Putin awards Order of Lenin to CIA chief’s son

John Reed, a young Harvard graduate and journalist, thought highly of the Bolshevik revolution and chronicled it in his book Ten Days That Shook the World. He is one of three Americans buried along the Kremlin Wall. Will Russian President Vladimir Putin extend a similar honor to Michael Alexander Gloss, the son of Juliane Gallina, a deputy director for digital innovation at the CIA?

Earlier this week, Putin handed President Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff something from Russia with love – the Order of Lenin. Putin apparently intended for it to be passed on to Gallina whose 21-year-old son died fighting with Russian forces against Ukraine in 2024. The Order was created in 1930 by the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union.

Among its previous recipients number Erich Honecker, the head of the German Democratic Republic, Enver Hoxha, the president of Albania, Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese revolutionary, and Kim Philby, the British double agent. The award also makes an appearance in the James Bond film A View to Kill, when 007 receives it from General Anatoli Gogol for offing the lunatic Max Zorin.

Into this august company now appears Gloss. If a recent Guardian dispatch is anything to go by, Gloss seems to have been a deluded youthful fellow traveler who viewed American as an evil empire and became mesmerized by the prospect of battling for what he saw as the righteous and good powers. Gloss, who attended high school in Virginia, was radicalized as a youth, espousing the causes of both Palestinians and Russians. A self-described proponent of a “multi-polar world,” he enlisted in the Russian army in September 2023. How avid he was for actual frontline combat is an open question. He may simply have enlisted in order to ensure that he received a Russian passport, but he was soon drafted and found himself fighting in an assault unit against Ukraine, an unenviable prospect for anyone other than a true diehard, as it were. Given the Russian way of war, his quick demise was all-but-inevitable.

For former KGB agent Putin, who relishes tweaking his adversaries in general and the CIA in particular – recall that he mocked Tucker Carlson for failing to measure up for entry into the CIA during their interview – the opportunity to mock Witkoff was one he could not resist. As Trump seeks a summit meeting with Putin, he would do well to mull over the Kremlin chief’s latest move. The very fact that the Kremlin continues to bestow something called the Order of Lenin indicates that less has changed in Russia than Trump might like to acknowledge.

Consistent with his diplomatic dexterity, Putin is now putting forth a murky peace plan that would allow him to seize control over all of Eastern Ukraine, while avoiding any commitments other than to cease fighting for the nonce. Putin is also suggesting that Russia can pass legislation declaring that it will not launch an attack on either Ukraine or Europe – a pledge that he might violate before the ink on it was even dry. Lenin would approve.