beautiful women, or whatever. When it doesn’t work, then they go to war.

The principle of subversion was formulated by a Chinese philosopher 2,500 years ago. Sun Tzu said, “All warfare is based primarily on deception of your enemy. To fight on the battlefield to achieve your goals is the most primitive and barbaric [way] to achieve your goals. The highest art of war is not to fight at all, but to subvert anything of value in your enemy’s country.” Which includes religion, moral principles, traditions, and natural[ly] established relationships between people, families, groups, classes, races. Turn the blacks against the whites; turn the teachers against students; turn Ralph Nader against the government; labor unions against business; homosexuals against heterosexuals; and keep on fighting, my dear friends, until you demoralize and destabilize yourself, and then you flop like a rotten apple and the enemy will take you over. You will invite the enemy.

This is the essence of subversion, and it is not new. In this little booklet I explain to you what exactly is the objective of the KGB. It is not destruction of the United States; please don’t believe your peaceniks and freezeniks. Yes, nuclear warheads have their dangers, but the objective is not to destroy [the] United States. Please use your heads. If they destroy [the] United States’ productive capability, where will they get their grain, credits, technology, computers, blue jeans. Where will they get the Cadillacs? From Zimbabwe?

The main objective of [the] KGB is to turn you from an open society, as I described in this diagram, to a closed one, which is carbon copy of the Soviet communist, or socialist, or fascist society. Why? Why would they bother? Very simple. To merge into one global system. They make no secrets about it. You cannot merge our systems today. They are incompatible. If we merge the U. S. free market capitalism with the state monopoly of the Soviet economy, it will be a great mess. Russians may enjoy it; they will disappear in your liquor stores and K-Marts. But you may not when you wake up tomorrow morning and see a tank in your back yard. I’ll bet you’ll become emotional. Merging, convergence, or interdependent economy, like some of your beautiful Brzezinskis are professing, is IMPOSSIBLE. But it is possible to slowly, in the long stretch of time, turn your country into a carbon copy of my society.

How? By infiltrating ideas into your minds. Not agents into your offices. No, KGB cannot infiltrate all the newspapers, all the public schools. Why? Because they will need an army of agents, thousands of them, and if they come to United States, you know what would happen to these agents? They will defect, because even the dumbest communist realizes that your system is the best. It may not be perfect; by no definition is it a perfect society. But it simply is the best. And they will defect. But it is possible, instead of infiltrating bodies into your system, to infiltrate ideas into your minds, and this is how it is being done.

I describe only one idea on this diagram. Not because it is the most dangerous, but because it is the most popular and evident in your ideology today. The idea is called egalitarianism, and it is not new. It goes all the way back to the time of French Revolution. It is simply equality. What’s wrong with equality, you may ask. Everything. Look at yourself. Are you equal in any imaginable way: spiritually, physically, socially, economically, racially, whatever? There is no such thing as equality. There never was.

All through the history of mankind, some people were tall, curly and dumb. Others are short, bald and smart. There are no two individuals which are identical. Every one is unique if we are talking about people. Fish may be equal. Insects, ball bearings, but not people. If we presume that we are created by God, I would think it would be no great deal for Him to make us all equal. No? We are unequal.

And that’s where I come into conflict with your beautiful intellectuals. They say, “Mr. Schuman, you don’t know our Constitution, especially our Declaration of Independence. It says, ‘We, the people, take it as self-evident truth that all men are created equal.’” See how ignorant I am? I don’t know your Constitution. Believe me, I know. I read it at the age of 15, and I was amazed how simple and how beautiful it is. It is the best constitution in the world. First of all, there is no period, there is a comma. Your liberals quote only one line: “We, the people, take it as self-evident truth that all men are created equal.”

Equal only in one respect. It has nothing to do with legislative, social, economic or any other type of equality. It has something to do with equal opportunities for unequal people to come to this land, or are brought here by force sometimes, to enjoy roughly equal opportunities. And above all, you the people are equal in one important respect-- in respect of the undetachable right to stay alive, be free and pursue happiness. And these basic rights are given to you people, the way I understand it, by God.

“So what?” they say. Very much so. Because you cannot reelect God. You cannot take Him down to face cameras and to lie to you about the quality of the distribution of wealth, social programming, social welfare, [and] all these beautiful concepts. Why did leaders throughout the history of mankind [want] people to believe that they are equal? We know we are not. We know we don’t have to be. Why then? Simple (and communists take advantage of this misconception): because it is impossible to control and exploit people as long as they stay unequal.

Then why have poor people always wanted to be equal? Simple. You name me one American who wanted to be equal with someone who has one popsicle less. I think you want always to be equal with someone who has one car more, one bedroom more, 20 cents an hour more. And if you don’t get this 20 cents an hour more, you become very unhappy.

What is the motivation of equality in the minds of poor people then? Greed. This is what happens. And this is the core of ideological manipulation of the masses. The concept of equality, forcefully introducing such ideology creates false expectations which clash with reality and produce unhappiness, frustration.

Discontented people produce less. Lower productivity creates economic instability and social unrest. This leads to radicalism because people become impatient. That leads to power struggles. Power struggles lead to replacement of social, political structure. That replacement is the fastest way to internal upheaval, civil war, or invasion. The result for the last observable 35 years is always the same: closed society. Just the opposite of what we started with. Everything is nationalized, from banks to washrooms. Human beings belong to the state. My right to live and pursue happiness in the USSR is not given by God because God is removed from the school, right? My right to live in Russia is given by the state. The State giveth, and the State taketh away.

