The Compatriots

INTRODUCTION

Toward the end of December 2017, a skinny, young Russian with expressive eyes, a stubbly beard, and a slight limp walked into a coffee shop in downtown Washington, DC. His name was Vladimir Kara-Murza (junior), and he was a Russian political émigré and anti-Kremlin lobbyist. He had lived in DC for years but often traveled back and forth to Moscow, irritating the Kremlin. On a trip to Moscow in spring 2015, he had been poisoned and nearly died. During his treatment in a Washington hospital, he received a visit from an FBI agent who said he had been assigned to Kara-Murza’s case. When Kara-Murza recovered, he flew back to Moscow, and in February 2017 he was poisoned a second time, experiencing identical symptoms. That was why, ten months later, he was still limping.

The young Russian took a seat next to the window and a minute later was joined by a tall man in his midforties: the FBI agent. The agent had called for a meeting, promising to bring Kara-Murza some information about his poisoning. At this point, they had known each other for two years.

“We think we found the active substance you were poisoned with,” the FBI agent said.

He told Kara-Murza that the agency was preparing a detailed report and explained that the heads of the Russian secret services would be soon visiting Washington: “We are going to hand the report over to them—that there was an attempted murder of a Russian citizen on Russian territory for political reasons.”

The FBI’s intent, the agent implied, was to send a message that they were not very happy about politically motivated poisonings in Moscow. But some in the agency were more troubled by the strange events happening on their own turf—in Washington.

A year and a half earlier, a Russian former press minister and presidential aide had been brutally beaten near his Dupont Circle hotel. He managed to make it to his room and then died there, not far from the coffee shop where Kara-Murza and the FBI agent were sitting. Those who had beaten the ex-minister to death were never found, and the rumor in Moscow was that he had fallen out of line with the Kremlin just before the incident.

The FBI wanted to make its concerns clear to the Russian intelligence community, and the upcoming visit provided a unique opportunity. The heads of all three major Russian spy agencies—SVR, the foreign intelligence agency; FSB, the domestic security service; and the GRU, military intelligence—had never before traveled together to a Western capital, but they planned to do exactly that at the end of January 2018.

Three weeks after their coffee shop meeting, the FBI agent called Kara-Murza again. He didn’t offer to meet this time. He just told Kara-Murza that laboratory results on the poison were inconclusive and that the plan to deliver a report had been called off. Then he hung up.

The heads of the three Russian intelligence agencies flew to Washington, as planned, at the end of January. It was very unlikely, given the circumstances, that the report on Kara-Murza was mentioned at the highly secret meeting.¹ The following month, another Russian, former spy Sergei Skripal, would be poisoned in Britain by two agents of Russian military intelligence.

Almost thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and twenty since Vladimir Putin came to power in the Kremlin, Russians abroad were suddenly in the crosshairs.

In January 2018, as the heads of all three Russian spy agencies went to Washington, we went to Paris.

In the heavy rain, across the enormous Champ de Mars, the Eiffel Tower seemed unreachable. We were standing at the epicenter of France’s military glory: behind us stood the stately classic complex of the École-Militaire—the famous center for French military education—and all around us the avenues were named after French marshals.

We decided to keep walking. It was a nice walk, even in the rain; after the winter in Moscow, it felt good to see something other than snow. From the Champ de Mars we headed down the Avenue Rapp—named after a Napoleonic general who led an attack at Austerlitz that completely decimated the Russian emperor’s elite Chevalier Guard. Our destination was the Pont de l’Alma, a bridge named after a Crimean War battle in which an expeditionary French and British force defeated the Russian army.

But our intentions for sightseeing were not historical in nature. Right at that junction stands a brand-new complex: four buildings with facades covered in beige limestone. The building in the middle, topped by five onion-shaped domes, is the Holy Trinity Cathedral—part of the Russian Orthodox Spiritual and Cultural Center.

We wanted to see it because although the center had been in operation for only two years, it had already sparked large-scale “spy mania.” Among the rumors circulating was that the French counterintelligence services had surrounded the complex with jamming devices to prevent the Russians from using the center’s facilities for electronic eavesdropping. And we knew that the officials at the French Foreign Ministry, located on the nearby Quai d’Orsay, were pissed off by the Russian government’s request that the center’s employees be granted diplomatic immunity.

We entered through the main doors. Two bulky security guards told us—very politely and in Russian—to open our bags. They checked the insides thoroughly.

We crossed the main hall and entered an internal courtyard, where the rain was still coming down. But when we tried to sneak into the next building, we were stopped; a man appeared from nowhere and gestured at us to stop and go back. It was clear that we had entered an area that was under careful watch. In an instant, we were struck by that familiar feeling of being on Russian territory—specifically, the territory of a Russian government institution abroad.

Indeed we were. The center is the property of the administration of the Russian president, and it is run by people experienced in promoting Russia’s foreign policy. The head of the center was a career Russian diplomat. And Bishop Nestor, the prior of Holy Trinity Cathedral, was no stranger to Russian diplomacy himself; he had spent four years serving in the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations, an alliance the Moscow Patriarchate called “a symphony between the state department and the church.”²

We walked back to the main hall, where a handful of French visitors were wandering around, looking at photographs on the walls. Announcements were posted everywhere about an upcoming concert featuring a male choir and an exhibition marking the centenary of the Bolshevik persecution of the Orthodox Church. Indeed, the center was getting ready to embark on an entire year of events commemorating the suffering of the church under the Communists.

