A Chilling Trip into Soviet Past

“After the pickup on the campus, Lona Cohen hurried to the railroad station. It was wartime, and military policemen were everywhere.”

That excerpt epitomizes the tense espionage tone of the opening hour of “Red Files,” a four-part PBS documentary that some may prefer tonight even over “Ally McBeal,” “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and Ray and Debra haggling over a can opener in “Everybody Loves Raymond.”

Not that everybody will love the weekly “Red Files”; only that this Soviet insiders’ view of the Cold War and its origins makes for fascinating, distinctive viewing.

Its middle episodes are worthy, if only because the segment titled “Soviet Sport Wars” shows how unrecognizable former gymnast Olga Korbut is today. And because “Secret Soviet Moon Mission” views the great space race largely through the prism of a rocket-science designer said to have been as anonymous to the public as he was prolific and influential. His name was Sergei Pavolich Korolev.

But installments in weeks one (“Secret Victories of the KGB”) and four (“Soviet Propaganda Machine”) are the real keepers. Their stories are truly absorbing, and so vividly presented by producer William Cran and others that the post-Cold War years immediately give way in your mind to a more menacing past.

It begins with tonight’s shadowy KGB operations of years ago, still resonant today given ongoing charges of high-level Chinese espionage in the U.S. and recent revelations about tweedy Londoner Melita Norwood, the 87-year-old great-granny said to have passed nuclear weapons secrets to Moscow from 1945 to 1972.

She is absent from “Red Files.” Nor is Britain’s most infamous Soviet spy, Kim Philby, on the scene, except briefly. Instead, main antiheroes here are New Yorkers Morris and Lona Cohen, dedicated Communists whose damaging espionage threads this hour from the wartime Manhattan Project at Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico to a leafy suburb of London where an innocent-looking cottage became a busy turnstile for Soviet agents.

It was in New Mexico, we hear tonight, where Lona Cohen received critical A-bomb papers from 19-year-old scientist Theodore Alvin Hall, hiding them in a Kleenex box for delivery to her KGB spymasters.

Prominent in this account, too, is “Colonel Molody”, a plant from Moscow who, after tutoring in North American English by Morris Cohen, became so wealthy as businessman Gordon Lonsdale that he reportedly never asked the KGB for money. Here also is George Blake, a famed turncoat British intelligence agent who informed the KGB of a secret U.S.-operated tunnel between East and West Berlin used to intercept Soviet communiques.

“Red Files” raises the possibility that the espionage for which Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953 was much less vital to the Soviets than secrets from the lesser-known Cohens, who fled New York and disappeared behind the Iron Curtain only days after their fellow Americans were arrested.

In 1961, the Cohens, Molody and Blake were arrested in Britain and imprisoned after being convicted there of espionage. The Cohens and Molody were later freed in prisoner exchanges with the Soviets. Blake escaped, and his videotaped comments are included in this hour, as are Morris Cohen’s from an interview he gave in a Moscow hospital shortly before his death.

Blake and the Cohens professed to be idealists who believed communism would produce a better world. “I think it is never wrong,” says Blake tonight, “to give your life to a noble ideal and to a noble experiment, even if it didn’t succeed.”

Just how much of a flop the Soviet Union’s was is evident in Part 4, which equates the Cold War with a propaganda war that narrator Lary Lewman says was “fought with words, ideas, images and the technologies of the new age.”

Hardly “new age,” though, is the ruthless censorship we see being imposed by Lenin on ordinary citizens as early as 1917, when the Bolsheviks gained control.

Americans who believe that U.S. media are coddled by the 1st Amendment would do well to note how regime-glorifying propaganda was abetted in the Soviet Union by total censorship. In other words, much better to have the messy free press Americans have than a tidier one in the smothering embrace of totalitarian rule.

Just as truth-fudging British and U.S. movie newsreels foreshadowed today’s TV news, so was Soviet cinema used, we hear tonight, to present Stalin as an epic, all-seeing, all-knowing icon. On the screen, for example, is a feature film in which a white-uniformed Stalin is made to loom, almost comically, above everyone else, as if he were deity.

With Stalin in control of all information, meanwhile, we hear of his enemies being “airbrushed from the pages of history,” and the emergence of a terrorizing “psychosis of denunciation,” in which parents feared speaking freely even in front of their children.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, other voices, including Radio Free Europe, began penetrating the Soviet Union with their own spin and counter spin, prompting not only jamming but counterattacks by a Radio Moscow with commentators speaking flawless Americanese for listeners abroad. One such Yank-style Soviet was beefy Joe Adamov, who later extended his no-frills persona of a Brooklyn butcher into his job as a Soviet spokesman. In contrast was Soviet spokesman Vladimir Pozner, a polished sophisticate who became a familiar face on U.S. television in the 1980s and later hooked up with Phil Donahue on some small-screen projects.

“Red Files” has Adamov and Pozner on camera commenting about earlier days when Moscow propaganda contrasted the “evils” of capitalism with the “virtues” of communism, en route to a segment on the 1980 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. That debacle became the Soviet Union’s own Vietnam, echoing the conflict for which it earlier had savaged the U.S.

Testifying to the power of propaganda, a woman tonight recalls myopic Cold War life as a Soviet: “They said turn left and I turned left. They said turn right and I turned right. I virtually didn’t have a brain.”

“Red Files” ends when the Soviet Union ends, but not before noting that the U.S. government also spins reality for self-serving reasons. The difference, of course, is that when U.S. media are on their toes, the government line is not the only line.

* “Red Files” begins tonight at 9 on KCET-TV and KVCR-TV and continues at 9 p.m. on Mondays through Oct. 18.