The afterlife of the Soviet spy

KGB Literati: Spy Fiction and State Security in the Soviet Union, Filip Kovacevic, University of Toronto Press, £24

How many ‘spy thriller’ novelists can you name? Take away John le Carré, Len Deighton, Ian Fleming and Mick Herron from your list; how many are you left with? Now, remove any novels written in English; what names remain? Next, can you think of any similar fiction written in Russian in the Soviet Union? Is your answer Yulian Semyonov (the creator of Seventeen Moments of Spring, 1969)? This would probably have been my response, too, until I read Filip Kovacevic’s new volume, KGB Literati. Since then, I have added numerous other names to my inventory, including Roman Kim, Zoya Voskresenskaya-Rybkina, Oleg Gribanov, Ivan Golovchenko and Sfibuba Sfiev.

Collectively, these former Soviet intelligence officers produced a rich seam of fiction focused on the KGB’s espionage and counter-espionage activities. The resulting texts are also, if it needs to be said, an insight into the process of mythologisation of the Soviet hero (as problematic as the idea of such a hero might now be), then portrayed as bravely battling the existential threats of western imperialism and fascism.

Similar tales, on both page and screen, continued to be produced up until the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, and, significantly, are alleged to have influenced Vladimir Putin’s decision to join the KGB. To paraphrase the Soviet film critic, Maya Turovskaya – writing about James Bond in the late 1960s – the Cold War ‘spy’ was a ‘hero of a heroless time’.

We might at this point pause to consider why any of this might matter. Some readers may be shrugging their shoulders and presuming anything produced under the auspices of the KGB was merely crude propaganda with little associated literary merit. This output was indeed propaganda, officially, and retrospectively, sanctioned by Yuri Andropov in KGB Executive Order No. 40, issued in March 1979, as Kovacevic notes. As such, these Soviet products could be considered by most thriller readers as being less worthy than the more illustrious, profitable and popular outputs penned by authors formally employed by the equivalent Intelligence Services in the West. That position however would seriously underestimate their influence.

So, too, there might be other readers who find the whole idea of there being any merit in the study of ‘spy fiction’ preposterous. As the novelist Eric Ambler noted in The Times, some may opine, ‘Oh I never read thrillers. That sort of rubbish simply doesn’t interest me.’ ‘Real’ intelligence studies, they might argue, should be grounded in rigorous archival work, and sustained engagement with intelligence officers and their institutions.

Not so, warns Kovacevic.

Whether you like ‘spy thrillers’ or not, they were a central feature of 20^th-century literature, and enjoyed a broad, cross-cultural appeal across all sides of the Iron and Bamboo curtains. While these novels may not reveal much about the actual ‘truth’ of espionage (though some ‘might’ do, as this book suggests), they contain a multiplicity of truths about the ‘spy’ as hero, and how societies, democratic and otherwise, culturally conceptualise threats to their existence and express their cravings for salvation. The hero-spy is a saviour figure after all, whether that be James Bond, Ethan Hunt or Max Otto von Stierlitz.

KGB Literati convincingly adds to the growing body of work that argues such fictions should be taken seriously, not merely as artefacts of the cultural Cold War, but as valuable mementos of Cold War culture. The ‘cultural turn’ arrived relatively late to the academic study of Cold War intelligence [conversely, cultural studies is now having its ‘archival turn’]: arguably commencing with Frances Stonor Saunder’s Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (1999); while more recent works such as Simon Willmetts’s 2019 article on the subject in the journal Intelligence and National Security, Hugh Wilford’s The CIA: An Imperial History (2024), and Tarik Cyril Amar’s James Bond’s Socialist Rivals (2024) have added to the depth, nuance and richness of the field.

The structure of Kovacevic’s book is deceptively simple, belying its underlying sophistication. He focuses on six individual authors, and multiple volumes of the KGB’s The Chekist Stories. All straightforward enough you might think, but little of this output has been translated into English (the CIA translated a handful of novels in order to assess the secrets they might contain), and Kovacevic scrupulously cross-checks the fiction against biographies of the authors, including in the KGB’s own personnel files, and against a wide array of primary and secondary materials.

The career arcs of Roman Kim, Zoya Voskresenskaya-Rybkina and Oleg Gribanov are sufficiently varied to illustrate these processes at work. Kim, of Korean heritage, started working for Soviet intelligence in the 1920s and survived Stalin’s purges by lying outrageously to his torturers. This is a remarkable enough story of survival in and of itself, yet what really caught my interest was that after Kim’s release in 1945 he began his literary career by lecturing on Anglophone detective fiction. The links between Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe and the emergence of modern espionage fiction are well-established. The problem for Soviet writers was that their ‘spies’ could not replicate the louche, disreputable bounders of Baker Street or Los Angeles. They had to be adapted to Soviet ‘norms’, a complex task if the stories were to also be both readable and engaging.

Voskresenskaya-Rybkina circumvented this problem by making Lenin her hero. She penned a series of tales that focused on his escapes from the Tsarist secret police, while stressing his competences in countersurveillance and tradecraft. She equally stands out as one of the very few KGB female employees mentioned, her 30-year-long career began when she was just 14 and her partner died (or was assassinated) in mysterious circumstances. Intriguingly, Voskresenskaya-Rybkina may also have been the model for the villainous Rosa Klebb in Ian Fleming’s From Russia with Love (1957), a suggestion which is rightly wreathed in layers of caveats.

Then there’s Gribanov. Gribanov was dishonourably discharged from his senior post in KGB counterintelligence in 1964, the varied rationales for which the author explores at length, and he went on to write the successful and popular Rezident novellas (later filmed). Yet, as the book reveals, there remain suggestions that Gribanov’s exit from the KGB was stage-managed, his later career as a novelist possibly a cover story for his ongoing service to the Soviet state. Forgive me for yet another Bondian reference, but this plot twist shares many similarities with the narrative at the heart of John Pearson’s James Bond: The Authorised Biography of 007 (1973).

If there’s a (minor) weakness in the book’s approach, then perhaps it’s the engagement with the spy stories themselves, which, unless you read Russian, remain somewhat elusive. We get the details of the plots but less of a feel for the effectiveness of the stories’ use of ‘pace and place’, and the audience’s reactions, although that’s hardly Kovacevic’s fault. His deftness in handling the Russian texts, while also demonstrating an in-depth knowledge about the internal organisation and workings of the KGB, should be noted and praised, not least as it’s all executed with a lightness of touch.

What emerges from Kovacevic’s research into the KGB’s ‘literati’ is a complex synthesis of the motivations, competing interests and outputs of the authors and the significance of the ‘heroic socialist spies’ they conjured up. The state they once served is long gone, but the legacy of these spies persists.