The KGB wants to know

Just follow these instructions—or else

Sit down, Comrade Lieutenant, and relax. If you can. Only your corporeal body is at stake, not that soul you reactionaries only imagine exists. Ask not for whom the cellphone rings. The call will be for you. It’s from Moscow—just as you suspected and have good reason to fear. If you’d prefer to go over the same old ground still again, you can re-read Peter Schweizer’s exhausting and exhaustively detailed Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, which appeared some three years ago—a whole age in terms of the American political calendar.

But that is not the subject of this friendly chat and not so friendly warning, Comrade Lieutenant. As you yourself must have surely surmised. We in the state’s security services do not make small talk. We have no time for anything but matters of life and death. In this case, your life and death, Comrade Lieutenant, which may be of great moment to you but, I assure you, is of no importance to us. So think carefully, Vassily Leontovich, for the life you save or forfeit by your answers may be your own. History rolls on, often over the bodies of those in the way.

It may be in the very nature of prosecutors to prosecute but there is also such a thing, almost forgotten by now, as prosecutorial discretion. And you can trust us, Comrade Lieutenant, to be discreet. For it wouldn’t help anyone if we let word get out that our decisions were pre-arranged, set in stone, and unaffected by the attitude of those who, like you, are called to give testimony to this tribunal.

Listen carefully. Can you hear the drum roll in the background? Whether it precedes a death sentence or a pardon depends on you. So pay attention and follow instructions carefully. Do not think you can weasel your way out of these charges, for whatever they are must remain a state secret. Which gives these proceedings the air of suspense, mystery and uncertainty they depend on to achieve the desired effect. Which is to strike terror into the minds and hearts of those at our mercy. To achieve that aim, the law must be not the law at all but a great shape-shifter, assuming whatever shape suits its enforcers at the time. And it’s up to us, your interlocutors, to decide the form it takes from moment to moment.

Cigarette, Comrade? Or perhaps a blindfold. It’s your choice. Since it’s the last choice you might make, you’ll want to take your time and hurry. Is that clear? No? Then we’ve achieved our objective. For clarity is an enemy of the state in these muddled circumstances. Just take a figurative stab at the answer you believe we might like to hear from you. That’s the best you can do. When the power being exercised over you is wholly arbitrary, then so is the fate this tribunal will assign you.

Cheer up, Comrade Lieutenant, as confusing as these instructions may be and confounding as they seem. That’s why life—and death—in a police state can be a matter of sheer luck, or the lack of same. Your answers to this brief quiz never mattered, as you surely realize by now. Which is why those beyond our grasp in a land of law and order can be grateful they live in a free country where law is supreme and not the will of those who would bend it to their own ends.

––––– v –––––

Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

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