What do they hope to achieve?

In Wednesday's Wall Street Journal Bret Stephens's column argued something we have been saying on this blog for a long time: Russia’s flaying about and bullying neighbouring smaller and weaker countries are not a sign of strength, no matter what most of the media repeats ad nauseam; it is a sign of weakness.

Putin, supposedly the strong man of Russia and of the whole Eurasian sphere, has demonstrated his and his government's weakness on a number of occasions, in the international and, more importantly, the domestic arena.

Continued on EU Referendum 2.

Death of an important man

Some years in history have been so significant that their very mention leads to people snapping to mental attention. Not all of the people and not all of the time but enough. In the twentieth century we have had a number of these years: 1914, of course, when it all started; 1917, the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik coup, the outcome of which has not yet been decided fully; 1945, the end of Nazism and Fascism; in Russia there is also 1937, the year that symbolizes the Great Terror; 1956, the year of Khrushchev’s speech, of the Hungarian Revolution and of the Suez debacle; 1989, the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

In my posting on Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU I wrote:

It is said that the speech produced an unprecedented effect. People fainted in the hall.

Supposedly secret, the speech was passed on to some Soviet and East European organizations. It was also smuggled out by one or two of the foreign Communist leaders who had been present. (One, the leader of the Polish party had a heart attack and died.)

The Poles passed the speech on to the Israelis, who passed it on to other western countries. Very swiftly, the so-called secret speech was known all over the world, though in the Soviet Union its existence was denied till the late eighties when it was finally published.

The news a few days ago of the death of Viktor Grayevsky allowed some to bring some clarity to the events. It was not widely noted, not even in Britain, despite Michael Ledeen’s flattering comment in his column on Pajamas Media.

In fact, so far as I can make it out, only the Daily Telegraph published an obituary.

There are one or two problems with both pieces. One is that they describe Mr Grayevsky as a double agent, who worked for the Soviet Union and Israel. The truth is that there is no such thing as a double agent. There are, of course, people who will work for anyone for money and have no loyalty to anybody. They do not really count.

Then there are people who pretend to be working for one side while really they are working for the other and that pretence is part of their work. Thus, Kim Philby was not a double agent. He was a Soviet agent who used his position in various branches of the British security services to further his work.

In the same way, Mr Grayevsky was not a double agent, for all that the Soviet Union awarded him the Lenin Medal (which he prudently did not collect in Moscow). He was an Israeli agent who supplied the Soviets with dubious information.

For many years after coming to Israel Grayevsky also worked as a double agent, posing as a Soviet spy but in fact serving the Israelis by feeding disinformation to Soviet intelligence officers. His Soviet handlers in Israel were KGB officers working under diplomatic cover or posing as clergy from the so-called Russian Orthodox Red Church in Israel.

Given that all the priests in the “Red” Church were KGB agents, inside and outside the country, I do not quite see why anybody had to “pose”.

However, Mr Grayevsky’s greatest achievement came earlier. He it was, who first managed to get a copy of Nikita Khrushchev’s speech to the West. Later there were others who managed to pass it on to certain East Europeans.

Grayevsky became a convinced Communist in Poland after the war, not least because of the Nazi extermination of the Jews (though he did have to change his name from Spielman because even in the People’s Republic he was not going to get far with an obviously Jewish surname). However, in 1955 he visited his sick father in Israel and what he saw there made him a Zionist.
It is possibly the tension between those two ideologies as well as journalistic instincts that made him play that crucial role in twentieth century, as the Telegraph obituary describes it:

Grayevsky had been able to obtain a copy with the help of his lover, Lucia Baranowski, wife of Poland's deputy prime minister.

He had come to see Lucia at the headquarters of the Communist Party, where she worked as secretary to Edward Ochab, the party leader.

Grayevsky recalled: "I noticed a thick booklet with a red binding, with the words: 'The 20th Party Congress, the speech of Comrade Khrushchev' written on it." The booklet was one of the few top-secret copies sent from Moscow to leaders of the Eastern Bloc countries. Lucia allowed Grayevsky to remove the booklet for a couple of hours, and he took it to the Israeli embassy in Warsaw, where it was photocopied.

The document provided a unique insight into the workings of the Soviet leadership. It was also the first official Soviet admission of the horrors perpetrated under Stalin. At the time Grayevsky was not employed as a spy, and he was not paid for his action, which arose from his Zionist convictions.

As there was no mention of the fact that Stalin’s second purge just before his death was largely anti-Semitic, Zionist convictions do not seem to me to be a good enough reason for Grayevsky’s actions. An understanding of the document’s importance need not have relied on any political conviction though, obviously, he had slipped far enough away from Communism not to react the way most East European leaders did and that is suppress all knowledge of the speech.

Michael Ledeen describes some of the outcome in the West. Neither he nor the Telegraph mention the effects on Eastern Europe for some reason.

The speech made headlines around the world, and Khrushchev’s revelations were vigorously exploited by the United States, shocking the Communist faithful. But even more importantly, the speech provided a clear window into the world of Soviet Communism for American analysts both in and outside the government. Until then, it was possible for intelligence analysts and foreign service officers to believe that the Soviet system wasn’t all that horrible. The speech put paid to that delusion.

In keeping with the general rule that the most important information about the Soviet Union invariably came from “walk-ins,” and not from “agents” recruited by CIA, Grayevsky performed his world-changing act solely out of personal conviction. He had recently visited Israel to be with his dying father, and he had become a Zionist, secretly determined to emigrate to Israel as soon as he could manage it. But he was not working for the Israeli Government, or indeed any Western country.

Makes one wonder about those intelligence analysts and foreign service officers. After all, it is not as if there had been no information about the Soviet Union before. Had they not read Alexander Orlov, Walter Krivitsky or Viktor Kravchenko? Clearly not.