Sixty-six million of my people lost the right to live. In your country, even the worst criminal who raped five neighbors and killed his babushka [is] still taken to court, and he is politely called a suspect. You see the difference? This is the core of ideological subversion. You go all the way from open to closed society, and later on to a merging. Four stages of subversion-- Demoralization: 20 years, destabilization: 5 years, crisis: one year, “normalization”: forever. On the stage of demoralization, the media plays the most important role. Why? Because it conveys ideas into your mind. If your media presents the picture of socialism this way, this image of your country, which you see every day on television-- crime, child abuse, police brutality, racial discrimination, acid rain, explosion-- this image is not to the advantage of the United States. A child can grow up in America believing that he lives in the worst possible country on earth, whereby the reality is just the opposite: you live in the best possible country.

If you think that I am crazy, please ask Mexicans. Have you ever heard of any smart Mexican sneaking across the border into Cuba, Nicaragua, or the USSR? Boat people never swim to Red China for equality and justice. Black African brothers are not running from South Africa. They run from Zimbabwe, Angola and Mozambique TO South Africa. If you don’t believe me, go there and stay for one hour at the border check.

Your media lies to you. Why? Media is a part of the process of demoralization. They are monopolized today. They are controlled by the same group of people, unelected, super-rich and super-powerful people who trade with murders of my nation in the Kremlin. Interesting isn’t it? With one hand these people send your boys to Vietnam for 12 years. [Who? The media?] With the other hand they send billions of dollars of credit to the Soviet government to build weapons to kill your boys in Vietnam. Imagine, when people make a mistake once and repeat this mistake-- repeats the same mistake three times-- we call him a dangerous idiot. What would you call people in your establishment who repeat the same mistake, aiding your enemy and the enemy of my people in the Kremlin, over and over again for 68 years? Traitors. And they control your media. [Who? Our Congress?] I described it here in this booklet World Thought Police, exactly what your media did for us, for the KGB. One service after another, how to recognize it in your media, and what to do about it.

And this is the last thing I want to mention before you fall asleep. What to do about it. I don’t want you to go home depressed. I want you to go home happy. You deserve to be happy. You look like normal people. The process of demoralization, which takes 20 years, has taken place only in part. Andropov, a year ago when he was still half alive, talking to the Kremlin assembly, said, “We (meaning communists) are entering the final stage of the battle for minds and hearts of the people.” He was not talking about invasion of El Salvador. No, he was talking about this process I just described. You have five more years, according to Andropov. Presuming that you are demoralized, which I don’t believe because you are still alive, and Andropov is dead. So is Chernenko.

What to do about this crazy situation. Believe me, the solution is ridiculously simple. You do not need any more MX-- you may have them, just in case, but you may not need them if you take my solution. If you prefer Dr. Kissinger’s solution, go ahead. Suit yourself. You’ve been following the advice of people like Kissinger, Schlesinger, Brzezinski, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, for the last observable history. Look where you are now. You lost all your friends in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and you are on your way to losing El Salvador, South Africa, Philippines, Mexico, Canada, and on and on.

Just for the sake of experiment, listen to Schuman. It costs you nothing. My solution is simple. You don’t want to be demoralized. Stay moral. See how simple? Stay moral. What does this imply? Exactly what CAUSA is telling you. Exactly what many millions of sensible Americans who belong to a multiplicity of conservative and religious groups are telling you on TV and radio. These stations grow like mushrooms. Stay moral. Bring prayer back to school. No matter what prayer, as long as your children will remember that their grand-grand-grandparents were not monkeys.

And so that they will grow up realizing that their right to live, to be free and pursue happiness, is not given by the state or federal government. It is given by God. You have to implant in the minds of your children, before it is too late, that yours is the best system. No, it is not perfect. No, it is not smooth. It is rough and there are pains and ups and downs, but believe me, your problems are nothing compared to the problems of Zimbabwe, and Angola, or people living now in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. That’s all you have to do.

Suppose you believe Andropov and are demoralized. Suppose we are really entering the final stage of your life, destabilization, five more years. Even then there is a solution. And again, this solution has nothing to do with more nuclear warheads. This solution is so primitive and so simple that nobody wants to listen to me, in the establishment. It is very simple, peaceful, nonviolent and very beneficial: stop aiding your enemy.

Right now, as your Congress is thinking how to cut the budget, how to reduce the deficit, they are thinking that your Pentagon doesn’t deserve $500 toilet seats. That Salvadorans do not deserve $30 million to protect it against communism. At the very same time, your Congress votes for billions of dollars of credits to the enemy of my people in the Kremlin. These billions of dollars are not reaching poor people in my country or Asia or Africa or Latin America. All of them are directed to the Soviet military-industrial complex, to world terrorist networks, to [the] destabilization process in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Stop this before it is too late.

Force your Congress to stop aiding my enemy and your enemy and there will be no nuclear war. You will not need more MX missiles. That’s all. You will not need more boys to be killed in Lebanon, Vietnam, or in Central America. Why? Because my people don’t want to fight war. There will be no international terrorist network, because all of them are on the Soviet payroll. If you think I am crazy, give me one example when terrorists are blowing up Soviet embassies, hijacking Soviet airplanes, abducting a Soviet diplomat. All you have to do is to stop aiding your enemy. You will immediately save yourself billions of dollars. The Soviet system already owes you $100 billion. Half of your deficit. Could you imagine? And they are thinking in Congress how to cut social welfare, or a $200 hammer for [the] Pentagon. Stop aiding your enemy! That’s all.

