Two Lives, One Russia.

WHILE PERFORMING his duties as a reporter for the Moscow bureau of U.S. News & World Report, Nicholas Daniloff was also exploring his family's Russian roots. Inspired by a nineteenth-century heirloom, an iron ring his father had inherited, he compiled a tremendous story about his great-great-grandfather, Alexander Frolov. The results of his research would have made an interesting book-for Russian-history buffs and Daniloff's relatives. But then, one day in the fall of 1986, a Russian-and a supposed friend-met Daniloff outside a Moscow subway station and handed him a sealed package; minutes later Daniloff was seated in the back of a van between two KGB thugs on his way to Lefortovo Prison, where he spent 14 days on suspicion of being an agent of the CIA. (He wasn't.) The book he wrote when he got out, Two Lives, One Russia, weaves together the story of his search for a not-so-famous nineteenth-century relative (sent ,to do time in Siberia for his alleged involvement in a revolt in which he did not participate) with an account of the author's own run-in with the KGB (his arrest, or rather kidnapping, was in retaliation for the arrest of a Soviet, Gennadi Zakharov, in the U.S., who was a spy). But Daniloff writes, "My troubles with the Soviet authorities did not begin [the day of my arrest], or even the week before. . . . My, troubles flowed . . . from an antique iron ring, lined with gold, which my father wore on the fourth finger of his left hand." His point is that, in a country where "the weather can be classified . . . and information sought by Western journalists is often considered secret," his zealous search raised suspicions, thereby making him a likely candidate when the KGB found it needed an American "spy" to arrest. Daniloff offers tremendous insight into the workings of the KGB, the reality of Soviet justice (if those two words can be used in such close proximity), and a brief history of other Americans who also wound up in his unfortunate position Professor Frederick Barhoorn for example, was held for 16 days in 1963, on similarly trumped-up charges). But this is not a spy story. This is a book about two men experiencing the same Russia 150 years apart. Two men who loved their Russian homeland, but who ended up innocent victims of ruthless, frustrated, and failing regimes.