Emil Draitser's Blog

Reading about the current Russian spy ring scandal, many Americans wonder why, with the Cold War almost two decades behinds us, Russia is still actively spying on their country. As Sergei Tretyakov, the Russian KGB officer who defected to the West in the year 2000, rightly noted, Russia, in fact, never stopped doing it. There are a number of reasons. Some of them have to do with the need at hand, some stem from the country’s long-standing distrust of the West in general and America in particular.

One of the reasons why the Soviet Union collapsed to begin with was the inability of the Soviet system of highly centralized economy to compete with the free market economies of the West. As a result of the rigid, bureaucracy-run, overly-controlled state machinery, Soviet technology grew backward, its science lagged. A shortcut for catching up with the West, a proclaimed goal of Soviet rulers since Nikita Khrushchev, has always been the theft of Western technological now-how. This had been done by the Soviets for many years and quite successfully. There are numerous examples of the clandestine theft of Western technological secrets and hasty copy-cat building of Russia's own machinery. One of them, which dates back to the years of WWII, is the unauthorized copying of the American “Flying Fortress,” the B-29 bomber.(see details of the operation)

In fact, the Russians had been stealing Western technology even back in the 1920s. Dmitri Bystrolyotov, the protagonist of my recent book, Stalin’s Romeo Spy: The Remarkable Rise and Fall of the KGB’s Most Daring Operative (see book details), used his male charms (“in exchange for intimate relationships,” as he puts it in his report to his superiors), to get blueprints and other technological documentation from secretaries and typists of a Czechoslovakian concern. At that time, Czechoslovakia had a technologically advanced economy and was politically opposed to the Soviet Union.

As to mistrusting the Western assurances of good will, it stems from such volatile events in the twentieth-century Russian history, as the invasion by fourteen foreign powers during Russian civil war and Churchill’s pledge to “strangle this Bolshevik baby in its cradle.” Many of those Russians who lived through the World War II and were exposed to the Stalin’s propaganda still account the delay of the opening of the “second front” to relieve Russia from the onslaught of German troops not as Western democracies’ reluctance to rush into a military campaign without proper preparation, thus risking unnecessary loss of human lives (never a headache for Stalin in regard to his own people), but as a manifestation of Western ill will toward the Russian people.