And if we are talking specifically about media like that, already I gave you the solution. Start your own media. If you read such monsters as The New York Times, or The Washington Post, or The Los Angeles Times, if you watch the garbage coming through the three major TV networks, just for curiosity’s sake, please subscribe to conservative literature. If you watch The Phil Donahue Show, just for curiosity watch Pat Robertson or Jimmy Swaggart, or Jerry Falwell; there are many others.

If you read The Los Angeles Times, read The Washington Times for a change. You will see the difference. That’s all I have to say to you. Please do it fast. Because if you pooh-pooh your system, you will follow the destiny of the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Nicaraguans, Zimbabweans and Ethiopians. And yours will be the last country.

Why am I shouting? Why am I so emotional? I am sick and tired of defecting! And believe me, if you destroy your system, you will have no place to defect to. Because your country is the last hope for mankind’s survival, freedom and justice.

MY PUBLICATIONS

5. “THE BEST OF SCHUMAN” on videotape. Two hours of continuous battle of ideas, recorded during my TV appearances—from “700 Club” to “Round Table With the Marxists.” Also included: my slide show, biographical story and examples of Western media being manipulated by the KGB. This tape is not only an “eye opener,” it is pure fun, I like it! So did some 60,000,000 Americans who saw me on TV and send me their letters of love and appreciation. Quality may not be as good as CBS, but what you expect for $39.60?

Mail your checks made to N.A.T.A., [omitted].

ISBN 0-935090-18-5
Copyright by Tomas Schuman [Thanks again.]

TOMAS SCHUMAN has been personally involved with the worldwide propaganda efforts of the Soviet regime. Like a true-life Winston Smith, from George Orwell’s “1984”, Tomas Schuman worked for the communist equivalent of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth: The Novosti Press Agency. Novosti, which means “News” in Russian, exists to produce slanted and false stories to plant in the foreign media. The term for this K.G.B. effort is “disinformation.”

Mr. Schuman was born under the name of Yuri Bezmenov in Moscow in 1939, the son of a senior officer in the Red Army. Consequently, he went to good schools. At the age of 17 he entered the Institute of Oriental Languages of Moscow State University.

After graduating, he worked for Novosti, then spent two years in India as an interpreter and public relations officer with Soviet Refineries Constructions. He returned to Moscow in 1965 to work for Novosti, serving as Economic Editor for the Hindi, Urdu and English Editions of Sovietland Magazine. In 1969 he went back to India and continued propaganda efforts for Novosti in New Delhi, working out of the Soviet Embassy in a department called Research and Counter-Propaganda. Due to his growing disgust, he began to plan defection.

In February of 1970 he disguised himself as a hippie complete with beads and [a] wig and joined a tour group to escape to Athens. He contacted the United States Embassy and, after a long debriefing by U.S. Intelligence, was granted asylum and went to Canada.

In Canada, he studied political science at the University of Toronto for two years, taught Russian language and literature and in 1972 was hired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s International Service as a Producer/Announcer, broadcasting to the Soviet Union. The K.G.B. forced him out of the job in 1976, so he began freelance journalism and worked on a variety of projects.

Today he is a political analyst for PANORAMA weekly in Los Angeles. He is married, and has two children. He is the author of two yet unpublished books.

You can order this book by mailing your check made to N.A.T.A.. (New American Talent Association)-$5.00 plus 60 cents for postage- to: Almanac, [omitted]. Tape-cassettes with Schuman’s talk on KGB’s Active Measures are available for $5 a piece plus postage.

ALMANAC
Los Angeles, 1985

Black is Beautiful: Part Three

Continued from Part One and Part Two.

This is another type of KGB curiosity. I am on the left with the beautiful Walter Mondale smile. On the left [is] Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, famous Indian guru. Again, the legitimate question, why KGB socializes with the religious cults? Simple: we are not after Maharishi’s secrets. We are after [the] public opinion of [the] United States. If you remember the history of rock and roll music you know the name of The Beatles. They were trained in India in an ashram in transcendental meditation, and they landed in the United States and they poisoned millions of minds of your children with the strange blend of Oriental mysticism and revolutionary music. “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” My KGB supervisors were dying of curiosity: how could it possibly happen that four degenerate monkeys are so rich and famous in [the] United States?

This was the subject of our studies. You can see me infiltrating the ashram there. I am not implying that Maharishi is on a KGB payroll. I am illustrating to you people that the main objective of KGB activity is your minds.

These two gentlemen: the one on the right is now, by the way, in the United States. He is a Soviet official at the United Nations. On the left, a famous Indian communist. Both of them worked together with me in a secret department called Research and Counter-Propaganda. What we did was neither. We simply compiled information on each individual who is instrumental in shaping public opinion. Those who promote Soviet propaganda will be promoted by us to positions of power and influence by bribery, corruption and publicity. Those who resist Soviet propaganda will be listed by us for defamation, blackmail, or at the time of a people’s revolution, for this: execution.

This picture was taken in Cambodia, but the same execution happens everywhere the ‘people’s” government [is] established. In Nicaragua, in Zimbabwe, in Angola, in Ethiopia, in Bangladesh, in Afghanistan, in Cuba. Everywhere, but you have thick eyeglasses. You have bananas in your ears. Your liberals don’t explain to you what is happening. Maybe I will.

