#rip my mountain lark you were the perfect accomplice in all things espionage

[sunlit-gully]

🤥 LYING - are they good liars? do they have tells to show they're lying?

Doing this for Mykola Tykhomyrovych Sokolenko from Anthologia Sovietica.

He was not a good liar. He was not a great liar. He was a consummate liar.

To be frank, this is an unwritten requirement in his job, aka foreign intelligence. Yes, Mykola worked as a KGB officer, a Major General upon retirement, so would it be any surprise that he had a co(s)mically big repertoire of false identities? To list his most frequently used identities, in the Centre he was Comrade Smirnov, in Britain he was Sir Alan Ross Norton, in Ireland he was Séamus de Búrca, in Australia he was Scott Hardy, in New Zealand he was Ewan Muir, and in Scandinavia he was Axel Hansen. But his contemporaries, they only called him one thing.

The Virtuoso.

In his personal life, though, Mykola could not hide shit to save his life (he would not have wanted to anyway). Medea had proven time and time again that she could be trusted with secrets (which is, frankly, to be expected for a doctor) and could handle the more unsavoury side of married life, so Mykola saw little reason to lie about his thoughts and feelings in their relationship. As of his children, Mykola did somewhat deceive them, if you call putting on a stern, distant face after the mother's death qualifies as deception. To be fair, lying implied that a party was not aware of the truth; all his kids saw through the act immediately but chose not to comment on it to his face.

All in all, the stage missed out big time on Mykola Sokolenko the moment he entered KGB.