Stalin's Agent: The Life and Death of Alexander Orlov

"This is an absolute masterpiece. It started out as an LSE PhD, supervised by Paul Preston, because a lot of the book deals with the Spanish Civil War . It wasn’t so much the story of Alexander Orlov—his pseudonym and the actual subject of the book—that fascinated me, as the story about all the NKVD people that Stalin dispatched to the Spanish Civil War, basically to murder people—dissidents on the Republican side, and indeed any captured nationalists. Orlov was just one of them. He claimed to be the top one, but he wasn’t. I got very interested in the lifestyle of these NKVD agents, because they went in under diplomatic cover, and they took along women who pretended to be their wives. Then they availed themselves of all the GRU secretaries and wireless operators who were there and had affairs with local Spanish women, too. It must have been like paradise after living in the Soviet Union in the 1930s to end up in Madrid or Barcelona, living the life of Riley. These people became highly efficient assassins. Most of them were Lithuanians and reconstructed themselves gradually as Spanish people or Latin Americans and then went on an international spree murdering people. Many of them were Jewish and had relatives in New York and elsewhere, they could easily move around in these circles. One of the interesting revelations in the book is about the family of the financier Bill Browder, Putin’s biggest enemy. His grandfather, Earl Browder, had been head of the American Communist Party. Bill explains that this had bad consequences for his own father, a mathematician who never really got a top university job because of the grandfather. What I didn’t know was that most of the family members were agents of the NKVD in the United States. The whole book is just full of revelations. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I don’t know quite how Volodarsky did it. I assume that when he left the collapsed Soviet Union he might have taken a whole load of files with him for his own personal use, which found their way into this book. The material is just quite extraordinary. The best story in the book is about Orlov, when he notices that far too many of his colleagues in Spain have been called back home in 1937-38 and have just disappeared (in other words, shot). He decides this is not going to happen to him. So he writes a letter and leaves it with the Russian consulate for the attention of Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the NKVD at the time—who would subsequently be shot himself. By this time Orlov had stolen $60,000 from NKVD funds to fund his life in exile with his wife. He writes to Yezhov, and the letter has a long appendix pointing out every assassination he’s been involved in, that he was the person who, for a brief time, controlled the Cambridge spies, Burgess, McLean and Philby. He writes to Yezhov that none of this would ever come to light, provided that nothing happened to his elderly mother in Moscow. It was a clear blackmail threat, but he managed to blackmail one of the most sinister and unpleasant people who ever existed. The whole book is just stunningly interesting."