A JOKE TOO FAR

Edward Lucas invented a bogus Russian

conspiracy. Unfortunately it was believed throughout the Baltic

Vilnius THE BALTIC AMBASSADOR was in confidential mood. We were speaking in his office and he had, he said, acquired an interesting piece of information, which he was willing to share with me. 'Our intelli- gence agents have found a secret docu- ment. The Russian secret service is planning to destabilise the Baltic states, destroy our democracy and end our inde- pendence,' he explained. I began to feel uneasy. He started giving details. I stopped him.

'Actually, I wrote that,' I explained. 'It was a joke, in a colour magazine.'

His face furrowed. 'Joke? No, no, this was not joke. Is true. Our security service send it to me.' I persisted. He became cross, and we parted in a miasma of mutu- al incomprehension and irritation.

Humour, and particularly satire, is a rare beast in the post-communist Baltic, where journalism (whatever its factual shortcom- ings) is seldom funny on purpose — as I learned when my newspaper, the Baltic Independent, launched a colour magazine. The magazine's brief was to entertain and not instruct; and thinking about entertain- ment, I began to wonder about the new Russian intelligence service, better known as the old KGB. Clearly, there must be somebody inside that organisation respon- sible for dealing with the Baltic states. What did he do? How much did he really understand? Most important of all, could he be conscripted into a column of the 'Dear Bill' type in Private Eye?

That was how Oleg Khuiyovich, Baltic desk officer at the KGB, made his now scandalous debut in print. His name is — as any speaker of colloquial Russian would spot instantly — impossible: it means, lit- erally, 'son of a prick'. I envisaged using him as a base to satirise Baltic politics, Russian misconceptions about them and life in general. As a stylistic device, I would pretend that his memos were being leaked to a 'deep throat', and I would be credited as the 'translator'.

His first (and now last) appearance was in the form of a memo to Boris Yeltsin describing how the 'reintegration' of the Baltic into the Russian sphere of influence was proceeding, by means of undermining democratic institutions through crime and corruption. The idea, wrote Khuiyovich, was to pave the way for Latin American- style regimes which would be autocratic at home but docile towards their superpower backers.

When this was written last autumn, it was still possible to parody Russian behaviour towards the Baltics. Vladimir Zhirinovsky was not yet in parliament; the Russian troop withdrawal from the Baltics seemed, in fits and starts, to be proceed- ing, and a really serious threat, as opposed to the occasional threatening rumble, seemed a long way off. So Colonel Khuiy- ovich's memo was published in the usual slot for a humorous article. More serious features included an account of the ten- day Riga-Istanbul bus route favoured by soap traders.

Distributing all 12,000 copies from Tallinn's antique printing plant takes some time. But two weeks later a fax from the main Baltic lobbying group in the United States arrived, requesting us to send the 'original' of the 'KGB document' as soon as possible, so that it could be used in a direct mail-shot alerting Baltic-Americans to the fiendish Russian plot. We giggled at what seemed an amusing, one-off misun- derstanding by a young, overly serious American lobbyist. Rather less funny was a phone call from the Latvian defence min- istry: please could we urgently publish a correction? The ministry was being bom- barded with faxes and phone calls from panicky Latvian-Americans who wanted to know what was being done to round up Mr 1Chuiyovich's agents. Somewhat embar- rassed, the civil servant explained, 'Of course I know it's a joke. With a name like that it's obvious. But these Americans don't believe me when I tell them.'

Next came the Lithuanian parliament's research and analysis centre. They did not call us, but had, we heard, spent several days 'analysing' the document (which by then had been translated into Lithuanian, minus the author's name). The country's security service had been asked to cross- check it point by point, and the embassy in Moscow was trying to confirm it. Via a third party, we tried to put them off the scent. 'If it's a joke, it's not very funny,' snapped an official, and put the phone down.

A few days later we received a phone call from the Estonian foreign ministry. Could we be a bit more specific about how the document was leaked? the official asked. We tried to explain. He was unconvinced.

'But look at the name — Khuiyovich — what it means in Russian.' I don't speak Russian,' he replied sniffily. 'And, anyway, only a sick person would joke about a sub- ject as serious as this.'

By the time of my interview with the worried Baltic ambassador, the memo had taken on wings of its own. Translated and retranslated, most of the clues that marked it as fictional had disappeared. And with what the Baits now call, without elabora- tion, the 'situation' (meaning the threat from Russia) darkening by the day, Colonel Khuiyovich's menacing assertions seemed all too likely to be true. We pub- lished correction after correction, but to no avail. Like the notorious Douglas Hurd memo on the desirability of expelling Mus- lims from Europe (a palpable forgery which is widely believed in the Arab world to be authentic), fiction was proving more believable than fact.

There is an unhappy precedent to this. Our prewar predecessor, the Baltic Review,

unwittingly provided the excuse for Stalin's annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithua- nia by printing an article about the need for a new Baltic security pact against the Russian threat. Stalin said that this was evi- dence that the Baltic states were plotting against the non-aggression pacts into which they had just been coerced, and marched in. It is hard to imagine Colonel 1Chuiy- ovich's memo playing such a deadly role. But in the current climate his first appear- ance in print will be — in so far as we can influence it — positively his last.

Edward Lucas is managing editor of the Baltic Independent.