Last September, some readers may recall, my letter was devoted to Viktor Suvorov, the pseudonymous writer and former GRU officer who now lives in England under yet another assumed name. It has taken me nearly a year to track down the author of Spetsnaz. Soon after our conversation begins, he recites in Russian:

In ’41

rich lodes from mother earth

by our shovels

will again be wrested

And possibly

a fuel meant for all

will be uranium,

by cyclotrone sequestered.

Like any year

for victory, for scope

of coal and metallurgy

we are headed

And possibly

to the existing sixteen crests

in due course new ones

will be added.

But let me begin from afar, as the Russians are fond of saying.

“Southwestern” is the abridged name of a publishing company in the U.S. which recruits college students to sell its products, mostly Bibles and encyclopedias, during summer vacations. A graduate of the “Southwestern” school of commercial daring is expected to knock on an average of 3,000 doors per month, apply secret methods of persuasion like “Selling Through the Screen Door,” rejoice in being arrested for trespassing or shot at by a reluctant prospect, and otherwise prove his devotion to the free market ideal during every one of his 16-hour days. (He knocks on his first door of the day at 7:59 A.M. Disregard of the rule—knocking at 8:00 or 8:03—is, in the opinion of the managers, a sure sign that he won’t make it at Southwestern.)

Thus schooled, the Southwestern salesman finds it difficult to function in a less competitive environment; the company’s training cry, “I feel happy, I feel healthy, I feel teRRRific!” is likely to sound in his head at 5:00 A.M. for the rest of his life, and a Yale friend of mine who had “done Southwestern” once confessed to have completed the year’s course work in one week, an accomplishment he was shrewd enough to conceal from his professors. Today, John runs a major television distribution network in Los Angeles; needless to say, he credits neither Yale nor even his beloved Harrow with his success.

Success is the opening subject of my discussion with Viktor Suvorov, which took place under circumstances I have agreed not to reveal. Suvorov is the author of four books, in addition to Spetsnaz: The Liberators, describing his 1968 mission of peace to Czechoslovakia with a motor-rifle company under his command (Soviet Military Intelligence); and Aquarium, in which he tells of his own training as an intelligence officer, his life as a rezident spy, and his subsequent defection. But what, the puzzled reader may ask, does all this have to do with success? Or door-to-door salesmen in Texas, for that matter?

A free society, Suvorov and I soon agree, is designed for life, while a totalitarian society is designed for war. Hence success is defined by the rules and practices of these two societies in radically different ways, and the same applies to their means of allocating resources, their attitudes to human abilities and achievements, their systems of punishments and rewards. Growing up in a “closed zone” of a country hidden from Western eyes for over half a century, Suvorov had not seen a man in civilian clothes—”without epaulettes,” as he puts it—until he was a teenager; yet how many American children have ever been inside a tank? Nearly all U.S. helicopters landed at Dasht-e Kavir to rescue the hostages held by Iran had failed to function; on the other hand, Soviet tractors perform no better. More cars are owned, per capita, by the poor blacks of South Africa than by the Soviet population; but NATO submarines are made of steel, while the Soviets have started making theirs of titanium, the “space metal” 1.5 times stronger and twice as light. The Soviets can’t feed their own people? True, but they produced 170 million tons of steel in 1984, while in the U.S. 242,000 tons was the total used that year for all “ordinance and other military” needs. And yes, a “Southwestern” teenager can outsell, outwit, and out-earn a Soviet minister for trade; yet even a Soviet schoolboy is liable to know more about war than Paul Nitze.

“I wanted to be a commanding officer since I could walk,” says Suvorov. “When Stalin died I was five, and I remember asking my father incredulously: ‘Why are we telling everyone he is dead? The Americans will think we are vulnerable.'” It was this ability to think clearly, together with his remarkable memory and physical stamina, that opened the doors of success for Suvorov when he joined the “Aquarium,” GRU’s Moscow headquarters, after attracting the favorable notice of his superiors during an exercise in which his tank company unexpectedly broke out of the tank park by demolishing it, and later proving himself worthy of that notice by his service record in Spetsnaz. After being shown a film of Oleg Penkovsky, the most important (and probably the last) agent Western intelligence has ever had in Russia, strapped to a conveyer belt edging its way into the open mouth of a crematorium furnace, he was offered a chance to change his mind about his promotion: “We have a simple rule,” he was told. “It’s a rouble to get in, but two to get out.” Moved by the ambition that marks born soldiers east of the Elbe and born salesmen west of the Mississippi, he opted for the rouble.

It was as a writer, not as a spy, that I discovered Suvorov. “I have never read anything as powerful as Spetsnaz,” I wrote in this space last September. “Were the reading public more interested in the immediate prospects for the survival of our civilization than in the opinions of the Nobel committee, the name of Viktor Suvorov—on the strength of this book alone—would doubtless eclipse that of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, while the exotic term this pseudonymous defector-turned-author uses as his title would become commonplace in our speech,” as the word “gulag” has. Having now read all of Suvorov’s books and interviewed him at length, I can put it differently, more dramatically.

