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And the Soviet ambassador Aleksandr Yakovlev made it his personal effort to discredit me; he complained to Pierre Trudeau, who is known to be [a] little bit soft on socialism, and the management of CBC behaved in a very strange, cowardly way, unbecoming of representatives of an independent country like Canada. They listened to every suggestion that [the] Soviet ambassador gave, and they started [a] shameful investigation, analyzing [the] content of my broadcasts to [the] USSR. Sure enough, they discovered that some of my statements were probably too... would be offending to the Soviet politburo. So I had to leave my job.

Once they spot that you are scared, they keep on developing that line, and then eventually you either have to give up entirely and work for them; or they neutralize you, they would definitely stop all kind[s] of political activity, which they failed to do in my case. Because I was stubbornly working for the Canadian Broadcasting [Corporation], and in response to their intimidations, I said that, ‘Look: this is a free country, and I am as free as you are, and I also can drive very fast, and gun control is not yet established in Canada, so I have [a] couple of good shotguns in my basement, so [you are] welcome to visit me some day, with your Kalashnikovs, machine guns.’

In the span of my career, I married three times. Most of these marriages were marriages of convenience on advice from the Department of Personnel. This was [a] normal practice in [the] USSR. When a Soviet citizen is assigned to a foreign job, he has to be married, either to keep [his] family in [the] USSR as hostages, or, if it’s a convenience marriage like mine, so that the husband and wife are virtually informers on each other, to prevent defection or contamination by ‘decadent imperialist or capitalist ideas.’ In my case, I hated that girl so much that the moment I landed in Moscow we were divorced and I married later a second time.

A group of twelve people arrived in [the] USSR from [the] United States to cover the 50th Anniversary of [the] October Socialist Revolution in my country.

Nothing could be [further] from [the] truth. These were not opinions; they were not opinions at all. They were the clichés which the Soviet propaganda [wanted the] American public to think that they think—if [that makes] any sense at all. It sure does, because from the viewpoint of the Soviet propaganda, although there are some subtle criticism[s] of the Soviet system, the basic message is that Russia today is a nice, functioning, efficient system, supported by [the] majority of [the] population

From the first page to the last page, it was a package of lies: propaganda cliché[s] which were presented to American readers as opinions and deductions of American journalists.

Another thing which I had to… sometimes risking my life to explain to foreigners: Time magazine, for example, is very critical of [the] South African racist regime. The whole article was dedicated to the shameful internal passport system, where blacks are not [being allowed] to leave [as whites are]. For some strange reason, for the last fourteen years since my defection, nobody wanted to pay attention to my passport.

This is my passport. It also shows my nationality, and it has a police rubber stamp which is called prapiska in [the] Russian language, which assigns me to a certain area of residence. I cannot leave that area. [It is the] same way as this black man cannot leave [his] area in South Africa. Yet we call [the] South African government [a] ‘racist regime.’ Not a single Jane Schmonda or Fonda is brave enough, courageous enough, to come to [the] media and say, ‘Look, this is what happens in [the] USSR.’ I sent a copy of my passport to many American liberals and civil rights defenders and all the other useful idiots. They never bothered to answer me back. This shows what kind of integrity, what kind of honesty these people [have]. They are [a] bunch of hypocrites, because they don’t want to recognize a good example of racism in my country.