Durham suggests Nellie Ohr planted the seeds of sourcing for the most explosive allegations leveled by the dossier against Trump, including the oft-cited notion that he and his campaign were engaged in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” with the Kremlin. The dossier attributed this, falsely, to Millian. Durham found that the Belarusian-American realtor was never a source for the dossier and was simply invented as one, along with the allegations attributed to him.

In fact, Durham says that Millian initially wasn’t even on the radar of Steele and his dossier “collector" Igor Danchenko, a former Brookings Institution analyst who's admitted much of the information he provided Steele was alcohol-lubricated gossip. Millian was called to their attention by Nellie Ohr, who the prosecutor said “implicated" Millian through her own reports. Durham suggests Steele and Danchenko merely followed her leads.

We have one chance anecdote about those years from a book by Samuel H. Baron and Cathy A. Frierson, about their "adventures and agonies" inside a regime determined "to keep a lock on its past."

Co-editor Frierson writes that she encountered Nellie Hauke Ohr in the Lenin Library in Moscow in 1989. There, Frierson writes, Ohr enthused over the "remarkable access" to "materials related to the collectivization campaign" she had recently enjoyed in Smolensk.

State control over the archives, who could enter them, and what they could see inside, came down to a point of minute detail, as Samuel H. Baron and Cathy A. Frierson make clear. The number of Americans ever engaged in such research, they report, was always small -- under 40 per year at the height of "detente" in the mid-1970s, with a peak of 50 in 1991-1992. As funded by the US government (I didn't know that), these programs would also ebb and flow. In 1989, when Cathy bumped into Nellie at the Lenin Library, they were among a few dozen young Americans who had sought and received approval from what the authors call "the Soviet research establishment."

People forget what it was like for foreigners to travel and work inside the USSR, and what accomodations (polite word) to the police state such travel and work entailed. A declassified CIA report on Soviet travel restrictions, circa July 1988, sets the stark scene: "The Soviet government tightly controls the movement of all foreigners in the USSR in order to prevent access to areas Moscow believes would be detrimental to its interests." Recent changes announced under Gorbachev, the report explains, amount to little more than "slightly liberaliz[ed] Soviet adminstrative procedures." Foreigners still had to "submit detailed itineraries for all travel outside the Moscow and Leningrad areas," and the rest of it -- although now they did it with that "glasnost" glow.

Specifically, these itineraries must include the date and time of departure, mode of transporation (including flight or train number), exact route, location and duration of any stopovers, and final destination (including name or hotel, date, and time of arrival). Itineraries must be submitted by diplomatic personnel to the Protocol Section of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and by defense attaches to the External Relations Directorate of the Ministry of Defense.