In their book Adieu Farewell, Sergei Kostin and Éric Raynaud recount the most remarkable spy story of the second half of the twentieth century. The original work appeared in 1997 and has recently been reprinted in parallel with the release of a film starring Emir Kusturica, L’Affaire Farewell (The Farewell Affair), which is broadly based on it. It is known that François Mitterrand told Ronald Reagan of the existence of this mole within the KGB, in doing so helping to ease the American President’s reservations regarding the four communist ministers then in the French government. It is the story of Vladimir Vetrov, who seemed to have everything needed for success: he was a brilliant student at a top technical school, an accomplished sportsman and a model husband and father who made an excellent operational start in the KGB. His conversion began 15 years later when, on feeling that his career was over and his family life wrecked by hate for his service and the communist regime, he contacted the DST (the French homeland security service) via a French engineer whose identity has recently been revealed. In less than a year, he passed to the West everything on Soviet scientific and technical espionage. Adieu Farewell is a novel that reveals starkly how high-level politics mixes with the inconsequential issues of everyday life, espionage and ideology, courage and baseness, love and hate, the calculated and the folly, crime and punishment. The book is a revised and expanded version of Bonjour Farewell, and presents much extra information gained from research carried out in France, Russia and the United States.

Cold War

The Cold War was not only a diplomatic confrontation, backed by military force, between two blocs, primarily between Washington and Moscow, but also had cultural and propaganda aspects which have been little researched, particularly on the Soviet side. In view of this, Par-delà le Mur (Beyond the Wall) presents a number of interesting viewpoints. Written by Andrei Kozovoi, a lecturer at Lille University, it is a meticulous examination of the period from 1975 to 1985, between the Brezhnev-Nixon détente of the springs of 1973 to 1975, and that opened up by Mikhail Gorbachev from March 1985. Through the great political and diplomatic events of the period, it scrutinises the United States as seen though Soviet eyes—the way in which the enemy was seen, and the image chosen to portray it. Yet despite official reservations and propaganda, American culture managed to infiltrate all levels of the population. Translated American books constituted 10 per cent of all children’s literature and 12 per cent of that for adults. The key point emerging from this meticulous study is that anti-Americanism, even though at the heart of official ideology, was never openly declared as such except in periods of grave crisis. Indeed, it was somewhat variable in intensity and effect, and never spread uniformly throughout Soviet society, which in any case eventually began to diversify and part company with the official line. Nevertheless, during this period the Soviets still felt that they were living under a regime derived from Stalinist terror, and not yet in Gorbachev’s world allowing freedom of speech. The era is particularly interesting, since it is the one in which Soviet society began to transform, laying the foundations for later developments that culminated in the events of 1989, about which so much has been written, and the subsequent collapse of the USSR.

The Slavic Soul

How can one explore the depths of the Russian soul without looking at literature, which has ever been one of the most successful expressions of Russia, particularly during the silver age from Pushkin to Chekhov? In a gripping summary, the contemporary critic Georges Haladas examines its destiny, asking what message ‘we other Russians’ might bring to the human race. Georges Haladas was born in Geneva in 1917 of a Greek father and a Swiss mother. It is a delight that his prefaces have been republished, because La Russie à travers les livres (Russia Through Books) is a wonderful tool for understanding Russian culture and an introduction to Russian history. In just a few pages the reader is acquainted with the great masters of Russian literature and their main works, using memorable novels and plays to guide him through the social, intellectual and political upheavals of the abortive Decabrist rebellion of 1825 to defeat in the war with Japan in 1905 and the first Russian Revolution. There is no lack of political comment: indeed, the preferred themes of Russian authors, notably Dostoyevsky, are essentially philosophical and political—power, military might, money, justice and education. It is therefore a surprise to read that an author as well informed as Chekhov, to whom many pages are dedicated, wrote in 1888 that there would never be a revolution in Russia. One cannot help noticing that those noted as philosophers or political thinkers, such as Alexander Herzen, a sort of Russian Jean Jaurès, were also men of letters. Herzen’s La Russie et l’Occident (Russia and the West) shows how a Westerner viewed the development of Russia and the obstacles to it. Another, Pierre Chaddayev, a descendant of the nobility that supported the victorious campaign of Alexander I, in his first and famous philosophical letter written in French, denounced the paralysis of the Russian nation and its culture. In that brief yet striking text, he posed fundamental questions to which Russia took nearly a century to reply.