Peter Power/Reuters
The Canadian government is seeking to revoke the citizenship of the son of two Russian spies whose nearly two decades as “sleeper” agents in the West served as the inspiration for The Americans. Twenty-three-year-old Alex Vavilov and his older brother, Tim, have maintained since their parents’ high-profile arrest in 2010 that they knew nothing about their family’s secret life. “I don’t pose a threat. I’m a Canadian citizen and I’m here to make my own life,” Alex Vavilov told the CBC last month. But the issue is at the center of a new legal challenge thrown down by the Canadian government, with its high court set to hear arguments for why Vavilov should lose his citizenship in December. Vavilov, who wants to find work in Canada, won an earlier bid to keep his citizenship through the Federal Court of Appeal last year. But the government is now trying to overturn that ruling, arguing that despite being born in Toronto, Vavilov’s citizenship was obtained under false pretenses, as his parents, Andrey Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova, were foreign agents—and not the ordinary Western couple they pretended to be.