Will Snowden be singing "Back in the USSR" for long?

Edward Snowden has it “all.” He has “fame.” He has the “girls”—at least the Russian variety. He supposedly has job offers out the wazoo from employers who don’t mind that he doesn’t speak their language. He even has a “clear” conscience. That is what temporary asylum in Russia has “bought” him, and little else, as others who followed his trail have discovered. I lived four years in Germany when I was in the Army; it was a pleasant, civilized country. But because my grasp of the language didn’t go much beyond what I needed to know to get by in a gasthaus, it was all quite “foreign” and I counted the days when I finally could go “home.”

But at least in Germany you enjoyed all the freedoms and material amenities of the U.S. In Russia, that might be more problematic. “Freedom of speech” is still a matter of who is speaking, and sometimes it can get you killed by poisoning. Two recent laws passed by the Russian Duma—one making it a “crime” to congregate or disseminate “propaganda” in support of the gay life style, and the other prohibiting the insulting of “religious feeling,” which an insultee could face three years of incarceration—would seem to indicate that Snowden may have stepped in just at the right time to be a useful public relations pawn. But Snowden should feel lucky: If he was under Chinese law, he might face execution following a show trial proceeding for his espionage activities. 

Snowden may survive long enough in Russia—say 90 years—to receive a medal from Vladimir Putin for being a traitor to his country, like British spy George Blake. But as a story by Reuters points out, Snowden—if he chooses to stay in Russia and not face the consequences of his actions—may discover that his exploits were a fool’s errand. “NSA cryptologists William Martin and Bernon Mitchell defected to the Soviet Union during the Cold War in 1960 because of disenchantment with U.S. intelligence gathering methods. The pair denounced Washington for spying on its own allies - charges echoed by Snowden half a century later. But Martin later called his choice foolhardy as he became disillusioned with the less than ideal life in the Soviet Union and the relevance of their revelations quickly faded.” Even the spying operation that Snowden “exposed” and so upset Germans was a program instituted almost fifty years ago, and hadn’t been used since 1990, when the Cold War ended. 

Some may still insist on portraying Snowden as some kind of “hero” for the Internet Age. I suspect that most of us—if not now, but in time—see him has a something of a traitor, a pompous, self-proclaimed but misguided “idealist” whose exposures did more harm to national security than the “good” of increasing public paranoia over intelligence programs that in fact have no noticeable impact on the average American’s life. 

The Russians themselves don’t think Snowden is a “hero” because he “exposed” what other countries already know and do themselves. He is a “hero” in Russia because of national self-consciousness of the throwing stones variety: You are guilty of what you accuse us of doing. Well, course Russians know that their intelligence and police services spy on them all the time, so it is a pleasant “surprise” to have the U.S. “exposed”—although not at the level of violation that Snowden and others like him would have you believe to justify their espionage. After all, he was only supposed to read and analyze “suspicious” communications; if he was tempted by poor judgment to go beyond that, then perhaps we are fortunate that he got himself out of the loop.