How Russians are everywhere - in fact and fiction
A president whose chief of staff is compromised by a relationship with a woman who runs a Russian-funded think tank and is planted there by the Russian government? Could Homeland be more of the moment than that? Does anyone see parallels with Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University academic who built the profiling app thisisyourdigitallife and sold data of 50 million Facebook profiles to Cambridge Analytica without their consent? Which data was then used to target voters during the 2016 presidential election in the US?
Kogan had previously unreported ties to a Russian university, including a teaching position and grants for research into Facebook. Sounds like a long-term plan to destabilise America and not let that "nasty woman" become president? Something that Hillary Clinton herself has written about, saying perhaps Vladimir Putin's dislike of her ("he's not the most feminist of leaders," she said of him at the India Today Conclave recently, adding, "He blamed me for causing the protests on the streets. I wish I had that kind of influence. But I did not.") had something to do with it.
Well, if you're living in reality TV-land which we are, thanks to a US president who became famous because of it, then anything is possible. Homeland, Showtime's fresh-off-the-press TV series, now in its seventh season, ended last season with a woman as president, in what was obviously in anticipation of Clinton's ascent. As everyone knows by now - and possibly Russian President Putin knew before anyone else - Donald Trump became President instead, and Clinton retired to walk in the woods and drink Chardonnay before writing a book that explains What Happened.
But the show quickly got itself together and in its new season has relentlessly followed the Russian lead. Episode after episode has been a minor lesson in the new and dangerous game of weaponised information. Saul Berenson, now President Elizabeth Keane's national security adviser has assembled a small team of analysts, one an old time Russia expert and another a contemporary data analyser, to understand how the Russians are tampering with the democratic process in America, from using fake Twitter accounts amplifying anti-Keane feeling to using social media clips downloaded on YouTube to precipitate a massive shootout involving an Alex Jones clone, who broadcasts alt right venom against the president.
What's interesting in this alternative universe of a Hillary Clinton clone in the Oval Office is that she is no angel. Keane is portrayed as a president who is at war with her own security establishment, having imprisoned 200 of them at the end of season six. She is seen as being just but barely able to handle the crises that engulf her presidency - from a rabid Alex Jones clone who calls for her head and precipitates a face-off to a chief of staff, who is deeply compromised to having to take credit for an air strike in Syria she did not authorise but which is used to win her brownie points for being tough on terror.
Homeland has no love lost for politicians, but it does have a soft corner for intelligence operatives who give up their lives to live in the shadows and fight for democracy. Carrie Mathison, played with great grit by the Golden Globe winning Claire Danes, is one such operative and she is the heart of the show, as is Berenson, her sometime mentor, counsellor, friend and conscience. The Americans, FX's show on two Russian agents working in America at the height of the Cold War in the eighties, shows the relationship between the two great nations as it used to be - hobbled by suspicion, constantly at risk of either biological warfare or psychological tit-for-tat, and Homeland's latest season shows how little has changed, except perhaps the advance of technology.
Suddenly, the Russians are back in the popular imagination of the Western world. It's not quite the heady days of the James Bond days when villains like General Orlov traded Faberge eggs and atomic bombs, but the bad guys are speaking in Russian accents again. Putin's aggression which has clearly a link with the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in London, has found another mainstream echo, in the Jennifer Lawrence-starrer Red Sparrow. She plays Dominika Egorova, a ballerina, an officer in the SVR, a Sparrow trained to bend others' minds (and bodies, because they belong to the state) to win the information war for Russia. Putin's name is never mentioned but it is clear that this new breed of spies reports directly to him. As a line in the film goes: "Russia most certainly did not lose the Cold War. It never ended."
And if anyone has not had enough of Russians on screen, they can always watch BBC1's McMafia, my favourite TV series of the year so far, based on Misha Glenny's book, which chronicles the rise of Russian mafia throughout the world, its links with the drugs business via Pakistan and India, with the business of fakes in Prague and with high priced escorts in Israel, all controlled seemingly smoothly by bankers who transfer milllions at the click of a button.
It shows the virtual takeover of the toniest parts of London by rich Russians, from smart townhouses to lavish country estates; the still basic level of living back home in Moscow, and the ruthless blood lust that has allowed the revolution to eat its own children. Little wonder then that the UK-based Russian embassy was critical of the drama, saying it "depicts Britain as a playground for Russian gangsters".
It may be bad for politics but it makes for great television. No one plays the bad guys as well as the Russians.