The message was clear: Orthodox believers in France, mostly Russian emigrants and their descendants, were invited to come to a church that was clearly under Moscow’s control. There, they would be embraced by the new Russia, one no longer divided into two groups—the Russian diaspora and Russians still living in Russia—but constituting a single Russky Mir (Russian world), whose members were all “compatriots.”

Putin latched on to the concept of Russky Mir—the worldwide community of Russian-speaking people whose identity is firmly connected to Russia’s history, culture, and language—in the early 2000s.³ It is a community whose members are, by definition, closely tied to Russia. No wonder Putin liked the idea; it could serve as a good political instrument for promoting Russia’s influence abroad. According to Putin, this “Russian world” now consists of more than thirty million people, with ten million living in Europe.⁴ And, he decided, the church would provide them all with spiritual guidance.

To make this work for the Russian émigrés, two things were needed. First, prominent emigrant families would need to cooperate with Moscow. Second, the Russian Orthodox Church had to be united and the abyss bridged between the priests inside and outside the country.

Putin achieved both sets of conditions. He was not the first to take steps in this direction; his predecessor Boris Yeltsin had started a conversation with the émigrés in the final year of the Soviet Union. But Putin’s goals were completely different.

Russia’s diaspora is the third largest in the world, exceeded only by those from India and Mexico (China is fourth), according to UN statistics.⁵ That didn’t start recently. Russians began leaving the country in large numbers in the late nineteenth century, fleeing pogroms, tsarist secret police persecution, the Russian Revolution, then Stalin and the KGB. This exodus created a rare opportunity for the Kremlin. Moscow’s masters and spymasters scored their biggest successes—recruiting among the Western establishment, stealing the secrets of the American atomic bomb—through networks of spies, many of whom were emigrants driven from Russia. During the 1930s and 1940s, dozens of spies were in New York City gathering information for Moscow.

The history of Russian espionage is soaked in blood, as Russian agents proved themselves ruthless and efficient at killing their fellow emigrants abroad. The Kremlin had learned well that to ensure political stability, it was not enough to have people inside the country under control; the émigré communities had to be brutally policed too. After all, the mighty Russian empire had been taken down by a bunch of emigrant revolutionaries who, at the end of World War I, had seized the opportunity to return to the country. Their descendants in the Kremlin had good memories, which they put to good use.

Did that story end with the collapse of the Soviet Union? No.

Mikhail Gorbachev opened the borders, and in the 1990s, Russians started to leave the country in much bigger numbers. Emigration remained a golden opportunity for the Russian spymasters but also a challenge. Post-Soviet Russia lived without politically motivated emigrations for only ten years. When Putin came to power, he immediately returned to the practice of forcing his enemies out of the country.

We are Russian investigative journalists based in Moscow. (Full disclosure: Although we have traveled extensively, including while researching this book, we have never lived abroad for more than a few months.) For more than twenty years we have been focused on researching the ways in which the Kremlin controls the Russian people. Our first book, The New Nobility, was about the secret services—Moscow’s traditional means of “running a tight ship.” In our second book, The Red Web, we described the Kremlin’s desperate attempts to bring the internet to heel. So it seemed like the next natural step was to look at another serious challenge to the Russian authorities—the people who have moved outside Russia’s borders—and to explore the ways in which the Kremlin is dealing with them.

In this book, we tell the story of how, throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the Kremlin has considered the presence of Russians in Western countries—particularly the United States—both its biggest threat and its biggest opportunity. Successive regimes in Moscow sought for years to use the Russian émigré community to achieve their goals. But they also sought to neutralize any potential dangers posed by Russians abroad, experimenting with tricks and methods that would also come in handy closer to home.

Part I covers the Soviet period from the time of Lenin’s death, when Soviet intelligence first began to develop ways to deal with the threat of emigration and ways of exploiting it, through the end of the Soviet Union. Much of that initial tool kit has been in use ever since. We also describe how the Americans struggled to make use of Russian émigré groups in the Cold War landscape.

Part II looks into the 1990s and how the opportunities created by Russia’s opening borders were exploited—by Russian American financiers, by Russian spies, and by different waves of Russian émigrés.

Part III shows how Putin changed the game, announcing and promulgating his own view of emigration, namely, that it was high time for Russian “compatriots” to advance Russia’s positions beyond its borders.

Finally, we describe in Part IV how Putin reintroduced political emigration—forcing Russians into exile and finding ways to signal to those who had left that Moscow’s hand could reach them anywhere and everywhere.

Russia’s borders remain porous, for the first time in its history, and that gives us hope. We tell the stories of some people who have found ways to fight the tactics of the current regime, both in Russia and from abroad. Their efforts, unsurprisingly, have raised the stakes and prompted the Kremlin to employ more desperate methods. That makes the world more dangerous, and more unpredictable, both for Russians abroad and for the countries that have welcomed them.