The wrong kind of unconditional love
On "The Americans", Evan Gershkovich's well-deserved welcome, and the cruelty of putting love for something else above one's own offspring
In an utterly dismaying twist, two of the "prisoners" swapped back to Russia in exchange for Western hostages like Evan Gershkovich were children who didn't even know they were Russians. Their parents had been posing as Argentines living in Slovenia, and the children themselves were actually born in Argentina.
■ It's a story that closely tracks with the "deep cover" story told in "The Americans". But these are real lives being affected -- not a couple of fictional characters on a television show. Now uprooted from not only the homeland of their birth but also of the country where they had been residing, they are now semi-public figures in a country to which they had no realized connection until they boarded an airplane days ago.
■ Consider the cruelty in that: Their parents, the only people with whom the children have any unsevered connection in the world, had them as unwitting accomplices in a spy game. And even though the one thing every child deserves to believe is that their parents love them unconditionally and above anything else, these children already know that their parents love the Russian state more than them.
■ Some of the people welcomed home in the prisoner exchange earned a hero's welcome by enduring punishment for doing the right thing. These two children, not yet even teenagers, are only now beginning a punishment for the crimes of their parents. No child should ever have to wonder about the authenticity of their parents' love.
