Comrade J

I was on business travel last week. Between flights I stopped at a bookstore and picked up this book:


In the Epilogue, Sergei Tretyakov explains what motivated him to defect to the United States:

As a professional intelligence officer who specialized in North American matters, I was studying U.S. history all the time and I could probably lecture as a part-time university professor about it. Yet it was a totally different feeling and meaning for me when I was refreshing my memory reading the Declaration of Independence before taking the [United States] citizenship test. I found its words of special importance.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

I have tried to explain in this book the "causes" that made me separate myself from Russia. The Declaration continues:

...Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive...it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it.... It is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government....

My wants and my desires were not much different from those early colonists'. In the end, I came to believe I was not betraying Russia. I felt its leaders had betrayed Russia and me.

If I attempted to return to Russia, I would be immediately arrested, sentenced to death, and executed. But I really don't care what they think about me in Russia.... I am now an American, and I consider myself--not a traitor nor a spy, but a new patriot.

--Comrade J, pp. 331-332.

As a native-born American I had the great fortune to grow up in this great land. I stand in awe of people like Sergei Tretyakov and my friends who gave up everything to immigrate to America.

God Bless America; let freedom ring!