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“The Americans” anticipates what a new cold war would be like

In the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the celebrated series “The Americans” is back in the news.

Russia invaded a country at the gates of NATO. The United States and Europe imposed financial restrictions of a level comparable only to wartime. The BBC withdrew its correspondents from Russia. The Kremlin blocked Facebook and Twitter and shut down an independent television channel. The United States asked its citizens in Russia to leave the territory ruled by Vladimir Putin. There was even a fire at a nuclear power plant, which did not lead to a Chernobyl-like disaster but evoked it.

That among the recent news, which sound like vintage of the cold war. And there is more.

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The interference of the Kremlin in the presidential elections of the United States. Leaks of security and financial documents. Former Russian agents poisoned. Cyber ​​attacks. Eternal re-election of the Russian president. Much of the recent history of the 21st century brings back the memory of the bipolar world that followed World War II and that had peaks of global hysteria in the Missile Crisis and the years of ronald reagan.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union the following year, the Cold War fell into oblivion, while interest in phenomena such as Islamic terrorism rose after the attack that destroyed the Twin Towers in 2001. But in the context of the invasion of Ukraine and the events that have followed, one feels a deja vu. And few series told the east-west tension as well as The Americans.

“The Americans” was created by Joe Waisberg, a former CIA agent. (FX)

With six seasons and 75 episodes Altogether, the creation of Joe Weissberg -not by chance a former CIA analyst- remains a cult series, celebrated by international critics and with a group of faithful followers: only in the United States, in the years of its broadcast on FX, 2013 to 2018 , achieved an average audience of 1.3 million people.

the fiction that won four Emmy Awards—and was nominated for 18— tells the story of the Jenningses, a typical American married couple of the 1980s, with their typical home in a typical middle-class Virginia suburb near Washington DC, and their typical demographic contribution of a daughter and a son. But Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Phillip (matthew rhys) do not actually make up the common statistic but another, the one that accounts for an exclusive elite: they are spies for the Soviet Union, part of a special intelligence program, “The illegals”, which existed —and probably will exist again, if ever it was interrupted—to infiltrate agents under the guise of an ordinary family.

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Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys played the spies for six seasons and 75 episodes. (FX)

The KGB recruited them when they were very young, and trained them in the typical tasks: searching for classified information, recruiting informants, using encryption keys, surveillance, organizing operations and handling weapons. But Directorate S—the part of Soviet intelligence dealing with “illegals”—also trained them on special issues, such as the features of daily life in Western countries and the elimination of the Slavic accent in other languages.

The celebrated fiction about the Jennings is based on the case of Tracy Foley and Donald Heathfield. Or rather, Elena Vavilova and Andrey Bezrukov.

These two Soviet spies fulfilled their mission for 20 years, 10 of them in the United States, where they were arrested in 2010 as part of an FBI operation that ended with the deportation of the couple and eight other Putin agents, including they Anna Chapman and Sergey Skripal, who would be poisoned later. Vavilova and Bezrukov kept the secret even from their children, who were the first to be surprised by their arrest.

Elizabeth and Philip “managed to recreate the atmosphere, the inner torments of secret agents, the difficulties – even of a personal nature – that have to be overcome to do this kind of work,” Bezrukov said of The Americans. His wife, on the other hand, considered that the series did not count “the real work”, because she added sex and violence, and she wrote a novel in code about his career as a spy, The Woman Who Can Keep Secrets (The woman who can keep secrets).

The Jenningses’ neighbor is Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), an FBI agent who befriends the couple, without imagining that they are at the center of his work. His KGB bosses on US soil are Claudia (margo martindale) and Gabriel (Frank Langella) and the next generation of spies—or so Elizabeth hopes, unlike Philip—is her daughter Page (holly taylor).

At the Russian embassy Oleg Burov (Ronin Coast), the son of a high-ranking Soviet official, whose brother fights in Afghanistan, brings the melancholy of the Slavic soul. Another character of enormous importance is Martha Hanson (Alison Wright), secretary of the director of the FBI whom Philip falls in love with a false identity, and whom he abuses over the years to access the secrets that his missions demand. Because, as the motto of the series warns, “All’s fair in love and the cold war”.

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Action lovers will be pleased to see covert operations, chases, explosions, homicides galore, and biological weapons smuggling. But The Americans goes far beyond the obvious to become a memorable drama, in which the tension is maintained only by the links between the characters, as time passes, experiences accumulate, missions are exacerbated and children grow. In itself, the strange love story of two strangers who formed a family is really a source of emotions.

Why did the KGB choose to send couples to Western countries? Since the ideal candidates were in their early twenties—younger they were frail and by 30 they lost malleability—and to think that someone young would not have a partner was unrealistic, the most practical thing was to form prefabricated marriages. The rest would be done by his spy attributes, his hormones and his sense of patriotism.

With an icon of the nineties like Russell, the protagonist of happinessand an unforgettable cast —Brandon J. Dirden, Annet Mahendru, Keidrich Sellati, Kelly AuCoin, Jennifer Garner and Richard Thomas among other actors, The Americans showed the cold war in the Reagan years from a unique perspective and with a gripping pace. As well as an ’80s fashion show, the countless costumes the Jennings have to wear for work, and the technology of the time.

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