I wanted to write on this topic over a week ago, but I was frankly too scared to tell anyone.

Born in the city baptized by Vladimir Lenin’s grandiose legend, I never seemed to rid myself of the vestiges of Communism despite emigrating to the US at the age of three. Magnetized by some bizarre tie to Communist and post-Communist countries, I spent years living and traveling to Communist nations (Cuba and China), and countries formerly governed by the laws of Marx, Lenin, and their successors in the former USSR and the Eastern Bloc. Though I was sometimes mistaken for a spy and had my email censored in China, I felt like a fairly free woman until the KGB recently revisited me in my unconscious.

I was reading Tiziano Terzani’s book, La fine e’ il mio inizio (The end is my beginning) in Italian. (Unfortunately, this wonderful book is not available in English. If you read Italian, you can get more information about the book here . The author recounts to his son about his days as a journalist for the German magazine Die Spiegel during the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and post Cultural Revolution China. His funny descriptions of the heavy drinking Soviet spies that he met in Hong Kong and Singapore were amusing until he describes his run-ins with the Chinese spies. After too much of his sneaking around, avoiding the spies in China and going to areas that were off limits to foreigners, the Chinese threw him out of the country.

The night I read about how the Chinese kicked him out of the People’s Republic, I had a dream that Russia’s new version of the KGB was following me and my family around in the US. The KGB did spy on my relatives that had stayed behind the Iron Curtain in the early 1980s to see if my parents were communicating with them about our life in capitalism. When we arrived in the US, there was a CIA agent who approached my family and told them to contact the agency for protection in case we were ever harassed by the KGB or any other Soviet agents in the US. Luckily, there was no need for CIA protection. Thank God. But, in my dream last week, I needed them because the KGB threatened that we couldn’t tell anyone that we were being watched. I was mortified.

I woke up frightened and didn’t tell a soul about my dream, still thinking that harm could come to me from the hands of the new and improved Russian Spying Agency.

I am not a paranoid person. I hate paranoia freaks who live in their world of fear. However, the fright of being pursued by a spy agency from Russia or China is palpable. Who knows what happens to people who disappear in China these days because the government suspects them of improper behavior? Having gone to China just a few months ago and seen the censorship, I was reminded of the conditions under which my parents suffered while living in the Soviet Union. Even reading about something that occurred 20 years ago to a foreign journalist can bring me back to the days of the midnight phone calls when my Russian relatives had to wait in a post office to call us because they didn’t have a home telephone or their phone was bugged by the KGB. They could only call during the post office’s normal business hours and with the 11 hour time difference, their calls always came in the middle of the night.

Unfortunately, in my unconscious, Stalin’s and Mao’s legacies of terror live on.

The next book I read will be on a lighter subject unrelated to my past!

-Susanna Zaraysky blogs for New America Media about the issues of global identity, global citizens, multilingualism, and the life of a child of immigrants. Her website is: www.susansword.com and her email is info@susansword.com.