Jeremy Silver

“The Soviet Union he returned to, in January 1970, was even more repressive, paranoid, and dingy than the one he had left three years earlier. The Communist orthodoxy of the Brezhnev era seemed to leech away all color and imagination. Gordievsky was repelled by his own homeland: “How shabby everything seemed.” The queues, the grime, the suffocating bureaucracy, fear, and corruption stood in grim contrast to the bright and bountiful world he had left in Denmark. The propaganda was ubiquitous, officials alternately servile and rude, and everyone spied on everyone else; the city stank of boiled cabbage and blocked drains. Nothing worked properly. Nobody smiled. The most casual contact with foreigners provoked immediate suspicion. But it was the music that gnawed at his soul, the patriotic mush blaring out of loudspeakers on every street corner, written to Communist formulas, bland, booming, and inescapable, the sound of Stalin. Gordievsky felt under daily assault from what he called this “totalitarian cacophony.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War