Operation Prophet

"This is my all-time favourite. This came out when the West, particularly America, was receiving Solzhenitsyn in the 1970s and there were various novels appearing that gave various versions of him. Operation Prophet came out in 1977 and it is a silly novel which I don’t recommend at all, with all due respect to Mr Asprey. It is a sub-James Bondian adventure, “a novel of suspense about a Nobel Prize-winning writer …” etc. Anyway, the sleuth’s code name is Echo and his mission is to find out if Kubiatshev (Solzhenitsyn) is really Kubiatshev or if he’s an agent provocateur. Eventually, it turns out that the plane bringing the deported Kubiatshev to the West was diverted and Kubiatshev has been kidnapped and replaced with an actor lookalike. So, Kubiatshev arrives in the West and, instead of the mild-mannered liberal democrat Western liberal democrats expected, he is this ranting person who is fiercely anti-Soviet, and trying to undermine détente. It turns out he’s not funded by the relatively nice Soviets but by renegade KGB elements and neo-Nazis in a bid to nudge the world towards armed conflict. Echo, the sleuth, is an expert in Russian accents (he studied at Oxford so perhaps it was here that we taught him this skill) and so he spots that Kubiatshev’s accent is wrong in one of the recordings. The real Kubiatshev (Solzhenitsyn) then goes to this big rally, unmasks the imposter, ruins the neo-Nazi plot, and tells nice liberal America that he would never swoop down ranting like an omniscient messiah and that he is not like that at all. It is glorious nonsense, but very typical of the liberal bewilderment that people experienced when Solzhenitsyn arrived. Most people didn’t know much about him and he was easily blurred into this kind of Prague Spring socialist, tailored subconsciously to liberal expectations of this nice guy who had suffered terribly. But suddenly there was the real Solzhenitsyn out there making strident anti-socialist speeches. So we have two choices. Either we say, well we didn’t really know him and should have read the books to get a proper impression of him. Or we say, is that really him? Nabokov actually believed it wasn’t him for a while. There was a real liberal reluctance to blend the two versions of Solzhenitsyn. So, this book, and the archival material, are really curios that show, in a kind of lopsided way, just how important politically Solzhenitsyn was."