Maybe you will remember the name of a small South Vietnamese city by the name of Hue. It was occupied by North Vietnamese communists for about 10 days, but it was recaptured by the South Vietnamese and US military. They discovered to their horror that several thousand pro-American Vietnamese, your best friends, who talk too much against communism, were rounded up, taken out of the city limits, and executed this way. The CIA could not figure out how the communists could possibly round up that many people, several thousands of them. How did they know their identity, their political affiliations, and their addresses? I knew how.

Long before communists invaded that city, they had established a network of informers, Vietnamese citizens: barbers, taxi drivers, [and] teachers who acted under control [of] the Soviet Embassy in Hanoi, from the department which is called Research and Counter-Propaganda, for which I was in New Delhi doing exactly the same job. And it took me one year, because I am a thick-skulled Russian, to realize that what I was doing [was] compiling death lists for innocent people simply because they talk too much. Believe me: the same lists exist in United Stares. There may be some informers right here in this room, and you don’t need to be paranoid about this but you must KNOW about it. You have the right to know what the Soviet Embassy is doing in your country, and your media doesn’t explain it to you. The dimwits like Dr. Kissinger are appealing to you that quiet diplomacy is what you need. You don’t need any quiet diplomacy. You need LOUD diplomacy, loud and clear against what the Soviet Embassy is doing in United States.

I have no chance to explain it to Dr. Kissinger. Maybe you will have a chance. This is what we are doing. It took me one year to realize that what I was doing [might] bring irreparable damage to India. Naturally my decision was to run away and to scream at the top of my voice: “People, please wake up before this comes to your country.”

My attitude was different. I love India, I respected their culture. I meditated about marrying an Indian girl, which I could not. Naturally, my decision was obvious. Run away! It was a very painful decision.

First of all, because I have to leave behind this type of life. I was filthy rich by Soviet standards. Maybe not as filthy as your Jane Fonda, but definitely rich. My father was a big boss in the military; I was a frequent traveler. I could buy anything I want[ed]. Just one telephone call: television sets, cars, booze, girls, you name it. Try to understand leaving all this behind to run to the United States to take the side of losers: you! And what do I get for this? For the last 15 years I have been screaming, “Wake up people!” What do I get in return? More than 15 countries since my defection have been occupied by communists. And yet your media calls me paranoid, right-wing fanatic, ultra-conservative, McCarthyist, or whatever.

This morning-- I have a tape if you want to listen. This morning people on the radio called me these names, dimwits living right here in Atlanta. A “fanatic and idiot” because I am trying to wake you up.

My decision was extremely painful because, as I say, you have to be absolutely crazy to leave behind a luxurious life to come to your side, trying to save you and get spit in my face. What do I get for the last 15 years? I was driving a taxi, I was a security guard, I was a farmhand, I was a translator, [and] I also worked for Canadian Broadcasting. For the last two years I was manager of an apartment building in downtown Los Angeles. Come and visit me. A building populated by [the] chronically unemployed and people who complain about American capitalism. They sit on welfare; they don’t want to pay rent. Even to collect rent would require a machine gun sometimes! Imagine, a Soviet diplomat, a son of high-ranking military officer in USSR, changing bulbs and flushing toilets in Los Angeles. I bet you would not like to take my place…

Another reason to think twice before defection: This secret document, which is called [a] recommendation letter… every Soviet agent assigned to a foreign country has to be co-sponsored by three long-standing members of the Communist Party. Their signatures are at the bottom.

If I defect, all three of them will be fired, imprisoned, or executed. Two of them are my friends. I don’t want to endanger their lives. Because I will feel guilty. Dr. Kissinger feels OK-- he has sentenced to death half of Asia. He is OK; he is nice, fat, talking about “important social-political structure confrontation.” He is smart! He feels OK-- he charged $15,000 for one lecture. Right? He sleeps well. He has good food. No problem.

Then there is another reason: my family. Even though it was a marriage of convenience, by mistake we made a baby already. It’s a shame to leave a baby and a wife. Even in the United States where husbands leave their wives without any political reason, it’s a shame. I was feeling reluctant to defect, and I could not take my wife and my child with me. Why? Very simple. Because the Indian government, which is described in your media as a “non-aligned democratic government,” betrays defectors to the Soviet KGB. Especially after this lady defected in India-- she is Stalin’s daughter-- she defected in 1967, but she is back in Russia, by the way. The Soviet Embassy was so mad at Indira Gandhi that we forced her to adopt a law which says that “no defector from any country has a right of political asylum in any embassy on the territory of India.” Which, as you may understand, is the highest degree of hypocrisy because only Soviet defectors need political asylum.

Imagine yourself, an American citizen, in India and you want to defect to the USSR. What kind of asylum do you need? Political? No, Psychiatric! In my case, my defection would end predictably if I walked into United States Embassy. I would be taken back to the warm embrace of the KGB, and yet I had to run away.

How? This is how. I noticed there are many American hippies [with] no shoes, long hair, smoking hashish, [and] gravely annoying Indian police. And I realized that with my pale European face I would stand out in the crowd of Asians; they will catch me in two minutes. But if I dress as a hippy, and I join a bunch of hippies from the United States, a crazy Russian in a crowd of crazy Americans, [I will be] very difficult to identify. This is exactly what I did. I mixed with them.

