Paul O’Connor takes a look at a memoir from someone who’s seen in person how Vladimir Putin operates and what he’s trying to achieve. The author puts what’s happening in the U.S. now into troubling perspective..
Reviewed by Paul T. O’Connor.
MIDNIGHT IN MOSCOW: A MEMOIR FROM THE FRONT LINES OF RUSSIA’S WAR AGAINST THE WEST. By John J. Sullivan. Little, Brown & Co. 389 pages. $32.50, hardcover. Also available in audiobook, read by Matt Godfrey. 17 hours, 59 minutes.
At a time when America’s president is saying that Ukraine started its war with Russia, when American officials refuse to confirm that Russia invaded Ukraine and when our Congress appears ready to dismiss Russian war crimes in Ukraine, it’s encouraging to hear a former Republican ambassador to Moscow tell the truth: Russia started the war by invading Ukraine and, in the process, has committed heinous war crimes that involve the massacre of countless innocent civilians.
John Sullivan was appointed ambassador by the very president who now lies about the war’s instigator. He served most of the last year of that man’s first term, then a year and a half more during Joe Biden’s presidency.
Sullivan argues that Vladimir Putin considers the West, and especially the United States, as its hated enemy, and that Putin is willing and ready to wage war to get what he wants: the dismemberment of the current world order and its replacement with an order where dictators do whatever the hell they want.
The Russian government has no respect for the truth, only for words and actions that will further Putin’s cause. Nor does this government have any interest in diplomacy. Sullivan details a sham peace treaty proposal that Russians made to the U.S. during 2021. In it, NATO and the U.S. would retreat from the world stage and cede it to Russia, which of course makes no concessions. When the U.S. rejected the proposal, Moscow accused the U.S. of refusing to negotiate.
Midnight in Moscow is an inside look at the operations of the American embassy in the Russian capital. It is an embassy under constant siege from Russian intelligence services, one in which sensitive conversations can be held only in a few secure rooms. And once off the embassy grounds, American diplomats and their families are subjected to repeated acts of harassment.
In what may be Sullivan’s best chapter, he quotes the Nazi Hermann Goering on the recipe for taking a nation into war. It involves lies and deceit, not just of your enemy but, more important, of your own people. It is a playbook that the Nazis used to start World War II. Sullivan then compares how Putin led his country into war in Ukraine, right down to the refusal to call his “special military action” a “war.” The Nazis did the same thing when they invaded Poland in 1939, changing their terminology only after England and France declared war on Germany.
I listened to the audiobook. I hate to say it, but Matt Godfrey is the worst reader I’ve encountered in my Audible subscription. He reads so slowly that I had to up the play speed to 1.5, and he stumbles over a number of foreign names and places.
Midnight in Moscow also would have benefitted from a good edit. Sullivan takes forever to get to the story. He spends far too many words telling us his personal story before his appointment as deputy secretary of state by former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Once he gets going, however, it really is a good read.
This is a valuable book to read at a time when domestic forces are copying Goering’s recipe for deception and corruption.