(urth) Short Story 90: The Peace Spy

[Marc Aramini]

“The Peace Spy” first appeared in *Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine*
in 1986 and is reprinted in *Endangered Species*.

SUMMARY: Sonja Aralov invites “Charles C. Percival” into her apartment,
believing him to be an American who will help her return to the Soviet
Union.  However, his real name is Krasilnikov, and after some small talk
about her furniture and the other Russians living in the United States as
part of the guest exchange, Krasilnikov thinks that she does not know as
much as she believes.

Krasilnikov says he has no intention of bringing her complaint to court
where it could be stalled for perhaps five years, and insists that his
methods will get her to return within five months. He identifies her father
as the Minister of Marine, the equivalent of the Secretary of the Navy, and
she goes to give him a check.  He refrains from checking for American
listening devices.

He asks about her father, and she replies that it was strange and terrible
and her eyes fill with tears, at which point “he felt something he had
thought dead since childhood move inside him.” She describes how the
President’s son, a dancer, was visiting Moscow and decided to stay as
“security against nuclear attack … just after [the Soviet Union’s] Party
Secretary had said *we* would never fire the first missile.”

Others came, and soon the children of influential Russians decided to come
to the United States as security as well. “She threw back her hair, her yes
gleaming, and he thrilled as if to the call of a trumpet. “Oh, they tried
to stop us, but they could not send us to the gulag … they had to let us
go, and they did.”

However, she now wants to go back, because there is fighting in the east,
and she feels she could do something, like become a nurse or even fight.  Then
her real reason for wanting to leave comes out: “I am so lonely here.”

He says there are other Russians there, and that it seems her father
doesn’t want to see her.  He sent money until she said she was returning,
then she heard nothing more.

Here, “his hand touched hers. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps
your father doesn’t really want you to return to Russian? …How do you know
he’s not secretly proud of you?”

She says he doesn’t understand her country and Russian families, and
Krasilnikov thinks, “He should have been proud, and he told himself to be
proud but the thing that had awakened was weeping in his chest.”  Here he
claims to be proud of the President’s son, maintaining the ruse that he is
American.

He offers to return her check, and says that if she still wants to return
home they will see a lot of each other.  She burned her passport when she
arrived and reveals that her real resentment is building towards the
American government of putting every possible obstacle in her path.

He suggest that things must be done his way if she wants help and that she
should get a green card and finds work to “pay the rent on this apartment
and maybe some legal fees.”

He tells her she is wearing a beautiful dress, which flatters her, and then
tells her not to wear it to find real work, then suggests that she tries
modeling, perhaps only having to lose ten pounds (“Not for a man … but for
a modeling agency, maybe.  We’ll let Madame Deppe decide.”)

She agrees to go meet his Madame and attain a green card, and the phone
rings.  When he answers the phone at her request, a man says they are
sending the actor Ipatiev to “hold her” and he thinks “Unless he goes to
Hollywood.”  When Sonja returns, he says the call was intended for him.
Noticing the Time subscription, he thinks it a valid way to trace every
agent, and looks at the current issue to see stories of the Chinese in
Kazakhstan and the Red Army stopped before Paris. He thinks, “Better than
when we were all so afraid, though at least we had peace.”

COMMENTARY:

The political message of the story is actually fairly deep: now that there
are hostages in the two countries against the threat of nuclear war, the
nations have nothing to fear … and is revealed in the final line, without
that fear, even though it really hasn’t been mentioned explicitly, the
world is now at war, with the Russians actually marching towards France.  For
the majority of the story, it seemed as if the world were now at peace
thanks to this bold and self-sacrificing move, but it served to prevent
only the threat of total annihilation and not war.

Krasilnikov’s motives are equally murky – even though he seems to be
working to get her “out” of the United States in his American persona,
working against the wishes of America, he drops enough hints and flatters
her enough to suggest she creates roots there in seeking a green card and
employment .  Indeed, his flirtation and compliments create a kind of
hopeful link for their future meetings, manipulating her away from her view
that her presence there is useless and lonely.

The motives of the United States and the Soviet Union are actually
marginally altruistic at first glance in this story – they want to avoid
the final nuclear war at all cost, so they keep “voluntary” hostages of the
other side, something which seemed fine to the main character, Sonja, until
loneliness and another purpose enter her mind. The United States is
reluctant to let her leave, and she willingly destroyed her passport on
arrival.  However, since the Secretary of the Navy has stopped sending
money to his daughter, and there is war blossoming, it seems that the
nations simply want war without the threat of mutual assured destruction.