All papers carried my picture, and [a] promise of 2,000 rupees for information leading to me arrest, as if I was a criminal or a murderer. An insult to me. And other insult was 2,000 rupees. I was sure I was worth more than that. And yet they could not find me because they were looking for this gentleman:

…and at the time of defection I looked like this:

No sensible detective would even imagine that the normal Russian diplomat would look like a total idiot and walk away from the Soviet Embassy. This is what saved my life and another thing was the American CIA which smuggled me out from Bombay airport, first to Greece. They debriefed me for six months. They gave me the name Tomas Schuman to protect my family [and] friends and keep me away from mischief for five years. I worked in Canada; I was employed by Canadian Broadcasting for six years. I was fired from there for my anti-communist jokes because I was stupid. I thought to be an anti-communist was OK in Canada. No? I was wrong. Under Pierre Trudeau it was a crime to be an anticommunist and be employed by Canadian government.

Continued in Part Four.

Black is Beautiful: Part Two

Continued from Part One.

This is another type of activity. You can see me second on the left with my KGB supervisor, with a group of intellectuals, “progressive writers, journalists, freedom fighters, and civil rights movement leaders, visiting the Kremlin in this picture, seemingly for one purpose only: to denounce American racism and imperialism and to glorify Soviet imperialism and racism. And of course they are being paid for this; don’t worry. Secretly people like [me] call them “useful idiots.” This is a gathering of such idiots in the headquarters of Novosti Press Agency. I am standing next to one of them: an Indian poet who wrote a poem entitled “Springtime Blossom for Mankind, Comrade Lenin.” You can imagine how much money we paid to him.

Pay attention to the number of bottles on the table. This, my dear friends, is hard booze. Part of my job was to keep foreigners permanently on a certain level of intoxication, not too drunk, not too sober. Why? Simple. So that everything looks nice to them in Russia. The moment that they walk out of the airplane in Moscow, we take them to the VIP lounge and we toast with champagne to friendship, understanding, detente, brotherhood, Andropov-style. And if they refuse to drink, we tell them, “It’s unethical. You may offend [the] feelings of our people, because it’s a tradition in our country to get drunk for friendship.” And the poor idiots start boozing for three, four, five, ten days continuously. And then next morning we stop. And if any of you who ever tried this trip, to drink for five days and then stop, you know what will happen next morning? You will be sick with a hangover, even sicker. You will feel guilty sometimes, trying to recollect: “What were we talking about yesterday? With whom did you spend the night?”

In the United States, this decadent capitalist country, it’s not a big problem. You go across the street; you buy a 6-pack of cold beer and refresh your memory. In my country, I control these idiots. I take them to the hotel and there is not a drop of alcohol miles around. And they are dying for a drink. This is the time, when their mentality is the most ‘flexible.’ If you don’t believe me, ask your doctor. Alcohol does it, drugs do it. This is the time when we get them involved in propaganda operations--not espionage, no: propaganda, blackmail.

Your beautiful politicians, journalists, can do any idiocy such as citing Helsinki agreements, SALT accords, [and] preferential trade agreements with the Soviet bandits in the Kremlin. They can make a speech in the Kremlin denouncing America and glorifying the USSR. They can sing a song like Pete Seeger did, or Paul Robeson did, in the Kremlin. Anything we want, to our advantage, and to the disadvantage of your nation. And when they come back to America, your media describes this type of people as “soberly thinking politicians.”

This is one sober-thinking politician, Edward Kennedy, dancing with a Russian bride in a wedding palace. We don’t have church weddings because churches are being destroyed by the communist party. So we have official weddings, and Edward Kennedy is attending one of them. What he believes is that (and Time magazine describes [this] misunderstanding too) he is finding common language with the Russians. No, he is not. He thinks he is a beautiful, charismatic politician. No. He is not. He is a part of a circus. It is a specially prepared occasion to impress your politicians. Then they come back to the United States and say, “Russians are just like us. They are normal people.” Yes, we are. We have two hands, one head and go to bathroom just like you do. We make love, we make babies.

I may forgive a little monkey, Samantha Smith, when she goes to Russia on the invitation of comrade Andropov, comes back and says, “Oh, Russians are lovable people.” Yes, we are. Samantha Smith may not notice the difference between the systems’ political structure[s], and I can forgive her. But I can never forgive a political prostitute like Edward Kennedy for not knowing the difference. You can see Edward Kennedy taking part in a farce, and I hope you will believe this is a farce. This is the same type of farce I organized for hundreds of delegates.

You can see [me] in the middle, probably the same bride on the left, and three impressed correspondents on the right. They will come back home and they will explain to their people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America: “Look, Russians are just like us.” Of course we are like you. Please, try to understand, we are not talking about people. We are talking about systems and concepts and moral principles.

Another type of activity: You can see me in the background under the red spot with a group of journalists visiting an ordinary kindergarten. The trick is: it is NOT an ordinary kindergarten.

THIS is the ordinary kindergarten. This picture was published by mistake in one of the government publications in Canada. The caption says, ‘Typical day care center in Siberia.” My dear friends, it is typical, but it is not day care center. It is a prison for the children of political prisoners. They don’t explain it to you, your beautiful journalists.

This is Stalingrad, now Volgograd, the monument to Mother Russia. This propaganda complex is being used to indoctrinate soldiers in unquestionable loyalty to Communist Party.

