Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 8 – Moscow’s
efforts to recruit spies perhaps not surprisingly has always attracted more attention
than its work to recruit agents of influence, Dmitry Khmelnitsky says; but
there are only a relative handful of the former while there are “hundreds of
thousands” of the latter.
Although the latter typically
violate no laws, the Russian specialist on this form of Russian activity abroad
who emigrated in 1987 and now lives in Germany, they play an ever important
part of Moscow’s activities abroad (cyprus-daily.news/pokupka-agentov-vliyaniya-osnovnaya-zadacha-rossijskih-spetssluzhb-za-granitsej/).
In an interview with Cyprus Daily
News, Khmelnitsky focuses on Moscow’s efforts to use members of the Russian
diaspora in this way. He says that in
many ways, including the enormous number of Russians now living outside their
homeland, this has become a second “golden age” for such recruitments, the first
being of course the 1920s.
The investigator says that the foundations
for the current Russian efforts in this regard were laid in the 1960s and 1970s
when Moscow allowed thousands of Soviet Jews to emigrate, ostensibly to Israel
but often to other countries. Its goal was “to create in the West a milieu
favorable for the activity of Soviet intelligence.”
“Rumors circulated that about 50
percent of [these]émigré who left formally for Israel signed agreements on
cooperation before departing. I myself left the USSR in this way and am ready
to believe this,” Khmelnitsky continues. Now, Moscow’s opportunities in this
regard are much greater.
There is no iron curtain and there
are millions of people from the former USSR living abroad. The reason people
from both these groups have been such “easy targets,” he says, is that there
were very few dissidents among the former, and almost none of among the latter.
They came out to benefit themselves materially but not for ideological reasons.
According to Khmelnitsky, before
1991, “these were ordinary Soviet people who had not other motives to leave the
country had there not appeared the opportunity to live better.” The same thing is true today. Russians who have come out for material gain,
“who love Putin, are not political emigres.”
“They do not understand how the Soviet
Union was bad, and they do not understand in what ways Russia today is. They
are absolutely certain that everything in Russia is normal. They use the benefits
of a democratic system but they do not have an understanding of the nature of that
system.”
This is a reflection of the nature of Soviet
education in the past and of Russian education now, Khmelnitsky says. And
because of its shortcomings, “the main mass of emigres alas are racists,
nationalists and anti-democratic simply as a result of traditional Soviet upbringing.”
They haven’t given up those notions when they leave.
Overcoming
this will take three or four generations, Khmelnitsky suggests. The first isn’t
interested in assimilating and the second even less so. Only the third and
fourth will, at least if they follow the pattern of the first Russian
emigration of the 1920s. Now, they are politically active not in their own
parties but in those who share their values.
In
Germany, in the first instance, this is the extreme right Alternative for Germany
party and to a lesser extent Die Linke, “the left.” And they take part
in anti-immigrant and pro-Russian actions that these parties are notorious for.
Germany’s
special services do follow these groups, but the services are too small and the
government too disinterested to do much good.
Often, Khmelnitsky says, the most useful way to expose Moscow’s use of
Russians living abroad is through the media.
There have been several cases of success in that regard, he concludes.
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