As a young Soviet student in 1978, Ieva could not have predicted that a holiday visit to her father, Imants Lesinskis, t | dG1fYkdWQmc5bDFxZlk
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Short filmTranscript
00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:01 And first time here?
00:03 No.
00:04 I stayed here in 1978.
00:07 Oh, wow.
00:08 Welcome back.
00:09 When I was six months old, my parents
00:18 flew to Moscow, where they underwent
00:20 KGB training to become spies.
00:22 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:30 My father started working for the United Nations in New York.
00:35 He invited me to come and visit him for a month
00:38 during my summer holidays.
00:39 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:48 After all that sensuous deprivation of the Soviet Union,
00:52 it just seemed like, oh, my god, this is paradise.
00:56 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:59 It was a long-time plan of mine.
01:01 And just in '78, there was an opportunity.
01:05 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:07 I say to my father, you know, I'm being followed.
01:10 And he says, no, no.
01:11 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:15 A couple of days passed.
01:17 And he said, you haven't seen Washington.
01:19 Let's go to Washington.
01:20 And then you go back home.
01:22 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:28 My father said that he and his wife
01:30 were defecting right there and then.
01:34 I could either stay with them, or I
01:36 should go to the Soviet embassy, renounce my father.
01:39 [SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
01:52 This is back in the '70s.
01:53 This is back in the days of the Cold War.
01:55 Had they been found out, they would have been at least
01:58 imprisoned, if not executed.
02:00 My father announced that we would have to change
02:03 our names in biographies.
02:04 [MUSIC PLAYING]
02:07 [EXPLOSION]
02:13 [SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
02:31 Given other things about what has happened
02:33 to defectors in the past, it seemed a live possibility
02:37 that he'd just been murdered.
02:39 That's too realistic.
02:48 (thunder rumbling)
02:51 [BLANK_AUDIO]