This is [me], in the same place, with a group of American journalists representing Look Magazine. You can see in the background the statue to Mother Russia. It is a huge monster, ten limes bigger than the Statue of Liberty, an oversized lady with an overdose of hormones, brandishing a sword at you.

This is a copy of Look Magazine, and we’ll come back to that issue later if we have time.

After several successful propaganda operations with American journalists, I was transferred back to India. Your media lies to you when they describe India as the biggest democracy in Asia. India never was the biggest democracy. It was an autocracy, ruled by the Nehru families: Jawaharlal Nehru, his daughter Indira Gandhi, and now her son.

Indira Gandhi was not a non-aligned politician. She was very much aligned with the Soviet Union. She was in the Soviet pocket from the moment she stepped into her office.

When she arrived in United States to visit you two years ago, she lied to you and your media repeated these lies. Indira Gandhi said to your people, “There is no evidence of Soviet military presence in India.” My dear friends, it was the biggest and fattest lie. I was dealing with the Soviet military in India. Some of them were building Indian seaports for Soviet nuclear submarines. Others were preparing invasion into East Pakistan, which the dimwits of your media described as a grassroots Islamic revolution. Believe me please, there was no grass, no root, no revolution, and least of all Islam. There is no such thing as an Islamic revolution. Revolution has nothing to do with Islam. There is no such thing as Islamic terrorists.

Your media lies to you when they say that [the] United States embassy was blown up by “Islamic terrorists.” They are terrorists, yes. But they are not Islamic simply because they were born in an Islamic country. Do you know the difference? I cannot call Comrade Andropov a Christian dictator simply because he was born in a country which was Christian. Islamic people do not hate America. They love you. They know where the money comes from. I am a Christian, but I have no reason to hate Islam, but if you read your own newspapers, you may have an impression that Islam is an enemy of American Christians. Baloney. Open up your eyes please.

This is another type of KGB activity. You can see on my right my KGB supervisor [and] in the middle [a] professor of political science, Delhi University. Why do you think [the] KGB socializes with professors of political science? What kind of secrets [do] we want from [a] professor? We don’t want his secrets. We want the brains of his students.

The KGB is not after secrets.

It is after public opinion.

We invite this professor to a meeting of the Soviet Cultural Society.

There is the whole meeting. We trained him in the teaching of Marxism-Leninism. We sent him to Russia, to study that. You can see me [above], sitting next to politicians and members of the Parliament of India. Why? To create an atmosphere of legitimacy and respectability for this propaganda operation. And these dimwits don’t realize what is going on in their own country. Then the professor will be sent back to Delhi University, and for many generations he will indoctrinate students. And they will grow up firmly believing that socialism is good and that America is bad. They will close their eyes; they will have bananas in their ears. Even though they will see that people die from socialism, they say, "No, no, this is because of [the] CIA."

These are the people who are in charge oft this type of propaganda. About the Information Department of the Soviet Embassy: Sometimes your journalists ask me questions, “Mr. Schuman, how many KGB spies do you think there are in Washington, D.C.?” I think it’s a very dumb question. All of them are. The solution is not to find who exactly works for KGB in which rank. The solution is to kick out all of them if they misbehave, together with their beautiful United Nations.

This is [a] group of people who have nothing to do with espionage. They have something to do with your minds. This gentleman is still in the United States. He’s in New York City. Your officer of [the] United States Army in East Germany was shot to death yesterday by Soviet soldiers, on the pretext that your soldier was spying. Whether he did or not is a big question. Besides, spying is an activity in which superpowers do engage.

This gentleman is also in New York City, a correspondent for the Novosti Press Agency. He IS spying. Nobody shoots him, which is a great pity. The FBI knows perfectly well what he is doing against your people. But you see-- there is no law which would enable FBI to kick him out, together with hundreds of other Soviet agents in your country. But there is a law in your country which forbids your FBI to use your own American mass media, even to explain to your people what they want to do to criminals like these. Please explain to me who is more dangerous to you: your FBI or my KGB? Are you a proud and free nation, or are you a bunch of masochists, afraid of your own police?

Continued in Part Three.

Black is Beautiful: Part One

The following excerpts are from a talk on DISINFORMATION IN THE LIBERAL MEDIA, given March 26 [1985] at a CAUSA USA Regional Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. The speaker, Mr. Tomas Schuman (Yuri Bezmenov), was formerly a correspondent for the Soviet Novosti Press Agency, specializing in producing disinformation for the foreign media. A defector, Mr. Schuman now works as a political analyst and public speaker on disinformation and other activities of the Soviet KGB.

My dear American capitalists, and oppressed masses, I would like to start my talk with three magic words, which usually give three years of imprisonment to any citizen of any socialist country if they pronounce these three magic words loudly and continuously: “I love America.” Apart from loving America, I also love CAUSA, if only for one reason, that they can collect so many interesting people in one room, including Hispanics and blacks.

I’m very happy to see many black Americans in this room, because my message concerns you, greatly. I believe that black is beautiful, but unlike some of your liberals, I practice what I preach. I live in a black area of Los Angeles, in the city which has the best black mayor in the United States, Tom Bradley. I am married to a girl who is rather black, maybe not as black as Andrew Young or Jesse Jackson, but nobody’s perfect. And I am trying to bring such beautiful concepts as equality, justice, and freedom into practical implementation. And believe me, I am not telling these things to you people just to please you. I am not running for political office. I don’t want anything from you people. I am not selling anything, I don’t want any money. I’m simply telling you what I feel.