What mattered to the faithful, on the other hand, was that very swiftly other sources from Eastern Europe confirmed the fact that this was, indeed, the speech the CPSU’s First Secretary made at the Congress. Once made, it could never be unmade. Once Viktor Grayevsky got the speech out into the open it could never be made secret again, except in its own homeland, where it took another 30 years for the “secret” speech to become open.

COMMENT THREAD

The heroes of not long ago

Sometimes it is hard to believe that my generation can recall a time, not so long ago, when the United States had a great President, the United Kingdom a great Prime Minister and the Catholic Church a great Pope. As it happens, I am an admirer (without being a Catholic, so no accusations of conspiracy, please) of the present Pope and think that the Catholic Church will probably do well under his leadership. I have less faith in the incumbents of the other two positions.

John O’Sullivan’s book “The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister”, subtitled “Three Who Changed the World”, published last year in the US is now available in Britain. It covers the last years of the Cold War, the period when, with extraordinary fortuity, the West was led by three giants.

There is, as O’Sullivan points out in the book (and did so again at the British launch last week), a curious parallel between the three. For various reasons they and all around them were convinced that they would not be able to reach the top position in their chosen field for somewhat peculiar reasons. Partly the reasons had to do with age (Reagan) or sex (Thatcher) but partly it was because they were too much of what they were supposed to represent. Reagan was “too American”, Thatcher was “too Conservative” and Karel Wojtyla was “too Catholic”. Not much room for the middle ground there.

The three achieved their positions of power and responsibility within a relatively short time. Karel Wojtyla was elected to be Pope in October 1978 and took the name of John Paul II; Margaret Thatcher was elected in May 1979 becoming Britain’s first woman Prime Minister on May 4; Ronald Reagan was elected in November 1980, taking office in January 1981.

There were other parallels, not least the fact that all three narrowly escaped with their lives in assassination attempts. John O’Sullivan describes what might be viewed as a series of coincidences, though he chooses to see it otherwise at the beginning of Chapter Three, entitled “Did God Guide the Bullets?”

If life were a supernatural thriller, the next plot twists would have been expected. Twenty-six months separated the elections of John Paul II and Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher began her premiership roughly in between. Fewer than three months (to be precise, seventy days) separated Reagan’s election and the attempt on his life by John Hinckley on March 30, 1981. John Paul II narrowly survived an attempted assassination a mere forty-three days later, in May 13. And three years later Thatcher escaped unharmed when an IRA bomb intended to kill her exploded in the Grand Hotel in Brighton on October 12, 1984, killing five people and wounding many others, including her close friend and ally Norman Tebbit.

There is an almost cinematic neatness about this series of crimes. In The Omen or The Exorcist they would be readily explained as the forces of Satan seeking to destroy the apostles of hope before they could do too much good (though a more formulaic film director than God would have insisted that Satan move his attempt on Thatcher’s life up to 1981). This slightly eerie impression is reinforced by the extraordinary narrowness of the escape of all three intended victims. At least two of those intended victims believed that God had intervened to preserve their lives, and guided their later action by the light of that belief.

Assassinations have sometimes altered the course of history; the First World War arose from one. On these occasions, it was the failure of assassination that may have altered history.

The book traces the preceding and subsequent careers of the President, the Pope and the Prime Minister, laying special emphasis on the Cold War and the fight against the Soviet Union with its many tentacles. It is worth reading this book if only to remind oneself of the many, seemingly disparate problems, crisis, upheavals and wars, that were, in reality, caused by the activity of the Soviet Politburo and its minions in various countries.

It is, as it happens, worth reading the book, anyway. Some time ago, on another site, I described it as the “must-read” for all conservatives. Actually, it will be the “must-read” for all those who are interested by the way the Cold War was won (even if we do seem to be losing the peace) and to whom the ideas and ideals of the West are dear even when the actual events seem to be going the wrong way.

The story weaves its way through public and private events, relying on written accounts and personal reminiscences, not least those of O'Sullivan himself, former Daily Telegraph journalist and former speech writer to the Iron Lady. In case we have forgotten, there is a good deal about the sheer venom that all three had to suffer from throughout the years of political power and, in the case of Reagan and Thatcher, afterwards. The whirligig of time brings its own. Who will remember all those silly snobbish comments about Thatcher being a grocer's daughter and, therefore, rather vulgar or Reagan being nothing but a second-rate Hollywood actor (which is untrue in itself - he was much better than that)?

One of the extraordinary aspects of this book, and it is a tribute to the author, is that I found it an exciting read, despite remembering very clearly all the major and many of the minor events described in it. What is going to happen next, one keeps asking oneself, while knowing full well the answer.

Let me quote some words of Ronald Reagan’s (observant readers of this blog know that I am something of a fan of his) from the speech he made to a group of World War II veterans at Pointe du Hoc, on June 6, 1984:

Here in this place where the West held together, let us make a vow to our dead. Let us show them by our actions that we understand what they died for. Let our actions say to them the words for which Matthew Ridgway listened: “I will not fail thee nor forsake thee.”

Strengthened by their courage, heartened by their valor, and borne by their memory, let us continue to stand for the ideals for which they lived and died.

Who could put it any better? As it happens, one of the Great Three is still around and was present at the launch, looking extremely well in a purple outfit, ready to talk to anyone who wanted to and equally ready to sign the book for anyone who plucked up courage to ask. (Oh yes, the author did get a look-in.)

It is, I cannot help feeling, up to us to ensure that the legacy of the President, the Pope and the Prime Minister is not dissipated. Yes, I know, the first question that will be asked is "who is this we, paleface".