Mind the Suwalki Gap

The season's best spy series comes from Poland

Such is the glut of quality content in the world that it’s fully possible for a streaming series to premiere on one of our biggest platforms and not be reviewed almost anywhere at all. I only have the algorithm to thank for leading me to The Eastern Gate, a thrilling Polish spy series that just ended its first-season run on Max to what looks like zero fanfare. After inhaling all six episodes, the only bit of mainstream U.S. coverage I could find was a short and weird review in the NY Times that made it sound like a bone-crunching action spectacle:

“I’m not sure there’s a show with more kicking. Oh, there’s punching, eyeball-squishing, wrist-wrenching and plenty of shooting, too, but all the ways people can kick or be kicked are on vicious display here.”

I might be suffering from some déformation professionnelle here, but I didn’t find The Eastern Gate particularly violent. At its heart, it is a serious, grown-up spy procedural in the vein of The Bureau / The Agency. The plot concerns an intelligence agent, Ewa (an excellent Lena Góra), who half-fails a mission and gets sent to Belarus on a queasy errand of sniffing out a mole at the Polish embassy there.

Ewa is an interesting character, interestingly rendered. For instance, she uses her femininity as one of the tools in her kit, but with palpable disgust (and is not sexualized by the director while doing so). The series, in general, is refreshingly unflinching about the things a woman faces in the spy trade — from multiple male characters making passes at Ewa to the embassy’s female security chief who tosses her room and leaves a sex toy out to embarrass her. In a particularly brutal bit of business in episode one, Ewa is established as being early into a pregnancy, so the following hand-to-hand fight (the one that thrilled the Times writer so much) has truly wrenching stakes. Indeed, it’s the first piece of TV I’ve ever seen to follow a combat sequence with a depiction of a miscarriage. Mission: Impossible this is not.

The Eastern Gate is not the perfect series I’d love it to be (toward the end, two unrelated plot lines are revealed to have been Connected All Along in an extremely coinkidinky way), but to those who love the genre and know the region, I’d recommend it wholeheartedly. Its provenance, and the unique optics that come with it, are alone worth it: the plot may hinge on classic East-West spy tropes, but since both sides are the former East, it comes off as fresh.

I will go out on a limb and guess that, for a casual U.S. viewer, there is little difference in the mental pictures that arise at the words “Poland” and “Belarus,” a fact of which the authors seem very aware. Thus, Warsaw in The Eastern Gate is depicted as a metropolis of gleaming skyscrapers and high-tech offices, and Minsk as a Slavic backwater. It’s cool, and the tiniest bit funny. Poland figures in spy stuff all the time, but as a setting more than the subject; it’s nice to see its agency, no pun intended.

Speaking of casual U.S. viewers. To be frank, I have no idea if one can follow the geopolitics of The Eastern Gate without at least some background. Here are the basics required to understand what the hell is going on: Belarus is Russia’s client state; Poles make up the second largest minority in Belarus (this one was admittedly news to me); the Suwalki Gap is an area on the Polish-Lithuanian border that also happens to be the shortest way from Belarus to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

The last part is the most important one. Despite hailing from the neighborhood — the Latvian border is only 200 or so miles north — I’ve never been more than dimly aware of the Suwalki Gap tensions (there were always more pressing issues back home). This series made me realize how vulnerable this area must feel to Poles and Lithuanians. In fact, the native title of the series — Przesmyk, literally “The Isthmus” — refers specifically to the Gap; it is implied that the Russian destabilizing antics in the region are ultimately all about taking military control over it. Your mileage may vary on the plausibility of that claim, though nothing surprises me lately. But that’s the beauty of spy fiction. Realistic or not, it’s the shortest route to understanding a society’s fears.

I may have a certain extra affinity with The Eastern Gate because some of it feels like the product of the same decisions I had made while writing The Collaborators. For instance, my book opens with a barely disguised riff on a true event from recent Belarus history — the so-called RyanAir incident. The Eastern Gate uses another story from the same year: Lukashenko’s manufactured border crisis. (Short version: the Belarusian government basically lured Syrian refugees to Minsk, dropped them off in the woods near the Polish and Lithuanian borders, and kept them there in brutal conditions until they inevitably crossed over to save themselves. This created chaos along the border, strained EU economies, and supercharged neo-Nazi sentiments: a win-win-win, if you’re a monster. I’m sure the current U.S. administration is taking notes).

Both the book and the series are also set in 2021, just before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. In my case, the reality of a hot war in Europe was still too mind-boggling to contemplate in 2023, when the bulk of The Collaborators was written, and certainly too raw to use as genre fodder; I suspect that The Eastern Gate’s authors felt similarly. This context only makes the series land harder. There’s a sad pathos to all this clandestine maneuvering when you know that, in a matter of months, the adversary will go mask-off and swap double agents for tanks and drones.

That said, another motif looks even sadder in retrospect. In one climactic scene, a Russian false-flag op collapses because a video contradicting the Kremlin narrative is “confirmed by American observers”: check and mate, comrades! In an attempt to dramatize the tail end of one status quo, The Eastern Gate accidentally preserves the dying gasp of another: the idea that, in the standoff with Russia, the U.S. will always have Europe’s back.