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The Book of the Week is “Breaking With Moscow” by Arkady N. Shevchenko, published in 1985. In this wordy volume, whose language is slightly awkward in spots, the author recounted his life and what he did when his cognitive dissonance (which everyone experienced in the former USSR) reached the breaking point.
Born in 1930, the author did his doctoral thesis on disarmament, a trendy topic in the mid-1950’s. He began working at the Soviet Foreign Ministry in October 1956. There, office resources were in short supply. He had to wait more than six months (!) to get his own desk.
In 1958, in order to have a career, he was forced to join the Communist Party; in order to move up the political ladder, he was forced to spend countless hours in Party organization, and self-criticism meetings. Prior to getting an overseas assignment, he had to be vetted backwards and forwards.
Soviet Premier Khrushchev thought president JFK was weak after he witnessed the JFK administration’s failure to: oust Castro in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, and stop the construction of the Berlin Wall. So Khrushchev thought he could secretly assemble ready-to-launch missiles in Cuba and the US would do nothing once they were discovered. But he was impressed when JFK finally got tough and ordered the missiles removed in October 1962.
Beginning in 1973, Shevchenko became the UN Under Secretary General for Political and Security Council Affairs. His employer-provided housing was cramped, as he and his wife had to share a three-bedroom suite with two other tenants on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Thirteen of the twenty comrades (whom he didn’t hire and over which he had no control) he supervised were either members of the GRU or the KGB.
The USSR’s government in Moscow required that every Soviet employee pay a kickback to it; it was also the ultimate authority on approving all of Shevchenko’s communications with UN ambassadors. Messages therefore got garbled through misunderstandings in a game of “telephone.”
Spring 1977 saw the Politburo cracking down on its diplomats’ palling around with Westerners. The Politburo imposed draconian rules on its foreign-policy employees in trying to keep them from becoming influenced by bourgeois values. For the umpteenth time, it proceeded to hysterically propagandize that foreigners were national-security risks (similar to the way American media company Fox has been doing for the past ten years!).
The bloated staff of Soviet bureaucrats at the UN consisted of overpaid noisemakers doing make-work, desperately clinging to their jobs, trying to feel important; skilled in ideological propagandizing. They knew nothing about worldwide affairs and troubles, or history. Their job was to further the USSR’s goal of world conquest, but their power was limited to the role of ceremonial messengers at social events. Sounds familiar.
In 1981, Premier Brezhnev theorized that all countries of the world would inevitably practice socialism. It is unclear at this point how much further the US government will go in taking financial control of its healthcare, education and housing services.
Since the mid-twentieth century, numerous American men and a few women and their families have received government-subsidized (socialist!) education, healthcare and some housing, because they have served in the military. But as there has been no military draft in the last fifty years, that number has dropped dramatically.
The Soviet bureaucrats dismissed as cliche, the kinds of crimes America’s president Richard Nixon committed. On a daily basis, they hushed up their own routine behaviors of ruling by fear and force, spying and corruption.
Andropov and Chernenko maintained the charade of allowing the old, sick Brezhnev to continue to serve as top leader of the USSR because they needed time to consolidate their power bases to win their respective power struggles.
Read the book to learn a whole lot more about Shevchenko’s adventures stumping for the USSR.