//------------------------------// // Pardon Committee's Background Material (Submission A) // Story: Summer of My Human Soldier // by KFDirector //------------------------------// Investigator’s note: the following testimony by GRU Colonel Stanislav Lunev was not disclosed to the Senate Subcommittee on Equestrian Relations until after his defection to the United States in 1992. Several congressmen have noted that Colonel Lunev, while suspected of being generally truthful, has a reputation for exaggerating certain facts. It nonetheless is useful context in understanding the case. Senator LUGAR. Thank you again, Colonel. You may proceed. Colonel LUNEV. You must understand, I was not personally acquainted with these operations. I was still in military academy in 1969. This is only what I learned second-hand, a decade after the fact, from those who were there. Senator PELL. We understand. Please continue. Colonel LUNEV. It was the policy of the Soviet Union throughout the 1960s to conduct operations in the Western hemisphere intended to alienate the United States’ allies, and if possible, to bring them into the Soviet sphere of influence. Senator LUGAR. Wasn’t this your policy in the fifties, too? Colonel LUNEV. Yes. And the seventies, and the eighties, and if there were still a Soviet Union today, in the nineties. Anyway, the grandest prize, and what we imagined the hardest target, was always Equestria. No other nation could pose as great a military threat to you—without the use of nuclear weapons—as the land of the ponies. There were many unfriendly nations with stronger armies, of course—our own, the Chinese—but after the Second World War, there was no chance of landing on mainland American soil in any numbers. Thank your navy for that. Senator LUGAR. We do. (Laughs) Colonel LUNEV. Equestria, however, shares a long land border with America. Not an easy to defend one, either—a border marked as often by watershed lines as by rivers. Of course, infiltrating the land of the ponies would be difficult, to say the least. America may be diverse and multicultural enough for our agents to operate with impunity, but no Soviet agent was going to be able to pass as a pony. Nor did we find any Soviet horses of even remotely comparable intelligence. I am not proud of the experiments upon which Soviet scientists embarked to try and create such a beast, but of course the CIA was dabbling in that field well before we were. Senator PELL. That’s ridiculous. Colonel LUNEV. Oh? They haven’t told you about that yet? (Laughs) We had only a few ponies who had emigrated to our nation and to other fellow-traveling nations at the end of the Second World War. They were...not well liked in their homeland, and so turned out not to be such good agents. But they provided valuable information about the ponies that their nation tried to keep secret. Of course, we verified what was common knowledge: that the ruling Canterlot nobility that called itself the Equestrian Republic was less than popular among the people. Was the unpopularity rational? Probably not. Their capitalist policies and free trade agreements with the West made winners and losers, but most ponies were doing on average better than they had been before. Local elections were fair and free, and the quick turnover in ruling parties meant national democracy was something like real, even if it produced one faction of weak rulers after another. There was a surge of patriotic fervor during the Second World War, when they worked more closely with Americans—and the British and ourselves—than they ever had before, but it faded quickly afterward. Really, it was a problem of legitimacy. Queen Celestia had seen the expansion of the empire into many new lands, into the Pacific, the Far East, even briefly into the Middle East—and she was, in pony beliefs, the immortal ruler of the sun. Senator LUGAR. The Japanese said that about their Emperor, too. Colonel LUNEV. The ponies believed it. The Japanese believed, at best, that the emperor was descended from the mythical goddess of the sun. The ponies believed that the sun literally rose and fell at the behest of Celestia. In any event, Queen Celestia’s only sin, in the eyes of the common pony, was letting herself get trapped in a terrible dilemma: breaking her word and betraying her allies Imperial China and Imperial Germany in the First World War, or going to war with the United States and its allies. Like most of the participants in that war, she must have genuinely thought that the web of alliances would serve to keep the peace and couldn’t figure out how to stop them from turning into war. The Canterlot Revolt may have saved the capital from attack by the Allies, but every pony who lived outside it was less than impressed, especially when the new Republic began collaborating with the Americans to rebuild their economy and infrastructure. Senator PELL. We were there to help. We were friends then. Colonel LUNEV. And America, like the Soviet Union, has a mixed record of being very convincing when it says things like that. Anyway, ever since then, the Equestrian Republic was...tainted, weak, illegitimate. But we had found no useful revolutionary tools to subvert it with—no pony Che Guevara, and believe me, we looked; hundreds of dossiers were built in the search. Ultimately, a drawn-out revolution would have been impossible—America would definitely have intervened if a civil war lasted any length of time, just as the ponies intervened in yours. The subversion would need to happen very quickly, and