>From the title, “The Peace Spy”, we can assume that Krasilnikov is actually
working to keep Sonja in the country, though there are so many ambiguities
involved in his assignment that his position is very hard to determine
exactly. His flattery seems to distract her very effectively. The United
States hopes to get her to stay by bringing over a famous Russian actor and
possibly fostering a relationship, but Krasilnikov knows this will be
thwarted by the actor’s Hollywood ambitions – why would he stay with her in
New York?  On a first reading it almost seems that Krasilnikov would
actually cause Ipatiev to go to Hollywood and never meet Sonja, but I think
this is a misreading – he simply knows that the actor will have further
ambitions leading him away from her. Krasilnikov’s other hints (that she
needs to find work, taking all the money that she has, and planting the
idea that her father is proud of her and does not want her to return
despite his earlier angry letters) seem designed to keep her in the United
States. In the final analysis, if he is actually a spy who desires peace,
he would help her go.  However, since he says that the situation they have
is “better” than when they were afraid, it is clear that his motivation is
to keep the system exactly like it is: hostages against ultimate nuclear
destruction while war blossoms in the world.

NAMES:

The Russian names mentioned in passing as hostages (or “guests”) are by and
large those of military heroes or important political figures in Russia
during Lenin’s and Trotsky’s time in particular. Symbolically these peace
loving people have actually allowed war to occur since the ultimate threat
no longer lingers, and they have become war heroes.

The most interesting is the name of Madame Deppe, who will decide which
career Sonja should pursue, as the name implies a practical joker or
professional comedian, right after Krasilnikov hints she should be a model.

Sonja Aralov: Sonja means ”wisdom”, a Russian variant of Sophia, and Aralov
was the first head of the Soviet Red Army Intelligence Directorate and
served a pivotal role for Lenin against Trotsky form his placement in the
GRU. Perhaps her wisdom is in recognizing, beyond her loneliness, that the
altruistic gambit has actually failed, and war resulted anyway.

Charles Percival – Charles can be derived from “warrior” or “army”, but it
is also related to Karl, or “free man”.  Percival is of course the knight
of the round table questing for the holy grail with Galahad, in some
stories failing to answer the questions of the fisher king and heal him in
others recovering the grail with Galahad.

Krasilnikov: In *White Terror: Cossack Warlords of the Trans-Siberian*,
Bisher writes:

In Omsk, the capital of free Russia, a lackadaisically concealed monarchist
gang calling itself the Mikhailkovski Hunting and Fishing Society ferreted
out Socialist-Revolutionary members of the constituent Assembly and sent
them to the ‘Kingdom of the Irtysh’, in other words, murdered them and fed
them to the fish.  A prominent hunter was Ataman I.N. Krasilnikov, renowned
for leading a reluctant Omsk orchestra in ‘God Save the Tsar’ with his
pistol, who orchestrated the kidnapping of Constituent Assemblyman V.N.
Moiseyeko and presumably presided over the latter’s torture and ritual
tossing into the Irtysh. … It did not bode well for a government that
claimed to be striving to restore law and order. (117)

I believe his name might be related to the concept of beauty, but my
understanding of Russian and the paucity of sources available concerning
name meanings lead me to latch onto war references rather than the actual
meanings of the names.

Lebedev means Swan, and there are several military “Heroes of the Soviet
Union” of that name.

The most famous Deniken was a Lieutenant General of the Imperial Russian
Army and an important general of the White movement in the Russian Civil
War.

Mikhalevo is a place name in Russia, and Nina implies “grace”.

Ipatiev, the actor who theoretically will keep Sonja there, shares the name
with a rather famous building: Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg where the
former Emperor Nicholas II of Russia was murdered with his family and
household.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS: Does Krasilnikov have more personal motives for
seeking to work with Sonja, such as fostering a relationship?  Sapping her
funds and encouraging her to find a flattering career indicate he doesn’t
really want her to leave, especially since the deal involves him keeping
the retainer whether she is freed from America or not.

Has something terrible happened to Sonja’s father, are his letters and
money being intercepted, or is Krasilnikov’s claims that her father is
secretly proud of her true?  It seems that Krasilnikov is lying here to
plant the idea that her father is actually proud of her, but can’t show it,
so that she will decide to stay.  Is her father interested in fostering and
spreading war as the Secretary of the Navy?

CONNECTION TO OTHER WORKS:

The central idea here, that children of influential people would be held as
hostages against aggression, certainly has historical precedent but also
appears in Wolfe’s most famous series and is the very reason that Thecla is
even there to meet Severian – the exultants must provide a representative
of their family in the clutches of the Autarch to assure their compliance
with his edicts and commands. Russian names and references may also be
found in “Cherry Jubilee”, but Wolfe is far more apt to make German and
Irish references in his work.  The idea that the threat of nuclear war is
actually beneficial for maintaining the peace does not seem to be found
extensively in Wolfe, as the fear at the end of “How I Lost the Second
World War and Helped Turn Back the German Invasion” saw the threat as
almost entirely ominous.
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