KGB Literati: Spy Fiction and State Security in the Soviet Union
Decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the great US and British spy novelists of the Cold War—
Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, Len Deighton and John le Carré—remain well known to global audiences; all of them also had experience as intelligence officers. But how many people outside of Russia and the former Soviet Bloc know that the Soviets also had writers, including at least one woman, who had served in the KGB or its predecessors before turning to writing espionage tales? In KGB Literati, Filip Kovacevic explores the lives and work of these little-known, at least in the West, authors. The result is a fascinating look at how the Soviet version of the genre developed and how it continues to influence Russian culture and politics.