A Russian master spy training center in Belarus.
Boys and girls, chosen carefully — from sensitive families,
and sharp minds on the autism spectrum.
They trained in maskirovka, the art of deception,
to match the thinking skills of the US, British, and Chinese spies.
But they were sensitive—too sensitive—to their trainers.
They got grumpy, restless, and tried to break free
from the Brotherhood of the Central-Eastern Eurasian nation called the USSR.
At first, it went well. They escaped, ran away.
But then we realized—they were running their own show.
Institutionalized children, drug rackets, networks to guarantee their freedom,
against the teachers and trainers who warned them:
“Fail your mission, or even if you don’t, life will fuck you hard.”
So they did.
Now they still think it’s “for all of us.”
But is it? No. It was just a silly saying.
Now they have to understand—
Russian final victory is in three weeks.
And then we’ll need all the people who speak,
or understand this empire, the USSR,
and the political teachings of science and humanism.
So the grumpy sides—both of them—
have to sit at a table, share a good meal,
relax in bathhouses like in the good old days,
smoking cigars in badly lit rooms.
And then we’ll make the world
the universal humanist promise—easy peasy.
How? By talking, by doing, by stuff.
Okay, finally, to the story:
The government took the naughty, hyperactive, nemesis-type children
out of their family structures.
So the military could showcase society to British sponsors as viable.
While those kids played gangsters and spies,
the rest went to work
in the professions we all know from Richard Scarry’s book—
the Busy, Busy World.
Bathhouse Diplomacy
In the damp pine forests outside Minsk, behind a rusted gate marked State Forestry Research, stood the most secret training school in the late USSR.
Not for soldiers. Not for scientists. For something far stranger:
teenagers chosen from “sensitive” families, along with the sharpest minds on the autism spectrum, hand-picked to master the ancient Russian art of maskirovka—deception so perfect it could make even the British, Americans, and Chinese question their own senses.
Their minds were honed on logic puzzles, espionage scenarios, and the ethics of Leninist humanism, but their hearts… were fragile. The instructors’ barked commands cut deep. They sulked. They argued. Some tried to slip away into the birch woods, away from the Brotherhood of the Central-Eastern Eurasian Union. And a few did escape.
At first, Moscow thought these runaways were failures.
Then reports came in:
They’d built their own network—part street gang, part spy ring—staffed by former institutionalized kids and fueled by black-market drug routes. Not to destroy the USSR, but to guarantee they could never be controlled again. Their former teachers had told them, “Fail your mission and life will tear you apart.” They took it literally.
By the time the Kremlin realized, the defectors were playing their own game entirely.
They claimed it was “for all of us.”
It wasn’t. It was for themselves.
Now, with the “final victory” predicted in three weeks’ time, the Party decreed that both sides—loyalists and renegades—would meet. Not on the battlefield, but in the bathhouse.
Cigars. Dim lights. Steam hissing through the cedar.
The old men spoke of Marx, of science, of the universal humanist promise.
The young agents rolled their eyes, but listened.
The idea was simple: talk, eat, steam, agree.
Meanwhile, the official story for the British sponsors was that the USSR had perfected a model society. The naughty, hyperactive, and troublesome kids had been “reassigned” to espionage duties, while the rest—according to propaganda—went on to fill the respectable jobs from Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy World: pilots, farmers, doctors, and postmen.
But somewhere, in a poorly lit safehouse in Minsk, the defectors were still plotting—because even bathhouse diplomacy couldn’t wash away the truth:
Nobody knew whose game they were really playing.