there were only two ponies in Equestria capable of uniting the nation—traditionally treacherous Canterlot nobility aside—that quickly. The first was Celestia. Of course, no one seemed to know where to find Celestia after 1918. The ponies all talked as if she were still around somewhere, doing her royal duties, but no one could give us her address. The other was Luna. And every pony knew exactly where she was. Senator PELL. What? Colonel LUNEV. Don’t you Americans read your own history? Senator PELL. I do, and I still don’t follow. Colonel LUNEV. When the First Lunar Republic was foolish enough to interfere in your own Civil War, they caused you some trouble, but you eventually were able to close on them. Celestia and her loyalists rose up and brought down the government, sued for peace with the Americans, signed a treaty setting the borders between your nations— Senator PELL. Yes, yes, I know all this. Colonel LUNEV. (Continuing)—and banished Luna to the moon. (Laughter) Senator LUGAR. That was just a metaphor. Colonel LUNEV. Really? Because that was where we found her. (Laughter) Colonel LUNEV. In 1966, a Soviet satellite flying by the far side of the moon obtained high resolution imagery of the, ah, ‘South Pole-Aitken basin’, a twenty-five-hundred kilometer crater that had been unknown to astronomers before the space race began—and certainly had never been observed before her banishment in 1866. After months of examination, we located a trail of hoofprints, wandering all throughout that crater. Luna was on the moon, alive. (Long pause here. Lunev appears to have been expecting to be interrupted by the Senators.) The decision was made immediately that the subversion of Equestria was to take priority over the moon shot. That is, over a public Soviet victory in the moon shot. I do not believe all of the Politburo was aware of this decision. It may in fact have been a decision made solely by the GRU without consulting. That was often the Soviet way. A team of cosmonauts was arranged, in secret. The death of Vladimir Komarov, due to the failure of Soyuz One, was staged as well. Alexey Leonov we needed for the public face of the program; Komarov we used for our mission. We permitted to let the Americans think they were taking the lead, and with the way our rockets were exploding even on accident, they may not have been wrong. But Komarov’s rocket, which launched on July 3, 1969, at the same time as the one we actually intended to let the Americans see explode—Komarov’s rocket launch was a success. Senator LUGAR. Are you saying—are you claiming that the Soviets actually beat us to the moon? Colonel LUNEV. It is funny, but no. Komarov’s rocket needed to take a special trajectory. We wished for the operation to happen without detection. We certainly did not wish to be mistaken for a missile or anything like that. His lander did not reach the lunar surface until July 21, 1969—some hours after your Armstrong had taken his giant leap for mankind. Eighteen days aboard that capsule could not have been comfortable. (Laughs) But it gave him time to catch up on his reading! (Laughs) Senator PELL. Reading? Colonel LUNEV. Komarov was a fine cosmonaut, but not an agent by training. Because we were expecting the lunar lander to have an extra occupant on return, we could not spare the mission mass for anyone specially trained to do what we needed him to do. Senator LUGAR. And that was? Colonel LUNEV. Convert Princess Luna into Comrade Luna. (Laughs) We did not think it would be too hard. Komarov had, as you might say, her only ticket off that rock. Besides, even when she had last reigned in Equestria, a little more than a hundred years prior, she had at first been a leftist. Expansionist ambitions and corrupt noblemen got the better of her in the end, and she made the mistake of getting involved in America’s Civil War, as we’ve said, but in her early years her heart was for her people—democracy, perhaps even proto-socialism. We just needed to make her an offer, and convince her of the merits of Communist ideals. Senator LUGAR. Apparently it wasn’t difficult. Colonel LUNEV. We never heard from Komarov the specifics. Senator PELL. Why not? Colonel LUNEV. Because Comrade Luna returned from the moon alone. (Another pause here.) We were quite startled. That a pony could even operate the lunar lander, much less the orbiter, and of course the fact that she had apparently left Komarov, either dead or to die, on the moon’s surface...and that she had successfully deceived our mission control into thinking that Komarov was still present and in control of the vessel up until the landing. When we realized what had happened, we were expecting disaster—the standoff was quite tense, I understand—but ultimately Comrade Luna proved surprisingly cooperative. We had our misgivings of her, and she of us—apparently, in a certain light, she did not quite match the old photographs and descriptions of her, seeming rather taller, and jet black in color rather than the dark blue she had once been—and she seemed at times quite insane—but when we explained our objective, she was most sympathetic. Over several months, we taught her the pattern of Soviet government, the ideals of Communism, and the methods of revolution. Under the cover of America’s free-trade pact with the ponies, we smuggled in arms caches of modern battle saddles to arm the followers she insisted would rise up on her behalf, and then finally, on October 31, 1969, we sent Luna herself. The rest, Senators, I believe you already know.