Throughout his childhood and adulthood, Joseph Weisberg has been fascinated by Russia. That fascination was mostly led by what he now considers moral superiority. He studied the Soviet Union in college at Yale andbecame a CIA agent with the hopes of helping free Russians from oppression. He also created a television series, “The Americans,” that follows two KGB agents working as spies in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. in the 1980s.
Eventually, though, he says that his understanding of Russia and its people shifted. An excerpt of the book was published on Crime Reads:
My deeply held conviction that the Soviet Union was an evil empire was a two-legged stool that eventually fell over. Still, the fact that it stood for so long on just two legs is a testament to the stubborn strength of those legs. One leg was built out of complex psychological forces, the other out of facts and logic. I have, and will continue to, ping-pong between these two sources of my conviction in an effort to demonstrate how they worked together to create something as powerful as an absolutist belief system.
Why are the United States and Russia locked in a seemingly endless conflict? And what should the future of that conflict look like? Joseph Weisberg makes the case that the so-called “new Cold War” is unwarranted, ineffective, and dangerous.
Copyright 2021 WAMU 88.5