Our government might stop making pronouncements on the Russians’ internal affairs and let them figure out their own problems without our unwelcome criticism (criticism better meted out to all countries by private individuals and organizations, not foreign governments). What would it look like if we tried, by ourselves, to ratchet down this dangerous back and forth? We might, for example, rescind sanctions against Russia. To them, they were the good guys, and we were the bad guys. Of course, Cherkashin and his friends in the KGB, like me and my friends at the CIA, also had a binary worldview. This was part of what inspired me to create “The Americans,” a TV show about relatable KGB officers. They were mostly bright, patriotic, fundamentally decent. Among other things, the people it employed (particularly in the branch devoted to foreign espionage) seemed like me and my friends from Langley, just transported into a different political system. After reading the memoir “ Spy Handler” by the former KGB officer Victor Cherkashin, it was clear to me that the KGB was far more similar to the CIA than I had ever imagined.
And the flood of new ideas and perspectives coming out of post-Soviet Russia profoundly challenged the old certainties about matters from Stalinism to the role of the Soviet press. In academia, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, more complex and nuanced views of Soviet history and politics increasingly flourished.
After I spent a few years at the CIA in my 20s, therapy in my 30s started to loosen the grip of rigid thinking. I eventually came to reckon with how simplistic my views on the “evil empire” were.
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