I would know. I recently spent three deranged weeks binge-watching all six seasons of The Americans, the Cold War thriller starring Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell as deep-cover KGB officers posing as all-American travel agents in suburban 1980s Virginia, and now I see spies everywhere. My life has been overthrown from within.
I’ve started using terms like “tradecraft” and “asset”; I found an excuse to wear a wig at the weekend. I seek out people who have not yet suffered through my evangelising about the many-layered, erotic nuances to a tooth-pulling scene, or explaining why a really romantic beheading is the ultimate test of a man’s devotion to his wife.
The Americans is a restrained, subtle portrait of two complex antiheroes, of the competing loyalties of family and country, of a Moscow-arranged marriage that turns into a real one (and realer still: Rhys and Russell fell in love off-screen and have a child), of the brutality and banality of espionage and the futility of all this sacrifice and bloodshed to save the doomed Soviet Union.
It is impossible, too, to watch it without considering the lingering impact of Russia’s long-held, deeply embedded contempt for the West.
But both during its original run from 2013 to 2018, and now, real-world events, its examination of the power of Soviet mythology and its plot’s grounding in cases of real-life “illegals” – undercover spies resident in foreign countries, operating without diplomatic cover – make their words redundant.
Every time the story appears to stretch credulity – the exhumation of a scientist’s body for cell samples, the KGB’s designs on Philip and Elizabeth’s children as “second generation” spies, the seduction of a CIA agent’s teenage daughter, the hunting down and assassination of defectors from decades past – there is evidence not just of how this really happened, but some modern story that is even more extreme. Think of Sergei Skripal, an enemy of Putin, who was poisoned with nerve agent Novichok in the Salisbury branch of Zizzi in 2018; or Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned with radioactive polonium in a London hotel in 2016.
These two soldiers, recruited as teenagers from Russian cities devastated during the Second World War and groomed to the Communist cause, are trained to be uncompromising in their belief that their job is part of the greater good and that the survival of their motherland is more important than anything else – including their own children. The drama’s greatest tension comes not from the action, but when their feelings about each other and their family threaten their commitment to the Party.
square MARK WALLACE
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The conflict between their loyalties, the fear that “Americanness” might be creeping into them and their children – who do not know their parents’ real identities – is more distressing to them than the relentless murders they are forced to commit. Their missions involve acts of untold evil, the orders from “Moscow Centre” growing more dangerous (and Philip more dubious about whether he is still working on the side of world peace) as they destroy or dispose of anyone who obstructs their pursuit of kompromat.
It would be foolish to imagine the impacts of this indoctrination do not live on. Decades before he was President, Vladimir Putin himself worked in Dresden as an illegals support officer. When he gained power, he gradually reactivated sleeper agents in the West who had been living as ordinary citizens since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ten were rounded up by the FBI in 2010 as part of “Operation Ghost Stories” – on which The Americans is partly based – and just last year Artyem and Anna Dultsev returned to Moscow after decades undercover in Buenos Aires and Slovenia, with their eight- and 10-year-old children, who believed they were Argentinian until they stepped on the plane. Putin met them with flowers and kisses at the airport.
‘The Americans’ is streaming on Channel 4 and Disney+
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