The rest of my message may not be as pleasant. I’m going to tell you something that is extremely unpleasant to hear. My impression and my knowledge, based on my experience on the Soviet side, is that much of the American mass media is being manipulated by the Soviet KGB. That was my job for about 12 years. There is a strange, nagging negativism in the American mass media in relation to America. The monopolized media in the United States tends to blame everything on the United States--earthquakes arranged by the CIA, acid rains come from American capitalism, oppression, discrimination, racism, come from America. I’m not disputing that there are some bigots in the United States: bigots are everywhere, and through the history of mankind there were people who were pathologically unable to be friendly to blacks, yellows, or any race.

I’m talking about governmental, state racism. This is something that never existed in the United States in observable history. America is not racist. Socialism is. And I’m going to demonstrate to you how and which way. When this morning I was on radio talk show, some caller said, “Mr. Schuman, we don’t want to discuss differences between capitalism and socialism. We want to discuss the injustices which exist in both camps.” Obviously, he doesn’t know what real injustice means.

Before I go into specifics about the mass media, why the media is so masochistic about the United States, why they lie to you--and I’m going to prove how they lie to you--I’m going to show you several pictures which will give you a glimpse into my life and my activity as a Soviet product, as a Soviet disinformation agent, and believe me I was not a spy.

When you watch your Hollywood movies about James Bond espionage, please believe me, most of it is pure garbage. The Soviet KGB do not need any James Bonds today; YOU GIVE THEM THE SECRETS, or SELL THEM THE SECRETS. I was engaged in something much more unpleasant than espionage. I was engaged in ideological subversion, which is seldom explained to people by your media, because the media is part of that process.

Let me show you part of my life story and activity. This is the town in the suburbs of Moscow where I was born. You can see Comrade Lenin’s statue in the middle of the central square, on the right. This is a typical decoration in any Soviet city.

Comrade Lenin is described in your mass media as a great politician, and great revolutionary. He is the idol of many of your intellectuals and freedom fighters and civil rights movements. The United Nations recently celebrated the anniversary of Comrade Lenin’s birthday. And your government sent congratulational telegrams to my government.

Now please try to understand that in the eyes of people who walk by Comrade Lenin’s statue, he was a short, bald man with a speech impediment who died from syphilis, and who introduced the system of mass terror and concentration camps in my country long before these beautiful ideas came to the mind of Adolf Hitler. Nazis killed 6 million Jews. The system established by Lenin killed 66 million of my people. Do you see the difference? Or similarity? You don’t have time to count how many people were killed by the system which is glorified in your mass media.

This is another great politician, the statue of Comrade Stalin, and [me] at the age of 6 or 7. When I realized that the mass media lied to both my people and your people when they describe Uncle Joe as a peacemaker. President Roosevelt called him a nice, charming Uncle Joe. The New York Times described him as a great humanist at the time when he was killing millions of my people.

At the age of 6, as you can see, I realized perfectly well that the United States is not my enemy. You have to be an exceptionally dumb child at the age of 6 to believe that such delicious food as Spam meat was supplied to us by the enemy. When Soviet propaganda tried to convince me that United States [was] just about to invade us, believe me, kids in my school and thousands of other schools were counting the days and minutes: When is Gen. Patton to invade our country?! We wanted to be invaded. We wanted to own blue jeans, jazz records with Glenn Miller music, more chocolate bars, more condensed milk, more Spam meat. We did not want Uncle Joe. Yet your presidents, multinationals, and religious groups imposed Uncle Joe on us to continue the slavery in my country. With your silent consent.

This is my father on the right, Inspector of Land Forces of the Soviet Army General Staff. He inspected Soviet troops stationed in such countries as China, Mongolia, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany, where one of your officers was killed last morning. My father died in 1973, but believe me, his comrades are doing the same job right now, inspecting Soviet troops in such countries as Nicaragua, El Salvador, Yemen, Mozambique, Syria, and Iraq. You want more? There are more. Zimbabwe, Angola, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan. You want more? Well, keep on sitting on your fat bottoms. There will be more countries like that.

Your media, your beautiful intellectuals, your think tanks, which I call stink tanks, all these countries they describe as Third World countries, nonaligned countries, and neutral countries. Some idiots come forward with such names as liberated, anti-colonial countries. Sensible people in my country--the Russians as you call us--we have different names for these countries. We call them betrayed countries, betrayed by your government, by your multinationals, by the dim wits of your establishment, intellectuals, some of your freedom and whatever fighters. And there will be more countries like that until you understand the difference between freedom and slavery.

This is the college from which I graduated: Institute of Oriental Languages, a small, elitist school for children of high-ranking officials of the USSR. I studied the languages of India, Pakistan, Hindi and Urdu. I also studied history, economy, political science, communications, mass media--anything that would enable me to be an effective Soviet bureaucrat in India.

I also studied the music of India, as you can see. I even tried to look like an Indian when I was a second year student, and I was encouraged to do so because we were preparing to be foreign correspondents, diplomats or spies.

[Picture not from book.] As every other Soviet student, I had to volunteer to harvest grain in Soviet collective farms. Strictly according to Marxist-Leninist slogans, those who do not work shall not eat. You can see me eating; therefore, I was working.

