SPY HANDLER
Victor Cherkashin with Gregory Feifer
Basic Books • $26
This book is a remarkably dispassionate tell-all espionage tome. Think John Le Carré without the literary flourish. Or Whitehall done over in Soviet neo-brutalist style (a phrase I gleefully steal from Roger Took, below).
Victor Cherkashin has had a remarkable life, from his childhood in war-torn Kursk and Stalingrad, to his induction into the KGB, followed by posting around the world, from Australia and Beirut, to London and the U.S., finally ending up managing security for banks and firms during the wild feasting over carcass of the Soviet economy. Yet his memoir does not embellish these facts, but presents them in a Dragnet deadpan that is as delightful as it is fascinating. After recounting an unsuccessful ploy to trap a British diplomat through sexual indiscretions, Cherkashin notes, “His case was typical of the kind of operation... conducted at the time. I often found the work dull, but I knew it was a necessary part of protecting the Motherland – and I felt privileged to be serving the KGB.”
Cherkashin’s career was distinguished by his fortuitous postings, during which both Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen fell into his lap (the publisher erroneously markets the book by saying Cherkashin “recruited” these two spies, yet both boldly volunteered their services, without any recruitment on Cherkashin’s behalf, a point he is clear to point out in his typically self-effacing style). He also had an inside view of other key Cold War spy cases, including the capture of Oleg Penkovsky and the defections of Vitaly Yurchenko and Oleg Gordievsky.
Anyone who seeks to crawl into the shallow mind space of a KGB officer could do much worse than to pick up this memoir. If you can look past the humorous “I was just doing my job for the KGB and country” tone, you will find it packed full of intriguing details about spycraft and the human-scale workings of the Soviet spy operation.
Running with reindeer
Roger Took
Westview • $17.95
Without guys like Roger Took, where would we be? Sitting in his flat in England, he reads an article by a Norwegian conservationist, extolling Lapland as “the largest area of uninterrupted natural landscape in Europe,” and the next thing you know, Took is taking Russian classes, buying up U.S. spy maps and heading north on a train to Murmansk.
Of course, it helps that Took is an observant and engaging storyteller, with a descriptive flair and a refreshingly dry wit.
Took set himself the task of understanding the lives, history and ways of the peoples who live in the remote region of Russia known as the Kola Peninsula. He made multiple visits there from the early 1990s forward, and he strings together his stories and impressions into a colorful canvas of Russian village life, taking us places we could never hope (wish?) to go, yet leaving us with a clear sense of what it was like to be there. The best travel essay on Russia to come out in years.
five empresses
Evgenii V. Anisimov
Praeger • $44.95
If the lives of Russia’s 18th century empresses have been under-scrutinized to this point, compared with their more numerous male antecedents and descendants, then Anisimov’s book tips the scales back toward something like balance. In Five Empresses, he presents detailed, rich histories of these women’s lives that are remarkable for being both readable and rooted in solid research.
Above all, Anisimov gets it that interesting history is sort of like journalism with footnotes – it is all about telling compelling stories, about human drama, about unexpected twists of fate. His recounting of the origins of Catherine I – Peter the Great’s wife – and how history could easily have taken another turn and she would never met Menshikov and thus Peter, is alone worth the steep cost of this book.
But there is of course more, expressed in the rich details and innate knowledge of what life was like in the courts, in the countryside, or in the dungeons of Schlüsselburg. And it is delightful to read a historian who begins a chapter by saying that, in order to understand the events he is about to unfold, we must first go back in time several decades and see where the real roots of this tragedy lie.
As an aside, it is evident that translator Kathleen Carroll laid a carefully-weighted hand on Anisimov’s original text. It is no easy task to smoothly translate a work such as this from Russian, while preserving the “Russian voice” of the original, but Carroll has succeeded masterfully.
Russian history is scarcely more interesting than when it delves into the lives of the tsars and tsarinas. And with this book, Anisimov vaults to the front of the pack. One hopes that this will not be the last of his works we see published in English.
War in the Wild East
Ben Shepherd
Harvard • $29.95
In the tradition of Daniel Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Shepherd probes the roots of the Nazis’ inhumanity – specifically, in their uncommonly vicious campaign against Soviet partisans. How was it, he asks, that one of Europe’s most advanced, well-educated societies committed war crimes on so vast a scale? All the more so that it was not just a few generals, but a vast number of average German troops in the field that participated in the annihilation policies of the Nazi regime.
Shepherd’s introduction offers a cogent summary of the institutional, societal and political forces that coagulated in pre-war Germany to create a military leadership that condoned, even ordered the commission of war crimes against first the Poles and then the Soviets – enemies that the Nazi leadership deemed to be “less than human.” The war in the East was, the German leadership said, to be a protracted race war, and Reich Marshal Göring predicted, “the biggest mass death in Europe since the Thirty Years’ War.”
The majority of Shepherd’s work is based on his study of internal documents from the 221st Security Division, which oversaw operations in the rear of the central front – in Belarus and Western Russia. It offers revealing looks at not just the brutality of Nazi soldiers, but at the realities of life for common Russians in the occupation zone, in particular the untenable situation which occupied villages found themselves in.
The Wehrmacht’s strategy to destroy the partisans was of course unsuccessful, and the partisans survived in the Bryansk forest (see story this issue), in Karelia, Belarus and elsewhere, playing a critical role in turning the tide of the war in 1943, accelerating Soviet momentum toward ultimate victory after the victory at Stalingrad.
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