The combination of talent and experience that had allowed Suvorov to become a success in totalitarian Russia has made him a failure in the free West: a brave, gifted, original writer whom nobody reads. Reviews of his books are infrequent and half-hearted; indeed, who cares about all that stuff except military analysts? Sales are equally slow (he was paid $5,000 for the American rights to one of his books); fortunately, he does not worry about money, since everything necessary for his life and safety is provided without charge. But, like any other writer obsessed with an idea—in this case, the survival of the West as a free civilization—he is a failure. Would Solzhenitsyn have been anything else if Khrushchev had not decided to use “One Day” against Stalin’s old guard in the course of his own struggle for power? Does anyone today remember Ivan Solonevich, who published his two-volume Russia in a Concentration Camp when Solzhenitsyn was still a loyal Stalinist? In fact, writing—that is, revealing in a new way new truths about man and the world—may be more frustrating in New York or London than peddling copies of Great Soviet Encyclopedia in Leningrad or East Berlin. Or working as a career intelligence officer in Virginia.

Two failures, we speak of the West’s chances for survival, increasingly bleak since Ron started talking to Misha about INF. Suvorov tells me about the book he is now writing on the origins of World War II, and it is here that he recites the New Year poem which appeared in Pravda on January 1, 1941. “The existing sixteen crests” are, of course, the Soviet “republics,” with Germany among the “new ones” to be “added.” The book will be entitled Icebreaker of the Revolution: that is how Stalin saw Hitler.

On December 17, 1987, nine days after the signing of the INF Treaty, an equally interesting poem appeared in Pravda: “Meditations From the Starting Position” by Aleksandr Prokhanov. “The march of a missile division / Along a snowbound road”—it began—”Changing its environment / Unknown to the enemy . . . / It is futile to seek it from space, / To grope for it with radar rays . . . “

Suvorov draws my attention to the photographs reproduced in his Inside the Soviet Army: missiles built “for parades,” to deceive the West and gain time for building real ones, bridges across the Dnieper built in under an hour to convince the West that the Rhine was no obstacle (it no longer is), dummy guidance stations complete with radar signals (for Western diplomats to observe and U.S. intelligence satellites to intercept) . . . The SALT talks were the culmination of the strategy of deception.

Suvorov writes in Inside the Soviet Army:

The Chief Directorate of Strategic Deception . . . is the most powerful Directorate in the Soviet General Staff. . . . Nothing can be published in the USSR without a permit from its head, no film can appear without one, not a single troop movement can take place . . . no rocket-base, no barracks—even for the troops of the KGB—can be built without its agreement, nor can a single factory, collective farm, pipe-line or railway be constructed without its prior permission. Everything in this huge country must be done in such a way that the enemy always has a false impression of what is going on: in some fields achievements are deliberately concealed, in others—as was done with anti-missile defence—they are exaggerated out of all recognition.

At the SALT I talks, it was General Ogarkov—now Marshal Ogarkov, chief of the Soviet General Staff—who stood next to Brezhnev in his capacity as head of the Chief Directorate of Strategic Deception.

If deception is the soul of totalitarianism’s strategy, its lifeblood is its unrivaled, yet often underestimated, ability to attract men of talent and even genius with the same lure of worldly success that, in the West, attracts them to business, medicine, or the practice of law. Those unwilling or unable to excel in strategically relevant fields are defined as social rejects, failures. Similarly, in the West, it is the abilities valued by a free market that ensure success in life.

But the most important difference is that, in a free society, freedom means, among other things, the freedom not to defend that society. By contrast, a totalitarian society entangles the individual’s “pursuit of happiness” in a strategic aim of global expansion, which it wants to attain at the expense of all free, voluntarily undefended societies on earth.

Not surprisingly, Suvorov sees the INF Treaty as the latest Western fiasco in the ongoing contest of abilities. Until President Reagan’s conversion, remarkably similar to that of President Kennedy in his day, there had existed a Western consensus that nuclear weapons are necessary to offset Soviet conventional superiority: a standing army of five million, another 55 in trained reserve, and secret armaments factories running around the clock to equip every one of them. Now, strategic deception—possible only under totalitarian conditions of universal peacetime militarization—will achieve its ultimate triumph in the implementation of the treaty.

“Is there hope?” I asked in an interview with Suvorov published in Britain.

Yes, thinks Suvorov, where there is freedom there is always hope, and I agree with him. For me he is the embodiment of that hope, for a man who has staked his all on freedom in our time is a living miracle. He walks among us under sentence of death. His words are muffled by our indifference. He is the ultimate failure, and if one Russian can admire another’s failure, I admire his.