This is the area where Soviet students spend their vacation; it is marked by the yellow color; it is called Kazakhstan. The picture is taken from an American news magazine, US News & World Report. I demonstrate it to you as an example of the monumental ignorance of your mass media. They call this area Russia’s breadbasket. I hope you people realize that Russia’s breadbasket is not Kazakhstan; it is Kansas, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Ohio.

This is my first assignment as a translator with a Soviet economic aid group building oil refineries. At the time I realized that what we were doing in India has nothing to do with friendship, cooperation. detente, peace. What we were doing was building a carbon-copy of the Soviet socialist system in India, peacefully, without tanks. I hated socialism back home, yet I did my job in India. Why? Simple.

My country sent me to India. My country, good or bad, I love my country, and I still do even though I despise the system. I tried to be friendly to Indians. I was trying to be friendly to little Indians like this boy [not shown]. I was trying to be friendly to not-so-little Indians like this girl.

If you remember, Karl Marx said, ‘Proletarians of all the countries, unite.’ To be a good Marxist, I wanted to unite with a nice proletarian girl. I was always crazy about Oriental girls for a very simple reason: apart from being a “racist” I spent my childhood in the Oriental part of USSR, in Kazakhstan. My father was fighting on the front lines; my mother was working in the factories. My adopted mother was an Oriental girl with dark skin and slanted eyes. That was the first lady [who] showed me some respect, love and tenderness, changed my diapers and wiped my nose. As every normal child, I remember her face for the rest of my life. I did not want to marry a fat, white Russian girl. I wanted to marry a slender, dark Indian girl.

I wish I could explain it to your freedom fighters in the United States, who blame America for being racist. It is my country, under Soviet socialism, which is the most racist system in the world. By law in USSR, I was not allowed to marry a foreign girl, and--Marx forbid!--to make love to her, because the Communist Party has control on my genes and chromosomes. I was not allowed to marry into an ‘inferior race,’ and this is something that I have desperately tried to explain to your civil rights activists who blame America.

They show you these pictures, taken from Time magazine: a black South African showing his passport. “Worldwide outcry against racism.” Yes, it is a shame to deny certain parts of a population--the majority of blacks in South Africa--their political rights. I am not debating that. Yes, it is a shame to have a passport, an internal document, which is unheard of in the United States, with a picture, description of nationality or racial origin, and a police rubber stamp, which prescribes for this man where he is supposed to live. His place of residence, right?

Now, why don’t you look at this passport--it is my passport, a Soviet passport. There is my picture. There is a police rubber stamp which prescribes where I have to reside, and there is my indication of racial origin on the right bottom line; it says ‘Ruski,’ Russian. I was lucky to be Russian. But if I were born a Jew in a God-forsaken village, I had no right to move from one city to another. Now there are demonstrations in front of the South African Embassy because 30 blacks were killed in South Africa. Have you ever heard about anyone of your liberal establishment demonstrating in front of the Soviet embassy, [which] killed 15 million Ukrainians, 2 million Crimean Tartars, and thousands of other ethnic minorities in my country? Where are your Jesse Jacksons? Why don’t they demonstrate in front of the Soviet embassy? Please explain it to me; maybe I’m a dumb Russian. Maybe I don’t understand what racism is. THIS IS RACISM!

Coming back to my wife’s story--the Communist Party didn’t want me to marry an Indian girl, so I had to marry this nice Russian girl in the middle. I couldn’t stand her, but that was the desire of my superiors. A Soviet bureaucrat of my caliber is not allowed to marry anyone he wants. My wife has to go through security clearance. Without love, husband and wife in the Soviet bureaucracy become virtually informers on each other to prevent defection. And if you behave like a good boy, if you marry who they want you to marry, this is what happens.

A status symbol of a Soviet young bureaucrat, government job, private car, nice-looking wife who speaks English--she hates you very much and reports everything you say to KGB--and a transistor radio, manufactured in Japan to listen to Voice of America.

[Picture not from book.]If you behave like a good boy, they promote you. You can see me on the right as a press officer of the USSR Embassy translating a speech by a Soviet boss on the occasion of the commissioning of this oil refinery in India. When the job was done, I was transferred back to Moscow to work for the Novosti Press Agency.

This is headquarters of Novosti. Novosti means ‘news’ in Russian. Novosti has nothing to do with news. Novosti is the KGB-controlled front for political indoctrination, ideological subversion, espionage and terrorism.

Part of my job was to manipulate and befriend students of Patrice Lumumba Friendship University. This is a group of such students visiting the Kremlin with me. They don’t look like students, and they were not. Nor were they spies.

They were future agents of disinformation, subversion and terrorism. They were imported to the USSR from Asia, Africa and Latin America, trained at Lumumba Friendship University, then for two years in KGB school, then dispatched back to their countries. And after a short period of time, they become leaders of national liberation movements.

And when they destabilize their own country, they start indiscriminately shooting and killing their own people. And when they do that, beautiful journalists of the United States describe these bandits as “anti-government guerrillas,” “leftist rebels,” right? Some even come forward with such fancy names as “freedom fighters,” or “fighters for majority rule.” Now, when Salvadorans want to fight back against these KGB-trained bandits and assassins and rapists, when Salvadorans shoot back, what does The New York Times call them? “Death squads,” “right-wing death squads.” Now, these are left-wing death squads. You ever heard this name in your media? Why not? Explain to me why not.

Continued in Part Two.