Smith left Russia for Ethiopia and renounced his Soviet citizenship, but he was never allowed to reclaim his US citizenship. He became a stateless person. Or he had always been a stateless person, in possession of a precarious citizenship, as conditional and prone to repeal as ever. He was an American, but he had no country. “The romance of treason never occurred to us for the brutally simple reason that you can’t betray a country you don’t have,” James Baldwin writes. You can’t be a traitor if you’ve never been a citizen.
